Cafe Booleans: A Game Dev Podcast

Join SA video game developers John Oestmann, Susie Emery and Jackson Michael as they hang out at Cafe Booleans and chat about culturally innovative games they’ve discovered and the development stories behind them ☕🎮

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For our final episode of the year, Alex and Kosta have sent in a heartfelt reflection on the history of Booleans, and now pass on the torch to John, Susie and Jacko.

We also use this episode to launch our new format, focusing on innovative and culturally interesting games as a springboard for conversation, rather than the current news cycle.

[Content Warning: One of the games discussed, Yume Nikki, contains some elements which reference death and suicide. Please see the timestamps below if you would like to skip our discussion around this game]

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Timestamps

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[01:13] Special Message from Alex and Kosta

[13:11] Yume Nikki - 2004 Surreal RPG Maker Proto-Walking-Sim developed by Kikiyama

[40:04] Community Messages

[44:04] Outer Wilds - 2019 Time-Loop Space Adventure developed by Mobius Digital

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Game Information Adapted From

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Cafe Booleans is back! ☕🎮

Alex Ferrabetta and John Oestmann are joined by Jacko to re-open the Cafe doors. Old friends join in spirit 👻

We discuss Sega's steps towards AI-powered User Generated Content tools, and the current state of Video-Game-to-Film Adaptations.

We also had planned to play through the Slam Jam 3 entries, however due to technical issues and the realization it really isn't that fun to listen to without visuals, we decided to give all entries a shout-out instead!

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Links from this episode:

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Join us in this second episode of The Business of Indie Game Development series:

🎯 The importance of marketing your indie game and how it's a mindset, not just a task

📈 We discuss the marketing funnel and its importance in understanding your audience's journey

💡 Explore how to build a strong marketing mindset, and why promoting your game early is vital

👥 Learn the benefits of community building, and how it can help hype your game, improve it through feedback, and establish a sense of legitimacy

🔎 Understand how to identify your game's target audience and why it's crucial for your game's success

📚 Discuss strategies for reaching out to influencers and streamers to boost your game's visibility

Join us as we demystify the world of indie game marketing, providing actionable insights to help you succeed in the business of game development.

Hosts:

Join us for the first episode of The Business of Indie Game Development series, where we delve into:

🎯 Navigating legal structures for indie game devs

💼 Understanding budgeting, finance, and payment structure in the gaming industry

🤝 Assembling a solid team and tip on working with contractors

🔐 Protecting your intellectual property and dealing with challenges

🎮 Sharing our and other game developers' experiences, tools, and insights in game development business

Legal Structures, Budgeting & Finance - crucial elements for indie game developers to succeed in the gaming world. We'll help you understand the basics and set a strong foundation for your game development journey.

Stay tuned and level up your indie dev business skills 🧡

Alex Ferrabetta - @amferrabetta Kosta Canatselis - @kostacana

Check out:

In this last episode for 2022 we chat with Hannah Crosby, multi-disciplinary Artist currently a Senior 3D Artist at Gameloft Brisbane, about:

❇️ How 'The Sims' kicked off Hannah's journey as a professional artist

🎬 Working in games and film for 16 years

🧊 Designing in 3D while being limited by technology of a given time

🤔 Process and working with technical artists at Gameloft

😍 Designing environments that capture certain feelings

🏞️ Bringing The Oregon Trail environments to life

🔍 GCAP panel discussing metaphors in visual media

👩‍🎨 Advice for aspiring artists

GUEST LINKS:

Join us at the cafe this week as we deep dive and chat about Incentives vs Rules in video games, more specifically:

🤔 How do incentives affect player behaviour?

💻 How technologies can shape culture and behaviour generally

🎉 Examples of games influencing player behavior and culture

💡Players discovering novel ways to play games

🌎 Games can reflect and comment on real-world incentives

🚶‍♂️Incentives in a game like Pokemon Go

💻 Technology choices can shape the culture of a game

SUPPORT ARTICLES:

Join us at the cafe this week as we deep dive and chat about Minimal and subtractive in video games video games, more specifically:

🤔 What is minimalist design and philosophy?

