But, when creator Gareth Damian Martin and I spoke, they didn't just want to talk about how their game worked – if anything, they seemed happy to leave that discussion until players could play it to find out for themselves. Instead, they wanted to say why they were making this game, and why they were doing it now.
After all, in an industry where game developers are closing up shop daily, making a first-person fungalpunk RPG isn't the safe bet.
Hurrah! Today is a very fine Thursday, as one of the most tightly written sci-fi RPGs around is available to pick up for free for around a week. That'll be Citizen Sleeper, by the way, a dice-driven RPG that I'm sure all of you must already know and love, but for the selection of you that don't technically exist, I'm sure you'll be happy to be able to pick it up for the cost of a couple of clicks.
While Crusader Kings 3 typically deals in the fantasy of sitting on a big chair in one place and shouting at underlings, roaming its world as a the unlanded leader of a band of travelling adventurers is just as fun and arguably the best way to kick off a custom dynasty. Up to now, the freedom to pursue the life of a ruthless mercenary, valiant knight, or stuffy bureaucrat surviving off of favours for rulers while searching for the ideal title or throne to claim as their own once they're ready has been locked behind 2024's Roads to Power expansion. Thankfully, Paradox plan to whisk it out from behind that curtain and make it a free part of the base game later this year.
The weather has been an unpredictable mess of downpour and blazing sun this week, but Saturday feels like it could be the turn. Another chance for the sun to yank on the starter cord of summer and get that season's engine thrumming.
I simply refuse to have to turn back from another walk around the park because 10 metres from my front door the lovely sunshine is replaced by pelting rain.
Reading the air: high and low context communication in teams
Picture the scene: you’re in a meeting with your new team. You ask what you think is a reasonable question, and knowing glances are exchanged across the room. A couple of people suppress laughter, and the team lead moves on. It’s clear that you’ve said something wrong, but you have no idea what. The rest of the team are picking up on, and sharing, cues you can’t read and you are suddenly and obviously the outsider. There is an implicit communication at play, and you’re not in on it.
This dynamic can be thought of in terms of the context of the communication. The rest of the team are operating with a high level of shared context – they are reading something into your words, and implicitly communicating something back to you, but you don’t have the shared context to understand what that is. This is a concept that anthropologist Edward Hall identified through his work which began in the 1930s, exploring how different groups of people communicate in different ways with their own shared norms, including how people who have known each other for a long time often communicate more implicitly than strangers who have just met. He later came to term this ‘high and low context’ communication, a framing which Erin Meyer brought to a wider organisational audience through her book The Culture Map. The idea of high and low context communication is a framework that has a lot to offer anyone thinking about how teams actually function.
High and low context: what the framework says
In high context communication, a great deal of meaning is carried implicitly. It lives in relationship history, shared understanding, tone, non-verbal signals and what is deliberately left unsaid. The speaker may be saying one thing explicitly while something else entirely is being communicated, and the onus is on the listener to read between the lines. Japan is often cited as a key example of a high context culture; Meyer describes how someone who fails to pick up on implicit cues risks being labelled a kuuki yomenai – literally, “a person who can’t read the air.” Korea, Indonesia and Iran are also broadly high context cultures.
High context communication tends to flourish in societies with long, dense shared histories – populations who have had many centuries, sometimes even millennia, to develop layered, sophisticated codes of meaning and to become fluent in interpreting them with each other.
Read the air: Mammatus clouds form when cold, sinking air (laden with ice crystals or water droplets) descends into warmer, drier air below, creating distinctive rounded lobes. They’re usually found on the underside of cumulonimbus anvils: the spreading top of a large thunderstorm
Low context communication works differently. Meaning is made as explicit and external as possible – it lives in the words themselves, in clear and precise instructions and in expectations that are named directly rather than gestured toward. The US is Meyer’s go-to example of a very low context culture. She explains that in the US, a country shaped by successive waves of immigration, with diverse populations bringing different languages, histories and backgrounds, people quickly learned that if you wanted your message to land, you had to make it as explicit as possible. Australia, Canada and the Netherlands sit similarly on the low context end of the spectrum.
