Inside the global computer crash

29:55We literally had a ticker that would go around in Canary Wolf. And it was powered by a spreadsheet, an Excel spreadsheet. And I'd input data into it myself and maintain it. And if I put in something wrong, it would crash the whole ticker and it'd be flashing and going crazy. That's just the perfect example of how you see this stuff out in the world, like the screens at airports and you just don't realize that usually it's some crappy software and just the most basic stuff powering that thing yeah probably from like 10 20 years ago i just i keep thinking about for whatever reason the i think it was when oppenheimer was out and there was that picture somebody posted of the imax theater with a with a palm pilot powering it uh and we went and found somebody who ran the theater and they were like look it works nobody touches it it's been there for years like no one understands it it's just this weird little thing that keeps the plate spinning so we we we keep it running and i feel like more of the world works like that than any of us would like it oh yeah it's all like held together by string that string started going apart on friday exactly so it seems like most of the worst of this is if not over then kind of on the way to recovery yeah i think so i think because if you're an itm and in a business you're going to prioritize the people and systems that matter the most, first of all, and get those back up and running.

31:17Yeah, there are a lot of people who worked all weekend, I suspect. So to all of you IT folks listening, we love you. Yeah, that's a tough one. Especially on Friday when you think, oh, nice, chill Friday, looking for the weekend. What fallout is left here? What are you keeping an eye on this week? I'm definitely keeping an eye on the Delta situation because they seem to be the most impacted by this in terms of airlines, hospitals, because we've seen people not being able to get their appointments and stuff to see in schools I guess as well although certainly in Europe and the UK a lot of kids are out of school now for the summer holidays so we'll see, it's where there's typically less investment in infrastructure where it kind of matters like schools and hospitals and stuff where they just don't have the budget so it'd be interesting to see where those go and whether there's still some sort of lingering issues today and tomorrow.

32:12But I feel like we'll hear less about this as the week goes on for sure. It's definitely, yeah, it's getting better out there. In some sense, like, thank God it happened on a Friday and not on like a Tuesday morning and we would have felt the full effects of this for like a couple of days in the middle of the week. Yeah. We'll see. Yeah. Yeah. It's on its way to being fixed now anyway. That's good. Well, yeah. As always, computers are terrifying, fragile things. The funniest thing about it though, It was like one of Microsoft's fixes was like, literally have you turned it off and on 15 times. Unreal.

32:44It's the meme coming true. It really, like, it is astounding how much of the world is just unplug it and plug it back in again. And it's, I mean, it goes back to the same thing, right? Like these things are fragile and simple in so, so many ways that we would, like, maybe it's scary that they're that fragile and that simple, but that is where we are. No, it definitely is. Yeah. All right, Tom, thank you as always. No worries. Thanks for having me. All right. we got to take a break and then we're going to come back and talk about fitness, but like in a, in a fun way. We'll be right back.

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34:30All right, we're back. So Victoria Song at The Verge, we all call her V, has been on the show a few times recently talking about wearables and rest days on the Apple Watch. And one of the things that I've discovered in talking to her over the last couple of months is that she and I have really similar ideas about fitness and the quantified self and the idea of tracking yourself, which mostly is to say we have very conflicted relationships with these things. The idea of having these streaks and leaderboards and you should always be aspiring to be an elite athlete. It's just a lot. And another thing that V and I have in common is that our journey as runners, hers much more successful than mine, started in the same place with an app called Zombies Run.

35:13So what she and I are going to do at a couple of different points over the rest of the summer is talk about what I've come to sort of tentatively call the super chill exercise system. Basically, she and I have both been exploring ways to exercise more, do better, get in better shape, keep track of how you're doing without all of the stuff that feels gamified and toxic. And like, it's always pushing you to do more and incentivizing you to go do crazy things when it might hurt you or you're sick. Or like, if I just have the Apple watch yell at me for not closing my rings when I'm sick one more time, I'm going to lose my mind.

35:51You know what I mean? so to kick off our discussions about the super chill exercise system real name pending we'll see i wanted to talk to the person who made zombies run so v and i called up adrian han who is a writer and developer and storyteller and worked on zombies run from the very beginning until very recently he spent more than a decade writing this game and zombies run if you've never played it is, I don't know how to describe it exactly. It's an exercise fitness app that is also narrative. So when you're running, it's tracking you and it's aware of what you're doing, but it weaves a story in.

36:30Basically, it's a zombie apocalypse. You're in a place called Abel Township and you are a runner. That's your job, right? You go out into the barren wasteland of the post-apocalyptic world and you do quests. You have to go find something or you have to go rescue somebody or you have to go to another place and learn about something. And it's all incentivizing you to run and be active and be out. But the idea is to make it fun with story, right? You're picking it up every morning to see what happens next, not to not break some streak. This app worked really well for me. Just having a thing that pushed me out, that gave me something fun to do while I was running.

