Brian Jackson

dma.space is proud to announce our grand opening! We'll be opening up the space, giving tours, demoing projects, and accepting membership sign-ups. No RSVP is needed!

Fri Jan 16, 5pm - 10pm
Sat Jan 17, Noon - 10pm
Sun Jan 18, Noon - 9pm

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Finally, Mars First Logistics is a worthy runner-up: it is difficult to imagine a world where the Lego franchise could have been more like Kerbal Space Program and less like Child-Friendly Diablo But All The Characters Are Toy Commercials. Mars First delivers, and I mean that in more than one way.

The Rogue Prince of Persia surprised me this year, not just for the copy-paste of the Dead Cells formula that works well in a different setting, but for standing on its own (especially when The Lost Crown was _also_ phenomenal and took a vastly different approach to the setting).

Shinobi: Art of Vengeance also belongs as a runner-up. It condenses all the things I loved about the series since playing The GG Shinobi as a kid, and plays the hits in a way that makes all the stuff since Shinobi III look amateur.

Not that it's a contest. But it is a contest.

Another runner-up: Pipistrello and the Cursed Yo-Yo. No, seriously. Play it. Everything that's fun about games is fun about Pipistrello, and while I know a lot of puzzle games get the prize from me, this one just radiates _joy_.

It can look the same way from outside when a game flounders due to lack of discipline in the scope of it versus when it's _strong_ discipline that does not deviate from the vision even if it means other hard choices, timeline included.

Not to gush for too long on one runner-up, but it was immensely gratifying that the developers maintained their course even when it was almost a meme that it was taking longer than people expected to ship.

Silksong is beautiful, earnest, uncompromising, and would have been the clear winner in a world where I stopped playing Blue Prince when the credits rolled.

Hollow Knight is very good, but Silksong is as perfect a game as exists in the genre.

For those who might be interested in the "runners-up" for my obviously very important Favorite Game of 2025 honor, there are several worth mentioning:

2016: Environmental Station Alpha, which is a love letter to Metroid. Hempuli's more-popular opus Baba is You may have been more influential, but ESA is special to me in how subtle the entrance to the Deeper Mystery is.

2017: The Witness, which in the years since 2017 has filled me with mixed feelings. It is a beautiful game with an interesting hook, which seems to be simultaneously a scathing, iconoclastic critique of puzzle games while also being a celebration of the human fixation on creating mysteries to solve.

2018: God of War, which seems like a dudebro game, but turns out to be an "even bros must grow up and face grief and parenthood" game. The intro cinematic of the sequel is also what I consider to be the most successful motion-captured portrayal of acting as craft that has ever appeared in games.

2019: Dead Cells, which is absolutely the template for how game developers Do Not Have To Settle when it comes to their vision, even while executing tropes like having crossovers or DLC.

2020: Outer Wilds, the best video game experience I believe I've ever had, and an absolute treasure in my heart. I cried so hard during the finale. _Go in blind_ yes I know I said I wouldn't repeat myself.

2021: Control, which is as well written and acted as a narrative-game has _ever_ been, and holds the new-weird aesthetic on a video game hammock between surreal earnestness and cackling self-parody

2022: Tunic, which precisely simulates the arc of "the Jackson bros. get a video game at a garage sale and it becomes our collective personalities for months"

2023: Void Stranger, which looks like a Game Boy sokoban game, and for some people, it will be exactly that.

For some people.

2024: Animal Well, which I can only describe as "squarely and precisely aimed at Brian."

My guidance on _all_ of the list is to go in blind, so I will spare further repetition on this point; it is a technical masterpiece as well as a design masterpiece, and everybody should give it a go.

Since my previous venue for this prestigious honor is now owned by a fascist white supremacist who dabbles in damaging the American common good, the winners so far have been:

I'm still playing Caves of Qud, though.

It has been my tradition to name a favorite game of the year, and seeing as we're coming down to the line, it's time to make a choice!

The choice in 2025 is easy: it was Blue Prince, for reasons that I cannot explain in a spoiler-free way.

As it should be.

Excited to present Blua at the Handmade Seattle mini-conference today (handmadecities.com/seattle/)!

Attendees will be bombarded by acronyms and initialisms that start with the letter B.

Refraining consumption as art is deeply self-deprecating - submitting to spiritual domestication underneath a host of commercial masters. It is not only rejecting the brush as extension of one's hand, but the grafting of a billboard onto the stump of one's wrist in its place.

The point of this whole rant is that communication is central to the human experience, but that framing another channel for consuming content as artistic creativity is incredibly insulting, and not only to those who "do it the hard way," but to oneself.

This polemic is not aimed at the use of large models to overcome an otherwise-impossible scale, timeliness, logistics, or scientific problem, either. Or else I'd be an enormous hypocrite: some problems can't be solved practically without complex statistics applied to huge datasets.

Artists' tools inherently extend or replace a function of human bodies and behaviors. A brush is a prosthetic finger, a lens is a prosthetic cornea, a notebook is prosthetic memory. So what is a prompting system replacing? The capacity to imagine? The skills of others, suitably packaged?

Many, many artists have found creative ways to imitate. Even forgery can be art! What it communicates is negative, but the only communication available interacting with conversational AI agents is "I want this, no, more like that than like this."

Becoming a user of software you didn't write, that summarizes an enormous amount of everyone's content but yours, and responds to queries is the pattern of a user - and users aren't inherently bad, there's just a difference between audience and musician.

You can write a program, even with assistive tools, and _that_ can be art. Art communicates about you through the use of technique, craft, creativity, experience, education, stubbornness.

I will tell you why prompting an AI system, even if you get something good back, doesn't make you or the generative model you used "artists." Artists are communicators, not consumers.