My most gatekeeper-y opinion about the game industry:

If you think you want to make games for a living, seriously ask yourself if that's true, or if you just wish you had a time machine so you could once again experience your favorite childhood game for the first time I've worked with too many dead-eyed engineers and designers who can't believe no one wants to pay them to recreate their favorite entry in the Final Fantasy franchise.

This is also why it's so important to CONSUME ART AND MEDIA THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH GAMES!!!

Chess variants I made up because I can’t sleep: a thread.

HOPPY CHESS: knights now move like pawns. Pawns now move like knights. SUICIDE KINGS: the goal is still to checkmate your opponent’s king, BUT ALSO, you control your opponent’s king instead of your own.

Do you want a thorough core loop breakdown of either of the two most recent games in the Candy Crush franchise?

I’ve been working in mobile games for almost a decade and you have no clue what you’re talking about.

https://twitter.com/BoopsGames/status/1310331800695185413

This is why I say F2P mobile game design is like pop music. Aspiring pretentious indie musicians think any idiot can spew out a top 40 hit, but it turns out making something millions of people dedicate millions of hours to is more complex than you think!

With the horrible injustice done to Breonna Taylor and the death of RBG, I’ve talked to a lot of (white) friends whose spirits are struggling.

If you grew up inside a family and/or faith tradition that didn’t prepare you for social justice work, this thread’s for you. It’s vitally important to remember that odds are excellent you will never see the results of the work you do in your life.

For a lot of white ppl, even when you’re not looking for “ally cookies,” there’s a reasonable human part of you that is motivated bc you want to see CHANGE.

Here's the thing that really strikes me about the “But if you don’t buy the HP game you’re hurting game developers!” argument:

Do you have any idea how many video games I don’t buy EVERY SINGLE DAY? By that measure I’m one of the worst things to EVER HAPPEN to game developers! Sometimes? People don’t want to buy games? Because there is something they find unappealing about that game??

It is never a moral requirement to purchase a fucking video game, and certainly not one that puts money in the pocket of the most visible TERF in the world.

Kids have started going back to school. There is no remote learning. Children are required to take off their masks during class for some godawful reason. This is going to be a disaster, and no matter how bad it gets, they’re not going to shut the schools again because “economy."

https://twitter.com/Nadine_Writes/status/1302733649947713538

I can’t actually express how fucked it is. Here are pictures: one from my youngest’s mandatory orientation, where bringing a parent was required. The other is of the masking rules, which also stresses that wearing masks is occasionally permissible, but never mandatory.

This is the most incredible story in the history of game development, and there are SOME DOOZIES out there.

https://twitter.com/WritNelson/status/1296323137257328640

And it’s not even over yet!!

Whenever I am incredibly frustrated with the state of the video game industry, it’s so comforting to know that tabletop is right there to remind me how much worse it could be For friends who don’t pay attention to this kind of inside baseball: a prestigious tabletop award was given… to the concept of “Black Excellence,” with a handful of “honorees” named. All of whom are cool people who, to be perfectly honest, deserve their own individual award.

Last week @leighalexander tweeted about how one of the main things holding the game industry back is a lack of institutional memory. Today a tweet goes viral with “hey guys, dunno if you noticed, but video games are empathy machines bc you literally pretend to be someone else!!" I think part of the problem is partially the incredibly high turnover in our industry, partially the feeling that no one has ever taken a video game seriously before you have, and partially that some people who think they’re taking games seriously… still aren't

As someone who grew up intensely Christian and even ministered from the pulpit: I’ve spent my life ping-ponging between total disillusionment with & total longing for the spiritual nourishment of my teen years / early adulthood. I’ve been thinking a lot about this since November. People talk about how AA is rooted in Christianity, but I don’t think there’s enough acknowledgment that the church, at its best, is like AA for sinners. The power of the church is that it is, at its best, a community rooted in vulnerability and accountability.

If you’re a white woman who ever wondered what people mean when they talk about the toxicity of white feminism, this sums it up nicely White feminism only cares about race solidarity insofar as it allows white women to speak derisively of white men, without ever interrogating the unique privileges and complicity inherent in white womanhood.

My kid's 11th birthday is tomorrow and we had tocancel everything, so I'm trying to surprise them in Animal Crossing This is some DIFFICULT SHIT when you don’t do time travel, let me tell you

It’s midnight on a Wednesday, which seems like a great time to dispense some management advice that is always good, but particularly useful right now:

Acknowledging reality doesn’t create anxiety in employees. Denial does. This is why I advocate for transparency: if you’re planning some big restructuring and your team hears rumors, don’t pretend like the restructuring isn’t happening. They’ll see signs, and whatever results they dream up for the reorg will be ten times worse than reality.

Update: moving house might literally kill me - Our letting agent called to tell us we can’t get into the new place until 1PM tomorrow

- Our movers won’t start moving our stuff from our current flat (a mile away) later than 9 AM

- Ikea is sending stuff to new place to arrive between 8-8:30 AM and there’s nothing to be done

I think it’s been long enough, and I think I can obscure the details enough, that I can finally tell you all about the ACTUAL worst interview of my life: my very first interview in the game industry.

I hope you’re ready. I wasn’t. The first person I met was the HR rep, and she was the only woman I met all day.

She politely but awkwardly told me, “While we want to follow all American employment laws, we are fundamentally a European company, and... well... it’s my job to see if you can take a joke.”

I grew up in a poor town next to a giant Air Force base. Our junior year of (public!) high school, every student was required to take the ASVAB— the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, basically the SATs for military service. Every student’s info was shared w/recruiters.

https://twitter.com/laurenthehough/status/1213439232884322314

When the results came in, our home phone rang 3-4 times a week for two years straight. Sky high promises. Sometimes they’d get my resistance and ask to bypass me entirely to speak to my parents.

I said I’d never pass the physical; they said they’d “make me” pass.

The original broadway cast recording of Les Miserables came out when I was 5 years old, and for my entire childhood it was the only thing my mother would listen to on road trips.

This thread is the plot of Les Mis, as I understood it to be, when I was a child. Jean Valjean didn’t get along with his brother, Javert. Mostly because Javert insisted on telling everyone Valjean’s lucky number, 24601.

If the US were so “backwards” as to be Denmark, we never would have left the country

https://twitter.com/Ibrahimpols/status/1188240435816390656

Like. I know I talk a lot about how lucky and grateful I feel to be living outside the US and how I can’t imagine willingly going back. But living this far away sucks! Our kids don’t get to see the rest of their family! I miss my friends! My mom is dying and I’m not there!

Literally only @AmiqusAl, which is part of why I recommend him to everyone.

But: I try REALLY HARD to be this person as a manager. We know no one is going to be in the same job for their whole career these days. So help your team figure out how to get where they want to go!

https://twitter.com/MrReciprocity/status/1188093205172117505

@AmiqusAl Employment is a two-way street: there’s no reason to be afraid of losing people if you’ve hired the right person for the right role and are giving them what they need to thrive.

Not to mention: people do better work when they feel like their work is meaningful.

Let’s quickly recap rebuttals to some frequently-asserted falsehoods about allegations of misconduct:

- Just because someone treated you well doesn’t mean they treat everyone well.
- Just because someone has female friends/allies/fans doesn’t mean they treat every woman well - Many predators vocally support the demographic of their prey, work within organizations focused on the demographic they prey upon, and position themselves as allies to their prey. Doing so provides cover as well as feeding grounds. (See also: the Catholic Church, Boy Scouts)