37:11Sometimes it'll just be like, oh no, zombies and you have to run faster. It was awesome. Like I've always been a person who likes sports more than I like just running because in sports, like there's something to do. I have a purpose for why I'm moving fast. This felt like that. And it's kind of like immersive in the way that listening to podcasts is immersive. It sort of distracts you from running while also having you run. The story is great. You get to know the characters. There's just something terrific about this game, but I haven't really seen replicated elsewhere. And Adrian was one of the people who built this thing from the very beginning.

37:45So V and I called up Adrian to get a sense of how a game like this comes together, why it's hard to do, and what it took to really pull it off. And we just started at the beginning. We asked him basically, you know, over a decade ago, you're thinking about building a fitness game. This is like in the early days of the iPhone. Where do you even start? I'm Adrian Holm. I ran Six to Start and co-founded it for 17 years. And so we made Zombies Run. I left about three months ago, four months ago. So that's probably the most well-known thing that I've done. Made Zombies Run. And also I wrote a book critiquing gamification called You've Been Played.

38:30So that's fun. So, you know, when we came up with the idea for Zombies Run, it was myself and novelist Naomi Alderman. and I had just kind of like really gotten into running at that time and I had a Garmin Forerunner 205, 201. So if you remember this, this is a massive like chunky, it's not a watch, I mean it's like a forearm bracelet and it could track you by GPS and I got this as a kind of way to make myself run more and it actually did work because it was cool to see like numbers and to see that I was getting better every day, every time I ran. And it had this thing called, I think it was like the virtual racer or virtual runner, which is like what it sounds like.

39:16It's like ghost racing in Mario Kart where you're racing against yourself. So you can go and go for a run and it will show you yourself versus yesterday's self. And it was kind of really cool to see myself like in this very proto gamification thing, getting better each time. but then there was a moment where I stopped getting better and I started getting worse and like my past self started beating myself and I was like this sucks like this is not motivating anymore uh because that only works on the way up like it doesn't work on the way down or when you plateau or if you're ill and so then the iPhone came out and then the App Store came out and we had Runkeeper there were even some smartphone running games actually there was one called cash and seek made by korean developer i think and the idea is that you'd run around your neighborhood and you see a map and there'd be like little treasure there and it's actually like multiplayer because other people can leave treasure for you and i started playing that and i was like i actually just don't want to run to these places it's telling me to run to because it's like not very safe or it doesn't look nice um and so we started thinking about like well how could we make a good running game?

40:32Because people are trying to make these running games. I mean, one of the problems of a lot of them actually was you have to look at the screen when you're running, which I think for people who have not run before, that sounds cool. Like that sounds like a good idea. And if you've ever run, then you're like, this is not just terrible from a kind of safety point of view, but also if you stop every like two minutes to look at your phone and then start running again. Like, how are you really going to do that? Like, that's not really practical. So the idea kind of came from, look, we have this amazing piece of technology, which is like a sort of like handheld computer, which is brand new, really.

41:12It's got internet connection. It's got GPS. It's got sound. People are used to using their headphones. What can we do of this to make a game? And so that's a lot of constraints, but it was also like really interesting from a game design point of view. well and i think somewhere in there you're also having to make a lot of decisions about like the mechanics of the game right because you're talking about like i think about all those early games and there were all those early running apps and a lot of them were just like track your run right like there's a there's a subset of people who just like want to know how far they run but then like you're saying there were others that were starting to play with this like how do we get you to run more and this is when everybody was starting to experiment with all these new ways of gamification and leaderboards and all these different things and i feel like from the very beginning, you kind of went the other direction of a lot of that stuff.

