I’m grateful for games that help me process whatever we’ll eventually call the past six years.

My favorite game of 2024, 1000xResist, imagined a sci-fi future in which a single teenage girl survives a global pandemic, and centuries later, her clones (many generations removed) grapple with what it means to be alive. It’s about COVID, diaspora, being an immigrant, being a teenager, and being human.

This week, Sunset Visitor, the creators of 1000xResist, announced their follow-up. Prove You’re Human is another sci-fi adventure grappling with the most pressing anxieties of the moment. It asks the player to convince an AI that she isn’t human, and interrogate what about themself is alive.

Which is to say, the team has managed to select an even more radioactive topic.

For help, Sunset Visitor teamed up with Black Tabby Games, the developers of hit narrative games Slay the Princes and Scarlet Hollow. That team has expanded into video game publishers, with Prove Your Human being their first publicly announced project.

I talk with members of both teams about how the project came to be, and why it’s time for a different sort of AI story.

And Post Games listeners, let’s not forget it’s Mailbag Week! I answer the question in the headline! Mix the interview with the mailbag, and you get an episode about the future of games, from the macro of the games industry’s ongoing evolution to the micro of a single game’s conception.

Let’s try to make sense of this moment together!

This Week on Post Games:

• Act 1: How to Tell Stories about Video Games

• Act 2: Where Video Games Go From Here

• Patreon Bonus: Getting into the Weeds of Video Game Culture

• Act 3: The News of the Week

Guests:

• Questions from listeners like you!

• Remy Siu: Creative director at Sunset Visitor

• Abby Howard: Co-founder of Black Tabby Games

• Tony Howard-Arias: Co-founder of Black Tabby Games

• Closing Song: “Blushin’” by James Currier (Rizz Dungeon: Skeleton Key to My Heart)

Patreon Spring Sale: $1 for a Month!

Until midnight Pacific time, new Post Games subscribers can get their first month for $1!

What does a buck get you?

• ​5 episodes of Past Games: the Patreon-exclusive podcast series that tells the histories of beloved games like Animal Crossing, The Legend of Zelda, Pokémon, and L.A. Noire. New episodes of Past Games release on the first Monday of every month!

• ​5 video episodes of Video Game Journalism 101: a standalone series adapted from my NYU Game Center course on the history, process, and purpose of games media!

• ​An audiobook history of Street Fighter: The Movie!

• ​Nearly 50 bonus segments: Every single episode is bigger and better, with extra interviews, essays, and more!

• ​No ads!

• Early access to new episodes every Friday!

Act 1: How to Tell Stories about Video Games

• A Life Well Wasted (https://alifewellwasted.com/)

• The Best Heists Are Also History Lessons (Post Games)

• Let’s rob a (video game) museum! (The Besties/Resties Patreon)

• The Strong National Museum of Play (https://www.museumofplay.org/)

• Tokyo Game Show (Wiki)

• Games Can Save Us from the Hell of Silicon Valley Optimization (Post Games)

• The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game (Penguin Random House)

Act 2: Where Video Games Go From Here

• The “too many games” problem (Jason Schreier) (Post Games)

• Itch.io (https://itch.io/)

• Xbox Adaptive Controller (Xbox)

• Azeron controllers (Azeron)

• Yo! Noid (Wiki)

• Chex Quest (Wiki)

• Obama campaigns in Burnout, 17 other games (GameSpot)

• ‘Toy Story’ is coming to ‘Fortnite’ – here’s everything we know about the collab (NME)

• If they made games like this anymore, they’d make Romeo is a Dead Man, a game as joyously weird as it is spectacular (Eurogamer)

• Video Game Journalism 101: A 5-Video Course (Patreon.com/PostGames)

• NYU Game Center Lecture Series Presents Chris Plante (NYU Game Center)

Patreon Bonus: Getting into the Weeds of Video Game Culture

• Extra segment and links available at Patreon.com/PostGames

Act 3: The News of the Week

• Prove You’re Human (Steam)

• 1000x Resist (Steam)

• Slay the Princess (Steam)

• Scarlet Hollow (Steam)

• Prove You’re Human - Behind the Scenes (Sunset Visitor on YouTube)

• Inside Prove You’re Human, The Otherwordly Next Game From The Award-Winning Studio Behind 1000xResist (CGM)

• 1000xResist isn’t just mind-bending sci-fi — it’s also an allegory for diaspora (Polygon)

• Dramaturgy (Wiki)

• Sunset Visitor (Discord)

This Week in Video Game Links

• Imprinted Offers A Supernatural Mystery That Only A Troubled Audio Engineer Could Solve (Exalclaw)

• Review: YOU HAVE TO BURN THE ROPE (Rob Secundus)

• Serfing the Superstructure (BPM)

• Resident Evil Requiem Spoilercast (starring Leo Vader and me!!) (Something Rotten)

• Here is a “5D” video game (Game File)

• Life Is Strange: Reunion gives fans everything they want, and is worse off for it (AV Club)

• Here’s our 17 most-loved multiplayer FPS levels (Jank)

Free Game of the Week: Backyard Baseball demo

From the Steam summary: “New game modes. New ways to play. Unlockables to chase and achievements to earn! Welcome to the all-new Backyard Baseball. Launching in Summer 2026, this reimagined version of an all-time classic blends the best of modern gaming with the timeless charm that made it legendary. Play in 11 remastered stadiums, choose from 24 original teams, and compete across 6 unique game modes with a roster of 30 beloved Backyard characters.” (Steam)

What Else I’m Enjoying

• Witch Hat Atelier Is About Having Hope In An Insane World (Aftermath.site)

• Revisiting Dashboard Confessional, 25 Years Later (Defector)

• “PENITENTS, a debut trans tribute to New French Extreme cinema and ’70s grindhouse horror” is now available for pre-order (Ghoulish.rip)

• An Incredibly Weird Time to Be Alive (The Atlantic)

• The Los Angeles Times’ Todd Marten launched a newsletter dedicated to theme parks! (LA Times)

Song of the Week: “Blushin’” by James Currier

From Rizz Dungeon: Skeleton Key to My Heart, coming to Steam in 2026. (Steam)

Games are art. So why do we rarely see them in museums?

To be fair to curators the world over, video games are (compared to paintings, sculptures, pottery, performance, photography, and even comics) a new medium. In the early 2000s, the pixelated aesthetic of games slowly infiltrated art galleries with artists like Cory Archangel modding NES cartridges into multimedia masterpieces. By the 2010s, art games struggling to find space in traditional venues began to spread online through digital storefronts and forums. Only recently have games in their true form – as things to be played – begun to find more predictable purchase in prestigious venues.

Helping to lead the charge is Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley. The artist is using video games in art galleries worldwide to pursue ambitions worthy of such important venues. Through play, she forces hard conversations, archives too-often erased communities, and, to put it not so artistically, makes the world a bit less shitty.

What follows is a sprawling interview with Brathwaite-Shirley about her process and her work, ranging from online games like BlackTransArchive.com to gallery experiences that inspire difficult conversations about the most timely topics, from war to climate collapse.

Now, I’m keenly aware that talking about video games as art is a high-wire act amongst my fellow chronically online gamers. For that reason, I will need you to agree to the Terms of Service. By proceeding, you accept the risks that come with the consumption of conversations about art and games. They are listed as follows.

Section A: You may, in the early moments of this conversation, feel Skeptical. To talk about art is to talk about the new, and the new can be intimidating and even a little scary. The new is alien, and upon first contact, we’ve yet to form confident opinions on whatever it may be.

Life online has instilled us with terror at having wrong opinions. So, when coming in contact with the new, the human brain often, as a method of self-preservation, rejects the new when it contradicts or threatens established beliefs. It defaults to the proven and safe.

To process this interview, I strongly encourage you to proactively loosen your assumptions about art’s power or lack thereof. Within the safety of the conversation, lower your shields of skepticism. And open yourself, if only momentarily, to contradiction.

Section B: As the interview progresses, you may feel Discomfort – particularly if you identify as a white cisgender man. You will certainly feel uncomfortable with the episode if the mere use of the term “white cisgender man” triggers a renewed skepticism. For reference, see Section A.

Section C: Before the interview concludes, you may feel Vulnerable. Great art isn’t purely about craft. The craft is a means to an end. No, great art operates like a rope, connecting the viewer to the artist, other viewers, the community, the culture, and human history. That magnificent power of art often makes people feel vulnerable, which can manifest as Skepticism and Discomfort.

To best appreciate both art and conversations about art, embrace the vulnerability. As my guest, artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, would say: Enjoying this interview is a two-way relationship. If you don’t put the work into the conversation, you don’t get the reward. But if you do put the effort into it, friends, you will gain access to untold riches.*

*These Terms of Service constitute a legally binding agreement made between an entity and the podcast. Post Games will provide one episode about video games as a progressive art form displayed in museums and digital venues, including but not limited to web browsers. Riches, as references in Terms, are limited to the metaphorical and spiritual planes. No monetary riches guaranteed.

This week on Post Games:

• Act 1: Games Enter the Art World

• Act 2: How Games Help Us Through Tough Conversations

• Patreon Bonus: A Personal History of Games in Art and Art in Games

Guests:

• Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley: artist, game designer, and archivist

• Closing Song: “It’s Raining Inside Alo’s Home” by Prateek Saxena (Fishbowl)

Listen to Post Games on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your podcast app of choice. Subscribe to the free newsletter at Post.Games for weekly show notes.

On the Patreon for $5

This week, I published “The History of L.A. Noire” with special guest Tim Rogers. It’s the latest entry in my monthly Patreon-exclusive series, in which experts walk us through the histories of important games celebrating big anniversaries in 2026. You can hear the full series, weekly bonus segments, and ad-free episodes for $5! Join at patreon.com/PostGames.

Act 1: Games Enter the Art World

• Black Trans Archive (blacktransarchive.com)

• Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (https://www.daniellebrathwaiteshirley.com/home)

• DANIELLE BRATHWAITE-SHIRLEY: “THE AUDIENCE IS A VITAL PART OF IT” (The Talks)

• THE INTERVIEW | DANIELLE BRATHWAITE-SHIRLEY (Right Click Save)

• Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley Invites You Into Her Gaming-Art World (W Magazine)

• The “Man-Monster” by Jonathan Ned Katz (Out History)

• Serpentine Galleries (serpentinegalleries.org/visit)

• In conversation with Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley (Flo London)

• I Can’t Follow You Anymore (Factory International)

Act 2: How Games Help Us Through Tough Conversations

• 1000xRESIST (Steam)

• eXoDOS (Retro Exo)

• Multi-user Dungeon (Wiki)

• The Museum of Anything Goes (The Collection Chamber)

• HyperCard (Wiki)

• The Manhole: Masterpiece Edition (Steam)

• David Blandy (https://davidblandy.co.uk)

• Final Fantasy, Jacolby Satterwhite (Art21)

• INTERVIEW: JACOLBY SATTERWHITE ON HOW VIDEO GAMES, ART HISTORY, AND SLEEP DEPRIVATION INSPIRE HIS 3D INTERIORS (Pin-Up Magazine)

Patreon Bonus: A Personal History of Games in Art and Art in Games

• Segment and links available at Patreon.com/PostGames

This Week in Video Game Links

• The lost wonder of Minecraft comes back in Lucid Blocks (Jank)

• The best games of 2026 (so far) (Polygon)

• Aug. (Ahoy)

• Only Cowards Complain About The Knife Being OP In Marathon (Kotaku)

• Crimson Desert’s commitment to cleaning up its clunky controls shines the brightest in how satisfying it feels to fly around Pywel now (PCGamer)

Free Game of the Week: RTFM: Read the Fucking Manual

“Solve puzzles and stay one step ahead of [redacted] in this co-op tech support simulator. One player, the Troubleshooter, uses the User Manual to troubleshoot for the Terminal Operator, who must convey what’s on the screen. Players must work together — or not — in this atmospheric game of trust and communication.” (itch.io)

What Else I’m Enjoying

• Meiko Kaji’s 60 Year Career Has Been Defined By Stubborn Ambition (Aftermath)

• My Undesirable Friends and yours (AV Club)

• The Napa Boys trailer (YouTube)

• Did You Know Criterion Invented the Commentary Track? (Criterion)

Closing Song: “It’s Raining Inside Alo’s Home” by Prateek Saxena

From Fishbowl, now available on Steam and PS5.

