Bombin' the A.M. With Vlambeer's Rami Ismail

Really, really enjoyed this episode. Rami is always a great pleasure to listen to.

@duxa: Perhaps you misheard him saying 16? Which is what I heard and is a fairly normal temperature for the Netherlands this time of year.

I think it's OK for a show to change its format once in awhile. It keeps the show from becoming stale and predictable like so many other video/radio shows.

When did gaming get so serious? Sometimes I feel people use them as a soapbox for their own personal agenda on impressionable youth, I'm still just interested in Mario and Zelda myself.

@ptys: Those games you like still exist. Just because people are creating things that are more serious or have a message does not mean Mario and Zelda are going away. Games are just getting bigger and maturing as a medium. It is a good thing and will only lead to more games. Jeff put it very succinctly in the talk he did at NYU which is worth a watch.

More of a Dumptruck than a Bombin' the AM, but still a super interesting listen!

Awesome show!

Rami is rad

Exactly. Last time I checked, they just released a new Zelda and Mario last year, and also Gone Home came out. They didn't cancel each other out.

My original point was about how indie developers make everything so "life and death". I'm a gamer who wants to chill and escape. Seems like every time I hear a new developer talking about the industry they have a little violinist sitting on their shoulder, lighten up guys games are about fun!!

When he talked about people being surprised by the amount of coding and hard work it takes to make a game, I remembered my job as a software engineer writing business/IT software. Writing good, optimized, safe and stable multi-threaded source code is very, VERY hard. It takes years and years of study, experience and hard work to get good at it, and even then you make mistakes, because of the sheer amount of code and the complexity of it.

Gamers, reviewers and game critics should all try and write some simple code to really see what it takes, to even build a simple program, let alone make a game that is fun to play and feels good. Maybe that knowledge would then translate into more thoughtful reviews.

each one is a new Vlambeer game. WHAT NOW HUH??????

To be fair, anytime someone has Arabic stuff in a positive light I've only ever heard of Muslism people protesting for it to be taken down or the content cut out.

Really wanted to hear what Rami has to say but the audio on the video made it impossible. Is there anyway to fix it?

Sometimes the video just stops, sometimes I get no audio, sometimes I get audio and a black screen...but that didn't stop me from watching the whole thing.

Rami is really interesting to listen to and this guy (and his game Luftrausers) keeps growing on me. Great show.

Shout out to the Netherlands.

God dammit. I was really looking forward this episode and the audio is all kinds of fucked up for me. Really glad for the podcast alternative right now.

How does a a half Egyptian, half Dutch guy end up having precisely the same accent as Bob Geldof?

Another great BtAM episode and Rami is certainly an interesting fellow and I enjoyed listening to what he had to say.

Rami is one smart dude, and very articulate. Great episode!

The talk about Arabic and Farsi reminded me of the comedian Kumail Nanjiani. He has jokes about Call Of Duty and how there was a level in Karachi, Pakistan his home city and how the signs are in the wrong language. He says they spend years and millions of dollars making these games and all they had to do was Google "Pakistan language" and they couldn't even do that lol.

Really liked this one, pretty interesting stuff from Rami, i don´t mind having one of those from time to time, it would be great to have a tone control with rami

I think he had his Celcius wrong. A horse with a body temp of 100 degrees celcius would be toast unless I'm missing something?

@wavioli: Thanks for the information, I was curious if there were many developers in Ireland. I'll give them all a look. I'm hoping that after college, I'll have enough experience to give development a go myself but who knows how things will turn out.

You are making it sound as if people taking stuff seriously and you enjoying a fun game are at odds with each other. They are not mutually exclusive. You can enjoy the shit out of, say, Ridiculous Fishing or Luftrausers without having to hear what Rami has to say about them and their development. The fun games you want are still there, but it is you, in the end, who decides whether to listen to these people or not.

As whether "games are about fun", well, that's debatable. Sure, for the end-user (i.e. the play), games are most of the time about fun. That doesn't mean that developing them is also fun... especially not when you're indie.

I've had this issue with a couple vids on the site this past week or two. Not much of an issue for something like this where the important bits are the audio, but in a QL it's a pain. :\

I just listened to this... and regarding to Rami's talk about having correct Language in games, I somehow agree. I am a Persian, and can somehow read/write Arabic. Since I have joined COD development (in the art side) I have been one of the prominent guys in the studio who actually has been making conscious effort to have correct translation/lettering, otherwise, not many people care. and that is the crazy part to me. Even though there are all these big organizations and every piece of signage in the game goes through a legal department to make sure there is no copyright violation, yet no one pays some random guy from the street who speak the language of the game to come and double check the spelling/translations!