41:59Yeah, there's a lot of, you know, to the extent that they really thought about motivation, I think it was basically competition, right? So it was like, we have a leaderboard, and can you get to the top of the leaderboard? So like, I was using the Fitbit at the time, and everyone was trying to get to the top of the leaderboard. And then the leaderboard would never move each week, because you'd have the people who like are in Europe, and they walk everywhere. And you have the people in america at the bottom who drive everywhere and they don't they don't climb and so it's just like this is not really motivating anyone actually um another aspect of that kind of parallel to that there'd be these territory capture games where you'd have like you divide the world up into hexagons or squares and it'd be like can you go and capture enough space and that's kind of like a leaderboard where it's just whoever runs the most you know um or has the most time wins and again for some people that's really motivating i don't really think there was anything beyond that not even kind of exploration and so we want to do something completely different which was storytelling basically it was like role play which i didn't think had been done before in that aspect um but it really came from the idea that people were already like listening to podcasts and audiobooks when they're running so we weren't asking people to do anything new and i think i still have this idea for a game someone feel free to steal it if you want which was um there's uh the bit in the born ultimatum when uh jason born is guiding this person through waterloo station and he's like okay turn right now turn left here okay pause for five seconds and born goes and murders him and i'm like oh that's kind of like a really that's a that's a very like interesting like dramatic thing uh which is just entirely voice-based basically and it's like oh we could do something like that where where you have this audio story which is telling you basically to run and when you're running crucially you don't look at the screen you don't tap on anything so it's not it's not really interactive um game you're just choosing or able to run faster or slower and the story and the game kind of adapts to that the zombies came into it because um uh naomi my co-creator she had just joined this running club and they'd said why do you want to run and some people wanted to lose weight and other people wanted to get fit and one woman said she wanted to survive the zombie apocalypse and uh and i was like oh yeah that's funny but then i was kind of like sick of zombies at that point this was like 2011 2012 and we had the walking dead and we had, you know, 28 days later.

44:40And I kind of thought zombies were over, which was wrong. They're still here. But from a storytelling point of view and from a gameplay point of view, especially for a running game, there's actually really nothing better that we found because zombies, everyone knows how they work. You just have to kind of move faster than them. But also the great thing with zombies is that most zombies don't actually run. So, you know, your classic zombies, your non-28 days later zombies, they just walk or they shamble. And so that was kind of a really clear thing for us, which was you don't actually have to run in Zombies Run.

45:16You can just walk if you want. And the game will not give you a hard time for that. There is nothing gated in Zombies Run based on your distance or your pace. So if you even want to do it sitting on a couch, you can do that. And some people do it like doing chores or whatever, and most people do run or jog. And so the crucial thing there was we're not measuring your performance. You can measure your performance. We give you stats and things like that. But actually, we're not rewarding that. In a way, what we're doing is we're saying, we're just going to make it more fun. We don't want to reward you for doing a run.

45:54We want you to be rewarded while running, which is a really important difference. And I think it's what makes for good gamification. like good gamification means where you're having fun while you're doing it not after you've done it which is really hard to do i actually this is my my running journey began with zombies run because i i you know i've been running for a long time but i was not a natural runner in any form i was the person who is very much like my natural form is a couch potato you could you would have to be chasing me basically for me to run. But it was a, it was a type of thing where I was like, oh, I have like a metabolic thing.

46:37I need to actually run. Running is one of the cheapest ways that you can exercise, but it is quite miserable when you're starting out. So like, I think the thing that really resonates with me here in terms of like, just talking about the chillness of things is like actually having fun while you exercise. Because I think with fitness tech. And like with the gamification of it, I don't know why, but we just decide to invite so much anxiety into the process, like leaderboard. Oh, I feel terrible about myself because I'm not number one. And then if I am number one, I have this intense pressure to stay number one.

47:13And so then that's not fun anymore. I've turned the exercise into work. And then also, just as you said, like it really kind of resonated with the whole idea of the virtual runner and you're running against your past self who is better than you. I am at that stage because if you do it long enough, if you do it long enough, you are going to plateau. You are going to have a slump. You're just not, you're just, you age. You know, as you get older, you're not going to be quite as fast as you were when you were younger. So I think with the game, you want people to keep playing. So what were some of the things that you tried that you just realized was like, oh, this is actually making the game less fun or, oh, this is making the game more fun.

47:57Yeah, I mean, you know, people come into it with different motivations and different expectations. So we did this Kickstarter right at the beginning and there were kind of two strands to it. One was, there's going to be an amazing story by an amazing storyteller. And for a lot of people, possibly even most people, that's like the big motivation, which is, I go out for a run. It's kind of told like in first person. So they're talking to you as if you're like, you know, a real person. It's not like an audio book. It has amazing characters. It's got like cliffhangers at the end of every mission. So you kind of want to know what happens next.

48:34And for us, that's a big thing where it was always, you know, we want you to get up on a rainy Sunday morning and actually be excited to find out what's going to happen next rather than be like, is there any excuse I can use not to go to rock? So I just, I just want to push back on one piece of that, that I think is really interesting that you said, which is the idea that you can, like, you could just sit on your couch and play the game, and it would still be very fun, right? I think that there's probably some truth to that, but also if that were true, you would have just made a game that you can play sitting on your couch, right?

49:06And part of the reason I think this is a thing V and I keep talking about is, like, gamification when it's like Monopoly Go trying to get your money, I have pretty unconflicted problematic feelings about. But this one is so different, right? Because the thing that you're doing creepy things to incentivize people to do is like ostensibly a good and healthy thing. And so you're in a position of saying like, okay, we built this cool game that people like because it's a game, but they also like it because it makes them exercise and because it makes them do a thing that is good for them and it makes that thing more bearable.

