Mind the Messy of PsychOdyssey

Here’s a newsflash for you that is probably super obvious: game dev is messy. Like, extremely messy. It’s all chaos all the time and then suddenly WHAM, out comes a game. Even throwing super regimented and organized individuals into the fray doesn’t seem to stem the tide of just pure, unadulterated chaos. I read books like Press Reset and Blood, Sweat, and Pixels and see some of the fallout from all this chaos and I can’t help but wonder…why? Why do people subject themselves to all of this…(please don’t say chaos again…) disarray for some pretty bleep bloops?

Enter PsychOdyssey, the enlightening 32-episode documentary series about Double Fine during the creation of Psychonauts 2. You read that correctly. Thirty-two. Episodes. 2 Player Productions, the documentarians in this venture, followed Tim Schafer et al. around for seven years, recording the ups, downs, and all the diagonals of the video game creation process. And boy are there a lot of diagonals.

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True Crime: Where’s The Line?

Wrestling with the balance of entertainment value of True Crime vs its insight.

 

The true part of true crime always gives me pause. It’s not that I am distrustful of documentarians, reporters, or even murder enthusiasts on podcasts. But engaging with true crime content makes me uneasy in the same way I felt nervous as a child when I did something I knew was wrong. For all the commentary these pieces offer, for all the new perspectives they provide or questions they raise about the quality of our justice system, these programs are first and foremost always about engaging an audience. To call them entertainment might seem crass, but therein lies the rub. True crime series and documentaries are inherently voyeuristic and thrilling. There is entertainment to be gained from real human suffering, and while we might learn something, it becomes a hard balance to reconcile.

 

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