They are simply lovers who experience a passing connection. Their search for something deeper (which eventually takes them on an ayahuasca trip overseen by a shaman played by an unrecognisable Lesley Manville) is thwarted by what the director calls the “asynchronous” nature of their dynamic.

How loud was the conversation back then over authentic casting? “It was never even discussed,” Craig says, looking askance. Guadagnino is equally dismissive: “Sexuality is not one thing. Is it five things, is it seven? There is no such thing as ‘the gay’.” Craig has another thought: “Sexuality is a very modern idea,” he says. “People’s sexuality, or whatever they desire, is as individual as a fingerprint.”

Does sharing a vocation reduce the chances of being asynchronous? “No, it enhances them because film-makers are radical narcissists who just want to do their own thing. It’s a disaster.”

Guadagnino goes into splutter mode again. “I would never put myself on the same shelf as Daniel. Come on, he’s an icon! I’m a grey, balding Italian-Algerian director who’s made some movies. I’m boring.” Craig leans forward: “So am I. Let’s say I wasn’t famous, and I was a free agent. It either happens or it doesn’t happen. Those moments are magic. I think of moments like that from my life and, my God, they’re electrifying. Whereas if you’re out on the prowl, that’s really sad. And look, Lee sort of was on the prowl. But he wasn’t looking for what he found with Allerton. That’s what I’m interested in capturing as an artist. The moment where you go, ‘Oh fuck!’”

“Facts. The reason why I blew up so fast is because I’m white, thin, privileged, and live in New York City,” she says, pointing out that her own content performed worse when she was living in North Carolina because there was nothing there to glamorize. She also shared how she worked to grow her account by making tons of different videos, privating the ones that didn’t perform, and replicating the ones that did until she nailed what TikTok wanted from her.  But “what TikTok wants” is still the most influential part of that, and as long as that’s still someone who looks like Victoria, there’s not one trick that can change it.

I find it tremendously hopeful that “Stoner” is thriving in a world in which capitalist energies are so hellbent on distracting us from the necessary anguish of our inner lives. “Stoner” argues that we are measured ultimately by our capacity to face the truth of who we are in private moments, not by the burnishing of our public selves.

The story of his life is not a neat crescendo of industry and triumph, but something more akin to our own lives: a muddle of desires and inhibitions and compromises.

The deepest lesson of “Stoner” is this: What makes a life heroic is the quality of attention paid to it.

Americans worship athletes and moguls and movie stars, those who possess the glittering gifts we equate with worth and happiness. The stories that flash across our screens tend to be paeans to reckless ambition.

It’s the staggering acceleration of our intellectual and emotional metabolisms: our hunger for sensation and narcissistic reward, our readiness to privilege action over contemplation. And, most of all, our desperate compulsion to be known by the world rather than seeking to know ourselves.

The emergence of a robust advertising culture reinforced the notion that Americans were more or less always on stage and thus in constant need of suitable costumes and props.

Consider our nightly parade of prime-time talent shows and ginned-up documentaries in which chefs and pawn brokers and bored housewives reinvent their private lives as theater.

If you want to be among those who count, and you don’t happen to be endowed with divine talents or a royal lineage, well then, make some noise. Put your wit — or your craft projects or your rants or your pranks — on public display.

Our most profound acts of virtue and vice, of heroism and villainy, will be known by only those closest to us and forgotten soon enough. Even our deepest feelings will, for the most part, lay concealed within the vault of our hearts. Much of the reason we construct garish fantasies of fame is to distract ourselves from these painful truths. We confess so much to so many, as if by these disclosures we might escape the terror of confronting our hidden selves.

revelation is triggered by literature. The novel is notable as art because it places such profound faith in art.

The man-child. The people who so loved playing characters that they played characters in their real lives, too, without actually transforming themselves into more mature human beings. He knew the cliché about celebrities staying developmentally the age that they were when they became famous. But how is a beloved movie star meant to change the right way? How is he supposed to grow up? How does he meaningfully evolve his life and art without killing his core?

What happens when you deliberately defy the moves that led you where you’d always wanted to go, and try something altogether different? It was a risk. But it made perfect sense. It happens. Your family members start to die. Your elders get replaced by your peers. You pack up your life and plant roots elsewhere. You put down the instrument that made you known and pick up another one instead. You plug it in. Do you hear that? That’s the buzz of something new. Wait till you hear what it sounds like when you strum.