49:35Like, does that change the balance of just like, if the goal was to just get more microtransactions from people, you would play it one way. But when it's like, okay, we actually want to have you do something that in moderation, even at greater intervals than you're currently doing, it is a good thing. Does that change the way you think about that balance? Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, by trying to design it in the way we did, we left money on the table. Like, you know, we could have had more engagement if we sent people notifications saying everyone in your base is going to die if you don't give a run tomorrow, right?

50:09I mean, that's what most games would have done, you know? Or we would say, like, if you go and do like a three-mile run now, then you'll get double, like, you know, supplies, right? Duolingo style stuff. and that all this stuff is really well documented and it does work in terms of increasing engagement and conversions. But I think that the nice thing about owning a company and having a small company is that you can just say, we're not going to do that because we don't think that's going to be a good experience for people in the long term. So we would get people saying, oh, but can't people just cheat?

50:44And it's like, yeah, people can cheat about anything. People can cheat in Dance Dance Revolution. you can cheat a guitar hero you can cheat all these things and it's like if you're going to cheat a dance dance revolution don't play dance dance revolution no one's making you do that it doesn't really bother me as a designer because it just shows that you kind of need to do it a little bit differently and I think that the other thing I see it as a kind of accessibility mode mostly rather than people cheating so we don't know what situations people are in in terms of their ability to move we call it simulate running when we do this.

51:19It might be that you can't use your legs, you know, then you're going to do another exercise while you're doing this. And so we've had, you know, people say, you know, they'd like it that we offer these options. So having said that, like most people do actually run. So it's fine. It's a really interesting thing to me because it really just hits home with the whole one size does not fit all, but especially with fitness, because we all have different capabilities, as you mentioned, with our bodies. We have different skill levels, different circumstances, but I find a lot of times I burn out when testing wearables and fitness tech because they are just kind of pushing you towards more.

52:03And it sometimes does feel like part of this is late-stage capitalism because they need to make money off of this thing and they need to keep user bases, So they need to get us addicted to these platforms. Like keep your streaks going. Sometimes it really does feel like streaks can be insidious just because like, oh, I know you're getting me addicted to this. But actually what my body is saying is I need to rest. I actually – so like it's a tricky thing, right? Because if you want to stay injury free, you can't constantly do more. You do have to take days off and that's good for you as well. So I think the big metric with gamification and fitness is streaks.

52:45And I was just curious what your thought process was towards streaks and do you have feelings towards it? I hate them, personally. I hate them. I don't like them. I mean, you will see people talk about how it motivates them to sort of go and have – if they're doing like NaNoWriMo, National Novel Writing Month, it's like nice to have a streak where you're writing for 30 days in a row, right? Or you've got like a calendar and you like mark it with an X every time you, you know, do something useful. And so I always kind of think it's about like, how can you get the incentives aligned correctly, right?

53:25And so I think that the issue with like fitness is that, you know, you see this with the Apple Watch, you see it with Peloton in particular, There are a lot of stories about Peloton where people were just completely burning out and really injuring themselves. I just don't think this is the way to good health and fitness, actually. A lot of these companies, along with trying to get you addicted, they're trying to sell this idea of you becoming a literal elite athlete, as if that is a good thing to be. If you want to be an elite athlete, that's fine, but it's not really a good idea. frankly, for most people.

54:06Like, you know, most people have got jobs and they've got families and it's very hard to maintain that. You know, it can actually be quite damaging. And I see that with a lot of the marketing. I mean, they've changed it a bit now, but like Nike and a lot of these other apps were made by people who used to be athletes or who just like incredibly fit, right? And so they'd be like, wow, you've got to go and break through the pain barrier. You've got to go and do all this stuff. It's like, you don't actually need to do that. Like, you're just saying you have to do that. So I don't, I don't like streaks.

54:36It can be done in a way that's like less bad, right? But I think that when I look at the best games and the best apps out there, like Nintendo doesn't like, I mean, Nintendo does actually have streaks in Animal Crossing, but like, it's very small. It's really small stuff. And it doesn't, it's not punishing at all if you don't, if you don't match it. Like, you know, there are streaks in some video games, but like you play Elden Ring, you'll play, you know, like Legends of Zelda. that's not like a streak for playing it two days in a row they don't need that because it's a really good game right and so i think it's just you know it's an excuse it um for not making something that is as targeted or as interesting for people it's very difficult because you know if you're running a company like i do have a lot of sympathy for people like we we didn't take investment when we started and so like well we have very little investment so they were like really patient and they were not giving us a hard time.

