"After School" - from LAN Party (2024)

photo of a random 2000s era US cybercafe

(This personal essay was written for LAN Party, a nice photo book about LAN gaming culture curated / edited by merritt k, along with many more essays like this one. You should buy the book and give it nice reviews. For this blog post version, I've made a few edits and added some pictures / links.)

After School

Sometimes on Fridays after school, a bunch of us would meet up to play video games.

We went to a cybercafé called CyberLab, which sounds like the generic yet clearly evil corporation in an 80s action movie. But no fancy cyber word reflected the reality of this place: a dingy room filled with surplus office furniture and overheating computers. It was probably more than a little smelly. Yet it was ours.

Upcoming game dev events in Australia and New Zealand, June - August 2025

Down here in the other hemisphere, Australians and New Zealanders are approaching winter... which means it's time to leave the beach and attend some game developer events. 

I'll be participating in a few public events this season:

• June 7-8, 2025: Frosty Games Fest @ online. We'll be premiering some Tryhard gameplay footage at this upcoming fresh new exciting Australia / New Zealand themed online games festival, featuring demos and trailers from AU / NZ designers and studios. If you're a streamer / video creator / journalist, fill out the form on their website for access.
• July 19, 2025: Wireframe @ Auckland, New Zealand. I'll be giving a short level design talk at the local game development conference here in New Zealand's largest city. You can check out the Wireframe speaker schedule here. There's also a planned games showcase for locals to submit their games. Join the Auckland Makes Games discord for info and updates.
• July 31 - August 2, 2025: Freeplay / Angles @ Melbourne, Australia. I'll (probably) be around at Australia's longest running indie games festival. Last time I was in Melbourne in 2018, I got the opportunity to make a gay AFL-themed alt ctrl game, and this year I have even more to say about sports games and sexuality. Speaker applications for 15-30 minute talks are still open, the submission deadline is June 3, 2025.

Lastly, if you're interested in keeping up-to-date with the Australia / New Zealand game dev community, sign up for the Indie Dev Digest newsletter by Meredith Hall. She also maintains a list of ANZ games events and a list of ANZ game funding initiatives too.

Space is not a wall: toward a less architectural level design

(This post is adapted from my micro talk "Teaching and Rethinking Level Design" at the GDC 2025 Educators Soapbox session. That's why it mentions "students" in the slide above.)

People want to do level design. They grow up playing games like Minecraft, Roblox, Fortnite — all 3D games with 3D worlds. And to create 3D worlds, supposedly you need this thing called “level design.” Then when you search YouTube, you'll be told that level design is about implanting secret lines that "guide the player" into walking down hallways. Such is the power of ARCHITECTURE! 

But this is not how architecture works, nor how level design works. Imaginary invisible shapes cannot mind control players, and even if they could, no one needs to be mind controlled to walk down a hallway. 

No one plays games like this, but why do we think we do? What's going on here?