I literally clicked this video because i knew who Bennett Foddy was thanks to Getting over it... So it really does humanize the game devs in a special way and makes the users care about the devs.

Have the "A game by X" subtitle, but pick a random team member every time you show the title screen. You could also build the credit scroll to show names in random order.

Whatever my next game is called, I'm gonna add "With Bennett Foddy" on the end.

insert clips of Markiplier screaming Foddy's name, damning him to every hell imaginable, lol

A great talk Bennett and Zach. Love the message and the acts of humanity. A comment by Tony Jose.

Zach's drawing a parallel to art is very pertinent. I'm not a painter, but in my line of trade it's just as expected that you put your actual name on your works. I'm a composer. Yet even so, the first time I signed a work of mine with my actual name it felt horrible and selfish and wrong. Boy, did it feel wrong. So if that's the main (or maybe indeed only) thing that's holding you back, I can totally relate. And the best piece of advice I can give from personal experience is: just start doing it. And then just continue doing it. In the long run, you'll be thanking yourself that you did. And in the short run, the most worstest thing that can possibly happen is that nobody will notice or care. Remember, nobody cares about your name as much as you do. To them it's just a label. To them it's of no consequence whether the title screen of your game, or the title page of your symphony, or the cover of your book says "Zach Gage" or "Dog House, Ltd". It does not matter. But if it doesn't matter, then just go ahead and make it _not_ say "Dog House, Ltd". Make it say "Zach Gage" alright. Seeing your name in plain text anywhere is always strange the first couple times. Or the first hundred times. That's normal. But you cannot get used to something that you never do. You can only get used to something that you keep doing. So start today. Godspeed. (Again, I am talking purely about the shyness side of things here. You can have a ton of other factors at play, as is well covered by the video above. But if anything that's one reason _less_ to add your shyness to the pile of concerns you have to juggle.)

One of the best GDC talks I've seen. Emotional and representative. Understanding the human connection in being in the game you made and bonding somehow with the people who play it is one of the most important steps now for game devs. Thanks for it all

Hey Zach, just for the record, I thought that painting was pretty dope.

Saw this talk recommended in the comments of the Extra Credits video about game celebrities. I'm really glad I did. I haven't even made my first game yet, and yet I can already tell I had the same inclination to hide my name when my first game was finally published. Very insightful!

I was wondering, maybe we could change the "credits" button to "Who made this game?" This increases the curiosity in the player rather than just "credits"...

A Hideo Kojima talk

Very enlightening talk! Seeing that signed art piece from Gage brings me back to another time... During my college years, every single one of my art professors and their assistants were vehemently against signing works. When turning work in, you were expected to sign your name on a separate piece of paper and clip it to the work. For the students who did sign their name directly on their work, the teachers would rip their pieces apart in front of the class. I know they were probably just drunk on the idea of 'art should speak for itself' and it can be valid, but it's refreshing to hear the point of view in this talk and feel like I'm not insane.

Just hearing "Bennett Foddy" gave me the chills

RIP any epileptics who didn’t survive the first minute of this video.

I've played some of the games you guys have put out and I've seen your website Zach with all your work and the art you've made. I love the meditation maze I just wanted to let you know. I've never played Getting Over It with Bennet foddy, but the voiceover and the secret at the end that you showed in this talk brought me to tears, and I am moved by your art.

Such a great talk, and I had high expectations thanks to the names already. One place I see names used often are game jams and contests, where people are kinda automatically participating as people who compete and make games, and I find those are some great ways to both try/explore something new and to get feedback.

One of my favourite GDC talks. Great work guys and thank you.

Tfw you're the Evacuation by Bennet Foddy superfan and get called out in public and on UKposts

That intro was really unexpected for a talk, but hooked me and i instantly understood the point of the talk. Yet I still stuck around. Great talk, guys!

really cool talk. i think there is still so much that can be said in this conversation, about artist-audience relationships and how that changes the perception of art, but i can't think of anything right now, so... yeah

Put Your Name on Your Talk, a Pretentious UKposts Comment by smilefires

I think a lot of the antagonistic communication comes from frustration with the increasing feeling of hostility from the games scene. As a "consumer" or a fan of games I increasingly feel as though I am being treated less like a person by the developer and more like an ATM machine. I personally try to remember that there are people behind the big corporations and that not all companies are the same and generally try to think carefully about how I am communicating to anyone no matter my level of frustration, I can also understand how someone would conflate the "games industry" into one monolith and let their frustration with the exploitative monolithic companies taint their perception of the 6 guys in their basement just doing their best.