55:31You know, people will call us like a lifestyle business, I guess. But it does mean that if you take investment and you kind of have to take investment if you're a startup, because otherwise you'll just be outgunned by all the other startups who take investment, right? You don't really have a choice. They need to see the line go up. And one of the easiest ways of getting the line to go up is by adding in streaks, is by adding in notifications and making people feel bad about not using it. so you know i i can blame individual like you know designers here but it's it's like they're in an arms race it does feel like a much harder bar to set for yourself though because essentially what you're describing is that instead of punishing me for not doing the thing that you've already given me you have to keep giving me new things which is a lot of work for you like it's much easier to just yell at me for not closing my rings than it is to like like you you mentioned Elden Ring, like people play Elden Ring because it's a great game.

56:25Like it's really hard to make a great game. And it's much easier to build a mechanic that requires me to open the app every day or my little character dies than it is to keep building a great game for 11 years. Yeah, that that's, that's really true. Yeah, it's definitely not easy. I mean, when you make a fitness game that's based around like narrative, you just need to keep on making more narrative right and so we turn from being a sort of tech company almost into like a content company and if you open up like zombies run or zrx now it kind of looks a bit like netflix like it has these carousels of rose and you know you can like choose different stories which is shows how the company kind of evolved over time from like trying all these different like gameplay mechanics some of which worked and some which didn't into like okay what we are doing is we're creating a process to try and make as many like consistently good stories as possible like every week multiple multiple stories a week and so you we ended up with like writers rooms and and just sound designers and you know like it's games as a service as software as a service and a lot of companies try and transition from making like a one-off game or one-off tech product into making constant you know content and it's just really difficult to do especially when you're making like specialized stories that are like about you running you know like that's that's a different kind of um storytelling and you know the team did it really well but i think that that's actually not something that tech companies are really set up to do it reminds me of peloton because they too have become a media company without i think necessarily intending that yeah so you know is this just then the challenge of gamifying fitness?

58:14Because I don't know, like I don't have an answer, but it's just like I constantly have to find new ways to motivate myself or sometimes just like let myself have permission to be bad at fitness, which is opposite to what all these devices are doing, which is to optimize yourself to be the best version of yourself. I feel like there's conflicting narratives here where like i think david and i just want to like be slightly healthier and not eat ourselves while doing it but then you know these watches these rings these games not yours but some of these games are just like here's how to be the best version of yourself with metrics and numbers and get you addicted to it so how do you like i mean they're sort of creating goals for you that maybe you didn't have when you began right which is like you know the The longest I've ever run is a half marathon.

59:08And everyone's like, oh, so why don't you do like a marathon? I'm like, why would I do a marathon? I don't want to do a marathon. That seems like a bad time for me. I love it. I'm glad for you if you've done a marathon. You know, I know someone who did like an ultra marathon. You know, she's great. But like, it's not for me. And so I think when you start, you know, these applications, it's all games. It's always like, so what's your goal? And you've just got these like massive goals, right? I'm like, oh, do I really want to do that? Or do I just want to do something else? Just be a little bit healthier.

59:41So a big part of it is, again, I just come back to how can we make it fun? How can we make it a little bit more bearable? You mentioned, V, that when you start out running, it was the same for me. It's just horrible. It's so painful, sweaty. It's just like you get a stitch. I just can't bear it. but then you know the thing is when you've done it a lot you get good at running and now i don't need like a game to go running like i just go out running to music or podcasts and it's actually pretty easy for me right and so like can we get people into that situation where they don't need us anymore of course like from a business point of view you know you want people to keep on playing and hopefully you're fun enough but that's where you want to get people to because it's the same with like a lot of stuff when you get to a good enough point it actually becomes way easier to maintain it i do think it's going to be a challenge for a lot of gamified fitness apps like because you just need to keep on providing the content like some of them you know will just become basically gym instructor classes like like peloton you know or like a lot of vr stuff you know some of them will just be um constant competition like the cycling you know things and Strava and that's fine you know like if you like that sort of thing you should do it I do think there's still more room for companies especially as AR like becomes more of a thing to do like even more fun um ways of making like sports and like competitive sports and cooperative sports I really want to make like a cooperative fitness game I think it'd be like so fun to do that so yeah like I think there's a lot we can do there like the kind of original gamified fitness is just playing like soccer so like you know maybe we just do more of that but they can make it a bit more convenient are there any fitness apps or just like services out there that you see and you're like oh i kind of dig what they're doing then because we have seen so many of them just kind of take the same leaderboard and competition approach to it so is there anyone out there that's doing it in a way that you're like oh that that actually seems like that's a cool way for us anxious people out here I have my list, but like us anxious people out here to actually take a step back and like build the foundational habits and get to the point where you're saying like you actually don't need it.

