Brendan Keogh Profile Banner
Brendan Keogh Profile
Brendan Keogh

@BRKeogh

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Videogame industry & culture researcher. The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist (MIT Press): he/him, @brkeogh on Bluesky, too.

Brisbane, Queensland
Joined March 2009
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
1 year
The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist is OUT NOW! It’s a call to take game dev srsly as a field of cultural production in all its complexities. It’s open-access! You can read it right now! Here's a 🧵of what bits of it I am most excited for you to read:
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
4 years
lmao
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
7 months
The idea of Ai creating 'realistic' NPCs is based on a false myth that videogames are 'worlds' as opposed to 'media texts created by people to express ideas and tell stories'. Why would I want to listen to dialog nobody wrote?
@Ubisoft
Ubisoft
7 months
Conversations with in-game characters are getting more real! Presenting our research project, NEO NPCs, a new kind of NPC that uses generative AI to really talk to you! Discover how our team of writers and developers are coming together in this exciting experiment:
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
2 years
Copyeditor: “I am going to break up some of your longer sentences” (crowd boos) “with more em-dash pairs” (crowd cheers)
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
6 years
Eggboy is very good and important but also like this dude apparently literally stopped the massacre from continuing
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
7 years
further evidence of what happens when they let me teach game students
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
1 year
The player:
@WillWArmstrong
William Armstrong
1 year
The game programming flex of all time.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
8 years
This whole racist-old-people-returning-us-to-fascism-before-they-die trend across the Western world is so exhausting and stressful.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
4 years
This isn't a subtweet of anyone in particular but I really don't like the No Man's Sky/Cyberpunk parallels people are drawing. NMS just wasn't the game people expected. Cyberpunk is fundamentally broken as a piece of software.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
5 months
Seeing a bit too much of this in my feed from well meaning people tbh
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
6 years
more studios vocally telling gamers they aren't backseat designers please
@insomniacgames
Insomniac Games
6 years
@NYCSpiderCop @TheTorete_CF @Michaelramos227 @Guncastlebrown Listening doesn’t mean we always will do what people tell us to. We hear you. Hearing doesn’t mean we always act or follow.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
3 years
Really glad they made the originals of these games unavailable for this remaster
@VinePotato
potad
3 years
What the FUCK
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
4 years
It’s just so stupid even before you get to the ecological disaster what the hell is wrong with these people
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
1 year
Made my first Playdate game.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
4 years
You can absolutely get into making games without a degree, just like you can get into writing or making films or acting or music without a degree. But maybe there’s some valuable reasons one might choose to study a craft professionally.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
3 years
I hope at the end of Elden Ring all the different enemies march along the screen with their names underneath them like in old NES games.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
4 years
Been resisting have a take on that tweet for a few hours now but here is my take: it’s bad
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
4 years
What's the funniest videogame box art ever? Why, it's Dot Gobbler
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
3 years
I keep seeing devs say the way to address toxic management in indie dev is for indie devs to hire HR. Never mind that most indie devs can't even afford to pay themselves, this fundamentally misunderstands the role of HR, which is ultimately to protect management.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
6 years
When internet commentators talk about how to 'fix' a videogame that's already been released
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
4 years
My full-time job is researching the videogame industry and I have no idea what this sentence means
@IGN
IGN
4 years
The Xbox Series S will not run Xbox One X enhanced versions of backwards compatible games, but will instead run Xbox One S versions of Xbox One and Xbox 360 titles.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
4 years
I truly hope any creator in any field that embraces NFTs is just shunned and mocked and exiled by the rest of the field.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
1 year
The thing with this is that games don’t actually need to keep getting bigger and more graphically detailed. We could just sit at the current or a previous level of detail forever and we’d still have endless good games. The industry turned its own treadmill up to max speed.
@VGC_News
VGC
1 year
Xbox Game Studios chief Matt Booty has said that both game players and the industry in general need to realise that most big games now have development cycles of around half a decade.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
4 years
Yes! This is exactly what I've been telling my game dev students to do for years.
@VG247
VG247
4 years
Hideo Kojima was stung by "at least 10 bees all at once" before becoming a game designer
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
1 year
The videogame industry might not exist but my book now does. So thrilled to finally physically hold this, and even more thrilled for people to read it. @mitpress
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
4 years
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
3 years
Once I asked a student to play Gone Home in front of the class, forgetting they were a hardcore Counter Strike player. Suffice to say, students learned very little about Gone Home.
