"Canada's Top Social Media Strategist" (SBC) | TEDx Speaker | #1 Best-selling author of "Trigger Fingers" | Tweets are my own
Toronto, Ontario
Joined November 2009
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100,000+ views in the first 29 days – cannot thank you all enough for the support I’ve received since my TEDxTalk, “How to Build Trust Online” dropped.
Now I can officially say: thank you for coming to my TEDTalk.
ICYMI: youtube.com/watch?v=6O2g6Ucs…
#TalkLikeTED #TEDTalk #trust
Adam Rodricks retweeted
I've said it for years: video games are massively underrated. Unlike TV or phones, the data on people who play videos games casually is surprisingly good.
It's people who are addicted to them and play them compulsively that give them a bad reputation.
Playing Super Mario 64 for 30 minutes a day for two months physically grew the brains of the people who played it. A 2014 study in Molecular Psychiatry scanned participants before and after two months of daily play and found increases in grey matter in three regions involved in memory, planning, and fine motor control.
The study was led by Simone Kuhn at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. She gave 23 adults a Nintendo DS and told them to play Super Mario 64 for at least 30 minutes a day for two months. A control group played nothing. MRI scans taken before and after showed that the Mario group had measurable increases in grey matter in the right hippocampus, the right prefrontal cortex, and the cerebellum, and the increases were not found in the control group.
The hippocampus is where the brain stores spatial maps. Super Mario 64 is a game built entirely around navigating three-dimensional space, jumping between platforms, remembering which doors lead where, and building a mental model of a world that does not exist. The brain treats a virtual world the same way it treats a real one: it maps it, stores it, and grows to accommodate it.
The prefrontal cortex handles planning and strategy, which the game demands constantly. The cerebellum handles timing and coordination, which every jump requires. The brain was not just entertained. It was being trained, and the tissue responded the same way muscle responds to a weight: it got bigger.
Kuhn said the results suggest that video game training could be used as a therapy for conditions where these brain regions are reduced, including post-traumatic stress disorder, schizophrenia, and age-related brain shrinkage. The prescription is a plumber in a red hat, 30 minutes a day. pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2416…
Been a gamer, collector and video game reviewer for decades. The move to all-digital is anti-consumer to its core. Even if you have the means, I urge you to vote with your wallet. #NOTBUYINGPS6
The dangers of prioritizing 'the next big thing' over your own identity.
Sony spent up to $400 million making a single video game. It sold 25,000 copies in 14 days before Sony pulled it from sale. Cost per copy sold: about $16,000. The studio shut down two months later. The executive who warned them had already been fired for saying no.
The game was Concord. The executive was Shuhei Yoshida, who ran Sony's in-house game studios for 11 years and helped ship some of the biggest PlayStation hits ever: God of War, The Last of Us, Uncharted, Ghost of Tsushima. These are games you buy once and finish. Sony made billions on that model. Spider-Man alone generated $315 million in digital sales. The Last of Us 2 pulled nearly $250 million. God of War Ragnarok sold 15 million copies, with $279 million from digital downloads alone.
Then in 2019, a new CEO took over PlayStation. Jim Ryan wanted Sony's studios to stop making those kinds of games and chase a different model: live service. Live service is Fortnite's model: games designed to keep you playing and paying forever, earning money through endless small purchases instead of one-time sales. Ryan told his team to ship 12 of these by 2025.
Yoshida refused. Ryan removed him from running the studios and gave him a choice: take a smaller role working with indie developers or leave the company. Yoshida took the role and stayed at Sony for another six years. At an industry event in Australia last weekend, he finally said plainly that Ryan fired him from running the studios for refusing to do the 'ridiculous things' Ryan had demanded.
Of those 12 live service games, 8 were cancelled before they ever came out. Naughty Dog killed a Last of Us multiplayer game in late 2023. Bend Studio's sci-fi game died in January 2025. Twisted Metal and a London fantasy game were both scrapped in early 2024, and the London studio was closed. Insomniac's Spider-Man multiplayer was abandoned. A God of War live service game was cancelled, then the studio making it (Bluepoint) was shut down this past February. A Destiny spin-off was scrapped. Deviation Games, a studio Sony had partnered with, was shut down before shipping anything.
Only one of the 12 actually worked. Helldivers 2 was a big hit. But the studio that made it, Arrowhead, isn't owned by Sony, and they've already said they won't partner with Sony on their next game.
The total damage under Ryan: $3.7 billion spent buying Bungie (the studio behind Destiny), up to $400 million written off on Concord, and roughly 1,500 jobs lost across studios that got shut down. The PS5 generation is now short on the kind of games that built PlayStation in the first place.
Yoshida was pushed out in 2019 for saying no to one strategy. Five years and a few billion dollars later, Sony's current CEO says the new plan is to 'fail early and fail cheaply.'
Adam Rodricks retweeted
The Giants have drafted 6 WR’s & TE’s in the first 2 rounds since 2014:
⁃ Odell Beckham Jr.
⁃ Sterling Shepard
⁃ Evan Engram
⁃ Kadarius Toney
⁃ Wan’Dale Robinson
⁃ Malik Nabers
5 out of 6 have suffered season-ending injuries at MetLife Stadium.
Adam Rodricks retweeted
Devon is a talent and should do incredibly well. I look forward to this generation of NOA. Congrats to @thetruebowser for the past 6+ years.
Hopped on CTV News tonightto discuss this dangerous new #socialmedia trend.
Dangerous social media challenge ignites safety concerns in some Canadian classrooms ctvnews.ca/canada/article/po…
Adam Rodricks retweeted
This is Post Malone
This was his first single ever
It is literally the worst song you've ever heard in your life
Now he is 10x platinum, and has made a billion dollars
I promise you your posts aren't as absolutely horrific as this song
JUST. START. POSTING.
No one stops to talk about how, for the first two years of school, Harry Potter’s conflict starts with simply not receiving mail addressed to him. @MuggleNet #harrypotter #Maggie
This week’s highs and lows of Playstation are definitely making it into his next book.
Adam Rodricks retweeted
This was so Assassin’s Creed I nearly desynchronised
#Olympics #AssassinsCreed
Adam Rodricks retweeted
Nintendo needed a sequel to the most popular Zelda game, a new 2D Mario, Pikmin 4, Super Mario RPG remake & more just to be get slightly higher sales than The Pokemon Company on a year with DLC and no new games 😭😭
No wonder they barely care about making Pokemon games better 💀
Adam Rodricks retweeted
The greatest motivational speaker of all time:
Jim Rohn.
He gave 6,000 speeches in 39 countries, became a millionaire by 31, and mentored a young Tony Robbins to greatness.
10 life-changing quotes that you'll never forget:
Potential @ouraring buyers beware:
Several users (myself included) are reporting severe battery degradation after 2 years at which point, they’ll run diagnostics, confirm their product doesn’t work, then tell you it’s out of warranty.
Worst bio-tech product #CustomerExperience
Adam Rodricks retweeted
It's up to Princess Zelda to save Hyrule in a brand-new The Legend of Zelda story.
The Legend of #Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom launches September 26th on #NintendoSwitch!
