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Process is Matthew Seiji Burns' first novel, in some ways following directly from his work on Eliza (and the under-appreciated rest of his narratives for the Zachtronics/Coincidence catalog) but in other ways, exploring weird new territory in the realms of unreliable narration, meditations on technology, and reflections on/of Seattle. You can get Process via Tune & Fairweather, or at your local independent bookshop, with or without the help of Bookshop.org. And you can find lots more of Matthew's work on his website. ——— • Here's Matthew's episode of Origin Story about Eliza. • The header image is from this launch trailer for Process. • The digital edition of Process, to be totally clear, comes with both a more-or-less text-only ebook file and a PDF with digital versions of all the graphical and typographical skullduggery from the physical edition. • As I say in the outro, Matthew did bring me and Sam Kulchin in on the the soundtrack to Kaizen: A Factory Story. ——— "All The People Say (Season 5)" by Carpe Demon. "Nobody's Business If I Do" by Porter Grainger and Everett Robbins, performed by Bob Geddins' Cavaliers. 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.

ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 184. The one and only droqen puzzle-platforms on over to discuss his latest game The End of Gameplay, and how it responds to the stubbornly present, all-too-alive gameplay in his game Starseed Pilgrim. This requires a provisional definition of gameplay. Whether the conversation’s other tributaries are required or not is a question … Continue reading "Who Could Want Gameplay? with Alexander Clair Tseu Martin (a.k.a. droqen)"

ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 183. Barney Oram gets into different patterns of sound design, in all sorts of different roles and at all sorts of different scales—plus his love of film in general and Billy Wilder in particular, the durable ethos that “if it sounds good, it is good,” and his extensive experience recording loud sounds … Continue reading "The Utility of Contrarianism, with Barney Oram"

ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 182. Rasheed Abueideh and Rami Ismail talk about Dreams on a Pillow. We talk about how the game combines layered, poetic audiovisuals and gameplay with history and folklore in order to create an account of the Nakba “that is so true to what happened that it is borderline-illegal to say it.” You … Continue reading "If We Can’t Do This, Then What Are We Doing? with Rasheed Abueideh and Rami Ismail"

ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 181. Lilith Walther aetherboosts her way on over to talk about Nightmare Kart, its previously life as Bloodborne KART, its demake predecessor Bloodborne PSX, and the relationship between retro aesthetics, open development practices, and a general attitude of… YOLO? Nightmare Kart will be out for free on May 31.You can see more … Continue reading "This Nightmare Will Never End! Hell Yeag! with Lilith Walther"

Dragon's Dogma II is full of inventive, quirky flourishes, meaningful frictions, and... shameless micro-transactions that capitalize on those exact quirks and frictions. We can, of course, get meaning and joy out of art that comes to us compromised. Which is good news, since most art, if not all art, comes to us compromised. But the details matter. So let's dig into the details, and along the way let's talk about monetization, opera, high art, low art, and how Dragon's Dogma II is like a D&D campaign where all of the other players are dogs. This episode contains discussions of death, dying, and mourning. ——— • Dia Lacina has written a bit about Dragon's Dogma II, and a bit about Dark Arisen. • Podcasters helping podcasters, here's a good summary of the weird relationship of dogs to Octavia Butler's work. • Here's Alexis Ong's piece about pawns. • And here's Dan Olson's video about Fortnite. • You can hear the Met's Saturday Matinee Broadcasts on lots of still-extant terrestrial radio stations and their websites. My mom and I usually go with KUSC. ——— "All The People Say (Season 5)" by Carpe Demon. Messa da Requiem by Guiseppe Verdi, performed by the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, conducted by Yannick N?zet-S?guin, featuring Leah Hawkins, Karen Cargill, Matthew Polenzani, and Dmitry Belosselskiy. Recorded September 27, 2023. Broadcast March 30, 2024. 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.