I’m working on a mailbag episode, and I’d love to answer your questions! Send a voice note to postgamesmailbag at gmail. Or drop a text question in the comments.

Please review the following instructions before recording and sending an audio message. This will ensure solid audio quality and make it easy to record and send from your phone.

How to record a mailbag question:

• Open the voice note app on your smartphone

• Record a question that’s no longer than 60 seconds. Ideally, shorter.

• Include your name, pronouns, and any professional title you’d like used on the show.

• Please make sure the question is a question and not only a personal story.

I’m going to say a word, and I will ask you not to roll your eyes. Ready? “Disco-like.” Let’s use it in a sentence. The 2026 fantasy game Esoteric Ebb is the best Disco-like game since Disco Elysium. I know. I feel it, too. Something’s a bit off.

As you, a gamer with refined taste, know, Disco Elysium’s creators released their unique twist on role-playing games in 2019. Its emphasis on conversation over combat, along with timely progressive politics, inspired a variety of copycats and homages. But nothing – including projects from the original game developers – has recreated the original’s magic. Can Disco-likes exist if nothing is quite Disco-like?

Obviously, I’m here to tell you, definitively, yes. Esoteric Ebb is a game that proves just that, and its creator accomplished the feat not by accident but with a scientific method-esque rigour. But I’m also here to serve as a verbal antacid for the nausea that comes when I say that word. “Disco-like.” Yuck.

Every new video game genre comes with skepticism.

Plastic instruments proved to be a landfill-filling fad. Hero shooters, extraction shooters, and battle royale convinced gullible executives to redirect a generation of talented game designers onto projects that would take years to make and weeks to shut down. I’ve lived through booms and busts for MMOs, FPS UGC, and MOBAs.

But the thing about new genres is that eventually they become old genres. Consider the Souls-like, a genre that for a time belonged exclusively to a single developer, then infected every corner of games, and now is just another type of game to choose from.

A new genre is like an active volcano.

One moment, the status quo. Then, boom, the New spews onto the surface. First, spectacular! Then, destabilizing. Decades-old structures collapse. Its plume blocks out the sun and everything else. Its lava oozes across the earth, incinerating all it touches.

The volcano can’t be controlled, and those who try get burned. But over the years, the lava cools into rock. New structures are built. The air clears, and the volcano becomes just another cool mountain. Just another part of the landscape.

New genres, led by a standard bearer or two, redirect rivers of players from one trend to the next. And following that player base comes a mix of inspired game developers and cynical publishers, chasing the new and the profitable. More often than not, the light their money on fire.

It takes time for genres to cool, for them to be understood, for them to become something not to be imitated but built upon. Today’s guest, Christoffer Bodegard, is the first game developer I’ve ever spoken with who has a graduate and master’s degree in player agency, who has had the gumption to spend years reverse engineering a single game, and for years after, constructing something new upon that foundation.

These days, people say rogue-like without having played Rogue – or even knowing Rogue exists. But it takes decades for genres to become so familiar, so diverse, so rock-solid that they blend into the background. At first, they’re awkward. “Disco-like.”

It’s growing on me.

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This week on Post Games:

• Act 1: Dissecting Disco Elysium, Organ by Organ

• Act 2: Converting Tabletop RPGs into Video Game Nirvana

• Patreon Bonus: All You Have to Do Is Write a Million Words

• Act 3: The News of the Week

Guests:

• Christoffer Bodegård: writer and developer, Esoteric Ebb

• Nathan Grayson: co-founder and reporter, Aftermath.site

• Closing Song: “Battle Beneath the Crust” by Marskye (Dosa Divas)

Review Drive Week at Post Games

To continue to grow Post Games into a stable business, I’m hosting what I call a review drive. It’s like a fundraising drive except it costs nothing. This week, if you have a free minute, please consider leaving a review of Post Games on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your podcast app of choice!

Thank you so, so, so much to everyone who has left a review. And if you’re adding a new review, thank you too!!

Act 1: Dissecting Disco Elysium, Organ by Organ

• I’m working on ‘Ebb’. As you can see, it’s a Disco-like! (r/DiscoElysium)

• Esoteric Ebb dev talks Disco Elysium and mind control: “It’s kind of stupid to make an entire RPG by yourself” (Radio Times)

• I was already intrigued by this Disco Elysium-inspired, D&D-based RPG where you play as the world’s worst cleric, but its demo blew my expectations out of the water (PCGamer)

• It’s only March, but I’m calling it: Esoteric Ebb is 2026’s best RPG and the first worthy successor to Disco Elysium (PCGamer)

Act 2: Converting Tabletop RPGs into Video Game Nirvana

• In Esoteric Ebb, men talk to men about manhood, and that’s a good thing (Mothership)

• Esoteric Ebb Review - Chaotic Good (GameSpot)

• ESOTERIC EBB REVIEW: Maybe the best RPG of 2026? (PCGamer)

• Esoteric Ebb Review (RPGFan)

• Disco Elysium RPG System Analysis (Game Design Thinking)

• PLEASE (DON’T) MAKE MORE GAMES WITH INTERACTIVE WRITING (Google Slides)

Patreon Bonus: All You Have to Do Is Write a Million Words

• A beginner’s guide to playing Dungeons and Dragons (Polygon)

• An independent, reader-supported, worker-owned outlet for journalism about tabletop roleplaying games and the people who make them (Rascal)

• DISPATCH REVIEW: AdHoc Studio’s first game is my new favourite superhero show (PCGamer)

• Cleric (Dungeons & Dragons) (Wiki)

• Cleric Class build guide for Dungeons & Dragons 5e 2024 (Polygon)

Act 3: The News of the Week

• Welcome To Woke Week (Aftermath)

• We’re Having A Sale! (Aftermath)

• Notes Towards A ‘Woke 2’ (Aftermath)

• Games Done Quick’s Long, Difficult Journey To A Better Gaming Future (Aftermath)

• Split Fiction by blackheartwings and ProfessorBurtch in 51:56 - Awesome Games Done Quick 2026 (Games Done Quick)

• Buy Some ‘Woke 2’ Merch, Support A Worker-Owned Website (Aftermath)

• A Love Letter To ‘Girl Games’ (Aftermath)

• ‘The Mission Is About Creating Supportive Environments And Authentic Content’: What A DEI Manager At A AAA Video Game Company Actually Does (Aftermath)

This Week in Video Game Links

• Death Dress (Plant or Beast)

• Video games can be a site for moral formation—for good or for ill (U.S. Catholic)

• Koudelka: Aberystwyth, 1898 (Kimimi)

• Glen Powell Will Play Fox McCloud In The Super Mario Galaxy Movie (Kotaku)

• The photo mode consultant helping you take better video game screenshots (The Verge)

• Sony announces major price hikes for PS5, PS5 Pro, and Portal as it blames “continued pressures in the global economic landscape” (Eurogamer)

Free Game of the Week: Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream demo

From the official site: “Experience creating up to three Mii characters in the demo on Nintendo eShop! Your save data from the demo will carry over to the main game upon purchase, and if you complete the demo you’ll get a Hamster Costume that you can give to your Mii characters.” I mean, obviously, I’m playing for the Hamster costume. (Nintendo)

What Else I’m Enjoying

• How to Shoot a Medieval Film in NYC on a Shoestring Budget (Hell Gate)

• The Most Terrible Time in My Life (ScreenSlate)

• ‘Art Isn’t Easy’ author offers new insights into Stephen Sondheim’s life and music (NPR)

Closing Song: “Battle Beneath the Crust” by Marskye

From Dosa Divas

What’s your earliest memory of pinball?

For me, it’s a sleepover birthday party in a suburban hotel. I’m ten. It’s late. And even though snow is falling outside, I’m soaked and steaming from the indoor pool. This isn’t a nice hotel; I’m not sure nice hotels even exist within a 500-mile radius. But who needs nice when you can walk from the pool directly into the adjoining mini-arcade, dubbed The Game Room. The other kids had figured out how to rig free games from the pinball tables by rapidly unplugging and plugging the power cords.

In hindsight, a few quarters would have cost less than the potential insurance bill for four kids playing with electricity while standing in puddles, soaking wet. I digress. What I remember is the sensory overload. The stickiness of the buttons. The resistance of the plunger, followed by its whiplash spring. The smell of spilled soda, sweat, and, in this particular venue, chlorine so potent it burnt my nostrils.

As a friend jammed my table’s cord into the socket, the machine awoke with bright, colorful lights and gaudy lo-fi noises. It was March, but it was Christmas.

I ask for your earliest memory, because I suspect it’s similar. Whether you first got your hands on the side table at a bar in the ‘80s, an arcade in the ‘90s, a cruise ship in the ‘00s, or a Dave & Busters last week, you experience the thing pinball does that video games can’t… a full-bodied sensory experience.

As an elder millennial, I caught the tale of the pinball golden age, experiencing first-hand the declining interest in this gaming relic from the days of discos and conceptual rock musicals. And the rising obsession with elaborate video games that, now playable at home, transported players to new worlds.

Who needed a wooden table and a steel ball? Who needed a game they could touch and shake and sweat all over?

In the ‘00s, a single American company kept pinball alive. Stern Pinball, run by Gary Stern, managed to keep the lights on by finding new audiences, first internationally, and then, surprisingly, with an aging and expanding set of Gen Xers who, unable to find pinball in arcades, opted to bring pinball into their homes. They craved something tangible. And they had the money to buy it.

By the late 2010s, competition reappeared. Jersey Jack in 2011. Spooky Pinball in 2013. Pinball Brothers 2017.

But Stern has remained the dominant force in pinball, building off its decades-long reputation in the good times and the bad. In recent years, it’s produced tables inspired by Stranger Things, James Bond, Dungeons & Dragons, Godzilla, Star Wars, and now Pokémon.

How did Stern survive pinball’s apocalypse? And how has pinball – as a game and a piece of technology – changed over the last 20 years?

To find out, I called the CEO of Stern, Seth Davis.

This Week on Post Games:

• Act 1: How Stern Survived the Pinball Apocalypse

• Act 2: What Makes a Pinball Table Special in 2026?

• Patreon Bonus: Adapting Pokémon into a Pinball Table

• Act 3: The News of the Week

Guests:

• Seth Davis: President and CEO, Stern Pinball

• Lewis Gordon: Reporter and Critic

• Closing Song: “A Musical Tale” by bermei.inazawa (Chicory: A Musical Tale)

Act 1: How Stern Survived the Pinball Apocalypse

• The History of Stern Pinball (Stern Pinball)

• For a Pinball Survivor, the Game Isn’t Over (NYTimes)

• Pinball losing its ping and zing of storied past (Chicago Tribune)

• No Place like Jersey: Inside the factory of the wizard of pinball (Polygon)

• Pinball Expo (pinballexpo.com)

Act 2: What Makes a Pinball Table Special in 2026?