But the framework isn’t only about national culture, it cuts across many kinds of grouping. A tight-knit friendship group who have grown up together will often have developed a highly implicit, almost private communication style that is opaque to anyone outside it. A group of students thrown together in university halls of residence for the first time will need to be much more explicit if they’re going to organise anything at all. The same applies in organisations. A small, long-established, relatively autonomous team will often communicate in a higher context style than a newly convened multidisciplinary group drawn from across different functions.
The problem with high context in diverse teams
And here is where we go beyond something that’s academically kind of interesting into something that’s really important for the way we work…
High context environments favour insiders. They require a depth of shared knowledge and reference that takes time and proximity to build. Anyone who doesn’t share that implicit frame – for instance new joiners, people from different cultural backgrounds, neurodivergent folks, people from outside the dominant professional culture – is operating with less information, greater ambiguity and a greater risk of getting things wrong. They’re having to work harder just to follow what everyone else seems to be understanding effortlessly. And they’re typically far less likely to speak up when they’re uncertain, because, as we know, uncertainty makes speaking up feel more risky.
This is where high context communication becomes an equity issue, not just a style preference. The implicit meanings, unspoken norms and in-jokes that mark the insiders all create gradients of access to conversation that track closely with who was there first, who shares the dominant cultural background and whose communication style is treated as the default.
This connects directly to how teams foster psychological safety. When norms are implicit, expectations are gestured at rather than named and people are expected to absorb the rules by osmosis, the barrier to speaking up rises sharply, especially for those newest to the group or furthest from the implicit reference frame. When we make our communication norms explicit, we widen the circle of people who can understand what kind of participation is welcome and how to make their voice heard.
Multidisciplinary teams
The challenge of communicating across contexts compounds when you bring together people not just from different cultural or social backgrounds but from different professional disciplines. A product manager, a clinician, a data scientist, a policy specialist and a sales lead have all been shaped by the norms, language and implicit assumptions of their respective fields. They each bring a professional context and assumed way of working and communicating that the others aren’t party to. Perhaps the clinician uses clinical terminology, which they assume everyone else will understand, while the policy specialist has a knowledge of the legislative landscape that underpins all that they say but is never made explicit. Perhaps the sales lead starts from the assumption that the team’s goal is purely commercial. None of them are wrong to carry their expertise, and in fact it’s the diversity of their backgrounds that could allow the work they do together to be hugely successful. But when their contextual assumptions go unexamined, misunderstandings and misalignments proliferate.
This is why taking some time to get to know one another’s ways of working, and, even more importantly, to establish some explicit, shared team norms at the outset of a multidisciplinary project matters so much. What this means in practice is a deliberate, intentional move to lower context communication – being as explicit and clear with each other as possible. All the dialogue that flows from there can be built on shared understanding.
When the stakes are highest: crisis and time pressure
The case for practising low context communication in ordinary conditions becomes even harder to ignore when you consider what happens when those conditions break down.
Under pressure, in a crisis, where decision making is time pressured but the stakes are high, we might feel as if we need to communicate more implicitly in order to go faster, but actually the time cost of ambiguity and flawed assumptions can be even higher.
In their work on ‘Crisis-Ready Teams’ Waller and Kaplan described the characteristics of high-performing teams in terms of their early interaction patterns, and discovered that higher performing teams spent significantly more time in what they called the early structuring phase, where they clarified team member’s roles and created ground rules around communicating – what we would call the social contract. They observed:
“While other teams seemed to jump into the problem feetfirst with very little effort given to structuring activities, high performing teams seemed to approach the crisis situation knowing if all team members weren’t on the ‘same page’ from the beginning, coordination would become more problematic as things became more complex.”
What these high performing teams were effectively doing was taking the time to build shared mental models of their work environment and how they could work together. They were explicitly building shared context. What’s more, these high-performing crisis teams also spent more time in what Waller and Kaplan call the information sharing phase – where they pool the information they have individually with each other to augment each other’s understanding. And the authors are keen to emphasise that this doesn’t mean pausing and deliberating before you ‘stop the bleeding’ or take any immediate actions needed as part of the first response phase of a crisis. But it does mean that as we tackle complex and evolving crises, we need teams who can continually monitor the situation, “freely sharing information about the situation without fear of reprisal,” as Waller and Kaplan put it. In other words, the teams need psychological safety.