1:02:04Because I, too, am at the place where I'm like, oh, I'm a week without a run. I feel bad. I need to like actually go out and do it. I actually just use like the Apple fitness app and the health app a lot to go and track my stuff, you know, like particularly things like sleep and like heart rate recovery. so these are like more more kind of technical like things i don't like have like a third party app that i use to track that but it is useful because i've noticed it does correlate actually with like when i've got more energy and i do use i use like the platform stuff because it just like integrates the best so if i'm going for a run or for a swim i just use whatever's on the apple watch which is boring but um i kind of don't want to i've sort of seen pass a curtain i guess for a lot of the stuff and i kind of a bit i'm a bit worried about what people would try and do to my experience if i let them you know i'm quite vulnerable to gamification i like i like extending streaks you know if you if you let me do it but even though i know it's not good for me and so i try and actually stay away from from a lot of that stuff so going for the more vanilla apple watch stuff is is what i tend to stay on do you think about things like sleep tracking and we're getting to these smart rings and all this stuff and we're getting to a point where there is this kind of like second by second 24 hour long ability to understand how you're doing and i'm like somebody is going to make the next version of zombies run that is not like an episodic thing that you put on headphones and listen to while you go exercise it's going to be like a lifestyle game uh and part of me wonders if that is super cool or totally dystopian and and the idea of like i'm gonna get a thing at you know 2 a.m that's just like zombies because it understood that i'm like in the right sleep zone for it and like this is coming we have the data to do this now and it feels like it's coming and i can't decide if that's good or bad um people keep on trying to do this and we we tried to do it with a with a game called the walk which was kind of like an all day like you know walking pedometer kind of thing and i think in practice it's quite hard to do because um people we found don't really like to be interrupted with like gameplay and story um it's kind of annoying and and so the issue is that like third party developers generally do not have enough contextual information about like what the person is doing to make sure that the interruptions work but of course you want to interrupt people like if you're like a line goes up business person so but then that usually gets too annoying so we did try and and make like two or three times to go and make these these games which would be kind of ambient and i think at the point at which using ai or using just more sensors devs have that ability then you will see more of that stuff.

1:04:57And I think it will actually end up looking really interesting and looking more almost like role playing, right? It'll be like an even richer experience. And I know that people actually want to play these sorts of games where they're kind of more into it. At the same time, I think people probably be a little bit like nervous about what that means because you know that if it's really good, it just actually takes over your life, right? And so do people really want that just to get fit? I don't know. As you look around this space right now, do you see any other things that that feel kind of spiritually similar to zombies run i think about like we've all at the verge been using this app called stompers which is basically it's like a it's a sort of silly pedometer game and i think it has hooked a lot of people in the same way that it's it's not even accurate but being accurate is not the point uh like do you do you see anything that feels like it's sort of doing the same thing the a similar way i mean like one of the oldest things which i know v's written about was a whole fantasy hike thing where and like you know and and like before that it was just a direct ripoff you know lord of the rings where you're like walking from the shire to like mordor and i think actually at the start you would just type in like how far you'd walked into like a web page and then work it out and it got slowly more more interesting and that's cool like that's a fun thing people have done various things like that There was a website or an app called the Beautiful Walk, which was kind of synced up to your fitness apps and would do that.

1:06:25Like spiritually, like a lot of the VR stuff and AR stuff I think is interesting in the sense of, you know, I come back to, I want people to be having fun when they exercise. and so I used to play like hollow point a lot which was this old steam like five game and it was like an archery game and basically you you were just shooting you're just using that you know enemies in virtual reality you know arena with archery and the cool thing was because the arrows kind of like move slowly then you could dodge them like you can't dodge bullets in real life right but like in super hot with other games you can dodge these and so you're always just like rolling around the floor and jumping up and down and and like it's just so energetic in a way that like you could never get me to do that in real life like if you told me okay go and go and fall over sideways and then go and scramble and roll back and jump up it's like no i'm not doing that but like you go and put me in vr and there's like arrows coming at me and i'm like shooting people with arrows i'm like this is the most fun i've ever had but i don't have room for it so i can't play around anymore so that's kind of the problem like what i i think and i and i do see like the you know beat saber and fit xr and things like that i'm like it seems a bit boring to me um you know i want something a bit more involved than that first of all how dare you beat saber is amazing this is that's that was outrageous but no i i'm glad you actually mentioned super hot because super hot is one of those games that i found to be like accidentally a surprisingly good workout it's like time only moves when you do so i'm doing a ton of like very deliberate intense movement and i'm like i'm sweating at the end and it's like all right this is what i'm going for this is like a fun thing that made me sweat not a thing that bullied me into exercising which feels very different i think when we get the glasses you know which we all want and not the heads you know the the vr headset this is going to be the way people exercise it's going to be amazing like it's so cool but like it's just not there at the moment like it's just like i don't know it's like sweaty I know people do use these things, but for most people, it doesn't seem to be a good experience.

