Not E3 2025: Day of the Devs

It's weird that since E3 died, the number of video games revealed every summer has increased rather than decreased. Once, not that long ago, the only conferences were hosted by Microsoft, Nintendo, Sony, EA, and Ubisoft. One person with a few disposable hours could see every announcement, on-stage demo, and awkward crowd interaction for that expo. Now, we have shows from Microsoft, Sony, Bethesda, the Summer Game Fest, Day of the Devs, Wholesome Direct, Devolver Direct, the PC Gaming Show, Black Voices in Gaming, the MIX Summer Game Showcase, the Green Games Showcase, the Women-Led Games Showcase, the Latin American Games Showcase, Frosty Game Fest, the South Asian Games Showcase, the IOI Showcase, and the Death Stranding 2 Premiere.

As a physical marketplace, E3 extolled its wares through its booths as much as its livestreams. When those marquees and demo stations were nixed, every developer went online, and the internet was soon fit to burst with trailers. Just as you can't visit every booth at an expo, you can't watch every Summer Game Fest showcase. Even I, who am terminally online, have not been able to compile the interesting bits of every sideshow on this page. Not E3 has defeated me, and all I can do is to show you the things of what I think are cool of those briefings that I saw and not the others. What's next?

Day of the Devs

I know this isn't the point of Day of the Devs, but Tim Schafer is persistently likeable. He is video games' cool Dad, someone who appears effortlessly confident in the chicks tucked under his wing. The standout game at Day of the Devs has gotta be Big Walk. Its pitch was equal parts polite and comical, triggering memories of rib-tickling Australian comedy for me, like the Boonta Vista podcast and the first season of Smiling Friends.

Time was that multiplayer tournaments saw hunting down the enemy or securing all the points as the topic of their play, and voice chat was a utility for coordinating around that objective. More recently, multiplayer parties like Amogus and Phasmophobia started thinking about how you could modify play and atmosphere by warping mic output or limiting the use of vocal communication. Big Walk is likely inspired by "walkabouts", the mythical meanderings of Indigenous Australians, but the openness of Big Walk's island and the dispersion of puzzles across it are also reminiscent of Myst and The Witness.

In Big Walk, information exchange is, too, part of the gameplay. Therefore, its systems recognise that that exchange can be modified and recontextualised to create new challenges, the same as any other gameplay element. Struggling to imply and infer in and from non-verbal communication can be an adhesive bonding experience. You can also see speech viscerally register on the faces of Big Walk's drinking birds, much like you can in R.E.P.O. In Goose Goose's game, text chatting looks like it hurts. We talk about games as if they've entirely packaged experiences, but many of today's most popular indies are platforms on which to build social experiences. Big Walk could be the next great stage.

Like a trusty boomerang, Sword of the Sea returned to us. The Off-Keighley shows are hostels for games that can't lodge at the big hotels. They are, further, observatories that give us longer looks at games that flash by elsewhere. The Xbox and PlayStation shows are brutally selective, and the Summer Game Fest keynote charges studios by the minute. So yeah, even if you've seen Sword of the Sea before, why not get an extra helping at Mr. Schafer's house? Both this new sandboarder and Matt Nava's virtual aquarium, ABZÛ, are united by his natural expeditions. Giant Squid's ocean was derived from deep sea diving, while Sword of the Sea, we can track back to Nava's snowboarding.

We often try to make sense of contemporary media by partitioning it into decades, but the fashions of film and music don't fit neatly into ten-year brackets. For example, what a lot of people call "80s music" didn't exist in the very early 80s and did continue into the 90s. That gives Mixtape a strong basis for accompaniment that straddles decades. It's a blast to see an indie game that has been able to license a soundtrack to put most AAAs to shame. Yet, the artistic frameyness that this and a few other games have adopted this year leaves me disoriented.

Please, Watch the Artwork has a fascinating background. Many art movements got their start when iconoclasts wrote a set of rules that became their heading. The futurist, stuckist, and surrealist movements all had manifestos for spark plugs. In 2016, the Italian game developer and doctor of Interactive Design, Pietro Righi Riva, published his thesis, Rejecta. For the full blueprint Riva laid out, you'll just have to click the link, but he has ten main commandments:

1. The game must flow like a river, time must exist beyond player's action.
2. Setting must be strictly instrumental to content and meaning.
3. Source material and collaborations must be found outside of games and related subcultures.
4. No game should last more than two hours.
5. No game should take more than six months to produce.
6. Human condition must be the topic, genre games are not acceptable.
7. All video game tradition in form, style, and content must be rejected.
8. Acting and performance must be central assets and affecting gameplay.
9. The results of the game's design must be uncertain, only unanswered questions must be asked.
10. The game must be socially accessible, aim for minimum sustainable price, maximum reach.

In 2017, Belgian developer Thomas Waterzooi founded Studio Waterzooi on the tenets of the Rejecta manifesto. Both Riva and Waterzooi are seeking attention from art devotees outside of gaming. That explains Waterzooi's Please, Touch the Artwork, and now, Please, Watch the Artwork. They are hybridisations of the anomaly detection in games like I'm On Observation Duty and the painting authentication in Animal Crossing. Part of me worries that PDTTA runs into the ol' Citizen Kane of video games misconception, trying to attract fans of other esteemed media by imitating it rather than blazing a trail of its own. All the same, "weird horror modern art game" is right in my wheelhouse.

I love the idea that as you become more corrupted in Blighted, you can see evils you couldn't before. There was a similar twist in the Dead Space 3 co-op where one player would hallucinate horrors that the other wouldn't. When the delusional player commented on or reacted to these sightings, they would appear mad to the other.

Here are a few quick-fire thoughts:

• It threw me for a loop to hear Warren Spector introduced as the creator of Epic Mickey. I have not heard anyone talk about Epic Mickey in years.
• Delightful to hear someone say in a casual voice, "Hello, I am Mortis Ghost".
• Very strong use of large, homogenous fields of colour in the backgrounds of OFF. It gives the game the feel of an art class scrapbook.
• Tireboy is the closest thing we have to a video game version of the film Rubber.
• "No gobblin'" has gotta be the setup to some sort of rude joke.
• I am sincerely impressed by the bravery of an African studio making a game about stealing artefacts that sit in the possession of real western museums and collectors.

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In the interest of making these blogs manageable for both of us, I'm going to cut this one here. Next time, I'll be talking the PC Gaming Show, the Latin American Games Showcase, and more. For the time being, Warren Spector remains at large and is believed dangerous. Thanks for reading.