Making low context communication an explicit group norm in ordinary conditions is partly preparation for these times. Teams that have practised stating expectations clearly and treating explicit communication as a mark of respect rather than an insult to intelligence are much better placed to communicate effectively when clarity becomes critical.
Building the habit: low context as a team norm
In practice this means taking time to build a social contract deliberately, and discussing the value of low context communication with the team from the start, not assuming that clarity will emerge naturally, but treating it as something the group actively commits to.
A happy outcome of this, of course, is that the more we work on making expectations explicit, encouraging information sharing and getting clear about our roles, the more we are actually building a shared context. In time that can mean more of our coordination becomes implicit again, the team reading each other well without needing to spell everything out. The difference is that this is an implicit understanding the group has built, rather than one it took for granted at the start.
A note on the costs
So does this mean the real goal was never low context communication at all, only creating the shared context that lets us work implicitly again? Not quite. In most teams the conditions for that never fully stabilise. New joiners arrive, team boundaries shift and the shared reference frame that makes implicit working reliable is always partly under construction. Diversity of background, discipline and cognitive approach adds to this: the assumptions any group builds will always be more accessible to some members than others. As Meyer puts it, “Multicultural teams need low-context processes” – and we would extend that further: so do teams with diversity of any kind, whether of discipline, background, neurodiversity or anything else.
But it is worth acknowledging that low context communication is not a universal good that everyone will welcome naturally. For those accustomed to high context styles, a move toward explicitness can feel slow, or even patronising: “You don’t need to spell it out – I get it!”.
There is a risk that imposing low context communication without acknowledging this discomfort lands as a power move in its own right, as if the explicit style were simply better, rather than better suited to working with team members who come from different contexts and have different histories. As Meyer describes, we might need to be really honest and upfront about why we’re communicating like this, saying things like:
I’ll put what we discussed and agreed in writing, not because we don’t trust each other but because then we have a clear agreement we can refer back to and catch any misunderstandings or confusions.
We can apply the principles of low context communication even to the process of moving to lower context approaches!
What a team is really developing is the capacity to move between the two styles deliberately: to grow enough shared context that it can work implicitly where that genuinely serves the group, while maintaining the discipline to switch to something more explicit whenever the situation demands it (which it often will). The way in is an honest conversation about how we communicate, and that conversation is itself an act of low context communication. We start by naming what we’re doing and why.
Surprise. the follow-up to Misfits Attic's Duskers is called Duskers 2.0. Get ready for more spooky and strategic scavenging of shipwrecks hovering ominously above planets, this time with the goal of establishing colonies which can give the denizens of a doomed universe a second chance.
Our Editorial Style Guide contains many conventions and we know from research that publishers struggle to remember to apply them. Could automation help? We experimented embedding style guide rules into a Drupal module that checked content against the rules in the editorial interface and suggested corrections when the rules weren’t followed.
As part of a concentrated effort to make it easier for publishers to apply our style guide rules, Mostafa Ebid, a student who came to work with us in summer 2025, installed Editoria11y, an open-source Drupal feature and configured it with selected rules from our University style guide. Applying this feature to a site with demo content, he tested it with University staff to see how well it worked, and how useful and usable they found it.
Drupal Editoria11y is an open-source accessibility checker
Editorial accessibility ally (shortened to Editoria11y) is a module developed by John Jameson from Princeton University that enables automated content checking directly in the editorial interface. Originally created to help content editors catch accessibility issues, its configurable architecture makes it well suited to embedding other kinds of rules, such as institutional style guide conventions. The checks can run in real time as content authors type, and can also be applied to content in published pages and previews, to flag issues to be corrected.
Editoria11y can include more than 50 built-in content tests covering image alt text, link quality, heading structure, and general content issues. Flagged issues are noted at the page level by an indicator bar, which includes a count and a categorisation of the type of issues (default categories are headings and alt text). Through this bar it is possible to identify the precise inline location of the problematic content with visualisers. Each visualiser is associated with a modal that contains detail about the problem element and plain language tips explaining how to fix it.