1:08:38So I think that's going to be great. I think make-believe and role-play and sports, that's one of the best ways of getting fit. I think giving myself permission to do the fantasy hike, to whack my editors with baseball bats and stompers, has really just kind of made it easier to be like, oh, it's okay if I'm not so fast. It's okay. you know what, just give yourself the participation trophy. That's the only real badge that you need. It's okay. Maybe it's because I'm a millennial, but the participation trophy is good enough. Well, I mean, you know, the way we put it in Zombies Run is as long as you can move faster than a slow shamble, then, you know, you're good for us.

1:09:19So keep on trying things until you find something that's fun. And if it's not fun, then it's not just that it's like, oh, well, boo hoo. It's more like if you find something fun, you're going to keep up with it and it's going to work better in the long run. And it might be something really weird, which people don't talk about, or it might be kind of a more niche sport. But you will find something that you like eventually, and then you should do that. And maybe there's an app for that as well. All right, we've got to take one more break, and then we're going to come back and we're going to take a question from the Vergecast Hotline.

1:09:49We'll be right back.

1:09:54Oh, hey, welcome to gift wrapping. Whoa, Zoe Saldana. Hey, can you wrap these, please? Wow, iPhone 17s. You splurged. At T-Mobile, you can get four iPhone 17s on them. It's the perfect gift for everyone. I'm the worst. I only got my mom a robe. Well, it's better than socks. So I have to trade in my old phone, right? No, at T-Mobile, there's no trade-ins needed when you switch. Keep your old phone or give it as a gift. Incredible. In fact, wrap up my old phone, too, for my Aunt Rosa. Forget that. Aunt Liz will be jealous. Sounds like my family drama. Oh, I got it. I'll give it to my abuela. I'll take reindeer paper with, hey, where are you going?

1:10:29To T-Mobile! Thanks, Zoe! The holidays are better at T-Mobile. Get four iPhone 17s on us. No trade in needed when you switch. Plus four lines for just$25 a line. With 24-month legal credits and four eligible portings on essentials for well-qualified customers, auto pay plus taxes, fees, and$35 device connection chart. Credits end-in balance due if you pay off earlier. Cancel. Contact us. Finance agreement. 256 gigabytes. $830 required. Visit T-Mobile.com.

1:10:58All right, we're back. Let's do the Vergecast hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE11. The email is vergecast at theverge.com. Send us all your questions. We try to answer at least one on the show every week. This week, we have a question about handheld games. Hey there, this is Keaton from Seattle, and I just listened to the handheld episode, and I'm about to have a baby, and so I've been thinking about what am I going to do for the endless hours sitting in a nursery with a child possibly on me. And I've been thinking about a handheld, but I've also kept myself from buying one because I think about the possibility of just using my iPhone with a backbone or my iPad with an Xbox controller.

1:11:42Is there an advantage to having a handheld over that situation if I've already got something like a Game Pass subscription? Thanks. Appreciate it. Bye. I should say, by the way, before we get started, thank you to everybody who responded about our segment last week about gaming handhelds. I got a ton of good ideas from people. I got a lot of people who just felt my pain about wanting to play FIFA and not having a good device to do it on. People are mad at EA. I'm also mad at EA. Thank you to everybody who reached out. I have a lot of gadgets to try. I haven't bought anything yet, but I'm committed to answering this question for real at some point very soon, and I'll get back in touch.

1:12:19But thank you to everybody who reached out with suggestions and ideas and commiseration. I appreciate it. My answer for this question is actually pretty simple. I just went through this recently. And I initially, I just went through this recently, my kid is about a year and a half old. At the beginning of 2023, I was in that like, sitting up at night for four hours while a small child sleeps on my lap vibes. And you're like, what do I do with myself? I tried all the things for a while I was carrying a switch around with me that I would use in those moments, I had a couple of like tester things.

1:12:54I got one of the slightly sketchy things from Amazon that you can buy that have a million retro games on them. I think the answer is just your phone. And I think this for a couple of reasons. One, and this is the key one, your phone is just there with you all the time. One of the things that happens when you're a new parent is that you just suddenly find yourself frozen to a place because your child just fell asleep. and you can plan ahead to some extent and say like, okay, I'm gonna leave the Switch in the room with the chair where I'm probably gonna be while the kid is sleeping or whatever, but your phone is just dramatically more likely to be in your pocket, right?