👩‍🎨 Designing by subtraction

✅ 7 Minimalist Games that Every Developer Should Take Inspiration From

👹 How minimal game design can help avoid feature creep

👾 Working with the PICO-8 and TIC-80

🧩 Does simple game design make gaming more accessible?

♟️One-page Tabletop RPGs - the ultimate minimalist game?

SUPPORT ARTICLES:

We chat with Reuben Moorhouse, the Founder and Director of Noble Steed Games, an Australian Game Studio & Consultancy, about:

🏜️ Reubens start as a game developer and working in Silicon Valley

🤝 The key to working as a consultancy studio with a range of clients, guiding their projects

🌎 Culture and the role it plays at both Noble Steed Games, and in teams

🗓️ Running standups productively and effectively

🤔 What is production? and how do you manage production in an Indie Team?

👏 Best practices for tracking tasks and keeping a team on track

GUEST LINKS:

We chat with Simon Scales, the Owner and Director of CDW Studios (Concept Design Workshop) school of visual effects and entertainment design about:

👶 Simon's start as an Illustrator and journey to founding CDW

🎂 CDW's 10 year anniversary

🚀 Launching two new CDW campuses in Victoria and NSW in 2023

📺 Creating original animated content and future roadmap with CDW Animation

🎨 Advice for artists on how to maximise their portfolios

🤖 AI art tools like DALLE and what impact it'll have on art and artists

🍦Being artistic is as good as eating ice cream?

GUEST LINKS:

The lights are off in the spooky Cafe this week for this Halloween special, join us as we chat about what makes a good horror game? More specifically:

🤔 What are some key elements of horror games?

🧟‍♂️ What are some of the best horror games?

🎃 Why are horror games important?

🧡 Why do people love horror games?

📗 What are some key narrative themes in successful horror games?

SUPPORT ARTICLES:

We chat and struggle to play Phasmaphobia with Chantal Ryan, Founder of We Have Always Lived in the Forest - developers of darkwebSTREAMER about:

🎃 The origins of RPG streamer simulation game, darkwebSTREAMER

🎨 Art style and story inspirations for the upcoming occult horror

🎉 Experiences and feedback from taking darkwebSTREAMER to PAX and Gamescom

🔀 Procedurally generating unique narrative and an entire 'internet' in-game

✈️ Chantal's insane childhood experience on a plane that shaped her

👨‍👩‍👦‍👦 Procedurally generating NPCs - what does it mean to be a person and have an identity?

GUEST LINKS:

Join us at the cafe this week as we deep dive and chat about Artificial Intelligence in video games, more specifically:

🤔 What is AI in gaming and how is it used?

🧑🏻‍💻 Why does AI matter in gaming?

🤖 Can an AI make video games?

🧐 What kind of bias exists in AI? What impact does this have on using it and results?

📕 Glaive - an AI tool for narrative design

🏓 A mini-brain in Petri dish learns how to play Pong

🛠 GPT3, DALL E 2, and other tools being used in the game development pipeline

SUPPORT ARTICLES:

Join us at the cafe this week as we deep dive and chat about open-source, more specifically:

🖥️ Open-sourced programs used to create video games

🎮 The moral argument of including and remixing copyrighted content in games

⚖️ The moral and legal dilemma of of modding in games.

SUPPORT ARTICLES:

Live from Melbourne... it's GCAP Recap. In this limited series we Recap our day by day at GCAP.

In our third GCAP Recap for 2022 we're talking about:

Talks

⚙️ Game Production for Indie Teams (Reuben Moorhouse)

🧐 Understanding your players better through user research (even on an indie budget) (Dr Megan Pusey)

🎨 A newcomers guide to adding interactivity for Artists and Designers (Chris Murphy)

👫 Strapped for Cash Not Style - Building a Strong Art Direction with a tiny team (Cyrian Guillaume, Callum Williams)

LIVE BOOLEANS LINKS

Live from Melbourne... it's GCAP Recap II. In this limited series we Recap our day by day at GCAP.

