Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈

@haraldhagen

[ Available for work! ] ✍️ Game Writer + Narrative Designer, to the great disapproval of my cats. Based in Yorkshire. He/him. 🎮 BG&E2 ▪︎ Game of Thrones: Tale of Crows ▪︎ The Stillness of the Wind ▪︎ NEO Scavenger ▪︎ etc. 💼 haraldthehagen.com

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Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· Jul 13

It just makes me happy that I can walk to a nearby 🇬🇧 grocery store and find a piece of 🇮🇩 home.

From right to left: on one corner of a stove is a small silver pot with pale yellow instant noodles steeped in boiling water, beside it a white ceramic bowl with seasonings in the middle of it and a silver fork balanced against its top rim, and beside that an opened packet of Indomie Mie Goreng with its sauce/seasoning packets torn open and depleted in preparation for a modest breakfast.

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· Jul 4

Happy birthday, Úna-Minh! From me and this little bannister bandit 🙂

Photo taken from a low angle of a grey and white cat peeking through a bannister, eyes full black with the hunting instinct, as she extends one paw with claws shown in a vaguely threatening implication.

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· May 29

Post a photo from 2019: Wandering around Manhattan in a bright purple shirt with a big-ass chocobo on it, wondering how the hell I got there. Damn, what a trip.

Photo of a mixed race guy looking up and off-camera, cropped from the shoulders up, in a bright purple tee. He wears round glasses with metallic frames, has wisps aspiring to be a moustache and goatee, thinning dark brown hair. Behind him is the grey marble wall of a building and secondary focal point, with the letters "30 ROCK" in gold carved onto it. The full text (30 ROCKEFELLER PLAZA) is obscured. The photo was taken in New York City in 2019.

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· May 19

It's time for another #GaMaYo this Thursday, and I'll be attending! Come say hey! 🙌

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· May 7

Boldly cringe teenager moment? I full on LIVED inside Photoshop every evening once home from school, with MSN messenger beebeebeeping in the background and a mix of Utada, Gackt, and misc anime opening/end themes blasting through Winamp. What was I 'shopping? Shit like THIS.

A wallpaper image depicting a distant figure of a robed man standing on a ledge overlooking a futuristic city. A waterfall effect on the right-hand side of the image belies glowing text: "die and be free of pain or live and fight your sorrow." The quote and the image are from the video game Final Fantasy X, the character is Auron, and the scene is from the game's opening hour.

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· May 6

Wisdom from the Burger Gem Saloon. (Dis)courtesy of one Albert Swearengen.

Burger king style ad with text replaced. A packed burger depicted. Text reads "damage don't end the world, or despair, or f*ckin beatings. The world ends when you're dead. Until then you got more punishment in store."

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· May 2

Today has been a self-care day. Thus my cats rewarded me by posing for photos.

Front view close-up of a cat's face lying flat on a white sherpa blanket. The cat has mostly black fur, with white regions on her left cheek and near the right half of her lip. Her green eyes are lazily half-open, caught as she was trying to get comfortable for a nap.

Side view of a grey-stripe and white cat, lying down relaxed with one front paw tucked in under her chest and the other front paw stretched out in front of her. Her eyes are shut, as if in power-saving mode.

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· Apr 9

If you see this, drop a hero with a sword! Basara's Maeda Keiji is so over the top, but so is the whole damn cast in that universe. Anyway the way he played and was animated in the games was sooo satisfying, swinging around an insensibly long nodachi like it was light as a garden broom. 10/10

A painterly illustration of a man garbed in yellow holding a long nodachi. A small monkey rests on his hand. He has long brown hair tied in a ponytail. He wears striped silver greaves. White background. The character is Keiji Maeda from the Sengoku Basara franchise.

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· Apr 4

Happy birthday, Dad 🤍 You would've been 89 today. But you were always one for round numbers. Someday when I see you again, no doubt you'll be on the Engineering deck, fixing things and cracking jokes.