1:13:34And it also has a lot of retro games now, especially which are really great to play A, on silent and B, for a couple of minutes at a time when you're in those moments where you're like, I don't know how long I'm gonna have to do this. you can just quickly fire up Delta or one of the other emulators. And I played, uh, I would say maybe an alarming amount of like old Mario games, a few minutes at a time with one thumb on the joystick and one thumb on the buttons kind of wrapped my arms around the kit. It was, it's, it's a, it's a scene, but it works. The other thing is it's really malleable, which I like, right?

1:14:10So I have a backbone controller, which I like very much. And when I was able to sort of plan for it, I would use the backbone. I would bring the backbone with me. I would plug it in. I would have the full better controller and that worked great. Works really well with a lot of games on iOS and Android. Highly recommend a backbone as a sort of addition to all of this. But when you don't have that, you can just use your phone, right? And so having something that you're not stuck because you forgot one piece of it is really helpful. The other piece of it is that you will find yourself needing your phone for all kinds of other things, right?

1:14:46Maybe you're going to be one of those parents like I was who has a spreadsheet of like every time your kid eats and sleeps and goes to the bathroom and having that with you at the same time that you have your like thing you want to play games on super helpful. If you are the type of parent who is going to be like texting your partner or taking lots of pictures or whatever. Again, your phone just becomes like the center of your baby universe in a very real way. And so not adding another device to the equation is sort of useful. There are good reasons to get a dedicated device. Like I've talked to a lot of people who bought a Switch, put like Zelda on it, and then left it in the baby's room.

1:15:28And that becomes the like, I am in the baby's room. This is the thing I'm going to play. There's something to that. But I think for me, having fewer batteries to worry about having the thing that's probably in my pocket be the thing that works and having kind of the one device to rule them all wound up being really helpful. Also, there are a lot of games that I played that I would call like deeply boring, repetitive games that are actually perfect for mobile. Because you're in this headspace when you have a newborn where you're just exhausted and you're like, okay, I wanna play a game. I don't wanna use my brain at all.

1:16:01And I'm gonna need to play this game for somewhere between one minute and five hours. games like hold down which is basically a it's like reverse snood you shoot a ball downward and you try to remove all the stuff down at the bottom and the further you go down the more points you get endlessly repeatable games i probably played a hundred hours of that game and it's a perfect little mobile game you can play it with one hand which is another victory given baby's sleep situations having something you can do with one hand is pretty helpful i did a lot of like crosswordy kinds of things when I was like, okay, I actually need to use my brain a little bit.

1:16:38I did a lot of those like temple run kind of endless runner games, because again, super easy, super repetitive, doesn't require any brain power. Those are the kinds of games that I ended up playing way more than I expected. I was like, oh, I'm going to play a lot of like fun old PS2 games because now I have all this time to kill. And I ended up playing like infinite hours of hold down. because it's just what happens in those moments. You're tired. You have one hand to spare while there's a human sleeping on top of you. And that just is what it is. So I think the answer is probably either a switch for the games or your phone with a backbone or some other kind of controller.

1:17:19But I would start with your phone because there's a lot of games. It's super easy. It's super accessible. And odds are it's going to be right there with you, which is pretty important. I hope that helps. Let me know. And again, I've gotten tons of really good handheld recommendations over the last couple of weeks. And if you have good ones for me or for Keaton here, please let me know. All right, that's it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everyone who's on the show. And thank you as always for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about from the Microsoft CrowdStrike chaos to V's great reporting on wearables and rest days in the Apple Watch to lots of stuff on gaming handhelds on theverge.com.

1:17:56I'll put some links in the show notes, but also read theverge.com. There is a shocking amount going on right now for it being like late July. So keep an eye on the website. And as always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or gaming handhelds you think I should buy, email us at vergecastattheverge.com or call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. Keep sending us questions. We've got lots more stuff to talk about this summer. Please keep all of your questions coming. And like I mentioned last week, I want more like teeny tiny weird tech mysteries. So if you have a teeny tiny weird tech mystery, send it to us.

1:18:29Can't wait to hear it. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Will Poore, and this episode was edited by Xander Adams. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about more of the Microsoft CrowdStrike mess, some AI news, some new gadgets, and Lord only knows what else between now and then. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

1:18:58Rinse takes your laundry and hand delivers it to your door. Expertly cleaned and folded. So you could take the time once spent folding and sorting and waiting to finally pursue a whole new version of you. Like tea time you. Mmm. Or this tea time you. Or even this tea time you. So did you hear about Dave? Or even tea time, tea time, tea time you. So update on Dave. It's up to you. We'll take the laundry. Rinse. It's time to be great.