#also from final fantasy union's interview with the devs

[oveliagirlhaditright]

So apparently, the reason we have an easy mode (story mode, as it's called in the game) in Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is because Jennifer English asked the devs for it, so she'd be able to play the game. LOL. So we have her to thank for it:)

And I guess Ben Starr jokingly calls it the "Jennifer English mode."

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include a mess of GDC talk goodness, plus Resident Evil 7/Biohazard's making-of, the role of mystery in games, & lots more.

So yep - Game Developers Conference is finally done & we're super happy with how it went. Thanks to any of you who made it out to San Francisco, or helped us with the event in ANY way! The good news for those who didn't is that GDC Vault recording was going on en masse, so we'll be rolling out LOTS of good content on our YouTube channel over the next few months. Now - time for a little rest?

Another reminder - if you dig Video Game Deep Cuts, please talk about it on social media and link to the sub page! That's how I get the bulk of my new subscribers, and it's much appreciated.

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

GDC-Related 

Lessons learned by an 'art-house indie' who joined a F2P game studio (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Veteran game designer Margaret Robertson opened her talk at GDC today on what she’s learned in her journey from a self-described “art-house indie” to someone who works at a free-to-play game studio."

alt.ctrl | Hands-On | GDC 2017 (Jess Conditt / Engadget) "[SIMON'S NOTE: this is the best video overview I've seen of the alternative controller exhibit (masterminded by John Polson & aided by me) that we run at Game Developers Conference every year. So much creativity here.]"

How Prompto's AI-driven selfie system in Final Fantasy XV was built (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Prasert “Sun” Prasertvithyakarn served as lead designer on Final Fantasy XV’s buddy system and AI; at GDC this week he took the stage to talk a bit about how the AI-driven snapshot system was designed and built."

Developing Crashlands while facing a terminal cancer diagnosis (Simon Parkin / Gamasutra) "In 2013, the 23-year-old game artist and developer Samuel Coster hallucinated a dragon made of blood bursting from his chest. The hallucinations continued and soon increased in regularity. “I figured I was struck with a strange virus,” Coster recalled, in a session titled 'The Last Game I Make Before I Die' delivered at the Game Developers Conference this morning."

Writing Mafia 3: 'We had a lot of very uncomfortable conversations' (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Today at GDC, Hangar 13 narrative director William Harms took the stage to break down how the studio pulled it off. Most notably, in the face of some praise for how Mafia 3’s pulpy revenge story effectively treats with themes of racism and discrimination, Harms pushed back against the notion that tackling racism was a core goal of the game’s narrative design."

Train Jam perfectly captures the magic of both traveling and game dev (Katherine Cross / Gamasutra) "Thus it was that Adriel Wallick, doyenne and major domo of the jam for the last four years, settled on “Unexpected Anticipation” as the theme for all of this year’s games. She spoke above the cheers of a 300-strong crowd in the newly refurbished Burlington Room of Chicago’s Union Station, christened by the opening ceremonies for this unique event."

Warren Spector traces Deus Ex's development back to a game of D&D (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Shortly after the game shipped, game director Warren Spector wrote a broad postmortem of the project. Today at GDC, he revisited the subject after 17 years to offer some fresh insight into how the groundbreaking game came to be. 'People always ask me which of my games are my favorite; don’t ever ask a game designer that,' said Spector. 'The closest I ever get to answering is saying that the game I’m most proud of is Deus Ex.'"

For Tim Sweeney, advancing Epic means racing into AR and VR (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "What does it feel like to receive an award honoring a lifetime of achievement...before you're 50? "I feel like maybe I'm an old fogey and should be shopping for a cane!" Epic chief Tim Sweeney tells Gamasutra, with a laugh."

Lessons learned from over 15 years of of teaching a VR/AR design course (Chris Baker / Gamasutra) "Virtual reality and augmented reality may seem like new mediums, suddenly made viable by the emergence of the Rift and the Vive and Hololens. But Jesse Schell has watched hundreds of people build immersive VR and AR environments for the last several decades. And he has some general lessons to impart from his experience."

A dev's guide to ensuring studio conflict is healthy and productive (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "At GDC today, Finji CEO and cofounder Rebekah Saltsman shared some advice on cultivating the former and avoiding the latter, based on her own experience shipping multiple games at Finji alongside her husband (and Finji cofounder) Adam Saltsman."

[SIMON'S NOTE: There's all kinds of other good GDC 2017 coverage out there. But I mainly stuck to Gamasutra, since we spent a lot of time on detailed talk write-ups, which are all compiled here...]

Non GDC-Related

A Fresh Narrative in Gaming (Justin Porter / New York Times) "A mixed-race man comes home from the Vietnam War to more carnage: His adoptive father, the leader of the black mob, is betrayed and killed by the Italian mafia, the main criminal power in a fictional city based on New Orleans. So the veteran, Lincoln Clay, starts taking retribution, leaving hundreds dead in his wake. That’s the familiar revenge-as-motive storyline of the video game Mafia III, developed by Hangar 13 and published by 2K, but the twist is that Lincoln is also a victim."

Shigeru Miyamoto – 1989 Developer Interview (TV Game / Shmuplations) "This short but insightful interview with Shigeru Miyamoto first appeared in an early seminal book of video game history, “terebi game denshi yuugi taizen” from 1989. The interview captures Miyamoto in the early limelight: not yet the legend he is today, but more of a bright star among other contemporary developers."

How SteamWorld Heist brought skill into turn-based tactics (Alex Wiltshire / RockPaperShotgun) "SteamWorld Heist is a tactics game about boarding procedural spaceships with a squad of desperado robots and grabbing all the swag you can before they’re turned to scrap. It’s also a cross-genre oddity, a turn-based platformer, with presentation and polish that comes across a bit like a Nintendo fan fell in love with XCOM."

Rediscovering Mystery (feat. Jonathan Blow / Derek Yu / Jim Crawford) (Noclip / YouTube) "In this special feature about video game mysteries, we talk to Jonathan Blow (The Witness / Braid), Derek Yu (Spelunky) and Jim Crawford (Frog Fractions) about the games that inspired wonder in us as children."

What the game industry thinks of Nintendo’s Switch (Matt Leone / Polygon) "Yet more than most consoles, Switch remains a bit of a mystery at launch. Are motion controls going to be a big part of it? What type of player will Switch developers cater to? In an attempt to wrap our heads around it, we recently reached out to a group of developers and industry veterans to get a sense of where those in the game business see it going."

Eleven Essential Books that will help shape your Game City (Konstantinos Dimopoulos / Medium) "Designing an imaginary city is not an easy thing to do. Even less so when it’s a videogame city, the construction of which will also have to take a myriad of technical and cost constraints into consideration."

toco toco ep.47, Katsura Hashino, Game Creator (toco toco TV / YouTube) "In this episode, we follow Katsura Hashino, director of various RPG games including episodes of the world-renown Persona series, he will introduce us to philosophy and his work. Starting from Shibuya’s Center Gai, we will hop on the Den-en-Toshi line over to Sangenjaya, which was the inspiration to create the city of Yongenjaya, a key area in Hashino’s latest title: Persona 5."

Frog Fractions: inside the mind behind the world's strangest video game (Chris Priestman / The Guardian) "Jim Crawford is a self-confessed dilettante who moves from project to project in the blink of an eye. How did he create the most anarchic video game ever made?"

BIOHAZARD 7 INSIDE REPORT File 01: The Meaning of A Moment of Silence (Toru Shiwasu / Alex Aniel) "BIOHAZARD 7 resident evil INSIDE REPORT was included in the COMPLETE EDITION of the Japanese version of Resident Evil 7 Biohazard. It is only available officially in Japanese, and no official English translation has been announced. [SIMON'S NOTE: There's multiple parts to this translation on Alex's blog, and it's all excellent stuff.]"

A Torch in the Dark: Using Creative Direction to Light The Darkest Dungeon (Chris Bourassa / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2016 talk, Red Hook Studios' Chris Bourassa breaks down the creative philosophy of Darkest Dungeon - one that is characterized by a steadfast commitment to a clearly articulated, externalized creative core."

Populists Stage A Coup In Space (Alex Barron / Simon Parkin / New Yorker Radio Hour) "EVE Online is a massive multiplayer online videogame set in outer space, with tens of thousands of people playing at any given time. A few years ago, a faction of upstarts within the game’s community, who thumbed their nose at the rules, went to war against the alliance of skilled players they regarded as corrupt, elitist insiders. They won, in a shocking coup precipitated by espionage. Sound familiar?"

