On February 10th, 2023, Double Fine and 2 Player Productions released a 32-part, 22-hour episodic documentary series called PsychOdyssey, covering nearly six and a half years of development on Psychonauts and the Rhombus of Ruin (2017) and Psychonauts 2 (2021). With over five thousand hours of footage of people on the studio floor, in meetings, in interviews, and early gameplay footage, it’s one of the most honest and in-depth looks into the lives of game developers that we’ve ever seen, or likely will see, for quite some time.
It also calls attention to a lot of the industry’s most glaring issues.
Some of these are explicitly mentioned and generally well known across the industry, such as the gender and racial disparities in game development, the high costs of living in tech-centric cities, the ever-looming specter of crunch, and the pressure of delivering a worthy sequel to a beloved game.
Over the course of its run, there’s a lot that’s explicitly said about all of the above topics that helps train viewers to understand how these issues are systemic, a result of larger social or organizational structures than the explicit fault of any one person or group. It’s a real testament to the folks at 2PP that the series was able to toe this line so well. In other hands, this could have easily been more sensationalized, distorted in the edit like a funhouse mirror. More “Reality TV” than Reality.
What’s more interesting to me, though, aren’t the things the series’s subjects talk about but what they all know and make an effort to not talk about: the elephants in the room. And not the (figurative) ones operating the cameras.
Pay close enough attention while you’re watching and you’ll see them: a pause as someone reflects on something before they say it. A verve mid-sentence. A shift in body language as the interviewer segues into a question the subjects hoped wouldn’t be asked. A nervous laugh in response. Or maybe, like Tim Schafer, a lot of spoken truths masked as jokes, whether the speaker means them to be or not. These are the moments I find most valuable about the documentary series. Thankfully, with a much longer runtime than your average film or TV series, 2PP allows their footage the room it needs to breathe, with plenty of time to include all of these little… elephantisms, we’ll call them. And they’re easy to spot once you learn to recognize them.
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