But Why Tho?

This week, Alex, Charles, and Swara talk about what happens when genres reach maturity, what's become of superhero movies, and what they would do to fix the genre's problems if they were in charge.

The Nakba, or "catastrophe" in Arabic, describing the ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Palestine by Israel since 1948, is not widely learned. Rasheed Abueideh, a Palestinian game designer based in the West Bank, aims to change that with his new game in development, Dreams on a Pillow. Here is our interview with Abueideh, in which he explains why he decided to pursue making the game, what he hopes players will get out of it, and how people can support it.

We sat down with Lead Vision Designer Mark Rosewater to discuss the design behind Magic: The Gathering's latest Universe's Beyond set, Marvel Super Heroes. From color choices to theme to navigating canon, Mark has insight on it all.

As one of Obsidian's most successful titles, Grounded 2's most recent Beat the Heat update keeps pushing the little game that could into a model for multiplayer play in 2026. During Summer Game Fest Play Days, we spoke with Chris Parker, the Game Director on Grounded 2, about introducing new fixtures like buggies and the King Dozer, and how the studio has looked to build its franchise with player feedback at the center while evolving consistently.

Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) introduced a new seasonal model this year, and with seasons, the Bethesda-published MMORPG is rolling out the most substantial sequential updates the game has released since launch.During Summer Game Fest Play Days, we spoke with ZeniMax Online Studios' developers Nick Giacomini (Game Director) and Jason Barnes (Associate Design Director) about everything we'll see this year.

This week, Alex is joined by Katherine and Ryan to talk about the massive amount of gaming news that's come out in the past week. They talk about Summer Games Fest, PlayStation's State of Play, and Xbox Games Showcase, and all of what's exciting and worrying them from it. This episode was recorded before this week's Nintendo Direct, so we'll discuss that news in next week's episode.

This week, Alex, Charles, and Swara discuss storytelling, when happy endings can be bad but sad or challenging endings be good, and what happens to stories when they prioritize the wrong things.

Directive 8020 gives space horror fans the first real taste of the genre since Dead Space’s homage to Event Horizon. The game wields space horror to great effect, letting the story and characters carry it.

We sat down with Directive 8020’s Creative Director, Will Doyle, to discuss the game’s inspirations, Supermassive Games’ approach to storytelling in the Dark Pictures Anthology series, and how their latest title shifted their narrative formula.

This week, Alex, Kate, and Matt talk about how basically everything on the internet now is either paid advertising that's inflating how much people care about a thing, or exploitative free advertising at the expense of actual marketing professionals and campaigns. It's all bad and makes products worse while making it impossible to believe that anything online is even real anymore. Plus, how AI is regenerating ads and paid endorsements as legitimate information.

This week, Alex and Kyle discuss the recent trend of physical media's seeming rising popularity. They discuss why they think people are moving towards a more analog, inconvenient age, the terrors of tech companies owning your digital content, and where community is and isn't being built around physical media purchasing and collecting.