Speaker 1: Alsome Media.
Speaker 2: All right, I think it's the time we blow this scene.
Speaker 2: Get everybody in that stuff together. Okay, three two one,
Speaker 2: that's podcast.
Speaker 1: Welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host ed Zitchrun.
Speaker 3: Today.
Speaker 2: I'm joined by the esteem Geeta Jackson and Nathan Grayson
Speaker 2: of independent gaming site After Marth and Nathan, of course
Speaker 2: has a new book out called Stream Big, The Triumphs
Speaker 2: and Turmoils for Twitch and the Stars behind the Screen.
Speaker 1: Both of you, thank you for being here.
Speaker 4: Thank you for having us, No problem, super fun.
Speaker 3: Hell yeah.
Speaker 2: So today we're talking about the games industry, which I
Speaker 2: think we can all agree is going well.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's going super good, bigger than Hollywood as we
Speaker 5: all know.
Speaker 1: So to that point, Nathan, what is actually going on
Speaker 1: right now?
Speaker 2: Because it feels like over the last few years I
Speaker 2: used to be a games journalist, but I've kind of
Speaker 2: dropped out of the industry stuff. What's going on?
Speaker 6: Well, right now, bunch of games companies are realizing that
Speaker 6: they well at least they've decided that what they need
Speaker 6: to do is make fewer, bigger games, and so they're
Speaker 6: laying a lot of people off in pursuit of that.
Speaker 6: Because games are in their minds a hits driven business, right,
Speaker 6: and so in order to achieve that, they're just like, okay,
Speaker 6: let's put all of our all of our eggs in
Speaker 6: these increasingly smaller baskets and if one of these lands,
Speaker 6: then great, we have the next like League Legends, so
Speaker 6: the next like Fortnite or whatever. And if they fail,
Speaker 6: then it's a catastrophe and we're going to lay a
Speaker 6: bunch of people off. And the only people who will
Speaker 6: not suffer from this are the executives who are making
Speaker 6: these bad decisions.
Speaker 1: And that keeps happening over and over and over. So
Speaker 1: what is a hit though, Like, well, how do they
Speaker 1: define a hit?
Speaker 5: They've defined it by a Hollywood terms, right, like which
Speaker 5: which are you you want to be have a level
Speaker 5: of cultural impact one that is inescapable. Fortnite is a
Speaker 5: very good example because literally every child plays Fortnite, right,
Speaker 5: and you can play it on every device. Everyone suddenly
Speaker 5: understands the terms through which that game is sort of created,
Speaker 5: is made and played.
Speaker 6: At birth, every child it's given an iPad with Fortnite on.
Speaker 5: It's that minecroft, yeah, one of those two. And then
Speaker 5: also there is a saying that a lot of executives
Speaker 5: love to tout when they talk about the financial success
Speaker 5: of their industry, which is that video games are a
Speaker 5: bigger industry, more by more. There's more money in video
Speaker 5: games than Hollywood.
Speaker 4: And I don't really think that that's true.
Speaker 1: Is there any proof behind the well, I mean they.
Speaker 5: Might games that are very, very, very successful, like Elderming
Speaker 5: is another great example of it, just a smash hit
Speaker 5: where millions of millions of games were sold. But the
Speaker 5: thing is that money that you make often goes immediately
Speaker 5: back into recouping all the cost of development, because games
Speaker 5: take a lot longer to make than a movie and
Speaker 5: require a lot more people to make them.
Speaker 6: Yeah, a lot of projects, a lot of projects in
Speaker 6: this day and age, are rebooted repeatedly over the course
Speaker 6: of their development, like that happened recently with a Dragon
Speaker 6: Age The Veilguard, a game that was originally meant to
Speaker 6: be like a live service multiplayer game, which is.
Speaker 1: A weird for that series to take.
Speaker 2: I'm for the for the listeners, you like, avid guy,
Speaker 2: But so a life service game is it's a game.
Speaker 5: It must sort of exist in perpetuity, right. The idea
Speaker 5: is that it has seasons of narrative and and gameplay even.
Speaker 1: Necessarily narrative, just like new stuff coming out.
Speaker 3: Like can you play a monthly fee again?
Speaker 5: Fortnite is a very good example of this. Fortnite refreshes
Speaker 5: the maps that you used to play the game on.
Speaker 5: They refresh that every occasionally. They call it seasons, like
Speaker 5: seasons of television, and they there's always just new skins,
Speaker 5: new items, new things, suspend your money.
Speaker 1: Collaborations with major brands.
Speaker 6: I the way over here there was an ad for
Speaker 6: like Cowboy Bebop skins in the game now, which.
Speaker 2: Is sick, but so Destiny Too is the one I
Speaker 2: remember with that right, is a lab service game and
Speaker 2: that's owned Vice Sony PlayStation now Sony Interactive Entertainment technically,
Speaker 2: but it's And so this is kind of from my
Speaker 2: experience at least gaming a shit tone when I was younger,
Speaker 2: by which I mean like two years ago. But the
Speaker 2: fact is that games now aren't just allowed to be
Speaker 2: good once.
Speaker 3: They have to be good forever.
Speaker 5: Yes, yes, you have to be the biggest game ever
Speaker 5: in order to be considered a success forever forever, like
Speaker 5: not just when the game comes out, but also every
Speaker 5: single month after that for the next year well.
Speaker 6: Which also, like I think works very much in conjunction
Speaker 6: with kind of like the line go up mentality of
Speaker 6: business in general, Like your game also has to be
Speaker 6: a line that's always going.
Speaker 2: On, yes, And it can't simply be successful in a
Speaker 2: linear sense. It can't just be like a game you sell.
Speaker 2: It is a game you are constantly rebooting. Like even
Speaker 2: with Marvel Rivals, they had and very successful game boned
Speaker 2: by Netsy Easy, and they just laid off a bunch
Speaker 2: of people.
Speaker 4: They laid off all of their their America.
Speaker 1: It was like unctually happened. Oh so it wasn't a
Speaker 1: huge layoff.
Speaker 6: Yeah, so this was also like it was part of
Speaker 6: a larger Net East plan to kind of divest from
Speaker 6: outside of China. Oh okay, yeah, And so like I
Speaker 6: think they were planning to do this even before Marvel
Speaker 6: Arrivals took off.
Speaker 4: Were getting at folks.
Speaker 5: My favorite example of this phenomenon is BioShock Infinite, a
Speaker 5: game that was incredibly successful, hugely critically acclaimed. After the
Speaker 5: game came out, the studio shuttered like it was over
Speaker 5: immediately immediately, couldn't recoup the costs, essentially like there was
Speaker 5: no amount of money they could make on that game
Speaker 5: that was financially successful and was critically acclaimed, to give
Speaker 5: back to the studio in order for make it like
Speaker 5: financially prop like a financially stable institution, and then all
Speaker 5: those developers scattered to the winds. That was kind of
Speaker 5: the end of major game development in Boston for.
Speaker 6: Until like literally now with CD project, they hadn't root
Speaker 6: over there at least thoughting up a Boston where they're
Speaker 6: making the next cyberpunk and what's where the CD brot is,
Speaker 6: like they've they were very cyberpunk.
Speaker 3: I did play it.
Speaker 2: I don't know why I'm acting like, I like don't
Speaker 2: have a gaming PC. I have like a gaming PC
Speaker 2: with like two motherboards inside.
Speaker 3: Is beautiful anyway, Yeah.
Speaker 6: You also sitting right behind us as one of the
Speaker 6: widest monitors I've seen in my.
Speaker 1: Hole, Like it's a beautiful.
Speaker 3: It's amazing.
Speaker 2: But that one was really tortured because the game was
Speaker 2: rushed out, and I don't think I've seen in a
Speaker 2: while like a game that rush and it ended up
Speaker 2: being dog shit.
Speaker 6: And they like if we're talking about the broader state
Speaker 6: of video games, Another characteristic I think is that most
Speaker 6: big games these days get rushed out in some capacity,
Speaker 6: it's just less glaring than it was for Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk
Speaker 6: was a lot of functional issues. Right now he gets
Speaker 6: a lot of games that are rushed out but polished,
Speaker 6: so they have all of these like mechanical problems and
Speaker 6: like other more deep seated issues where they could have
Speaker 6: solved it just by like you know, giving the developers
Speaker 6: more time to cook.
Speaker 1: But they know that people will be off.
Speaker 6: Put by a game that doesn't work, so they make
Speaker 6: sure it works.
Speaker 3: But it's not good exactly. What can you give me
Speaker 3: an example?
Speaker 1: Dragon Age Dragonage of the Vilguard is facing. Was it bad?
Speaker 5: So I'm like huge, I'm a huge dragon Age fan,
Speaker 5: and I was really looking forward to this game because
Speaker 5: I'm like invested in the narrative and the characters and
Speaker 5: dragon Age in Quisition. I think like a lot of
Speaker 5: people who if you've played are listening to this and
Speaker 5: played dragon Age Inquisition, you know the experience of you're
Speaker 5: incredibly fucking depressed.
Speaker 4: You yeah, completely just mainline.
Speaker 5: A game and the writing and the characters are so
Speaker 5: good it becomes your entire world and you can just
Speaker 5: live inside that fandom. And that was me for a
Speaker 5: little bit so I waited like ten years for this
Speaker 5: game to come out, and the longer a game stays
Speaker 5: in development, though, generally speaking, the worse it will be
Speaker 5: when you actually get your hands on it.
Speaker 1: And when the.
Speaker 5: Game came out, it worked and it functioned, but it
Speaker 5: was not finally tuned there when you could tell and
Speaker 5: feel when you played it there were things that should
Speaker 5: have been there that were not there, and it felt
Speaker 5: empty and like it was missing things.
Speaker 2: With role playing games, it's extremely important to get the
Speaker 2: mechanics right.
Speaker 6: Right, yeah, And like this was a byproduct of just
Speaker 6: like how the game was made. So again, it started
Speaker 6: many years ago. It's like it began development like all
Speaker 6: nearly a decade ago as one kind of game, as
Speaker 6: a multiplayer live service game, and then over time EA
Speaker 6: and bio where were like, this isn't working. Let's reboot
Speaker 6: it mid development and try something else that didn't work.
Speaker 6: They had key personal leave. They're like, let's reboot it
Speaker 6: again into something else, and that's what became the game
Speaker 6: that came out, which is like this mishmash of all
Speaker 6: these mechanics and assets they came up with over time,
Speaker 6: and so internally the way this played out, is. They
Speaker 6: were like, well, again, it needs to reach a certain
Speaker 6: like quality and review bar from the cell. So let's
Speaker 6: just make sure that it feels polished, Like let's pop
Speaker 6: all this stuff together, but make sure it looks nice.
Speaker 2: It has the smell and the taste of a triple
Speaker 2: A game without actually being fun. So what is it
Speaker 2: that makes so expensive though? Like, what is the cost center?
Speaker 2: Is it people?
