Uploaded October 2021 | Updated September 2026, 4 days ago
Among the many ways digital worlds speak to us is through their bugs. As twitter accounts like The Strange Log and Dwarf Fortress Bugs show, we care about bugs in tenderer terms than how we define them — as interruptions in a misunderstood "pure" experience. This is an exploratory talk with a few goals: to build a framework for understanding the aesthetics at work here, to reflect on my own creative practice as a maker of buggy games, and, finally, to celebrate bugs and edge cases, and ask other devs to embrace them as the idiosyncratic feature of our medium.
Among the many ways digital worlds speak to us is through their bugs. As twitter accounts like The Strange Log and Dwarf Fortress Bugs show, we care about bugs in tenderer terms than how we define them — as interruptions in a misunderstood "pure" experience. This is an exploratory talk with a few goals: to build a framework for understanding the aesthetics at work here, to reflect on my own creative practice as a maker of buggy games, and, finally, to celebrate bugs and edge cases, and ask other devs to embrace them as the idiosyncratic feature of our medium.
