Hey, how's the AAA games industry doing about now?

Happy Juneteenth! I promise I didn't plan it this way, but we happened to talk a lot about being a black game developer in 2026 with @shawndoublea.bsky.social in the podcast last week and they're passions and insights are perfect for the holiday. youtu.be/NEq9dH9hflw?...

Black Voices in Gaming is where all the best Black developers hang. We had and amazing showcase this year, and we've got an excellent collection of newly released and upcoming games on steam from Next fest. store.steampowered.com/sale/BlackVo...

More than anything else, I want video games to be a space where Black art flourishes. This week we got a brand new @shawndoublea.bsky.social game Beatdown City Survivors! But we also lost Compulsion Games after its excellent example of gaming Blackness, the deeply underappreciated South of Midnight

this may well be the defining joke of our era theonion.com/guy-who-suck...

I truly fucking love the idea that universities are "indoctrinating" students to do anything. The sort of sentence uttered by someone who's never tried to get a college student to attend class or turn in a paper.

Think of creative advice the same way you would dating advice: be your authentic self, not a pick-up artist creep. People can smell the difference.

So proud to be on this list! @literaryhub.bsky.social says The Cruelty of Nice Folks:"deftly situates the state’s paradoxical history of outwardly progressive politics and quietly regressive policies within the epoch-making tumult of the past six years"

Marjane Satrapi died today & the world lost a powerful and eloquent voice. I met her almost 20yrs ago and spent an afternoon w/her drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. I loved her. She was only 56. That monsters live to 100 proves to me of the absence of god. filmfreakcentral.net/2008/04/satr...

This is not an exaggeration. My parents literally forced me to destroy my RPGs when I was 16 because the Christian psychologist they sent me to told me "Satan is real" and I might "catch a demon" if I didn't stop. This man had a PhD on his wall.

If you ever wondered why Lucas' projects seemed different after Return of the Jedi, you need to read up on Marcia's *enormous* contribution to his early work, as well as her collaborations with Scorsese and others. The Death Star raid is one of the great film sequences primarily because of her.

Best thing about IOI's #JamesBondGame so far is how it uses familiar tropes against you, like when the classically hot girl at the bar is not your contact, or how you think the tux is yours but then Q informs you're going to be the chauffeur on this mission.

Yes, this is famously why Stranger Things never made any money or connected with Gen-Z audiences. :P People who think this don't understand what the point of referencing pop-culture / generational specificity even is in a story. [1/21]

Peter's the best collaborator a Narrative Designer could want, and was a blast to work with in crafting the main story campaign. Check out his interview here if you want to know what makes #ChaosGateDeathwatch unique from its predecessor. www.ign.com/articles/war...

Oh hey. The game I've been doing the Principal Writing / Narrative Design for these past few years has been announced. store.steampowered.com/app/3010270/...

Wonder if this person has seen Last Night In Soho.

The panel I was on ended up as one of the free videos on the #GDC Vault. Lots of solid advice from @toiya.bsky.social, @nessathewriter.bsky.social, @ashleyruhl.bsky.social, @asaraviapt.bsky.social. Check it out here: gdcvault.com/play/1035891...

indie game making in the early 2010's was filled people making simple 2d platformers who had bizarre elaborate life philosophies behind what they were doing. now it's filled with people making weird 3d games called Dream Explorer but every word out of their mouth sounds like a marketing executive

How good an adaptation is #MarioGalaxyMovie of what is arguably the most cinematic game in the series? letterboxd.com/mjweise/film...

Orson Welles isn't having your media effects bullshit. www.youtube.com/watch?v=JK7B...

The third Mario movie should be a straight adaptation of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead but with Wario and Waluigi.

I am begging people to stop acting like we have to compromise or right wingers will enact fascism. THEY WILL ENACT THE FASCISM ANYWAY. The conservative justices on SCOTUS are going to rule against trans rights no matter what principle Kagan and Sotomayor try to follow. So why join them?

Because #DarkSouls is in the news: here is an article I wrote for VICE a while back about how the true genre of FromSoft's games is RELIGIOUS HORROR, in which the only real enemy is a heartless God, and our only real triumph as players is to bear witness to mortal pain. share.google/kwnlgEKKyIyd...

Toxic game bros who misread the difficulty of these games as a macho challenge have sullied the legacy if one of the most thoughtful, empathetic franchises games have to offer. I love these games because they feel like the OPPOSITE of bro-y bullshit, but bros will fucking ruin anything, won't they?

