About

I'm Ben - professional game developer, unprofessional musician.

I've been working in the game development industry for over 15 years as a gameplay programmer who specialises in multiplayer and AI. I've worked on various games ranging from those you probably never heard of (Emergency Mayhem), through those you might possibly have heard of (Everquest Next) and those which were somehow popular enough for Snoop Dogg to play (Fall Guys). More recently I've done co-development work on AAA projects I can't talk about. Yet.

Occasionally I write about game development, mostly in the abstract due to confidentiality around my day job: https://gamedev.ebonyfortress.com/

I'm also interested in the ethics of online platforms and the internet, and how platform moderation (or absence of it) has negative effects on creative workers, especially musicians, but increasingly others as well such as visual artists. With creative workers unable to effectively enforce their copyright it's meant that 'content-sharing' platforms (to use the legal term, despite it demeaning art and culture as 'content') have been able to thrive while the people who provide that so-called 'content' have struggled. My even-more-occasional writing about this, and especially about recent law changes around copyright protection, is here: https://copyright.ebonyfortress.com/

And as you might have guessed from the byline, I also write music. Mostly it's death/black/gothic metal that most of you will not be interested in. Occasionally it's soundtrack music or dungeon synth, that most of you will still not be interested in but will likely be less offended by.

If you'd like to contact me to write on these or related topics, email ben at bensizer.com and let me know how I can help.