• STERN PINBALL ANNOUNCES HIRING OF NEW PRESIDENT (Stern Pinball)

• Jersey Jack Pinball: The Pinball of Oz (Polygon)

• This Wrestlemania pinball machine is Stern’s newest, most technologically advanced table (2015) (The Verge)

• The Best Pinball Machines of 2025 Ranked (Kineticist)

• Pinball Top 100 (Pinside)

• What is Stern Pinball’s ‘Insider Connected’ Feature? (Liberty Games)

Patreon Bonus: Adapting Pokémon into a Pinball Table

• Pokémon Pinball (Stern Pinball)

• Pokémon by Stern Pinball Game Trailer (YouTube)

• Pokémon by Stern Pinball Live Gameplay Premiere (YouTube)

• Pokémon Pinball for Game Boy Color (Bulbapedia)

• Pokémon Pinball is Finally Here and It’s Not What I Expected (RetroRalph)

Act 3: News of the Week

• Crimson Desert review - it’s a bit like prestige Candy Crush (Eurogamer)

• After K-Pop and K-Drama, Here Come K-Games (NYTimes)

• Crimson Desert reviews suggest Skyrim is safe for now (Polygon)

This Week in Video Game Links

• What happens when all the Pokémon fans are dead? (New piece by me at Mothership)

• How Outersloth’s investment fund contracts upend the status quo for indie developers (Mothership)

• Nvidia’s DLSS 5 is like motion smoothing for video games, but worse (The Verge)

• Marathon is a satire (ReaderGrev)

• I’ve Killed Runners (Ed Smith on Google Docs)

• Paranormasight series director Ishiyama & producer Oushu speak on how The Mermaid’s Curse was created. (RPGSite)

• Funi Raccoon Game Is Queer, Funny, And Irish (Aftermath)

Free Game of the Week: The Ratline demo

Owlskip Games consistently publishes some of the most interesting narrative deductive games on Steam. The latest game has one hell of a pitch: “A murdered priest. A secret list. Hunt Nazi fugitives across the globe in this gritty 1971 detective thriller. Analyze evidence, follow leads, and make sharp deductions before the trail goes cold. From the creators of Family, Rivals, Conspiracy, Echo Beach and Riley & Rochelle.” (Steam)

What Else I’m Enjoying

• What Actually Happened to the Clay Behind ‘Wallace & Gromit’? (WSJ)

• Against Rigour (Will Sloan)

• Love in the Time of A.I. Companions (New Yorker)

Song of the Week: “A Musical Tale” by bermei.inazawa (Chicory: A Musical Tale)

• Available on Bandcamp

PSA: Murder at the Birch Tree Theater Released on Steam!

In August, I interviewed musical composer, orchestrator, lyricist, conductor, and musician Mike Pettry about his first video game. Murder at the Birch Tree Theater splices Golden Idol deduction with community theater drama. The demo has been available for a while, but now you can play the full game on Steam! (Steam)

Throughout the 2010s, one buzzword connected video games conventions and C-suite retreats: gamification. We were bombarded with TED Talks and newspaper op-eds promising that games could unlock the potential of disinterested millennials by turning every mundane task into a game.

Apps began rewarding players with badges for tracking their exercise, learning languages, and even checking for breast cancer. Silicon Valley startups imagined office software that turned the daily grind into grinding for XP. Millions of young people voluntarily joined Foursquare, with which they would track their travels throughout each week, the app praising them for visiting 50 new venues or becoming the most frequent guest at a local cafe or bar.

It’s hard to imagine now, but for a moment, the promise of the future was all games, all the time. In 2011, the app was valued at $600 million – for context, Instagram would sell a year later for $1 billion in a mix of cash and stock.

You already know how this ends, because fifteen years have passed since that valuation, and you don’t use Foursquare. The fantasy of gamification has faded into our current, joyless reality of metrics culture.

To be fair to gamification, what executives found appealing about the novel engagement strategy was the data and analytics. The gamification framing was merely the latest method for harvesting information, a cultural obsession with flattening the complexity of life into numbers with which rigid, sweeping policy can be set.

This fixation with metrics has been undermining everything from the economy to education, health care to journalism for the past century.

And yet, here you are listening to a podcast about how and why we love games. Which raises a question: how can games, with their rules and scores, bring us such joy, freedom, and inspiration, when metrics, applied in our lives, can inspire cruel government policy, empower big companies to make sweeping cuts, and suck the joy from our very souls.

Today’s guest has the answer. C. Thi Nguyen is the author of The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game. Nguyen, an academic and philosopher, had spotted a similar conflict in his own writing.

His first book, Games: Agency as Art, found aesthetic beauty in the design and engineering of games. And in The Score, he builds on that idea, showing the way games help us connect with our bodies, provide spaces to experiment with ideas, and offer playgrounds on which to express ourselves.

But when he thought of metrics, Nguyen saw similar rule and score-based systems muddying our understanding of the world around us, often motivating us to pursue goals that no longer aligned with our personal ambitions and beliefs.

As the title suggests, Nguyen doesn’t just spot the difference between games and metrics, but offers a healthy way in which the former can free us from the latter.

In hindsight, I see gamification as a well-intentioned but ultimately misguided philosophy that appealed to the system as it exists today. But as you’ll hear in this conversation, we can throw away the buzzword without tossing aside the medium as a whole. Games have the capacity to improve our lives, so long as the rules serve to help us — not exploit us.

This week on Post Games:

• Act 1: Games Teach Us to Break Free from Life’s Grind

• Act 2: Metrics Suck the Joy Out of Life

• Patreon Bonus: Have Metrics Infected Video Games?

• Act 3: The News of the Week

Guests:

• C. Thi Nguyen: a philosopher, educator, and author. His latest book is The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game

• Gita Jackson: critic, editor, and co-founder of Aftermath

• Closing Song: “Ocarina of Time” by Sixth Station Trio (Zelda Classics album)

On the Patreon for $5

• New monthly bonus episode: The History of The Legend of Zelda!

• Early access to ad-free episodes

• Weekly bonus segments

• An archive of over 50 Patreon-exclusive bonus segments and episodes, including…

  • Multiple histories of beloved video games and video game movies

  • Book club-style conversations with video game creators

  • A five-part series on the history, future, and behind-the-scenes details of games media, adapted from my course for NYU Game Center

Act 1: How Games Teach Us to Break Free from Life’s Grind

• The Score: How to Stop Playing Somebody Else’s Game by C. Thi Nguyen (Penguin Random House)

• Why Keeping Score Isn’t Fun Anymore (NYTimes)

• Gamification (Wiki)

• Foursquare (Wiki)

• List of Foursquare Badges (Fandom)

• 2025 was the year friendslop reigned, and so many low-cost ways to have fun with your pals couldn’t have come at a better time (PCGamer)

• The Five Obstructions (Kanopy)

• Reiner Knizia Overview (BoardGameGeek)

• Erotic art and pornographic pictures by Jerrold Levinson (PhilPapers)

• Schopenhauer on aesthetics and the goal of art (Honeysucklewalks)

• Collingwood’s Aesthetics (Stanford)

• Performance indicator (Wiki)

• Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life by Theodore Porter (Wiki)

• Excerpts from Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers (PDF)

• Rules: A Short History of What We Live By by Lorraine Daston (Barnes & Noble)

• House rule (Wiki)

Act 2: Metrics Suck the Joy Out of Life

• Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott (Yale University Press)

• Boys Just Wanna Looksmax (Slate)

• Imperial (BoardGameGeek)

• The Sims Social Review (Actionbutton.net via Archive.org)

• Aristotle on the Meaning of Life (Psychology Today)

• C. Thi Nguyen’s webpage (objectionable.net)

Patreon Bonus: Have Metrics Infected Video Games?

• Links and segment available at Patreon.com/PostGames

Act 3: The News of the Week

• I Cannot Stop Thinking About Marathon (Aftermath)

• Bungie is laying off 220 employees and moving others to PlayStation (The Verge)

• Former Marathon art director says ‘what I could control, I feel really good about’ in the face of pre-release animosity: ‘You can’t take that away from me’ (PCGamer)

• ‘The vibes have never been worse’ Bungie’s morale is reportedly in ‘free fall’ following its art theft fiasco (PCGamer)

• With its fluorescent characters and ASCII text, Marathon is a masterclass in 90s nostalgia (The Guardian)

• Marathon day one check-in: Thief impressions, broken Deluxe Edition bonuses, and so many Assassins (PCGamer)

• As the Marathon player count discourse reaches peak stupidity, Warframe and Overwatch devs speak up in solidarity: ‘This is big unemployed, maidenless behavior’ (PCGamer)

• Marathon’s First Big Update Is Basically Perfect (Kotaku)

This Week in Video Game Links

• CONTINUE: A Defiant, New Videogames Magazine (Kickstarter)

• Thanks for injecting me with 500 cursed Black Knight Ultra Greatswords (RPS)

• After Thirty Years, I Finally Understand Pokémon (VGBees)

• Happy Mario Day, The World Is Ending (At the Mountains of Sadness)

• Resident Evil Requiem Confronts The Franchise’s Burdensome Past To Save Its Future (Kotaku)

• Project Helix vs PS6 Will Be Interesting - But Arguably Misses The Point (Digital Foundry)

Free Game of the Week: Cozy Grove

“Welcome to Cozy Grove, a life-sim game about camping on a haunted, ever-changing island. As a Spirit Scout, you’ll wander the island’s forest each day, finding new hidden secrets and helping soothe the local ghosts.” (Available for free on Epic Games Store until March 19)

What Else I’m Enjoying

• I’m this week’s guest on Get Played! (Get Played)

• The Celebrity Crush (Just Atad)

• The Atlanta Hawks’ Magic City Night Was Too Misunderstood To Live (Defector)

Song of the Week

• “Ocarina of Time” by Sixth Station Trio (Zelda Classics album)

[Editor’s note: This week, all subscribers will have access to the Patreon-exclusive bonus segment. If you enjoy this extra material, or would just like to support the long-term health of the show, please consider subscribing on Patreon or leaving a review on Apple Podcasts.]

Today’s guest is ESA President Stanley Pierre-Louis. He took on the leadership role in 2019 after 4 years serving as VP and General Counsel. Over his decade-long tenure with the trade group, he and his team at the ESA have led public policy efforts to, in their own words, “showcase the dynamic impact of the video game industry on business, entertainment and culture.”

Or to put it bluntly: when a politician wants to make policy about video games, Pierre-Louis is giving them a call.

We’ll be opening mid-conversation, with the president of the ESA recounting the events that led to video games’ biggest players sitting before Congress in 1993, arguing for their lives. In the second act, with full historical context, we hop into a conversation about the many challenges facing games today and in the not-so-distant future.

This week on Post Games:

• Act 1: The 17-Year Fight to Protect Games from the Government

• Act 2: The ESA’s President on AI, Child Safety, and Calls for Unionization

• Patreon Bonus: Three Big Takeaways from the Interview

Guests:

• Stanley Pierre-Louis: President and CEO, ESA

• Closing Song: “Jumping Voices (Big Walk Theme)” by aksfx (Big Walk)

Act 1: The 17-Year Fight to Protect Games from the Government

• The Entertainment Software Association (theesa.com)

• A Brief History of the ESRB (Game Developer)

• Video Game Violence Congressional Hearings (C-SPAN)

• When Mortal Kombat Came Under Congressional Scrutiny (The New York Times)

• International Age Rating Coalition (IARC)

• 2 Live Crew (Wiki)

• “Pinball,” Reviewed: A Remedy for Your Post-Oscar Hangover (New Yorker)

• Amicus curiae (Legal Information Institute)

• Justice Scalia’s opinion in Brown, et al. v. Entertainment Merchants Assn. (Justia.com)

Act 2: The ESA’s President on AI, Child Safety, and Calls for Unionization

• Roblox’s Pedophile Problem (Bloomberg)

• Video game company stock prices dip after Google introduces an AI world-generation tool (Bloomberg)

• Video Games Aren’t Why Shootings Happen. Politicians Still Blame Them. (NYTimes)

• AARP Games Center (AARP)

• What Parents Need To Know About Roblox (ESRB)

• Older Americans are embracing video games, AARP survey shows (CBS News)

• We Asked Nintendo, Microsoft, and 12 Other Devs How They Deal With Crunch (Waypoint)

• Do Video Games Lead to Mass Shootings? Researchers Say No (The New York Times)

Patreon Bonus: Three Big Takeaways from the Episode’s Interview

• Game Workers Coalition (https://gameworkerscoalition.org)

• The Rise of the Video Game Union (Polygon)

  • Printable PDF (Archive.org)

• United Videogame Workers-CWA (https://uvw-cwa.org/)

• ESRB Ratings Guides, Categories, Content Descriptors (ESRB)

• Why NSFW games aren’t doomed (for now) (Post Games)

This Week in Video Game Links

• One of Marathon’s more controversial mechanics brings back a neat idea from Anthem (RPS)

• Matthew Lillard’s Wing Commander nightmares and FIFA dreams | Shelf Quest (Polygon)

• The ‘90s Lobo fighting game got censored because of... Tupac? (Design Room)

• This video of kawaii Space Marines is canon, actually (jank)

• Ditto Plushies Have Invaded Our Heart Right In Time For Pokopia Fever (Kotaku)

• Call Of Duty Enters The White House’s Arsenal Of Memes (Aftermath)

• Don Doko Don: Taking a silly game seriously (Kimimi)

• “Why Bother If You’re Not Going To Do It Properly?” - Why SEGAGAGA’s AI Translation Is Upsetting So Many People (TimeExtension)

Free Game of the Week: Hozy demo

From the summary: “Restore a forgotten neighbourhood through your favourite hobby, one cozy room at a time. In Hozy, clean, paint, and decorate abandoned homes with satisfying mechanics and intuitive controls. Enjoy the little details as you interact with tools, items and furniture to bring each space back to life.” (Steam)

What Else I’m Enjoying

• Gorillaz - Orange County ft Bizarrap/Kara Jackson/Anoushka Shankar (Live on The Graham Norton Show) (Gorillaz)

• Gorillaz - The Mountain, The Moon Cave and The Sad God (Gorillaz)

• Gorillaz - The Mountain ALBUM REVIEW (theneedledrop)

• House of Kong Los Angeles (https://houseofkong.gorillaz.com)

Song of the Week

“Jumping Voices (Big Walk Theme)” by aksfx (Big Walk)

For the past 15 years, it’s been easy to take video games’ existential stability for granted.

