Everybody's Talking At Once

Sam Rosenthal shuffles on over to talk about Where Cards Fall, a reflective, touch-native narrative puzzle game almost a decade in the making—as well as his previous work on the fiercely and rightly beloved What Remains of Edith Finch.

Along the way, Sam talks about how Apple Arcade could offer new opportunities for smaller, weirder games, how working on Skylanders taught him the finer points of gamefeel, and how book clubs might just offer a better discursive model than the game press currently does.

Also: Robert Frost and Radiohead.

You can play Where Cards Fall via Apple Arcade on iOS and iPadOS now, and macOS soon.

• Here's that other interview Sam did about Where Cards Fall.

• Here's Kurt Vonnegut on "the shapes of stories."

• And sure, I'll share Celeste's movement code yet again. (The new levels are lovely, by the way).

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Ricky Haggett takes stock of his work on Wilmot's Warehouse, Hohokum, Loot Rascals, Frobisher Says, Tenya Wanya Teens, and his other odd, wondrous work. We talk about the primacy of collaboration in his games, the importance of making game development rewarding (practically and financially as well as creatively), the "repetitive stress injury for your brain" that prevents developers from enjoying their own games after release, and the intrinsic joy of putting things in order and deciding how to do so.

You can get Wilmot's Warehouse on Steam, Itch, and Switch.

• For those who would know why Bennet Foddy and Zach Gage put their names on their games.

• Chuchel is really something of "a masterpiece of comic timing and animation and audio design," as Ricky says.

• So many lovely little projects have come out of Wild Rumpus and its offshoot Mild Rumpus.

• Hellcouch is a game you should very much play if you can.

• Behold Celeste's movement code.

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Matthew Seiji Burns is responsible for some of the best and least-discussed narratives and soundtracks in games, namely those in the beloved-for-other-reasons Zachtronics works Infinifactory, TIS-100, SHENZHEN I/O, and Opus Magnum?not to mention the generally under-discussed Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, his Twine work, and his past-life AAA work on the Call of Duty, Halo, and Destiny series.

In this interview, we talk about basically none of those.

Instead we focus on Eliza, the new Zachtronics-published visual novel that finally puts his writing (and to a lesser, though significant degree, his audio) front and center. It's a game about human connections, moral responsibility, burnout, and the problems that technology and futurism are ill-equipped to solve. So mostly, that's what we talk about.

You can get Eliza on Steam, Itch, GOG, and Humble.

And if you want to hear way more about Zachtronics, here are the episodes featuring the one and only Zach Barth:

17. On the Art of the Anti-Puzzle

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• Here's the web-based version of the original Eliza.

• It was Arlie Russell Hochschild who first talked about emotional labor, most famously in The Managed Heart. What the hell was I thinking when I said Donna Haraway? "Manifesto for Cyborgs," probably, since that's relevant to Eliza for other, gender-and-tech reasons.

• Homosexuality became officially not-a-pathology in 1973.

• Here's that Science Vs about eugenics.

• And here's Matthew's game The Arboretum.

• Full disclosure, for those who consider saying nice things about a video game to be the most sacred of trusts: I did some testing/proofreading/incredibly minor script consulting for Eliza.

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Melos Han-Tani and Marina Kittaka worked together on the original Anodyne, its under-appreciated follow-up Even the Ocean, and now their latest Analgesic Productions joint, Anodyne 2: Return to Dust. It's a game about getting to know the world in its infinite strangeness, acquiring and shedding preconceptions, and meeting new people who radically alter your sense of what's right, what's wrong, and who you are. It's also a game about every possible meaning of the words fidelity and scale.

Of course, it's not only about any one of those things. It's looser and more expansive than that, which is exactly why, like the previous Anodyne before, it offers such a nourishing meal for players' imaginations. In this interview, Melos and Marina shrink to ETAO scale to talk about how they build worlds in not much time, the eternal duality of canon and meta, and plenty else.

You can get Anodyne 2: Return to Dust on Steam, Itch, GOG, Humble, and Kartridge.

• The archive of my Destiny 2 tidying stream lives on YouTube, and of course, here on the site.

