There are two things Sam Lake loves more than anything: coffee and Twin Peaks.

His TikTok is filled with dozens of brief clips of the video game writer taking a single sip of coffee in various situations and dapper outfits — even one while he’s swimming in an actual lake. Lake has an innate affinity for the offbeat and idiosyncratic. That’s immediately apparent in the way his entire body lights up when I ask about Twin Peaks, prompting a 10-minute dissection of the 2017 reboot/revival season Twin Peaks: The Return, which he was “thrilled” by.

There’s an undeniable charm to the passionate way Lake talks about the things he loves, which naturally includes the cult-classic games he’s masterminded — Max Payne, Alan Wake, and Control. There’s a quirkiness to those titles that speaks to the offbeat personality of the writer himself. (Sam Lake is a pen name — his full name is Sami Antero Järvi, and “järvi” means “lake” in Finnish.) For Lake, games are a marriage of magic and technology, and the upcoming Alan Wake 2, out October 17, is a culmination of that philosophy.

Sarah Bond can see me. And I don't just mean that my camera is working. She flashes her gleaming Disney Princess smile and addresses me by name multiple times. We jump in at the deep end. Why dovideo games matter so much to nearly 3 billion people, we ponder, by which we both clearly mean, “Why do games matter so much to us?” Unlike me, Bond has actually done her homework on the subject. You’d expect as much. She is, after all, head of creator experience and ecosystem at Xbox.

“There's three types of empathy. There's cognitive empathy, where you can understand another person’s perspective. Then there's emotional empathy, where you actually imagine that you are that person. The last one is compassionate empathy, which means that you decide to act differently than you normally would," she says.

This might sound like Psychology 301, but really Bond is laying out a radical view of the gaming industry as a whole. "Games take you all the way through this arc. And they are the only form of media where you can have that experience with another person,” she explains. Gaming to Bond is a radical art form, and games have the ability to bring people together in a way that supersedes any other art form.