Yes, we still see private companies like Valve prohibiting some titles from appearing on their platform. But the vast majority of games – even the hyper-violent and sexually taboo – can be made and sold online, and purchased and played in your home without fear of government oversight.

[The episode is now live on Patreon and will be available on all podcast feeds this Monday.]

That relative freedom, of both artist and audience, is relatively young; guaranteed in 2011, when the Supreme Court ruled in a 7-2 decision that video games deserve the same protections as other art forms. Until the decision on Brown vs. Entertainment, games had been perpetually threatened with oversight from local, state, and national governance.

Cities prohibited the sale of certain illicit games. States attempted to prohibit sales of games based on the consumer’s age. And the United States Congress, briefly but intensely, considered national oversight on what games could and couldn’t be sold. It was out of that congressional showdown, way back in 1993, that the Interactive Digital Software Association, now known as the Entertainment Software Association, or ESA, was born.

Through the ‘90s and ‘00s, the ESA served as stick and carrot. It was the muscle defending a relatively young medium, its members traveling from state to state, throwing themselves into the muck of lawsuits and legislation around the assumption that video games caused violence. And therefore should be strictly limited in sale if not outright censored. The ESA also threw the industry’s big annual party, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, a.k.a. E3. A decadent afair, it attracted a mix of retailers, investors, politicians, and press to a gaudy conference hall full of loud screens, bored models, and desperate publicists trying to draw attention to a medium that, every other day of the year, was dismissed as frivolous kids’ stuff.

With this mix of spicy and sweet, the trade organization performed a relentless, nearly two-decade long sweat act, hoping to win the hearts of consumers and influence the minds of the US government. And damn if it didn’t work. It felt, in that moment, as if the ESA spoke for the entire games industry, a centralized voice demanding cultural acceptance.

But every so often, the dog actually catches the man. Or in this case, the budding art form gets legal protections.

After securing a designation as protected speech in 2011, the ESA’s function has shifted from survival to more complex questions. With the games industry’s wealth and power growing each year, and the most powerful tech companies on the planet inserting themselves into the space, the notion of a unified games industry became a core challenge for the trade organization.

The ESA’s members are the biggest and most powerful gaming companies in the world. How can it find middleground between rivals like Epic, Roblox, and Nintendo on political issues as divisive as child safety policies, limitations on generative artificial intelligence, and the growing costs of RAM in the age of tariffs and data centers? And what does it mean to speak for the video game industry, when your members are EA, Ubisoft, Amazon, Konami, Nintendo, and practically every other big name you can think of?

To learn how the ESA navigates unifying and protecting the games industry amid arguably the greatest existential threats to the medium since Brown v. Entertainment in 2011, I spoke with the current ESA President, Stanley Pierre-Louise.

My guest has been serving in this role since 2019, and before that served as VP and General Counsel for the ESA. He has a long career in media beyond games, including working for music companies in the age of Napster and Viacom during the Brown vs. Entertainment – which had him involved in the case, albeit from a unique outsider position. We dig into that in our chat.

Ahead of this conversation, though, I came across an interview with Pierre-Louis’ predecessor, former ESA president Michael Gallagher. In a 2018 interview with Waypoint, Gallagher was asked about calls for unionization, but his answer gets at something even bigger: a worldview out of time.

“So, this is fortunately an issue we haven’t had to deal with much in my time as the leader of the ESA, and I think there’s a reason for that. The wages in the video game industry are very high. The barriers to exit for employees are very low, and the opportunities to create within the industry are abundant [...] The returns and the revenue have never been higher. When you put all of those elements together, it’s created great opportunity for individual laborers, or the game makers, at whatever level, to make choices that empower themselves. So I think that’s why we’ve had less... it hasn’t been a significant issue in the game industry for the last ten years.

He would go on to say, “You have to pay attention to them when they’re small because they can become big. And then when they’re bigger, they’re much more difficult to manage.”

I haven’t been able to get these words out of my head. They’re a message from those early years after Brown v. Board of Education, when growth seemed infinite, and government intervention seemed defanged.

In 2026, the problems are much bigger. How does one even begin to manage?

Let’s start with a deep breath, a sincere question, and an honest answer. Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

I believe the answer is universally yes. That having the hots for a character in a cartoon, a book, or a video game is something that we’ve all experienced but rarely said aloud. Names like Jessica Rabbit and Lola Bunny, Flynn Rider and Prince Zuko might send a tingle up the back of your neck. And that’s okay!

The flutter of the heart and the raising of the pulse might end when the credits roll, or it might continue; the character appearing in a fan’s social media avatars, on their bumper stickers, or throughout their favorite fan fiction. On a dark and lonely night, they might even switch on Incognito Mode and search for their favorite character’s name plus “Rule 34” – their computer screen filling with Yogi Bear performing the most taboo of acts on a delighted Snaggelpuss. And that’s okay, too!

For most people, these crushes, from the sweet to the NSFW, go no further than attraction. Because, after all, fictional characters by definition are fiction. But for a small group of people who identify as fictophiles, the feelings flourish into love.

Video games have been associated with fictophilia since 2018, when a man symbolically married Hatsune Miku, a fictional pop star who appears in gobs of video games where players not only help her sing hit songs, but select her clothes, style her looks, and decorate her Diva Room, a sort of adorable green room space where you can hang out with the teal haired icon. And away from games, they have the freedom to create songs for her to sing using specialized Vocaloid software. Which is to say, fans can make her into whatever they’d like.

We’ve come a long way since Miku. Since 2018, the biggest and wealthiest tech companies have sunk billions into artificial intelligence to create machines that don’t just sing and dance and wear your favorite clothes, but perform menial tasks and shower the user in flirtatious praise, chopped from copyright-protected text and then collaged by a predictive algorithm.

CEOs have been open about their desire to hook customers with chatbot tools designed to mimic human behavior. Cautious brands have paid celebrities millions of dollars to appear in Super Bowls where they talk to their smart home speaker like it’s their best friend. While Elon Musk has proudly loaded his AI with an army of sexbots, a glorified mechanical parrot that will say all of your favorite naughty words.

Which is why I felt strongly about doing this episode. I believe, in the coming years, we will need to be collectively prepared to have tough, sensitive, and often contradictory conversations about what it means to fall in love with fictional characters.

This week on Post Games, I’m talking with one of the leading researchers of fictophilia and fictosexuality, Tanja Välisalo. I spoke with my guest because fictosexuality is broadly misunderstood and varies between people, regions, and experiences. So I wanted to chat with someone who has spent time reading, analyzing, and contextualizing the words and feelings of people from across the community.

That said, I want you to have the chance to hear directly from people who identify as fictophilic or fictosexual. I’ve included a variety of links in the show notes, ranging from interviews with the man who symbolically married Hatsune Miku to the lesser-covered, everyday experiences of people on the fictosexual subreddit, where experiences range from fictosexuality to semifictosexual to having comfort characters.

I do ask that, if you choose to visit these sites, especially community spaces like Reddit, that you engage with them sincerely. We don’t want to be tourists in these communities. We want to learn about the wide breadth of human experience and see where it overlaps with our own.

Which is my long-winded way of saying: I want to handle this topic with as much respect as possible. Because we all deserve as much!

I’ll let my anxiety be known up front. As a journalist in the entertainment and tech space, I’ve watched tech and media companies use games, apps, and subscriptions to convert experiences that used to be human and free into something cold and commoditized.

People no longer meet at bars, because tech companies have made perpetually paying higher rates for dating app subscriptions to be the new normal. The biggest game publishers have reimagined games to hook players with an endless list of free-to-play chores, rather than to simply relish play. And now I worry that something universal – having an attraction, both to people and a piece of fiction – will be leveraged to get us to build intense emotional relationships with machines so that we can’t live without them.

If this week’s episode has a target, it’s not fictophilia, but the businesses eager to exploit it.

This week on Post Games:

Act 1: What Is Fictophilia?

Act 2: Fandom, Parasocial Relationships, and Big Tech

Patreon Bonus: Post Games Hits Two Milestones

Act 3: The News of the Week

Guests:

• Tanja Välisalo: Teacher, researcher, and project coordinator at the Department of Music, Art and Culture Studies at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland

• Nicole Carpenter: Reporter at publications like 404 Media, Vulture, Polygon, and more

• Closing Song: “Character Selection Theme “ by Vibe Avenue (Tears of Metal)

INCOGNI Deal: To get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan, go to incogni.com/postgames

On the Patreon for $5

• New monthly bonus episode: The History of The Legend of Zelda!!!

• Early access to ad-free episodes

• Weekly bonus segments

• An archive of over 50 Patreon-exclusive bonus segments, episodes

  • Multiple histories of beloved video games and video game movies

  • Book club-style conversations with video game creators

  • A five-part series on the history, future, and behind-the-scenes details of games media, adapted from my course for NYU Game Center

Act 1: What Is Fictophilia?

