How Growth Is Killing Video Games

29:55Of course. And then someone posted my parents' address and I'd moved to New York and I really had to stop myself being like, missed me, bitch. But then I emailed the developers and I was like, fucking take this shit down now. But now it's constant. I reviewed the most recent Final Fantasy game, Final Fantasy 16, which is a game that I said has some of the, in the review, this is what I said, that the combat was thrilling and incredible. You fucking go to space and punch a dragon in the head. Like, it is so fucking cool. But the story is dog shit, and I hated it. I hated every second of it. I'm going to say that most stories that involve going to space and punching a dragon, like, don't really cohere otherwise.

30:37it's hard to make that into a compelling narrative yeah and i i especially like it was a game where there was a subplot with slavery and it was handled really really really poorly i personally thought the whole game was bad but that's why i don't review games anymore no i i just like when you give me a combo meter i just go into sicko mode it's something that just happens to me but no i i said those things and i tried to be fair and complimentary toward the first thing that happened was someone found my email address and told me to kill myself jesus yeah no it's like i I similarly gave the Harry Potter game a pretty dismal review.

31:11And there is a reaction. There is an entire culture devoted to trying to seed reactionary politics into young minds through the fandom of video games. Games are like the easiest mark for that, because I think that I mean, for one, a lot of people have based their identity on games. That's the starting point. And then the other element of that is that a lot of that identity comes out of this perceived persecution complex. This idea that games were once for nerds who are bullied constantly. And not only that, though, there was a real reactionary movement against video games post-Columbine. With Jack Thompson, there were congressional hearings about whether or not games were evil and were destroying the minds of youth, which is obviously not true.

31:58I recently went to the UN. Look at all of us. Yeah, you know, we're normal people. I mean, my mind has been destroyed. My mind was, my mind's perfect. Anyway, so you went to the UN. I went to the UN and I was on this panel to talk about terrorism and extremism in gaming spaces. And the one thing that many of the panelists made sure to say was that this idea that it's violent video games that cause violence is not true. And in fact, often games are pro-social spaces. They encourage isolated people to interact with other people and and form friendships. It's just that those people are so vulnerable and people extremists know how vulnerable these people are.

32:41It's very easy to say, join a discord server and then start spreading dog whistles about like extremist like white supremacist thought. And then you normalize these things, these expressions and these phrases and these images. and then you can take those people out of that bigger discord server and funnel them into more and more extremist spaces what's insane is it seems to get back to a point i was getting as well is that they've they're trying to monetize this they're trying to monetize it by making the games less about being good games but symbolic of stuff and then the right-wing types seem to see games that are not doing that like dragon age the veil garden being like ah woke wokeness has begun it's purple which means black i guess like like just well no there's a there's a new one every week too like there's a new dei and video games controversy every week yeah and like it wasn't always this way um but after like there there was a conspiracy movement last year around a consulting firm called sweet baby inc yeah that is when this sort of became a well-oiled machine that's when all of these content creators started latching on to this constantly their biggest crime essentially was that the head of the company kim bel-air is a black woman and like that's it that's literally just it something she controlled yes absolutely she chose to be a black woman creator so what were you saying about as well but yeah and so like now you just have these people um you have content creators who've made this their entire identity and like their entire brand and so like gita was saying you know games can be really pro-social but you'll have these people come in and sort of say okay well these games that you like are being taken away by this evil dei woke mob right and so your purpose the underlying purpose that maybe you as a person have been looking for is now to fight a battle against these people who are taking your toys away and like that works really well on a lot of people who you know feel purposeless directionless always that we all commonly feel under capitalism and i feel like and i feel like as well games are an incredible vector for that not just because there's things to rely around but also there's a satisfaction to them.

34:43The reason I play Hades all the time, I have Hades on my, I'm not playing it right now, I promise. I would, though. The reason I play Hades is it feels good. It feels like you have industry over something. You can get good at something. I'll take this a step further. I think that the core fantasy of a lot of video games, no matter what their setting is, whether they are sci-fi or fantasy or set in the present day, is what if capitalism was fair? What if every input gave you a fair output? A consistent one. yeah yeah oh i like something you get better and better over time look at like a sim city right yes you in sim city you are essentially the mayor of a city you are the developer of the city you're the engineer of the city you design the entire city and you also have control over its taxes and it is it is like just a equals a shit basically when you look at how the tax system works in sim city it assumes that taxes are always fair right and consistent and consistent and you won't get a huge lobby from the people in the highest tax bracket asking for their taxes to be lowered.

35:46I wonder if they would add that. There should be just a SimCity, which is real. I mean, I'm sure the modders have gone into the tax system and just, like, torn out all the wires. What was that, Cities Skylines? Oh, Cities Skylines. I love watching the Cities by Diana, Cities by Diana, one of the endorsed, better offline, best Instagram accounts. I do love Cities by Diana so much. I've wanted to interview her for a long time, but just, like, thank you. she's amazing. Diana, you're always welcome on the show. Just a beautiful and unique mind. I love her. So let's change topics to something that I actually really, a positive thing.