@redeadofficial
redead
3 years
this how warzone mfs play Resident Evil 8 lmao
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
2 years
I’ve watched this tiktok so many times over the last few days. I can’t get over it.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
4 years
This looks amazing (title is 'Scribble Rider' apparently)
@fukusanity
グッドフクサニティ賞
4 years
Tumblrで広告になってるゲーム、毎回「面白いもの考えるなあ」と感心する
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
2 years
Shout out to the young boys at the dog park who insisted on staying a bit longer despite being very bored because “this is like her [the dog’s] gaming time”
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
2 years
I love that games spent like a decade on ‘how can we make the player feel conflicted about violence?’ and no answer to this is half as effective as Elden Ring’s ‘some enemies sing when they are unaware of you’
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
4 years
(Non-games followers, sorry). The fact that in Cyberpunk you can apparently choose between 6 different penises but only 1 vagina is the funniest fucking triple-a-ass thing ever.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
4 years
Bloodborne prequel sounds weird
@TheAVClub
The A.V. Club
4 years
Scientists plan to shoot massive load of sperm samples onto the moon
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
3 years
My take for the take god is that making a weird cool thing for free, giving people a lot of joy for a while, and then walking away with a bag of cash while someone else destroys it is really the best outcome any creator can home for in the current world.
@powerlanguish
Josh Wardle
3 years
An update on Wordle
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
4 years
Literally the first time I hear of any seemingly massively popular gamer-streamer is when they share a bad opinion about how easy game development is
@summit1g
summit1g
4 years
A game that’s so simple being so successful should be a newsflash to gaming devs everywhere imo. @FallGuysGame
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
6 years
The auspol holy trinity: - the dude who made the 'howard djs like a mad cunt meme' - the guy who headbutted Tony Abbott - the kid who egged Fraser Anning
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
2 years
Still not on the MIT Press website, but my forthcoming book's cover seems to exist in a few other places on the internet, so here it is:
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
5 months
This is like a fantasy rpg boss where a bunch of slimes morph into a big slime and then you hit it once and it explodes back into a bunch of little slimes again
@GamesHubDotCom
GamesHub
5 months
BREAKING: Embracer Group will split into three companies by 2025.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
5 years
I feel like I learned something really important about capitalism when someone pointed out to me, very simply, that you never see these companies accidentally overpay staff $400,000,000.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
7 years
when a game dev dude thinks the way to solve gender inequality in the industry is for women to just work harder
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
6 years
So are gamers as mad about the activision-blizzard layoffs as they were about a mobile Diablo game existing or what
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
5 years
Working in games is being absolutely certain of the cultural significance and maturity of the medium, and then having to say 'gamasutra' out loud to someone not in games.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
8 years
oh man
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
4 years
If you want to sell a random string of numbers and letters just do that without stealing art or destroying the planet???
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
3 years
HR doesn't prevent toxic workplace culture. In every sector, HR ensures toxic workplace cultures stay private and that problematic staff disappear before they make things tricky for management or the company. You don't need to hire HR. You need to form a union.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
5 years
Imagine telling a room full of powerful people 'you're literally killing me' and those people just cheering and applauding and not doing anything to stop killing you. Being Greta Thunberg sounds like a nightmare.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
7 years
Hey Australian media. Milo is a dangerous neo-nazi but he isn’t ‘controversial’. Everything he says is just pure, stubborn, afraid-to-change status quo bullshit spoken with the confidence of a pubescent boy who learned a new swear word that others have been saying for centuries.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
6 years
"a wormy planet"
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
6 years
Firmly believe no one has a poorer understanding of the process of videogame development (or what videogames even are) than their most vocal fans.
@Kotaku
Kotaku
6 years
People who haven't played Spider-Man are mad the developers took out a puddle.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
5 years
Gonna be a horrible day for games discourse. Gamergaters are going to be out in full force, probs stronger than any other time since 2014. Don’t engage and give them any oxygen, just immediately block.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
8 years
tfw you've owned yourself so hard it's worth retweeting
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
4 years
I will never shut up about how stupid the whole NMS launch discourse was. You can't stop me.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
5 years
This is exactly the same as supermarkets under capitalism except the same product owned by the same corporation is packaged in 5 different ways to give the impression of variety and personal choice.