In addition to the on-page alerts, it is possible to review issues across a site via a reporting dashboard which can be configured to log recurring issues or most problematic pages, as required.
We designed tests to learn if Editoria11y would be useful and usable to embed style guide rules
Editoria11y presented itself as a mechanism to enable web publishers to check their content against style guide rules, and we wanted to understand the kind of experience this provided in EdWeb2. In particular, we wanted to understand:
If Editoria11y could effectively check content against our style guide rules
How Editoria11y presented results of the checks in the editorial interface
If publishers could use Editoria11y to correct content that misaligned with the style guide
Moreover, we wanted to learn if the addition of Editoria11y to the EdWeb2 editorial interface improved the publisher experience or not.
We picked deterministic rules about dates and numbers for the tests
Like many Drupal features, Editoria11y is very flexible and customisable to fit a range of different use cases. Since it was new to our publishers, we were keen to avoid overengineering it, taking care to configure it to present the minimal information necessary to achieve our testing goals.
The University’s Editorial Style Guide contains between 60 and 70 separate rules, of which fewer than half are deterministic (in other words, can be applied directly without editorial judgement). It made sense to include deterministic rules in the tests, to enable us to accurately assess how effective Editoria11y was at checking them.
Rules in the dates and numbers section of the style guide seemed a good fit for the tests, so these were configured into Editoria11y.
We set up Editoria11y to display an indicator bar, visualisers, modals and a dashboard
The module was set up to display the indicator bar, the inline visualisers and the reporting dashboard. Content that contained sentences with dates and numbers was saved in draft in a demo interface which had Editoria11y applied. In the test scenario, participants were asked to assume they had been asked to review this draft content before it went live and to use a checker tool to help them with this.
Screenshot of the Drupal Editori11y tool in action, showing the yellow indicator bar at the bottom right of the interface, tallying the total number of style guide errors on the draft page
Screenshot of Editoria11y showing on the left, the indicator bar at the bottom right of the draft page, and on the right, the same draft page, but revealing the locations of the style guide errors (activated when the indicator bar is pressed) and an example of the modal giving detail of the error and the suggested fix
Screenshot of Editoria11y showing on the left, the display with the indicator, and on the right, the reporting dashboard summarising all the errors (which opened in another window in the interface)
Watching participants use Editoria11y, we learned what worked and what didn’t
Tests were carried out with seven participants. Observing how they made sense of the different parts of Editoria11y and interacted with it, we were able to draw conclusions about how useful and usable it was to support the context of web publishing in EdWeb2.
Participants understood the relationship between the indicator and the visualisers
The first part of the tests involved showing participants the draft content in the editorial interface with Editoria11y applied. All of them were able to understand that the number of style guide errors on the page were tallied in the indicator bar at the bottom right of the page, and that they could use the indicator bar to reveal precise locations of the errors on the page, together with a modal for each error, explaining the error and the suggested fix.
Placement of the visualisers and modals often made it hard to read the draft content
Taking an overview of the visualisers in the draft content, participants commented that they felt a bit overwhelmed to see so many. Some felt the placement of the question mark visualisers made it difficult to ascertain which parts of the content needed to be corrected, which was slightly helped by yellow outlines around the text. Placement of the modals masked the text beneath, however, meaning participants found it difficult to engage with the original context of the errors to be corrected to assess whether to accept the suggestion or not
Screenshot of Editoria11y showing a view that some participants found overwhelming: indicator bar, question-mark indicators, yellow outlines and an open modal
Descriptions of the errors in the modals were not clear to some participants
Reading the information in the modals, some participants were unclear of the error it was pointing out. Specifically, in a modal describing the rule to write dates without including ‘th’ or ‘rd’ after numbers was written as ‘Write dates without commas or ordinal suffixes’. Some participants were unfamiliar with what ‘ordinal suffixes’ were, but seeing the suggested change presented as a ‘before and after’ tracked change with the error crossed out (in red) and the suggested change presented in green helped participants understand the proposed correction.