36:18Aftermath. So how long have you been going? A little bit more than a year. So how is the company structured exactly? Well, okay. So it's called Aftermath because we all used to work at Kotaku, right? Right. And none of us really had much editorial control at Kotaku. Even Riley, who was a managing editor there, like he was like the story of his life is having strong opinions and wanting to enact the plans based on his opinions and then being told no, he can't do it essentially. So we are the aftermath of all of that. The slow dissolution of GeoMedia and our own just losing our brains working there with the conditions there.

36:58GeoMedia was the former holding company of Gizmodo, Kotaku, io9. and somebody came out of Gawker being sued into oblivion. Right. Yes. And we own the company and we try to structure it in such a way where we all have a relative amount of control over the work we do and what we want to do. We are not technically a co-op, but we try to behave as if we're a co-op. A fun fact is that a lot of co-ops are not co-ops because it's weird on taxes and everyone's just like, yeah, morphing into one takes too much work and it's better to just be an LLC or something else. But it's worker owned. It's worker owned.

37:35It's 100 % worker owned. We have no outside investment, no outside capital. We literally just rely on subscriptions and nothing else. For now, we might incorporate a small amount of ad-based stuff in the future, but that'll just be on like a podcast. And there's nothing wrong with ads. I mean, I definitely can't because someone listening to this is probably going to email me and be like, Ed, did you hear there's an AI ad? There's an AI ad that ran. Did you hear the AI ad? It ran off the AI ad. If you are emailing me or messaging me about the AI ad, I have hurt you over 150 times. And every single person, I'm not bitter.

38:09I'm just like, at this point, if you think it's novel to mention this to me, it isn't. And every time I kind of roll my eyes. And if you're trying to hurt me, which you would love, then keep going. But please don't. But nevertheless, it's good that this exists, though, because my experience of games journalism was future publishing and Dennis publishing. Oh, no. Oh, no. A little bit of Zitron law for all of you. So I was a games journalist from the age of 16. I interned at Computer and Video Games Magazine. It's steamed out there, owned by Dennis Publishing, sold to future publishing, really like out of the toilet into the toilet situation.

38:45The worst shittier toilet, yeah. And I worked at PC Zone as well. And it was definitely, and there's British libel laws, which will stop me being fully honest here. It was a challenging corporate environment with many incentive structures that affected the output and structure of the work regularly. And it's funny because games journalism feels like something that could be bigger and better than it is, but it just won't be. So the example that I think is really useful is Kotaku, essentially. We all worked there in a certain era where we had an editor-in-chief who was like an old school magazine guy, like went to the Columbia School of Journalism, really wanted us to get scoops.

39:23And we had for at least a short while management that understood the value of actually reporting news and not caring about the reaction from quote unquote gamers. Right. However, that did not make us very advertiser friendly. so now where we are at with Kotaku after everyone that we've worked with has left essentially yeah um they're in an environment where they're like what advertisers want is not news on how badly the industry is doing what they would prefer is guides and hype and what's what our gamers want what are gamers talking about you know I like reporting on fandom because I do think that the cultural impact of gaming is really fascinating.

40:11And frankly, I did not realize when we started Aftermath that we'd be doing journalism that is actually quite important in understanding the slow dissolution of democracy in America. But it certainly seems like it has been. I think that it's worth contextualizing that gaming has often been a canary in the coal mine for the slow dissolution of democracy and of these cultural movements that... Can you elaborate? Elon Musk. Gamergate. Yeah, literally Gamergate. And actually, Nathan, both of you split this question, I think would be good. Can you describe Gamergate for people that were outside of it?

40:52Gamergate was kind of the first real reactionary movement in video games, basically. I mean, I had a lot of personal experience. Yeah, you had a little bit of a part of it. Yeah, so the short version is there was a prominent indie game developer named Zoe Quinn, and she and I ended up dating for a minute. And gamers took this to me, well, not gamers. Basically, she had a jilted ex who published a manifesto about her, in which he claimed, among other things, that she had effectively slept with me for positive coverage of her game. When that never actually happened, there was no such coverage. It was all bullshit.

41:33but a lot of people a lot of gamers who are already after her there had been this whole like hate movement against her even before this but they latched onto this and it became their plausible deniability and so they started saying oh it's about ethics and games journalism we got to fix this and then all of these other people from outside of video games latched onto that that's where you got people like Milo Yiannopoulos that's where you've got a lot of like Breitbart's notability in that era yeah and I think that's when a lot of these people in the conservative movement realized oh like this is a perfect seed bed for the future of conservatism and the future we can grab people right here no you can literally brute force a reality is what they learned you the things that they claim and you will still see people claim these things on the internet none of these things are true none of them are provable none of them are anywhere near provable there is no review of zoe's game that nathan wrote yep it does not exist and they will never show it to you.

