Toy 01 · Live

Pause Menu

"I play. I pause. I tell you why it works."

Every other week · ~75 min session

A livestream that doubles as a podcast. I play a game, new or old, and hit pause whenever something's worth deconstructing. The VOD gets cut into a podcast episode and short clips.

Surface vibeHanging out while a game veteran plays, groans at a tutorial, and cheers a great hit-stop.
Profound layerWatching how an expert spots the moment a player decides to quit, and why it happened.

Season 0: the talks

Before the first recorded stream, two spoken-word pieces stand in. Season 1 starts when three sessions are in the can.

Episode 00 · Pilot · a conference talk, not a stream · 2026-09-30 · 26 min

Games are spreadsheets. UX is what makes you forget.

A 25-minute walk through 25 years: why legacy UI is fine until it isn't, the bucket test on Crimson Skies, brick-for-wheat on Catan, why I never say tutorial, and the one thing I'll say about AI. Recorded live at a game dev conference. Season 1 proper starts when the first stream is recorded.

Timestamps
  1. 0:00Juries, DNA evidence, and how I accidentally found UX
  2. 3:30Games are spreadsheets. Your job is to make nobody notice.
  3. 5:00Legacy UI: Diablo in 1996, Diablo in 2016, Baldur's Gate 3 and the arrows problem
  4. 9:00Don't copy the farm: Hay Day vs. the dragon game
  5. 11:30Why I banned the word tutorial in 2001
  6. 13:00Crimson Skies: the bucket test, hot-swapped feel, Capture the Chicken
  7. 17:00Catan: brick for wheat, loaded dice, and the AI that trades it back
  8. 21:00World 1-1, sound you can play blind, and why your engineers are UX
  9. 22:30AI doesn't have taste. Who does?
  10. 25:00The question I leave you with
The pauses
Pause · Baldur's Gate 3

All I wanted was to give my arrows to my archer. The party paper-doll pattern breaks the moment there are four of you.

Pause · Catan (XBLA)

Every arrow and label we drew made the trade screen worse. The fix was a kinder opponent, not a clearer screen.

Pause · Super Mario Bros., World 1-1

The goomba walks at you. Two buttons. You learn to jump because you're curious, not because a box told you to.

Recording: with the conference organizers, link when it's posted

Episode G1 · Guest appearance · 2026-08-15 · Guest segment

Player 2 Podcast: vultures, taste, and why clients show up earlier now

A guest turn on the Player 2 Podcast with Rad Stolovich and Dave Liry. Topics that stuck: why a UX studio does better when the industry is struggling, what changed when clients started showing up before they had a build, and the honest version of the AI prototyping question.

Timestamps
  1. Sanding off the sucky parts: what game UX actually is
  2. Clients show up earlier now. Why that's new and what it costs them.
  3. AI for UI prototyping: where it helps, where it has no taste
  4. Show versus tell with overseas teams
  5. Game of the week
The pauses

No pause cards for this one.

Episode link coming from the hosts

Co-op variant: Two-Player Pause

PlaceholderPlaceholder. We both get a pause button. Whoever hits it has to say why, in one breath. Then the other one gets to say whether they'd have paused there.

This week on Pause Menu: a guest Stacker and I play the first hour of a game neither of us has touched. House rule: you pause, you explain. Score at the end is who paused on the thing that actually matters.

Get new episodes

Newsletter provider not chosen yet. Nothing is collected.