Riverdale has gone in so many directions since it started. What did you think it was going to be?Petsch: A way to get me out of my restaurant hosting job. Charles Melton: I was a dog walker and working a Chinese takeout when I did my chemistry read with KJ and Cole for season two.In season one, Reggie was played by Ross Butler, who left to continue his role on Netflix’s 13 Reasons Why. Lili Reinhart: I had just signed a lease by myself in L.A., and I was terrified because I couldn’t afford it. This was my second time moving there to try and make it work, and I had no money and no job. I remember after my final audition, I was on the phone with my mom and told her it was the first time ever in an audition process that I felt like I truly was okay and at peace with whatever the outcome was: “I gave them my version of what this character is, take it or leave it.” That night, I found out I got it.

Casey Cott: I don’t think people understand how Riverdale works. Very quickly, before you start shooting an episode — we’re talking two days — you get the script. And sometimes you don’t even have a script. You just get an email that says, “You have a recording session.” And if you’re really lucky, you get a text from Roberto that says, “Hey, we should sing this song.” Mendes: If there’s one thing that show taught us, it’s how to wing it.

Reinhart: I think it’s important to acknowledge that our show is made fun of a lot. People see clips taken out of contextBy 2019, “Riverdale Cringe” videos had become a genre online, be they TikTok reactions to particularly funny lines of dialogue or YouTube compilations of strange moments from the show. and are like, What? I thought this was about teenagers. And we thought so as well—in season one. But it’s really not been easy to feel that you’re the butt of a joke. We all want to be actors; we’re passionate about what we do. So when the absurdity of our show became a talking point, it was difficult. It is What the fuck? That’s the whole point. When we’re doing our table reads and something ridiculous happens, Roberto is laughing because he understands the absurdity and the campiness.

If you want to watch a teen show where there’s just a bunch of kids in a high school dealing with relationship drama, there’s a lot out there. Sprouse: Go watch Euphoria. Mendes:  But Roberto didn’t want to do that. I think he wanted something that was more outlandish. Sprouse: That’s the natural life cycle of a cult program. North America is the only part of the world that raises vocal opposition to the absurdity of the show. England, which has a more dry, sort of crass, sarcastic sense of humor, loves it and gets it. We find a huge audience in France that has a fascination with classic Americana. Mendes: And don’t forget Brazil! All the show’s fan accounts. We’ve done so much that anytime we get a new script or go into a new project, it’s like, I’ve done a version of this on Riverdale.

Petsch: Does anyone remember when I had my whole-ass own church in season five? I think my favorite line is “I am Cheryl Blossom, queen of the bees!” And by “favorite,” I mean that’s the only time I ever texted Roberto and said, “Please, please, please, don’t make me say this.” I had to shake honeycombs at my mother to banish her.

Mendes: I had this long line, and I remember I was like, “I fucking hate this!” I couldn’t get it, and it was so complicated, but now it’s my little party trick. Sprouse: Say it, Cami. Petsch: Say it, girl. Mendes: “Word of my exploits serving Nick his comeuppance has seeped into the demimonde of mobsters and molls my father used to associate with.” [Everyone cheers and applauds.]

Maybe we’ll get to a point where the novelty will be that a human being wrote something: This person proved that they were in a box away from any A.I. when they wrote this thing

as writers and creators, you want people to watch your show, so if you can make something look and sound like something else that people already want to watch, then you might be able to convince a producer that it will have legs. But I discovered through doing “Fleabag” that you have to write something that is more dangerous, more honest, more unusual and more provocative — especially if it’s going to go into a pool with a million other things. Honing the uniqueness of whatever you do is your best chance. I know I’m saying that having just signed up to do “Tomb Raider,” which has an audience already, and I know that’s what Amazon wants, and Amazon made this unbelievable deal8 8 In 2019, Variety reported about Waller-Bridge’s development deal with Amazon Studios, that “sources say the deal is worth around $20 million a year.” with me. I care so much about delivering for them. Being able to do that dangerous, naughty, transgressive stuff in the heart of something that is very valuable to them in terms of I.P. satisfies both of those things, but the discipline for me is to not just give them the “Tomb Raider” they think they want, but to give them something else.

People are going to interpret everything I do as my feelings on contemporary womanhood because I’m a contemporary woman. I don’t want to escape that part of me. I can see how I’ve gone into masculine roles with Bond and “Indiana Jones,” but those worlds are the ones that always intrigued me. The high-stakes action world appeals to me, whether it’s masculine or feminine. I like the urgency of it and the idea of being able to write a female character in a world like that.

