Happy holidays everyone! To close out the year we've got Walt (writer and creative director at New Game Plus, and has worked on games such as The Darkness, Bioshock 1 and 2, Spec Ops: The Line, and Star Wars Battlefront 2, and he’s also the author of the book Significant Zero: Heroes, Villains, and the Fight for Art & Soul in Games) and Mary (currently writes at Insomniac Games, and has also written for Certain Affinity, Techland on Dying Light 2, and Telltale on the final season of The Walking Dead and Batman: The Enemy Within) joining us to talk Narrative QA, their most important collaborators, narrative band-aid experiences, storytelling that they appreciate in other games that may go unnoticed by players, making "good" and "bad" choices, emotion-oriented goals, violence-based games, not giving your characters more story than they can handle, narrative pet peeves, things they've learned by slipping up, overwriting, digital media shelf life, what game project(s) they wish they'd been a part of, how important costume design is to their writing process, writing tests, and a thing or two more that you'll just have to find out for yourself!

Our Guests on the Internet

Walt's Twitter, Instagram. and check out Significant Zero: Heroes, Villains, and the Fight for Art and Soul in Video Games

Mary's Twitter, and check out Read Only memories #1

Stuff We Talked About

Spec Ops: The Line

Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice

We Are Not Heroes: Contextualizing Violence Through Narrative GDC Talk by Walt Williams

The Walking Dead: The Final Season

Disco Elysium

When the Streaming Platform Dies, What Happens to its Shows?

What Remains of Edith Finch

Spider-Man

Night in the Woods

Star Wars Battlefront II

Also Max and I worked on Neo Cab and Man of Medan, two great games that came out this year, and they're totally worth checking out!

Our theme music was created by Isabella Ness, and our logo was created by Lily Nishita.