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[oveliagirlhaditright]

Something really interesting the audience can glean from Final Fantasy Union's interview with the Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 devs, is that game writer Jennifer Svedberg-Yen said that a large portion of the game was written during Covid: and she thinks that's probably where a lot of the game's themes about grief came from. Because even if someone on the team, for example, didn't lose someone to Covid, they know someone who did (like we all experienced during Covid, of course):(

And my GOSH, does this make SO much about the game make make sense to me. Even, perhaps, why it's such a masterpiece--because artists often create their best work as an outlet to grief and to perhaps try and make sense of it (like how Sakaguchi wrote Final Fantasy VII in trying to understand his mother's death)... which is just a tad bit ironic with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33's story, of course. But it also completely lines up.

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include a mess of GDC talk goodness, plus Resident Evil 7/Biohazard's making-of, the role of mystery in games, & lots more.

So yep - Game Developers Conference is finally done & we're super happy with how it went. Thanks to any of you who made it out to San Francisco, or helped us with the event in ANY way! The good news for those who didn't is that GDC Vault recording was going on en masse, so we'll be rolling out LOTS of good content on our YouTube channel over the next few months. Now - time for a little rest?

Another reminder - if you dig Video Game Deep Cuts, please talk about it on social media and link to the sub page! That's how I get the bulk of my new subscribers, and it's much appreciated.

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

GDC-Related 

Lessons learned by an 'art-house indie' who joined a F2P game studio (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Veteran game designer Margaret Robertson opened her talk at GDC today on what she’s learned in her journey from a self-described “art-house indie” to someone who works at a free-to-play game studio."

alt.ctrl | Hands-On | GDC 2017 (Jess Conditt / Engadget) "[SIMON'S NOTE: this is the best video overview I've seen of the alternative controller exhibit (masterminded by John Polson & aided by me) that we run at Game Developers Conference every year. So much creativity here.]"

How Prompto's AI-driven selfie system in Final Fantasy XV was built (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Prasert “Sun” Prasertvithyakarn served as lead designer on Final Fantasy XV’s buddy system and AI; at GDC this week he took the stage to talk a bit about how the AI-driven snapshot system was designed and built."

Developing Crashlands while facing a terminal cancer diagnosis (Simon Parkin / Gamasutra) "In 2013, the 23-year-old game artist and developer Samuel Coster hallucinated a dragon made of blood bursting from his chest. The hallucinations continued and soon increased in regularity. “I figured I was struck with a strange virus,” Coster recalled, in a session titled 'The Last Game I Make Before I Die' delivered at the Game Developers Conference this morning."

Writing Mafia 3: 'We had a lot of very uncomfortable conversations' (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Today at GDC, Hangar 13 narrative director William Harms took the stage to break down how the studio pulled it off. Most notably, in the face of some praise for how Mafia 3’s pulpy revenge story effectively treats with themes of racism and discrimination, Harms pushed back against the notion that tackling racism was a core goal of the game’s narrative design."

Train Jam perfectly captures the magic of both traveling and game dev (Katherine Cross / Gamasutra) "Thus it was that Adriel Wallick, doyenne and major domo of the jam for the last four years, settled on “Unexpected Anticipation” as the theme for all of this year’s games. She spoke above the cheers of a 300-strong crowd in the newly refurbished Burlington Room of Chicago’s Union Station, christened by the opening ceremonies for this unique event."

Warren Spector traces Deus Ex's development back to a game of D&D (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Shortly after the game shipped, game director Warren Spector wrote a broad postmortem of the project. Today at GDC, he revisited the subject after 17 years to offer some fresh insight into how the groundbreaking game came to be. 'People always ask me which of my games are my favorite; don’t ever ask a game designer that,' said Spector. 'The closest I ever get to answering is saying that the game I’m most proud of is Deus Ex.'"

For Tim Sweeney, advancing Epic means racing into AR and VR (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "What does it feel like to receive an award honoring a lifetime of achievement...before you're 50? "I feel like maybe I'm an old fogey and should be shopping for a cane!" Epic chief Tim Sweeney tells Gamasutra, with a laugh."

Lessons learned from over 15 years of of teaching a VR/AR design course (Chris Baker / Gamasutra) "Virtual reality and augmented reality may seem like new mediums, suddenly made viable by the emergence of the Rift and the Vive and Hololens. But Jesse Schell has watched hundreds of people build immersive VR and AR environments for the last several decades. And he has some general lessons to impart from his experience."

A dev's guide to ensuring studio conflict is healthy and productive (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "At GDC today, Finji CEO and cofounder Rebekah Saltsman shared some advice on cultivating the former and avoiding the latter, based on her own experience shipping multiple games at Finji alongside her husband (and Finji cofounder) Adam Saltsman."

[SIMON'S NOTE: There's all kinds of other good GDC 2017 coverage out there. But I mainly stuck to Gamasutra, since we spent a lot of time on detailed talk write-ups, which are all compiled here...]

Non GDC-Related

A Fresh Narrative in Gaming (Justin Porter / New York Times) "A mixed-race man comes home from the Vietnam War to more carnage: His adoptive father, the leader of the black mob, is betrayed and killed by the Italian mafia, the main criminal power in a fictional city based on New Orleans. So the veteran, Lincoln Clay, starts taking retribution, leaving hundreds dead in his wake. That’s the familiar revenge-as-motive storyline of the video game Mafia III, developed by Hangar 13 and published by 2K, but the twist is that Lincoln is also a victim."

Shigeru Miyamoto – 1989 Developer Interview (TV Game / Shmuplations) "This short but insightful interview with Shigeru Miyamoto first appeared in an early seminal book of video game history, “terebi game denshi yuugi taizen” from 1989. The interview captures Miyamoto in the early limelight: not yet the legend he is today, but more of a bright star among other contemporary developers."

How SteamWorld Heist brought skill into turn-based tactics (Alex Wiltshire / RockPaperShotgun) "SteamWorld Heist is a tactics game about boarding procedural spaceships with a squad of desperado robots and grabbing all the swag you can before they’re turned to scrap. It’s also a cross-genre oddity, a turn-based platformer, with presentation and polish that comes across a bit like a Nintendo fan fell in love with XCOM."

Rediscovering Mystery (feat. Jonathan Blow / Derek Yu / Jim Crawford) (Noclip / YouTube) "In this special feature about video game mysteries, we talk to Jonathan Blow (The Witness / Braid), Derek Yu (Spelunky) and Jim Crawford (Frog Fractions) about the games that inspired wonder in us as children."

What the game industry thinks of Nintendo’s Switch (Matt Leone / Polygon) "Yet more than most consoles, Switch remains a bit of a mystery at launch. Are motion controls going to be a big part of it? What type of player will Switch developers cater to? In an attempt to wrap our heads around it, we recently reached out to a group of developers and industry veterans to get a sense of where those in the game business see it going."

Eleven Essential Books that will help shape your Game City (Konstantinos Dimopoulos / Medium) "Designing an imaginary city is not an easy thing to do. Even less so when it’s a videogame city, the construction of which will also have to take a myriad of technical and cost constraints into consideration."

toco toco ep.47, Katsura Hashino, Game Creator (toco toco TV / YouTube) "In this episode, we follow Katsura Hashino, director of various RPG games including episodes of the world-renown Persona series, he will introduce us to philosophy and his work. Starting from Shibuya’s Center Gai, we will hop on the Den-en-Toshi line over to Sangenjaya, which was the inspiration to create the city of Yongenjaya, a key area in Hashino’s latest title: Persona 5."

Frog Fractions: inside the mind behind the world's strangest video game (Chris Priestman / The Guardian) "Jim Crawford is a self-confessed dilettante who moves from project to project in the blink of an eye. How did he create the most anarchic video game ever made?"

BIOHAZARD 7 INSIDE REPORT File 01: The Meaning of A Moment of Silence (Toru Shiwasu / Alex Aniel) "BIOHAZARD 7 resident evil INSIDE REPORT was included in the COMPLETE EDITION of the Japanese version of Resident Evil 7 Biohazard. It is only available officially in Japanese, and no official English translation has been announced. [SIMON'S NOTE: There's multiple parts to this translation on Alex's blog, and it's all excellent stuff.]"