In our second GCAP Recap for 2022 we're talking about our takeaways from:

Talks

🤖 Keynote: Voltrons Will Save Us--Flexible Collaboration Structures in the Information Age

🤘PROG ROCK ODYSSEY: Designing the Artful Escape (Johnny Galvatron)

🗣 A series of quiet conversations (Alexander Swords)

📚 Data-driven narrative and narrative analytics (Emma Losin, Rebekah Little)

🎨 State of the (technical) Art - A Tech Artists Panel (Teja Godson, Chris Murphy, Dan Elliot, Hannah Grace)

🏃‍♂️UI Animation: The Art of making Buttons Move (Emmanuel Jr Vasquez)

✅ UE5 to 10: Easy techniques to make your scene look Unreal (Chris Murphy)

🙏 Building a Better Industry - Australia’s First Union for Game Workers (Tim Colwill, Jill McCabe)

👩‍💻 Don't quit your day job: How to survive making games on the side (Brendan Keogh)

💃 Throwing Shade: How to Yassify Your Game (Teja Godson)

👾 1001 ways to draw an object: An isometric pixel art tutorial (Angus Doolan)

🧶 Logos for Games (Ben Harmon)

LIVE BOOLEANS LINKS

Live from Melbourne... it's GCAP Recap. In this limited series we Recap our day by day at GCAP. 

In our first GCAP Recap for 2022 we're talking about:

Talks

🎨 Show Don't Tell - The intricacies of metaphors in visual media

💰 Max Art - Winning $250k in 30 days a prototype retrospective

🧑🏻‍💻 BeginPlay: The Dos, Don’ts and Key Concepts in Switching to Unreal Engine

Booths

🌐 AWS for Games

🎮 Playside Studios

🗝 Mighty Games (Keyword Studios)

LIVE BOOLEANS LINKS

We chat with Ben Marsh, the Managing Director of local Adelaide game studio and leaders in mud & dirt racing video games, Odd Games, about:

👶 How Odd Games began, and Ben's introduction into the games industry

🐣 The game development industry in Adelaide in 2011

🚙 Odd Game's super popular Monster Truck Destruction and Trucks Off Road on mobile

🛞 Slicing and dicing the racing genre market on mobile devices, how to find your niche

👀 The art and challenges of approaching partnerships, with Monster Truck IP owners

📊 Using the Business Model Canvas to flesh out your video game business

GUEST LINKS:

Join us at the diner this week as we deep dive and chat about Serious Games, more specifically:

🤔 What are serious games?

⚙️ Where are serious games used?

✅ What are the advantages of serious games and why are they important?

🌊 Examples of Serious Games including Sea Hero Quest - a game that collects data for dementia

Join us at the diner this week as we chat about:

🎟 SAFC sponsored GCAP all-access tickets – apply now!

😍 Whats your most memorable and favourite storytelling in games?

🧐 What are the different 'types' of storytelling in games?

🤔 Is there a 'best way' of storytelling?

🎮 Some games to check out with amazing storytelling

🎬 How is storytelling in games different to movies and TV shows?

We chat with local indie game developer, Joakim "Chef" Lundström, of Partum Artifex and previously horror hit 'Stairs', about:

🧟 Partum Artifex, a puzzle horror game that features creative and challenging puzzles while telling a gruesome story about a failed artist

🚀 Taking Partum Artifex from a game jam entry, to a full-fledged video game release

🎃 How to terrify people with storytelling in the horror genre

🧑‍🤝‍🧑 Utilising asset packs, and other tips and tricks to excel in a small two-person team

📽 Partum Artifex reaching 200k+ views on YouTube

👀 Creating a thrilling and exciting teaser trailer for the game

🎉 Experiences working as creative lead on horror game Stairs with over 10M+ views on YouTube (including play through with Markiplier!)

GUEST LINKS:

Join us at the diner this week as we chat about:

⚔️ Xbox and Sony battle it out in court over Activision Blizzard acquisition, PS4 sold twice as much as Xbox One

😰 Netflix Games not doing very well..... why isn't anyone trying it out?

