Transcript

Aaron Nemoyten (00:00)
Hey everyone, my name is Aaron and this is Make Games Drink Coffee. I usually say this is a podcast about game developers, their jobs, hobbies, and interests, but today it’s just me. It’ll be a shorter episode than usual, so I’m making it as a bonus rather than giving it an actual episode number. I don’t really know how that works. Let’s get into it though.

First, why is it just me this week? Well, my planned guests canceled. I won’t give details about who and where they are, but one of the reasons they gave was that they were stressed out because ICE was in their neighborhood. I’m gonna spend a minute or two on politics now. I promise I will talk about game industry stuff after this.

But I want to be clear about where I stand on these issues because they’re a lot more important and impactful than almost anything that’s been on the podcast thus far. I’m pretty open about my politics on social media, but writing about it is quite frankly, a lot easier than saying it out loud. The government of this country, the United States, that’s where I am, is currently led by people who don’t believe in freedom of speech, freedom of association, separation of church and state due process.

You know, the important parts of the Bill of Rights. I know not everyone who listens to this podcast is actually in the United States. I do look at the analytics. Many countries, though, are dealing with similar problems, and some lucky ones are not. I hope you never have to.

But it should be obvious how ridiculous it is that this is a country where a successful professional in this massive industry is stressing out because an unpopular government wants to score political points with their base by sending masked thugs to grab law abiding people off the street and getting photos and videos of angry but peaceful protesters that they’ll keep using as propaganda and justification for more violence.

But this is a podcast about video games, right? All of this chaos is affecting the game industry. Friends of mine in the industry are looking at jobs overseas, moving out of the country to avoid the chaos and bigotry that they can’t be absolutely sure they’ll avoid if they stay. And despite San Francisco’s reputation as a progressive city, many foreigners are refusing to travel to the United States for GDC, that’s the Game Developers Conference for listeners who aren’t in the industry, and I don’t blame them.

I don’t consider myself an expert when it comes to politics, more like an enthusiast, but I’m 41 years old, and I’ve been following this stuff pretty closely since high school. So I like to think I know what I’m talking about.

There is actually one important issue I have been avoiding on this podcast, but I wanna mention it here and that’s unionization. This is a hot, hot topic in the industry right now. id Software, creators of Doom and one of my biggest inspirations to join the industry, fully unionized recently.

Various other studios have either unionized, been shut down or experienced layoffs after unionizing or exploring unionization, or have had whole disciplines like QA unionize. I have had some conversations about unionization with guests, but I decided not to include them on the podcast because I don’t think I know enough to speak about the topic, to speak about it intelligently, and I don’t want to accidentally put out any misinformation or uninformed opinions.

Unlike a lot of other topics, it’s relevant, important, hotly debated, and has real ramifications on this industry. At some point, I’d like to do an episode about unionization and bring on some guests who are truly experts. Okay, now onto some good news. This podcast is heading to GDC. Well, sort of. I haven’t bought a pass, but I plan on heading over to Yerba Buena Gardens during my day ⁓ while the kids are in school.

with make games drink coffee stickers and a nice little portable microphone. I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but I’ll chat with anyone who wants to be on the podcast, even if it’s just for a minute or two. Finally, this isn’t supposed to be a review show, but I just rolled credits on Doom, the Dark Ages and my God, what a blast. I have an article on Medium that explains some of the issues I have with Doom Eternal.

And I don’t wanna be too negative because I think it’s in poor taste to be publicly critical of stuff from the industry I work in, at least while it’s recent. I think there’s a statute of limitations on that. But the point is, The Dark Ages basically fixes every issue I had with Doom Eternal and is probably my favorite mainline Doom experience since Doom 2. I cannot recommend it highly enough. And if you’re not an FPS person, but you’re curious,

You can actually customize the difficulty in very specific ways and basically make the game as easy or hard as you want.

Well, that was gonna be my last point, but I just wanna say for those of you watching this on video, ⁓ yeah, I’m not totally looking at the camera because I wrote a script for this. ⁓ I don’t have any kind of teleprompter device which would, ⁓ you know, put like a screen with a mirror over the camera and let me look directly at the camera while reading, which is what a lot of YouTubers do, even if they don’t say it explicitly.

It would be cool if I could maintain perfect eye contact with the camera, like as if I was doing this off the cuff, but like frankly, I’m just not good at this yet and I need practice. So please bear with me and I hope that the rest of the podcast did not sound too canned. If you know what I mean, All right, that’s it for today.

Make Games Drink Coffee is made by me, Aaron Nemoyten I hope you enjoyed today’s short editorial bonus episode. Questions, comments, complaints, recipes for delicious chocolate chip cookies should be sent to MakeGamesDrinkCoffee at gmail.com. All right, I’ll see you in a few weeks or maybe a GDC.