@bennyjohnson
Benny Johnson
5 years
I just returned from Cuba. What would your supermarket would look like on socialism? This is the fanciest “supermarket” in Havana. Notice anything odd? Aisles are filled with goods having NO VARIETY AT ALL. No competition No choice No hope SHARE so @BernieSanders & @AOC see THIS:
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
6 years
Valve: 30% cut Epic: 12% cut! Discord: 10% cut!!! itch: whatever cut you want to donate
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
9 years
If Bowie is really dead at least this inability for any of us to tell reality from fiction is a really fitting way to go out.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
5 years
On the contrary, we didn’t lose hobbies. We lost stable, reliable work, and suddenly we had to figure out how to live on our hobbies. Hobbies were a product of a time when work/rest were at their most discrete, in part to allow ‘productivity’ to penetrate ‘non-work’ time.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
6 years
There aren't too many indie developers. There are just too many indie developers who don't realise that being an indie developer is like starting a band. It's a thing you do and get value out of and, if you're incredibly lucky, might even make you some money one day maybe.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
3 years
On this R U OK Day, remember that any time an employer or politician is talking about mental health, they are doing so to prevent you thinking about collective class struggle.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
7 years
Once every few years Kill Screen fires everyone they underpaid and then delete everything they wrote from the internet.
@KillScreen
Killscreen
7 years
ATTN: We're looking for some freelance positions in strategy and research. Esports knowledge is a plus!
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
3 years
Working from home means paying for the electricity, internet, and property that the employer no longer needs to pay for. If anything, we should be paid more to work from home.
@abcnews
ABC News
3 years
Would you take a pay cut to keep working from home?
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
6 years
imagine having such a low opinion of videogames as a creative medium that you think this is an appropriate analogy
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
6 years
Game companies continue to throw woman developers under the bus for having to deal with being woman game developers on social media
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
3 years
Just saw a tweet from a livestreamer complaining at how little a triple-a company was offering them to play their game. And like, sweet, get that cash. But it’s so baffling this happens parallel to constant conspiracy theories of game journos accepting bribes to write reviews.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
3 years
If this how Border Force treats world-famous celebrities on the record, imagine how they treat the refugees for which no one holds them account
@susanamet
Susan Metcalfe
3 years
Djokovic (interview 6 Jan): So you’re giving me legally 20 minutes to try to provide additional information that I don’t have? At 4 o clock in the morning?
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
7 years
Thinking a phone call is less invasive than a text message is some boomer ass shit
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
2 years
Sorry but Mastodon still sounds worse than Musk twitter to me (for now at least)
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
4 years
Literally every big 'realistic' triple-a videogame, the good ones and the bad ones, is a whole bunch of smoke and mirrors and jank pretending to be complex systems that breaks down the second you look for the creases, and that's fine.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
6 years
Heard a number of accounts of TB fans aggressively harassing and attempting to dox his various victims since his death, which is exactly the legacy that he left for videogame culture that he should be remembered for. He made videogames a worse place.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
1 year
I don't have concrete evidence of this but I feel like Waypoint played a critical role in game journalism more broadly deciding that game development labour conditions should be a fundamental part of the game journalism beat, alongside the rise of GWU etc. in the late 2010s.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
6 years
The ArenaNet stuff still completely sucks but it's *so good* to see so many game journo outlets actually reporting on it properly and chasing up the workers in question and addressing it as a labour issue.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
4 years
So strange how the devaluing and dismantling of humanities education in favour of 'job ready skills' over the past decades has coincided with the re-popularisation of fascism around the world. What are the chances
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
1 year
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
5 years
Jesus christ. Morrison just trotted out the ‘greenies are anti backburning + arsonists’ response to a question about climate change. Straight up endorseing and giving credibility to conspiracy theories!
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
5 years
Fantastic. Truly the Bioshock of cinema
@HeerJeet
Jeet Heer
5 years
Anyways, Citizen Kane is on Netflix. It's a really great, great movie & more than lives up to its reputation. Worth watching just to encourage Netflix to stream more old movies.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
4 years
“There’s no need to panic”
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
7 years
i got way too much to do today so here is one word-vomit take on games and stories and I'm out now
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
4 years
It’s scientifically proven to be impossible to be a white dude who released a successful indie game in the mid 2000s and to not have subsequently had your brain completely fried by right-wing libertarian ideals.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
6 years
If you can’t afford to moderate a platform properly you can’t afford to run a platform.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
4 years
This is a spectacularly explicit example of a classic triple-a move that academics have been pointing out for over a decade now. ‘Solidarity’ gets replaced with the management-serving idea of ‘teamwork’.
