Chelsea Stark, Polygon Exit Interview, 5/29/2026

• What was important to me is if people aren’t struggling with operational problems, they can work better. If everyone understands where to go for things, it makes their lives easier. I've certainly worked at places with confusing or frustrating operational systems. And overall, having worked at good and bad workplaces, I really wanted to make sure we had a place where people felt supported and like we were creating a good culture. Sometimes, it feels like you're climbing a mountain, because the work never stops, and it is hard, and at the end of the day it’s largely vibes. And sometimes, some stuff is not your fault, or people will be upset at you for things outside of your control, and you just kind of have to eat that. That’s what it is. [...] I just wanted to make sure we had a place where no one is y...

Roopa Vasudevan, The Creative Independen..., 5/30/2026

• “Well, we’re in a really bad situation. But look at this artist, they can show us the new way forward.” That started to really frustrate me. That view treats artists almost as if they are exempt from all of the problems that plague everyone else in their relationships with technology, when in reality they’re just as susceptible to all of this. We really have to start reckoning with that idea rather than thinking of ourselves as somehow exempt.
• The whole idea of strategic transparency came from observing that tech companies use artists as a kind of clout. I really go into depth in my book analyzing the way that Google utilized the Arcade Fire project, the interactive music video they did for “We Used to Wait” in 2010. It was a really innovative, amazing project, ...

Anonymous, Beyond the Screen, the Stars

• "Social pressures to have a smartphone, to be connected and reachable at all moments, push us into an ultimatum: adapt or be left behind. ... How do we want to connect with the people we care about? With strangers? What type of relationships do we want to nurture? These considerations are paved right over with fear and threats – you’ll lose all connection, you’ll lose touch with what’s going on, you’ll become irrelevant – a parasitic and relational blackmail. We are denied even the dignified option of solitude, which in the digital world is rewritten as isolation, loneliness, depression, irrelevance."
• "Their words also raise the problem of the faultlines formed between those who refuse this enclosure on an individual level, possibly along with their close comrade...

Tony Howard Arias, Post Games(?) (can't remember), 4/15/2026

• Lecturing or starting from a conclusion [isn't] an effective way to have a dialogue [with an audience].

Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley, Post Games, 4/15/2026

• Leaving the experience [of a piece or game] with a story or "I" statement

Meredith Gran's game dev playthrough of Perfect Tides, 2/9/2026

• Video games are a way to share embodied experience of what it was like to be alive/use technology at a certain time
• Mechanics serve theme/plot, e.g. point and click mirrors awkwardness of navigating the world(!)

games and game design

• Game designers usually don’t tell us exactly what to do. They aren’t like novelists, who fix every action of every character. Game designers work a step back. They shape the general contours of our action, but not the precise details. They give us motivations and abilities, and an environment full of obstacles to face—but then set us free to act, to figure out how to achieve those goals. Our actions are still our own.
• Scoring systems can be used to explore alternate selves. Games are a library of agency.
• This is the incredible part of games: Whatever feeling you want, whatever kind of absorption or intensity you desire, whatever level of difficulty works for you at that moment, you can find it. Games offer you the freedom to sculpt the world, the tasks, and the goal to give you whatever...