Talking Simulator

As the 35th anniversary of the Zelda franchise prompts rankings and discussion of which game was best, Breath of the Wild seems to top everyone’s lists. But not Shay Thompson’s. In this final episode of series 2 of Talking Simulator, she tells Jordan what she loves about a very different kind of Zelda game: the creepy time-looping Majora’s Mask.

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mattie brice is an activist, critic, designer, and currently Visiting Assistant Arts Professor at New York University’s Game Center. In this episode, she and Jordan discuss the effectiveness of so-called educational games and games for change, and mattie shares her ideas for how we can use play for everyday activism, touching on topics from diversity and inclusion to psychological experiments to BDSM.

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Writer and narrative designer Leigh Alexander, known for her work on games like Neo Cab and Reigns: Her Majesty, talks through some of her thoughts on the current state of narrative design in games and its potential for the future.

How can narrative designers meet a younger audience where they already are? Is it possible to harness the undeniable power of social media in more constructive ways? And what can we learn from looking back to the games and other future-looking media of the past?

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Kim Belair is a writer and narrative designer who has worked on a wide range of games, from big franchises like the recent Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and the upcoming Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League to smaller, more unique titles like Neo Cab and Goodbye Volcano High.

She talks Jordan through what it was like to work on Valhalla, the latest entry to a series with more than a decade of history, and how she contributed to what makes it different (no spoilers!). Then, the conversation expands into broader questions about the work of writing video games. How does it differ across games and teams? What’s the role of a narrative development company like Sweet Baby? And what are Kim’s hopes for the future of storytelling in games?

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I Am Dead is a charming puzzle adventure game from the creators of Hohokum and Wilmot’s Warehouse, in which you play as a ghost finding other ghosts by exploring an island, unlocking the memories of its colourful characters, and using supernatural powers to peer through objects and find mementos linked to the dead.

Catherine Johnson is an experienced writer of books, radio, television and more, but this is her first game. She tells Jordan what it was like to jump into this new medium, and how she and the rest of the team crafted this rich world and the stories the player uncovers within.

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The African continent has historically been underrepresented in the global game development scene, but game developers living there want to change that. Sithe Ncube, who is Zambian and currently studying Computer Science in South Africa, spends much of her spare time working with various initiatives supporting Black game developers, African game developers, and specifically African women making games.

Among other work, Sithe is a strategic advisor for Humble Bundle’s new $1 million a year Black Game Developer Fund, and a regional organiser for Global Game Jam supporting participants in Sub-Saharan Africa. In this conversation, she tells Jordan about game development in Africa and about her own initiative, Prosearium, which aims to document 1,000 African women creating and contributing to games.

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The Sims is one of the most popular series of games in the world, in part because it caters to many players who are underrepresented elsewhere. But players like Danielle have long been dissatisfied with the way this series represents Black people, with fewer options for skin tones and hair styles than their white equivalents and often lower quality for those options that do exist.

Danielle, otherwise known as EbonixSims, tells Jordan how she started making custom content for The Sims 4 to fill this gap and provide more options for Black sims, and how she has been involved—as an EA Game Changer—with helping the Sims team make the game better for players like her.

You can find Danielle’s custom content for The Sims 4 at ebonix.com

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In 2019, Elizabeth Orji-Smith was one of the winners of that year’s BAFTA Young Game Designers competition for their game concept Creatively Bankrupt, an action RPG that uses heists to explore topics like unionisation in creative industries. In this episode, they tell Jordan where they got the idea for the game, what they’re up to now, and what they want from the future.

The 2021 BAFTA Young Game Designers competition is open for entries until March 2021. Sadly, a few days before this episode was released, BAFTA shared the news that a previous winner, Lucy-Jack Reynolds, died in March 2020. In her memory, book publisher Muswell Press has launched a competition for entries to a new anthology called Queer Life, Queer Love. Please consider supporting young trans people.

The Beak, Feather, & Bone supplement Tail, Scale, & Bone, which Elizabeth illustrated, is available on itch.io - all proceeds are being donated to the Bukit Bail Fund of Pittsburgh.

The actual play podcast that provided some of the inspiration for Creatively Bankrupt is Friends at the Table.

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Brittney Morris is a writer of novels and video games. Her debut novel Slay (2019) is about a fictional online multiplayer game of the same name, designed by a teenager called Kiera as a secret safe space for her and other Black players.

In the novel, Kiera faces a crisis when the rest of the world finds out about her game, but this conversation doesn’t spoil what happens next. Instead, Brittney tells Jordan how she designed her fictional game, and what it was like to go on to write for real-world video games like Subnautica: Below Zero.

Brittney mentions the novel Warcross by Marie Lu, the film Black Panther, and the television series Code Lyoko.

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For this first episode of series 2, Jordan invites her good friend Chella Ramanan to talk about her new game Before I Forget, which tells the story of a woman with dementia. They discuss the main characters—Indian cosmologist Sunita and her pianist husband Dylan—and how Chella wrote mental illness into the game, which may well teach you something you didn’t know about what having dementia is really like.

This episode contains discussion of some key moments from the game, which some listeners may want to save for after they’ve played it, but avoids spoiling the central mystery of the story.

Chella mentions the film Still Alice and the novel Elizabeth is Missing.

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