It’s a window into your psychology: You want to be a pleaser and do the assignment well, but what you actually want to do is something riskier. Oh, my gosh. That’s exactly what it is. But the best thing is when you satisfy both. The journey there can be quite [laughs] — I love the feeling of having done what’s been asked, but I hate the feeling of pleasing.

I think that with Bond there is something dangerous, transgressive and incendiary about that character, and it’s the same with Indy. He completely revolutionized the action hero, which Harrison1 1 Harrison Ford, of course, who has said “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” will be his last go-round with Indy’s famous whip and fedora. is dead set against him being described as, but there was something that broke the form. We accept them now as the biggest franchises, but in the kernel of these characters is something naughty and dangerous. They were the rascals of their time, and I feel like Villanelle and Fleabag are rascals.2 2 Villanelle is the name of the assassin character, played by Jodie Comer, in “Killing Eve.” “Fleabag,” for those who haven’t seen it, is that show’s title character, played by Waller-Bridge. The show earned six Emmy Awards and 11 nominations for its second season. So it was less like, “I want to go do this big movie,” and more, “I want to play in the sand pit with these rascals.” That’s one way of looking at it.

I couldn’t write anything that I felt didn’t have that deeper element sincerely at the heart of it, and that writer is with me everywhere I go. It’s ever-present: What does this mean? Because I’m obsessed with having an audience be moved.6 6 Waller-Bridge said the most recent things that moved her were the TV series “Dead Ringers,” a concert by the singer Christine Bovill in which she performed Edith Piaf songs and a revival of “Guys and Dolls” at the Bridge Theater in London. I was moved when I read the script, and I was moved when I heard Jim7 7 James Mangold, the director of “Dial of Destiny.” He is the first director other than Steven Spielberg to direct an “Indiana Jones” movie. and Harrison and Kathy talk about it. I mean, I wasn’t in tears on the floor, but I felt that tingle of, this has got some human stuff going on. But the day-to-day? Some of the days were superfun, and we did look really cool. But the proper actors don’t want to just look cool. They want to make you cry while looking cool.

If you are wondering whether Barbie is a satire of a toy company’s capitalist ambitions, a searing indictment of the current fraught state of gender relations, a heartwarming if occasionally clichéd tribute to girl power, or a musical spectacle filled with earworms from Nicki Minaj and Dua Lipa, the answer is yes. All of the above. And then some.

Gerwig still can’t seem to believe she got away with making this version. “This movie is a goddamn miracle,” she says. She calls it a “surprising spicy margarita.” By the time you realize the salted rim has cayenne mixed in, it’s too late. “You can already taste the sweetness and you sort of go with the spice.”

Every single actor I spoke to cited Gerwig and the sharp script as the reason they joined the film. “I knew this was not going to shy away from the parts of Barbie that are more interesting but potentially a little bit more fraught,” says Hari Nef, who plays a doctor Barbie. “The contemporary history of feminism and body positivity—there are questions of how Barbie can fit into all of that.”

At one point Richard Dickson, COO and president of Mattel, says he took a flight to the London set to argue with Gerwig and Robbie over a particular scene, which he felt was off-brand. Dickson dials up his natural boyish exuberance, imitating himself righteously marching off the plane to meet them. But Gerwig and Robbie performed the scene for him and changed his mind. “When you look on the page, the nuance isn’t there, the delivery isn’t there,” explains Robbie.

Robbie had laid the groundwork for this with Mattel’s CEO when she met with him in 2018 in the hopes that LuckyChap could take on the Barbie project. “In that very first meeting, we impressed upon Ynon we are going to honor the legacy of your brand, but if we don’t acknowledge certain things—if we don’t say it, someone else is going to say it,” she says. “So you might as well be a part of that conversation.”

“The most important transition was from being a toy-manufacturing company that was making items to becoming an IP company that is managing franchises,” he says. It’s a particularly prescient strategy at a moment when superhero fatigue has set in and studios are desperate to find new intellectual property with a built-in fan base—from Super Mario Bros. to Dungeons & Dragons.

Issa Rae, 38, who plays President Barbie, argues that the entire point of the film is to portray a world in which there isn’t a singular ideal. “My worry was that it was going to feel too white feminist-y, but I think that it’s self-aware,” she says. “Barbie Land is perfect, right? It represents perfection. So if perfection is just a bunch of white Barbies, I don’t know that anybody can get on board with that.”