👹 New Dungeons and Dragons coming in 2024, including an official virtual tabletop made in Unreal 5

💛 Pokemon Company International Pledges $25 million to philanthropic organisations over the next 5 years

🎶 A Janet Jackson song crashing computers in the 1990s

We chat with Founder of Health VR company Add Life Technologies and UX/UI, Game Design Lecturer at SAE Australia, Daish Malani about:

👨‍🏫 Experience and journey teaching pre-school in Japan to working in VR

✏️ Teaching game design and UX/UI design at SAE

🧠 Designing cognitive, fine motor skill, and relaxation exercises for rehabilitation in the form of VR Games

🕶 Developing for The Oculus Quest 2 VR headset, and utilising hand-tracking for gameplay and menu interactions

🚀 The future of Add Life, Apple and Oculus VR - digital companions, digital homes, and much more

GUEST LINKS:

Join us at the diner this week as we chat about:

😍 Tantalus Media is opening and hiring developers in Adelaide, South Australia

🤖 Technical artist using AI image generation tool, DALL E 2 as part of their workflow for texturing models

🎨 Exploring an AI image generation tool that creates images from textual descriptions similar to DALL E 2, called Mid Journey, to generate inspiration

🪧 Uncovering a divisive unfinished video game set in South Australia, called Escape from Woomera and it's use as a tool for protest

📚 Life is Strange won't be going back to the episodic model, and the impact episodic structure has on video game narrative

🏰 Mighty Kingdom to Recapitalise and Restructure with Strategic Investment and New Directors

We chat with author and experienced games user researcher Steve Bromley, previously at Playstation, about:

🥼 What is Games User Research and what does it look like in real-life?

📚 Why Steve authored his books 'How to Be A Games User Researcher' and 'Building User Research Teams' and how they're useful

🎮 Steve's experience working as a researcher at Sony Playstation on a variety of games including Horizon, Sly Cooper, and more

✅ The pros and cons of working within larger and small teams, and how to communicate insights to teams

🥽 Challenges of conducting user research in VR

📝 What type of research to conduct and when

🔮 AI play testing? What will the future of games user research hold?

GUEST LINKS:

Join us at the diner this week as we chat about:

💰 GameStop launching an NFT marketplace, and $100M grant program for game developers with Immutable

🤔 Unity lets employees go and announces it's merging with a company known for malware delivery

🎬 Nintendo purchases Tokyo-based CG animation studio and renames it 'Nintendo Pictures'

🎉 Screen Australia announces over $4 million for 31 games through the 'Games: Expansion Fund'

🥇 World Video Game Hall of Fame inductees announced for 2022, what games are missing?

👷‍♀️ Game Workers Australia is hosting networking events all over Australia, including Adelaide

We chat with Alex's old game art lecturer from Flinders University, co-founder of Monkeystack and all around digital creative Shane Bevin about:

👀 A story about when Alex was Shane's student

🎨 Can you teach someone to be creative? How to exercise your creativity & what to do when the creativity "well" runs dry

📅 How to stay consistent as an artist

🔥 Coping with burnout and "bouncing back"

🙈 The origins of South Australian Studio Monkeystack

🎓 What does it mean to be an educator? What are the responsibilities?

📚 Ideation and the importance of narrative in design

🏫 The strengths of mentoring and teaching creative work within a University structure

🎮 Flinders University's new Bachelor of Creative Arts Game Production

👉 How to pivot into creative work

💻 The importance of sharing your work with others

GUEST LINKS:

Join us at the diner this week as we chat about:

🤿 A horrifying scientific study rom an Austrian university simulates suffocation with a special VR mask

🦆 Untitled Goose Game IP acquired by ACMI - what does this mean for the future of the games preservation?

🧠 EndeauvorRX - a video game for treating ADHD has been approved by the FDA

⚕️Games for Health, things to consider and the challenges that come with it

🙋‍♀️ The most wishlisted game of Steam is being made with 'volunteers', is this kind of practice okay?

📣 Community Poll: what aspects of your life would you like to see gamified

We chat with Simon Hanna aka Grand Prize Big Fuzz, award winning Music Artist & Composer for Video Games such as RITE and Immutable's Gods Unchained about:

🎼 Simon's process of creativity and composing music for games

👾 Working on the soundtrack for retro-inspired video game RITE

🎹 Composing for Immutable's trading card game, Gods Unchained

🎸 Finding and working with unique instruments and artists from all around the world

🥵 A 15-second rapid fire quiz testing Simon's ability to come up with soundtracks to strange game concepts on the spot

🤔 Key advice for aspiring game composers

Join us at the diner this week as we chat about:

- Melbourne developer Lumi Interactive smashes records securing largest to date investment, for any women-led studio in Australia, of $AU9.76 million dollars in VC seed funding

- Lumi's gamified mindfulness planting game, and what else could gamification be applied to?