Sometimes it comes back to the fact that there are people in that studio present who know about the culture/language.

Another example I could say is a simple thing such as a mosque. probably 99% of people have no idea that when a mosque has 1 minaret, it belongs to Sunni Muslims (aka. Saudi Arabia, Lebanon region) and when it is 2 minarets, it belongs to Shia Muslims.(aka Iran and Iraq) and I had to explain this to people in the studio to have correct representation.

One of the worst offenders in my recent memory was in Battlefield 3, as they go to Tehran, and they have done a literal translation for the word "child Care" for one of the local signage which would translate to "penis"!! Go figure!

Then why are you listening to interviews in which you learn the personal stories behind games? :)

What you're talking about underscores a real problem in the industry. Yes, many games are about fun, but the stories behind how that fun is made isn't always so pretty. You're free to be ignorant about the development process, but the larger ignorance about game development contributes to a culture where we don't even understand the creative process behind what we love. Knowing there was blood, sweat, and tears shed in making something I appreciate lets me appreciate it more.

Precisely. The process of making a game is part (or the whole) of a career, and careers are, to put it your way, @ptys, "life and death". Disneyland is a lot of fun, but learning about the trials and tribulations Walt and crew underwent in order for it to be what it is today will put a damper on your spirit if you choose to see Disneyland - or, in this case, a game - as the struggle itself, and not the product of triumphing over that struggle.

The game industry has evolved in the same way in which the movie industry has evolved, in that its consumers are now just as interested in following the production of the product as they are interested in the product itself (the existence of sites like this are evidence of this fact). While I understand your point, which is that looking behind the curtain can ruin the magic, perhaps you ought to choose to not peek.

Really enjoyable episode. Rami has some super interesting insights to the industry, and it's always good to have a guest share their viewpoints. Not to say I don't enjoy it when it's just the two of you - those episodes are also entertaining and informative!

I watch alot of content on the site so there's always the misconception that "I don't understand". It's just so exhausting to hear another indie talk about how hard it is and that big games are bad. I really enjoyed Rami's points on the GDC livestream, you guys did a good job staring him in the right direction, but I had to turn it off half way through just not what I'm looking for.

Rami is such a friggin' boss. Fantastic insight. One of my favorite personalities in game development. He should be a regular, if he weren't so busy all the time.

Rami always has such level headed and well reasoned views on things. Probably the best B'tAM guest yet.

The focus on the thinking side of games is mostly half-baked nonsense, and I include much of what I read from devs, but this was the single most interesting and critical examination of games as expression I can remember seeing. The values and logic the guy grounds what he does in are so much more intrinsically meaningful than the fluff "serious" material that's out there

I think game criticism is getting exponentially better, and I'm sure there are many equally principled developers out there who just aren't as charismatically blessed as Rami, but for the most part, people try too hard and miss the point.

Everything is focused either on the societal effect/cultural impact games create (ignoring the games themselves) or the user's relationship with a game (again, viewing the game as a cause instead of possessing intrinsic values). Many articles I've read explaining the source of game's theme or tone by the creator don 't even bother going skin deep analytically into meaning beyond "this happened."

And to the three people who complained about the interview, Seriously get bent. Not because you don't want to deconstruct Vlambeer's design philosophy (your values pertaining to games are just as legitimate as anybody's), but because you'd rather the discussion didn't exist (even though you lose nothing if it takes place).

Great work, and get him back ASAP.

Very interesting. My personal favourite guest so far on this show. As Alex mentioned, it was really interesting to hear about the emotional state of the developers that inspired Luftrausers.

This was a fantastic interview; I know so little about gaming in the parts of the world he was discussing, and hearing him talk about actual development was equally interesting.

"Ignorant" isn't a very good way to put it. Not caring about the development behind a game isn't necessarily something to be frowned upon, and a culture where we don't think about the creative process behind what we love also doesn't strike me as inherently negative. I think it's better that coverage, at least here, is significantly embracing more developer exposure, but that doesn't make the opposite problematic.

Suggesting people who don't want to hear about that stuff just not listen is a bit of a horse before the cart situation, at least in this case where not being receptive to a particular sort of discussion doesn't necessarily translate to not caring about all development discussions.

