Osama Dorias talks about making games from the heart at GDC 2021.

The DeanBeat: The learnings of the week in games

The online-only Game Developers Conference had 550 talks scheduled this week, and some of them are still happening today. They reminded me what I love about games. No matter how much I think I know about games, they are so vast that I can always learn something new.

And this week, I learned both good things and bad things.

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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.