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Victoria Tran is the community director at Innersloth, creators of the incredibly popular Among Us, and she has also worked on games like Unpacking, Boyfriend Dungeon, and Pupperazzi. For this deep dive into what it's like to manage communities of video game players, Victoria tells Jordan what makes her particularly suited to this kind of work, how she hopes to create kinder and more sustainable online communities, and how the approach to community management changes across games of different sizes, genres, and tones.
As always, if you enjoy this episode please do let us know! Rate and review the show in Apple Podcasts, share it with your friends on social media (or even in person!), and help us to spread the word.
Mix: Dan Parkes
Music: Jazz Mickle
Art: Emily Majarian
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The wonderful If Found... is a game you play by erasing the sketch-filled pages of a young Irish woman's diary. So Jordan wanted to talk to its artist, Liadh Young, about the process of creating gorgeous illustrations that were made to be erased.
Links:
My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness
As always, if you enjoy this episode please do let us know! Rate and review the show in Apple Podcasts, share it with your friends on social media (or even in person!), and help us to spread the word.
Mix: Dan Parkes
Music: Jazz Mickle
Art: Emily Majarian
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Eurogamer video producer Zoe Delahunty-Light asked Jordan if she could come on the podcast to talk about a recent indie game she "absolutely devoured": Wytchwood. Their conversation ended up covering the pros and cons of repetition in games, how it feels to play as an older female character, and a different kind of video game villain.
Check out Zoe's stream of the first hour of Wytchwood for Eurogamer on YouTube. Jordan also streamed it on Twitch!
As always, if you enjoy this episode please do let us know! Rate and review the show in Apple Podcasts, share it with your friends on social media (or even in person!), and help us to spread the word.
Mix: Dan Parkes
Music: Jazz Mickle
Art: Emily Majarian
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Hana Lee co-developed the semi-autobiographical game No Longer Home with their partner Cel Davison (with help from others on the music and code) over the course of six years. In this episode, Hana tells Jordan what it was like to recreate their home and represent their relationship in a game, and how their feelings about it changed over the long development.
No Longer Home features the unhappy consequences of borders and visa limitations. If you've experienced similar, take care when listening to this episode and/or playing the game.
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In Crème de la Crème you can be gay, straight, or pansexual; asexual and/or aromantic; monogamous or polyamorous; female, male, or nonbinary. You can choose the genders of other characters, and then befriend them, romance them, or even get engaged. You can use your time at the exclusive finishing school of Gallatin College to study, make connections, suck up to the staff, and try to restore your family name... or explore the darker side of the school and take a stand against it.
So how do you write a game with so much choice, and well enough to win several awards? Jordan asked its writer Hannah Powell-Smith.
As always, if you enjoy this episode please do let us know! Rate and review the show in Apple Podcasts, share it with your friends on social media (or even in person!), and help us to spread the word.
Mix: Dan Parkes
Music: Jazz Mickle
Art: Emily Majarian
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Draknek is known for their excellent puzzle games like Sokobond, A Good Snowman is Hard to Build, and Cosmic Express. A Monster's Expedition (Through Puzzling Exhibitions) continues that legacy but also adds narrative. You play as an adorable monster navigating a museum of humanity curated by someone with only a vague understanding of what any of the objects actually are. In this episode, writer Pip Warr tells Jordan how she drew on her own interests and experience to write the humorous exhibition plaques that provide a moment of respite between the challenging puzzles.
As always, if you enjoy this episode please do let us know! Rate and review the show in Apple Podcasts, share it with your friends on social media (or even in person!), and help us to spread the word.
Mix: Dan Parkes
Music: Jazz Mickle
Art: Emily Majarian
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Murder by Numbers is a joyful mix of genres: a visual novel with Phoenix Wright style witness interrogation interspersed with nonogram puzzle-solving, in a camp 1990s setting. To get a sense of how a game like that gets made, Jordan spoke to its lead programmer Liz Wright, who explains how she built the framework to hold all of those disparate parts, what she would change if there was a sequel (please, let there be a sequel), and what it's like to move from working on tools to working on games... and back again.
As always, if you enjoy this episode please do let us know! Rate and review the show in Apple Podcasts, share it with your friends on social media (or even in person!), and help us to spread the word.
Mix: Dan Parkes
Music: Jazz Mickle
Art: Emily Majarian
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Sarah Wendell is the co-founder of Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, a website for readers of romance fiction, and host of their podcast Smart Podcast, Trashy Books. When she's not reading, she loves to play video games, so Jordan invited her on the show to talk about how games approach her area of expertise: romance.
For this whistlestop tour through how romance is written in the kinds of games Sarah plays (Dragon Age, Mass Effect, The Witcher, Stardew Valley...), she and Jordan discuss the male gaze, indecision when faced with an abundance of love interests, happily ever afters, whether or not romanceable characters should have their own preferences, and what romance novels Sarah would like to see adapted into a game.
Sarah has also discussed this topic with her cohost Amanda and with Laura Nash from The Short Game podcast.
Books mentioned: Alyssa Cole's Reluctant Royals and Shelly Laurenston's Call of Crows.
That Twitter thread about the male gaze that lived rent free in Sarah's head is from @kyalbr.
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Jordan knew she would love Unpacking, but it turned out to be one of her favourite games of the year so far. In this episode, she interviews its creative director Wren Brier about how this gentle puzzle game about unpacking moving boxes uses that popular concept of 'environmental storytelling' to almost wordlessly convey a character's life and relationships.
As always, if you enjoy this episode please do let us know! Rate and review the show in Apple Podcasts, share it with your friends on social media (or even in person!), and help us to spread the word.