Still, in an interview for this story, Brenner called Gerwig’s film “not a feminist movie,” a sentiment echoed by other Mattel executives I spoke with. It was a striking contrast to my interpretation of the film and conversations with many of the actors, who used that term unprompted to describe the script. When I relay Mattel’s words to Robbie, she raises an eyebrow. “Who said that?” she asks then sighs. “It’s not that it is or it isn’t. It’s a movie. It’s a movie that’s got so much in it.” The bigger point, Robbie impresses upon me, is “we’re in on the joke. This isn’t a Barbie puff piece.”

Gerwig’s team built an entire neighborhood made up of Dream Houses that were missing walls. The actors had to be secured by wires so they wouldn’t topple off the second floors. The skies and clouds in the background were hand-painted to render a playroom-like quality, as was much of the rest of the set.

But McKinnon, 39, watched her sister and friends play with the dolls: they cut Barbie’s hair, drew on her face, and even set her on fire. She theorizes, “They were externalizing how they felt, and they felt different.” So when Gerwig offered McKinnon the role of Weird Barbie, a doll that’s been played with a little too aggressively in the real world, she jumped at the chance. McKinnon was impressed by the way the script dealt with girls’ complicated attachments to the doll. “It comments honestly about the positive and negative feelings,” she says. “It’s an incisive cultural critique.”

“We’re looking to create movies that become cultural events,” Kreiz says, and to do that Mattel needs visionaries to produce something more intriguing than a toy ad. “If you can excite filmmakers like Greta and Noah to embrace the opportunity and have creative freedom, you can have a real impact.”

“There is a problem within the games industry where we don’t value institutional knowledge,” Moon said. “Companies will prioritize bringing someone from outside rather than keeping their junior or mid-level developers and training them up. We are shooting ourselves in the foot by not valuing that institutional knowledge. You can really see it in Tears of the Kingdom. It’s an advancement of what made Breath of the Wild special.”

numerous sources say they cannot discern what kind of material Salke and head of television Vernon Sanders want to make. A showrunner with ample experience at the studio says, “There’s no vision for what an Amazon Prime show is. You can’t say, ‘They stand for this kind of storytelling.’ It’s completely random what they make and how they make it.” Another showrunner with multiple series at Amazon finds it baffling that the streamer hasn’t had more success: Amazon has “more money than God,” this person says. “If they wanted to produce unbelievable television, they certainly have the resources to do it.”

I’m not a fan of modern fandom. This isn’t only because I’ve been swarmed on Twitter by angry devotees of Marvel and DC and (more recently) “Top Gun: Maverick” and “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” It’s more that the behavior of these social media hordes represents an anti-democratic, anti-intellectual mind-set that is harmful to the cause of art and antithetical to the spirit of movies. Fan culture is rooted in conformity, obedience, group identity and mob behavior, and its rise mirrors and models the spread of intolerant, authoritarian, aggressive tendencies in our politics and our communal life.

I will always love being at the movies: the tense anticipation in a darkening theater, the rapt attention and gasping surprise as a the story unfolds, and the tingly silence that follows the final shot, right before the cheers — and the arguments — start.

point systems often don’t measure what we want to measure. They artificially simplify or distort our values. Our goals are messy. They’re strange and complex and multifaceted, but then they are collapsed down to scoring systems. And the thing that can happen here is we lose sight of what we wanted and we begin to want what the point system wants

We are being changed by point systems and structures that we’re not taught to see, that often have incentives and logics that are hidden from us

when you quantify in an institution— and I want to stress here, this is not about quantification in any circumstance, right— this is about quantification in bureaucracies and institutions— what you do is you kind of take really context-sensitive nuanced information that requires a lot of background to understand and then you carve out all of the subtle nuance and all the weird little information that needs a lot of shared context to understand.

So in order to make that information travel well, I need to create this neat little informational packet where I strip off all of the weird context-sensitive stuff and just create something simple. In this case, I rank each student inside a pre-established spectrum— F to A. And that information, right, is totally comprehensible to anyone. It aggregates easily. Everyone collects it in the same way. It’s been standardized. It mounts up.So if you have large-scale bureaucracies that need to be organized and function coherently, then you need these kind of simple, nuance-free packets of information. And I think that’s one of the reasons we’ve seen this constant rise of simplified metrical analysis.

He says, large-scale states can only see the kinds of information they can process. And the kinds of information they can process are things like this— standardized, quantified information.So he thinks that only the parts of the world that are legible to the state, that are put in the terms a state can understand, that’s the only kind of thing the state can process, act on, and see. And so the state wants to transform the world into the kinds of things it can work on. The state can’t see my individual feedback about my students, about you know, what they need for their emotional arc. It can see the letter grade average of the university.