Screenshot of Editoria11y showing a modal explaining the rule to not include ordinal suffixes when writing dates
Participants were able to use the modals to correct some style guide errors
When they had read and understood the errors being highlighted, most participants were able to assess whether to accept the suggested fixes and apply them based on the information contained in the modal. Several participants entered into a flow of using the arrow keys in the modals to clicking through the different errors and accepting the fixes, especially when the fixes related to a recurrent error – for example, capitalising the first letter when writing days of the week. They appreciated a notification alerting them that the fix had been applied, which temporarily appeared at the top right of the screen, although some said they would have appreciated this notification to remain for longer as it was easy to miss. They were also unclear whether they needed to save after applying each fix, or if this could be done when they had worked through all of the fixes on the page.
Screenshot of Editoria11y showing a notification in the top right of the interface to confirm the fix had been applied
Not all errors were fixable with automatic rule application – some required interpretation and judgement
Viewing the suggestions in the modals, several participants noted a problem with the fixes being based on automatic application of the style guide rules. Specifically, relating to the rule about omitting ordinal suffixes for numbers, there were several instances where it didn’t make sense to apply this rule directly. For example, a date written as ‘5th of December’ contained a suggested fix to remove ‘th’ but not to remove ‘of’. Another relating to ‘4th year’ of studies suggested removing the ‘th’ but not writing ‘fourth’ as a way to make the sentence readable, and similarly, another advised removing ‘st’ from ‘1st floor’ which was an incomplete fix.
Screenshots of Editoria11y showing instances where the ordinal suffix corrections couldn’t be directly applied
Some participants’ trust in the checker waned when they realised it didn’t catch all the errors
Of those who took part in the tests – some were more familiar with the rules of the style guide than others, and this impacted the trust they placed in Editoria11y. When they reviewed the Editoria11y outputs against the draft content and spotted corrections that hadn’t been picked up or flagged by Editoria11y, they were inclined to disregard the tool and check the content for themselves to ensure the text was completely compliant.
Screenshot of Editoria11y showing a style guide error where the pound sign is missing from an amount that the tool has not picked up
Few participants said they would use the dashboard as they felt that was for a site administrator
Navigating through the different options on the indicator, participants were able to access the dashboard interface, which was titled ‘Content Accessibility Issues’. Reviewing what was there, in sections called ‘Top issues’, ‘Pages with the most issues’ and ‘Recent issues’ most participants said they didn’t feel they would use this feature, and presumed it would be for someone with full responsibility for the whole site.
Editoria11y has potential as a style guide helper tool, but would need contextual refinement
Taking the findings together, Editoria11y showed promise as a way to embed the style guide rules into draft content, to avoid web publishers needing to navigate away from the editorial interface to check the rules in the guide itself to then apply them. Participants understood what the indicator bar was there to achieve, and liked the idea of being able to check off corrections to their content through the modals. Some identified areas for improvement included:
Refinement of the style guide rules embedded in Editoria11y, to include examples, exceptions and applications based on scope and context
Embedding a more complete set of style guide rules into Editoria11y to help build trust in the tool
Adaptation of the modal options to include ‘Accept with edits’ as well as ‘Accept’ and ‘Ignore’ to account for instances where editorial judgement needed to be applied to the suggested correction
A way to show corrections in categories (for example, all those relating to numbers together, all those relating to punctuation together and son on) which could be addressed by the editor in sequence, to avoid overwhelm in the interface
Suggestions for correcting content when reworked sentences were required – powered by an LLM such as ELM
As well as Editoria11y surfacing style guide rules, there is potential to use it for its intended purpose, as an accessibility checker, containing checks about the heading hierarchy and alt text on images. If this was to be included as well as style guide rules, however, progressive disclosure of the information should be used to avoid the interface becoming too cluttered.
Many of these areas overlap with work currently progressing in open-source Drupal, firstly develop a Context Control Center – as a way of handling rules to enable AI-assisted content production, and secondly to develop an AI Content Review feature, capable of reviewing content against defined rules and conventions.
Read more about these Drupal developments in my related blog post:
If your app or website makes people feel confused, lost, or quietly scream into a pillow, your UX needs a reboot. These 10 timeless UX principles are the difference between digital love and digital rage-quitting. Designers, read this before you accidentally make another invisible button.
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