42:31And what's insane as well is there are actual issues in games. Oh yeah. Like, I mean, like I've, I'm not saying what magazine I'm talking about or indeed who this was said to, but I know multiple different games covers of games magazines for certain PC games magazines that were bartered with drugs and that where scores were raised to please publishers and raised to please advertisers. These are the actual fucking issues. Or even just sort of the like parasitic relationship. game devs especially the higher up in management you go they consider uh the games press to just be a pr wing oh yeah their same industry so the idea that we are journalists and we are do not have the same goals as they do which is to please developers and help make sure that their games sell that is considered like really really hostile and it is something that you have to explain and re-explain over and over again i don't care if your game sells well like i'm sorry i want games to do well, but I'm not doing PR for you.

43:29That is not what I want to do. Also, there's already, like a lot of these games already have these massive marketing budgets anyway. It's like the press is not a big needle mover there. But what a lot of people want the press to be, whether they are executives or whether they're gamers, is this like mouthpiece for the industry. Like going back to, you know, those like law or those court cases against games as a whole and things like that. They want industry advocates. They're still stuck in this mindset from like 30 years ago of like the industry needs defending it's just a little guy and it's like no you can't simultaneously be quote bigger than hollywood and just just be a little guy that needs me yeah you know i love video games i love the culture of video games in a lot of ways i love i think play is a fundamental part of human life that we all need more of especially the more bleak it if you have imagination then you can imagine a better world it also feels like we fundamentally got away from the thing that games is, which is escape.

44:25Yeah. Like, I don't... It's not that I'm ashamed of being a gamer. I have plenty of other things I'm ashamed of. But it's the sense that, like, I do this to try and not think about it. I will say, however, like, Bellatro. If anyone knows the Bellatro developer. Bellatro developer, welcome on Better Offline. Official endorsement. Bellatro is incredible. Such a fucking good game. Bellatro also, like, got me through, like, mental health things. Just I was able to... There's an EMDR effect, I think. But nevertheless, these games are meant to be, if not a distraction, something you escape into, even if you're not escaping life.

44:56But it's like people want them to mean something else almost. Fiction is transformative. I was thinking there's a big indie game hit that is really depressing and sort of about the experience of living under lay capitalism mouthwashing. It's an indie game. It's a visual novel. It's not mechanics heavy. It's very story heavy. but it became an enormous indie hit with a very big sort of unexpected fandom. Right. Because it describes an experience that people have, and they love feeling like the misery and stress and pain that they are being told by so many different forces doesn't exist and doesn't matter.

45:37They love being told, yes, it does matter. Your personhood does matter. The things you experience in the world do matter and have significance. Being able to experience that is something that brings us closer together as a society and allows us to, again, just start to imagine what if the world didn't have to be like this? right you know that's what all media all enter to forms of entertainment can give you and i do feel like by becoming an industry that is chasing a bigger and bigger number more than anything else you do lose sight of that that like art can't just be measured in dollars art is something that touches you and changes you yeah i mean i think that the yeah the the big issue is that games aren't supposed to be anything, especially not at this point.

46:28Yeah, it's an art form of source. And also, there are so many of them. So last year, almost 20 ,000 games came out on Steam. Jesus. Yeah, 20 ,000. And with that in mind, the fact that there's this reactionary movement going around saying, oh, this game can't be this. It can't have a black person. It can't portray trans issues. It's like, well, why does that matter to you? Also, why are you content? There are 19 ,999 more games over there that aren't doing that. So we have like 30 years of games which were not bad. Yeah. On top of that, you were talking about this idea of games as escapism. And it's so funny because this reactionary movement essentially posits that yes, games should only be escapism and nothing else.

47:11Right. They shouldn't have quote unquote political topics in them. For example, trans people or black people. But these people have dedicated their lives to fighting a political battle about games. in effect shoving their politics into games that's all they do anymore and so they're like games should be escapism no politics except for all the time on my terms you know for me a great level of escapism would be imagining a world where i don't have an annoying conversation with a white person it like you know like that would be that is completely imaginary you know that would be a wonderful escape for me but you do when you get down to when you see one of these viral posts that comes across your dash or whatever social media figure you're on.

47:51And they are so upset about a promo image for a game because the example character they've shown is a black person. You realize that the escapism that these people want to experience is an escape from black people. And it's just they don't want to have to see a black person. And that is an inherently political thing to say. That is an endorsement of white supremacy. It's an endorsement of an ethnostate. Yeah, it's very fucking frustrating as well, because I don't know, maybe they could learn to be in a situation with a black person, but they're like, no, no, I couldn't possibly. Wait, wait, wait, there's an option buried in these menus that allows me to have trans-like features, and fuck no.