Man I teared up a little with all that humanity achieved in a medium that's supposed to be soulless and draining us of our connection to each other. Here's the pushback!

his voice fills me with rage... its great

Great Talk, i will definitely put my name in my next game now

Listening to this in the background while developing my game and I just added my name onto the splash screen :)

I finished getting over it, a few months after it came out. When I did, there were other people in the chatroom, I don't even know if Bennett was one of them, I was so surprised to see anyone else there at the same time.

Great talk! I know I'll never forget who Lucas Pope is thanks to Papers Please!

I watched this video because I was struggling what to name my indie game!!! It helped me a lot, SamSin

I agree with the whole talk 100%. But, No Man's Sky was not review bombed. It was just reviewed.

I used to want to put my name on my work, but now I don't. Gaming in general has turned into a godawful mess of harassment and shitty attitudes, and I don't want any of my personal details attached to anything that gets sold to them. I want to be able to make unpopular but necessary updates to my games without opening my front door to a swat team the next morning. I still love gaming as a medium, but I've fallen out of love with it as an industry and as a community.

wow, that's great! after watching this I feal like getting to work immediately and change the names on my games haha! cool I treasure this idea ..thanks ! intuitive!

These are all very valuable points.

Excellent

I love it, I thought about that but now I know more

I didn't realize player unknown's BGs was a person's name at the front even with the grammar showing ownership, I just thought it was a stupid name for a game.

Table 53's "This is a Great Video", coming to a UKposts comment section May 2019

0:50 does anyone know what connection Brows Held High has with IGF?

fun fact: I gave some feedback to Bennett for this talk, but in fact I am not credited at all !!! where are my royalties

not sure if this was mentioned , but what about the legal protection gained the representing your products with your company name rather than personal name? Are you and your business still a separate legal entity if you build a personal brand using your real name?

Did the little helper at 39:35 get credited?

When a young video game team made a game about a the high seas, they wanted to convey what it was about but also not use a generic name. So the main designer stepped up and attached his name to that 1987 pirate simulation, naming it "Sid Meier's Pirates!" Although Meier later explained it was because the game departed so much from Microprose's earlier titles, he did it again later, making it a company staple starting with "Sid Meier's Covert Ops" and "Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon". And yet, "Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri" has Brian Reynolds known more for it. But the time of the "video game heroes" is over. There isn't that cult of personality anymore except for very few masters like Hideo Kojima, Shigeru Miyamoto, etc. Recently, an Easter Egg was discovered that might be the very first appearance of credits in a video game. You had to do something so obscure it took over 40 years to figure out, but it is older than Adventure for the Atari 2600. I think oddheader covered it in one of his videos, but it didn't gain much traction yet.

I think a lot of people that specifically play indie games are playing them for the very reasons discussed in this video, the term they usually use is "soul". Games from back in the day had more soul, games from indie dev's have way more soul than big triple A games. Why? The usual agreement is because in the past games had much smaller teams, indie games are done by a small group of people or even an individual, so the game tends to have an idea that shows throughout the entire experience. The soul is there because it's not just separate groups of 30 people all doing their task given to them from the top filling a checklist that sells well. Anyway, my point being, many consumers already understand why they love indie games and in my opinion, this talk exemplifies exactly what consumers are looking for when they play smaller games. The Soul, the human piece of the art, adding your name to the game or even going beyond that really helps this. A few examples of both triple A games and indie games: Metal Gear Solid? Kojima Super Smash Bros? Sakurai Getting over it? Bennet Foddy Undertale? Toby Foxx No Man's Sky? Sean Murray(this one was most likely accidental at the time, he just had the burden of needing to promote his indie game that turned triple A due to hype) Halflife? Steam? Valve? Lord Gaben, Gabe Newell Elder Scrolls? Bethesda? Tom Howard I don't just remember the game, I remember the creator behind it, it works.

Putting my name on the game just makes me feel like people will think im trying to copy/be Kojima or something lol.

That bit about the "cash box" made my blood boil. Knowing who the devs are is JUSTICE!

8:32 He's right, I mentioned all three of their names when usually I wouldn't look deeply into a development company to find any individual's name. I did still find a way to call Gabe Cuzzillo 'Gabe Carrizzolo' though, so there's still no accounting for individual stupidity haha

one of the best video game talks I saw, I would love to be part of a project in the future :)

22:50 dang, i had that idea. I suspected it could have been done before, but oh well. I guess it's a project i'm not gonna develop after all.

YESS

If chess is so fair, I'll play white.

Hey, I used to have really bad chess and I loved playing it, haha

what an amazing talk!

what game is Brows Held High connected with? seems like a goof

Here from Matt Trobbiani's tweets.

With all due respect to Mr. Foddy, it's quite easy to put your name in a game after two universal hits under your belt. It's weird that he didn't even mentioned the fact that putting your name in a game exposes you to the whole gaming community, which isn't known for its embracement and kindness to say the least. If your game is "bad", gamers will beat you to a pulp.