A Torch in the Dark: Using Creative Direction to Light The Darkest Dungeon (Chris Bourassa / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2016 talk, Red Hook Studios' Chris Bourassa breaks down the creative philosophy of Darkest Dungeon - one that is characterized by a steadfast commitment to a clearly articulated, externalized creative core."

Populists Stage A Coup In Space (Alex Barron / Simon Parkin / New Yorker Radio Hour) "EVE Online is a massive multiplayer online videogame set in outer space, with tens of thousands of people playing at any given time. A few years ago, a faction of upstarts within the game’s community, who thumbed their nose at the rules, went to war against the alliance of skilled players they regarded as corrupt, elitist insiders. They won, in a shocking coup precipitated by espionage. Sound familiar?"

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include a mess of GDC talk goodness, plus Resident Evil 7/Biohazard's making-of, the role of mystery in games, & lots more.

So yep - Game Developers Conference is finally done & we're super happy with how it went. Thanks to any of you who made it out to San Francisco, or helped us with the event in ANY way! The good news for those who didn't is that GDC Vault recording was going on en masse, so we'll be rolling out LOTS of good content on our YouTube channel over the next few months. Now - time for a little rest?

Another reminder - if you dig Video Game Deep Cuts, please talk about it on social media and link to the sub page! That's how I get the bulk of my new subscribers, and it's much appreciated.

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

GDC-Related 

Lessons learned by an 'art-house indie' who joined a F2P game studio (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Veteran game designer Margaret Robertson opened her talk at GDC today on what she’s learned in her journey from a self-described “art-house indie” to someone who works at a free-to-play game studio."

alt.ctrl | Hands-On | GDC 2017 (Jess Conditt / Engadget) "[SIMON'S NOTE: this is the best video overview I've seen of the alternative controller exhibit (masterminded by John Polson & aided by me) that we run at Game Developers Conference every year. So much creativity here.]"

How Prompto's AI-driven selfie system in Final Fantasy XV was built (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Prasert “Sun” Prasertvithyakarn served as lead designer on Final Fantasy XV’s buddy system and AI; at GDC this week he took the stage to talk a bit about how the AI-driven snapshot system was designed and built."

Developing Crashlands while facing a terminal cancer diagnosis (Simon Parkin / Gamasutra) "In 2013, the 23-year-old game artist and developer Samuel Coster hallucinated a dragon made of blood bursting from his chest. The hallucinations continued and soon increased in regularity. “I figured I was struck with a strange virus,” Coster recalled, in a session titled 'The Last Game I Make Before I Die' delivered at the Game Developers Conference this morning."

Writing Mafia 3: 'We had a lot of very uncomfortable conversations' (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Today at GDC, Hangar 13 narrative director William Harms took the stage to break down how the studio pulled it off. Most notably, in the face of some praise for how Mafia 3’s pulpy revenge story effectively treats with themes of racism and discrimination, Harms pushed back against the notion that tackling racism was a core goal of the game’s narrative design."

Train Jam perfectly captures the magic of both traveling and game dev (Katherine Cross / Gamasutra) "Thus it was that Adriel Wallick, doyenne and major domo of the jam for the last four years, settled on “Unexpected Anticipation” as the theme for all of this year’s games. She spoke above the cheers of a 300-strong crowd in the newly refurbished Burlington Room of Chicago’s Union Station, christened by the opening ceremonies for this unique event."

Warren Spector traces Deus Ex's development back to a game of D&D (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Shortly after the game shipped, game director Warren Spector wrote a broad postmortem of the project. Today at GDC, he revisited the subject after 17 years to offer some fresh insight into how the groundbreaking game came to be. 'People always ask me which of my games are my favorite; don’t ever ask a game designer that,' said Spector. 'The closest I ever get to answering is saying that the game I’m most proud of is Deus Ex.'"

For Tim Sweeney, advancing Epic means racing into AR and VR (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "What does it feel like to receive an award honoring a lifetime of achievement...before you're 50? "I feel like maybe I'm an old fogey and should be shopping for a cane!" Epic chief Tim Sweeney tells Gamasutra, with a laugh."

Lessons learned from over 15 years of of teaching a VR/AR design course (Chris Baker / Gamasutra) "Virtual reality and augmented reality may seem like new mediums, suddenly made viable by the emergence of the Rift and the Vive and Hololens. But Jesse Schell has watched hundreds of people build immersive VR and AR environments for the last several decades. And he has some general lessons to impart from his experience."

A dev's guide to ensuring studio conflict is healthy and productive (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "At GDC today, Finji CEO and cofounder Rebekah Saltsman shared some advice on cultivating the former and avoiding the latter, based on her own experience shipping multiple games at Finji alongside her husband (and Finji cofounder) Adam Saltsman."

[SIMON'S NOTE: There's all kinds of other good GDC 2017 coverage out there. But I mainly stuck to Gamasutra, since we spent a lot of time on detailed talk write-ups, which are all compiled here...]

Non GDC-Related

A Fresh Narrative in Gaming (Justin Porter / New York Times) "A mixed-race man comes home from the Vietnam War to more carnage: His adoptive father, the leader of the black mob, is betrayed and killed by the Italian mafia, the main criminal power in a fictional city based on New Orleans. So the veteran, Lincoln Clay, starts taking retribution, leaving hundreds dead in his wake. That’s the familiar revenge-as-motive storyline of the video game Mafia III, developed by Hangar 13 and published by 2K, but the twist is that Lincoln is also a victim."

Shigeru Miyamoto – 1989 Developer Interview (TV Game / Shmuplations) "This short but insightful interview with Shigeru Miyamoto first appeared in an early seminal book of video game history, “terebi game denshi yuugi taizen” from 1989. The interview captures Miyamoto in the early limelight: not yet the legend he is today, but more of a bright star among other contemporary developers."

How SteamWorld Heist brought skill into turn-based tactics (Alex Wiltshire / RockPaperShotgun) "SteamWorld Heist is a tactics game about boarding procedural spaceships with a squad of desperado robots and grabbing all the swag you can before they’re turned to scrap. It’s also a cross-genre oddity, a turn-based platformer, with presentation and polish that comes across a bit like a Nintendo fan fell in love with XCOM."

Rediscovering Mystery (feat. Jonathan Blow / Derek Yu / Jim Crawford) (Noclip / YouTube) "In this special feature about video game mysteries, we talk to Jonathan Blow (The Witness / Braid), Derek Yu (Spelunky) and Jim Crawford (Frog Fractions) about the games that inspired wonder in us as children."

What the game industry thinks of Nintendo’s Switch (Matt Leone / Polygon) "Yet more than most consoles, Switch remains a bit of a mystery at launch. Are motion controls going to be a big part of it? What type of player will Switch developers cater to? In an attempt to wrap our heads around it, we recently reached out to a group of developers and industry veterans to get a sense of where those in the game business see it going."

Eleven Essential Books that will help shape your Game City (Konstantinos Dimopoulos / Medium) "Designing an imaginary city is not an easy thing to do. Even less so when it’s a videogame city, the construction of which will also have to take a myriad of technical and cost constraints into consideration."

toco toco ep.47, Katsura Hashino, Game Creator (toco toco TV / YouTube) "In this episode, we follow Katsura Hashino, director of various RPG games including episodes of the world-renown Persona series, he will introduce us to philosophy and his work. Starting from Shibuya’s Center Gai, we will hop on the Den-en-Toshi line over to Sangenjaya, which was the inspiration to create the city of Yongenjaya, a key area in Hashino’s latest title: Persona 5."

Frog Fractions: inside the mind behind the world's strangest video game (Chris Priestman / The Guardian) "Jim Crawford is a self-confessed dilettante who moves from project to project in the blink of an eye. How did he create the most anarchic video game ever made?"

BIOHAZARD 7 INSIDE REPORT File 01: The Meaning of A Moment of Silence (Toru Shiwasu / Alex Aniel) "BIOHAZARD 7 resident evil INSIDE REPORT was included in the COMPLETE EDITION of the Japanese version of Resident Evil 7 Biohazard. It is only available officially in Japanese, and no official English translation has been announced. [SIMON'S NOTE: There's multiple parts to this translation on Alex's blog, and it's all excellent stuff.]"