Speaker 1: Is it comput is something we don't know?
Speaker 6: So this is the thing I there There's been a
Speaker 6: lot of discourse around like the increasing, you know, level
Speaker 6: of fidelity that you need for a triple A game,
Speaker 6: and like all of these various concerns about the number
Speaker 6: of people that you need to create all these assets
Speaker 6: and maintain that. But I think that Jason Schreier in
Speaker 6: particular has done really good reporting on the real problem,
Speaker 6: which is mismanagement at every level. Executive is making poor
Speaker 6: decisions while siphoning away millions and millions of dollars from
Speaker 6: a project.
Speaker 1: Siphoning it from to when themselves.
Speaker 4: Themselves, Yeah, often themselves.
Speaker 1: How does that mean, you know, check out like the
Speaker 1: kind of money that throws sell nick.
Speaker 2: Oh okay, So it's like the CEOs of making obscene
Speaker 2: amounts of mind in a lot of cases.
Speaker 3: Yeah, fucking hell.
Speaker 5: So often in uh AT E three, Rest and Peace
Speaker 5: and other video game sort of industry conferences that will
Speaker 5: make comparisons to Hollywood between themselves. In Hollywood, they want
Speaker 5: to be a part of the entertainment into say, they want.
Speaker 1: To be paid like David Zaslaw exactly exactly.
Speaker 5: But there's the huge differences between what how Hollywood operates
Speaker 5: and how the video game industry operates. And the main
Speaker 5: difference is there, these are not the people who work
Speaker 5: on games are not unionized craft people right, with a
Speaker 5: culture of unionization in their workplaces, so they really can
Speaker 5: like you are a contract worker. You sign on for
Speaker 5: a gig and if you aren't there when the game
Speaker 5: is completed, you don't get your name in the credits,
Speaker 5: and you just have to move in a herd from
Speaker 5: studio to studio to studio.
Speaker 3: And all those credits important. I'm guessing they're.
Speaker 4: Very important in order to get better paying jobs.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I'll just put it on your LinkedIn.
Speaker 7: No.
Speaker 5: I mean, especially if you're working on a project like
Speaker 5: at Monolith, the studio that's shattered this week. They were
Speaker 5: they're two years into development on a wonder Woman game
Speaker 5: and wonder Woman and I think you're a DC comics person.
Speaker 1: I'm more of a Marvel person, but I'm familiar with
Speaker 1: wonder Woman.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I hope so.
Speaker 5: Well, it's like, it's interesting that you say that because,
Speaker 5: like wonder Woman in comparison to the other two big
Speaker 5: heroes at DC, I'm a big DC comics person.
Speaker 4: Uh, Superman and Batman.
Speaker 5: They've both had cartoons, movies the gamut, like video games, everything.
Speaker 5: Even Superman had an extremely bad series. Oh yes, a
Speaker 5: classic god. But there's with wonder Woman. There's been no cartoons. Uh,
Speaker 5: there are a couple of flagshit comics, but they've had
Speaker 5: a lot of a harder time finding really good writers
Speaker 5: to write really good Wonder Woman books. And there have
Speaker 5: been zero games. This would have been like the first
Speaker 5: game there. They worked on it for two years and
Speaker 5: there's a lot of people now who cannot even talk
Speaker 5: about what they did on these games. It can't show
Speaker 5: the art.
Speaker 1: That they they don't have the assets they come.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the assets don't belong to them. They haven't been publicized.
Speaker 5: And these are also contract workers, so they don't have
Speaker 5: the rights to anything that they have worked on.
Speaker 2: And I just want to say none of these are
Speaker 2: actionable legal threats. But mono If Studios made one of
Speaker 2: my two of my most favorite Gameskeeter. We were talking
Speaker 2: about this when we came in Lord of the Rings,
Speaker 2: Shadow of Mortal and the Shadow of War, two of
Speaker 2: the best games ever made.
Speaker 1: I have.
Speaker 2: Not only Hades is a game. Hades is a game
Speaker 2: I think I will be playing until I'm an old man. Yes, absolutely,
Speaker 2: but Shadow of War especially, like these are amazing games.
Speaker 2: And these are games the systems are perfect, and they're beautiful,
Speaker 2: and they.
Speaker 5: They give you that feeling that I think these major
Speaker 5: studios are trying to chase in these enormous games like
Speaker 5: Cyberpunk twenty seventy seven and this game. This world is
Speaker 5: a living world. This world things are happening inside of it,
Speaker 5: even when you are not there is the feeling you
Speaker 5: get I'm playing that and.
Speaker 1: The orcs are talking shit about you.
Speaker 3: And that's the thing.
Speaker 2: So to explain this game to people who have not
Speaker 2: even don't play games, I really recommend it. So what
Speaker 2: it is is it's kind of an open world game
Speaker 2: where you run around. You're some Lord of the Rings fellow.
Speaker 2: I do not remember the story not going to try
Speaker 2: and remember. But the big thing about it is something
Speaker 2: called the Nemesis system. And there are these orcs and
Speaker 2: various troll creatures that will and they're all generated procedurally,
Speaker 2: even flawlessly said that word, and where they come up
Speaker 2: and they're like someone of Biles and they'll come up
Speaker 2: and they'll be covered in postures and be like, oh,
Speaker 2: man field off and then you're able to It kind
Speaker 2: of mirrors my real life and that some horrible creature
Speaker 2: comes up to me and goes off, and then I
Speaker 2: convert them to my side. So you can convert these
Speaker 2: orcs and they follow you around and they have these
Speaker 2: or charts.
Speaker 5: Yes of like, and if you die to an orc
Speaker 5: in a combat encounter, that orc will then go back
Speaker 5: to his little Orc friends and be like, I fucking
Speaker 5: fucked up, and they'll talk about.
Speaker 6: Talk about it, and they'll talk to you later and
Speaker 6: they'll recount specifically, like how they killed you and stuff.
Speaker 1: It's like they keep that in mind.
Speaker 2: And it's quite literally what I love about video games
Speaker 2: large It's just like a weird freak system full of
Speaker 2: weird goblin creatures. You can see each other.
Speaker 4: Have you played Dwarf Fortress.
Speaker 1: Ever I've tried it never really stuck.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna I'm gonna teach you how you're tea.
Speaker 5: It's because it's this thing, right do you? There are
Speaker 5: character with memory, right, and they learn things and they
Speaker 5: have personalities, right, and that change. Like this is a
Speaker 5: game that's made by two guys of two brothers. Until
Speaker 5: very recently it was literally just the two of them, right,
Speaker 5: And like it is so fascinating how you can have
Speaker 5: that same sort of magical black box experience of there's
Speaker 5: magic inside of this, there's a personality inside of this.
Speaker 5: One of them comes from two brothers that have worked
Speaker 5: on this thing on and off for like twenty fucking
Speaker 5: years of their life.
Speaker 4: And the other is an enormous studio using the IP
Speaker 4: Lord of the Rings.
Speaker 2: And I just want to be clear about a few things. One,
Speaker 2: this is one of the few games I've heard like
Speaker 2: unilaterally loved by games journalists. Like, sure, there are people
Speaker 2: who don't like the genre, but anyone who has even
Speaker 2: the smell of RPGs loves this shit.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I also want to add the WB Games CEO JB.
Speaker 2: Perett and WB Games former CEO David hadda do you
Speaker 2: want enemies of better offline? You want enemies of this show?
Speaker 2: Your growth all costs for economy bullshit? Will you will
Speaker 2: be by all the people who listened to the show.
Speaker 2: So the reason that this, I'm literally looking at Nathan's
Speaker 2: story about this, the reason that Monoliths got shut down
Speaker 2: is just that Warner Brothers cannot run a fucking studio.
Speaker 3: They're stupid and bad in the industry.
Speaker 6: Yes, yeah, like I mean you know they've also been
Speaker 6: tanking tons of like television and movie properties too.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: No, the Warner ever since Warner Brothers Discoveries on my
Speaker 5: shit list and has been for a long time. It's
Speaker 5: an incredible It's an incredible Hollywood studio. It's so much
Speaker 5: incredible history. The whole story of Coyote Versus Acme has
Speaker 5: been I just want to jump off for three. Okay,
Speaker 5: there is there was a movie in production, Coyote Versus Acme,
Speaker 5: an adaptation of the Looney Tunes cartoon, you know, the
Speaker 5: Coyote Roadrunner in the Coyote, And it had John Cena
Speaker 5: in it, and it by all accounts, everyone who worked
Speaker 5: on it said it was incredible.
Speaker 1: It used the James Gunn movie.
Speaker 4: Yeah, James gun movie. He it was also what's the movie.
Speaker 2: James Gunn By the way, for the listeners got into
Speaker 2: the Galaxy Suicide Squad.
Speaker 5: Having Superman movie upcoming Superman I'm freaking psyched about I
Speaker 5: love it. Yeah, but you know it was going to
Speaker 5: be a Roger Rabbit type thing, a mixed media animation
Speaker 5: and real life stuff like a lot of the stuff
Speaker 5: that moviegoers actually really really love seeing, real stunts and
Speaker 5: real effects, not CGI, not VFX, that kind of thing.
Speaker 2: I'm chipping that the chip Dales movie did really well
Speaker 2: as well on Disney.
Speaker 1: Plus that's a very similar thing anyway, can Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and they the movies wrapped. It's totally fully completed.
Speaker 1: Sheld it, sheldy literally for tax reasons.
Speaker 4: Literally for tax reasons. No one will ever see it.
Speaker 2: And David Zaslav, if you go back to the Shareholders
Speaker 2: Supremacy to Parter, you will learn all about him. Jack Welch,
Speaker 2: the CEO of G who created the modern culture of layoffs,
Speaker 2: literally the guy who didn't invent layoffs. But if you
Speaker 2: go back to those episodes, there's the story of Jack Welch,
Speaker 2: c of G. Well, upcoming CEO one of the candidates
Speaker 2: for it was running several divisions and came up with
Speaker 2: this idea, what if we just laid people off to
Speaker 2: increase profits and not the time layoffs were considered something
Speaker 2: you only did as a last resort. But Jack Welch.
Speaker 2: Jack Welch thought what if we did this? He did it,
Speaker 2: and everyone else went, that's a great fucking idea. Number
Speaker 2: go up. The reason I'm bringing this up is that
Speaker 2: David Zaslav's CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery, once referred to
Speaker 2: Jack Welch as like a big brother to him. Okay,
Speaker 2: I think I just want you to know everything I've
Speaker 2: been doing for the last few years has driven me insane.
Speaker 4: Because truning into the Joker in real.
Speaker 2: Time, the makeup is appearing on our faces. But Coyote
Speaker 2: versus actme was like will Forte was going to be
Speaker 2: and it was like going to be a very like
Speaker 2: it very clearly would have done really well, really really well,
Speaker 2: and they just shelled it for tax reasons. This is
Speaker 2: the same company that owns WAWB Games, which owns Monolith
Speaker 2: This is the likes.
