39. A Delicious Mushball

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Lords:

• Shane is a Jesuit Regent who used to make video games.
  • https://twitter.com/OptimistPanda
  • Donate to the Jesuit Refugee Service: https://jrs.net/donate
• Nathan makes games mostly about jumping and shooting 2D monsters.
  • https://twitter.com/MommysBestGames
  • http://mommysbestgames.com/

Topics:

• Beforeigners (Norwegian TV show about refugees from different historical periods showing up in present-day)
  • Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ASr0n5LnWnU
• Curating your child's entertainment so they grow up with good taste
• I spent half an hour watching someone solve a Sudoku and it was amazing
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKf9aUIxdb4
• Brandon asks: "Taking care of children vs taking care of pets"
• Other jobs game designers would do well performing, after they leave game dev
• History of changing worldviews -- not just Darwin, but things like the Big Bang and Continental Drift were originally seen as crackpot fringe theories

Microtopics:

• Saying your names at the beginning of the podcast and activating your wonder twin powers.
• Quality inventive gameplay-driven entertainment.
• Doing an earnest plug for once.
• Figuring out how to make games for someone other than gamers.
• Your game dev heroes being in their fifties and chasing success they had in their twenties.
• Taking a vow of poverty and annoying off your wife and child.
• Needing to find a patron because your art is not commercially viable.
• No longer having your finger on the pulse of indie games.
• Assuming the internet will be all over a particular TV series but somehow there are not endless memes about it.
• Vikings apparating into modern Oslo and and solving a murder mystery.
• The show about Vikings solving a modern-day murder mystery somehow not incorporating The Immigrant Song.
• The American remake of Beforeigners where it's still about vikings so the protagonists can be white.
• Finding out that a game is only four hours long and asking if it could be two hours instead.
• Introducing video games to your child in order of release so they develop a taste for the classics.
• Figuring out how to introduce your child to the Internet without ruining them.
• Installing an internet proxy to protect your child from depraved porn by replacing it with videos of normal people having normal sex.
• Today's teens playing Bushido Blade and discovering that it has a pocket sand button.
• The classic game history situations.
• Wanting your child to like all the hobbies you think are boring.
• Watching a man repeatedly astonish himself at his own ability to solve a puzzle.
• Feeling like you are in conversation with the puzzle designer.
• Watching a movie over and over again.
• Taking the smallest possible step when a problem seems impossible.
• One of those Master Class videos if the person was discovering that they were a master while making the video.
• A five year old taking the family car to California to buy a Lamborghini with the $3 in his pocket.
• Feeling your family tree stretching out forwards into the future and behind you into the past.
• Watching your child grow agency and opinions and knowing it's your responsibility to shape them.
• You and the cat enjoying each other's company while the cat doesn't die.
• Your kid doing something bad and everybody looking at you.
• Cheering when your child goes down the stairs correctly.
• Game design teaching you to see the world as systems.
• Studying economics at an academic level and feeling like you're turning our game design skills inside out.
• Trying to convince people outside of game development that being a game developer has taught you anything meaningful.
• Being failed up to a level design role because anyone can scrub out a tile map.
• Level designers getting more respect when it started requiring technical chops.
• Needing a web page and getting your nephew to do it rather than paying an expensive consultant, because frankly 99% of people can't tell the difference.
• Trying to write your own CSS renderer because you don't want to just make it a web page.
• Trying to convince your friends that you were once a big shot in the game dev world.
• The Societate Jesu having an incredible faction progression.
• Giving people progressively cooler titles instead of raises.
• Getting an extra year of being a priest before you die.
• Doing a cool thing while you're alone and getting bummed out that nobody saw it.
• Trying to throw fruits and vegetables as close as possible to the ceiling without actually hitting it.
• Hating doing marketing so much that you invent a project where the whole point is that it's a secret and you'll never promote it.
• How South America kind of fits right into Africa.
• Hypothesizing continental drift and the scientific community telling you to fuck right off.
• The lost continent of Lemuria.
• Fringe scientific theories only gaining traction when existing scientists die.
• Taking comfort in the fact that how people in the past were wrong but what we believe now is definitely correct and we'll never have to change our minds.
• Being presented with contrary evidence and dying on the spot.
• The most delicious bolus.
• Eating cookie dough rather than ruining it by putting it in the oven.
• The variety of textures and flavors of drinking milk and then eating cookies. (Not dipping the cookies in milk.)
• The worldview shift that leads you to change your handle from Cynical Panda to Optimist Panda.
• Playing Bomberman '93 with your nine year old and eventually having to explain to him that 93 is your dad's age.
• An alternate-history Spock-with-a-goatee video game console.
• Living in your house for 30 years and suddenly discovering three additional rooms.
• Buying a NES and SNES classic even though you've been playing those games in emulation since the 90s.