018 Rami Ismail - Games are a Magic Trick

Our hosts Chantal and Jörg have been busy making games, but Directional is BACK with a new season and a great guest, indie giant Rami Ismail (Ridiculous Fishing, Luftrausers, Nuclear Throne)! We're talking about the state of the games and media industries, the rise of AI and where we take our magical medium next.

While the podcast has gone through a period of hibernation, the game ‘industry’ has, well, shat the bed. In this first episode of a new season and format, Chantal and Jörg look past the doom and gloom and towards a more sustainable and beautiful future. The waves are crashing down - so let’s surf! Notes: C-Smash VRS on Meta Quest: https://www.meta.com/en-gb/experiences/7255247917854212/ darkwebSTREAMER: https://www.darkwebstreamer.com Chantal’s tweet: https://x.com/thoughtrise/status/1764535542203683250 Kazimierz Dabrowski’s “Positive Disintegration”: https://www.positivedisintegration.com/

Luc Bernard has built the Holocaust Museum inside Fortnite and put his own money into an acclaimed game about one of the darkest chapters in history. We talk about campaigning for peace and staying human in a world ravaged by politics. The Altruistic Personality (mentioned by Chan) Meghna Jayanth's thread on The Golden Joystick Awards

Auteurs can be geniuses, they can be villains, they can get all the credit even on games with big teams. We sit down with Sam Barlow, creator of "Her Story" and "Immortality", to dissect these curious creatures.

Directional was born at Gamescom 2022 - chiefly as a passionate response to gaming's biggest event. A year later, Chantal and Jörg reunite in Cologne and re-examine their relationship to the chaos. Recorded live amidst 320,000 attendees.

While Chantal is flying to Gamescom (where this show began), Jörg talks to videogames' top time-traveller, Digital Foundry's John Linneman, about the need to touch our origins. Look out for an unexpected cameo by Steven Spielberg.

Chantal and Jörg took their games to different game events last week: BitSummit in Kyoto and AVCon in Adelaide. While Jörg was in nerd heaven, Chantal met the dark side of nerddom. Naturally.

Games are the world's leading entertainment medium, our main forum, the ultimate artform. Now let's start acting like it. A provocation and a manifesto for new meaning. This special video podcast is Jörg's evening Keynote, recorded at Reboot Develop Blue in Dubrovnik, Croatia, in April 2023.

Caroline Marchal, Creative Director of independent narrative studio INTERIOR/NIGHT (As Dusk Falls), talks about the power and human endurance behind building multi-threaded, interactive stories.

In this first Directional Live, Jörg and Chantal took the stage at Reboot Develop Blue 2023 with Aaron Loeb, most recently Chief Business Officer at mobile games giant Scopely. The broken PC and console industry turned him into a mobile gaming pioneer. But could the mobile industry have created new and potentially more damaging problems for society at large?