Category: Culture
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The Game Nobody Was Making
I was in early. The studio was the kind of open space floorplan that the industry fell in love with at some point — no walls, sight lines everywhere, the ambient noise of other people’s work as your permanent soundtrack. The Executive Producer for the project was already there, playing an extraction shooter at their…
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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…
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Losing The Things We Love
I recently found some old music playlists of my own creation from 2011-2012. While the playlists themselves still exist, my efforts to compile or at least listen to the music on them has been a challenge. Many songs are no longer physically being printed. A handful are not available on any streaming services. Some are…
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The Best Book I’ve Read All Year Scares Me
(Blogtober Day 5) I’ve been on a non-fiction kick for the last handful of years. Occasionally a science fiction or fantasy novel has creeped it’s way into the queue, but I would say nine out of ten books I read are non-fiction. They tend to be about history or on skills that I wish to…