If our taste and our values and our interests are varying and wide, and plural and rich, the state can’t see that. The state can’t get a handle on my bizarre taste in the tabletop role-playing games.

one thing I like about analytics is that outside of the context of simply argue about the flaws of analytics, not having them allows you to bullshit yourself a lot. Allows you to bullshit yourself about whether or not people are reading you, what you’re really doing here, are you serving an audience. But then having them allows you to stop seeing anything they can’t measure.

Fitbit can capture steps but it can’t capture your joy and ecstasy and physical emotion. If I exercise and I don’t use any objective measures, then I could just be fooling myself. But if I become obsessed with objective measures, then I’m not going to exercise for any of the things that fall outside those objective measures, like the aesthetic joy of movement.

you can track anything. But at some point, the tracking becomes the point.

People who write about games as an art form, as something special, really get super excited by two kinds of games. One are games like Romero’s game “Train,” because it’s so obviously meaningful and ethically potent. And they get really excited about games that tell stories in ways that are familiar to us from movies and novels.

I’m actually a little worried that this kind of focus loses for us something that’s really special about games. It pushes us towards the kind of games that are familiar to us. Those of us that care about art and have read about the theory of fiction or the— that kind of thing we can recognize. Things like the beauty of a really good puzzle game, or the beauty of rock climbing, or the beauty of chess— those are more alien and that’s the thing that I want to understand.

every art form is a crystallization of some common sense experience. That the visual arts are the crystallization of seeing. That music is a crystallization of hearing. And you argue that games are the crystallization of doing.

when you’re playing a game, you’re trying to get some end state. Like if you’re running a marathon, you’re trying to get to a particular point in space. But we don’t actually care about being at that point in space in and of itself, or we would take the easy way. We would take a lift, take an Uber, take a shortcut.

what makes games special is not just that they create a world or an environment, but that the game designer tells you what abilities you have and what obstacles you’ll face, but most importantly, what goals you’ll have. So the punchline in the book is that games are the art form that works in the medium of agency itself.

What the game designer is doing is creating an alternate self for you, an alternate agent, describing the skeleton of that agent, saying here are the abilities you have, here’s what you’re going to care about.

In the same way that I think we understand some of the art forms as making our senses more acute and our perception of the world more sensitive, games can do that for the way we see the goals and means we adopt in the course of a day.

The thing that was in philosophy that was so delightful and pleasurable quickly and now I have to struggle for four years to get another interesting epiphany. “Baba Is You” is just like epiphany after epiphany after epiphany. You play it for 20 minutes. You solve a level. You had another epiphany. It takes that pleasure and it extracts it and concentrates it.

In the world, our goals and our abilities and the world— a lot of the times they don’t align. You do what you want. And to get what you want, you have to do something incredibly boring and repetitive. Or you face problems that are way beyond you.But in games, because the game designer manipulates what you want to do and the abilities and the obstacles, the game designer can create harmonious action. They can create these possibilities where you’re— what you need to do— the obstacles you face and your abilities just match perfectly. So this is the weird sense in which I feel like games are like an existential balm for the horror of life. A lot of life is you don’t fit. You have to do things. And it sucks and it’s horrible and it’s boring.And in games, for once in your life, you know exactly what you’re doing and you know exactly that you can do it. And then you have just the right amount of ability to do it. It’s a feeling of concentrated, crystallized action. For me, solving puzzles, or balancing over in a rock climb, or seeing a trap ahead in chess, this is ecstasy. And it’s an ecstasy I get once in a while in my non-game life. But game designers have sculpted these little action universes so that we can step into them and just have this ecstasy over and over again.

they are taking what reality is, which is we are constantly opting into these different systems with incentives, and structures, and our skills, and they have to match the means to get to a goal, and distilling that down to a small core.

I think the most important thing about games is the way they manipulate our agency. The way we enter into this alternate self. And that’s I think where you can see the greatest power of games and their greatest danger. The greatest power of games is that you can explore this landscape of different agencies. The greatest danger of games is that you can get sucked into this experience of just craving and wanting to be in a clear, crisp and gentle universe where you know exactly what to do and exactly how well it’s measured.