48:30Yeah. I can't even consider a world where that's an option. Yeah, given the choice of a they-them pronoun is something that just terrifies them. Just seeing it. Their YouTube videos where these people are reduced to actual tears because of how upset they are. I love how masculine that is as well. Oh, it's crazy. I mean, I could go off on it. They're so macho. So back to Aftermath, though. On a more positive note, what are you trying to create with it? You don't need to have a big vision, but what are you trying to do differently to Kotaku, for example? Not destroy our brains and bodies, number one.

49:04Sure. Yeah. I also think we want to acknowledge and embrace both editorial and hard scoops in reporting. That was not something I think we did very well, embracing the duality of that. You need news, and then also you need to help people interpret and understand the cultural impact of this news. Nathan has been doing an incredible job reporting, just really fucking killing it. I currently have two full-time jobs, so I've been writing less than I'd love to. But really my interest is understanding industry trends and looking at them as sort of long-term research projects and understanding the way that the world moves as we understand how money flows and moves.

49:50And I think that both of these things are equally important. Essentially, even though video games as an industry, people just lie about how much money they make and how culturally important they are. they are now a massive and indelible part of the american entertainment industry and our economy they are mainstream especially for like you know gen z millennials like we all grew up playing them they are as much a part of the cultural fabric as any film as any tv shows anything else yeah you know that also they need to be covered that way and it's so weird to look at like major publications major papers having almost nobody dedicated to them yeah like washington post has one person Gene Park.

50:31Yep. And even then, Gene doesn't really do hard reporting. He just does like criticism, which is important, but it's not the whole thing. Like, I need a team for that.

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52:47Well, something I like about, like you did this one about Steam, the Steam users and AI. yeah and it was specifically the story is about how actually you know walk it through the next first games part why would i read your story to you yeah so basically right now steam is running this promotional uh event called next fest where there are a ton of demos everybody like is play is getting prominent placement for the demos which will in turn cause people to go check out their games and maybe buy them that's really important right um and so this time around people have been scrolling through and seeing a lot of ai art and they're like oh that's not good because that means that a bunch of like AI slop is potentially crowding out deserving good games that have been in development for a long time and that, you know, have a chance of it attaining real success.

53:31And so the thing about that is that, yes, it looks bad. But then at the same time, Steam has this hyper complicated algorithm that they've been tuning over the years. And so they basically tuned it to change the way that games are seen in the first few days of something like Next Fest. Right. so that you end up seeing a random scattering of them in the first few days, then it becomes personalized. And so basically that sorts out the AI garbage because those games, people don't really interact with much. They see them, they move on. And so they've built a system that sort of anticipates AI slop, which is good, but they still have this larger problem that I think that you see in a lot of industries now in this era of peak content, which is that there's tons of good stuff coming out on Steam all the time.

54:18too much of that for most people to like find what they're really looking for and then on top of that you're also competing with all of the old good stuff which is still on steam constantly goes on sale has bigger name recognition than you do and so like that's the real battle that people need to be fighting whereas i think looking at ai on steam is like this major issue is tempting and it is to an extent but it's not kind of the core problem that a lot of developers face so the reason i brought up this story was to compliment you uh it's because this is exactly why aftermath rocks and why i actually think the future of journalism is more yeah it's like better offline of course it is but it's things like aftermath as well because this isn't just a story about games culture which is the anxiety over ai slop also the anxiety over indie games not getting the attention they need it's also an industrial analysis because you've got fucking numbers here and actual view counts and actually because to cover the games industry it seems like much like tech you need true domain expertise but you also need industrial jason schreier style yeah and jason schreier by the way over at bloomberg legend gotta get him on the show it's my fault jason um do you want to know something amazing about jason yes there's one great jason story that he told me right before we left kotaku i used to sit next to him every day and he told me when he first started there he asked if there was a dress code he said and his boss told him no so to that effect he wore basketball shorts literally every single day and at his yearly review his boss came up to him and said Jason I did not know that I had a line for dress code but I realized that my line is please don't wear basketball shorts literally every day.

55:55Didn't he counter this one online at some point? I feel like he added some particulars that muddy the waters of that story a tiny bit Oh I see, I see. I just love every time you see Jason tweet something that pisses you off. I just love imagining him in basketball shorts. That's all. Yeah, but also, I'm remembering, if any of the British games press are listening to this, we don't, we never dressed that. I dressed like a, I was in like a dirty jeans. Imagine dirty jeans. Now I resist this. We just, like, people dress like, I guess we didn't see their legs because it's England and it was cold. But I feel like that, that's the difference to the British gaming press.

56:31I guess they would just look like creatures. No, what Kieran Gillen said is about, I love Gillen. He's such a sweetie pie. He said in what, when his little manifesto he wrote, like, I don't know, it's like 20 years ago. New Games Journalism. I love Kieran, but I fucking hated that. He said something about, there were two models of games journalism when he was working there. And it was the US model, which was a lot like car journalism, which is also pretty fraught. And there was the UK model, which is a lot more like music journalism, which now does not really exist in America anymore. And the US model, which was all about stats and statistics and numbers and products, that model won out eventually.