A Torch in the Dark: Using Creative Direction to Light The Darkest Dungeon (Chris Bourassa / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2016 talk, Red Hook Studios' Chris Bourassa breaks down the creative philosophy of Darkest Dungeon - one that is characterized by a steadfast commitment to a clearly articulated, externalized creative core."

Populists Stage A Coup In Space (Alex Barron / Simon Parkin / New Yorker Radio Hour) "EVE Online is a massive multiplayer online videogame set in outer space, with tens of thousands of people playing at any given time. A few years ago, a faction of upstarts within the game’s community, who thumbed their nose at the rules, went to war against the alliance of skilled players they regarded as corrupt, elitist insiders. They won, in a shocking coup precipitated by espionage. Sound familiar?"

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include a mess of GDC talk goodness, plus Resident Evil 7/Biohazard's making-of, the role of mystery in games, & lots more.

So yep - Game Developers Conference is finally done & we're super happy with how it went. Thanks to any of you who made it out to San Francisco, or helped us with the event in ANY way! The good news for those who didn't is that GDC Vault recording was going on en masse, so we'll be rolling out LOTS of good content on our YouTube channel over the next few months. Now - time for a little rest?

Another reminder - if you dig Video Game Deep Cuts, please talk about it on social media and link to the sub page! That's how I get the bulk of my new subscribers, and it's much appreciated.

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

GDC-Related 

Lessons learned by an 'art-house indie' who joined a F2P game studio (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Veteran game designer Margaret Robertson opened her talk at GDC today on what she’s learned in her journey from a self-described “art-house indie” to someone who works at a free-to-play game studio."

alt.ctrl | Hands-On | GDC 2017 (Jess Conditt / Engadget) "[SIMON'S NOTE: this is the best video overview I've seen of the alternative controller exhibit (masterminded by John Polson & aided by me) that we run at Game Developers Conference every year. So much creativity here.]"

How Prompto's AI-driven selfie system in Final Fantasy XV was built (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Prasert “Sun” Prasertvithyakarn served as lead designer on Final Fantasy XV’s buddy system and AI; at GDC this week he took the stage to talk a bit about how the AI-driven snapshot system was designed and built."

Developing Crashlands while facing a terminal cancer diagnosis (Simon Parkin / Gamasutra) "In 2013, the 23-year-old game artist and developer Samuel Coster hallucinated a dragon made of blood bursting from his chest. The hallucinations continued and soon increased in regularity. “I figured I was struck with a strange virus,” Coster recalled, in a session titled 'The Last Game I Make Before I Die' delivered at the Game Developers Conference this morning."

Writing Mafia 3: 'We had a lot of very uncomfortable conversations' (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Today at GDC, Hangar 13 narrative director William Harms took the stage to break down how the studio pulled it off. Most notably, in the face of some praise for how Mafia 3’s pulpy revenge story effectively treats with themes of racism and discrimination, Harms pushed back against the notion that tackling racism was a core goal of the game’s narrative design."

Train Jam perfectly captures the magic of both traveling and game dev (Katherine Cross / Gamasutra) "Thus it was that Adriel Wallick, doyenne and major domo of the jam for the last four years, settled on “Unexpected Anticipation” as the theme for all of this year’s games. She spoke above the cheers of a 300-strong crowd in the newly refurbished Burlington Room of Chicago’s Union Station, christened by the opening ceremonies for this unique event."

Warren Spector traces Deus Ex's development back to a game of D&D (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Shortly after the game shipped, game director Warren Spector wrote a broad postmortem of the project. Today at GDC, he revisited the subject after 17 years to offer some fresh insight into how the groundbreaking game came to be. 'People always ask me which of my games are my favorite; don’t ever ask a game designer that,' said Spector. 'The closest I ever get to answering is saying that the game I’m most proud of is Deus Ex.'"

For Tim Sweeney, advancing Epic means racing into AR and VR (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "What does it feel like to receive an award honoring a lifetime of achievement...before you're 50? "I feel like maybe I'm an old fogey and should be shopping for a cane!" Epic chief Tim Sweeney tells Gamasutra, with a laugh."

Lessons learned from over 15 years of of teaching a VR/AR design course (Chris Baker / Gamasutra) "Virtual reality and augmented reality may seem like new mediums, suddenly made viable by the emergence of the Rift and the Vive and Hololens. But Jesse Schell has watched hundreds of people build immersive VR and AR environments for the last several decades. And he has some general lessons to impart from his experience."

A dev's guide to ensuring studio conflict is healthy and productive (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "At GDC today, Finji CEO and cofounder Rebekah Saltsman shared some advice on cultivating the former and avoiding the latter, based on her own experience shipping multiple games at Finji alongside her husband (and Finji cofounder) Adam Saltsman."

[SIMON'S NOTE: There's all kinds of other good GDC 2017 coverage out there. But I mainly stuck to Gamasutra, since we spent a lot of time on detailed talk write-ups, which are all compiled here...]

Non GDC-Related

A Fresh Narrative in Gaming (Justin Porter / New York Times) "A mixed-race man comes home from the Vietnam War to more carnage: His adoptive father, the leader of the black mob, is betrayed and killed by the Italian mafia, the main criminal power in a fictional city based on New Orleans. So the veteran, Lincoln Clay, starts taking retribution, leaving hundreds dead in his wake. That’s the familiar revenge-as-motive storyline of the video game Mafia III, developed by Hangar 13 and published by 2K, but the twist is that Lincoln is also a victim."

Shigeru Miyamoto – 1989 Developer Interview (TV Game / Shmuplations) "This short but insightful interview with Shigeru Miyamoto first appeared in an early seminal book of video game history, “terebi game denshi yuugi taizen” from 1989. The interview captures Miyamoto in the early limelight: not yet the legend he is today, but more of a bright star among other contemporary developers."

How SteamWorld Heist brought skill into turn-based tactics (Alex Wiltshire / RockPaperShotgun) "SteamWorld Heist is a tactics game about boarding procedural spaceships with a squad of desperado robots and grabbing all the swag you can before they’re turned to scrap. It’s also a cross-genre oddity, a turn-based platformer, with presentation and polish that comes across a bit like a Nintendo fan fell in love with XCOM."

Rediscovering Mystery (feat. Jonathan Blow / Derek Yu / Jim Crawford) (Noclip / YouTube) "In this special feature about video game mysteries, we talk to Jonathan Blow (The Witness / Braid), Derek Yu (Spelunky) and Jim Crawford (Frog Fractions) about the games that inspired wonder in us as children."

What the game industry thinks of Nintendo’s Switch (Matt Leone / Polygon) "Yet more than most consoles, Switch remains a bit of a mystery at launch. Are motion controls going to be a big part of it? What type of player will Switch developers cater to? In an attempt to wrap our heads around it, we recently reached out to a group of developers and industry veterans to get a sense of where those in the game business see it going."

Eleven Essential Books that will help shape your Game City (Konstantinos Dimopoulos / Medium) "Designing an imaginary city is not an easy thing to do. Even less so when it’s a videogame city, the construction of which will also have to take a myriad of technical and cost constraints into consideration."

toco toco ep.47, Katsura Hashino, Game Creator (toco toco TV / YouTube) "In this episode, we follow Katsura Hashino, director of various RPG games including episodes of the world-renown Persona series, he will introduce us to philosophy and his work. Starting from Shibuya’s Center Gai, we will hop on the Den-en-Toshi line over to Sangenjaya, which was the inspiration to create the city of Yongenjaya, a key area in Hashino’s latest title: Persona 5."

Frog Fractions: inside the mind behind the world's strangest video game (Chris Priestman / The Guardian) "Jim Crawford is a self-confessed dilettante who moves from project to project in the blink of an eye. How did he create the most anarchic video game ever made?"

BIOHAZARD 7 INSIDE REPORT File 01: The Meaning of A Moment of Silence (Toru Shiwasu / Alex Aniel) "BIOHAZARD 7 resident evil INSIDE REPORT was included in the COMPLETE EDITION of the Japanese version of Resident Evil 7 Biohazard. It is only available officially in Japanese, and no official English translation has been announced. [SIMON'S NOTE: There's multiple parts to this translation on Alex's blog, and it's all excellent stuff.]"

A Torch in the Dark: Using Creative Direction to Light The Darkest Dungeon (Chris Bourassa / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2016 talk, Red Hook Studios' Chris Bourassa breaks down the creative philosophy of Darkest Dungeon - one that is characterized by a steadfast commitment to a clearly articulated, externalized creative core."

