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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Last year was an important one for the gaming world. It was a year ago this week that The Last of Us, the TV series, debuted, the Pedro Pascal-led post-apocalyptic show about a killer fungus marked the first time a prestige network released a project based on a video game. Then after production deadlines got pushed back due to pandemic, 2023 saw the release of several long-awaited big studio games, including a new Final Fantasy, the Space Exploration Game, Starfield, and a Resident Evil remake, among several others.

There are many different genres, something for everybody, adventure games, horror games. There are types of gameplay like crafting games. There are different game mechanics like point-and-click or button mashing, run and gun, boss fights.

Listeners, we're talking about the best video games of 2023 and what you're looking forward to in 2024. Give us a call with your favorite console game, PC game, handheld game, casual cell phone game, or any other video games you might want to shout out. Phone lines are open, 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC, or maybe you have a question about deciding what console or what game to get for one of the kids in your life, for kids of all ages, we should say, anything else you want to know about the video game landscape. Our phone lines are open. 212-433-9692, 212-433-WNYC is where you can call in and join us on air or text us. Also, our social media is available @allofitwnyc.

Joining us now to help take some of those questions, and please welcome, Harold Goldberg, founder of the New York Video Games Critic Circle, author of All Your Base Are Belong to Us: How Fifty Years of Videogames Conquered Pop Culture. Welcome, Harold.

Harold Goldberg: Hey, thanks, Alison.

Alison Stewart: I want to mention Harold's organization. The New York Video Game Critic Circle will be holding its annual New York Game Awards presentation next Tuesday, January 23rd at the SVA Theater. The Critic Circle is a nonprofit that aims to teach kids journalism, criticism, and writing skills by centering their writing around video games, which brings me to our next guest, Kimari Rennis, who first participated in the Critic Circle programs when she was 14 and has stuck with it and is now at NYU studying game design. Kimari, welcome to the studio as well.

Kimari Rennis: Oh, it's lovely to be here.

Alison Stewart: Let's start with an easy one. Harold, what was the first video game you remember playing that you couldn't put down?

Harold Goldberg: Wow. I am a bit older. There was a Donkey Kong-type game and it was based with Popeye. That's really the first one that I remember playing. Possibly also a handheld football game that RadioShack made that my mom got me.

Alison Stewart: The Shack, what a throwback?

Harold Goldberg: Way back.

Alison Stewart: Kimari, what was the video game that you just really couldn't put down that just really captured?

Kimari Rennis: There were so many games that I just couldn't put down. I would say maybe the most recent one would be Cyberpunk 2077.

Alison Stewart: All right. Tell me a little bit about Cyberpunk 2027.

Kimari Rennis: Wow. As the name suggests, it's set in the year 2077, but there's been so many technological advancements. Everyone has operating systems in their head, eyes that they can swap out for different eyes with different brands. You can swap out parts of your body parts with different ones, be it combat or utility-focused. It's this action RPG, with just so much to do and it's action-packed. It's thrilling. It's amazing.

Alison Stewart: I'm in. That was quite a description. Harold, your video game writing and critique can be found in your 2011 book, All Your Base Are Belong To Us. That's also a throwback. How did you get from there to founding the New York Video Game Critic Circle?

Harold Goldberg: When the book came out, it made a small splash. I'd become known for writing that book. I had some offers from game companies to come and write narratives for them. I had done some of that already with Sony Online Entertainment as editor-in-chief there. Then there was interest as a documentary, and I remember Guillermo del Toro saying, Hollywood is the land of the long no. I said maybe I could do this down the line, but what I really thought we needed was a diverse group of critics to advocate for themselves here in New York City. We did that.

The first meeting was on the Lower East Side in a hotel lobby with a young Black man named Evan Narcisse, who ended up writing the Spider-Man: Miles Morales video game, which was quite-- Then also Tracy John, who's at Netflix games now, and Andrew Yon, who was a critic turned game maker who passed. We name our Legend Award after Andrew. It was a diverse group from the get-go.

A couple of years after that, we heard from our friend, Catherine Soros, who said, "Why don't you go up to the Bronx and help these kids with their college essays?" My partner, Helen, and I went up there. One young man said to me, "I feel really out of place at this school. No one really pays attention to me, so will that happen if I go to college?" I said, "No, you find your own people in college." I was quite moved by that.

When I got back downtown, I said to our critics, I think we should just take our collective knowledge of writing and journalism uptown to the Bronx and begin to teach there. Kimari was actually in the first after-school class we ever taught. She's been with us since the age of 14. I think her first review was of Plants Versus Zombies.

Kimari Rennis: I love that game.

Alison Stewart: Now you're studying game design at NYU. What questions do designers have to consider about when designing a game that maybe wouldn't occur to the average human?