A smiling boy with dark hair (left) sits with his father (right), both in white t-shirts. An old photo in a new picture frame. The boy holds a V sign with his hand off the father's left shoulder.

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· Apr 2

I loved writing item descriptions in The Stillness of the Wind! Books showed the PC's reactions rather than excerpts/summaries. 'Treasures' had the peddler's mythologised sales pitches and Talma's initial matter-of-fact descriptions, later replaced by her mystical ones when reality starts changing.

Photo of an excel spreadsheet. The highlighted cells read:

The Shard Sword of Endrel
Recovered from the grave of the Great Pixie Queen Advadavix, the sword boasts an edge capable of slicing through the mightiest sheets of metal!
It looks like a letter opener.
Letters faintly shimmer on this small blade. Letters I almost recognise, powerful and gold.

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· Mar 27

These were the relics of my age. The treasures of my time. Memory lane, here we go! 1/6

A set of 6 Mighty Max toys in the shapes of (top left to bottom right): a black spider, a green snake head, a grey fanged skull, a cyan alien head, a yellow coiled snake, a grey demonic skull. Hex-patterned table cover underneath.

Mighty Max toys x2, depicted in a closed and open state. Left is a grey/white demon skull with a scifi interior. Right is a red/yellow dinosaur head with a cyan modern industrial interior.

Mighty Max toys x3. Left is a cyan alien head with an arctic scifi interior. Middle is dark blue shark head with a submarine interior. Right is a werewolf head with a purple organic horror interior.

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· Mar 26

Sale: souls, unsalted.

Pen. Black background. Text reads: "write a horror story using only 3 words."

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· Mar 25

Had my lovely assistant sleeping on my belly today. Very assisting, much helpful, 10/10 cat. ❤️

Close-up of a black-and-white cat's head as she sleeps peacefully between the folds of a thick grass-green hoodie, a bright red sofa cushion in the background. What does she dream of? What great adventures? What ideals does she yearn for? We may never know.

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· Mar 14

O what forbidden knowledge! What ancient secrets! What dark biddings and divine instruction! What baneful poisons of ignorance, tales of truths untold! O what words of power, ringing with sound and fury! Good stuff, this.

A photo of the book "The Game Narrative Kaleidoscope: 100+ essays on the craft of game writing. Collated by Jon Ingold". The book, with its black base colour and multicoloured shapes and font, rests on a wooden table.

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· Mar 12

Heya! I'm Harald and this is #WhatAGameDevLooksLike. Particularly when sitting with his Mom 🙂 I'm an Indonesian-Norwegian game writer, freelancing narratively(?) in indie/AAA since 2013(!). I'm not at GDC this year, chilling instead in the very windy north of England. Also I'm available for work!

A photo of my mother (left) and me (right). Mom is wearing a black top and white/lavender headscarf. I'm wearing a blue/green plaid shirt and a deep red scarf. We're sat in a booth with green seating and a wooden partition behind it.

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· Mar 6

Bah, have another 9. This is fun. Alundra and Thirty Flights were sooo influential to my young self.

A set of 9 games. From top left to bottom right: Dissidia Duodecim 012. Persona 4. Red Dead Redemption. Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers. Kingdom Hearts II. Thirty Flights of Loving. Digimon World. Alundra. NieR Automata.

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· Mar 6

Yeah well who tf wanted to predict all this crap

"The best way to predict the future is to create it." Words written on a slip of paper, held in a hand.

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· Mar 6

Me picking my 9 games: Here are #my9games from my9games.com there are 9 of them and they're games.

A selection of the cover art of my favourite games. In order from top left to bottom right: Suikoden II, Final Fantasy VI, Journey, Control, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Chrono Trigger, Megaman Legends (Rockman DASH), Portal, Wild ARMs.