Speaker 5: It is like the tech industry ification of the entire
Speaker 5: entertainment industry. Everything just disastrous for art in general. You
Speaker 5: can see it very visually in film, in cinema just
Speaker 5: sort of. I used to be a person that just
Speaker 5: fucking loved blockbuster action movies.
Speaker 4: I love them.
Speaker 3: That's losings wrong with that.
Speaker 5: In the summer, when it's hot out, nothing better you
Speaker 5: can do than go to a theater for two hours
Speaker 5: with air conditioning and just enjoy mindless action. Except they
Speaker 5: all started to suck when Disney realized that you can
Speaker 5: feed people like not like the suggestion of a plot,
Speaker 5: but not actually a story. Essentially, you just sort of
Speaker 5: allude to things that will happen in the future, and
Speaker 5: you can make billions of dollars off of that. And
Speaker 5: you don't actually have to shoot on sets. You can
Speaker 5: just put people in front of a green screen and
Speaker 5: then ununionized VFX workers can fill in everything else for you.
Speaker 2: Right, And this is also something that fed into the
Speaker 2: creation of one of the worst things fandoms.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean, I love the experience of being in
Speaker 5: a fandom, but there is this tribalistic thing that is
Speaker 5: disturbing to me.
Speaker 2: Let me be a little more specific, because I'm a
Speaker 2: huge fan of many things. Yeah, like I've seen Queen
Speaker 2: to the Stone Age sixteen times. I'm like, I'm a
Speaker 2: nasty freak when it comes to a person of interest,
Speaker 2: Like I really love my ship. I consider fendom, or
Speaker 2: at least perhaps I'm just describing the worst elements of
Speaker 2: it as something separate where it's not really about liking something,
Speaker 2: it's about memorizing facts.
Speaker 4: It is about being a defender of the thing I.
Speaker 6: Say, it's about being in a tribe. And like, this
Speaker 6: comes up a lot in my book, is like, you know,
Speaker 6: the ways that fandoms can behave. One of the things
Speaker 6: that I found especially interesting in the course of reporting
Speaker 6: it is that there are also fandoms around, just like
Speaker 6: pure hatred. One of my chapters tell Me is about Keffel's,
Speaker 6: who is a streamer.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, it's pretty controversial.
Speaker 6: You know, did some dumb bullshit, but also like managed
Speaker 6: to attract this hate mob from Kiwi farms right, and
Speaker 6: when I interviewed her while she was still like on
Speaker 6: the run was ky FHMs.
Speaker 3: Sorry.
Speaker 6: They are an online forum dedicated to like dosing people,
Speaker 6: so finding their personal information and you know, outing it
Speaker 6: and then.
Speaker 5: Coming in and like of course they particularly target marginalized
Speaker 5: people because they the goal and the goal of most
Speaker 5: hate fandoms is to get a reaction out of the
Speaker 5: person that you want. It is like to cause them
Speaker 5: pain and then to use that pain as your personal
Speaker 5: source of entertainment.
Speaker 6: What I was gonna say, yes, yeah, is that in
Speaker 6: her particular case, you know, she was like showing me
Speaker 6: some of the things that these people were doing in
Speaker 6: their free time in addition to directly harassing her, and
Speaker 6: these involved like making what were effectively like fan art
Speaker 6: and even fan songs about her, just from the perspective
Speaker 6: of someone who despises her, who likes her. But the
Speaker 6: mechanics were all really similar, and so like fandom can
Speaker 6: be this thing that coalesces using the exact same again,
Speaker 6: like sets of tools and behaviors, but around despising someone
Speaker 6: as opposed to liking them.
Speaker 2: So this is the thing that really gets me because
Speaker 2: I have to wonder if the reason that brought up fandoms,
Speaker 2: other than just despising them is I have to wonder
Speaker 2: if they're not part of not saying that it's the fold,
Speaker 2: but I feel like the entertainment industry, and by extension,
Speaker 2: the game's industry, is really trying to sell to them
Speaker 2: when Marv I love the first run of Marvel movies.
Speaker 1: I'm a little pig. Show me if it's the charming people.
Speaker 4: Ironman movie is fucking amazing.
Speaker 5: It is a really great film, and it's because they
Speaker 5: let Favro be Farro.
Speaker 2: You had the charming people doing the things and they
Speaker 2: were talking and it was enjoying, enjoyable to watch them.
Speaker 2: But it feels like it really got into the hog
Speaker 2: slop era where it's just you, like this guy, look
Speaker 2: at this guy. Look, we've got Jack Black and we've
Speaker 2: got Lizzo in the Mandalorian. Look you remember that thing
Speaker 2: from that thing? Look it's it's the Dark Troopers from
Speaker 2: the Star Wars game. You remember Dark Forces.
Speaker 4: So it's a frend. They fly now, blah blah blah.
Speaker 2: You know it's like yes, But it's the reason I
Speaker 2: bring that up is that's a commodity at this point.
Speaker 2: It's if it stops being about telling a story when
Speaker 2: it's more symbolic, when it's more about just people being
Speaker 2: factions against or for something, it's just can I sell
Speaker 2: you a fucking product? And when it comes to I
Speaker 2: actually wanted to ask with Twitch the cultures around streamers.
Speaker 2: Are those different to like forums culture or social media culture,
Speaker 2: like the more I synchronous culture. Is there something about
Speaker 2: the live experience that changes things?
Speaker 1: Oh?
Speaker 6: Yeah, completely, because I mean, for one, there's just the
Speaker 6: basic fact that if you are in a twitch chat,
Speaker 6: you can say something that the person who's on screen
Speaker 6: might immediately react to, right, and that people in that
Speaker 6: chat might immediately react to, And that immediacy changes everything
Speaker 6: about it, because I mean just think about like how
Speaker 6: we have conversations. If somebody is able to immediately react,
Speaker 6: they are not going to consider what they're saying very right,
Speaker 6: They're just going to go for it. Especially if it's
Speaker 6: like a fast moving Twitch chat. Everyone's just trying to
Speaker 6: say the most incendiary thing possible because that's all that
Speaker 6: gets noticed. Yeah, something measured or interesting.
Speaker 5: Perfect example of this is hasan piker saying off the
Speaker 5: cuff America to serve Tin eleven.
Speaker 4: Yeah, which I know is not what he meant to say.
Speaker 5: Well, but he meant to say, America created the conditions
Speaker 5: that created the people that right to us.
Speaker 6: Yeah, in that right, like he explained that during that
Speaker 6: same stream happens well, and also what happens is that
Speaker 6: people then clipped that out of context. Yes, and then
Speaker 6: you know, surfaced it on all.
Speaker 5: These other and now this clip will haunt him forever
Speaker 5: every time someone is mad at him. He has a
Speaker 5: similarly sized, like hate fandom that is constantly, constantly trying
Speaker 5: to get a rise out of him, and it really Yeah.
Speaker 2: Find destiny, different kind of destiny to the game.
Speaker 5: Yeah, destiny that sucks.
Speaker 3: I'm going to get him. And Norman Finkelstein.
Speaker 2: When you you when you speak, it's like Wikipedia.
Speaker 4: It to be by satandibly.
Speaker 3: I've been thinking about that too much.
Speaker 2: It's funny as well because as a just a gentleman
Speaker 2: podcaster with a decent sized fandom, I don't get as
Speaker 2: many insane people. I don't get people threatening or hating
Speaker 2: me other than everyone because.
Speaker 3: They wish I was dead.
Speaker 2: But it feels like there's something altogether different, specifically about
Speaker 2: games because I left games journalism in like two thousand
Speaker 2: and eight. Oh no, no, I like and even then
Speaker 2: someone fucking doxed me. I got dogs because there was
Speaker 2: someone I reviewed a game I'm not even gonna name,
Speaker 2: just because it also leads to the funniest YouTube in
Speaker 2: the world.
Speaker 3: But there was an MMRP.
Speaker 2: I reviewed that fucking sucked, and they claimed I didn't
Speaker 2: play it, of course, And then someone posted my parents'
Speaker 2: address and I'd moved to New York, and I really
Speaker 2: had to stop myself being like, missed me, bitch. But
Speaker 2: then I emailed the developers and I was like, fucking
Speaker 2: take this shit down now, but now it's constant.
Speaker 5: I reviewed the most recent Final Fantasy game, Final Fantasy sixteen,
Speaker 5: which is a game I said has some of the
Speaker 5: In the review, this is what I said. That the
Speaker 5: combat was thrilling and incredible. You fucking go to space
Speaker 5: and punch a dragon in the head, like, it is
Speaker 5: so fucking cool. But the story is dogshit and I
Speaker 5: hated it. I hated it every second.
Speaker 6: I'm going to say that most stories that involve going
Speaker 6: to space and punching and dragon like don't really cohere. Otherwise, Yeah,
Speaker 6: it's hard to make that into a compelling narrative.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and I especially like it was a game where
Speaker 5: there was a subplot with slavery and it was handled really, really,
Speaker 5: really poorly.
Speaker 3: I personally thought the whole game was bad. But that's
Speaker 3: why I don't review games.
Speaker 5: No, I just like, when you give me a combo meter.
Speaker 5: I just go into stickomad. It's something that just happens
Speaker 5: to me. But no I said those things, and I
Speaker 5: tried to be fair and complimentary to it. The first
Speaker 5: thing that happened was someone found my email address and
Speaker 5: told me to kill myself Jesus.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Well, it's like I similarly gave the Harry Potter game
Speaker 5: a pretty dismal review, and there is a reaction. There
Speaker 5: is an entire culture devoted to trying to seed reactionary
Speaker 5: politics into young minds through the fandom.
Speaker 4: Of video games.
Speaker 6: It's like games are like the easiest mark for that
Speaker 6: because I think that. I mean, for one, a lot
Speaker 6: of people have based their identity on games. That's the
Speaker 6: starting point, right, And then the other element of that
Speaker 6: is that a lot of that identity comes out of
Speaker 6: this perceived persecution complex. Right, games were once for nerds
Speaker 6: who are bullied.
Speaker 5: Content only that though there was a real reactionary movement
Speaker 5: against video games post Columbine right with Jack Thompson, their
Speaker 5: congressional hearings about whether or no or not games were
Speaker 5: evil and we're destroying the minds of youth, which is
Speaker 5: obviously not true. When I recently went to the UN.
Speaker 3: Look at us.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, we're normal people.
Speaker 1: I mean, my mind has been destroyed.
Speaker 3: My mind was my mind's perfect.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Anyway, so you went to the UN.
Speaker 5: I went to the UN and I was on this
Speaker 5: panel to talk about terrorism and and extremism and gaming spaces.
Speaker 5: And the one thing that many of the panelists made
Speaker 5: sure to say was that this idea that it's violent
Speaker 5: video games that cause violence is not true, and in fact,
Speaker 5: often games are pro social spaces. They encourage isolated people
Speaker 5: to interact with other people and form friendships. It's just
Speaker 5: that those people are so vulnerable, and people extremists know
Speaker 5: how vulnerable.