57:18And you can see how much it has won out because now it's only about toys. Like we talk about games as if they are toys and disposable and nothing else. And you evaluate them and you make guides about them and that's pretty much it. I remember why it pissed me off because he fucking worked at PC Gamer, which was exactly what you just described. Well, that's why he left and made Rock Paper Shack. And now he fucking writes amazing comics. He does. The power fantasy is so fucking good. It's really good. It's great. But no, I was going to say in line with a lot of that and the way that I think games journalism kind of, you know, continued to mature along those lines and mostly considering games to be these disposable products.

57:56And like, you know, a lot of sites consider like posting about a trailer to be news. the thing that I think Aftermath does that we really focus on doing is contextualizing a lot of the news especially the harder news something like the WB layoffs and contextualizing it I think with the kind of feeling it deserves something that I think you also do really well with all of your different projects you know well people people find it very cathartic to have people confirm what they feel about the world which is things are stuck in our back but also they sometimes don't yeah with facts but also sometimes they don't recognize how bad things are.

58:31They need to be told. Yeah. That was my point in that WB piece, which I, the headline for those who don't know is just fuck WB. And fuck WB by the way. Yeah, literally just fuck WB. And it goes into all the reasons why they deserve to be fucked because they've been mismanaging their business horribly and treating people and their various properties as disposable and like doing it in these ways that are very avoidable. They are an expression of the way that the tech industry as a whole has changed how employment works and changed how companies understand value and it is disgusting to watch it happen in something that's very important to me which is the world of art like i uh i was a cinema studies major in college i had these old highfalutin dreams of being a gallery uh curator etc etc these things really matter to me like human expression really really matters to me and they're the the wonderful history of american cinema is just being flushed down the fucking toilet and and it feels like they're doing the same thing in games and in tech and everything because not to tie it back to my own bullshit but it's it's the google search thing it's the facebook thing it's the thing that we fell in love with the idea of games i guess it's more what it's more death by a thousand cuts with games yeah sometimes the cuts are larger but it's like watching like monolith for example monolith also i like i swear monolith had something to do with like free space as well it was like volition entertainment like we've watched it it's been this slow burn where you'd see these amazing games come out and then the studio would just disappear or they'd be dog shit and it seems like it's just this problem of ceos it's these executives who have nothing to do with games they don't play games they wouldn't dare touch these games they've got important things to do like go to lunch and write emails or i mean okay so actually this is a good example um there are ceos who at least like pretend to or do but they still make the same decisions somebody like phil spencer is a great example of this he's like the gamer ceo he's at microsoft but is he actually like a gamer though Yes.

1:00:26I mean, his Xbox Live stats were public for a long time. You can see how many hundreds of hours he's putting into games. That makes it worse. Yeah, exactly. It makes it way worse. Because what that suggests is that the problem is not that these people are not gamers. Right. The problem is the structural incentives that accompany being an executive. That you will still, even appreciating the art form, cut thousands of people loose from their jobs. Right. And make decisions that actively harm games and their quality. Isn't the problem also that games are just insanely expensive to build, though?

1:00:57The AAA gaming is, are we not running towards this unsustainable point? It's already unsustainable. There was that New York Times article about graphics in games that I read a few weeks ago, maybe last month, that was about like there is so much money being pumped into these the Spider-Man games for as an example. Realistic one to one fidelity of the world we see outside of our window, including physics systems that replicate real life physics. And we are at a point where that last 10, it's like self-driving cars, that last 10 % may never be solved because our human brain interprets and processes things so much faster than a computer program and a computer can, just in general.

1:01:42And these studios put so much money into creating that thing and players don't notice or care. Players literally don't care whether or not this happens. There's documentation about this for Spider-Man 2 in particular. Which is a really good game. Yeah, it's a good game. But Insomniac, the developer of that game, suffered a leak a little while ago. And in some of their own conversations about the game, they were like, yeah, our budget for this sequel was$300 million or somewhere thereabouts. Almost double what the original game cost. But we don't think that players actually notice just how much better the graphics are.

1:02:16We actually think that they'd take either version and be fine with it. And so at that point, why are we spending all of this money on increasing the fidelity? What is the end that we're trying to achieve here? And then meanwhile, the other wild part of all of this to me is that the current video game juggernauts for Gen Z are like Minecraft and Roblox. These games do not have high fidelity graphics at all. Yeah, no, Roblox, in fact, it is a kind of disgusting, exploitative model where they rely on community developers to make games for them. Oh yeah, they got child labor. And children. And children mostly.