So when you play chess, you get really sucked into this kind of agency where you are thinking ahead and calculating linearly. When you play diplomacy, you get sucked into this agency where you’re constantly thinking about how you can lie to people and misrepresent yourself. And when you play rock climbing, you get sucked into an agency where all your powers are about balance and fine precision and motion.

the body of games is a kind of library of agencies. The real promise of games, if you take them seriously, is that by playing a ton of them, you can traverse all the different possibilities of agency

The

The biggest danger that I’m worried about for games is if you spend your life playing games, you’ll expect that value systems will be crisp, clear, well-defined, and quantified. And then you leave games, you’ll start looking around for— I don’t know— things to do, or institutions to be a part of, or jobs to do where the outcomes are clear, crystallized, quantified, and shared between people. I’m worried about getting stuck in the world of maximizing your clicks or Wall Street finance just because you have an expectation that what it is to act in the world is to act for clear externally well-defined points.

What might be true is if you spend all your time in point-scoring environments, you will become used to life being about scoring points. And you will begin to adopt that approach and begin to adopt those values without even realizing it. You’ll become habituated. The game will change you. That is a second principle I want to put out here— that games change us.

“Twitter shapes our goals for discourse by making conversation something like a game. Twitter scores our conversation. And it does so not in terms of our own particular and rich purposes for communication, but in terms of its own preloaded, painfully-thin metrics— likes, retweets, and follower counts. And if we take up Twitter’s invitation and internalize those evaluations, we’ll be thinning out and simplifying our own goals for communication.”

you can care about all kinds of things going on on Twitter. You can care about having fun. You can care about connecting with a few people. You can care about getting knowledge. You can care about getting understanding. You can care about connecting.But those things aren’t measured by Twitter. What Twitter measures is who clicked like, who clicked retweet, who clicked follow. And what you might think is, oh, because people click like, then that’s just a good proxy for all these other values. They’re only going click like if you actually successfully communicated something. But clicking like is a really narrow information capture.

So I think if you look at what a lot of people in politics and media think they’re doing on Twitter, they are writing things that on their face are meant to be persuasive. A gloss on a news article. A tweet about democracy, or single payer health care, or how Joe Biden is bad, or whatever it might be. But that tweet is then attached to a scoring system that has nothing to do with whether or not you are persuasive to the people you need to convince. It’s whether or not that tweet is applauded by the people who already like you.

These little worlds where every mechanism is something you can internalize, and you can make a plan that encompasses every single mechanism the game has and it all fits.

When you read people who are excited about a conspiracy theory— like the flat earth conspiracy theory— one of the things they say over and over again is they felt so disempowered before the conspiracy theory. And once they became a flat-earther, or something like this, they felt empowered. And the reason, I think, is the conspiracy theories fit inside your head. They’re the right size for you just like games are the right size for you to take some kind of action.

If you believe in a conspiracy theory, now you have total intellectual agency. You don’t have to trust other people. You don’t have to do this awkward weird thing of trusting somebody and trusting who they trust and then trusting all the million things— people they trust. You can think everything through yourself and then come to a conclusion using this engine that’s so powerful that lets you explain anything.

Games are exciting when they test us and they put us right at the limit of our abilities. And then we push through and then we can make it. The games are beautiful when our whole practical self fits the challenge.

So if you expect someone to make a game out of intellectual life, you shouldn’t expect them to make something so complicated that you have to do this horrible trusting thing. And you shouldn’t expect them to make it easy. You should expect them to make it so challenging that it really fully engages people. But it’s just the right size, so if they fight hard, they can actually find explanation for everything.

one of the difficult things about being alive during, as you put it, the great endarkenment, is we are all choosing which explanations to believe, built to some degree on structures of social trust, not a first person verification. We can’t verify a lot of what we believe we know about the world.

how do you develop a sensitivity— not a cynicism and maybe not even always a skepticism, but just first a sensitivity to being able to see all the different game-like scored, simplifying systems that you’ve adopted and all of the values they are pushing you towards? How do you develop game mindfulness?

I’m trying to develop the same kind of instinct in belief systems. Someone hands you a belief system and you’re like, oh, this feels so good. That’s— and then you have to pause and be like, wait, is this designed just to make me feel good? So the short answer is I’m now suspicious of pleasure, which I hate.

thinking about games shows me two possibilities that are like two flip sides of the same coin. And the richness of games is when temporary hyper-focus on a goal opens up all this rich, sculpted, interesting activity, all these amazing movements, or decisions, or calculations that are just lovely. That’s the promise of games.AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyAnd the danger of games and the game-like attitude is when we hyper-focus on that goal and we forget about all the other stuff that could happen along the way. And we just narrowly see the goal. And like, games for me are good when you engage in a duality of experience of them. You spend some time buried and trying to win, but you realize that winning isn’t the point. And then you step back and you see, oh my god, the process of doing it was so rich and so lovely.And games are toxic for me when we just get hyper-narrowed on the point system and we never think about the larger outcome of the point system. We never think about what our life is like or what the activity is like under that point system. We never think about what follows from it. The big worry with the impact of highly gamified external systems is it encourages us not to step into a game and step back from it and think about the richness of the activity and whether it was worth it. What I’m worried about is those cases when the point system blocks out everything else from your universe and you don’t see any of the other stuff.