Speaker 4: These people are.
Speaker 5: It's very easy to say, join a discord server and
Speaker 5: then start spreading dog whistles about like extremist like white
Speaker 5: supremacists thought, and then you normalize these things, these expressions
Speaker 5: and these phrases and these images, and then you can
Speaker 5: take those people out of that bigger discord server and
Speaker 5: funnel them into more and more extremist space.
Speaker 2: And what's insane is it seems to get back to
Speaker 2: a point I was getting as well, is that they're
Speaker 2: trying to monetize this. They're trying to monetize it by
Speaker 2: making the games less about being good games but symbolic
Speaker 2: of stuff. And then the right wing types seem to
Speaker 2: see games that are not doing that, like Dragon Age
Speaker 2: the Veil God and being like, ah has begun it's
Speaker 2: which means black I guess, like like just.
Speaker 6: Well, no, there's a there's a new one every week too,
Speaker 6: Like there's a new DEI in video games controversy every week,
Speaker 6: and like it wasn't always this way, but after like
Speaker 6: there there was a conspiracy movement last year around a
Speaker 6: consulting firm called Sweet Baby In and that is when
Speaker 6: this sort of became a well oiled machine. That's when
Speaker 6: all of these content creators.
Speaker 4: Started trying it was constantly.
Speaker 5: Their biggest crime essentially was that the head of the company,
Speaker 5: Kim Bellair, is a black woman, and like that's it.
Speaker 1: That's literally just it something she controlled.
Speaker 4: Yes, absolutely to be a black woman creator.
Speaker 3: So what we're saying about as well, but.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and so like now you just have these people,
Speaker 6: you have content creators who've made this their entire identity
Speaker 6: and like their entire brand, and so like Geta was saying,
Speaker 6: you know, games can be really pro social, but you'll
Speaker 6: have these people come in and sort of say, okay, well,
Speaker 6: these games that you like are being taken away by
Speaker 6: this evil dee I woke mob. And so your purpose,
Speaker 6: the underlying purpose that maybe you as a person have
Speaker 6: been looking for, is now to fight a battle against
Speaker 6: these people who are taking your toys away. And like,
Speaker 6: that works really well on a lot of people who
Speaker 6: you know, feel purposeless, directionless, always that we all commonly
Speaker 6: feel under.
Speaker 1: Capitalists, and I feel like and I feel like as well.
Speaker 2: Games are an incredible vector for that, not just because
Speaker 2: there's things to a lie around, but also there's a
Speaker 2: satisfaction to them.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The reason I play Haides all the time, I have
Speaker 2: Haides on my I'm not playing it right now, I would.
Speaker 2: The reason I play Hades is it feels good. It
Speaker 2: feels like you have industry over something you have you
Speaker 2: can get good at something.
Speaker 1: I'll take this a step further, please.
Speaker 6: I think that the core fantasy of a lot of
Speaker 6: video games, no matter what they're setting is, whether they're
Speaker 6: sci fi or fantasy, are set in the present day,
Speaker 6: is what if capitalism was fair, if every input gave
Speaker 6: you a fair output, a consistent one.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, oh I like that.
Speaker 1: Thing you get better and better over time.
Speaker 5: Look at like a sim city, right, Yes, you in
Speaker 5: sim city, you are essentially the mayor of a city.
Speaker 5: You are the developer of the city. You're the engineer
Speaker 5: of the city. You design the entire city, and you
Speaker 5: also have control over its taxes. And it is is
Speaker 5: like just a equals ash. It Basically, when you look
Speaker 5: at how the tax system works in some city, it
Speaker 5: assumes that taxes are always fair.
Speaker 4: Right and consistent and consistent, and they don't.
Speaker 5: You won't get a huge lobby from the people in
Speaker 5: the highest tax bracket asking for their taxes to be lowered.
Speaker 2: I wonder if they would add that they should there
Speaker 2: should be just the same city, which is real.
Speaker 6: I mean, I'm sure the matters in the taxes. City's
Speaker 6: like torn out of the wires.
Speaker 1: The city skylines, the city skylines.
Speaker 2: I love watching the Cities by Cities by Diana, one
Speaker 2: of the endorsed Flying Best Instagram accounts.
Speaker 5: I do love Cities by Diana so much. I wanted
Speaker 5: to interview her for a long time.
Speaker 2: But she's amazing, Diana, You're always welcome on the show.
Speaker 4: A beautiful and unique mind. I love her.
Speaker 2: So let's change change topics to something I actually really
Speaker 2: opposed a thing often off, So how long have you been.
Speaker 1: Going a little bit more than a hear? So?
Speaker 3: How is the company structured? Exactly?
Speaker 1: Well?
Speaker 5: Okay, so it's called aftermath because we all used to
Speaker 5: work at Kataku, right right, and none of us really
Speaker 5: had much editorial control at Kataku, even Riley, who was
Speaker 5: managing editor there, like he his like the story of
Speaker 5: his life is having strong opinions and wanting to enact
Speaker 5: the plans based on his opinions and then.
Speaker 4: Being told no that he can't do it.
Speaker 5: Essentially, so we are the aftermath of all of that,
Speaker 5: the slow dissolution of Geomedia and our own just losing
Speaker 5: our brains working there with the conditions there.
Speaker 2: Geomedia was the formal holding company of Gizmoto dot I
Speaker 2: nine and.
Speaker 1: Came out of Dowker being sued into oblivion, right, yes.
Speaker 5: Yeah, And we we own the company and we try
Speaker 5: to structure it in such a way where we all
Speaker 5: have a relative amount of control over the work we
Speaker 5: do and what we want to do. We are not
Speaker 5: technically a co op, but we try to behave as
Speaker 5: if we're contact.
Speaker 6: Is that a lot of a lot of like co
Speaker 6: ops are not co ops because it's a it's weird
Speaker 6: on taxes and everyone's just like, yeah, dwarfing into one
Speaker 6: whenever it's got to work and it's better to just
Speaker 6: be an LLC or something else. Yeah, but it's worker
Speaker 6: own outside investment, no outside capital. We literally just rely
Speaker 6: on subscriptions and nothing else for now. We might incorporate
Speaker 6: a small amount of ad based stuff in the future,
Speaker 6: but that'll just be on like a podcast.
Speaker 1: And there's nothing and there's nothing wrong with ads.
Speaker 2: I mean, I definitely can't because someone listening to this
Speaker 2: is probably going to email me and be like, did
Speaker 2: you hear there's an ai AD as an ai AD
Speaker 2: that ran Did you hear the ai AD? It ran
Speaker 2: off the ai AD? If you want emailing me or
Speaker 2: messaging me about the ai AD, I have heard you
Speaker 2: over one hundred and fifty times, and every single person.
Speaker 2: I'm not bitter. I'm just like, at this point, if
Speaker 2: you think it's novel to mention this to me, it isn't.
Speaker 2: And every time I kind of roll my eyes. And
Speaker 2: if you're trying to hurt me, which you would love,
Speaker 2: then keep going, but please don't. But nevertheless, it's good
Speaker 2: that it's good that this exists, though, because my experience
Speaker 2: of games journalism was Future Publishing and Dennis so I
Speaker 2: won a little bit of Zitron law for all of you.
Speaker 2: So I was a games journalist from the age of sixteen.
Speaker 2: I interned at Computer and Video Games Magazine is steamed
Speaker 2: out there, owned by Dennis Publishing, sold to Future Publishing.
Speaker 2: Really like out of the toilet, into the toilet.
Speaker 4: Situation worst or toilet.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And I worked at PC Zone as well, and it
Speaker 2: was definitely and there's British libel laws which will stop
Speaker 2: me being fully honest here. It was a challenging corporate
Speaker 2: environment with many incentive structures that affected the output and
Speaker 2: structure of the work regularly. And it's funny because games
Speaker 2: journalism feels like something that could be bigger and better
Speaker 2: than it is, but it't.
Speaker 3: It just won't be.
Speaker 5: So like the example that I think is really useful
Speaker 5: is the Kataka. Essentially, we all worked there in a
Speaker 5: certain era where we had an editor in chief who
Speaker 5: was like an old school magazine guy like went to
Speaker 5: the Columbia School of Journalism, really wanted us to get
Speaker 5: scoops and we had for at least a short while
Speaker 5: management that understood the value of actually reporting news and
Speaker 5: not caring about the reaction from quote unquote gamers. However,
Speaker 5: that did not make us very advertiser friendly. So now
Speaker 5: where we are at with Kataku after everyone that we
Speaker 5: worked with has left, essentially they're in an environment where
Speaker 5: they're like, what advertisers want is not news on how
Speaker 5: badly the industry is doing. What they would prefer is
Speaker 5: guides and hype, and what are gamers want? What are
Speaker 5: gamers talking about? You know, I like reporting on fandom
Speaker 5: because I do think that the cultural impact of gaming
Speaker 5: is really fascinating. And frankly, I did not realize when
Speaker 5: we started Aftermath that we'd be doing journalism that is
Speaker 5: actually quite important in understanding the slow dissolution of democracy
Speaker 5: in America. But it certainly seems like it has been.
Speaker 6: You know, I think that it's worth contextualizing that gaming
Speaker 6: has often been a canary in the coal mine for
Speaker 6: the slow dissolution of democracy and of you know, these
Speaker 6: cultural movements that can.
Speaker 3: You elaborate.
Speaker 2: Gamer Gate literally, gamer Nason and both of you split
Speaker 2: this question, I think would be good. Can you describe
Speaker 2: game and Gate for people to outside of it.
Speaker 6: Gamer Gate was kind of the first like real reactionary
Speaker 6: movement video games. Basically, I mean I had a lot
Speaker 6: of personal experience.
Speaker 3: You you had a little bit of a pot.
Speaker 6: There was a you know, prominent indie game developer named
Speaker 6: Zoe Quinn and she and I ended up dating for
Speaker 6: a minute, and gamers to this to me and will
Speaker 6: not gamers. Basically, she had a jilted X who published
Speaker 6: a manifesto about her in which he claimed, among other things,
Speaker 6: that she had, you know, effectively slept with me for
Speaker 6: positive coverage of her game, when that never actually happened.
Speaker 6: There was no such coverage. It was all bullshit. But
Speaker 6: a lot of people, a lot of gamers who are
Speaker 6: already after her. There had been this whole like movement
Speaker 6: against her even before this, but they lashed onto this
Speaker 6: and it became their plausible deniability, and so they started saying, oh,
Speaker 6: it's about ethics and games journalism, we got to fix this,
Speaker 6: and then all of these other people from outside of
Speaker 6: video games lashed onto that. That's where you've got people
Speaker 6: like Miley Ianopolis. That's where you've got a lot of
Speaker 6: like Breitbart's notability in that era. And I think That's
Speaker 6: when a lot of these people in the conservative movement realized, oh,
Speaker 6: like this is a perfect seed bed for the future
Speaker 6: of conservatism, and the future can grab people.
