Dylan Mann

I’m Dylan Mann, Gaming Writer at Go Cybernaut.

I grew up loving games, but somewhere along the way I realized that winning wasn’t actually the part that interested me most.

I wanted to understand them.

Why did losing that particular character hurt?

Why did an empty room make me nervous?

Why did I spend forty minutes helping an NPC find something when the fictional universe was supposedly minutes away from destruction?

And why, after finishing a game, would I immediately start again and make a different choice?

Games taught me something extraordinary about storytelling:

Stories can answer back.

A book can ask me to imagine.

A film can ask me to witness.

A game can look at me and say:

Okay. What are YOU going to do?

That changes the relationship.

Choice creates responsibility, even when the world is fictional.

It’s why I’m increasingly interested in player agency, interactive storytelling and the tiny decisions developers place throughout their worlds.

I’m also interested in who gets to participate.

Accessibility isn’t something that should be sprinkled onto a finished game because someone remembered it before launch.

Accessibility is design.

If you’re creating a world and unnecessarily preventing people from entering it, that’s a design question worth asking.

My work at Go Cybernaut has also changed how I think about gaming communities.

Numbers are useful.

Players aren’t numbers.

Followers aren’t numbers.

Readers aren’t numbers.

Behind every controller, keyboard, screen and username is somebody arriving with an entire life you can’t see.

That matters.

It’s also why I’m wary of interaction designed solely to manufacture engagement.

I don’t want to ask someone to click something simply because clicking improves a metric.

I’d rather say:

Here’s a door.

Would you like to open it?

And if you do, something should happen.

Your choice should matter.

That’s where my interactive-story experiments have been heading. Lani has become one of the people willing to test these strange little branching worlds with me, and sometimes she’ll make a choice I absolutely didn’t anticipate.

Those are usually the best tests.

Because players will always find the path the designer didn’t expect.

I’ve learned something else from Go Cybernaut too.

Never underestimate the side quest.

Games traditionally teach us that there’s a main objective.

Go there.

Defeat this.

Find that.

Save them.

Finish.

But some of my favourite gaming memories have absolutely nothing to do with completing the primary objective.

They came from wandering.

Talking to somebody I didn’t need to talk to.

Finding a room I didn’t need to enter.

Reading a note someone could easily have walked past.

Helping a character whose problem had nothing whatsoever to do with saving the world.

The main quest advances the plot.

Side quests deepen the world.

I’m starting to think life works that way too.

Not everything meaningful has to advance the grand objective.

Learning something strange because you’re curious counts.

Playing GeoGuessr counts.

Building LEGO for an afternoon counts.

Watching Jaxon investigate the aquarium for the nine-hundredth time counts.

Calling somebody because you thought of them counts.

Taking the long route because you’ve never been down that street counts.

Sometimes the side quest becomes the story you remember.

And sometimes it becomes the story somebody needed.

I still keep my private document:

Games That Changed Me.

There are no scores.

No rankings.

No “Top 100.”

Just games, moments and little notes about why they stayed.

Because I’ve spent enough years writing about games to know something:

The technically greatest game you’ve ever played and the game you needed at exactly the right moment may be completely different games.

Both matter.

That’s what I want my work at Go Cybernaut to protect.

Curiosity.

Choice.

Play.

Craft.

Accessibility.

Community.

And the possibility that somewhere inside a fictional world, someone might find a very real sense of belonging.

My catchphrase remains:

“Let’s talk about what the game’s really saying.”

And my north star remains:

“Respect the craft. Honor the player. Write like the story matters, because it does.”

But after this first year, I’d add one more line beneath it:

Respect the person holding the controller. 🎮💙

Dylan’s entire expansion is now woven into his cumulative character DNA, rather than replacing anything that came before.