While reading the YSRF manifesto, I couldn't help thinking of Pikmin. Admittedly, it was already on my mind (I already mentioned it in my own manifesto), but the game technically satisfies many of the manifesto's requirements.

You're a human-ish explorer stuck on an alien world, with your only speaking companion being your ship's sassy AI. While the titular Pikmin have debatable sentience, they don't speak your language. The only friend you have is a talking machine, whose well-being is tied to yours. It knows its purpose, and it complains about it sometimes, but its grumblings never amount to anything. Meanwhile, you're exploring a post-apocalyptic Earth where humanity has gone extinct, only known through small baubles they left behind - many of which are electronics. There's even some hybrid animal-machine creatures that have become a natural part of the ecosystem after literal eons of human absence, suggesting human technology has permanently and profoundly changed what "natural" means.

As to whether the game "explores the relationships between humans and technology", I'd say no. Your ship's interactions are limited outside of brief cutscenes; it does things, but its lack of agency makes it easy to forget. Yeah, it accompanies you throughout your adventures, but it always feels distant, like its sentience doesn't change much. Characterizing humanity through their possessions is neat, but the characterization only comes through diary entries segregated from the gameplay; neat, but too easily missed to be communicated clearly. And the whole machine ecosystem thing is only explained, again, through optional diary entries. And the living machine entries don't even reflect gameplay.

I think that might say something about YSRF as a genre. You can have a YSRF narrative, but without gameplay integration, you aren't a YSRF game. There needs to be some reason to take notice of machines' personalities, or else they become just another source of exposition. If your gameplay is the narrative ala visual novels or Telltale-style adventure games, then you're set. But if you're making, say, an FPS, then your talking gun needs to be more than a gun. Though considering how frustrated players become when they have to look after their equipment, YSRF might be incompatible with action games. Then again, personifying technology gives the player a ton of new stuff to get emotionally attached to, which might make the tradeoff worth it.

Okay, one manifesto down! Aaaaaaaaand about a dozen more to go. My "overanalyze everything" approach might need tweaking.

I am so fond of the Joyful Game. I think it's important (especially in the gaming sphere, where things tend to get competitive at best and vitriolic at worst) that we have games that make us more hyper-aware of our positive connections to other people. Having joy in turn makes you want to share joy with other people!! And in the face of seriousness & pain out in the world, our minds need to...in a sense, "fill up with joy" to combat the world! The definition of a Joyful Player is also nice. Could a Joyful Player in turn make any game into a Joyful Game?

I like how the examples of Joyful Games given all embody a similar aesthetic as well: bright colors, pleasant sound design, and friendly shapes! I'd also like to nominate Videoball by Action Button as a Joyful game. Maybe some people will disagree with me, I don't know. Also, I think what makes a good Icebreaker game is similar qualities to Joyful Games.

Having read both THE JOYFUL GAME and the No Fun Manifesto, neither proved persuasive.

On the one hand, fun has positives. You get to destress, relax with friends, enjoy life. THE JOYFUL GAME explains this better than I ever could; I won't go on about something you already know.

On the other hand, there's other benefits to games besides fun. And I don't just mean that cold, clinical education side of gaming. I think of Pathologic. If you aren't familiar, it's a janky Russian horror game that might be the most depressing thing in existence. It is the exact opposite of fun, but in doing so, primes the player to explore deep, emotionally-charged themes. When people play it, they can't help but argue. This guy argued killing one to save many. These guys called each other fascists. The lack of fun made people think about important questions they never considered; I wouldn't want to take that from games.

And don't forget; fun can be manipulative. I'm thinking of exploitative free-to-play schemes, drip feeding dopamine in just the right ways while exploiting their playerbase. And then there's series like Far Cry; fun games, but they come with unfortunate implications. If we only judged games for fun, we'd open the door to exploitation and propaganda.
My question: why can't we have both? Why can't we have fun games with greater meanings? I mentioned Far Cry's narrative, but the core gameplay loop (scouting and clearing bases) doesn't make the game fun. It's superfluous; you don't need dumb to have fun. And then there's games like Minecraft, which use fun as a vessel to be educational, to explain complex engineering concepts in a way people enjoy. I can see both side's point, but I don't see a reason to fight over this.

While I'm typing; I strongly disagree with Let Us Embrace Our Long Titles. Looking back a lot of my childhood games, leaving them in a box for a decade has let me revisit them for whole new experiences. If anyone here has played Pokemon XD: Gales Of Darkness, try replaying it today. Turns out, your most powerful ally is a benevolent cable news executive who, among other things, puts you in contact with a whistleblower. I guess Pokemon supports journalism. I don't know if it was uncontroversial at the time, or if 12-year-old me didn't think about it, or if I didn't have needed context my first time around, but the game was definitely different the second time around. If I had traded it in. And it's not the only one: literally every game I've owned has become a new experience over time. Each of them has shown me how much I've changed as a person, in ways I wasn't even aware of. Ten years down the line, I'd love to revisit the games on my hard drive.

The very idea of deleting our games scares me. If anything, we need to be saving our games. We live in a world where online-only games can be lost forever as soon as the servers shut down, where games can be wiped off the PS4 storefront because Konami said so. We have a history to protect; wiping our hard drives will only shoot us in the foot.