1:02:53Literal children. Yeah, and the split is one of the most predatory in the industry in terms of how much money Roblox will make off of your game versus how much money you make off of your game. What's insane is Roblox only loses money as well. They're horribly unprofitable. It's just ridiculous. I feel like we need to have a referendum on the CEOs on a very basic level of put aside all the moral stuff that's very obvious. Let's just be like, you fucking suck at this. Right. No. When we started our own company, what we marveled at for a long time was like, no, we don't have MBAs. And yes, the money stuff is kind of difficult, but actually getting people to visit our website and trust our reporting was extremely easy.

1:03:29Like the actual like day to day put blogs on the site, run a business, promote ourselves. That's so, so, so easy. And there were so many people at GeoMedia that made so much money that couldn't do things like there was a HR lead that couldn't attach. she couldn't put an attachment on an email and she made a quarter million of a dollar a quarter million of dollars a year I hated her so much that is insane I love being a published author and not even making close to that what's fucking insane as well is this is the larger problem I know that someone's going to email me the problem's capitalism wow, by the way, if you're one of the I don't know, I'm acting like I have derision I love my listeners, for the most part it's just I get one person I'm going to start emailing you like this all the time.

1:04:16It's actually capitalism. I fucking know. But it's just, this is actually something that really frustrated me at a former games publication I may have been at, where it was just like the people writing were fucking amazing. They loved games. I mean, I can talk about Log, for example. Disappointment on Blue Sky or Steve Hogarty at PC Zone. Will Porter as well, like, loved games. It was a real joyous energy to it. And then there was just this mandate from above where it was just, yeah, well, we've got to make sure we sell more issues, so you've got to put this on the cover. It was never something fucking interesting.

1:04:49You get an occasional one, like I did my one cover about the third World of Warcraft expansion. That was fun. But it's like the incentives, the people driving the incentives are not people that I even understand the customer so much. They're just like, I need to resemble the thing that my boss wants me to, and then I will be the best at my job, even if I'm not good at it at all. Like David Zaslav, I have a lot of thoughts about what could happen to him that I won't be sharing. Have I introduced you to my concept of the well-based system of justice? You got a deep, deep well. Okay. And like you just throw him down there.

1:05:25I mean, like Samara from The Ring. Like she lived down there. She didn't die right away, right? She had a nice time down there. You know, we'll feed him sandwiches, a little piggy basket every once in a while. And he can try to get out. Maybe he'll succeed. But he'll just have to repent. This is all happening in Minecraft and or robots. Yeah, this is parody. Yes. This is parody. But it's just fucking frustrating as well, because despite all this frustration and annoyance, we've had some incredible fucking games the last few years, like Hades and Hades 2. Hades and Supergiant is just an incredible, incredible studio.

1:05:57Yeah, they're having like a weird dust up about voice acting and not working with like SAG for reasons that they want to win. I actually - Oh, Supergiant. A bit of quick insight. Because they put out this statement. basically a voice actor came out and said that super giant was considering not renewing with them um over like their insistence on having a sag contract and so then super giant put out a statement saying like actually we have some of the best protections against ai and things like that in the industry and like we're just not working with sag for reasons and they did not state those reasons and sag currently is on strike specifically in the video game industry over ai protections and voice acting.

1:06:35I'm just reading this statement. Yeah. We have respected and will continue to respect any actor needing to pause work during the ongoing SAG-AFTRA video game strike while none of our games have ever been subject to the SAG-AFTRA contracts for a variety of reasons. There we go. What does that mean? We wish SAG-AFTRA were the best. I reached out to Greg Kasavin, who's the creative director over at Supergiant and who I've known for a lot of years and asked that. I was like, can you provide any of the reasons? And he was basically like, no. And I was like, oh, thank you, man. I appreciate the comment.

1:07:09And it's just like, it's frustrating because Supergiant, I assume, makes a shit ton of money. Oh, I mean, Hades was a massive, massive hit for that. They're also a very small studio relative to, I mean, they have a 30 people. So there's not a lot of overhead, essentially. Are you receiving the money there? Where's that going? It's not even like the CEO makes more money if they do that. It's confusing. Well, and also it's like, it's a real bummer because otherwise they've been amazing in terms of making games the right way. They are a very people-focused studio. I interviewed them years ago about all the ways that they...

1:07:41For example, they have mandatory vacation. So if you reach the end of the year and you haven't taken your vacation time, you have to just take a month off. They do that kind of a thing. And just to describe for the listeners who haven't played Hades or Hades 2, which is coming out next year probably. Yeah, it's in early access right now. You can play it. And you can play it. This game is both mechanically perfect. Hades 2, I would argue, isn't. I think Hades 2 I actually really like Hades 2. I love it. No, I love it. I'm with you in that. I love it in that there are some bits that - Well, also, Hades 2 isn't finished yet.