Populists Stage A Coup In Space (Alex Barron / Simon Parkin / New Yorker Radio Hour) "EVE Online is a massive multiplayer online videogame set in outer space, with tens of thousands of people playing at any given time. A few years ago, a faction of upstarts within the game’s community, who thumbed their nose at the rules, went to war against the alliance of skilled players they regarded as corrupt, elitist insiders. They won, in a shocking coup precipitated by espionage. Sound familiar?"

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include a mess of GDC talk goodness, plus Resident Evil 7/Biohazard's making-of, the role of mystery in games, & lots more.

So yep - Game Developers Conference is finally done & we're super happy with how it went. Thanks to any of you who made it out to San Francisco, or helped us with the event in ANY way! The good news for those who didn't is that GDC Vault recording was going on en masse, so we'll be rolling out LOTS of good content on our YouTube channel over the next few months. Now - time for a little rest?

Another reminder - if you dig Video Game Deep Cuts, please talk about it on social media and link to the sub page! That's how I get the bulk of my new subscribers, and it's much appreciated.

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

GDC-Related 

Lessons learned by an 'art-house indie' who joined a F2P game studio (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Veteran game designer Margaret Robertson opened her talk at GDC today on what she’s learned in her journey from a self-described “art-house indie” to someone who works at a free-to-play game studio."

alt.ctrl | Hands-On | GDC 2017 (Jess Conditt / Engadget) "[SIMON'S NOTE: this is the best video overview I've seen of the alternative controller exhibit (masterminded by John Polson & aided by me) that we run at Game Developers Conference every year. So much creativity here.]"

How Prompto's AI-driven selfie system in Final Fantasy XV was built (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Prasert “Sun” Prasertvithyakarn served as lead designer on Final Fantasy XV’s buddy system and AI; at GDC this week he took the stage to talk a bit about how the AI-driven snapshot system was designed and built."

Developing Crashlands while facing a terminal cancer diagnosis (Simon Parkin / Gamasutra) "In 2013, the 23-year-old game artist and developer Samuel Coster hallucinated a dragon made of blood bursting from his chest. The hallucinations continued and soon increased in regularity. “I figured I was struck with a strange virus,” Coster recalled, in a session titled 'The Last Game I Make Before I Die' delivered at the Game Developers Conference this morning."

Writing Mafia 3: 'We had a lot of very uncomfortable conversations' (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Today at GDC, Hangar 13 narrative director William Harms took the stage to break down how the studio pulled it off. Most notably, in the face of some praise for how Mafia 3’s pulpy revenge story effectively treats with themes of racism and discrimination, Harms pushed back against the notion that tackling racism was a core goal of the game’s narrative design."

Train Jam perfectly captures the magic of both traveling and game dev (Katherine Cross / Gamasutra) "Thus it was that Adriel Wallick, doyenne and major domo of the jam for the last four years, settled on “Unexpected Anticipation” as the theme for all of this year’s games. She spoke above the cheers of a 300-strong crowd in the newly refurbished Burlington Room of Chicago’s Union Station, christened by the opening ceremonies for this unique event."

Warren Spector traces Deus Ex's development back to a game of D&D (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "Shortly after the game shipped, game director Warren Spector wrote a broad postmortem of the project. Today at GDC, he revisited the subject after 17 years to offer some fresh insight into how the groundbreaking game came to be. 'People always ask me which of my games are my favorite; don’t ever ask a game designer that,' said Spector. 'The closest I ever get to answering is saying that the game I’m most proud of is Deus Ex.'"

For Tim Sweeney, advancing Epic means racing into AR and VR (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "What does it feel like to receive an award honoring a lifetime of achievement...before you're 50? "I feel like maybe I'm an old fogey and should be shopping for a cane!" Epic chief Tim Sweeney tells Gamasutra, with a laugh."

Lessons learned from over 15 years of of teaching a VR/AR design course (Chris Baker / Gamasutra) "Virtual reality and augmented reality may seem like new mediums, suddenly made viable by the emergence of the Rift and the Vive and Hololens. But Jesse Schell has watched hundreds of people build immersive VR and AR environments for the last several decades. And he has some general lessons to impart from his experience."

A dev's guide to ensuring studio conflict is healthy and productive (Alex Wawro / Gamasutra) "At GDC today, Finji CEO and cofounder Rebekah Saltsman shared some advice on cultivating the former and avoiding the latter, based on her own experience shipping multiple games at Finji alongside her husband (and Finji cofounder) Adam Saltsman."

[SIMON'S NOTE: There's all kinds of other good GDC 2017 coverage out there. But I mainly stuck to Gamasutra, since we spent a lot of time on detailed talk write-ups, which are all compiled here...]

Non GDC-Related

A Fresh Narrative in Gaming (Justin Porter / New York Times) "A mixed-race man comes home from the Vietnam War to more carnage: His adoptive father, the leader of the black mob, is betrayed and killed by the Italian mafia, the main criminal power in a fictional city based on New Orleans. So the veteran, Lincoln Clay, starts taking retribution, leaving hundreds dead in his wake. That’s the familiar revenge-as-motive storyline of the video game Mafia III, developed by Hangar 13 and published by 2K, but the twist is that Lincoln is also a victim."

Shigeru Miyamoto – 1989 Developer Interview (TV Game / Shmuplations) "This short but insightful interview with Shigeru Miyamoto first appeared in an early seminal book of video game history, “terebi game denshi yuugi taizen” from 1989. The interview captures Miyamoto in the early limelight: not yet the legend he is today, but more of a bright star among other contemporary developers."

How SteamWorld Heist brought skill into turn-based tactics (Alex Wiltshire / RockPaperShotgun) "SteamWorld Heist is a tactics game about boarding procedural spaceships with a squad of desperado robots and grabbing all the swag you can before they’re turned to scrap. It’s also a cross-genre oddity, a turn-based platformer, with presentation and polish that comes across a bit like a Nintendo fan fell in love with XCOM."

Rediscovering Mystery (feat. Jonathan Blow / Derek Yu / Jim Crawford) (Noclip / YouTube) "In this special feature about video game mysteries, we talk to Jonathan Blow (The Witness / Braid), Derek Yu (Spelunky) and Jim Crawford (Frog Fractions) about the games that inspired wonder in us as children."

What the game industry thinks of Nintendo’s Switch (Matt Leone / Polygon) "Yet more than most consoles, Switch remains a bit of a mystery at launch. Are motion controls going to be a big part of it? What type of player will Switch developers cater to? In an attempt to wrap our heads around it, we recently reached out to a group of developers and industry veterans to get a sense of where those in the game business see it going."

Eleven Essential Books that will help shape your Game City (Konstantinos Dimopoulos / Medium) "Designing an imaginary city is not an easy thing to do. Even less so when it’s a videogame city, the construction of which will also have to take a myriad of technical and cost constraints into consideration."

toco toco ep.47, Katsura Hashino, Game Creator (toco toco TV / YouTube) "In this episode, we follow Katsura Hashino, director of various RPG games including episodes of the world-renown Persona series, he will introduce us to philosophy and his work. Starting from Shibuya’s Center Gai, we will hop on the Den-en-Toshi line over to Sangenjaya, which was the inspiration to create the city of Yongenjaya, a key area in Hashino’s latest title: Persona 5."

Frog Fractions: inside the mind behind the world's strangest video game (Chris Priestman / The Guardian) "Jim Crawford is a self-confessed dilettante who moves from project to project in the blink of an eye. How did he create the most anarchic video game ever made?"

BIOHAZARD 7 INSIDE REPORT File 01: The Meaning of A Moment of Silence (Toru Shiwasu / Alex Aniel) "BIOHAZARD 7 resident evil INSIDE REPORT was included in the COMPLETE EDITION of the Japanese version of Resident Evil 7 Biohazard. It is only available officially in Japanese, and no official English translation has been announced. [SIMON'S NOTE: There's multiple parts to this translation on Alex's blog, and it's all excellent stuff.]"

A Torch in the Dark: Using Creative Direction to Light The Darkest Dungeon (Chris Bourassa / GDC / YouTube) "In this 2016 talk, Red Hook Studios' Chris Bourassa breaks down the creative philosophy of Darkest Dungeon - one that is characterized by a steadfast commitment to a clearly articulated, externalized creative core."