I think it’s a good painting

"and if that's too hard, put it on someone else's"

by David Cage

Better than names is including a photo. I remember the original *Lemmings* and also *Duke Nukem 3D* had a group photo of the developers within the game, iirc it was an unlockable at the end of the game. That is always so cool, especially for these older games now it's like a tiny time capsule.

This is probably the first time I've seen something like "embrace humanity" in something other than faceless corporate virtue signalling, and it makes a hell of a lot of sense here. It's a shame such phrases have been abused to the point of them giving me a nasty knee-jerk reaction even when they're used appropriately.

I tried to think about why I use a company name on my works but couldn't come to an answer.

Now the question here is, how do you put everyone's name in, if you're working with a team of 12? Wouldn't that be a bit hard to do?

To the question on 49:48 here is a good example on building a game around you, youtuber style: ukposts.info

Can anyone give the TL:DW version of this?

Nintendo is so confident about their ayatems that all of their home systems have it officially.

had to take a break from this talk 39 minutes in to buy and beat Getting Over It. There goes my month.

Good to see Efecto Studios on that reel, at the beginning... as well as many other Latam Companies.

Why do people presenting their old artwork always have to say that it sucks? Just because you think you can do better now, doesn't mean it sucks.

This talk pushed me through. Also, Yonathan is the most popular name in korea? That is unbelievable!

GIGACHADs yes, I made this game

Makes a talk about using their name. Me: oh he's @helvetica

I've been talking about this topic since I was a kid.

Wait. Gage made really bad chess? I had no idea, that's so ironic.

Just be realistic guys, nobody wants to put his name out there and feed it to a toxic gaming community just to be doxed or harassed because you didn't add a fluorescent pink skin in your game...

Something interesting. I tried out being personal with people who view or play my games, one... hater expressed his discontent with my content. I apologized, and so did he. Basically he said something like "it ruins the subreddit" or something like that, and some other guy defended me. He apologized after that, this video came back to mind as when I replied I thought of "I need to be personal so his irrationality can calm down"... kinda worked. For the context, i post devlogs in a subreddit, some guy say it ruins the subreddit, I apologized, another guy defended me, and the guy who complained tried to tone down his complaint while apologizing.

I have a cool example of unfairness in games - so in overwatch there's a 1v1 mode that picks a random hero both players use in a mirrored duel. I had a friend who wanted to play with me, but there was a skill gap between us. Sooooo I tweaked the mode so the duel wasn't mirrored. The game has some really one-sided match-ups - so it was fun for me to get Winston versus Bastion and laugh/cry about it.

Me about to comment that I don't want to come of as egotistical seeing that exact line in a thought bubble at 3:30 or so

Created by "Cash Grab Games Enterprises"

On one hand yeah, makes sense, on the other hand, if we take the film industry, for example, very few directors put their name directly in the title of their movies, and it always comes off as very arrogant, pretentious and, yes, egocentric.

Man, every single talk where Bennet appears is good, I swear I can't get enough of this man

Publishers in general have to respect all developers work and have a the fair share on what developers work that know their price on their game , even indie to the biggest brand and make all those hours in creating a world where people like to enjoy and play

47:50, Bennett Fucks, a brazilian slang...

I've played the bad chess game before watching the talk, it's a great game.

the flashing colours in the intro are pretty bad and I don't even have epilepsy

I thought Gage's name sounded familiar until he mentioned Really Bad Chess. That's the reason I knew that name 🤔

I would go the opposite way as to say, if your game is shit you should perhaps consider putting your name by it lol

Bennett is one of the most interesting thinkers and creators in game design today

I really love the message of the talk, especially coming from a TV/movie production background. But as a woman of color, the audience question about personal safety and potential backlash is definitely a sobering consideration. It's natural - and necessary for career growth - to want to put your name on your work, but it seems grossly unfair that the toxic outliers of our community make many of us hesitate to do so.

How to get a seizure in 20 secs.

what if your name isn't pronounceable by the average player

think about the board game world. you have designers like reiner knizia that are recognized even outside of enthusiasts! is it a mark of ego, or is it just good branding? why can't video game designers have the same?

Since when is signing your painting the default? maybe in the 19th century...

38:04 "That's what she said"

RICHARD GARRIOT LITERALLY WENT TO SPACE

Hearing his voice... It upset me

But did he get death threats?

Wait hold up why the heck was Kyle Kallgren in that list?!

Did you ever really check the creditlist at the end of a game that made you immerse 130h or more ? Should be always in the very start of the game.

Amazing talk! however it's easy to say when you have a very Enlish likeable name.

Ye good luck with my east european name that has weird characters in it. No thanks so ye Im using like a nickname but the bigger problem is to have a game you are ready to put your name on lol. But when I have a game I'll put both! :D