Interview with Spencer Baughman

08 Feb 2021

Get to Know Who’s Who At GLGX 2021!

In the run up to this year’s event, we are conducting a series of interviews with presenters at Great Lakes Game Expo. We hope to channel from all corners of game development to present you with the best experience possible. So please enjoy getting to know our wonderful speakers!

Who are you?

Ahoyhoy! My name’s Spencer Baughman. I’m an independent game developer who publishes under the name of Attempting Entertainment and the kinds of games I want to associate with the brand are experimental “story-first” titles which celebrate the human condition, in all of it’s confusing but cathartic glory.

What are you presenting at GLGX2021?

I’m giving a talk on my undergraduate thesis research! The short spiel is that I give an abridged post-mortem on the two of three games currently developed for a separate horror themed anthology my thesis team has been developing called A Prisoner In Your Skull; Led A Long Way Down & Ceremony respectively. In addition to the post-mortems I’ll also be digging into the screenwriting research I’ve done that has inspired the development of the anthology, and why an anthology was appealing to three thesis level dev students in the first place.

What got you started in game development?

Reading game journalism, if I’m being honest! As a 5th grader, I couldn’t be seen without my GBA and my copy of Mega Man Battle Network 3 so I was already into games somewhat, and seeing all of these adults in a magazine writing reviews, covering industry news and taking games seriously as a career was really the spark that made me realize, “Oh this is something I could do for a living” and that spark’s never really left even as I start to hit my mid twenties. I still remember my first Game Informer issue that had Insomniac’s Resistance 2 for the cover story with a Samba De Amigo review and Top 25 Games for the Wii as the sub headers. Of course by that time as well, 2007-ish, Game Informer was really the only option for kids interested in print media about games. There might’ve been a stray Nintendo Power here and there, but I was too young for the GamePro’s or the golden age of Ziff Davis’ EGM and the like.

What games are you most inspired by?

So many! When I was younger the first game I played that really left a mark on me was BioShock; it just provided a kind of experience that was revelatory to a 13 year old me. Even though time has not been kind to the series from a critical, media analysis type perspective, I can’t deny the impact it had on my artistic sensibilities for better and worse. These days however, there hasn’t been a single more important game to me than Mobius Digital’s Outer Wilds, although that does seem to be the general consensus around the game (which, for the record, is fantastic. Outer Wilds deserves every last bit of praise it receives). To put a bit of a spotlight, however, on smaller games that punch equally as hard - titles like The Friends of Ringo Ishikawa, the To The Moon franchise and Boreal Tenebrae all feature fantastic narratives which are alone worth the price of admission and have profoundly influenced my work.

What has been your favorite game to work on?

Out of all the short form, single level games I’ve been working on recently, the one I’m the most happy with is probably It Doesn’t Have To Be Like This, the second episode in this anthology series I’ve been working on called Made For TV. I’ll be touching on why anthologies have been an appealing format to me in the talk I’m giving, so I won’t go too far into it here, but it’s a twine title where you take on the role of a gas station clerk working her shift on the day the earth is destroyed. Generally speaking, apocalypse fiction can really irk me for the fact it’s too easy to perpetrate really dour, depressing and needlessly cynical ideologies so this was my attempt to counteract that trope and I was pretty happy with how it turned out. Honestly, I might come back to it soon, do another revision pass to try and make the script as strong as it possibly can be and release the edit as a 1.5 update sort of thing.

What do you think is the most important problem the game industry faces today?

Labor! The game industry has and has had a labor problem for a really long time. I’ve spent time while still in school working as a labor organizer to help spread awareness and at the very least, start a conversation around the issue where it might not have happened on it’s own for a while and even though I’ve had to step down due to the fact I’m looking at applying for grad school soon, I still feel just as strongly about it today.

Tune in for GLGX 2021 to hear more from Spencer and our other presenters! We will be live from the 18th to the 21st of February on Twitch.