Helldivers II is a wildly popular co-op shooter. It's also extremely funny. It's also very much about fascism, both in the sense that its satirical lens is aimed at fascist tendencies in moribund democracies, and in the sense that its core pleasures are... sort of fascist? The music makes you feel like a hero as you do your space violence on behalf of Super Earth, and let's be honest, the capes are rather dashing. Here's a game that wants to have its cake and eat it too, and we're inclined to say it pulls it off. So let's dig into how it's doing what it's doing, and the slipperiness of making art about fascism that isn't useful to fascists. ——— • The clip about Super Earth is from this Helldivers II ad. The in-game propaganda and advertising are fairly consistent in tone, and so far, in terms of world-building as well. • If you'd like to keep entirely Joel mysterious in your mind, then we can respect that—but if you'd like to know more (to coin a phrase), then Aftermath has you covered (kind of). • Here's my piece on moon, and one where I talked more about "Tomorrow Belongs to Me" in contrast to "Springtime for Hitler." • Here's Umberto Eco's essay on "Ur-Fascism" and Ruben Ferdinand and Elliot Trinidad's essay on Attack on Titan (a classic pairing). • We use bits of Lindsay Ellis' video on Mel Brooks, F.D Signifier's video about Hajime Isayama's New York Times interview, and Mark Brown's recent video on Spec Ops: The Line. • We don't think there's anywhere to (legally) hear the full Starship Troopers commentary other than the physical releases of the film, unfortunately. • The Freud quote is from The Ego and the Id, and the Truffaut quote is from this interview. • The intrusive thought at the end is from this clip. ——— "All The People Say (Season 5)" by Carpe Demon. "Guren no Yumiya" by Linked Horizon, from the first season of Attack on Titan. "My Heart Leaps Up" from Mack and Mabel by Jerry Herman. The extraction and victory music from Helldivers II. 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.

While the show was taking a break, Drew started putting together some essays on the growing list of recent recent surprise hits—games that, for whatever reason, have been doing vastly better than their developers or publishers had expected. 2024 does, so far, seem to have a sort of serial monogamy to it, with the Sauron's Eye of game-liker attention focusing intensely on one thing before moving on to the next, abruptly and fickly, with equally frightening fervor. So at the risk of being eternally behind the viral content curve (as though we've ever feared that around here), we're going to take a little time to think through the breakout successes of this year, starting with Palworld. We'll also be talking about Last Epoch and Helldivers II (which got so popular that they ceased to function) in future installments. ——— • I mention the episode of Experience Points about Palworld, in the context of positing a possible public domain Pikachu. • Jack Saint's video brought the fan design issue to my attention, and also got me thinking about which pal designs work better than which other ones. (Those would be the more original, less chimeric pals). • Here's that much-discussed Hbomberguy video about YouTube plagiarism. • And here's OpenAI telling the UK's Parliament that they would have no business model if they had to respect anyone else's intellectual property rights. • Astra Taylor pointed out that full automation is still an aspiration and a threat, a pipe dream and a nightmare, rather than a reality, when she coined the terms "fauxtomation." I learned about this concept from Brian Merchant's thoroughly excellent Neo-Luddite book about the original Luddites, and about what we can learn from them, Blood in the Machine. ——— "All The People Say (Season 5)" by Carpe Demon. "Pal of My Lonesome Hours" by Abe Lyman and Walter Hirsch, performed by Abe Lyman and His California Orchestra. 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.

Lucio and Drew talk about some of the games they've enjoyed gaming at this year, from KarmaZoo, Pizza Tower, Wobbly Life, and The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, to Remnant II, Spider-Man 2, Street Fighter 6, Jedi: Survivor, Wo Long, and Tears of the Kingdom. Speaking of, spoilers for Remnant II from 40:53 to 44:21. ——— • We've talked before about playing games, including but not limited to Destiny 2, wrong. • Guilty Gear -STRIVE- does not, at time, of publishing, have a simplified input option for supers. • Here once again the Bartle taxonomy of player types. • The curling documentary in question is "Stone Cold," which is the fourth episode of the Netflix series Losers. ——— "All The People Say (Season 5)" by Carpe Demon. "If It Wasn't For You" by Buddy Rose, Gene Rose, Harold C. Berg, and Herb Wiedoeft, performed by the Crystal Orchestra. 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.