- Epic Games rolls out new cross-play tools for steam and the Epic Games Store breaking down barriers between games platforms on PC - win or bust?

- Microsoft signs labor neutrality agreement with workers union ahead of Activision Blizzard deal, finally assisting users

- Which platforms should you launch your video game on first? Exploring a variety of configs and seeing evidence on what works

- Game developers, publishers issue statements supporting abortion rights - what's the responsibility of a game developer and game companies and how does Roe v. Wade affect game developers?

Join us as we do a deep dive into:

🎮 Avoiding burnout and managing time as game developers 

🥵 Define what burnout is and how it can affect us

🤔 Give ways to assess burnout in our lives

❗ Provide 9 steps to prevent burnout in our lives

🧰 Share our and listeners personal experiences, tools, and techniques that help us day to day 

Join us at the diner this week as we chat about:

- Xbox Game Pass coming directly to Samsung TVs - how this might open up distribution of games to new audiences

- New research showing that making video games enables new forms of self-awareness for people struggling with their mental health

- Exploring different types of social experiences in games and how games enhance the social experience of players

- Roblox hosting a month-long virtual development conference for creators

- a Google engineer put on leave after saying that an AI chatbot has become sentient

- We take a look at the best demonstration of AI in video games

- Virtual children in the 'metaverse' ?!

John takes us through a journey of two years of laughs, interviews, jokes, and most importantly, friends and family of this game development podcast.

We would like to thank you all so much for joining us in the studio and the cafe week after week. Your continued support has meant the world to us and we hope we can continue to bring the good times into your mornings, afternoons, evenings and nights.

Onward to the next two years of Live Booleans! We have some exciting things planned, and as always, some amazing people to talk to across this industry.

♥
the Live Booleans team

Join us at the diner this week as we chat about:

- Tennis legend John McEnroe plays against an AI version of himself via ESPN's Augmented Reality tennis match - what kind of opportunities does this open up in the future?

- AI system DALLE2 which creates art from natural language descriptions, what does this kind of AI open up in game development - will it disrupt or impact workflows?

- The French culture ministry banning English gamer jargon like 'streamer' from being used in government correspondence

- 3 things you can do right now to become a better game designer, and the broader process of improving and honing your skills

- Where did you get your start in the games industry and what did you need to do 'get in'?

- Is video games modding beneficial to developers?

We chat with Carl Leducq NZ Games Advocate, Host of the Zero to Play game development podcast, and experienced Games Producer about:

- His journey into games and game development
- The intricacies of the New Zealand games industry and how it compares to Australia's industry
- Starting and growing game development podcast, Zero to Play and learnings from it
- Being a producer, finding suitable mentors and honing your skills
- Working at company Altered State Machine on trainable AI, video game Muhammad Ali: Next Legends, and more
- Motivations for working in 'web3', and the broader benefits and challenges in the space

Join us at the diner this week as we chat about:

- Batman, Superman, Mickey Mouse, Wizard of Oz, 1984 and other huge IPs are going to, or are currently in, the public domain. What opportunities does this open up for new artistic direction and games for these iconic IPs? What would you like to see enter public domain?

- 9-day Adelaide Game Developers SA Slam Jam coming 17th June!!! (Sean explains)

- Exploring Melbourne's ACMI (formerly Australian Centre for the Moving Image) exhibition setup celebrating and preserving Australian game development history

- A new video game study that suggests they boost intelligence in children

- What are some great non-violent video games? and how does no violence impact game design, environment and narrative

- A dive into player types and bartles taxonomy of player types

We chat with Leo Cheung aka BlueTwoDays, Artist and Design lead of Paper Cactus Games about:

- Developing, play-testing and launching the super unique and super fun tabletop RPG, Parselings - a game about tattoos and collaborative word magic
- Hosting a successful Indiegogo and Kickstarter campaign, and the challenges that come with it
- Working with a publisher across timezones, and the benefits of having a publisher
- Leo's career change from a dentist into a game designer and artist
- The importance of discipline and work ethic in game development
- The transition from board games into video games with future projects