• Fictosexuality, Fictoromance, and Fictophilia: A Qualitative Study of Love and Desire for Fictional Characters (Frontiers)

• Imaginary social worlds : a cultural approach by John Caughey (Archive.org)

• Jessica Rabbit (Fandom)

• Akihiki Kondo (Wiki)

• Fictosexuality.org (fictosexuality.org)

• Japanese Man Who Married Hatsune Miku (TAKASHii)

• What is being fictosexual (Reddit)

Act 2: Fandom, Parasocial Relationships, and Big Tech

• This Man Married a Fictional Character. He’d Like You to Hear Him Out. (NYTimes)

• Parasocial Interaction (Wiki)

• I Tried Dating Elon Musk’s AI Anime Girl Companion But She’s a Terrible Girlfriend (PCMag)

• Has anyone tried an AI girlfriend app? What was your experience and which one was best? (Reddit)

• Tanja Välisalo on Bluesky (bsky.app)

Patreon Bonus: Post Games Hits Two Milestones

• Segment and links available on Patreon.com/PostGames

Act 3: The News of the Week

• Roblox Head of Parental Advocacy Says We’re All Responsible for Kids’ Online Safety (Vulture)

• We Asked Roblox’s C.E.O. About Child Safety. It Got Tense. (NYTimes)

• Nicole Carpenter on Bluesky (Bsky.app)

This Week in Video Game Links

• Video games need to do better than treating skin like skins (Mothership)

• How a Dungeons & Dragons meetup turned into mutual aid during ICE operations (MPRNews)

• ICE Arrests Beloved Fighting Game Community Member Ludovic (Aftermath)

• The Dream Of Titanfall 2’s Gauntlet Is Alive In VHOLUME (Aftermath)

• The Story Behind the Failure of ‘Highguard’ (Bloomberg)

• One More Catch is a new, indie Pokémon site (OneMoreCatch.site)

• Not everything is Concord (ReaderGrev)

• A full scan of “Metal Gear Solid: The Twin Snakes Survival Guide In The Darkness of Shadow Moses”, published in Japan in 2004. (Archive.org)

• On Baby Steps (Arcadence)

• Is It Appropriate for a Grown Man to Have a Big Fat Ass? (BPM)

• A not-at-all-mandatory list of video games Black folks should play at least once (Mothership)

• They Trained You For This (Peterspittech)

Free Game of the Week: today and every day, i become a chinese new year bonsai

Thank you to Warpdoor for spotlighting this delight. “move your mouse back and forth rapidly to prune your bonsai” (Warpdoor)

What Else I’m Enjoying

• Even Tony Kushner Warned Steven Spielberg About Making Munich (GQ)

• Scream 7’s gnarliest casualty is the franchise’s dignity (AVClub)

• Daft Punk - Human After All (Official Music Video) (YouTube)

Today’s guest is Paul W.S. Anderson. The veteran film director began his work in the UK with the action crime drama Shopping. But Anderson was always a Hollywood director at heart. After Shoppings’ warmer reception at Sundance, Anderson moved to Los Angeles and shortly after directed Mortal Kombat, the first hit video game-to-movie adaptation.

Anderon would return to video games for inspiration years later with Resident Evil, which would metastasize into a grimy, gory, and gloriously profitable 6-film series. Anderson has revived many other beloved IPs from Alien vs. Predator to The Three Musketeers and even an adaptation of another beloved gaming series: Monster Hunter.

We chat about his recipe for a hit video game movie, his flight out of NYC on 9/11 to film what was then titled Resident Evil: Ground Zero, and his love for Tár — a film with a very different response to an artist adapting video games into other media.

This week on Post Games:

• Act 1: Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil, and the Birth of the Video Game Movie

• Act 2: Life of a Video Game Movie Auteur

• Patreon Bonus: How to Make a Hit Video Game Movie

• Act 3: The News of the Week

Guests:

• Paul W.S. Anderson: Director of Mortal Kombat, the Resident Evil film series, and more

• Kazuma Hashimoto: Video game critic, analyst, and consultant

• Closing Song: “Altar” by Jorge Flores (Desktop Explorer)

This week’s sponsor is Incogni. To get an exclusive 60% off an annual Incogni plan, go to incogni.com/postgames.

On the Patreon for $5

• Early access to ad-free episodes

• Weekly bonus segments

• This week, Edmund joined me for a second interview to talk about the “sunnier side” of his life, from pinball to musicals to long walks on the beach.

• New monthly bonus episode: The History of Animal Crossing

• Extended show notes, including the free game of the week

• An archive of Patreon-exclusive bonus episodes, segments, and posts

Act 1: Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil, and the Birth of the Video Game Movie

• Ram-raiding (Wiki)

• Shopping (JustWatch)

• How the Mastermind Behind ‘Resident Evil’ Kept the Franchise Going for 15 Years (Thrillist)

• Resident Evil - Milla Jovovich and Paul W. S. Anderson Play the Game And Talk About the Movie (NeoGamer)

• List of zombie films (Wiki)

• Paul W.S. Anderson and Milla Jovovich: A Marriage Built on Monsters (NYTimes)

• Interview: Paul W.S. Anderson and Jeremy Bolt Reflect on the RESIDENT EVIL Film Franchise and EVENT HORIZON (Daily Dead)

• Jason and the Argonauts (JustWatch)

• Colonial House (West Hollywood, California) (Wiki)

• War & Peace (Goodreads)

• Proscenium (Wiki)

• Top 10 Resident Evil Doors (Ink Ribbon)

Act 2: Life of a Video Game Movie Auteur

• AVP: Alien vs. Predator (JustWatch)

• D&D Basic Rules (Wizards of the Coast)

• Does Anybody know Where this Jacket is now from 1995 Mortal Kombat movie? (Reddit)

• Honestly, Shang Tsung’s movie outfit is my favorite Shang Tsung design. (Reddit)

• Monster Hunter (JustWatch)

• TÁR (JustWatch)

Patreon Bonus: How to Make a Hit Video Game Movie

• Segments and links available at Patreon.com/PostGames

Act 3: News of the week

• Kazuma Hashimoto (Bluesky)

• Resident Evil’s most unsettling theme isn’t zombies — it’s eugenics (Polygon)

• Political Monsters (Bullet Points Monthly)

• Review: Resident Evil 4 Remake Abandons Horror for Action (Siliconera)

• Thought/Process: More on Resident Evil 5 and Uncomfortable Echoes (Time via Archive.org)

• Resident Evil 2 Remake (Steam)

• Resident Evil Survivor 2 – Code: Veronica (Wiki)

• RE Survivor 2 arcade cabinet (Fandom)

• Uncomfortable Echoes: A Conversation With Resident Evil 5 Director Jun Takeuchi (Time via Archive.org)

• Resident Evil: Gaiden (Fandom )

A Free Patreon Preview:

Every week in the Patreon version of the show notes, I include my favorite links from video game sites, videos, podcasts, and beyond. Here’s this week’s section!

This Week in Video Game Links

• Mario Tennis Fever Is the Best Mario Sports Game Ever Made (Jake Should Be Writing)

• Fishbowl’s developers created the game as a ‘ray of hope’ in the pandemic (Polygon)

• A Time-Traveling Love Story to Make Kafka and Lynch Proud (NYTimes)

• The new game from Disco Elysium’s studio feels like the first Christmas after your parents’ divorce (PCGamer)

• Video games are losing the “attention war” to gambling, porn, and crypto, according to industry report (Eurogamer)

• Street Fighter Pros Beg For Help After ICE Snatches Their Teammate (Kotaku)

• A love letter to the rhythm game communities that helped me find myself (Mothership)

• The Left Doesn’t Hate Technology, We Hate Being Exploited (Aftermath)

• 6 Years To Build BIG HOPS - Dev Dive Documentary (Dev Dive and Chris Wade | Luckshot Games)

30 years of Resident Evil releases have led to this moment.

2026 opens with the release of Resident Evil Requiem, the ninth mainline entry in the series, and the 30th entry if you include spinoffs and remakes. And it closes with a fresh reboot of the Resident Evil films, this one by Zach Cregger, the director of Weapons and one of the most in-demand talents in Hollywood. But before we enjoy these high-production cost, prestige spectacles, let us spare a moment of gratitude for the unsung hero of the franchise: the Resident Evil films hexalogy.

Because while Resident Evil games have had high highs, the series has had its fair share of comically low lows. And so, when we look back upon the parallel timelines of Resident Evil games and films, there’s a stretch from 2009 to 2017 in which only one set of footprints can be seen. Because that’s when the movies were carrying our beloved undead video game franchise.

Why 2009? That’s the year Capcom released Resident Evil 5, infamously remembered for its shallow and grotesque characterization of Black zombies in its vague West African setting. Less remembered is the game itself, with which its creator redirected the series from survival horror to the sepia-toned third-person cover shooter. In short: it stunk.

Resident Evil 5 would break sales records and garnish glowing reviews, but its fixation on action would gradually sour fans and, by 2012, would misguide the design team into a dead end formally known as Resident Evil 6. A new mainline Resident Evil wouldn’t release for five years, at that point, the longest hiatus for the series.

During this same window of time, the films, back under the helm of original director Paul W.S. Anderson, would achieve unprecedented levels of success. Resident Evil: Afterlife, the fourth entry in the film series, made with a budget of $60 million, earned a staggering $300 million. Retribution, released in 2012, the same year as Resident Evil 6, made $240 million.

Sales don’t connote quality. But they do express interest. Whether or not audiences loved these films, they showed up in theaters again and again and again… and again and again and again. Anderson’s zombie flicks, made in collaboration with star Milla Jovovich (the pair have been married since 2009), came to a close in 2016 with Resident Evil: The Final Chapter. The sixth entry, made on a comparably humble $40 million budget, became the most successful of the series, grossing $314 million.

In total, the hexalogy would gross over $1.2 billion and hold three slots in the top 50 highest-grossing horror films worldwide.

A year after the release of Resident Evil: Afterlife, Capcom rebooted the Resident Evil franchise with Resident Evil 7: Biohazard, and the video game series has been thriving ever since. But across its 30 years legacy, the middle decade belonged to the movies.

This week’s guest on Post Games is Paul W.S. Anderson, the creator of the Resident Evil film franchise. We chat about him proving video game-to-movie adaptations are Hollywood gold, why he sees himself as an auteur, and his flight out of NYC on 9/11 to film a movie then called Resident Evil: Ground Zero. Seriously.

The episode is now available on Patreon.com/postgames and will be available for free on all podcast apps and YouTube on Monday — minus the bonus segment in which we discuss the steps to making a hit video game movie adaptation.

Today’s guest is Edmund McMillen, a veteran indie game designer who broke into mainstream popularity with Super Meat Boy, one of the early indie hits on Xbox Arcade. The making and release of that game was documented in Indie Game: The Movie, perhaps the most recognizable documentary about the making of video games.

Edmund’s career can be divided neatly into the before and after Super Meat Boy eras.

Before Super Meat Boy, Edmund made provocative, grotesque, and, depending on your taste, quite funny video games and interactive experiments for Newgrounds, where games made in Flash and Shockwave could reach a wide audience long before indie games became widely available on modern platforms like Steam and Itch.io

[A small aside: in this interview, you’ll hear Edmund refer to Tom. That’s Tom Fulp, the creator of Newgrounds, the co-founder of Castle Crashers studio The Behemoth, and a mentor to a number of indie game developers. Edmund included.]

After Super Meat Boy, Edmund has worked with a variety of collaborators on games ranging from minor success to mega hits, like The Binding of Isaac.

In the first act, we talk about his long road from teenage comic artist to his latest game, Mewgenics. And in the second act, we dig into what he sees as his magnum opus.

This week on Post Games:

• Act 1: A Career Built on “A Cry for Help”

• Act 2: “This Is a Fuck You”

• Patreon Bonus: Tidepools, Pinball, and a Musical: The “Sunny Side” of Edmund McMillen

Guests:

• Edmund McMillen: Co-creator of Mewgenics

• Closing Song: “Fleas and Parasites” by Matthias Bossi and John Evans (Mewgenics)

On the Patreon for $5

• Early access to ad-free episodes

• Weekly bonus segments

  • This week, Edmund joined me for a second interview to talk about the “sunnier side” of his life, from pinball to musicals to long walks on the beach.

• New monthly bonus episode: The History of Animal Crossing

• Extended show notes, including the free game of the week

• An archive of Patreon-exclusive bonus episodes, segments, and posts

Act 1: A Career Built on “A Cry for Help”

• Edmund McMillen’s Newgrounds Games (Newgrounds)

• The Undateables (Wiki)

• Pontifex (Chronic Logic)

• Alex Austin (alexraustin.com)

• The Independent Games Festival (IGF.com)

• The award that changes the lives of its winners (Post Games)

• Evil Dead 2 (JustWatch)

• Braindead (A.K.A. Dead Alive) (JustWatch)

• The Toxic Avenger (JustWatch)

• When I asked about Rage 2’s worst character, I got an unexpected response (Polygon)

• Love on the Spectrum (Netflix)

• Jhonen Vasquez (Wiki)

• R. Crumb Looks Back (The New Yorker)

• Gish (Steam)

• Tri-achnid (Newgrounds)

• Time Fcuk (Newgrounds)

• Aether (Newgrounds)

• Coil (Steam)

• Super Meat Boy (Steam)

Act 2: “This Is a Fuck You”

• Mewgenics (Steam)

• Mewgenics review - a roguelite where sacrificial arse maggots and frightful defecation are the keys to success (RPS)

• Mewgenics review – infinite ways to skin a cat (The Guardian)

• Mewgenics Review (PC Gamer)

• Jeffrey Epstein Couldn’t Stop Emailing People About Eugenics (Mother Jones)

• From fringe to federal: The rise of eugenicist thinking in US policy (Al Jazeera)

• A slippery slope to eugenics’: advocates reject RFK Jr’s national autism database (The Guardian)

• The Trump administration’s approach to autism is tangled up with ableism, eugenics, and pronatalism (Stat News)

• RFK Jr.’s Eugenics-Coded Crusade (Vanity Fair)

• RFK Jr. Must Go. And He’s Not the Only One. (Science)

Patreon Bonus: Tidepools, Pinball, and a Musical: The “Sunny Side” of Edmund McMillen

• Link and segment available at Patreon.com/PostGames

I’ve spent fifteen years hiding from a video game.