Glen Henry and Chase Bethea drop achor awhile and talk about Sunken Stones, why pirates mean freedom, and why the Golden Age of Piracy was a lot more Caribbean than Pirates of the Caribbean would have you believe. Also, inevitably, One Piece. You can play the Sunken Stones demo on Itch.io, and wishlist the full game on Steam. You can find Chase's work on his own website, as well as on Spotify and Bandcamp. And you can find Glen's work on the Spritewrench website. ——— • Here's Glen's previous appearance on the show. • And here's our conversation with Tanya X. Short, wherein we talked a bit about Five Strategies for Collaborating with a Machine and On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots. • For more about why Drew will take every opportunity to defend and ere's Blood in the Machine and a great recent interview about it. • And here's Chase talking a bit about his process, including the more technical side thereof. • LucasArts made some intensely impressive music tech for the Monkey Island series specifically, including iMuse. • In Pirate Enlightenment, David Graeber gives us this useful assessment of the centrality of freedom for the actual, historical pirates of the Golden Age: Perhaps the best that could be said of them is that their brutality was in no way unusual by the standards of the their time, but their democratic practices were almost completely unprecedented. ——— "All The People Say (Season 5)" by Carpe Demon. "Luck Don't Live Out Here" and "Pugnacity in Port Royal" from the Sunken Stones Soundtrack by Chase Bethea. 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.

Ezra Szanton painstakingly platforms his way over to talk about To The Flame, the first in his new studio's forthcoming kinda-trilogy of horror games. He also talks about how to effective horror, what makes a game interesting to watch as well as play, and some of the potentially-actually-pretty-intereting applications for so-called AI. You can find Ezra's games on his Itch.io page. You can also follow Ezra on Cohost, Mastadon, Twitter, and Bluesky. ——— • Ezra's Guide to Magic and Otherwise Significant Objects has Ezra's name on it in part because of Bennet Foddy and Zach Gage's 2019 GDC talk, "Put Your Name on Your Game, a Talk by Bennett Foddy and Zach Gage." • Here's my piece on the hypothetical No Berlin Roguelike, as well as my Babycastles talk about masocore platformers, and about how Celeste fits into that tradition and also my article about the history of asking machines to lie to us. • Be Honest is indeed featured in Tiny Mass Games, which you can hear more about in our talk with Matt Brelsford. We should note that Ezra also worked with recent guest Ryan Canuel, who himself is currently working with other recent guest Ichiro Lambe. • Here's the SCP Wiki (which is intensely creepy, as discussed), as well as a great video essay on why VHS is such a great format for horror. • And here's Ezra's appearance on Party of One. • Ezra's studio co-founder is Fergus Ferguson, with whom he also collaborated on Radio Tower. • Here's Edward Ongweso Jr. arguing for the outright abolition of venture capital. • And worst of all, here are Snolf and Snolf 0. ——— "All The People Say (Season 5)" by Carpe Demon. "Prom" by The Spookfish. 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.