Speaker 1: Right here now.
Speaker 5: You can literally brute force a reality. Is what they learned,
Speaker 5: the things that they claim, and you will still see
Speaker 5: people claim these things on the internet. None of these
Speaker 5: things are true, none of them are improvable, none of
Speaker 5: them are anywhere near provable. There is no review of
Speaker 5: Zoe's game that Nathan wrote. Yep, it does not exist,
Speaker 5: and they will never show it to you.
Speaker 2: What's insane as well, is there are actual issues in
Speaker 2: games like I mean, like I'm not saying what magazine
Speaker 2: I'm talking about or indeed who this was said to,
Speaker 2: but I know multiple different games covers of games magazines
Speaker 2: for certain PC games magazines that were bartered with drugs
Speaker 2: and that where scores were raised to please publishers and
Speaker 2: raise to police advertisers.
Speaker 3: The actual fucking issue.
Speaker 5: Even just sort of the like parasitic relationship game devs,
Speaker 5: especially the higher up in management you go, they consider
Speaker 5: the games press to just be a pr wing their
Speaker 5: same industry. So the idea that we are journalists and
Speaker 5: we do not have the same goals as they do,
Speaker 5: which is to please developers and help make sure their
Speaker 5: game sell. That is considered like really really hostile and
Speaker 5: it is something that you have to explain and re
Speaker 5: explain over and over again. I don't care if your
Speaker 5: game sell as well. Like I'm sorry, I want games
Speaker 5: to do well, but I'm not doing pr for you.
Speaker 4: That is not what I want to do.
Speaker 6: Also, there's already like a lot of these games already
Speaker 6: have these massive marketing budgets. Anyway, Yeah, like the press
Speaker 6: is not a big needle mover there. But what a
Speaker 6: lot of people want the press to be, whether they
Speaker 6: are executives or whether they're gamers, is this like mouthpiece
Speaker 6: for the industry. It's like going back to you know,
Speaker 6: those like law or those court cases against games as
Speaker 6: a whole and things like that. They want industry advocates.
Speaker 6: They're still stuck in this mindset from like thirty years
Speaker 6: ago of like the industry needs defending.
Speaker 1: It's just a little guy.
Speaker 5: And it's like no, no, you can't simultaneously be quote
Speaker 5: bigger than Hollywood and to just be a little guy.
Speaker 5: That makes Yeah, you know, I love video games. I
Speaker 5: love the culture of video games. In a lot of ways.
Speaker 4: I love.
Speaker 5: I think play is a fundamental part of human life
Speaker 5: that we all need more of, especially the more bleak it.
Speaker 5: If you have imagination, then you can imagine a better world.
Speaker 2: It also feels like we fundamentally got away from the
Speaker 2: thing that games is, which is escape.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Like, I know, it's not that I'm ashamed of being
Speaker 2: a gamer. I have plenty of other things am ashamed of.
Speaker 2: But it's this sense that like I do this to
Speaker 2: try and not like not think about it. I will say, however,
Speaker 2: like Balatro, if anyone knows the Balatro developer, Bilatro developer,
Speaker 2: welcome on Better Offline official endorsement is incredible fucking Blatro.
Speaker 2: I also like got me through like mental health things
Speaker 2: just I was able to. There's an emdr effect, I think.
Speaker 2: But nevertheless, these games are meant to be, if not
Speaker 2: a distraction, something you escape into. If it's even if
Speaker 2: you're not escaping life. But it's like people people want
Speaker 2: them to.
Speaker 3: Mean something else. Almost fiction is.
Speaker 4: Fiction is transformative.
Speaker 5: Like I was thinking, there's a big indie game hit
Speaker 5: that is really depressing and a sort of about the
Speaker 5: experience of living under La capitalism, mouthwashing it's an indie game,
Speaker 5: it's a visual novel.
Speaker 4: It's not mechanics heavy, it's very story heavy. But it
Speaker 4: became an.
Speaker 5: Enormous indie hit with a very big, sort of unexpected
Speaker 5: fandom because it describes an experience that people have and
Speaker 5: they love feeling like the misery and stress and pain
Speaker 5: that they are trying are being told by so many
Speaker 5: different forces doesn't exist and doesn't matter. They love being told, Yes,
Speaker 5: it does matter. Your personhood does matter. The things you
Speaker 5: experience in the world do matter and have significance. Being
Speaker 5: able to experience that is something that brings us closer
Speaker 5: together as a society and allows us to again just
Speaker 5: start to imagine what if the world didn't have to
Speaker 5: be like this?
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 5: That's what all media, all enter forms of entertainment can
Speaker 5: give you. And I do feel like by becoming an
Speaker 5: industry that is chasing a bigger and bigger number more
Speaker 5: than anything else, you do lose sight of that that,
Speaker 5: like art can't just be measured in dollars or it
Speaker 5: is something that touches you and changes you.
Speaker 6: Yeah, I mean I think that the Yeah, the big
Speaker 6: issue is that games aren't supposed to be anything, especially
Speaker 6: not at this point, like and I'll give you, and
Speaker 6: also like there are so many of them. So yes,
Speaker 6: last year, almost twenty thousand games came out on Steam
Speaker 6: Jesus twenty thousand. And with that in mind, like the
Speaker 6: fact that there's this reactionary movement going around saying, oh,
Speaker 6: you know, this game can't be this, it can't have
Speaker 6: like a black person, it can't portray trans issues, It's like, well,
Speaker 6: why does that matter to you?
Speaker 1: Why there are there are nineteen more games over there
Speaker 1: that aren't doing that, thirty years of games which would.
Speaker 6: Not Then Yeah, on top of that, you were talking
Speaker 6: about this idea of games is escapism. And it's so
Speaker 6: funny because this reactionary movement essentially posits that, yes, games
Speaker 6: should only be escapism and nothing else. They shouldn't have
Speaker 6: quote unquote political topics in them. Trans people or black people.
Speaker 6: People have dedicated their lives to fighting a political battle
Speaker 6: about games, in effect, shoving their politics into games. That's
Speaker 6: all they do anymore. And so they're like, games should
Speaker 6: be escapism, no politics, except for all the time.
Speaker 1: On my terms.
Speaker 5: You know, for me, a great level of escapism would
Speaker 5: be imagining a world where I don't have an annoying
Speaker 5: conversation with a white person, like you know, like.
Speaker 2: That would be that is completely imaginary.
Speaker 4: You know, that would be a wonderful escape for me.
Speaker 5: But you do when you get down to when you
Speaker 5: see one of these viral posts that comes across your
Speaker 5: dash about or you know, whatever social media figure you're on,
Speaker 5: and they are so upset about a promo image for
Speaker 5: a game because the example character they've shown is a
Speaker 5: black person, you realize that the escapism that these people
Speaker 5: want to experience is an escape from black people, and
Speaker 5: it's just they don't want to have to see a
Speaker 5: black person. And that is like an inherently political things
Speaker 5: to say.
Speaker 4: That is an endorsement of white supremacy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's an endorsement of an no state. Yeah, it's it's.
Speaker 2: Very fucking frustrating as well, because I don't know, maybe
Speaker 2: they could learn to be in a situation with a
Speaker 2: black person, but they're like, no, no, I couldn't post it.
Speaker 2: Wait wait, wait, there's an option buried in these menus
Speaker 2: that allows me to have trends like features and fuck no, yeah,
Speaker 2: I can't even consider a world where that's an option.
Speaker 5: Being given the choice of a They them pronoun is
Speaker 5: something that just terrifies them, just like.
Speaker 1: They're YouTube videos. Are these people? Yeah, are reduced to
Speaker 1: like actual tears. How upset they are? Love Yeah? Oh
Speaker 1: it's crazy, I mean I could so.
Speaker 2: So back to aftermath though, on a more positive note,
Speaker 2: what are you trying to create with it? I don't
Speaker 2: you don't need to have like a big vision, But
Speaker 2: what are you trying to do differently to like Kataku
Speaker 2: for example.
Speaker 4: Not destroy our brains and bodies?
Speaker 1: Number one?
Speaker 3: Sure?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I also think we want to acknowledge, like and
Speaker 5: embrace the both editorial and hard scoops and reporting. That
Speaker 5: was not something I think we did very well, like
Speaker 5: embracing the duality of that you need news and then
Speaker 5: also you need to help people interpret and understand the
Speaker 5: cultural impact of this news. Nathan has been doing an
Speaker 5: incredible job reporting, like just really fucking killing it. I
Speaker 5: currently have two full time jobs, so I've been writing
Speaker 5: less than I'd love to. But really my interest is
Speaker 5: understanding industry trends and looking at them as sort of
Speaker 5: long term research projects, and understanding the way that the
Speaker 5: world moves as we understand how money flows and moves.
Speaker 5: And I think that those both of these things are
Speaker 5: equally important. Essentially, just even though video games tell like
Speaker 5: as an industry, people just lie about how how much
Speaker 5: money they make and how culturally important they are. They
Speaker 5: are now a massive and indelible part of the American
Speaker 5: entertainment industry and our economy.
Speaker 6: They are mainstream, especially for like you know, gen Z millennials,
Speaker 6: like we all grew up playing them. They are as
Speaker 6: much a part of the cultural fabric as any film,
Speaker 6: as any TV show, as anything else.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and that they need to.
Speaker 1: Be covered that way.
Speaker 6: And it's so weird to look at like major publications,
Speaker 6: major papers having almost nobody dedicated to them, like Washington
Speaker 6: Post has.
Speaker 1: One person game Park. And even then Gene doesn't really
Speaker 1: do hard report.
Speaker 6: He just does like criticism, which is important, but it's
Speaker 6: not the whole thing, Like.
Speaker 4: I had a team for that.
Speaker 2: Well something I like about, like you did this one
Speaker 2: about Steve the Steam uses n ai Yeah, and it
Speaker 2: was specifically the story is about how actually you know,
Speaker 2: won't get through the next Fest Games pod.
Speaker 3: Why why would I read your story to you?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 6: So basically, right now, Steam is running this promotional event
Speaker 6: called next Vest where there are a ton of demos
Speaker 6: everybody like play is getting prominent placement for the demos,
Speaker 6: which will in turn people cause people to go check
Speaker 6: out their games and maybe buy them. That's really important.
Speaker 6: And so this time around, people have been scrolling through
Speaker 6: and seeing a lot of AI art and they're like, oh,
Speaker 6: that's not good, because that means that a bunch of
Speaker 6: like AI slop is potentially crowding out deserving good games
Speaker 6: that have been development for a long time, and that
Speaker 6: you have a chance of it attaining real success.
Speaker 1: And so.
Speaker 6: The thing about that is that, yes, it looks bad.
