I'm watching @unrooolie play the new Mario Party and it's real good with some really interesting design choices and changes, so I'm gonna write a small thread about some things I've noticed just from glossing over it a little. Here goes: @unrooolie So first off, I think it's really interesting to see a Mario Party with a complete overhaul of the UI design AND it being the first that is really minimalist and super clean. All white, simple lines and fonts, which I really appreciate contrasting the otherwise intense design.

This is a really great thread on how parents can teach their children that it's ok to set boundaries and leave uncomfortable situations.

I have a counterstory of how we teach boys to step over boundaries:

https://twitter.com/ErynnBrook/status/1046055387617775616

I was 17 and my boyfriend was 18 when I broke up with him after he had been bugging me aggressively for months and months that I was better at playing videogames than him (real story, not kidding). He was getting quite hostile and aggressive so I broke up with him.

I read an article today that one of the most dire side-effects of neo-liberalism was an epidemic of loneliness.

Combating this epidemic is one of the reasons why I became a game designer - so here is a small thread about the love of creating connection using games! I became a gamer because I was attracted to the connection and community I was offered within the medium and its community - as critical as I am of it at times.
I intimately know the potential of both.

Belonging is one of the very basic human needs - we know this.

Hey, hi, I wanted to write about this earlier already but life happened, so let me write about it now: I believe the most important skill as a designer are communication and debating skills. Yes, debating. Proper debate. Because game design NEVER exists in isolation. I was chatting to @rebheartsyou about communication between UI/UX designers and game designers and we came to that point because especially in larger teams but also for clients and smaller companies, you will always have to justify your choices - and more.

Y’all keep linking me that Kotaku piece on Riot Games culture and sexism asking for my thoughts, so I guess I’ll write you a thread.

I’ve read so many pieces like this. So. Many. I read them nowadays half-engaged because they all read the same, honestly. Now, not to say it’s not a good piece of journalism or that they shouldn’t exist - they do. They put explicit pressure on companies to do better.

But to people like myself and other marginalised folks, this is just same old, same old.

Ok ok so... I was thinking about the amazing car chase scene in Uncharted 4 and I wanna write a small thread about how well designed and curated it is. Let’s gooooo....! I don’t have to scream at you about the cinematic mastery of Uncharted, that’s pretty obvious. But I specifically love the grit of Uncharted 4 and especially how it uses voice acting and sound design to emphasise timing and pretend that Drake is kinda winging everything.

I usually don't directly share these but I need y'all to see how stories such as Jessica Price's and her firing from ArenaNet have serious consequences beyond just one company and instead spread like poison through our entire industry.

We got this message at Opaque about me. It's been 6 days of people screeching at me about talking about the lack of female CEOs in the German games industry.

Jessica Price's firing from ArenaNet emboldens people to ask for people like me to be lectured at best by my employer, fired at worst.

GDC this year was quite difficult with cases of harassment and abuse that we had to deal with as a community. Those can be very difficult to handle if the accused happens to be your friend or an outspoken advocate for good - I’d like to talk about that part. In the past few weeks I’ve been on all kinds of ends of situations where I had to deal with this topic, with people taking sides with openly called out harassers as well as being on the side of being the friend of one myself. This is very tricky to navigate. Some markers:

So... this is definitely a slightly esoteric, more philosophical approach to this topic and I'm not 100% sure where I'm going with it just yet, so you'll have to be along for the ride, but I want to chat about the correlation between emergence and game design... From a scientific standpoint, emergence is the concept within our universe where small, independent parts with different properties in a system come together to form new complexity arising from simplicity of its parts. It's a concept that is pretty much everywhere around us.

Can’t sleep so I’m writing you a thread about how patriarchal systems hurt everybody using the example of the friend zone - but not the way you think!
At its core, the friend zone problem is about how we expect women to be the universal carriers of emotional weight. Here: The friend zone is widely known as the idea by mainly men that once you listen to a woman’s feelings and offer support, you have a right to eventually get into her pants as if we were some sort of slot machine.

I don’t need to tell you that that’s horseshit of course.

So I've had this on my mind for a while so I'll write a quick thread about it: How much of an inspiration Arrival is for my own work as a movie, but mainly for how it handles its female main character... There are many reasons to love arrival: it's brilliant audio design with one of the best soundtracks ever, the overall way of tackling the first contact topic, love for language and so much about its cinematography.

It may be hard but you need to hear this: If you promote crunch and overworking, you do not deserve to be a mentor or role model. Period. As a far-away colleague of ours went missing 2 weeks ago after struggling in his startup business and due to burnout, we need to hear this.

I get a whole bunch of people flooding into my mentions now who are very disappointed that devs "cheat" them. Let me tell you something... The nature of play is being in on the ride that you know is not real in the first place. You subconsciously choose to believe us :)

Hey #gamedev, tell me about some brilliant mechanics in games that are hidden from the player to get across a certain feeling. Example: Assassin's Creed and Doom value the last bit of health as more hit points than the rest of it to encourage a feeling of *JUST* surviving.