Populists Stage A Coup In Space (Alex Barron / Simon Parkin / New Yorker Radio Hour) "EVE Online is a massive multiplayer online videogame set in outer space, with tens of thousands of people playing at any given time. A few years ago, a faction of upstarts within the game’s community, who thumbed their nose at the rules, went to war against the alliance of skilled players they regarded as corrupt, elitist insiders. They won, in a shocking coup precipitated by espionage. Sound familiar?"

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include the magic of The Void, John Romero on the TEd tool, Hyper Light Drifter's charm, & much more.

We're here! GDC 2017 kicks off first thing on Monday here in San Francisco, and whoa, there's still lots to do, so I'll keep it brief. Oh, one useful thing - ex Game Developer magazine EIC (& excellent indie dev!) Brandon Sheffield made a super helpful post about all the cool stuff you can see with an Expo Pass at GDC this year - and if you have a bigger pass, you can see all the listed things too!

Whether at GDC or not, have fun this week, and I'll be back next weekend with an all-GDC Video Game Deep Cuts.

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Why Ever Stop Playing Video Games? (Frank Guan / New York Magazine) "Like so many others, I played video games, often to excess, and had done so eagerly since childhood, to the point where the games we played became, necessarily, reflections of our being. To the uninitiated, the figures are nothing if not staggering: 155 million Americans play video games, more than the number who voted in November’s presidential election."

All work and no play (Simon Parkin / Eurogamer) "Few video game protagonists keep to strict working hours, and how could they? When there's a war to win, a world to save, a lover's heart to ensnare and all the other grand and arduous problems that a game designer asks us to solve, it would be practically irresponsible to clock off a five for a pint of lager, a packet of crisps and a prestige TV box set."

The Dark Souls of News Journalism (Mega64 / YouTube) "If you don't understand this video, you really need to practice and get better at it. [SIMON'S NOTE: This is the Dark Souls of videos that mention Dark Souls.]"

The Video Game Industry Is Afraid of Unions (Emmanuel Maiberg / Motherboard / Vice) "On November 17 of last year, 450 members of the SAG-AFTRA union picketed developer Insomniac Games in Burbank, California. Some of the faces marching up and down the street with signs in hand were familiar, like Clancy Brown, who played Sgt. Zim in the movie Starship Troopers, but who, on that day, stood up for his rights as a voice actor in popular video games like Call of Duty, God of War, and many others."

"Make it Biblical:" How Vagrant Story Changed Game Localization (John Learned / USGamer) "Released that May in North America, Vagrant Story was a significant step forward for English localization... I recently had the opportunity to interview localization editor Richard Amtower and famous translator Alexander O. Smith over email on their breakthrough early work in the field and to reflect on the rise of localization as a craft that truly mattered."

It's time for cyberpunk games to remember how to be punk (Jody Macgregor / PC Gamer) "While most of the games in the genre that followed [Neuromancer & Syndicate] explored spaces somewhere in between those two extremes, there's been a tendency for them to focus on the high-tech and not the low-life. They get the cyber, but not the punk."

The Magic of the First Legend of Zelda (Mark Brown / Game Maker's Toolkit / YouTube) "The next Zelda game, Breath of the Wild, is said to be inspired by the very first game in the series. Let's revisit that seminal game, to see how Nintendo made such an intoxicating adventure."

How fantastical Atari box art taught the world what makes video games special (Nick Wanserski / AV Club) "Atari 2600 box art is well loved and rightly revered. Some of that can be chalked up to nostalgia for a system that was released in the first years of the Carter administration, but there’s no shortage of collectors who appreciate the amount of thought and technical accomplishment that went into crafting the identity of an emerging entertainment form."

What It Takes To Run A Fighting Game Tournament (Suriel Vazquez / Game Informer) "Without people like Rick Thiher, eSports tournaments would be chaos. Major events require hundreds of man-hours, months of planning, and the ability to manage dozens of moving parts deftly. Thiher runs Combo Breaker, one of the largest tournaments for fighting games throughout the year, and as attendees and players tell it, it’s a well oiled machine."

Virtual Reality’s Potential for Magic Gets Real (Brooks Barnes / New York Times) "In an ordinary office complex here, past stacked cartons of Mountain Dew and a throng of hoodie-wearing employees, sits a prototype for an attraction that Hollywood thinks will become the next entertainment craze — an offering that could mint money for its developers, throw a lifeline to struggling shopping malls and, at long last, jump-start sales of virtual reality gear."

World of Warcraft's gold rush has upended Blizzard’s economy (Daniel Friedman / Polygon) "There has been an economic panic in World of Warcraft. On Feb. 6, Blizzard changed the rules, allowing players to exchange WoW Tokens for Battle.net balance. That means that gold you earn or buy in World of Warcraft can now be used in any Blizzard property."

We tried IMAX VR, and it left us excited as hell (and weak in the knees) (Ryan Waniata / Digital Trends) "Suddenly, I’m propelled around a spiraling chute hundreds of feet above an arctic landscape before diving into a glittering river, through frosted ice caves... This isn’t Disney’s latest Star Tours ride, and it’s not exactly an arcade game, either. It’s part of an all-new take on VR from cinema magnate IMAX (that’s right, IMAX) called The IMAX VR Experience Centre."

Hyper Light Drifter: The Best Game Ever (Cool Ghosts / YouTube) "[SIMON'S NOTE: Another wonderfully deep analysis - as a YouTube commenter notes: 'So we get a "spoilers" warning but not a "this next bit will make you reflect back on your past, wasted opportunities, reflect on your future, inevitable demise and then cry inside" warning? Yeah cheers, Matt ;)'.]

The three reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber (Michael Sawyer / Polygon) "Allow me to extrapolate on a meme those kids today are using: “Dude, you had one job. And it looked like a really easy one.” Let’s Players, streamers or content creators, whatever you like, get to play video games and make jokes while doing so. It seems like a dream gig, so why even risk these sort of gaffes?"

Q&A With Eugene Jarvis: Cruis’n Blast And The Modern Arcade Industry (Arcade Heroes) "The last time we talked with Eugene Jarvis, CEO of Raw Thrills, it was about Jurassic Park. Fast forward to today and his company is busier than ever, pumping out Space Invaders Frenzy, The Walking Dead, Cruis’n Blast along with some other titles in development."

Meet The Woman Raising Japan’s Next Generation Of Street Fighter Champions (Cecilia D'Anastasio / Kotaku) "When I called Street Fighter pro Yuko “Chocoblanka” Momochi at 11 a.m. Japan time, her husband, the legendary Street Fighter champion Yusuke Momochi, was asleep. The husband-wife team, both Street Fighter players, had recently launched a school to train promising Japanese competitors."

Classic Tools Retrospective: John Romero talks about creating TEd, the tile editor that shipped over 30 games (David Lightbown / Gamasutra) "In recent years, retrospectives of classic games have been well received at GDC, but there have been very few stories about classic game tools... For the first article of this series, I have the great pleasure of speaking with John Romero about TEd, the tile editor that he created at id Software, which went on to ship 33 games."

VA-11 Hall-A is Not About Bartending, it's About Your Life (Jake Juliett / Field Notes For Play / YouTube) "Thusly, I enjoy VA-11 Hall-A for the thing it is - a story about living well in modern society. I also mention the woeful lack of analysis about the story."

Playing With Toys While People are Dying (Paul Kilduff-Taylor / Medium) "The work of video game developers distracts the world from problems which desperately need solutions. The culture this feeds is fundamentally depraved, the financial outcomes are random and, ultimately, nothing of worth is produced."

Rod Humble and Erica Gangsei in Conversation (Erica Gangsei / SFMOMA) "In this interview, Erica Gangsei, SFMOMA’s head of interpretive media and creator of the PlaySFMOMA initiative, talks with Humble about his personal and professional projects, and his aspirations for games and gaming."

Todd Howard Discusses Open World Multiplayer, Juggling Seven Projects, And His Hall Of Fame Induction (Matt Bertz / Game Informer) "On the eve of his induction into the AIAS Hall of Fame, we sat down with Howard to discuss his legacy, his plans for the future, and his noble crusade to get EA Sports to resurrect the NCAA Football franchise."

The future of Final Fantasy 15 (Jeremy Parish / Polygon) "That forward-looking attitude continues to guide Tabata's vision for Final Fantasy 15, as the company considers a new model for the franchise: Life for a single-playing story-based game beyond its initial release."