Speaker 6: But then at the same time, Steam has this hyper
Speaker 6: complicated algorithm that they've been tuning over the years, and
Speaker 6: so they basically tuned it to change the way that
Speaker 6: games are seen in the first few days of something
Speaker 6: like Nextfest, right, so that you end up seeing like
Speaker 6: a random kind of scattering of them in the first
Speaker 6: few days. Then it becomes personalized, and so basically that
Speaker 6: sorts out the AI garbage because those games people don't
Speaker 6: really interact with much. They see them, they move on,
Speaker 6: and so like they've built a system that sort of
Speaker 6: anticipates AI slop, which is good, but they still have
Speaker 6: this larger problem that I think that you see in
Speaker 6: a lot of industries now in this era of peak content,
Speaker 6: which is that there's tons of good stuff coming out
Speaker 6: on Steam all the time, too much of that for
Speaker 6: most people to like find what they're really looking for.
Speaker 6: And then on top of that, you're also competing with
Speaker 6: all of the old goods stuff which is still on
Speaker 6: Steam correctly goes on sale, has bigger name recognition than
Speaker 6: you do, and so like that's the real battle that
Speaker 6: people need to be fighting, whereas I think looking at
Speaker 6: AI on Steam is like this major issue is tempting,
Speaker 6: and it is to an extent, but it's not kind
Speaker 6: of the core problem.
Speaker 1: That a lot of developers face.
Speaker 2: So the reason I brought up this story was to
Speaker 2: compliment you, because this is exactly why After Moth rocks
Speaker 2: and why I actually think the future of journalism is more. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's like Batter off line, of course it is, but
Speaker 2: it's things like after Moth as well, Because this isn't
Speaker 2: just a story about games culture, which is the anxiety
Speaker 2: of rai slop, also the anxiety of a indie games
Speaker 2: not getting the attention they need. It's also an industrial
Speaker 2: analysis because you've got fucking numbers here. In actual view,
Speaker 2: he counts, and actually because to cover the games industry,
Speaker 2: it seems like, much like tech, you need true domain expertise,
Speaker 2: but you also need industrial Jason Shryer style and Jason
Speaker 2: Shryap by the way over at Bloomberg Legend got to
Speaker 2: get him on the show. It's my fault, Jason.
Speaker 5: So you want I know something amazing about Jason. Yes,
Speaker 5: just one great Jason story that he told me right
Speaker 5: before we left Kataku. I used to sit next to
Speaker 5: him every day, and he told me when he first
Speaker 5: started there, he asked if there was a dress code,
Speaker 5: he said, and his boss told him no, right So,
Speaker 5: to that effect, he wore basketball shorts literally every single day,
Speaker 5: and at his yearly review, his boss came up to
Speaker 5: him and said, Jason, I did not know that I
Speaker 5: had a line for dress code, but I realized that
Speaker 5: my line is, please don't wear basketball shorts literally every day.
Speaker 6: If anyone didn't he encounter this one online at some point,
Speaker 6: I feel like he added some particulars that muddy the
Speaker 6: waters of that story a tiny bit.
Speaker 4: Oh, I see, I see it.
Speaker 5: I just love every time you see Jason tweet something
Speaker 5: that pisses you off. I just love imagining him in
Speaker 5: basketball shorts.
Speaker 4: That's all.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: But also I'm remembering if any of the British games
Speaker 2: press are listening to this, we don't. We never dressed that.
Speaker 2: I dressed like I was in like a dirty jeens.
Speaker 1: And actually dirty genes.
Speaker 3: Now I resist.
Speaker 2: We just like people dressed like I guess we didn't
Speaker 2: see their legs because it's England as it was cold,
Speaker 2: but I feel like that that's the difference of the
Speaker 2: British gaming press.
Speaker 3: I guess they would just look like.
Speaker 5: What Kieran Gillan said is about I love Gillan, He's
Speaker 5: such a sweety pie. He said in what When his
Speaker 5: little manifesto, he wrote like, I don't know, it's like
Speaker 5: twenty years ago.
Speaker 1: Journalism, he said.
Speaker 3: I love Karen, but I fucking hate it.
Speaker 5: He said something about there were two models of games
Speaker 5: journalism when he was working there, and it was the
Speaker 5: US model, which was a lot like car journalism, which
Speaker 5: is also pretty fraught. And there was the UK model,
Speaker 5: which is a lot more like music journalism, which now
Speaker 5: does not really exist in America anymore. And the US model,
Speaker 5: which was all about stats and statistics, statistics and numbers
Speaker 5: and products and products. That model won out eventually, and
Speaker 5: you can see how much it has went out because
Speaker 5: now it's it's only about toys, like we talk about
Speaker 5: games as if they are toys and.
Speaker 1: You guys, and that's pretty much it.
Speaker 2: I remember why it pissed me off because he fucking
Speaker 2: wroked a PC game which was exactly what you just described.
Speaker 2: That's what he left and made rockets and now and
Speaker 2: now he fucking writes amazing comedy.
Speaker 5: God, the power Fantasy is so fasy and it really good.
Speaker 4: It's great.
Speaker 6: I'm sorry, but no, I was going to say, in
Speaker 6: line with a lot of that and the way that
Speaker 6: I think games journalism kind of you know, continued to
Speaker 6: mature along those lines and mostly considering games to be
Speaker 6: these disposable products, and like you know, a lot of
Speaker 6: sites consider like posting about a trailer to be news.
Speaker 6: The thing that I think Aftermath does that we really
Speaker 6: focus on doing is contextualizing a lot of the news,
Speaker 6: especially the harder news, something that you be layoffs and
Speaker 6: xtualizing it I think with the kind of feeling it deserves,
Speaker 6: something that I think you also do really well with
Speaker 6: all of your different projects.
Speaker 5: You know, well people people find it very cathartic to
Speaker 5: have people confirm what they feel about the world, which
Speaker 5: is things are.
Speaker 6: Also sometimes don't yeah with facts, but also sometimes they
Speaker 6: don't recognize how bad things are.
Speaker 1: They need to be told.
Speaker 6: That was my point in that wbpiece, which I then
Speaker 6: the headline for those who don't know, is just fucked WB.
Speaker 3: And fucked w Babe on the way.
Speaker 4: Yeah, literally just fucked WB.
Speaker 6: Like and it goes into all the reasons why they
Speaker 6: deserve to be fucked, because they've been mismanaging their business
Speaker 6: horribly and treating people and their various properties is disposable,
Speaker 6: and like doing it in these ways that are.
Speaker 5: Very avoidable are an expression of the way that the
Speaker 5: tech industry as a whole has changed how employment works
Speaker 5: and changed how companies understand value. And it is disgusting
Speaker 5: to watch it happen in something that's very important to me,
Speaker 5: which is the world of art. Like I was a
Speaker 5: cinema studies major in college. I had these old, hyphalutant
Speaker 5: dreams of being a gallery curator, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 5: These things really matter to me, like human expression really
Speaker 5: really matters to me, and they're the wonderful history of
Speaker 5: American cinema is just being flushed on the fucking toilet.
Speaker 2: And it feels like they're doing the same thing in
Speaker 2: games and in tech and everything. Because not to tie
Speaker 2: it back to my own bullshit, but it's it's the
Speaker 2: Google search thing, it's the Facebook thing, it's the thing
Speaker 2: that we fell in love with the idea of games.
Speaker 2: I guess it's more what it's more death by a
Speaker 2: thousand cuts with games. Yet sometimes the cuts are larger.
Speaker 2: But it's like watching like Monolith for example. Monolith also,
Speaker 2: I like, I swear Modelf had something to do with
Speaker 2: like free space as well. It was a volition entertainment,
Speaker 2: like we've watched it. It's been this slow burm where
Speaker 2: you'd see these amazing games come out and then the
Speaker 2: studio would just disappear or they dog shit, and it
Speaker 2: seems like it's just this problem of CEOs. It's these
Speaker 2: executives who have nothing to do with games. They don't
Speaker 2: play games, they wouldn't dare touch these games. They've got
Speaker 2: imported things to do, like go to lunch and write
Speaker 2: emails or.
Speaker 6: I mean, okay, so actually this is a good example.
Speaker 6: They're CEOs who at least like pretend to or do,
Speaker 6: but they still make the same decisions. Somebody like Phil
Speaker 6: Spencer is a great example of this. He's like the
Speaker 6: gamer CEO's at Microsoft, but he's.
Speaker 1: Actually like a game.
Speaker 6: Yes, I mean he like his Xbox Live stats were
Speaker 6: like public for a long time. You can see how
Speaker 6: many hundreds of hours he's putting into games.
Speaker 1: That makes it worse.
Speaker 6: But yeah, exactly it makes is What that suggests is
Speaker 6: that like the problem is that these is not that
Speaker 6: these people are not gamers, right, The problem is the
Speaker 6: structural incentives at a company, being an executive that you
Speaker 6: will still even appreciating the art form cut thousands of
Speaker 6: people loose from their jobs, right, and like make decisions
Speaker 6: that actively harm games and their quality.
Speaker 2: Isn't the problem more so that games are just insanely
Speaker 2: expensive to build? Though the triple A gaming is are
Speaker 2: we not running towards this unsustainable point?
Speaker 1: It's already unsustainable.
Speaker 5: Well, there was that New York Times article about graphics
Speaker 5: and games that I read a few weeks ago, maybe
Speaker 5: last month, that was about, like, there is so much
Speaker 5: money being pumped into these the Spider Man games, for
Speaker 5: asn example, realistic one to one fidelity of the world
Speaker 5: we see outside of our window, including physics systems that
Speaker 5: replicate real life physics, right, and there we are at
Speaker 5: a point where that last ten it's like self driven
Speaker 5: cars that last ten percent may never be solved because
Speaker 5: our human brain interprets and processes things so much faster
Speaker 5: than a computer program, and a computer can just in general,
Speaker 5: and we these studios put so much money into creating
Speaker 5: that thing, and players don't notice or care.
Speaker 4: Players literally don't care.
Speaker 6: For Spider Man too in particular, really insane. Yeah, it's
Speaker 6: a good game, but Insomniac, the developer of that game,
Speaker 6: suffered a week a little while ago, and in some
Speaker 6: of their own conversations about the game, they're like, yeah,
Speaker 6: our budget for this this sequel was three hundred million
Speaker 6: dollars or somewhere there, almost double what the original game costs.
Speaker 6: But we don't think that players actually notice just how
Speaker 6: much better the graphics are. We actually think that they
Speaker 6: like they take either version and be fine with it.
Speaker 6: And so at that point, why are we spending all
Speaker 6: of this money on increasing the fidelity? What what is
Speaker 6: the end that we're trying to achieve here? And meanwhile,
Speaker 6: look at the other wild part of all of us
Speaker 6: to me is that the current like video game Juggernauts
Speaker 6: for gen Z are like Minecraft and Roadblocks. These games
Speaker 6: do not have high fidelity graphics.
Speaker 4: At all ye Roadblocks.