Eric Peterson hops on over to talk about the joys of hobbyist game development, the things that need to change in professional game development (even when compared to other parts of tech), and the cultural importance of drawing little guys. You can play JOUNCER PX (as it's called now) on itch.io. You can find a bunch of Eric's work on his Linktree, and specifically on his Itch.io. You can also follow Eric on Twitter. ——— • Here's our conversation with Jerry Belich about, among other things, Alt.ctrl. • Drew has absolutely been referring Big Bad Beetleborgs as Bad Bad Beetleborgs, charmed by the misremembered repetition, for decades. • Eric says "this the season" for witchy vibes, which indeed it was when we spoke. And of course, in a very important sense, it always is. • Here's that scene from Jurassic Park, recreated in Dreams. And then there's this. • This recent episode of This Machine Kills has a good summary of the labor actions taking place throughout, specifically, the US. • If you have a few spare bucks, consider donating a few to Medical Aid for Palestinians, Palestine Legal, or If Not Now. There is also lots you can do, especially if you're in the US. ——— "All The People Say (Season 5)" by Carpe Demon. Some music that may or may not end up in Bounce Box, by Scott Lindeman. 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.

Ryan Canuel of Petricore stops by for a mostly-not-especially-spooky conversation about augmented reality, what bootstrapping actually means, and?alright, some stuff about horror movies right at the end there. You can get the Mythic Realms demo in Quest App Lab. You can wishlist AaaaaAAaaaAAAaaAAAAaAAAAA!!! Remastered and play its demo on Steam, where you can also play Operation DogFight for free. And you can find a whole bunch of Petricore Games' work on their website. ——— "All The People Say (Season 5)" by Carpe Demon. The music from the Mind the Arrow trailer, by Aaron Lin. "After the Rain" by Francis Canaro, performed by Harry Fryer and His Orchestra. 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.

Jerry Belich talks about his wild work in the Alt.ctrl milieu, his boundary-redefining escape rooms (for lack of a better term), and his digital game work, from Recommendation Dog and Reel Steal on the Playdate, to High on Life and High on Knife. High on Knife is out now on Steam, Epic, Xbox, and Playstation. You can find Jerry's work on this pretty comprehensive page of his website. A Masterpiece in Disarray is available wherever you get books. You can also follow Jerry on Bluesky. ——— • Here are our past conversations with Megan Fox, Robin Baumgarten, Adriel Wallick, and the bit comedy devotee himself, William Pugh. • And here's the Experimental Gameplay Workshop where Jerry talks about Please Stand By. • Arvi Teikari was indeed a student at the University of Helsinki when he started working on Baba Is You—and he also made the initial prototype for Nordic Game Jam. So that's (at least) two villages that one might say it took. • Drew mentions at the end that his music is on Bandcamp, which it is, for now. ——— "All The People Say (Season 5)" by Carpe Demon. Some music from the Dune Swede that Jerry mentions. "Mack the Knife" by Kurt Weil, performed by Ted Ferrer with the Klaus Alzners Orkester. 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.

Des Gayle ascends to the sky island of podcastery to discuss his storied career as a producer, the difficulty of enjoying art when you know how it's made?experiencing it with kids can help?and the joys of self-contained stories in the age of the mega-franchise. You can learn more about Altered Gene and Radical Forge on their websites. You also can wishlist Forever Lost and The Analyst, and preorder The Analyst: Redacted. ——— • This interview with Joe Russo contains the clearest explanation we've gotten of just how, and just how much, the direction of the MCU is pre-determined: Disney makes ambitious, semi-longterm plans about which projects they plan to make, but then they're intensely flexible and reactive about the business of actually making them. That interview is the main source for that one Screen Rant piece, and that one other Screen Rant piece, both of which hinge on this quote: The way it works at Marvel, and I'm sure at some point somebody will talk in detail about this, but part of Kevin [Feige]'s brilliance is that there isn't really a plan. There's an idea, but you can't have a plan if the movie you're making tanks. There's no plan after that, right? So, it's really about, as the movie succeeded, there was sort of an enthusiasm about well, what else could we do? [...]A lot of the stuff was made up in between the movies. And some of the best call forwards or callbacks were thought of after the fact. • Here's our talk with Anton Hand about simulationist tendencies, and the limits thereof. ——— "All The People Say (Season 5)" by Carpe Demon. "Effugere" from the Forever Lost OST by Richard J Moir. 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.