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| Cover art for U.S. Release of Valkryia Chronicles 4 |
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| Description: Logo for DEXCON 21 |
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| Description: "Telltale Games Will Remember That" |
These conditions almost always hit one group the hardest: developers, or the people who actually make the games. Layoffs are a pervasive fact of life, even at successful studios where developers are often hired en masse to help hit tight deadlines and then fired to cut costs after the game ships or is canceled. With the next deadline, the cycle begins anew. Overwork, job insecurity, and profound burnout are omnipresent concerns; more than three-quarters of developers report working under “crunch” conditions, which can mean working up to 20 hours a day and more than 100 hours a week. These practices can have a significant and debilitating cost to employees, one that often feels baked into video game development culture.And how does Telltale Games, the studio that done everything from The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones to Batman and Sam and Max episodic games factor into this? Farokhmanesh elaborates:
The story of Telltale — its rise, decline, and potential reformation — is not just the story of the missteps of one studio. It’s a shocking window into the $36 billion video game industry (which is now so large and lucrative that it rivals the film industry), and how its worst practices can grind down and burn out even the most devoted and valuable employees.The entire article is important for anyone interested in the human cost of the video games they enjoy, and what is currently being done, and can be done about working conditions in the future.Read the whole thing.
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| Description: A tombstone with a tuft of grass with the symbol for the program Adobe Flash wedged in it at an angle. |
"... Flash is arguably the largest treasure trove of unpreserved gaming history today... Spanning literal[ly] tens of thousands of games over a period of twenty years, the library of Flash games, breadth and depth, outlives any other game console on the market.
When your browser no longer has the plugin to run those games, what happens to them?"The answer the Archive Project has advanced is BlueMaxima’s Flashpoint, which serves as the connection for preservation of Flash game collections. Latimore runs a discord server for the project here where you can download the current archive, make requests and discuss the project itself.
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| Description: A small brown envelope with a black & white drawing of a fox in the lower right hand corner. A single quarter is displayed at the bottom corner for size comparison. The envelope is approximately 3 quarters high and 3 quarters wide. |
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| Description: An assortment of stickers scattered across a table and atop a tiny treasures envelope. |
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| Description: Screenshot from Silent Hill 2. A fat, white man with blond hair wearing a backwards baseball cap & striped shirt points a finger towards the camera, with the subtitle "You've been laughin' at me all along, haven't you?" displayed at the bottom. |
if the fear of alienating a player is so great that lazy tropes are somehow safer, this alone doesn’t account for their frequency — if a fat body appears at all.The essay is a bracing but necessary look at not just the history of video games as technical development, but also as popular entertainment, and how certain story telling and design decisions in video games as a medium seem baked into the process from the beginning. Please, give the whole essay a read.
Sunset Overdrive was released in 2014 by Insomniac Games. Part zombie shooter, part Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater, the Xbox One exclusive boasted a robust customization system that let you be whatever you wanted — except fat. “We wanted to put our time into wild outfits instead of technology to bloat up people or bloat them down,” Sunset Overdrive director Drew Murray told Kotaku. (“Bloat” — what a word to describe my body. )
Later in the piece, a shape emerges. “You have so much other complexity in all the things you can wear, the hair, the animations,” said Insomniac CEO Ted Price. “We had to pick our battles, and that was kind of where we chose to draw the line.”
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| Description: Close up of a pair of hands holding a Playstation 4 controller. The controller is a deep blue, and a light on the front of the controller glows brightly. |
"Awareness, though, can be hard to come by directly—the circumstances in which games are made are not the same as those in which games are played. Console games are not played on a 27-inch monitor, 18 inches from your face; but that's often the environment in which day-to-day UI decisions are made... There's no reason why the system can't be designed and implemented before the content it's going to display is finalized. That's something I'd dearly love to see addressed at an engine level, as there's really no need for developers to keep reinventing the wheel every time—especially when it's so often reinvented as a square. Again, as with a great deal in accessibility, this isn't rocket science to solve, at all. It's just about actually getting it done."
"I want to be a beacon of light on the internet, and I feel in order to do that, I must also navigate the dark crevices and bring out the light in the situation. I try to be nice with everything I do and say, and I think that's translated to my physical life, my real life. My digital life and my digital personas are very sweet and kind, and now my physical persona has assumed that form as well. You have to put out the niceness and create the light that you wish to see reflected upon you."
My mistake was believing that... I could face depression on my own with exercise, healthy eating and positivity. These things are extremely beneficial to one’s health, but sometimes these habits are just not enough. Some depression sufferers like me need medicated assistance as well and that’s okay! ... My outward appearance is a projection of sweetness, friendliness, and understanding. Sometimes, I am not so nice. Sometimes I am downright mean. My self-hate and anger boil over and I become a monster to those around me. A Rottenbelly. Though I am not proud of these moments, I am also not ashamed. Just like anyone else, I can be weak at times. But I can also be strong. Part of being strong is accepting your actions, forgiving yourself for them, apologizing to any parties who may be hurt or offended and correcting your behavior for the future.
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| Description: Screenshot of a close-up of of the back of Kiryu Kazama. He is shirtless, showing off a muscular back adorned with an elaborately detailed dragon tattoo. |