1:08:09Nevertheless, the point is, these games are mechanically perfect. They sound incredible. Voice acting's amazing. They look, they feel amazing. There are tiny little systems. And on top of that, they're incredibly diverse. Like, they prove that you can do diversity in this way that's very, like, sincere. And it doesn't feel - And it fits the setting. The setting is like Greek mythology. And it's really cool. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, the whole plot of Achilles and Patroclus in Hades just melts my heart. It really is affecting. Nathan and I are both big fans of the game Pyre, which is the game that came out right before.

1:08:43Still the best Supergiant game. An NBA jam, essentially. With wizards. With wizards. And then also it's a story of sincere revolution that asks you, the player, what it would mean to overcome oppression and why you would fight for it. and it is a really affecting and meaningful storyline. One of the most amazing things about Supergiant is they have this bespoke relationship with Darren Korb, a singer-songwriter. Oh my God. And the music he makes for these games drive me to tears. I love them. I actually really want to talk about Darren Korb real quick. So Hades 2 has a boss against this band of sirens.

1:09:21Still on the sirens. And there are two different metal-adjacent songs. One that's about how much they hate you for killing them. And how bad your hair looks and what they're going to do to you. And these songs are fucking bangers. They're great. They have blast beats in one. It's fucking sick. Bear in mind, too, that they had to write these songs with the expectation that because of the game's run-based structure, that you do the same thing over and over and over, that you will hear these songs like a hundred times. So they've got to write something that they know you're not going to be irritated by hearing this many times.

1:09:53No, and they're catchy. itself is this like level of craft that's so different than just writing a song. There's like a little bit of a crossover with like musical theater with Duren Corp, where the songs are, people sing in these games when they are called to such a high level of emotion. And then they anticipate that level of emotion also from you, the player, so that by the time you get to Scylla and the Sirens in your run again, you will be, your blood will be pumping so hot that you just want to hear them burst into song. And it's fucking great. And also, I'm ranting about this. I don't care.

1:10:24You little pigs will slop this up. But what's also great about this boss fight is it's three different things you're fighting. And one is the drummer, one is the guitarist, one is the singer. And if you kill off the drummer, you no longer hear the drum beat. And it's like... It's beautiful. And the reason I bring this up as well is it's proof of what you can do in games and with technology when you just fucking think about what the medium is. And it's so expertly done and it shows so much love. and it frustrates me because I know we've been quite negative today, but there are so many signs that games can be so much better and that there are these incredible, like, Hades 2 is, even in early access has so many bits to it where you're just like, wow, not only do you love games, but you want this to be cool.

1:11:08You have genuine creative expression that cannot be done anywhere else. Yes, in no other form. This is why I talk about Dwarf Fortress in New York constantly. It's like, this is a game made by people that are clearly just obsessed with Lord of the Rings, but they also are obsessed with fantasy and building a world and just native narrative experiences, the way that you as a human being create a story inside of your mind. Yeah. Like you have this little group of dwarves and they all have distinct personalities that are all procedurally generated. They all have memories. They have all lived in a world that has built itself up over, you know in game like 250 in game years so there is history when you ask your dwarves to engrave carvings into the fortress you build inside of a mountain they will build carvings of things that they remember from life like when your mayor got elected etc etc so as what i'm gonna do before i die i'm gonna carve eric adams into something yes just carve this uh my main memory number one memory is eric adams but no i remember i played a game once and there was a dwarf child that was just mad all the time and i was like dwarf child you can't you can't keep hitting people with an axe like you have what's going on with you god wokeness gone wild well it was because uh after a big uh orc attack at my fortress a goblin attack uh his father had been in the military and his father died and there weren't enough dwarfs after this attack to clean up all the corpses so this dwarf child had to watch his father rot away at the floor and that permanently changed his personality so now he's angry all the time all within this game dwarf fortress yes and i think that this is the thing i i refuse to be fully nihilistic about this stuff because even with the slop kings in power it seems like cool shit is still being built and so as we wrap up data first is there anything you're really looking forward to is there like a game coming out or something very recent you've played you've kind of i mean it's avowed i'm playing about what What is Avowed?

1:13:11Avowed is the new game from Obsidian, the most recent game that people remember from them. And what did Obsidian make? They've made tons of incredible RPGs. Fallout New Vegas. Oh, I'm sold. I'm sold. Fallout New Vegas is just a precious jewel. I love that game. It is worth, Fallout New Vegas is worth the three hours I spent modding the game so it would not crash when I tried to play it on my PC. So it wasn't an Obsidian game anymore. Sorry. I agree. But Avowed is, it takes a lot of the systems that they developed for the outer worlds and refines them. And then also you get really, really excellent character writing all of the time.

1:13:50There's a character you meet right away in Avowed named Kai, who is like a fish person. And he's always got a little sarcastic quip to say about something. But he's also like a deeply empathetic, like he has like a real tangible personality traits that make me excited to talk to him and hear him react to the things that I do. you and another wonderful thing about this is the combat stuff is really really fun but the choices in the quests that you're forced to make they do not present a path to you that will not piss someone off so you have to sit there yeah sorry this is the fate of the smiling man um you just have to think to yourself what are my convictions and that is something that games can really make you confront within yourself what do i believe about something and uh you play as an envoy of an empire.