Mix: Dan Parkes
Music: Jazz Mickle
Art: Emily Majarian
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After playing yet another indie game that used something that looked a lot like mental illness for its plot twist, Jordan wrote an article for Waypoint criticising the trope, which quoted a similarly critical review of the game Draugen by writer Katherine Cross. For this first episode of Season 3 of Talking Simulator, Jordan and Katherine pick apart the problems they have with the use of certain kinds of life experiences for surprise reveals in video games, and in doing so also discuss content warnings and spoilers.
If you enjoy this episode, please let us know!
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As the 35th anniversary of the Zelda franchise prompts rankings and discussion of which game was best, Breath of the Wild seems to top everyone’s lists. But not Shay Thompson’s. In this final episode of series 2 of Talking Simulator, she tells Jordan what she loves about a very different kind of Zelda game: the creepy time-looping Majora’s Mask.
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mattie brice is an activist, critic, designer, and currently Visiting Assistant Arts Professor at New York University’s Game Center. In this episode, she and Jordan discuss the effectiveness of so-called educational games and games for change, and mattie shares her ideas for how we can use play for everyday activism, touching on topics from diversity and inclusion to psychological experiments to BDSM.
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Writer and narrative designer Leigh Alexander, known for her work on games like Neo Cab and Reigns: Her Majesty, talks through some of her thoughts on the current state of narrative design in games and its potential for the future.
How can narrative designers meet a younger audience where they already are? Is it possible to harness the undeniable power of social media in more constructive ways? And what can we learn from looking back to the games and other future-looking media of the past?
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Kim Belair is a writer and narrative designer who has worked on a wide range of games, from big franchises like the recent Assassin’s Creed Valhalla and the upcoming Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League to smaller, more unique titles like Neo Cab and Goodbye Volcano High.
She talks Jordan through what it was like to work on Valhalla, the latest entry to a series with more than a decade of history, and how she contributed to what makes it different (no spoilers!). Then, the conversation expands into broader questions about the work of writing video games. How does it differ across games and teams? What’s the role of a narrative development company like Sweet Baby? And what are Kim’s hopes for the future of storytelling in games?
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I Am Dead is a charming puzzle adventure game from the creators of Hohokum and Wilmot’s Warehouse, in which you play as a ghost finding other ghosts by exploring an island, unlocking the memories of its colourful characters, and using supernatural powers to peer through objects and find mementos linked to the dead.
Catherine Johnson is an experienced writer of books, radio, television and more, but this is her first game. She tells Jordan what it was like to jump into this new medium, and how she and the rest of the team crafted this rich world and the stories the player uncovers within.
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The African continent has historically been underrepresented in the global game development scene, but game developers living there want to change that. Sithe Ncube, who is Zambian and currently studying Computer Science in South Africa, spends much of her spare time working with various initiatives supporting Black game developers, African game developers, and specifically African women making games.
Among other work, Sithe is a strategic advisor for Humble Bundle’s new $1 million a year Black Game Developer Fund, and a regional organiser for Global Game Jam supporting participants in Sub-Saharan Africa. In this conversation, she tells Jordan about game development in Africa and about her own initiative, Prosearium, which aims to document 1,000 African women creating and contributing to games.
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The Sims is one of the most popular series of games in the world, in part because it caters to many players who are underrepresented elsewhere. But players like Danielle have long been dissatisfied with the way this series represents Black people, with fewer options for skin tones and hair styles than their white equivalents and often lower quality for those options that do exist.
Danielle, otherwise known as EbonixSims, tells Jordan how she started making custom content for The Sims 4 to fill this gap and provide more options for Black sims, and how she has been involved—as an EA Game Changer—with helping the Sims team make the game better for players like her.
You can find Danielle’s custom content for The Sims 4 at ebonix.com
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In 2019, Elizabeth Orji-Smith was one of the winners of that year’s BAFTA Young Game Designers competition for their game concept Creatively Bankrupt, an action RPG that uses heists to explore topics like unionisation in creative industries. In this episode, they tell Jordan where they got the idea for the game, what they’re up to now, and what they want from the future.
The 2021 BAFTA Young Game Designers competition is open for entries until March 2021. Sadly, a few days before this episode was released, BAFTA shared the news that a previous winner, Lucy-Jack Reynolds, died in March 2020. In her memory, book publisher Muswell Press has launched a competition for entries to a new anthology called Queer Life, Queer Love. Please consider supporting young trans people.
The Beak, Feather, & Bone supplement Tail, Scale, & Bone, which Elizabeth illustrated, is available on itch.io - all proceeds are being donated to the Bukit Bail Fund of Pittsburgh.
The actual play podcast that provided some of the inspiration for Creatively Bankrupt is Friends at the Table.
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Brittney Morris is a writer of novels and video games. Her debut novel Slay (2019) is about a fictional online multiplayer game of the same name, designed by a teenager called Kiera as a secret safe space for her and other Black players.
In the novel, Kiera faces a crisis when the rest of the world finds out about her game, but this conversation doesn’t spoil what happens next. Instead, Brittney tells Jordan how she designed her fictional game, and what it was like to go on to write for real-world video games like Subnautica: Below Zero.
Brittney mentions the novel Warcross by Marie Lu, the film Black Panther, and the television series Code Lyoko.
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For this first episode of series 2, Jordan invites her good friend Chella Ramanan to talk about her new game Before I Forget, which tells the story of a woman with dementia. They discuss the main characters—Indian cosmologist Sunita and her pianist husband Dylan—and how Chella wrote mental illness into the game, which may well teach you something you didn’t know about what having dementia is really like.
This episode contains discussion of some key moments from the game, which some listeners may want to save for after they’ve played it, but avoids spoiling the central mystery of the story.
Chella mentions the film Still Alice and the novel Elizabeth is Missing.
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