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· Mar 2

In a bright colourful font, the words "stigmatise wealth hoarding" over a game screenshot of a farm

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· Mar 2

Happy birthday, Sally! A small source of recent joy: seeing soft translucent fabric carved from stone. 🤍

Photo depicts a sculpture called The Veiled Lady by artist Niccoló Bazzanti. The sculpture is a bust carved from white stone, now grey with dust and time, mounted on a black stand. One particularly stand-out element of the bust is that the woman's figure is shown draped with a translucent veil over her head and chest, a ghostly material rendered with deft mastery so as to appear soft and see-through despite being carved from rock and allowing the expression of the subject to come through.

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· Feb 21

Museum time! Always fun to see an artistic representation of a house of religious worship pointedly made of incendiary devices.

Photo of a sculpture of a church in miniature, housed in a glass display case. The sculpture is made of matches.

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· Feb 1

Brought to you by: www.storytellingcollective.com

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· Jan 31

It's Friday night and we're cranking up the factory tetris vibes on Endfield. This has so quickly become my happy place.

Screenshot from Arknights Endfield game. Sci-fi. A grey-coated man in a mask stands on a cliff in the foreground, while far behind him is an array of machines arranged neatly in a grid. He holds a gold-glowing geometric object. What is he contemplating? Does the Endministrator foresee and work toward a paradise that has solved all scarcity? Or is he simply posing at a windy vantage point trying to look cool while scattering a strategically delayed fart in the wind? Only time will tell. If the gods know the answer, they are not- oh god what is that smell.

Screenshot from Arknights Endfield. Scifi. A topdown view of an arrangement of factory machines and orange light-based conveyor belts.

Screenshot from Arknights Endfield. Scifi. A topdown view of an arrangement of factory machines and orange light-based conveyor belts. In blueprint form, greyscale. Partial. On the right hand side is a list of the elements in the array.

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· Jan 13

No new pictures, where are you mentally?

Meme using images of Galadriel, reading at the top "what do you have to be anxious about?" And four panels below answering "things that were / things that are / and some things... / that have not yet come to pass"

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· Jan 7

Finished TNG! What a lovely scene to end on. An existential crisis averted in a test of metacognitive potential that also saves a poignant personal one of drifting relationships. Cerebral and heartfelt, as ever. And what a lovely little creature asleep on my lap to have during it.

A close-up photo of a white-and-grey-striped cat's face, falling asleep on a green hoodie, with a TV blurred in the background.

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· Dec 6

Sending over Strength and this: The Asymmetrical Balance of Cat.

Two cats (striped greywhite and tux blackwhite) coiled next to each other, photographed from overhead.

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· Nov 18

Very excited down to the molecular level 😬

Photo of the softcover book "Steering the Craft" by Ursula K. Le Guin.

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· Nov 11

How my mind straight up exploded. Biggest concern is how three-cueing seems to throw wide the gates for bias to warp literacy. If your method of reading a text asks you to fill in blanks yourself in lieu of clear context clues or correction, subtle prejudices can quickly become self-reinforcing.

Screenshot from linked article. The text reads: "when I asked him what he makes of the cognitive science research, he told me he thinks scientists focus too much on word recognition. He still doesn't believe accurate word recognition is necessary for reading comprehension.

'Word recognition is a preoccupation,' he said. 'I don't teach word recognition. I teach people to make sense of language. And learning the words is incidental to that.'"

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· Oct 20

It's just this particular thing right now that scratches the incredibly specific itch I have. This box-filling craft mechanic. The loop of gather > mix > heal/give to npc > upgrade tools/house is in heaps of games, but i dunno this weirdly specific mood for a game is a new experience for me.

Screenshot from the game Potion Permit, showing an ingredients bag and a cauldron with a square grid into which items must be placed.

Harald Hagen 🏳️‍🌈@haraldhagen· Oct 15

Laughing every time I think about the audacity of this twink rocking up to every inn/pub/tabled venue and taking their umbrella stand solely to rest his impractically large sword so he can focus on playing a children's card game.