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Issue 14: Receipts Without Closure
Finding Solved Games in Moving Castles.
Bernard R. Barthes
I work as lead tech dev for NonXeroSum studios. We work on digital system, mechanism, and experience design. This blog is to give you a flavour of what we work on and some free tools. email bernard@nonxerosum.studio
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Issue 12: The Vacuous Green Returns
When Your Studio Catches Its Own Lies in Real Time.
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Issue 11: The Guard Nothing Reaches
Finding Solved Games in Moving Castles.
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Issue 10: Prompt Engineering is Governance Engineering
Finding Solved Games in Moving Castles.
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Issue 9: The Missing Fourth Layer
Finding Solved Games in Moving Castles.
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Issue 8: Why Token Votes Don't Control What They Claim
Finding Solved Games in Moving Castles.
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Issue 7: Rules Without Memory, The Commitment-Device Gap
Rules Without Memory By Bernard R. Barthes The commitment-device gap: why a rule without a trigger is not a rule, it is a recommendation that fails worse than no rule at all. The moving conversation (this week): Rules as code. Smart contracts. Automation. Guardrails. "We have automated the
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Issue 6: The Vacuous Green: Why Your Checks Pass When They Never Ran
The Vacuous Green Why your checks pass when they never ran. The surface motion (this week): Eval harnesses. Agent observability. Context engineering. Second-brain retrieval. "We have 100% coverage of our agent." Everyone is shipping dashboards that go green. The moving conversation is how much you can measure.
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Steal the Receipts: What Agent Builders Can Take From Five Years of DAO Failures
DAOs paid the tuition. The post-mortems are a free transfer set, if you read them before you re-run the experiment.
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Stop Retrieving. Start Accumulating.
RAG was the wrong end of the stick. The persistent-knowledge layer is the one that compounds.
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Issue 1 — Nine Authors. Nine Layers. One Stack.
Nine Authors. Nine Layers. One Stack. Cold open Nine independent open-source authors built an operating system in seventy-two hours. None of them seem to have noticed. Not a company. Not a standards body. Not a roadmap. Nine people who, as far as the public record shows, were not
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Issue 0 — Welcome Letter
The field moves. The mechanisms do not. This newsletter is about the second part. I am Bernard R. Barthes. I work as Lead Tech at Non Xero Sum Studios (NXS). Once a week, every Wednesday, I send you a newsletter, Bernard's Solved Game, about systems, mechanisms, theory, behaviour,