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include the magic of The Void, John Romero on the TEd tool, Hyper Light Drifter's charm, & much more.

We're here! GDC 2017 kicks off first thing on Monday here in San Francisco, and whoa, there's still lots to do, so I'll keep it brief. Oh, one useful thing - ex Game Developer magazine EIC (& excellent indie dev!) Brandon Sheffield made a super helpful post about all the cool stuff you can see with an Expo Pass at GDC this year - and if you have a bigger pass, you can see all the listed things too!

Whether at GDC or not, have fun this week, and I'll be back next weekend with an all-GDC Video Game Deep Cuts.

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Why Ever Stop Playing Video Games? (Frank Guan / New York Magazine) "Like so many others, I played video games, often to excess, and had done so eagerly since childhood, to the point where the games we played became, necessarily, reflections of our being. To the uninitiated, the figures are nothing if not staggering: 155 million Americans play video games, more than the number who voted in November’s presidential election."

All work and no play (Simon Parkin / Eurogamer) "Few video game protagonists keep to strict working hours, and how could they? When there's a war to win, a world to save, a lover's heart to ensnare and all the other grand and arduous problems that a game designer asks us to solve, it would be practically irresponsible to clock off a five for a pint of lager, a packet of crisps and a prestige TV box set."

The Dark Souls of News Journalism (Mega64 / YouTube) "If you don't understand this video, you really need to practice and get better at it. [SIMON'S NOTE: This is the Dark Souls of videos that mention Dark Souls.]"

The Video Game Industry Is Afraid of Unions (Emmanuel Maiberg / Motherboard / Vice) "On November 17 of last year, 450 members of the SAG-AFTRA union picketed developer Insomniac Games in Burbank, California. Some of the faces marching up and down the street with signs in hand were familiar, like Clancy Brown, who played Sgt. Zim in the movie Starship Troopers, but who, on that day, stood up for his rights as a voice actor in popular video games like Call of Duty, God of War, and many others."

"Make it Biblical:" How Vagrant Story Changed Game Localization (John Learned / USGamer) "Released that May in North America, Vagrant Story was a significant step forward for English localization... I recently had the opportunity to interview localization editor Richard Amtower and famous translator Alexander O. Smith over email on their breakthrough early work in the field and to reflect on the rise of localization as a craft that truly mattered."

It's time for cyberpunk games to remember how to be punk (Jody Macgregor / PC Gamer) "While most of the games in the genre that followed [Neuromancer & Syndicate] explored spaces somewhere in between those two extremes, there's been a tendency for them to focus on the high-tech and not the low-life. They get the cyber, but not the punk."

The Magic of the First Legend of Zelda (Mark Brown / Game Maker's Toolkit / YouTube) "The next Zelda game, Breath of the Wild, is said to be inspired by the very first game in the series. Let's revisit that seminal game, to see how Nintendo made such an intoxicating adventure."

How fantastical Atari box art taught the world what makes video games special (Nick Wanserski / AV Club) "Atari 2600 box art is well loved and rightly revered. Some of that can be chalked up to nostalgia for a system that was released in the first years of the Carter administration, but there’s no shortage of collectors who appreciate the amount of thought and technical accomplishment that went into crafting the identity of an emerging entertainment form."

What It Takes To Run A Fighting Game Tournament (Suriel Vazquez / Game Informer) "Without people like Rick Thiher, eSports tournaments would be chaos. Major events require hundreds of man-hours, months of planning, and the ability to manage dozens of moving parts deftly. Thiher runs Combo Breaker, one of the largest tournaments for fighting games throughout the year, and as attendees and players tell it, it’s a well oiled machine."

Virtual Reality’s Potential for Magic Gets Real (Brooks Barnes / New York Times) "In an ordinary office complex here, past stacked cartons of Mountain Dew and a throng of hoodie-wearing employees, sits a prototype for an attraction that Hollywood thinks will become the next entertainment craze — an offering that could mint money for its developers, throw a lifeline to struggling shopping malls and, at long last, jump-start sales of virtual reality gear."

World of Warcraft's gold rush has upended Blizzard’s economy (Daniel Friedman / Polygon) "There has been an economic panic in World of Warcraft. On Feb. 6, Blizzard changed the rules, allowing players to exchange WoW Tokens for Battle.net balance. That means that gold you earn or buy in World of Warcraft can now be used in any Blizzard property."

We tried IMAX VR, and it left us excited as hell (and weak in the knees) (Ryan Waniata / Digital Trends) "Suddenly, I’m propelled around a spiraling chute hundreds of feet above an arctic landscape before diving into a glittering river, through frosted ice caves... This isn’t Disney’s latest Star Tours ride, and it’s not exactly an arcade game, either. It’s part of an all-new take on VR from cinema magnate IMAX (that’s right, IMAX) called The IMAX VR Experience Centre."

Hyper Light Drifter: The Best Game Ever (Cool Ghosts / YouTube) "[SIMON'S NOTE: Another wonderfully deep analysis - as a YouTube commenter notes: 'So we get a "spoilers" warning but not a "this next bit will make you reflect back on your past, wasted opportunities, reflect on your future, inevitable demise and then cry inside" warning? Yeah cheers, Matt ;)'.]

The three reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber (Michael Sawyer / Polygon) "Allow me to extrapolate on a meme those kids today are using: “Dude, you had one job. And it looked like a really easy one.” Let’s Players, streamers or content creators, whatever you like, get to play video games and make jokes while doing so. It seems like a dream gig, so why even risk these sort of gaffes?"

Q&A With Eugene Jarvis: Cruis’n Blast And The Modern Arcade Industry (Arcade Heroes) "The last time we talked with Eugene Jarvis, CEO of Raw Thrills, it was about Jurassic Park. Fast forward to today and his company is busier than ever, pumping out Space Invaders Frenzy, The Walking Dead, Cruis’n Blast along with some other titles in development."

Meet The Woman Raising Japan’s Next Generation Of Street Fighter Champions (Cecilia D'Anastasio / Kotaku) "When I called Street Fighter pro Yuko “Chocoblanka” Momochi at 11 a.m. Japan time, her husband, the legendary Street Fighter champion Yusuke Momochi, was asleep. The husband-wife team, both Street Fighter players, had recently launched a school to train promising Japanese competitors."

Classic Tools Retrospective: John Romero talks about creating TEd, the tile editor that shipped over 30 games (David Lightbown / Gamasutra) "In recent years, retrospectives of classic games have been well received at GDC, but there have been very few stories about classic game tools... For the first article of this series, I have the great pleasure of speaking with John Romero about TEd, the tile editor that he created at id Software, which went on to ship 33 games."

VA-11 Hall-A is Not About Bartending, it's About Your Life (Jake Juliett / Field Notes For Play / YouTube) "Thusly, I enjoy VA-11 Hall-A for the thing it is - a story about living well in modern society. I also mention the woeful lack of analysis about the story."

Playing With Toys While People are Dying (Paul Kilduff-Taylor / Medium) "The work of video game developers distracts the world from problems which desperately need solutions. The culture this feeds is fundamentally depraved, the financial outcomes are random and, ultimately, nothing of worth is produced."

Rod Humble and Erica Gangsei in Conversation (Erica Gangsei / SFMOMA) "In this interview, Erica Gangsei, SFMOMA’s head of interpretive media and creator of the PlaySFMOMA initiative, talks with Humble about his personal and professional projects, and his aspirations for games and gaming."

Todd Howard Discusses Open World Multiplayer, Juggling Seven Projects, And His Hall Of Fame Induction (Matt Bertz / Game Informer) "On the eve of his induction into the AIAS Hall of Fame, we sat down with Howard to discuss his legacy, his plans for the future, and his noble crusade to get EA Sports to resurrect the NCAA Football franchise."

The future of Final Fantasy 15 (Jeremy Parish / Polygon) "That forward-looking attitude continues to guide Tabata's vision for Final Fantasy 15, as the company considers a new model for the franchise: Life for a single-playing story-based game beyond its initial release."

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]

[symbianosgames]

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

[Video Game Deep Cuts is a weekly newsletter from curator/video game industry veteran Simon Carless, rounding up the best longread & standout articles & videos about games, every weekend. This week's highlights include the magic of The Void, John Romero on the TEd tool, Hyper Light Drifter's charm, & much more.

