Everybody's Talking At Once

Russell Quinn has had a unique career as a technologist enabling stories, building the underlying systems for the ahead-of-its time McSweeney's app, as well as for the equally-ahead-of-theirs, novel-adjacent multimedia projects The Silent History and The Pickle Index. He's brought remarkably inventive and playful stories to the world, though not as a storyteller, exactly.

That is, until his current solo project Linda & Joan, which tells an intensely personal story about family, loss, and what people can do for each other when things get truly bad. (Given the subject matter, as I say in the intro, this episode does definitely come with a CONTENT WARNING for illness, death, and trauma). Here Russell talks about the desire to make something that is recognizably and definitively a game while still being as thoughtful as ever about form—and about the healing that can come with making art out of awful experiences.

You can wishlist Linda & Joan on Steam and Itch, get the "Four Months Earlier" prologue on Steam, Itch, and Apple, and check out the Zine Club and The Candle on the project's website.

• Here's that Miranda July piece that Russell worked on.

Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

Chevy Ray has been making games for a long time now—though most of them are currently tough to play; RIP Flash—but is probably best known for Ikenfell, a tactical RPG about going to magic school, working through difficult relationships, and petting a great many cats.

Here Chevy talks about what it means to keep an RPG character-focused, the difference between nuance and subtlety, his love of "setpiece games," and the significant hidden benefits of pursuing accessibility.

You can get Ikenfell on Steam Humble, GOG, PlayStation, Xbox (where it's included in GamePass), and Switch. You can get the soundtrack on Bandcamp.

• That game Chevy was talking about was Genital Jousting.

• Chevy's episode of Eggplant is just wonderful.

• Cherry Thompson is definitely a person you should know.

• As is Ikenfell's lead sensitivity consultant, Joanna Blackheart.

• Those interested in accessibility in games can also check out Can I Play That? and these game accessibility guidelines.

• And here's that Bryce Johnson talk.

• If you do want to play the Linda & Joan prologue, "Four Months Earlier," before listening to the next episode, you can do so here.

Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

Anisa Sanusi is an accomplished UI/UX designer, probably best known for her work on Elite Dangerous and Planet Coaster—two utterly different games that bring with them utterly different challenges in terms of usability, accessibility, tone, and scope. She's also the founder of the Limit Break mentorship program, an organization dedicated to providing guidance, access, and support to underrepresented genders (and in this new year, BIPOC and LGBT+ folx) in the UK games industry.

Here Anisa talks about the difficulty of doing as much good as she can with Limit Break without allowing the scope of it to expand beyond what she can feasibly achieve, her approach to UI/UX, and how those two kinds of work potentially overlap.

Also: Marveling at Hades' incredible UX despite the absence of a dedicated UX person on the project. Also-also: Undoing the myth of misery making for better art.

You can learn more about Limit Break on their Twitter, their Instagram, and their website.

• And here's my conversation with Greg Batha—a good one to check out if you want to hear about what UI and UX are, even.

• As I say in the outro: Applications for Limit Break will be open next month, and we'll be sure to remind interested would-be applicants when the time comes.

Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

Chris King of Batterystaple Games shares a chunk of his time to discuss 30XX, the reimagined, souped-up sequel to the Mega Man X-esque roguelike-alike 20XX.

We get pretty far into the weeds as far as the differences between the two games, the double-edged beam-sword of encouraging player-created content from day one, the advantages and disadvantages of working with an engine built from scratch, and why roguelike design patterns are likely here to stay.

You can get 30XX on Steam.

Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

Our America puts you in the shoes of a Black father driving his son to school—and if that doesn't sound potentially harrowing to you, then you might be exactly the project's intended audience. It's a work that means to illuminate, instruct, challenge, and speak simple, difficult truths. In this interview, Bryant Young talks about why he started developing Our America, who hopes will hear its message, and what he hopes they'll walk away with.

CONTENT WARNING for racism, police violence, and murder.

Here's where you can download the Our America, alpha/demo, and support the project.

• And I seriously cannot recommend Are Prisons Obsolete? highly enough.

Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

You might know Chel Wong from her rightly-celebrated, highly modular soundtrack to Kine, and some more people are about to know her from Watch This Space. But you definitely already know her if you're even tangentially involved in the Boston-area indie scene (or for that matter, the New England Smash scene). She's in some ways as accomplished at fostering community as she as at crafting intricate, reactive soundscapes.

Here we talk about Chel's music-making process, how her approach to networking has changes, and the specific difficulties of being an extrovert in these long, hug-deprived COVID months. Also, we goof around a fair bit.

You can find Watch This Space on Steam.

• Only Cans is a hoot, as is Chel's chill-ass Shize™️ jingle.

Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

For our hundredth episode, we're trying something a little different and editing together some of our favorite moments from the past year of the 'cast. If you've been looking to catch up but haven't had the time to dive into entire longform interviews, then this should provide a good place to start?and even if you've already heard these clips and the episodes they come from, this format should highlight some themes that our interviews have shared in common.

This episode features clips from:

98. The Work of War, with Zach Barth

• For those unfamiliar with the weapons triangle.

• The "XAC" that Greg refers to is the Xbox Adaptive Controller.

• The Patrick, Duncan, and Robin that Paula refers to are her fellow Chance Agency team members, Patrick Ewing, Duncan Fyfe, and Robin Sloan.

Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

2020, everybody. It was a weird year for lots of things, we think it's fair to say—including but by no means limited to games. So in this episode, we take a moment to recap the games we played this year, the games currently glistening atop (or languishing deep within) our to-read piles, and the games of the future we're anticipating.

From the blockbusters to the altgames, and from the newest newnesses to the remasters and remakes, we compare our notes, clarify our disagreements, and celebrate the games and gameoids we found so very worth celebrating through this stupid, stupid year.

• Here's Drew's piece on Death Stranding and Breath of the Wild.

• Mark Brown's video on accessibility in games in 2020 talks a fair bit about The Last of Us Part II's next-levelness in that department.

• Here's Drew's piece on Demon's Souls and the irresolvable weirdness of remakes, and here's his piece on moon (among other things).

• Mixolumia blew up Drew's timeline, but didn't win any Game Awards or whatever. Check it out.

Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

Like Eliza before it, Möbius Front '83 is a Zachtornics game that longtime Zachtronics fans probably didn't expect—though also like Eliza, it has more than a few themes in common with the rest of the catalog, and beyond that, Möbius Front '83 adheres to Zach-like conventions more closely than you might expect. Like a lot of the studio's recent work, it's at once familiar and unfamiliar. For that matter, it's recognizably a war game, but it clearly means to be a from-first principles reinvention of war games. It's all of that, and if Zachtronics games are all about work, then it's also a game about war as work.

Zach Barth is back to cover all of that ground, the importance of doing passionate research, the perils of thereafter considering yourself an expert, the "the tyranny of space."

You can get Möbius Front '83 on Steam, GOG, and Itch.

• Valley of Tears is that HBO show about the Yom Kippur War.

• Here's that C-SPAN clip of David Shaw and Seymour Papert debating.

• The story about the water treatment expert/chemical engineer comes from Richard G. Mitchell's book on doomsday preppers, Dancing at Armageddon.

• When Zach was talking about the war museums in Europe and Asia, I definitely thought about the tank yard at the Patton Museum in California.

• The John Keegan book that Zach was primarily talking about is A History of Warfare.

• If you've never seen Francisco Goya's Disasters of War series, then well, goddamn.

• Our episode with Juan Vaca does get into his time in the military a little, but he went into the story in more detail here. (Also, having nothing directly to do with Juan, there's this).

Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

The PlayStation 5 is out, as is the Xbox Series X and Series S Series! That's exciting, at least for those of us who can get our hands on them. Drew's been PS5ing, and he and Lucio both built new PCs this year, so now seemed like a fairly ideal time to take stock of the state of consoles, and of gaming machines more generally—what they mean to us now, what they meant to us growing up, and what they mean (or don't) to the next generation (of people, not consoles).

• We only touched briefly on the overall idea of console generations, and of which machines and works belong to each, so here's an overview and a timeline.

• Here's that Movies with Mikey about Nintendo's Gen 3 escapades.

Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.