Category: Gaming Culture
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Prove It
I used to pester the user research team every time I heard a playtest was scheduled. Can you ask if they understood the narrative? Can you ask if they prefer the way this gun sounds or that one? I wanted feedback from people who weren’t on the project team badly enough that I made myself…
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The Island of Misfit Toys
There was a senior producer on one of the games I worked on who had spent years managing a high-end restaurant kitchen before she ended up in the games industry. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made. Kitchen management at that level is logistics, triage, people management, quality control, and crisis…
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The Fastest “Team” In The Room
Let me be upfront about something before we get into it: AI is one of those topics where I think nuance tends to get flattened fast. I completely understand why a lot of creatives — artists, musicians, writers, developers — have strong and formal objections to AI tools, particularly around generated art and audio. Those…
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Interpreting Thelonious Monk’s “25 Tips for Musicians” To Game Development
In 1960, saxophonist Steve Lacy was hired to play a series of performances with Thelonious Monk. During that time he wrote down a list of tips — things Monk said, observations he made, advice offered in the way that advice often gets offered in a working band: casually, in the moment, not necessarily intended to…
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Nobody Came Here To Watch You Know Things
It’s 20XX and I’m settling into a folding chair at GDC, buzzing with the kind of excitement that only makes sense if you understand what it took to get there. This was my first time at the conference after nearly eight years in the industry. A few colleagues and I had pooled resources and were…
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From Playing to Watching: How Let’s Plays Changed What It Means to Be a Gamer
There’s something I’ve been turning over in my mind lately, and I think it’s worth putting into words. Here’s my hot take: the rise of Let’s Play videos and live streaming has fundamentally shifted what the gaming community is. Not just in size, but in its very nature. And I’m not sure we talk about…