Kimari Rennis: Oh, wow. A lot of people play video games and they mainly just pick it up. You're given a tutorial, you're learning how to play, but there are so many design factors that go into that, such as figuring out the control scheme that you want to give to players so that they feel comfortable and that it's easy to pick up. You need to know how to frame the setting so that you're giving visual cues that other people won't be able to pick up on, but it guides the player to what they need to do.

There's a lot of studying that you need to do on cinematics-level design. You need to know how to do UI design, narrative design. There's so much that goes into making a concise experience for players. I love learning about all of that.

Alison Stewart: Let's hear from a young player. Wyatt is in a car with his mom. Wyatt, how old are you?

Wyatt: Seven years old.

Alison Stewart: All right. Wyatt, tell me what game you like to play.

Wyatt: Fortnite.

Alison Stewart: Why do you like to play Fortnite?

Wyatt: Because you can play with your friends and it's really fun.

Alison Stewart: Though it's two great reasons, you can play with your friends and it's really fun. Let's talk to Benjamin from Livingston, New Jersey. Thank you, Wyatt, by the way. Benjamin from Livingston, thanks for calling in.

Benjamin: Hello, I'm Ben.

Alison Stewart: Hey, Ben.

Benjamin: A game that I want to recommend to everybody play is on the VR, the Oculus. It's the Resident Evil Four remake. It's a very good game, and I recommend it to everybody who has an Oculus.

Kimari Rennis: That's a really good one.

Harold Goldberg: It's a good one.

Alison Stewart: How is VR technology change progressing at this point?

Harold Goldberg: It's getting a lot more detailed as far as the visual experience goes. I like VR. I'm one of those people who gets a little dizzy when playing it. The game the listener mentions is one of the best of the Resident Evil series. I remember playing it when it first came out I think in the late 1990s. I was gobsmacked at how good the graphics were for it and how good the story was.

I think that around the year 2000, Alison, narrative got really good in video games. There was Dan Hauser at Rockstar Games writing Grand Theft Auto, Amy Hennig who created the Uncharted series, which is a really deep narrative experience, and I think Ken Levine, who made this game called Bioshock, and they were all just really inspired by current literature and literature of the past. That's why I stuck with it because the stories are so good.

Alison Stewart: One of the things it says on your website, Harold, is the goal is to build pathways into careers and games journalism and narrative design. That's what you mentioned. You are taking your skills up to the Bronx and helping out young people with their writing skills, with their journalism skills. Can you connect the dots for somebody who's thinking, how do you go from video games to teaching journalism skills? What's one of the ways? What are the stepping stones across that bridge?

Harold Goldberg: It's interesting because a lot of folks think that you really need an engineering degree of some sort to work in the game industry. We teach kids how to write a basic review. Before writing about games, I was a music critic and a film critic. We have a Journalism 101 class that we teach after school that runs for 10 to 12 weeks. During that time, we teach kids how to write, and then they can become paid interns with us. Like Kimari who's been with us I think seven years now.

Kimari Rennis: Seven years.

Alison Stewart: Wow.

Harold Goldberg: Kimari is ready to write for anyone at this point if she chooses. Then we also have them write game narratives. In our classes, whether it's in Brooklyn, lower Eastside, or the Bronx, we say, "Well, think about the game you want to make, and just write about it. Here are the guides from some old-school games like Doom," which was I think the first first-person shooter.

The lead character which you never saw because it was a first-person perspective, that was the first person of color who starred in a video game Doom. We show them that particular design document, and then they can look at current design documents, and then they will create a narrative. We actually taught a class in playwriting at one of our schools, and that worked out really well too. Everyone wrote a one-act play featuring video games and people of color.

Alison Stewart: Harold Goldberg is the founder of The New York Video Game Critic Circle, and Kimari Rennis has been a participant with the group since she is 14, now studying video game designs at NYU. We're talking about some of the best video games of 2023 in the world of gaming. Let me read off some texts real quick. "Big fan of Nintendo Switch Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom is quite amazing, and I just started farming games Stardew Valley." Someone wrote, "Passage is the most profound game ever from 2007, and Baldur's Gate 3 is the best game from 2023. Great story and replayability."

Kimari Rennis: I have to agree with that.

Alison Stewart: All right. We're coming to you next. Tell me your thoughts about what our listeners have texted in.

Kimari Rennis: I love how everyone here has such good taste. [laughter]

Alison Stewart: What were some of the standout games for you last year?

Kimari Rennis: Oh, wow. Last year?

Alison Stewart: Or recently.

Harold Goldberg: You just reviewed Baldur's Gate, right?