I absolutely was turned off by the descriptions of these games - very often from men in the Souls community - were punishing and not for the faint of heart. But my bff @tylercolp.bsky.social loved them so much that I tried them and realized all the games were asking of me was to learn and be patient

Shoutouts to Signalis and Crow Country, two of the best survival horror games (indie or otherwise) of the last few years. And it's not indie, but Silent Hill f is basically a primal scream about languishing under systemic misogyny. There's some great stuff out there...

ARM (Always Repost Mifune)

Had a great time at GDC. Reconnected with the community, met cool new folks, commiserated with other writers (an important past time), and thanks to @toiya.bsky.social, @nessathewriter.bsky.social, @ashleyruhl.bsky.social, and @asaraviapt.bsky.social the panel was a smash. See y'all in the next one!

#RE9 feels like alternating between being Ash in Evil Dead 1 and Ash in Evil Dead 3.

ARM (Always Repost Mifune)

I'm not at #GDC, though I'd have loved to see people's pretty faces. You can find many of my NYC darlings there, however, so say hi if you meet @mjweise.bsky.social, @jesshaskins.bsky.social and any of my amazing colleagues and students from the @nyugamecenter.bsky.social because they're the best.

Late to the party I know, but I just finished #SIGNALIS for the first time, and if you ever wanted Resident Evil to be a lot more like Portrait of a Lady on Fire, I very much recommend it.

If you're attending #GDC next week, I'm on a panel with several other talented writers. Stop by if you want the inside scoop on game narrative from people who've been doing it for years. schedule.gdconf.com/session/its-...

Chulip (be a kissing mailman) Disaster Report (survival without the horror) Haunting Ground (most disturbing final girl sim ever) Life Line (control with mic, terrible and fascinating) Mister Mosquito (suck blood of human giants) (more...)

Y'all looked at us funny when we said this apocalyptic death-cult mutation of Christianity was a feature, not a bug, of the Religious Right, but now here we are. They were telling us shit like this in Sunday School in the 80s.

I am pro Iranian people. I stand with them against their own government’s repression AND against the imperial violence in the form of bombs dropped from the sky from Israel & the US who have already killed hundreds. I support neither imperialism or dictatorship. Sahar Delijani said it best:

@adriandaub.bsky.social You mentioned having some dealing with the Bay Area tech world in the last podcast. Do you ever make it to GDC, or is the game branch of tech sort of apart from the circles you've been in?

i think games should be weird and frustrating sometimes for the same reason i think billionaires should not exist-- a lack of friction in your experiences will drive you crazy if you let it

no, it simply isnt. People are talking about capital using gAI as an excuse to conduct mass lay-offs, about students losing learning because theyre being lied to about gAI in education, about the mass theft of the work of artists and authors to train LLMs, about CSAM and nonconsensual sexual images.

The problem with stormtroopers isn't "training". The problem with stormtroopers is that they are stormtroopers.

It's more than a little disconcerting that invading another country to steal its resources is now less controversial and more acceptable to my government and much of this country than me using the bathroom

The new transfer of Eyes Wide Shut is completely stunning, and in the service of a deeply rich text. I tried to organize some thoughts about the movie. boxd.it/coS1wR

agree with this thread, but: i wouldn't assume people have seen some challenging piece of art. so many gamers don't engage with any media outside 'nerd' spaces. likely a big reason why we're sleepwalking into reliving 20th century censorship battles is these people don't know the history at all

#WakeUpDeadMan convinced me The Last Jedi is about Rian Johnson's relationship with Christianity. Faith, pacificsm, the distance between reality and myth... the way the two films' thematic obsessions echo each other is hard to ignore.

This is the movie everyone thinks Casablanca is.

An incredible actor often hamstrung by type casting but rose above it all the same. Would have been the *perfect* actor (right age, leading man vibes, *actually* Mexican) for the Heston role in Touch of Evil.

#SilentHillf is a fucking knife to the gut, the best the series has been in over 20 years, and further evidence that Silent Hill is at its most compelling when giving voice to female rage.

Day 301: "You were almost a Jill sandwich!!1!"

Thanks to Signalis I can no longer look at any scifi horror game without thinking: "Okay why not but the important thing is — are there lesbians and if so what level of yearning are we talking about here?"

Caught @realgdt.bsky.social presenting his majestic, mythic, and timely adaptation of Frankenstein at the Paris in NYC yesterday, about an angel sent to Earth that none of us deserve.