I also find these personal stories enriching, whatever the mood, but I understand how the serious tone they can to turn to could be off-putting to some.

Anyways, wonderful interview. Rami seems like the kind of interviewee you can ask a question and let him go off for a while, which is great.

This was an amazing conversation to watch! Thanks, guys!

Rami is a frighteningly smart dude. That guy knows a ton about making games, and better yet, he's extremely talented when it comes to both the business aspects of making games and the communicative aspects of both the development and business. Plus, he helped make a game where I shot fish with a machine gun. He's pretty much the best.

@patrickklepek Why no podcast for friday's? :/

This is Rami's flight site if anyone is curious.

He seems like a smart and sensible part of the community and it was nice to hear his perspectives in relation to culture bias in video games (I think movies and books might be more progressive because they are older mediums).

Hey @patrickklepek, not trying to be a hater, but I think the criticism I wrote below could legitimately make this show even better if you were a little more mindful of it:

Super late to this discussion, but hey, I'm behind.

My problem with this is that while the Interview Dumptrucks are just raw dumps of an audio interview (and that's fine), Bombin' the A.M. is more of a legit podcast/news show/conversation thing, with Patrick and Alex. I wish Patrick would keep it in talk show mode, instead of going full interview mode.

Because when they actually have a talkative guest on like Rami (who was fascinating to listen to, granted), Patrick goes into Interview mode, where sometimes he does this thing where he will respond for 15-20 seconds at a time, but he says "It sounds like-" and then proceeds to just rephrase everything the guest just said. While I guess that's a useful jouranlism skill for when you're strictly doing interviews and you want to make sure you've understood what your subject has said (and I'm fine with it being in the unedited Dumptrucks), it's kind of irritating in any other circumstance. Example:

[About 12 minutes in, Rami talks about Iranian dude with his game, and how the dude is so far removed from the American/European indie games scene, PayPal isn't an option in Iran, etc.]

Patrick: "It seems like, a little bit of what you're touching on, is the fact that a lot of the discourse, a lot of when we share lessons in game development and game publishing, or you know, talking to folks like myself in the press, it is very Western-centric, so a lot of the lessons and a lot of the discussion happens around enabling people that are from those areas of the world where they can participate in those systems, and it seems like something you've seen a number of times throughout your travels, is that there a lot of people that fall through the cracks, where none of this applies to them. And while, you know, Steam has- things like being on the front page of Steam has been your shot at glory for a lot of folks, that's not even an option for someone working out of Iran."

Sure, I could've added a few more periods to make that more readable, but that would also be charity; Patrick really did say it as that crazy of a run-on sentence. While I understand that Brad still gets nervous in front of the camera and in front of large crowds, I feel like Patrick should be better than this? He's an old hand at interviews and says he doesn't formally prepare questions like he used to in the old days and feels comfortable winging it. But when I see sentences like what I just quoted: A) It's like he's never thinking more than about 3 words in advance so he constructs these elaborate run-on sentences, and B) YEAH DAWG, I know that's a summary of everything Rami just said, thanks, I was listening too. I caught the message the first time. Or even if Rami didn't directly say them, after Rami finished speaking, I feel like it goes without saying that obviously these are issues you don't see written about much in Western games press, and obviously guy in Iran is soooo far removed from being able to have his game on the front page of Steam. Anyone deep enough into gaming to be listening to this podcast kinda auto-deduced both of those points.

I feel like that whole section I quoted could've easily been one simple sentence like "It's good that you're out there talking to those people, because unfortunately many of the discussions at GDC or in the games press are nearsighted, in the sense that they're only addressing issues relevant to Western indie devs." DONE. In like, a quarter of the word count.

It feels like Patrick is filling dead air at times, and I think he needs a better strategy when he just wants to have a neutral response to something interesting a guest said. I'm singling out this one section, but this restating of what a guest just said happens pretty frequently. So like, go watch late night talk shows, take note of how they keep the discussion moving and the host doesn't ramble on restating what has already been said. If you restate what your guest is saying while on a live talk show, either A) you think your audience is dumb and needs to hear something twice for it to sink in, or B) you think you can say it better than your guest did. Either way: not great!

Instead, ask them to share more, or challenge them on some opinion if you disagree, or do a small bit of research about them so you have another topic to transition to, or SOMETHING, but it's just really poor form to ramble on for 40 seconds while saying nothing that hasn't just been said or very obviously implied.