Chance, Curation, Providence, with Matthew Brelsford

Everybody's Talking at Once

ETAO PODCAST, EPISODE 170.

Matt Brelsford opens his hundred eyes and talks about the “loose collective” that is Tiny Mass Games, the spiritual dimension of game development, and (of course) Ophanim.

You can find Tiny Mass Games on itch.io.
You can also find Betty & Earl and Retro Wing Prime on Steam.
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• Here are our interviews with Tijmen Tio from Sokpop, Arvi Teikari of Baba Is You fame, and Andrew from Indiepocalypse, as well as with Star St. Germain.

• What the Internet calls Biblically Accurate Angels are indeed more properly called Ophanim.

• The “David Foster Wallace piece” Drew was referring to is Infinite Jest. (He overcorrected, not wanting to assume that all notable David Foster Wallace quotes were from Infinite Jest).

• And here’s that Sasha Chapin piece about David Foster Wallace and “the gift of sight,” which I’ve mentioned previously in the context of Death Stranding and Breath of the Wild.

• This conversation does sort of conflate games that are small in scope or short in duration with games that are smaller works, in the sense of being less polished, or made more quickly. There are, of course, hyper-polished, commercially released, “real” games that are, nonetheless and purposefully, quite short. Venba is a recent example. Portal is a less recent, oft-cited one.

• Here’s a decent summary of what in the hell has been going on with Unity.

• Dave the Diver was made by Mintrocket, which is a subsidiary of Nexon, which has somewhere between 6,500 and 7,100 employees.

• As far as we can tell, the Supergiant team is 24 people. (They had “fewer than 20 people” when Hades launched into early access on the Epic store ).

• Here’s The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist.

• And here’s my piece on how weird it is that we want computers to lie to us.

• We should also note that the infinite Seinfeld episode didn’t, like, end super well.

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“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
“Womb,” from the Betty & Earl OST by Matt Brelsford.

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