The Binding of Isaac was released in 2011 to warm reviews and decent sales, but its popularity would increase exponentially alongside its many updates and a gargantuan expansion.

By 2020, it averaged a whopping 6,000 concurrent players on Steam. Unlike so many COVID cultural phenomena, Isaac’s audience continued to grow. In January of this year, it averaged 21,000 concurrent players. Which is to say, at any point of any day this year, an average of 21,000 people have been playing this video game from 2011.

Sales numbers for The Binding of Isaac aren’t public, but VGChartz estimates over 10 million copies. For comparison, Final Fantasy 16 sold around 4 million.

That’s the macro level. On a micro level, my longtime friend and collaborator Russ Frushtick became one of the game’s most passionate fans. Year after year, he tried to bring me into this game that brought him so much joy. Just last year, after 14 years of play, he finally finished the game and… well, I had hardly started.

My refusal to commit more than a few hours to a game this beloved and important, not just to gaming culture but people I care about, appeared stubborn if not outright selfish.

With each update making the game more accommodating and compelling, my excuses change. It was too difficult. It was too mechanically opaque. It didn’t run on Switch, and once it did run on Switch, it didn’t have mod support, as if I would play so much of the game that I would eventually dig into the mods. When the sprawling Rebirth edition launched, I declared the game was simply too big.

None of those reasons was the truth.

I didn’t play The Binding of Isaac because it made me uncomfortable. I’ve written before about being born with a cleft lip and palate, and I’ve also written about my skepticism of games that use birth defects to emphasize the inhumanity of their villains. But where games like Rage 2 used birth defects as spice, Binding of Isaac chopped them, fried them, and plated them like a fine dining tasting menu.

When I first tried the game, I saw myself, and I wondered if I was once again the punchline. And in an instant, I built a wall that has lasted until this week.

In those 15 years, I started therapy. Twice. I’m back in it. Also in those 15 years, the creator of Binding of Isaac, Edmund McMillen, imagined, developed, canceled, restarted, and most recently released what he himself would describe as his life’s work: Mewgenics.

Mewgenics goes further than Binding of Isaac, not just in gameplay but in its depiction of the many unique ways we can be brought into this life. It’s a tactical strategy game featuring cats, in which the player must breed strays to birth kitten warriors, many of which have real cat and human disorders and diseases. A cat may be autistic. It may have OCD. Or it may have lesser-known traits, like Williams Syndrome. You may be feeling what I felt 15 years ago. The wall is being built. I did, when the opportunity to talk with the creator appeared in my inbox. But then I remembered what I love so much about this show — and the job of a journalist. I get to ask people who they are and why they do what they do. I can ask anything I’d like.

I’m so glad I did. It would have been a shame to deprive myself, not just of another beautiful video game, but of a human conversation about why we make art about what scares us most. In hindsight, I wasn’t hiding from The Binding of Isaac; I was hiding from myself.

Today’s guest, Edmund McMillen, has taken the opposite approach, speeding through darkness toward the uncomfortable truths of life, even when it’s not always clear that the light he sees is a streetlamp or the headlights of an oncoming dump truck.

This week on Post Games:

Edmund McMillen wants you to ask the uncomfortable questions

• Act 1: A Career Built on “A Cry for Help”

• Act 2: This Is a “Fuck You!”

• Patreon Bonus: Tidepools, Pinball, and Kids: The “Sunny Side” of Edmund McMillen

Guests:

Edmund McMillen: Co-creator of Mewgenics

Closing Song: “Fleas and Parasites” by Matthias Bossi and John Evans (Mewgenics)

The episode is now live on Patreon and will be available on all podcast feeds this Monday.

Relooted is a video game about reconsidering what is possible.

The story of this audacious indie heist game is set in a distant future, in which Johannesburg has further flourished, and America has devolved into a gaudy sprawl of Vegas-style excess. And yet, even decades from now, the white colonial nations have held tightly onto the antiquities, relics, and human remains they stole from the African continent.

Were it a film, Relooted would be filed amongst the heist classics, like Ocean’s Eleven and Rififi.

You play as a gymnast, and your collaborators range from a perpetually annoyed IT expert to a retired history professor. True to the genre, the missions demand you assemble your motley crew of talents to outwit the security systems of billionaire private collectors and state-funded museums.

You might ask yourself: Can a handful of people really rob the most powerful and heavily protected museums on the planet?

In October 2025, real-life thieves performed one of the most audacious art heists in history, robbing the Louvre by dressing as workmen, raising a crane to a first-floor window, and smashing and grabbing eight pieces of jewellery valued at a combined $102 million.

So yes, a crack team of thieves could rob museums. But as you listen to this episode, I’d like you to consider other things that we assume to be true because of laws, policies, and security systems in the literal and the abstract sense.

What will it take for the relics, artifacts, and human remains stolen from African nations, and now locked largely within the vaults of museums in North America and Europe, to be returned?

Relooted allows players to experience one scenario: a series of international heists that would make the Louvre thieves blush. The targets are something more valuable than wealth. They’re a people’s history made tangible.

Is it really theft if it’s already been stolen?

My guests, on Post Games Ben Myres and Mohale Mashigo, talk about making the repatriation of artifacts fun, the differences between Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism, and art’s power to help us imagine a better future so that we can build toward it. They also explain how the heist formula is inherently educational, each mission requiring its thieves to know the history and context that gives their target value.

Listen for free on your podcast app of choice!

This week on Post Games:

• Act 1: Stealing What’s Yours

• Act 2: The Need for Africanfuturism

• Patreon Bonus: What It’s Actually Like Making Games in South Africa

• Act 3: The News of the Week

Guests:

• Ben Myres, CEO, Co-Founder, and Creative Director of Nyamakop

• Mohale Mashigo, Narrative Director of Relooted

• Nathan Grayson, Co-Founder of Aftermath

On the Patreon for $5

• Early access to ad-free episodes

• Weekly bonus segments

• New monthly bonus episode: The History of Animal Crossing

• Extended show notes, including the free game of the week

• An archive of Patreon-exclusive bonus episodes, segments, and posts

Act 1: Stealing What’s Yours

• Nereid Monument (British Museum)

• Léopold Sédar Senghor (Presidency of Senegal)

• The Game Relooted - Interview with Devs - Ep 26 (Archaeology Podcast Network)

• Africa’s Most Ambitious Indie Game? | Ben Myres on Building Relooted (Scott Peter Smith)

• How Relooted, A Game About Reclaiming African Artifacts From Western Museums, Ended Up Being Shown By A White Guy At Summer Game Fest (Aftermath)

• NYAMAKOP CEO BEN MYRES ON AFRICANFUTURIST HEIST GAME ‘RELOOTED (Inside Gaming)

• Senegal’s Museum of Black Civilisations: Celebrating Blackness (CGTN Africa)

• Nyamakop: “There’s demand for African-created content outside of the continent” (GamesIndustry.biz)

• Developing a strategy to grow and transform the South African Game Development Ecosystem 2021 (Tshimologong)

• Patrice Lumumba: DR Congo buries tooth of independence hero (BBC)

• Patrice Lumumba: Why Belgium is returning a Congolese hero’s golden tooth (BBC)

• Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat (Kanopy)

• The significance of Sarah Baartman (BBC)

• The Tanzanians searching for their grandfathers’ skulls in Germany (BBC)

• Cameroon’s Ngonnso: ‘My fight to bring our sacred stolen statue home (BBC)

• Rekindled Hope: 85 Sacred Vigango Return Home (Unesco)

Act 2: The Need for Africanfuturism

• ‘Afrofuturism is not for Africans living in Africa’—an essay by Mohale Mashigo, excerpted from her new collection of short stories, Intruder (The Johannesburg Review of Books)

• What is Africanjujuism? (Brittle Paper)

• THIS AFROFUTURISTIC VIDEO GAME FEATURES HEISTS FOR STOLEN ARTIFACTS (Ebony)

• Why Civil Rights Activists Protested the Moon Landing (History)

• NASA Helped Kick-start Diversity in Employment Opportunities (NASA)

• Lara Croft the Tomb Raider vs. Sophiline Cheam-Shapiro the Cambodian Dancer (UCPress)

• MotoRace USA (aka Zippy Race) (Wiki)

Patreon Bonus:    What It’s Actually Like Making Games in South Africa

• Segments and links available at Patreon.com/postgames

Act 3: The News of the Week

• The Epstein Files Reveal What Powerful People See In Video Games: Profit, Coercion, And Control (Aftermath)

• Ex-GTA Veteran Leslie Benzies Refutes Epstein Files Allegation: ‘I Have Never Met Jeffrey Epstein’ (Kotaku)

• Ex-Activision Boss Bobby Kotick Allegedly Emailed With Jeffrey Epstein A Bunch (Kotaku)

In 1989, Nintendo Power mailed subscribers half a million free copies of Dragon Warrior. The promise of a free game attracted tens of thousands of new subscribers to the official Nintendo magazine, a tremendous success for the fledgling publication. But Dragon Warrior itself? That’s a different story.

The early RPG had been a colossal hit in Japan three years earlier under the title Dragon Quest, but Dragon Warrior was deemed by many critics and fans as both too simple and visually dated. A damning critique from an audience broadly composed of children who had received the game for free in a time when the average price of a new game, adjusted for inflation, was over $100.

With each new entry through the 1990s, Dragon Quest would become one of Japan’s most popular video game series and merchandise lines. New entries caused such a commotion that Enix shifted the release days to land on weekends, hoping to dissuade children from skipping school. And the series commercial equivalent of Pikachu, an adorably dead-eyed blue slime, would appear on everything shirts and keychains to underwear and expensive jewelry.

Outside Japan, these fantasy adventures struggled, their colossal and elaborate scripts requiring three to four years to localize and distribute, a lethal delay when you consider the speed at which video game design and visuals were evolving. For example, Dragon Quest III was released on the Famicom in Japan in 1988. It wouldn’t be on the NES in the United States until 1992 — a full year after the launch of the Super Nintendo.

By Dragon Quest V, Enix ceased series localization, limiting the series to Japan. Through a mix of manga and merchandise, Enix focused ongrowing the popularity of Dragon Quest beyond gaming, to the point its characters became inescapable from everyday Japanese life. And all was well for a time.

But the question of global success never went away. After all, how could the game be so tremendously popular in Japan, and greeted so tepidly everywhere else. Following the global breakthrough of Final Fantasy 7, the Dragon Quest team opted to try again. And again. And again.

Nothing quite worked. Not mall tours. Not Final Fantasy marketing tie-ins. Not even a release on the tremendously popular Nintendo DS, which had become a home for fan-favorite JRPGS.

Nine years ago, Square-Enix made its most aggressive push to date, not by simply promoting its latest entry, Dragon Quest XI, but by devising a multi-game effort to introduce the Dragon Quest universe through a grab bag of genres and audiences. Square-Enix enticed American audiences with Dragon Quest spin-off games inspired by Pokémon, Minecraft, and Zelda. Fan-favorite entry Dragon Quest VII received a high-touch remake, while earlier titles were ported to handheld and mobile devices. And Dragon Quest XI, particularly its updated release for the Nintendo Switch, benefited from an intense marketing push and gushing reviews.

