QNTM entanglement

Videogames and literature collide in the search for new forms

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Working under the alias QNTM, Sam Hughes has made a number of videogames over the past few years that are as likely to make you feel frustrated as much as pleased.

There's Hatetris, a version of Tetris in which you can always rely on receiving the worst possible tetromino, and Absurdle, an “adversarial” take on Wordle, in which the game only begins to shuffle through a pool of potential answers once you are already guessing. But Hughes isn’t a developer or a designer, at least in the traditional senses. Rather than creating actual games, the majority of his work is perhaps better described as ‘game adjacent’ — his written fiction attempts to illuminate the nature of videogames as a medium from the outside.

Hughes’ 2020 novel,