1:14:37And I found that what I have been doing in this game is just you know, I met up with the rebels. I had the option to kill someone who attempted to assassinate me or not. And when I heard that he realized that assassinating me wasn't the right choice to then write the right way to defeat the empire that is trying to take over the living lands, I decided to forgive him because I don't actually have any beef with them and I don't think the things that the empire are doing in this land, me, the person, me, Gita. I don't think the things that they're doing, they attempt at colonizing this beautiful lush landscape that is fighting against them.

1:15:11I don't think that that is right. And so other characters have judged me for this, but I decided, you know what? I side with the rebels. I want the empire to dissolve. And that is how I'm going to play this game. That's the way this character is going to play this game. And this is on PC and Xbox. Yes. It's fantastic. Yeah, it's really good. So Nathan, what about you? What game? So I recently played a demo for a game called Skin deep and so skin deep is i would describe it as a like slapstick stealth immersive sim game the idea being that like you are somebody who works in a very wacky form of insurance where basically okay you get frozen and stored aboard ships that have important cargo on them and if somebody breaks into that ship then they unfreeze you and you run around and take care of whoever's on there okay and it's really it's just really clever it's one of those games that again it could only be a game so like it thinks about all these things that other games of this sort don't so like um your character is barefoot for whatever reason and so like if there's glass around you can step on the glass and then you can like pry it out of your foot and use it as a weapon if you want to um but also like the combat is so different from what you expect in these games and that like instead of you being this master of like martial arts um you have to like briefly incapacitate somebody with any number of comedy items like you can throw a banana peel and they'll slip and fall and then you like go jump on their back and like you're trying to wrestle them into something and they're like trying to push you off you're not like physically stronger than them and so it descends into just like lunacy and madness almost every time that you are trying to bring somebody down and just to be clear what what platform is this it's pc so it's not vr or anything you're doing this with yeah that's um and it's from this one studio that actually they're called blendo they've been around for a while i love blendo games yeah they're amazing um and they they they've always been really smart about like integrating cinematic techniques that other video games don't they made this one game forever ago called 30 flights of loving that relies a lot on like jump cuts yeah um in a first person setting which feels i think unnatural to gamers who are used to continuity in a first person game 30 flights of loving is a an experience worth having it's a very short uh narrative game and i if you want to understand just like how games work how um the moving image creates narrative creates associations.

1:17:26It is very instructive and it's also really affecting. Yeah. Cool. And so these developers are also really good, surprisingly good at not making just like on rail cinematic experiences, but also like these really intricate systems. And that's what skin deep is. It's this game where so many funny, weird things can happen. Like, you know, and you can, you can replay levels and figure out all this stuff. Like the first time that I played the demo level, I nearly like lost. and you know I sucked at it and the second time I realized oh man I can break the glass on this spaceship and open it to the vacuum of space and so I can go around like wreaking havoc on these guards by just like subjecting them to like a James Bond like a moon raker situation yeah yeah that's so beautiful so and that's the thing I really want to leave the listeners here with the sense that there's still cool shit happening oh yeah everywhere and there is hope to be had Geeta where can people find you oh you can find me on aftermath.site mainly.

1:18:23I'm xoxogossipghita on social media Instagram and Blue Sky basically is where I post at this point. But yeah, everything I write will be on Aftermath, so look after me there. Aftermath.ca as well. And then I'm at Nathan Grayson on Blue Sky. I'm gloriouscurlymopp on Instagram. And then I also have a book called Stream Big, The Triumphs and Turmoils of Twitch and the Stars Behind the Screen. And you can get that wherever books are sold. Now, I'm going to kind of force you all to do this. I need you to go to aftermath.site. I need you to pay them. I need you to buy Nathan's book. Ideally, I need you to go and make your friends buy it as well.

1:19:02And you also subscribe to aftermath. I say this from the bottom of my heart to leave this episode. Games journalism... Jesus Christ. I'm not cutting it. Games journalism genuinely made me who I am. And people like Will Porter, Steve Hogarty, and Log, of course, John Bythe, really changed. And even Kieran Gillen. who's become more of a friend since I left anyway. And it's lovely to have you two here because games journalism is very meaningful and I still don't think it's where it needs to be, but I think the aftermath's bringing it there. You all love me, though, so you know where to find my shit.

1:19:35Please keep downloading this show. Please tell people to download it, too. I need the downloads. If I don't get them, I'll die. I love you all. You keep wasting away in front of my eyes. I'm literally dying, but I do love you all.

1:19:56Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Ossowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M-A-T-T-O-S-O-W-S-K-I dot com. You can email me at ez at betteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat.wheresyoured.at to visit the Discord and go to r slash betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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