Kimari Rennis: Yes. I'm so glad I got to review that game. At first, I didn't like it because it was a genre I had never played before, so it was pretty frustrating getting used to the new controls and the mechanics. Then my friend realized that I would play for hours at a time and would question, "Hey, are you sure you don't like this game?" It's so funny. I put this screenshot in my review. I'm sure Harold saw it. I was streaming Baldur's Gate to my friend trying to figure out the controls, go through the wonderful story. My friend took a screenshot that said I had played for 11 hours straight. That's when I realized I like this game a lot.

Harold Goldberg: Despite it being frustrating.

Kimari Rennis: I got used to the frustration. That's part of the fun of the game. Yes, I love Baldur's Gate. I think I'm about 100 hours in now, where in hour 1, I wanted to stop playing altogether.

Alison Stewart: Harold, I understand that a lot of the games last year were heavily story-based. When you're thinking about story-based games, what's your understanding of what makes a story particularly good for a video game?

Harold Goldberg: For a video game, you need an immersion and interactivity because you're going to-- with a lot of games, particularly Baldur's Gate, and Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, you're going to spend a lot of time with them. The story has to be compelling all the way through. Comparing a video game script to a movie script, movie script to say 90 pages, a video game script can be 5, 6, 700 pages. The best books are things that I eventually dream about them. In the same thing with the best games, I tend to have a good dream or two about the game I'm playing because you're immersed in it for so long.

Alison Stewart: One of the categories for the awards is best hidden gem. What's the criteria for best hidden gem?

Harold Goldberg: It's an Indie game that is so Indie, people may not have heard of it. There are a number of very small games that are in that category that we want to highlight as something people should play. We'll be giving that the Hidden Gem Award on Tuesday at SVA Theatre.

Alison Stewart: When you mentioned Indie, it's like the film industry, they are Indie producers, and then there are the giant big producers like Nintendo, of course. Kimari, what can studios do better than Indie designers and vice versa?

Kimari Rennis: Oh, wow. There are benefits and drawbacks to each. Triple A Studios have a lot of funds to really make groundbreaking narrative and cinematic visuals, trying to get as close to real life as possible. You've seen that with games like The Last of Us Part II, God of War, where it really captures you with how real and gripping it is. However, where Indie games really shine and what really draws me to them is they put a lot more that scrappy passion into their work.

You have a group of 10 to 50 people coming up with wonderful ideas, putting them together, and making really fun experiences that are way more accessible than the $70, $80 games that are put out in the market. Everyone just has a dream to-- Everyone has a place in the games industry, and I think that's a beautiful ecosystem to have.

Alison Stewart: Scrappy passion. I think I'm just going to write that down and put it up on my desk.

Harold Goldberg: Exactly.

Alison Stewart: I'm saying something now that is not a secret that the gaming world can be sexist. What has been your experience as a young woman of color in this industry, in the space?

Kimari Rennis: I remember back when I was 14, I think I played GTA online on the Xbox 360. Loved it. There was this one time that I foolishly got on the microphone system, and I asked someone where the military base was so I could steal a plane. I was just met with some of the most horrendous comments ever. It was very jarring.

Alison Stewart: I'm sorry, and I'm mad about that post.

Kimari Rennis: I didn't understand it at the time, but I think it's very unfortunate that-- I don't know if that is still the case, especially since I play single-player games now. If I do play a multiplayer game, the mic is off unless I'm with a group of friends that I know and trust. It's very weird how that being anonymous can really make people just say whatever they want to anyone.

Alison Stewart: Thank you for answering that honestly. I really appreciate it. Harold, in our last moments, what do you want people to understand about video games for people who this is maybe not their wheelhouse?

Harold Goldberg: I always look at narrative in whatever piece of media I'm consuming. I think if you like a good story, there is a genre in video games for you, like The Last of Us Part II and I are really story-heavy games. You don't have to play the game to enjoy the great HBO series. Then just as a side, we have the creator of The Last of Us, Neil Druckmann as our Legend Award winner-

Alison Stewart: Oh, great.

Harold Goldberg: -at the New York Game Awards on Tuesday night. If you go to nygamecritics.com, you can see how to get a ticket for that. I've always loved narrative, and that's why I stick with writing about games.

Alison Stewart: Well, thank you for the work you do, and thank you so much for being here, and have a great award ceremony. Kimari, it was so nice to meet you. Thank you for coming to the studio.

Kimari Rennis: Thank you for having me on.

Alison Stewart: My guests have been Harold Goldberg, founder of The New York Video Game Critics Circle, and Kimari Rennis who is studying Video Game Design at NYU. Hey, there's more All Of It on the way. Ava DuVernay's award-winning work includes 13th, Selma, and When They See Us. Her latest film, Origin, is New York Times Critic's Pick. We've been receiving praise for her work. DuVernay and actor Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor, join us right after the news.

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