We're here! GDC 2017 kicks off first thing on Monday here in San Francisco, and whoa, there's still lots to do, so I'll keep it brief. Oh, one useful thing - ex Game Developer magazine EIC (& excellent indie dev!) Brandon Sheffield made a super helpful post about all the cool stuff you can see with an Expo Pass at GDC this year - and if you have a bigger pass, you can see all the listed things too!

Whether at GDC or not, have fun this week, and I'll be back next weekend with an all-GDC Video Game Deep Cuts.

- Simon, curator.]

-------------------

Why Ever Stop Playing Video Games? (Frank Guan / New York Magazine) "Like so many others, I played video games, often to excess, and had done so eagerly since childhood, to the point where the games we played became, necessarily, reflections of our being. To the uninitiated, the figures are nothing if not staggering: 155 million Americans play video games, more than the number who voted in November’s presidential election."

All work and no play (Simon Parkin / Eurogamer) "Few video game protagonists keep to strict working hours, and how could they? When there's a war to win, a world to save, a lover's heart to ensnare and all the other grand and arduous problems that a game designer asks us to solve, it would be practically irresponsible to clock off a five for a pint of lager, a packet of crisps and a prestige TV box set."

The Dark Souls of News Journalism (Mega64 / YouTube) "If you don't understand this video, you really need to practice and get better at it. [SIMON'S NOTE: This is the Dark Souls of videos that mention Dark Souls.]"

The Video Game Industry Is Afraid of Unions (Emmanuel Maiberg / Motherboard / Vice) "On November 17 of last year, 450 members of the SAG-AFTRA union picketed developer Insomniac Games in Burbank, California. Some of the faces marching up and down the street with signs in hand were familiar, like Clancy Brown, who played Sgt. Zim in the movie Starship Troopers, but who, on that day, stood up for his rights as a voice actor in popular video games like Call of Duty, God of War, and many others."

"Make it Biblical:" How Vagrant Story Changed Game Localization (John Learned / USGamer) "Released that May in North America, Vagrant Story was a significant step forward for English localization... I recently had the opportunity to interview localization editor Richard Amtower and famous translator Alexander O. Smith over email on their breakthrough early work in the field and to reflect on the rise of localization as a craft that truly mattered."

It's time for cyberpunk games to remember how to be punk (Jody Macgregor / PC Gamer) "While most of the games in the genre that followed [Neuromancer & Syndicate] explored spaces somewhere in between those two extremes, there's been a tendency for them to focus on the high-tech and not the low-life. They get the cyber, but not the punk."

The Magic of the First Legend of Zelda (Mark Brown / Game Maker's Toolkit / YouTube) "The next Zelda game, Breath of the Wild, is said to be inspired by the very first game in the series. Let's revisit that seminal game, to see how Nintendo made such an intoxicating adventure."

How fantastical Atari box art taught the world what makes video games special (Nick Wanserski / AV Club) "Atari 2600 box art is well loved and rightly revered. Some of that can be chalked up to nostalgia for a system that was released in the first years of the Carter administration, but there’s no shortage of collectors who appreciate the amount of thought and technical accomplishment that went into crafting the identity of an emerging entertainment form."

What It Takes To Run A Fighting Game Tournament (Suriel Vazquez / Game Informer) "Without people like Rick Thiher, eSports tournaments would be chaos. Major events require hundreds of man-hours, months of planning, and the ability to manage dozens of moving parts deftly. Thiher runs Combo Breaker, one of the largest tournaments for fighting games throughout the year, and as attendees and players tell it, it’s a well oiled machine."

Virtual Reality’s Potential for Magic Gets Real (Brooks Barnes / New York Times) "In an ordinary office complex here, past stacked cartons of Mountain Dew and a throng of hoodie-wearing employees, sits a prototype for an attraction that Hollywood thinks will become the next entertainment craze — an offering that could mint money for its developers, throw a lifeline to struggling shopping malls and, at long last, jump-start sales of virtual reality gear."

World of Warcraft's gold rush has upended Blizzard’s economy (Daniel Friedman / Polygon) "There has been an economic panic in World of Warcraft. On Feb. 6, Blizzard changed the rules, allowing players to exchange WoW Tokens for Battle.net balance. That means that gold you earn or buy in World of Warcraft can now be used in any Blizzard property."

We tried IMAX VR, and it left us excited as hell (and weak in the knees) (Ryan Waniata / Digital Trends) "Suddenly, I’m propelled around a spiraling chute hundreds of feet above an arctic landscape before diving into a glittering river, through frosted ice caves... This isn’t Disney’s latest Star Tours ride, and it’s not exactly an arcade game, either. It’s part of an all-new take on VR from cinema magnate IMAX (that’s right, IMAX) called The IMAX VR Experience Centre."

Hyper Light Drifter: The Best Game Ever (Cool Ghosts / YouTube) "[SIMON'S NOTE: Another wonderfully deep analysis - as a YouTube commenter notes: 'So we get a "spoilers" warning but not a "this next bit will make you reflect back on your past, wasted opportunities, reflect on your future, inevitable demise and then cry inside" warning? Yeah cheers, Matt ;)'.]

The three reasons YouTubers keep imploding, from a YouTuber (Michael Sawyer / Polygon) "Allow me to extrapolate on a meme those kids today are using: “Dude, you had one job. And it looked like a really easy one.” Let’s Players, streamers or content creators, whatever you like, get to play video games and make jokes while doing so. It seems like a dream gig, so why even risk these sort of gaffes?"

Q&A With Eugene Jarvis: Cruis’n Blast And The Modern Arcade Industry (Arcade Heroes) "The last time we talked with Eugene Jarvis, CEO of Raw Thrills, it was about Jurassic Park. Fast forward to today and his company is busier than ever, pumping out Space Invaders Frenzy, The Walking Dead, Cruis’n Blast along with some other titles in development."

Meet The Woman Raising Japan’s Next Generation Of Street Fighter Champions (Cecilia D'Anastasio / Kotaku) "When I called Street Fighter pro Yuko “Chocoblanka” Momochi at 11 a.m. Japan time, her husband, the legendary Street Fighter champion Yusuke Momochi, was asleep. The husband-wife team, both Street Fighter players, had recently launched a school to train promising Japanese competitors."

Classic Tools Retrospective: John Romero talks about creating TEd, the tile editor that shipped over 30 games (David Lightbown / Gamasutra) "In recent years, retrospectives of classic games have been well received at GDC, but there have been very few stories about classic game tools... For the first article of this series, I have the great pleasure of speaking with John Romero about TEd, the tile editor that he created at id Software, which went on to ship 33 games."

VA-11 Hall-A is Not About Bartending, it's About Your Life (Jake Juliett / Field Notes For Play / YouTube) "Thusly, I enjoy VA-11 Hall-A for the thing it is - a story about living well in modern society. I also mention the woeful lack of analysis about the story."

Playing With Toys While People are Dying (Paul Kilduff-Taylor / Medium) "The work of video game developers distracts the world from problems which desperately need solutions. The culture this feeds is fundamentally depraved, the financial outcomes are random and, ultimately, nothing of worth is produced."

Rod Humble and Erica Gangsei in Conversation (Erica Gangsei / SFMOMA) "In this interview, Erica Gangsei, SFMOMA’s head of interpretive media and creator of the PlaySFMOMA initiative, talks with Humble about his personal and professional projects, and his aspirations for games and gaming."

Todd Howard Discusses Open World Multiplayer, Juggling Seven Projects, And His Hall Of Fame Induction (Matt Bertz / Game Informer) "On the eve of his induction into the AIAS Hall of Fame, we sat down with Howard to discuss his legacy, his plans for the future, and his noble crusade to get EA Sports to resurrect the NCAA Football franchise."

The future of Final Fantasy 15 (Jeremy Parish / Polygon) "That forward-looking attitude continues to guide Tabata's vision for Final Fantasy 15, as the company considers a new model for the franchise: Life for a single-playing story-based game beyond its initial release."

-------------------

[REMINDER: you can sign up to receive this newsletter every weekend at http://ift.tt/2dUXrva we crosspost to Gamasutra later on Sunday, but get it first via newsletter! Story tips and comments can be emailed to vgdeepcuts@simoncarless.com. MINI-DISCLOSURE: Simon is one of the organizers of GDC and Gamasutra, so you may sometimes see links from those entities in his picks. Or not!]