• I poked at capital-s Surrealism a bunch, thinking of André Breton's ideas of automatic writing and Salvador Dalí's approach to surrealist subject matter, both of which I'd say are relevant to Melos and Marina's approach.

• In case you're never read about Shovel Knight's selective faithfulness to the NES and SNES. Anodyne 2 really does take almost exactly the opposite approach, in some ways.

• Here's Marina on the Nice Games Club podcast.

• And here's GLITCH, the co-working space in Minneapolis that Marina mentioned.

• Just as importantly, here's a look at 七ツ風の島物語.

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Alan Dang emerges from the shadows to talk about his work on the Skullgirls mobile game, the VR garden-'em-up Fujii, and the indie arcade esport stalwart Killer Queen. Plus, we talk about the broader possibilities for virtual reality, the criminally ignored potential of games for education, and the fact that a gimmick is only a gimmick until someone uses it really well.

• Nintendo's first-party Pro controller for Switch does not in fact have a turbo button. What Alan saw at Evo, he later realized, was this Third-party Pro-ish controller.

• I'm pretty sure it was Chris Hecker who said the thing about how games are where cinema was when it was filming Fred Ott sneezing, but I can't find the source. If you can, hit me up.

• That description of Yoko Taro's work was, on reflection, a paraphrase of this immortal tweet.

• Here's the XKCD I was referring to, about the Ballmer Peak and all.

• Here's Alan's excellent Killer Queen Arcade explainer. I'd post his GDC talk as well, if not for that fact that it's currently locked away in the Vault.

• For more on the positive effects of putting a human face and name on your game, see Bennett Foddy and Zach Gage's wonderful GDC talk (by Bennett Foddy and Zach Gage).

• Here's the Zachtronics book that Alan mentions.

• And here's to Zacademics.

• Toca Boca, meanwhile, is indeed quite the phenomenon.

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Bryant Cannon joins us to discuss Oxenfree, its follow-up Afterparty, and the licensed, now-delisted Night School games that came in between—not to mention his previous mobile work, much of it also now delisted. As such, we talk about the melancholy weirdness of games being delisted, and more broadly, of games being treated as products first and foremost.

But mostly we talk about narratives, and how to weave them into every part of games, and Bryant's "design-first" engineering approach as one way of achieving that aim. If story is gameplay, then the narrative designers have to be able to iterate on stories quickly, without getting bogged down in technical particulars they only half understand—and likewise, developers shouldn't need to hard-code each individual plot point as something unique and irreducible. Bryant's work at Night School has largely been about striking that balance, threading that needle.

We also talk Zelda. Life's too short not to.

• See Frank Cifaldi's GDC talk for more on the state of game preservation.

• So, as I say in the intro: If we go to the katakana, It's ムジュラ, which you'd pronounce as ma-jō-ra, and which is probably a pun on 魔女 (which means witch and is pronounced ma-jo). So yeah, I'm wrong.

• Here's that blog post on the radio in Oxenfree.

• That quote about art never being finished, only abandoned, is probably originally attributable to Paul Valéry.

• King of Kings: The Early Years is indeed a Wisdom Tree joint, just like Bible Adventures, and a Christian bookstore would indeed have been where one would have encountered both.

• That flower in Breath of the Wild are called the silent princess, for the record.

• Here's me plahying through Zelda II, in tweet form.

• I flipped the color scheme in 4 Minutes, 33 Seconds of Uniqueness.

• Here's that recent Game Maker's Tool Kit about conversation as gameplay.

• The new Klei game is called Griftlands, and I have no excuse for forgetting that, since Jim Guthrie talked to me about his musical contributions to it not too long ago.

• Do check out Who Shot GuyBrush Threepwood?—not only the most recent episode, but also episodes one and two.

• Last but not least, here's one of Bryant's other talks, with a focus on Switch porting.

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Juan Vaca chooses to adventure with us—into his work at Telltale Games, at Endless Entertainment, and now at the burgeoning interactive team at Netflix. We talk about Juan's approach to narrative, the oft-ignored importance of theme, and his longstanding interest in using existing characters and worlds to tell original stories. We also talk about Juan's life as a veteran, the emptiness of "supporting the troops" without offering any, um, support, and the reality of the military as both a very large, very close family and an ice-cold bureaucracy.