Speaker 5: In fact, it is a kind of disgusting exploitative model
Speaker 5: where they rely on community developers who make games for them.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they got child labors and children and children children, and.
Speaker 5: The split is one of the most predatory in the
Speaker 5: industry in terms of how much money Roadblox will make
Speaker 5: off of your game versus how much money you make.
Speaker 2: What you're saying is Roadbox only loses money as well.
Speaker 2: They're horribly unpossible.
Speaker 4: It's just ridiculous.
Speaker 2: I feel like we need to like have a referendum
Speaker 2: on the CEOs on a very basic level. Have put
Speaker 2: aside all the moral stuff that's very obvious. Let's just
Speaker 2: be like, you fucking suck at this right.
Speaker 5: No, When we started our own company, what we marveled
Speaker 5: at for a long time was like, no, we don't
Speaker 5: have MBAs, and yes, the money stuff is kind of difficult,
Speaker 5: but actually getting people to visit our website and trust
Speaker 5: our reporting.
Speaker 4: Was extremely easy.
Speaker 5: Like the actual like day to day put blocks on
Speaker 5: the site. Run a business promote ourselves. That's so, so,
Speaker 5: so easy. And there were so many people at TiO
Speaker 5: Media that made so much money that couldn't do things
Speaker 5: like there was an HR lead that couldn't attach. She
Speaker 5: couldn't put an attachment on an email, and she made
Speaker 5: a quarter million of a dollar cordon million of dollars
Speaker 5: a year.
Speaker 4: I hated herself.
Speaker 3: That is insane.
Speaker 6: Yeah, it seems like this is being a published author
Speaker 6: and not even making close to that.
Speaker 1: It's so cool.
Speaker 2: What's insane as well, is it's like this is the
Speaker 2: larger problem. This is I know that someone's going to
Speaker 2: email and me like the problems capitalism. Wow, by the way,
Speaker 2: if you're one of the PI, I don't know. I'm
Speaker 2: acting like I have derision, but I love my listeners.
Speaker 2: Like for the most part, it's just I get one
Speaker 2: person and.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna start emailing you like this all the time. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like actually killy capital I fucking know.
Speaker 2: But it's just this is actually something that really frustrated
Speaker 2: me at a former games publication. I may have been
Speaker 2: where it was just like the people writing were fucking amazing.
Speaker 2: They loved games. I mean I can talk about log
Speaker 2: for example, disappointment on Blue Sky or Steve Hogarty at
Speaker 2: Pieces on Yeah, Will Porter as well, Like Love Games
Speaker 2: was so like it was a real joyous energy to it,
Speaker 2: and then there was just this mandate from above where
Speaker 2: it was just yeah, well we got to make sure
Speaker 2: we sell more issues, so you got to put this
Speaker 2: on the cover.
Speaker 1: It's never something fucking interesting.
Speaker 2: You get an occasional one, like I did my one
Speaker 2: cover about the third World of Warcraft expansion.
Speaker 1: That was fun, But.
Speaker 2: It's like the thing the incentives, the people driving the
Speaker 2: incentives are not people that I even understand the customers
Speaker 2: so much. They're just like I need to resemble the
Speaker 2: thing that my boss wants me to and then I
Speaker 2: will be the best at my job, even if fun
Speaker 2: not good at it at all. Like David Zaslav, I
Speaker 2: have a lot of thoughts about what could happen to
Speaker 2: him that I won't be sharing.
Speaker 5: How do I introduce you to my concept of the
Speaker 5: well based system of justice? You got it a deep,
Speaker 5: deep well, okay, and like you just throw them down there.
Speaker 5: I mean, like Samorrow from the Ring, like she lived
Speaker 5: down there. She didn't die right away, right.
Speaker 3: She had a nice time that you know, we'll feed them.
Speaker 5: Sandwiches a little picky basket every once in a while,
Speaker 5: and you can try to get out maybe he'll succeed.
Speaker 4: But disclaimer, this.
Speaker 1: Is this is all happening in Minecraft and or Ro.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is all parrot. This is parody. Yes, this
Speaker 2: is parody. But it's just fucking frustrating as well, because
Speaker 2: despite all this frustration and annoyance, we've had some incredible
Speaker 2: fucking games the way she is, like Hades and Hades Too.
Speaker 4: And super Giant, it is an incredible, incredible.
Speaker 6: They're having like a weird dust up about acting and
Speaker 6: not working with like SAG for reasons that they want,
Speaker 6: and I actually super Giant a bit of quick insight,
Speaker 6: I like, because they put up this statement. Basically voice
Speaker 6: actor came out and said that Super Giant was considering
Speaker 6: not renewing with them over like their insistence on having
Speaker 6: a SAG contract. And so then super Giant put out
Speaker 6: a statement saying like, actually, we have some of the
Speaker 6: best protections against AI and things like that in the industry,
Speaker 6: and like we're just not working with SAG for reasons,
Speaker 6: and they did not state those reasons, and SAG.
Speaker 5: Currently is on strike specifically in the video game industry
Speaker 5: over AI protections and voice acting.
Speaker 3: I'm just reading this statement.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we have respected and will continue to respect any
Speaker 2: act in needing to poost work during the ongoing sag
Speaker 2: aff Aftra video game strike. Well, none of all games
Speaker 2: have ever been subject to the sag Aftra contracts. For
Speaker 2: a variety of reasons. There we go, which means we
Speaker 2: wish the best.
Speaker 6: And so I reached out to Greg Kasavin, who's the
Speaker 6: like creative director over at Super Giant, who I've known
Speaker 6: for a lot of years, and asked that. I was like,
Speaker 6: can you provide any of the reasons, and he was
Speaker 6: basically like no.
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, thank you, man, I appreciate the comment.
Speaker 2: And it's just it's frustrating because Super Giant, I assume
Speaker 2: makes a ship a ton of money.
Speaker 4: Oh I mean haities was a massive a.
Speaker 1: Small studio relative to I mean.
Speaker 4: They's not a lot of overhead essentially.
Speaker 2: Saving the money there, where's that going. It's not even
Speaker 2: what the CEO makes more money if they if they
Speaker 2: do that, it's it's well.
Speaker 6: And also it's like it's a real bummer because otherwise
Speaker 6: they've been amazing in terms of like making games the
Speaker 6: right way, like they are very people focused studio I
Speaker 6: interviewed them years ago about like all the ways that
Speaker 6: they like. For example, they have mandatory vacation, so if
Speaker 6: you reach the end of the year and you haven't
Speaker 6: taken your vacation time, you have to just like take
Speaker 6: a month.
Speaker 1: Off and do that kind of a thing.
Speaker 2: And just to describe for the listeners, you haven't played
Speaker 2: Haydas or Haidi's two, which is coming out next year, probably.
Speaker 4: Isn't early access right now, and you can't.
Speaker 2: Play this game is both mechanically perfect. Haities two, I
Speaker 2: would argue, isn't I think Hades to.
Speaker 1: Really like Haites?
Speaker 3: I love it?
Speaker 1: No, I love it, I love you. I love it
Speaker 1: in that there are some bits that also isn't finished yet. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Nonetheless, the point is these games are mechanically perfect. They
Speaker 2: sound incredible, voice acting is amazing, they look, they feel amazing.
Speaker 2: There are tiny little systems, and on top of that,
Speaker 2: they're incredibly diverse. They prove that you can do diversity
Speaker 2: in this way that's very like a sincere and it
Speaker 2: doesn't feel it.
Speaker 6: Fits the setting, and the setting is like Greek mythology,
Speaker 6: and it's really cool.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah, the whole plot of Achilles and Patroclus in Hades
Speaker 5: just melts my heart. It really is affecting. Nathan and
Speaker 5: I are both big fans of the game Pire, which
Speaker 5: is the game that came out right before, which.
Speaker 1: Is like still the best Super Giant game NBA.
Speaker 5: Jam essentially with Wizards, and then also it's a story
Speaker 5: of sincere revolution that asks you, the player, what it
Speaker 5: would mean to overcome oppression and why you would fight
Speaker 5: for it, and it is really affecting and meaningful storyline.
Speaker 5: One of the most amazing things about Super Giant is
Speaker 5: they have this like bespoke relationship with Darren corr a
Speaker 5: singer songwriter, Oh my music he makes where these games
Speaker 5: drive me to tears.
Speaker 1: And I love them.
Speaker 2: I actually really want to talk about Daryn Corb real quick.
Speaker 2: So Hades two has a boss against this band of
Speaker 2: Siren and they're all two different metals, like like metal
Speaker 2: adjacent songs.
Speaker 1: And that's about how much they hate you for killing.
Speaker 2: And how Badjo looks and what they're going to do
Speaker 2: to you, like and these songs are fucking bangas they're great.
Speaker 1: They want they have bloss bets.
Speaker 6: And one also bear in mind too that they had
Speaker 6: to write these songs with the expectation that, because of
Speaker 6: the game's run based structure, that you like do the
Speaker 6: same thing over and over and over. Yeah, but you
Speaker 6: will hear these songs like a hundred times, So they
Speaker 6: got to write something that they know you're not going
Speaker 6: to be irritated by hearing this many times, which to
Speaker 6: itself is this like level of craft is so different
Speaker 6: than just writing a song.
Speaker 5: There's like a little bit of a crossover with like
Speaker 5: musical theater with Durincorb, where the songs are people sing
Speaker 5: in these games when they are called to such a
Speaker 5: high level of emotion, and then they paint that a
Speaker 5: level of emotion also from you, the player, so that
Speaker 5: by the time you get to Sylla and the Sirens
Speaker 5: and your run again, you will be your blood will
Speaker 5: be pumping so hot that you just want to hear
Speaker 5: them burst into some minds And it's fucking great.
Speaker 2: And also that I'm ranting about this, I don't care.
Speaker 2: Your little pigs will slop this up. What's also great
Speaker 2: about this boss fight is it's three different things you're
Speaker 2: fighting and as you one is the drama, one is
Speaker 2: the guitarist, one as the singer, and if you kill
Speaker 2: off the drama, you no longer hear the drum baby
Speaker 2: or when they do, And it's.
Speaker 4: Like, it's beautiful.
Speaker 2: And the reason I bring this up as well is
Speaker 2: it's proof of what you can do in games and
Speaker 2: with technology when you just fucking think about what the
Speaker 2: medium is. Yeah, and it's so expertly done and it
Speaker 2: shows so much love, and it frustrates me because I
Speaker 2: know we've been quite negative today, but there are so
Speaker 2: many signs that games can be so much better and
Speaker 2: that there are these incredible like Hades two is even
Speaker 2: in early access, has so many bits to it. You're
Speaker 2: just like, wow, not only do you love games, but
Speaker 2: you want this to be cool. You have genuine creative
Speaker 2: expression that cannot be done anywhere else.
