If you’re stuck at home looking for distractions to take your mind off of COVID-19—or if you’ve realized that you don’t actually have to pay attention to your department’s snooze-inducing staff meeting and you’d rather not watch your boss try and fail for twenty solid minutes to get WebEx desktop sharing to work—I’ve got a humble suggestion: how about watching some of our “War Stories” videos on game-design challenges?

We started “War Stories” a couple of years ago with the idea being that we’d sit down with some brilliant game designers and get them to describe to us a moment in their work when it felt like they had run up against an unsolvable (or nearly unsolvable) problem, and how they eventually overcame that problem. Over the years we’ve heard some fascinating tales of programming derring-do from some fascinating folks—people like Sid Meier (Civilization), Paul Neurath (Thief: The Dark Project), Glen Schofield (Dead Space) and even Lord British himself, Richard Garriott (Ultima Online).

(The series is also in active production, and there are two new episodes nearly finished—including one that we’ll be publishing tomorrow about a certain rotoscoped prince, and one coming soon about a certain neuroscientist named “Karan.”)