Breaking The Wheel

A screen grab from one of Justin's GDC17 sessions

GDC17 Feedback and Responses

GDC 2017 was my first GDC ever. So, I figured “Why not be an asshole about it?” and signed up to give two presentations. 6’ish months later I found myself at GDC, sweating bullets and shitting bricks. I should also mention that the longest presentation I’d ever given was about 10 minutes, and had signed up for a total of 90 minutes of speaking time. Anyhoo, both presentations went well and nobody died. And then, a month and half’ish later, my compiled speaker feedback arrived. It was largely positive. But, of course, there were a few people (4 in each session, based on the reviews) who took umbrage with ol’ Justy. And some of the negative comments bothered me. Not because people disagreed with me (that’s to be expected, after all) but because I couldn’t respond. But then I realized that not only could I respond (having a blog and[…]

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A picture of a bottleneck, because auteurs bottleneck stuff

Bottlenecks and Hindsight: Why Auteurs Make Horrible Economists

This post is about an empirical issue: the economic cost of being an auteur. When I originally posted this entry on Gamasutra back in 2014 it was not without its detractors. David Jaffe even dropped a line on it, saying he thought it was neat, while simultaneously implying that I was full of shit. Nonetheless, in retrospect, I still feel this idea is worth considering in an industry like ours, one that consists of both public personas and massive-team-based endeavors.

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