And we talk about Juan's work at Latinx in Gaming. Oh, and his rather good jug band.

• Molly Ringwald's excellent essay was framed around The Breakfast Club and Pretty in Pink as much as Sixteen Candles. Recommended reading, albeit with trigger warnings aplenty.

• Here's Juan being interviewed by another veteran.

• And here's the interview wherein Juan recounts the good, the bad, and the institutionally broken of his time in the Marine Corps.

• Few would argue that Southland Tales is the best movie, but it might well be the most movie.

• The 2019 Latinx in Gaming roundtable at GDC doesn't seem to be public, (and that IndieCade panel about imposter syndrome doesn't seem to live online anywhere either, sad to say), but here's another recent Latinx in Gaming roundtable, in podcast form.

• Behold Jim Kweskin!

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Greg Batha has done a remarkable variety of creative/technical work, from the interface of Dream Daddy, to live visualizations for touring musicians, to the hectic and adorable puzzle battler bit bit blocks. What brings it all together, he explains in this wide-ranging interview, is the desire to do things in a given medium that can only be done in that medium. Come for the actually quite workable distinction between art and design, stay for the discussion of that one Futurama where Bender meets God (after being God) as a metaphor for good UX and UI!

• I don't think there is yet a definitive single source for the astonishing tech behind Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, but for whatever it's worth, I had this video in mind when I mentioned those glorious, all-important dots.

• "Springs fully forth" is a dumb malapropy phrase of mine that I actually kind of dig, upon listening back to it.

• Here's the fantastic Contrapoints video about the fraught and often awful way that straight cis men too often imagine trans women. (It's not just about that, mind you, specifically because it's not all about our infinitely fragile cismale feelings, my dudes).

• The notion of "The 8 Kinds of Fun" comes mostly from Marc "MAHK" MeBlanc's sundry self-styled "rants."

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Jim Guthrie joins us to reflect on his storied soundtracking career, from Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP and BELOW, to Indie Game: The Movie, to (implicitly, here) Reigns: Her Majesty and Planet Coaster—not to mention his auspicious and only-semi-separate indie rock career, the joys and sorrows of playing live, and Bandcamp's mad scheme to press its own vinyl (with the BELOW OST being an early and obvious and opulent candidate for the endeavor).

• Here are three of my favorite interviews with Jim that I read while getting ready: One about tone and intent, one about gear and production, and one about the sheer aesthetic joys of pretty, pretty vinyl.

• That Polygon interview about BELOW was great too, but you don't need me to tell you that.

• And here's the episode where C. Andrew Rohrmann talks about "anonymous ubiquity."

• Like I said, since recording this conversation, I've seen Bathtubs Over Broadway (which was produced by Focus Features, not Netflix, but which is nonetheless on Netflix) and gone down the rabbit hole of industrial musicals. Said rabbit hole goes pretty deep, as WFMU has explored here and here and here and here.

• The Griftlands trailer does promise much (and does, on reflection, sound very Jim Guthrie).

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Zach Chandler catches the bus with us and talks about Nth Dimension[al] Hiking, his gently arcane spectral traverse-'em-up. We discuss Zach's guiding principle, namely that if you're going to make a game that isn't obvious, then you'd better be sure that it's nonetheless truthful. That's easier said than done, of course, and we spend some time talking about the doing, and about why it matters. And furthermore:

horror : comedy :: Bennet Foddy games : kaizo hacks

• Here's a lovely little Gamasutra interview with Zach.

• Here's Film Crit Hulk on Red Dead Redemption 2.

• For those unfamiliar with Dogme 95 and their "vow of chastity."

• 多脚戦車  were indeed those tank-things from the Ghost in the Shell PS1 game.

• Here's my favorite piece on the texture work in Final Fantasy XII.

• I too am so excited to make stupid garbage.

• Connor Sherlock's games are lovely things indeed.

• My love for Starseed Pilgrim is well documented, and its whyproffness is endlessly inspiring.

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