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DeanBeat: A big brain dump on video games in Montreal

  • Posted byby Dean Takahashi
  • Updated
  • 6 min

MONTREAL — It’s a wonderful and merciless exercise to force speakers to talk about something important in just five minutes. I saw that recently at the Montreal International Game Summit during the final session, dubbed the Brain Dump. This session, where the speakers talked about “moments of clarity” in their lives as game designers, really made me think.

I wrote my impressions of three Brain Dump presenters — Vander Caballero,  Amy Hennig, and Mia Consalvo — last week. Those talks made me think about the violence in France and the ethics of game design. But we have more to talk about in reference to video games than just violence, for sure.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.