About

Welcome to Third Helix!

This site serves two functions: it collects my various creative works, including games, mods, music, and photos; and it serves as a blog for my thoughts on the game industry, the field of game design, and politics and current events.

I’m Josh Sutphin, a professional game designer (I most recently did Warhawk for the Playstation 3) with an intense interest in the field. My goal is to raise the bar for emotional involvement in games by developing methods unique to our medium, instead of aping film. Storytelling is a very different beast when you add interactivity to the mix, and we’re going to need new approaches in order to fully realize that experience. I also aim to expand awareness of what game design really is (and perhaps more importantly, what it isn’t) and thereby combat the too-common perspective of game design as opinion, rather than skill.

I produce electronic music as a hobby, most recently under the alias “Soulbound”. I’m a huge fan of trance music; it’s as perfect to work by as it is to play by.

I’m also an unabashed liberal atheist trying to comprehend today’s American conservative worldview. Liberalism and atheism have both been cast as excuses to lead an immoral lifestyle, but I contend that to be moral only because “God is watching” is to have no morality at all. And I think civics is important, even though it’s usually boring, sometimes byzantine, and occasionally infuriating. This is the foundation of our society, and we have a responsibility to uphold it.