Join us at the diner this week as we chat about:

- The launch of Game Workers Australia (GWA); the new national union for Australian game workers and the Australian Chapter of Game Workers Unite (GWU) and what this means for indie devs and studio devs

- Examples of educational games and the merit of teaching with games as opposed to the traditional teaching methods

- Twitch to supposedly changing their revenue split with streamers to 50/50 instead of the current 70/30

- Congrats to Sydney-based SMG Studios for Moving Out reaching 1,000,000 sales

Sarah Brown is the Lead Technologist at Code Like a Girl - a social enterprise providing girls, women and minorities with the confidence, tools, knowledge and support to enter and flourish in the world of code. With John and Susannah in the interviewer chairs this episode, we discuss:

- The difference between equality and equity and why it is important

- Why initiatives like 'Code like a Girl' are necessary for our society

- The power of having visible role models

- Great entry points for starting your programming career.

Join us at the diner this week, as we chat about:

We chat with Ceri Hutton, the Director of Operations & Projects at the Interactive Games & Entertainment Association (IGEA) about:

- Ceri’s journey into the games industry
- Nurturing an inclusive environment at The Arcade, a game development incubator and shared workspace in Melbourne Victoria
- Ceri’s view on supporting game developers and the importance of a community
- The challenges of hosting the AGDAs and GCAP remotely and plans for upcoming events
- GCAP 2022 theme of ‘Ambition’ and what it means

Join us at the diner this week, as we chat about:

We chat with Cam Rogers, a digital entertainment lawyer having worked on over 100 shipped titles on platforms across PS5, Xbox, Steam, Switch, VR, and mobile platforms about:

- Common legal issues game developers and creatives run into early on and how to prevent them
- Where to start with protecting your video game
- Cam's journey into the film industry and then the games industry
- Stories assisting developers small and large at any stage of development, from conception all all the way to distribution
- Cam's approach that makes him different to 'traditional' lawyers
- What copyright is and intricacies of dealing with copyright issues
- The future of NFTs and legalities around the technology

Join us at the diner this week, as we chat about:

We chat with Celia Hodent, expert in game UX (user experience) and cognitive psychology previously on games such as Fortnite, Star Wars 1313, and at Ubisoft about:

- What is 'UX'? And the history of UX
- Celias studies in cognitive psychology and journey into the games industry
- How game developers can design games to be more inclusive and accessible
- Biases we have as game developers and how we can avoid them
- The success of Fortnite and the process of playtesting to find UX problems to solve
- Video game addiction, UX dark design patterns, and ethics in games
- Star Wars 1313 prototyping

Join us at the diner this week, as we chat about:

We chat with Chris Larkin, composer for video games such as Hollow Knight, Hollow Knight: Silksong, TOHU, Hacknet, and more about:

- His journey into composing music and inspirations
- Experience working on a variety of TV, film, and games
- Working on Hollow Knight with Team Cherry
- 'Getting your foot in the door' and getting hired as a composer on projects
- A fun little activity testing Chris' ability to come up with music on the spot!
- Chris' equipment and setup, and so so much more

Join us at the diner this week, as we chat about:

- Mighty Kingdom's new tie-in video game called 'Carnifex'
- Local indie MMO project TitanReach shutting down
- Crowd-funding video games through Kickstarter and risks/issues involved
- Kickstarter for games trends for 2021
- Trying out games from the latest Adelaide Global 2022 Game Jam
- Answering last episodes question "What current game do you hope, or see, becoming a classic?"

We chat with Gayan Ediriweera, AR/VR developer formerly at Facebook/Oculus, about:

- His journey into game development on franchises such as Star Wars at Krome Studios
- Development on rhythm game NBA Baller Beats and using a real-life basketball as a controller
- VR development at Oculus, culture at Facebook 
- Meeting Palmer Lucky and John Carmack 
- The future of VR and AR in video games, and so much more!

Join us at the diner this week, as we chat about the changing 'value' of games and the costs of distribution for game developers, players habits and game design choices in the newly released in Pokemon Legends: Arceus, a new game for Sega Dreamcast - 23 years after console launch, a huge Kaws art exhibit in Fortnite, the upcoming games user research summit, Sony buying Bungie, and so much more!