@jasonschreier
Jason Schreier
4 years
- One CDPR developer told their manager that they didn't want to work overtime, as their CEO had said would be OK. Fine, their manager said, but one of their other coworkers would just have to work extra hours to make up for them. Several other developers shared similar stories
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
3 years
A silly analogy I often use for the difficulties of preservation in the digital platform age is imagine if while you were asleep, George Lucas broken into your house and replaced your original Star Wars DVDs with the 20th Edition crappy CGI remakes. Feels apt here.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
2 years
The rapid shift in language in the NFT racket from play-to-earn to play-to-own is interesting. ‘Earn’ clearly sounded too much like actual wage-labour whereas ‘own’ has nice neoliberal connotations of being at the top of the pile, doing the exploiting.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
4 years
You can’t even do it ironically. You can’t! Just stop! Christ.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
1 year
what's preventing game studies from looking like this
@MarioBrothBlog
Supper Mario Broth
1 year
Super Mario Odyssey contains four central themes: Hat, Rabbits, Wedding, and Moon. Remarkably, in addition to synthesizing all four themes, the game touches on areas where a preexisting overlap between the themes can be found, filling out a diagram of thematic connections.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
7 years
train carriages linking perfectly
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
6 years
Hey thanks for approving my request to join this game dev facebook group. Anyway, I have this great idea for a game and was wondering if someone wanted to code it for me. Also, any tips on game dev and storytelling? Thanks!
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
1 year
At long last, after literal years of challenges and delays, the SURVIVING WHITENESS IN GAMES special issue of Journal of Games Criticism is now published in full. *14* incredible articles on games and race from a variety of different perspectives.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
7 years
I think the best thing in videogames is still characters in 2D jrpgs walking into beds under a sheet layer to look like they are lying down.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
5 years
Most impressive thing I've ever done in a videogame
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
9 years
The year is 2025. Teens are reacting to old 'Teens react' videos. Only 4 people in the world own property.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
6 years
Probability of me addressing someone ‘mate’: Australian woman: 30% Australian dude under 40: 40% Aus dude over 50: 60% My wife: 90% US customs officer, any gender or ages: 100%
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
1 year
Feeling the academic hustle pressure to write a long Twitter thread about the Unity thing but instead I will simply post some passages from my recent book and leave it at that.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
7 years
Setting up our campus for open day and totally forgot I put this important @TeddyDief advice on the wall months ago
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
7 years
"Are videogames games or stories?" Me 2007: yes, both Me 2017: no, neither
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
3 years
This is definitely happening at every university in the country.
@abcmelbourne
ABC Melbourne
3 years
University of Melbourne staff doing unpaid work to give students feedback, tutor says
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
4 years
And you’re a horrible goose.
@JoeBiden
Joe Biden
4 years
It’s a new day in America.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
3 years
CrYpTo WiLl LeAd To InNoVaTiOnS iN tHe EnErGy SeCtOr
@ClimateNexus
Climate Nexus
3 years
An old power plant in Dresden, NY is planning to ramp up Bitcoin mining. If it's allowed to proceed, some warn dozens of fossil fuel plants could gain new life by repurposing as Bitcoin miners or other energy-intense data centers. by @PMantius w/ @nysfocus
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
6 years
The most successful people I know: - Always seem tired and stressed out - 'success' is a weird metric to measure a life's value by - I'd rather just do enough work to live and then chill out tbh
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
5 years
(Smart youtuber critic friends don't read this) My most old person opinion is that it is really bad we let youtubers gain as much authority as actual journalists & critics despite most of them not having nearly the same critical capacity to evaluate what is going on in the world.
@xMBGx
MBG
5 years
Naughty Dog is the best studio in the world for a reason. It's because they understand if you want to be a champion, you better be willing to make the necessary sacrifices. Blood sweat, and tears. They know if they don't go the extra mile, someone else will.
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@BRKeogh
Brendan Keogh
3 years
Just submitted the final draft of my next book "The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist" to MIT Press. Very excited for people to finally read this (early next year, hopefully)
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