And readers: it did well! To be clear, of the 7 million global copies, 5.8 million were sold in Japan. But while you might not know the name Dragon Warrior, you most certainly know Dragon Quest.

Nearly a decade later, Square Enix is running the playbook one more time. Last year, we received exceptional remakes of the first three Dragon Quest games, presented in the beautiful HD-2D art direction the developer has honed into a sort of house style. And with a coherent English localization to boot. This year, Dragon Quest VII once again receives the decadent remake treatment, the art style updated to resemble the art on a classic gaming strategy guide – now playable rather than stuck in our imaginations.

These titles are paving the way for Dragon Quest XII, expected to be released in the next couple of years.

With Dragon Quest VII: Reimagined days away, I wanted to learn more about why the early entries failed to click with Western audiences, what about the series creators attracted such intense fandom in Japan, and where newcomers can get into the series. Naturally, I invited The Verge’s Andrew Webster, who wrote about Dragon Quest’s creators’ efforts to popularize the series in America way back in 2017.

This is an exceptionally cozy episode, a perfect match for an exceptionally cozy series. So brew some mint tea, cuddle a plush slime, and put on those headphones. It’s time to go on a quest.

This week on Post Games:

• Act 1: Dragon Quest’s Many False Starts in America

• Act 2: How Dragon Quest Became Inescapable

• Patreon Bonus: Tim Rogers on How to Savor a Dragon Quest Game

• Act 3: The News of the Week

  • Guests: Andrew Webster, The Verge & Tim Rogers, Action Button

  • Closing Song: “Haven” by Nicolas Gueguen (MIO: Memories in Orbit)

On the Patreon for $5

• Early access to ad-free episodes

• Weekly bonus segments

• A new monthly bonus episode: The History of Animal Crossing

• An archive of Patreon-exclusive bonus episodes, segments, and posts

• All of that and more for only $5 a month!

Act 1: Dragon Quest’s Many False Starts in America

• The History of Dragon Quest (Game Developer)

• Wizardry (Wiki)

• “Employee newsletter Nintendo Power offer coverage: ‘I survived the 1990 Dragon Warrior Mailing’ 9M pieces t-shirt!” (X)

• Myth Confirmed! Square Enix Talks Selling Dragon Quest On School Days (GameInformer)

• Dragon Quest’s Dialects (Fandom)

• The Journey To Make Dragon Quest Thrive In The West (GameInformer)

Act 2: How Dragon Quest Became Inescapable

• The decades-long quest to make Dragon Quest a hit in America (The Verge)

• Dragon Quest XI is video game comfort food (The Verge)

• Sometimes you just need a straightforward, old-school RPG (The Verge)

• DRAGON QUEST® XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age™ - Definitive Edition (Steam)

• DRAGON QUEST I & II HD-2D Remake (Steam)

• DRAGON QUEST III HD-2D Remake (Steam)

• DRAGON QUEST BUILDERS 2 (Steam)

• DRAGON QUEST HEROES II (Steam)

• DRAGON QUEST SMASH/GROW, THE NEWEST MOBILE TITLE IN THE DRAGON QUEST SERIES, LAUNCHES IN 2026 (Square Enix)

Patreon Bonus: Tim Rogers on How to Savor a Dragon Quest Game

• Segments and links available at Patreon.com/postgames

Act 3: News of the Week

• What Made Tomodachi Life So Perfect? (Mariomikester)

• E3 2010: No Plans for Tomodachi Collection in America (1UP/Archive)

• Tomodachi Life review (Eurogamer)

• Tomodachi Life Review (GameSpot)

• Tomodachi Life review: semi charmed (Polygon)

• Tomodachi Life™: Living the Dream (Nintendo)

Why do gamers treat Nintendo differently? A new book on the history of the company helped me find the answer.

Where Nintendo’s contemporaries, Sony and Xbox, are viewed as cynical corporate machines, the House of Mario is typically described as a benevolent force. It floats above the popular culture, occasionally raining fresh entries of beloved franchises like Zelda and Animal Crossing onto the fields of parched gamers.

Sure, fans and press will grumble over the quality of the latest Pokémon games or the ceaseless legal efforts to shut down ROM websites and punish their operators. But rarely, if ever, do Nintendo’s actions inspire expansive boycotts, nor do we see Shuntaro Furukawa, the sixth and current President of Nintendo, in headlines on gaming news sites that will gleefully slide CEOs like Strauss Zelnick, Tim Sweeney, and Phil Spencer onto a skewer to roast over open flame.

This rarified status wasn’t given, but earned.

Nintendo’s leaders have, for decades, been careful to guarantee its reputation as a company by prioritizing the reputation of its art. Which is to say, for as long as Nintendo’s been in the business of making games, its various leaders have shared in the opinion that the best way to protect their station at the top of video game culture is to

A.) Cancel weak games as early as possible.

B.) Ship good games, even when it takes extra time

C.) Protect the value of what does reach the market by rarely lowering its price, suggesting, through the market itself, that Nintendo games aren’t like other games, nor is Nintendo like other game makers.

The company has been so successful at constructing and maintaining this merry monolithic image, and so secretive about its internal workings, that most people forget that it is a company at all. Of course, it is a company, one run by brilliant but fallible artists and business people. It has a ruddy and tangled history. Its employees, even the most famous and idolized, make mistakes.

Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play by Keza MacDonald is a new history of Nintendo (available on February 3, though you can pre-order now) that does the deceptively bold act of showing how a mix of unusual corporate moves, intergenerational friendships, and even some luck laid the foundation for the Nintendo we know today.

We don’t have Nintendo without a young CEO who fired employees who questioned his ambitions, including family rivals. Nor do we have Nintendo without illicit card games, love hotels, a taxi company, and a factory line repairperson who, in a fit of boredom, imagines a toy that would change the company’s focus and its fortunes.

This history matters — not to tear down Nintendo, but to help us learn how it was made to begin with. How can other game makers construct themselves in its style? And how might future caretakers not merely maintain the structure, but adapt the company to a rapidly changing culture, one that has more in common with the uncertain video game experimentation of the 1990s, than the relative stability of the early 21st century.

Keza MacDonald joins Post Games to share that history and the lessons that can be learned from it.

This week on Post Games:

• Act 1: How Nintendo Became a Game Company

• Act 2: Nintendo’s Present

• Patreon Bonus: The Future of Nintendo After Its Icons Depart

• Act 3: News of the Week

  • Guest: Keza MacDonald, journalist and author of Super Nintendo: The Game-Changing Company That Unlocked the Power of Play

  • Closing Song:  “Oubliette: from Ratcheteer DX (Matthew Grim)

On the Patreon for $5

• Early access to ad-free episodes

• Weekly bonus segments

• A new bonus mini-episode!

  • A spoiler-filled conversation with Perfect Tides: Station to Station’s creator, Meredith Gran. We talk about the themes, the twists, and the ending!

• The latest exclusive episode of Past Games, a monthly series that tells the histories of 2026’s biggest gaming anniversaries.

• An archive of Patreon-exclusive bonus episodes, segments, and posts

• All of that and more for only $5 a month!

Act 1: How Nintendo Became a Game Company

• Super Nintendo by Keza MacDonald (Linktree)

• Hiroshi Yamauchi - The Man Who Made Nintendo (Nintendo Life)

• How Gunpei Yokoi Reinvented Nintendo (Vice)

• Space Invaders (The Strong Museum)

• The forgotten history of Donkey Kong (Post Games)

• Gunpei Yokoi’s Life Story: The Man Who Made Nintendo (Did You Know Gaming)

Act 2: Nintendo’s Present

• Nintendo’s design guru Shigeru Miyamoto: ‘I wanted to make something weird’ (The Guardian)

• 11 Memorable Satoru Iwata Quotes (IGN)

• Shigeru Miyamoto Wants to Create a Kinder World (New Yorker)

• The Impact of Iwata - Hardcover Book (Nintendoforce Magazine)

• Ask Iwata: Words of Wisdom from Satoru Iwata, Nintendo’s Legendary CEO (Simon & Schuster)

• Shigesata Itoi (Wiki)

• Super Nintendo World is sensory overload (The Verge)

• List of video games featuring Mario (Wiki)

Patreon Bonus: The Future of Nintendo

• Segment and links available at Patreon.com/PostGames

Act 3: News of the Week

• A Eulogy for the Video Game Publishing Titans (2000-2026) (Post Games)

• Ubisoft Shake-Up: Layoffs, Studio Closures Begin in Major Reorg; Six Games Canceled, Including ‘Prince of Persia’ Remake (Variety)

• Interview: As Arc Raiders surges, Nexon CEO eyes the west (and is dreaming of gaming’s “third wave”) (Game File)

• EA Announces Agreement to be Acquired by PIF, Silver Lake, and Affinity Partners for $55 Billion (EA)

Song of the Week: “Oubliette” from Ratcheteer DX

Music by Matthew Grim.

This week, Ubisoft announced it had canceled six games, including a remake of Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. The cancellations are part of a much larger corporate restructuring that will lead to a yet-to-be-shared number of layoffs. This follows last year’s restructuring and layoffs at Ubisoft, along with perpetual rumors that the company’s investors are interested in an acquisition.

Ubisoft isn’t the only publisher flailing its way through a precarious moment. To show some (perhaps undeserved) sympathy, what’s happening is far worse than the typical down-year of sales or generational shift in popular genres. What we’re witnessing is the end of a video game epoch.

Consider this its eulogy.

[This piece can be heard in the News of the Week segment in the latest episode of Post Games, The Untold History of Nintendo.]

In the early 2000s, the video game industry had consolidated around the power players that would dominate the early 21st century. Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft were the big three console makers. Video game publishing belonged in the West to EA, Activision, and Ubisoft. In Japan, Square Enix, Konami, and Capcom were the leaders.

By the mid-’00s, Blizzard would come to dominate the MMO space. And Valve would, by the end of the ‘00s, assert control over PC through Steam. However, the majority of games were still sold through brick-and-mortar retailers, namely GameStop. And thus, equilibrium.

For twenty years, these titans lived comfortably alongside each other. Occasionally, one would step over a line and into another’s space, like Ubisoft and EA building online gaming marketplaces of their own. But these aggressions would fail, and in short order, everyone would return to something resembling the status quo

By the end of the 2010s, some analysts, developers, and press began to sound the alarm. Habits were changing. Young people were playing fewer games, and what money they did spend went into free-to-play items and subscriptions. Then came Covid-19, and suddenly every adult who had ever given gaming a passing glance was stuck in their house playing everything from Animal Crossing to Call of Duty. The financial highs of the pandemic were a coat of paint over a moldy wall, and now, six years later, not only is the mold visible, but it’s also spread within the walls. The very structure is fucked.

The signs are especially dire amongst companies from the US and Canada. Some of these titans have consolidated, hoping to find comfort within mega tech giants to weather the oncoming storm. Others have sought protection from foreign wealth funds. All have taken shears to their portfolios, cumulatively canceling dozens of projects and laying off thousands of employees.

In Japan, things are, if not reminiscent of the golden, then at least stable, the industry benefiting from a surplus in creativity, and broadly speaking, a refusal to chase the ill-fated genres, like hero shooters, and monetization schemes, like games as a service, that undercut their western peers.

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But all corners of the old guard are reckoning with the fact that their era is coming to an end, and a new era, with new established titans, has just begun.

This shift can’t and shouldn’t be tied to any one cause. And yet, if I had to pick a catalyst, it would be Minecraft, a game that was comparably cheap to create but offered unlimited space for creative expression. Its big-budget contemporaries chased cinema, prizing lifelike visuals, dramatic stories, and incremental power fantasies that placed players into the shoes of superheroes and supersoldiers.