So when ex-Telltale Games designer and writer Sean Vanaman announced last month that the first game from Campo Santo, his new video game development studio, was "being both backed by and made in collaboration with the stupendous, stupidly-successful Mac utility software-cum-design studio slash app/t-shirt/engineering company Panic Inc. from Portland, Oregon," it wasn't expected, but it wasn't exactly surprising, either. It was, instead, the logical conclusion of years-long friendships and suddenly aligning desires.

"There's a weird confluence of things that have crisscrossed," he said. "One is that we're lucky in that Panic is the kind of company that has never been defined by a limited mission statement, or 'We're the network tool guys' or anything like that. I mean, we made a really popular mp3 player. Then we kind of fell into network tools and utilities, but we've always done goofy stuff like our icon changer and these shirts and all that other stuff. "I kind of love that we can build stuff, and the best reaction that we can get when we do a curveball like this is, 'That's totally weird, but also that totally makes sense for Panic.'"

"To me," Sasser said, "when you have actually good people who are more interested in making awesome things than obsessing over the business side of things or trying to squeeze every ounce of everything from everybody, then that stuff just goes easy. It's just fun. The feeling that you're left with is just excitement.

I think all writing — and criticism is very much included in this — is a form of autobiography, and I thought that I wanted to lean into it a little bit, and talk about what these shows meant to me.

Mixed in with seeing Disney movies, at age 10, she discovered John Cassavetes’ Minnie And Moskowitz and thought, “To see that and to say, ‘What’s this world out there and how do I fit in it?’ that to me is the most important part of filmmaking and being in films.

Torres, who is thirty-three, is more attuned to the visual world than most comedians. His imagination is a comic synesthesia, assigning anthropomorphic traits to colors, objects, and design flaws.

There once was a chandelier at the Metropolitan Opera who thought that the audience was applauding just for him. The chandelier fell in love with one of the janitors, a man named Rocco, and wanted only Rocco to change his bulbs. Rocco returned the chandelier’s love, but when his boss found out about the affair he was fired. Late one night, Rocco broke into the Met and stole the chandelier. They settled into Rocco’s apartment, blissful in their union, the chandelier’s light blazing through the window onto the street below.This peculiar romance is not from a magical-realist novel or a quarantine fever dream. It’s an idea for a digital short that Julio Torres pitched again and again at “Saturday Night Live,” where he worked as a writer from 2016 to 2019.

In Torres’s HBO special, “My Favorite Shapes,” which was released in 2019, Torres sits on a dreamlike pastel set, and, as small items come out on a conveyor belt, he narrates their inner thoughts. A pink rectangle with a chipped corner is “having a really bad day.” An oval is prone to gazing at its reflection, “wishing he were a circle.” The conceit sounds twee, but Torres’s delivery has the matter-of-factness of a child describing the secret lives of his toys

Tita told me, in Spanish. The family shares an aesthetic language, influenced by the Memphis design movement of the eighties, which favors bold colors and cutout shapes;

He refuses to use credit cards (“I just don’t like games”) and, for a time, shut down his bank account. “At that point, I had, like, forty dollars,” he said.

Finally, he spied a brocade with a blue-and-green watercolor pattern. He pulled the bolt from the shelf and felt the cloth between his fingers. “A floral that’s not a floral!” he said. “It does exist.”

Tita loved science fiction and Brazilian telenovelas, which often feature fantastical story lines. Torres half-remembered one about a man in a dungeon whose lover is reincarnated as the moon.

Unhappy with Mattel’s premade Dream Houses, he enlisted his mother to make customized homes out of cardboard. “I wanted circular windows and for the doors to open a certain way, so she made them per my specifications, setting me on this lifelong journey of being, like, ‘If it doesn’t exist, I have to create it,’ ” he said. (At “Saturday Night Live,” he channelled his Barbie obsession into a recurring sketch in which interns at Mattel write captions for Barbie’s Instagram account.) His parents encouraged his nontraditional interests. “It gave him the power to be different against the world,” his sister said.