Speaker 5: Yes, in no other form, Like I mean that, this
Speaker 5: is why I talk about Dwarf Fortress like and you're
Speaker 5: constantly it's like, this is a game made by people
Speaker 5: that are clearly just obsessed with Lord of the Rings,
Speaker 5: but they also are obsessed with fantasy and building a
Speaker 5: world and uh, just native narrative experiences, the way that you,
Speaker 5: as a human being create a story inside of your mind.
Speaker 4: Yeah, Like you you.
Speaker 5: Have this little group of dwarves, and they all have
Speaker 5: distinct personalities that are all procedurally generated. They all have memories.
Speaker 5: They have all lived in a world that has built
Speaker 5: itself up over you know, in game like two hundred
Speaker 5: fifty in game years, So there is history. When you
Speaker 5: ask your dwarves to engrave carvings into the fortress you
Speaker 5: build inside of a mountain, they will build carvings of
Speaker 5: things that they remember from life, like when your mayor
Speaker 5: got elected, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker 1: So as what I'm gonna do before I die, I'm
Speaker 1: gonna carve Eric.
Speaker 5: Adams in this Why oh God, yes, this carve is
Speaker 5: a my main memory memory.
Speaker 4: Eric Adams.
Speaker 5: But no, I remember I played a game once and
Speaker 5: there was a dwarf child that was just mad all
Speaker 5: the time, and I was like, dwarf child, you can't.
Speaker 5: You can't keep hitting people with an axe like you have.
Speaker 1: What's going on, God, Woke has gone wild?
Speaker 5: Well, it's because after a big orc attack at my fortress,
Speaker 5: a Goblin attack. His father had been in the military
Speaker 5: and his father died, and there weren't enough dwarfs after
Speaker 5: this attack to clean up all the corpses. So this
Speaker 5: dwarf child had to watch his father rode away at
Speaker 5: the floor and that permanently changed his personality. So now
Speaker 5: he's angry almost shiite.
Speaker 3: Within this game Dwarf Fortress.
Speaker 1: Yes, and I think that this is the thing.
Speaker 2: I refuse to be fully nihilistic about this stuff, because
Speaker 2: even with the slop Kings in power, it seems like
Speaker 2: cool shit is still being built. And as we wrap
Speaker 2: updata first, is there anything you're really looking forward to?
Speaker 2: Is there like a game coming out with something very
Speaker 2: recent you've played, You've kind of and it's Avowed.
Speaker 4: I'm playing at to stop.
Speaker 5: Avowed is the new game from Obsidian, the most recent
Speaker 5: game that people.
Speaker 1: Have died for them.
Speaker 4: I mean, they've made tons of incredible.
Speaker 1: Vegas is.
Speaker 4: I mean, Following New Vegas is just a precious jewel.
Speaker 4: I love that game. It is. It is worth.
Speaker 5: Following New Vegas is worth the three hours I spent
Speaker 5: modding the game so it would not crash when I
Speaker 5: tried to play it on my PC.
Speaker 1: I so it wasn't an Obsidian game anymore.
Speaker 5: Sorry, but it Avowed is It takes a lot of
Speaker 5: the systems that they developed for the Outer the Outer
Speaker 5: worlds and refines them, and then also you get really
Speaker 5: really excellent character writing all of the time. There's a
Speaker 5: character you meet right away in a vowed named Kai
Speaker 5: who is like a fish person and he's always got
Speaker 5: a little sarcastic quip to say about something, but he's
Speaker 5: also like a deeply empathetic like he has like a
Speaker 5: real tangible personality traits that make me excited to talk
Speaker 5: to him and hear him react to the things that
Speaker 5: I do. And another wonderful thing about this is the
Speaker 5: combat stuff is really really fun. But the choices in
Speaker 5: the quests that you're forced to make, they do not
Speaker 5: present a path to you that will not piss someone off.
Speaker 4: So you have to sit there.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Sorry, that's the fate of the smiling man. You just
Speaker 5: have to think to yourself, what are my convictions? And
Speaker 5: that is something that games can really make you confront
Speaker 5: within yourself.
Speaker 4: What do I believe about something?
Speaker 5: And you play as an envoy of an empire, and
Speaker 5: I found that what I have been doing in this
Speaker 5: game is just you know, I met up with the rebels,
Speaker 5: I had the option to kill someone who attempted to
Speaker 5: assassinate me or not. And when I heard that he
Speaker 5: realized that assassinating me wasn't the right choice to and
Speaker 5: then write the right way to defeat the Empire that
Speaker 5: is trying to take over the living lands. I decided
Speaker 5: to forgive him because I don't actually have any beef
Speaker 5: with them, and I don't think the things that the
Speaker 5: Empire are doing in this land me the person me Gita,
Speaker 5: I don't think the things that they are doing their
Speaker 5: attempt at colonizing this beautiful, lush lance gap that is
Speaker 5: fighting against them. I don't think that that is right,
Speaker 5: and so other characters have judged me for this, but
Speaker 5: I decided, you know what, I side with the rebels.
Speaker 5: I want the Umpire to dissolve, and that is how
Speaker 5: I'm going to play this game. That's the way this
Speaker 5: character is going to play this game.
Speaker 3: This is on PC and Xbox.
Speaker 4: Yes, it's fan tactic.
Speaker 1: That's really good.
Speaker 3: So it's nice. What about you? What game? So?
Speaker 6: I recently played a demo for a game called skin Deep,
Speaker 6: and so skin Deep is I would describe it as
Speaker 6: a like slapstick stealth immersive sim game. The idea being that,
Speaker 6: like you are somebody who works in a very wacky
Speaker 6: form of insurance where basically you get frozen and stored
Speaker 6: to board ships that have important cargo on them, and
Speaker 6: if somebody breaks into that ship, then they unfreeze you
Speaker 6: and you run around and take care of whoever's on there, okay,
Speaker 6: And it's really it's just really clever. It's one of
Speaker 6: those games that, again it could only be a game,
Speaker 6: so like it thinks about all these things that other
Speaker 6: games of this sort don't. So like your character is
Speaker 6: barefoot for whatever reason, and so like if there's glass around,
Speaker 6: you can step on the glass and then you can
Speaker 6: like pry it out of your foot and use it
Speaker 6: as a weapon if you want to. But also like
Speaker 6: the combat is so different from what you expect in
Speaker 6: these games, and that like instead of you being this
Speaker 6: master of like martial arts, you have to like briefly
Speaker 6: incapacitate somebody with any number of comedy items, Like you
Speaker 6: can throw a banana peel and they'll slip them all on,
Speaker 6: and then you like go jump on their back, and
Speaker 6: like you're trying to wrestle them into something and they're
Speaker 6: like trying to push you off. You're not like physically
Speaker 6: stronger than them, and so it descends into just like
Speaker 6: lunacy and madness almost every time that you are trying
Speaker 6: to bring somebody down.
Speaker 2: And just to be clear, what platform is this on.
Speaker 2: That's PC, So it's not VR or anything you're not
Speaker 2: doing this with.
Speaker 6: Yeah, that's and it's from this one studio that actually
Speaker 6: they're called Blendo. They've been around for a while. Yeah,
Speaker 6: they're amazing, and they they've always been really smart about
Speaker 6: like integrating cinematic techniques that other video games don't. They
Speaker 6: made this one game forever ago called Thirty Flights of
Speaker 6: Level that relies a lot on like jump cuts, yeah,
Speaker 6: in a first person setting, which feels I think unnatural
Speaker 6: to gamers who are used to continuity in a first
Speaker 6: person game.
Speaker 5: The Thirty Flights of Loving is an experience worth having.
Speaker 5: It's a very short, narrative game, and I if you
Speaker 5: want to understand just like how games work, how the
Speaker 5: moving image creates narrative, creates associations. It is very instructive
Speaker 5: and it's also really affecting.
Speaker 1: Yeah cool.
Speaker 6: And so these developers are also really good, surprisingly good
Speaker 6: at not making just like on rail cinematic experiences, but
Speaker 6: also like these really intricate systems. And that's what skin
Speaker 6: Deep is it's this game where so many funny, weird
Speaker 6: things can happen, like you know, and you can you
Speaker 6: can replay levels and figure out all this stuff. Like
Speaker 6: the first time that I played the demo level, I
Speaker 6: nearly like lost, and you know, I sucked at it.
Speaker 6: And the second time I realized, Oh, man, I can
Speaker 6: break the glass on this spaceship and open it to
Speaker 6: the vacuum of space, and so I can go around
Speaker 6: like wreaking havoc on these guards by just like subjecting
Speaker 6: them to.
Speaker 2: Like a James Bone, like a moonrak Is situation. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: that's so beautiful.
Speaker 1: So and that's the thing.
Speaker 2: I really want to leave the listeners here with the censor,
Speaker 2: there's still cool shit happening. Oh yeah, everywhere, and there
Speaker 2: is hope to be had. Geeta, where can people find you?
Speaker 5: Oh, you can find me on Aftermath that site totally.
Speaker 5: I'm exo Exo gossip gita on social media Instagram and
Speaker 5: Blue Sky basically is where I post at this point.
Speaker 5: But yeah, everything I write will be on Aftermath, So
Speaker 5: look after me there, Nathan.
Speaker 6: Aftermath, do's say as well? And then I'm at Nathan
Speaker 6: Grayson on Blue Sky. I'm glorious curly map on Instagram.
Speaker 6: And then I also for a book called Stream Big
Speaker 6: the Triumphs and Turmoils of Twitch and the starts behind
Speaker 6: the Screen, and you can get that wherever books are sold.
Speaker 2: Now I'm going to kind of force you all to
Speaker 2: do this. I need you to go to aftermath dot
Speaker 2: site and need you to pay them. I need you
Speaker 2: to buy Nathan's book. Ideally, I need you to go
Speaker 2: and make your friends by it as well, and you
Speaker 2: also subscribe to Aftermath. I say this from the bottom
Speaker 2: of my heart to leave this episode games show them,
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 1: I'm not I'm not cutting it.
Speaker 2: Games journalism genuinely made me who I am and like
Speaker 2: people like Will Porter, Steve Hogarty and log of course
Speaker 2: John byThe really changed and even Kieran Gillen, who's become
Speaker 2: more of a friends since I left anyway, And it's
Speaker 2: lovely to have you two here because games journalism is
Speaker 2: very meaningful and I still don't think it's where it
Speaker 2: needs to be, but I think the aftermaths bringing it there.
Speaker 2: You will love me, though, so you know where to
Speaker 2: find my shit. Please keep downloading this show. Please tell
Speaker 2: people to download it to I need the downloads if
Speaker 2: I don't get them all died, I love.
Speaker 4: You all away in front of my eyes.
Speaker 3: I'm literally dying, but I do love you.
Speaker 1: Thank you for listening to Better Offline.
Speaker 7: The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song
Speaker 7: is Mattasowski. You can check out more of his music
Speaker 7: and audio projects at Mattasowski dot com m A. T.
Speaker 1: T OsO w s Ki.
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Speaker 1: Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a
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