The games of the new era would be established somewhere on this spectrum. Take, for example, Fortnite, which has the combat and intellectual property pizazz, while allowing players to build, destroy, and perhaps most importantly, style themselves as they see fit. Or consider Roblox, a game that saw kids accepting the visual simplicity of Minecraft, and discovered that aesthetic could be disregarded altogether. As could assumptions of quality. All that mattered, for millions of young players, was community.

It’s not new to say that these forever games are disrupting the status quo. What’s different is the industry-wide sense that the people in power at the old guard have no fucking clue what to do next.

Most publishers spent the past decade attempting to create their own versions of these money-printing machines. But they have failed. The CEOs, the investors, and the game directors learned the hard way that putting hundreds of millions of dollars into these games guarantees nothing. Over the past five years, Ubisoft’s stock value has dropped 90%.

I don’t know what comes next. In a recent interview with Stephen Totilo at GameFile, the CEO of Nexon, Junghun Lee, spoke about the incoming third wave, one that may even threaten the Robloxes and Fortnites of the world:

“The boundary between our everyday life and games is becoming more and more blurry, and they’re kind of torn down. So, I thought maybe that could be a fun kind of space, an area where we can gain some great clue towards what will be the next fun experience.”

Maybe the old guard will run in this direction, whatever it might be. Or maybe they will do what so many former titans have done in the past. Run out of ideas. Look for ways to cash out, through painful layoffs and hurried acquisitions. And disappear.

In 1980, Atari was unstoppable. By 1984, it was practically dead. It’s the perpetual reminder to an industry led by a narrowing list of absurdly wealthy CEOs, that even the biggest monuments will turn to dust. And so, don’t be surprised if years from now you stumble upon an ancient press release that reads, “My name is Bobby Kotick, King of Kings: Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!” And you find yourself asking, “Who the hell was Bobby Kotick?”

[Enjoy this post? Subscribe to the Post Games podcast and hear this story along with weekly interviews digging into the most pressing and interesting topics in gaming.]

This week on Post Games:

• Act 1: Turning Your Life into a Game

• Act 2: Recreating a Place and a Moment

• Patreon Bonus: The History of Memoir Games in 5 Titles

• Act 3: News of the Week

  • Guest: Meredith Gran, creator of Perfect Tides: Station to Station

  • Closing Music: Perfect Tides: Station to Station

  • Upcoming Mini-Episode: An extra special bonus for Patreon subscribers. On the launch day of Station to Station, January 22nd, I’ll release an additional mini-episode in which Meredith and I talk about the game’s themes, twists, and ending. It was incredible to chat with a game creator without the fear of spoilers, to actually dig deep into the work and their intentions. You’ll love it!

Read this week’s blog post: What is a memoir game?

On the Patreon - Only $5!!!

• Weekly bonus segments, including this week’s segment charting the history of memoir games through 5 must-play titles

• A bonus mini-episode: Perfect Tides: Station to Station Book Club! Meredith Gran talks about the themes, the twists, and the ending!

• The latest exclusive episode of Past Games, a monthly series that tells the histories of 2026’s biggest gaming anniversaries.

  • In this episode, My Life in Gaming’s co-hosts share the history of 1996, and make the case that it’s the most important year in video game history

• Early access to ad-free episodes

• An archive of monthly Patreon-exclusive bonus episodes

• Expanded newsletter and show notes

• All of that and more for only $5 a month!

Act 1: The Pleasures and Pains of a Memoir Game

• Octopus Pie, #001 (Octopus Pie)

• Perpsective and Time in Meredith Gran’s Octopus Pie (The Comics Journal)

• Perfect Tides (Steam)

• Perfect Tides: Station to Station (Steam)

• Growing up on Perfect Tides with Meredith Gran (Kritiqal Care)

• Memoir (Wiki)

• Autofiction: What It Is and What It Isn’t (Publisher’s Weekly)

• Second-person narration (Merriam-Webster)

• Fast Asleep in Frog Pajamas by Tom Robbins (Penguin Randomhouse)

Act 2: Recreating a Place and a Moment

• The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin (Archive.org)

• Veseleka (Veseleka)

• The 1926 Yiddish Art Theatre -- 181 2nd Avenue (Daytonian in Manhattan)

• Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever (Wiki)

• Fire Island (Wiki)

Patreon Bonus: 5 Great Memoir Games

• Segment and links available on Patreon.com/PostGames

Act 3: News of the Week

• What are Americans’ New Year’s resolutions for 2026? (YouGov)

• The Video Game Library (thevideogamelibrary.org)

• Good Game, No Rematch (Harper Collins)

• Boss Fight Books (bossfightbooks.com)

• Hurt Me Plenty: The Ultimate Guide to First-Person Shooters 2003–2010 (Bitmap Books)

• You’re Not Overthinking It (Lost in Cult)

• How a Game Lives (Harper Collins)

Song of the Week: “Library” from Perfect Tides” Station to Station

Music by Daniel Kobylarz.

Over the past 15 years, a new subgenre has been gestating: autobiographical video games.

Autobiographical flourishes are as old as video games themselves, but as a holistic style, autobiography took root in the early 2010s. Some early entries blurred the line between fantastical fiction and something more personal. Take, for example, Papo & Yo, an adventure game released on PlayStation 3 in 2012, in which a monster’s addiction to poisonous frogs represents a father and his alcoholism.

At this time, it felt as if the smaller a game’s budget, the more willing its creators were to put themselves into their work. Tiny teams, and often solo creators, chronicled their experiences with online dating, gender dysphoria, and the loss of a child to cancer.

Despite this burst of experimentation, by the late 2010s, following rampant harassment of game developers on social media in the wake of GamerGate, autobiographical projects shrank. The most interesting work happened in text-forward micro games built in tools like Twine. And for a moment, it seems the style might have been a temporary trend, rather than a lasting pillar of popular gaming storytelling.

However! In the 2020s, following the COVID-19 pandemic, and presumably many artists spending a profound amount of time with themselves, the autobiographical games have returned.

This category has never received a proper name. In reviews, interviews, and developer notes, people have used terms like the journal game, the personal game, and the non-fiction game.

I call them memoir games. Memoir feels more intimate, human, and a little voyeuristic — something that can’t be removed from these games’ appeal

A memoir game may be a memoir in the truest sense, a non-fiction story through which the author recalls experiences as they happened. Like 2025’s Despelote. However, I see the term memoir game as more expansive, allowing for fantastical fictional stories too, like the aforementioned Papo & Yo. The memoir game also contains games written in the style of autofiction, stories in which the author might modify certain details of their life experience, or even imagine entire characters or moments, in pursuit of a greater truth. Like the Perfect Tides series.

My latest guest is Meredith Gran, the creator of Perfect Tides: Station to Station. Station to Station is the second entry in the series. That said, you don’t have to have played the original, about an emo, terminally online teenager’s life on Fire Island, NY, in the year 2000, to enjoy Station to Station, which is about an indie rock aspiring writer attending college in Manhattan in 2003.

That timeline’s specificity isn’t an accident. Though the game follows the fictional character Mara, it borrows liberally from its creator’s life.

I’ll let my feelings be clear up top. Station to Station is one of the best games of the 2020s. And that I was an indie rock-loving aspiring writer attending college in Manhattan in 2004, a year after this game is set… well, I confess that might influence my opinion.

In the episode, I chat with Meredtih Gran about creating a game based on her life. How one person’s ultra-specific experiences can help someone recall their own. What it’s like to revisit your college self. Why’s it important to talk about bad sex. And how do you turn your worst breakup into a boss fight?

Update: The episode is now available.

And as always, if you’d like to hear the episode early, ad-free, and with a bonus section on the history of memoir games, you can find that now at patreon.com/postgames.

This week on Post Games:

• Act 1: A History of Women in Games Media

• Act 2: Mothership Lands on Earth

• Patreon Bonus: Imagining a Better Future for Video Games

• Act 3: The News of the Week

• Patreon Bonus Mini-Episode: A Century of Women’s Media in 15-Minutes

• Guests: Maddy Myers and Zoë Hannah, founders of Mothership.blog

[Editor’s note: This episode went live at the same time as its Patreon version so everyone had access to news of Mothership.blog. The public Post Games feed will return to its Monday release time next week.]

Say hello to your next favorite website.

Mothership is a site built at the intersection of gender and games. Today, I’ll be chatting with founders Maddy Myers and Zoë Hannah. They’ll provide a primer on the history of women in games media, dating back to the early 1980s. And they’ll share their months-long effort to make Mothership a reality.

To set the stage, here’s part of Mothership.blog‘s mission statement:

Whenever we boot up an RPG character creator (or pick up a TTRPG character sheet), we can’t help but interrogate the choices that are available — and the ones that aren’t. We’ve noticed how many female video game characters, even our favorites, have hourglass figures and pale complexions. We can’t help but consider and interrogate the gender norms on display among male characters in games as well, whether we’re revving a Lancer as Marcus Fenix or swinging a sword as Link… or putting on a Gerudo disguise.

At Mothership, you’ll read writing from a diverse roster of contributors. You’ll find reviews, criticism, and opinion stories about games’ depiction of gender, as well as stories about how these games are marketed. You’ll get investigative reporting on the people who make games in an era when “DEI” is on the wane. You’ll read historical deep dives on the games and creators that paved the way, especially those that didn’t get due credit way back then.

This is a sprawling conversation about games, gender, media, and that deep urge we all share to connect and be seen

On the Patreon - Only $5!!!

• A bonus mini-episode: A Century of Women’s Media in 15-Minutes

• The latest exclusive episode of Past Games, a monthly series that tells the histories of 2026’s biggest gaming anniversaries

  • In this episode, My Life in Gaming’s co-hosts share the history of 1996, and make the case that it’s the most important year in video game history

• Early access to ad-free episodes

• Weekly bonus segments, including this week’s segment imagining a better future for video games

• An archive of monthly Patreon-exclusive bonus episodes

• Expanded newsletter and show notes

• All of that and more for only $5 a month!

Mothership.blog

Act 1: A History of Women in Games Media

• The entire Computer Entertainer archive (Video Game History Foundation)

• Just like “planning a dinner”? The feminization of computer programming (National Museum of American History)

• No Girls Allowed: Unraveling the story behind the stereotype of video games being for boys (Polygon)

• The Border House (archive.org)

• Sexyvideogameland (Blogspot)

• The Gay Gaymer (Blogspot)

• How an Online Mob Created a Playbook for a Culture War (NYTimes)

Act 2: Mothership Lands on Earth

• Mothership (mothership.blog)

• The Tragic Loss of Teen Vogue (Columbia Journalism Review)

• Sweet Baby Inc. Doesn’t Do What Some Gamers Think It Does (Kotaku)

• Some Good News for a Change: Better Libel Insurance Now Available for Smaller Newsrooms (Second Rough Draft)

• Lawyers for Reporters (Vance Center for International Justice)

• Spirit Swap (Steam)

Patreon Bonus: Imagining a Better Future for Video Games

• Segments and links available at Patreon.com/postgames

Act 3: News of the week

• Fortnite’s South Park crossover looks low-key amazing (Polygon)

• Netflix confirms The Witcher series will end this year (Eurogamer)

• Fallout season three filming starts sooner than expected (Eurogamer)

• GamesBeat’s Dean Takahashi talks to Patrick Söderlund of Embark and Owen Mahoney in ARC Raiders (Dean Takahashi)

• The Witcher 3 expansion rumours refuse to go away: originating analyst is “100% certain CD Projekt Red will release significant new content this year (Eurogamer)

• Over 1000 Classic PC Games Are Dirt Cheap On GOG Right Now (Kotaku)

Bonus Episode: A Century of Women’s Media in 15-Minutes

On the Post Games Patreon, you’ll find a 15-minute mini-episode in which today’s guests, the founders of Mothership, walk us through the history of women in media from the Victorian Era to the feminist magazines of the 1960s and ‘70s.

Song of the Week: “OVR Dublin,” Angeline Era

A beautiful song from Melos Han-Tani and the Angeline Era OST Volume 1.