When Torres was eleven, his grandfather died, leaving crippling debts, which his father inherited. His mother’s store went out of business, and the family had to move to a farmhouse where Tita had been brought up, on the outskirts of the city. Torres was prone to allergies and developed a respiratory condition. He hated the outdoors. And he no longer had his mother’s seamstresses at his beck and call.

He and his sister won scholarships to attend a private high school in San Salvador, where their rich classmates were picked up by servants. “I got picked up by my dad, whose car was older than I am,” he said. “Oh, my God, the noise the car made, pulling up to this castle.”

His second time applying to the New School, he got a significant scholarship, and in 2009 he moved to Manhattan, with enough money to live there for two years. “They wanted a translation of my transcripts, because they were in Spanish, so I translated them myself and I embellished a bunch of courses,” he said. “And then I sheepishly put it in front of the admissions officer, and she was, like, ‘Oh, my God, why didn’t you say you took all these courses when you applied?’ And she takes out her calculator and says, ‘You’re a junior, not a freshman.’ And I’m, like, ‘Ooh, I guess I am.’ ”

he found a job as an art archivist for the estate of the late painter John Heliker. He worked in a windowless vault in Newark, cataloguing Heliker’s papers. “I glamorized the optics of that job,” he said. “Solitude has never really been a problem for me. I liked how weird and difficult it was.”

Working at the coat check one day, he recalled, “I overheard this elderly rich woman tell this other elderly rich woman, ‘Oh, remind me to send you that article on how good standing is for you.’ That was the moment where I realized that New Yorker cartoons were based on a reality.”

Torres was a peculiar presence in the comedy scene, which is riddled with dudes in flannel shirts complaining about their girlfriends. He usually read non sequiturs from a notebook, with a flat affect. “He would always say ‘Hi’ before he started,” Einbinder said. “And then, at the end, he would always say, ‘So unless anyone has any questions . . .’ ”

In order to apply to stay in the country as a comedian, he had to pay more than five thousand dollars in legal and filing fees. His new friends in the comedy world, including Chris Gethard, Jo Firestone, and Newman, made a YouTube video called “Legalize Julio,” and the money was raised in an hour. His new visa classified him as an “alien of extraordinary ability.”

“I’ve seen so many corporations—HBO included—talk about how now it’s time to ‘elevate Black voices,’ and that got me thinking about the Hollywood fairy tale that representation equals change,” he said. “For a while, I have felt like a pawn in this hollow representation game. Because what the hell does Disney’s ‘Coco’ do for Mexican children? Bob Iger gets richer. That’s the climax. And then I’m researching the C.E.O.s of these media conglomerates, and they’re predictably the mushiest white faces you can think of. You see who is reaping the benefits of all the ‘woke’ content that me and my peers produce, and it’s just these kings. These monarchs.” He let out a cynical laugh. “I don’t know what the answer is.”

Torres was hired at “Saturday Night Live” in 2016, as the show was feeling pressure to diversify. He had applied for a writing job and been rejected, but then was asked to audition as a cast member. “Instead of showing a wide array of characters that I could play, I just stood there and did my standup, with glitter on my face,” he recalled. He was brought on initially as a guest writer. Torres managed to float above the show’s nerve-racking backstage culture. “It’s the tradition to wear a suit on Saturdays,” Jeremy Beiler told me. “On Julio’s first Saturday show, he showed up in a sparkly silver jacket. I was just, like, ‘Oh, that’s another way to do it.’ ”

Torres is clear-eyed about his success. “I’m certainly not bringing in the big bucks for HBO,” he told me. “It feels like ‘Game of Thrones’ is a rich student, and I’m the scholarship kid.”

One by one, he summoned an all-star roster of guest performers. First up was the comedian Nick Kroll, who was lounging in front of a roaring fireplace. Torres gave lessons in “hand acting,” instructing him to act out scenarios using only his hands, such as dropping a knife after committing a murder: “But you didn’t plan for the murder—it sort of just happened.” Kroll tried it, using a pen. “One thing I found missing from your knife-dropping was regret,” Torres said, then tilted his own camera toward his hands and acted the scene with quivering fingers.

Fred Armisen played a similar game with letters of the alphabet. “I have very strong feelings about Q,” Torres proclaimed. “To me, Q is misplaced in the alphabet. Q should be all the way in the back with the avant-garde X-Y-Z.” He imagined Q performing early in the evening at a rock club, between the more mainstream letters P and R. “Q is doing noise music, and people are, like, Whoa.”