Where Is The Line For AI in Game Development?

Kirk, Jason, and Maddy open up the mailbag to answer some of your questions! What's the ideal skill level for a video game reviewer? What's the funniest made-up video game word? And where's the line when it comes to the use of generative AI in game development?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Kirk Hamilton?

  It makes sense that Donkey Kong fuels his Bonanza mode with banana energy, but he generates banana energy primarily by collecting gold. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week, we're opening the mailbag to tackle your questions about fan casting, Jason's new book, AI tools in game development, our favorite made up video game words, and so much more. Stick around.

• 0:31Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm Kirk Hamilton.

• 0:32Speaker 01

  I'm Maddy Myers.

• 0:33Jason Schreier?

  And I'm Jason Schreier. Hello.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Hello.

• 0:36Jason Schreier?

  We're back for another episode. It's question time. You guys ready for some questions?

• 0:42Speaker 01

  I love questions.

• 0:43Kirk Hamilton?

  I am ready for some questions. And for the first question, you might be wondering, can you support Triple Click in some way?

• 0:49Jason Schreier?

  That is, that has always been, yeah, that's always been my burning question.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 0:53Kirk Hamilton?

  Yes, it's the most burning question of all. It's burning at the hottest temperature. How could you possibly support Triple Click if you wanted to? And the answer to that is, well, you could become a member. That's one way. Become a member of Maximum Fun. We are a 100% listener supported show. We make this show purely with, with all of your support. So maximumfun.org/join. That lets you become a member of our network, support Maximum Fun, support Triple Click, and get access to monthly bonus episodes that we put out. There's a ton of them now because we've been around for a long time. You could also buy some merch. That's another way to support us. And there is a bunch of new merch, a bunch of new designs in the Maximum Fun store. There's a link for that in the show notes. I know some folks have been ordering things. We've gotten some requests that we're going to fulfill,

• 1:35Kirk Hamilton?

  actually. Someone requested a, like, desk pad or a mouse pad. And we can do that. So that's going to be in the store at some point. Maybe by the time you're hearing this, that'll be added to the store. So there's a bunch of great designs, some of the designs we had at our live show. We'll be adding some more later this year, too. So we're, we're beefing up the Triple Click merch situation. So by all means, go buy some merch. That also supports us. So, uh, yeah, there's two ways that you can support Triple Click. And thank you so much to everyone who does so, because really, You're the reason we make this show. You're the reason we're able to keep this thing going. So thanks so much to all of the Maximum Fun members out there listening. And all right, let's, let's get into some more questions. We've answered the first most important question. Jason, why don't you take us away for some additional questions?

• 2:20Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, this week, we are answering some of your questions. As always, these are questions that are coming straight to our inbox at tripleclickatmaximumfun.org. So that's where you can mail us your own questions. And as always, keep them short, keep them interesting. Don't ask questions that people have asked before, etc., etc. You guys know the rules. Let's get into it. Matty, why don't you read this first one?

• 2:46Speaker 01

  Sure. So this one's from Elias, who writes, "A question occurred to me while listening to your recent episode on Donkey Kong Bonanza. What is the ideal skill level of a game reviewer? Maddie talked about how she's directionally challenged and how that made her appreciate some of the map features in the game. If Maddie had been a quote unquote, 'better gamer,' that might not have occurred to her. And that sense her, quote, 'lack of ability,' I feel like I gotta include the scare quotes here because I do understand what Elias is getting at. Quote, 'lack of ability' in this particular area enabled her to better assess the game. In a way, the better of a game player you become, the less your experience of playing the game resembles an ordinary person's experience with the same game. Does

• 3:31Speaker 01

  that ever affect your ability to review a game?"

• 3:35Jason Schreier?

  The ideal reviewer is just as bad as Maddie is, is what Elias is trying to say.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  That's why I'm the ideal reviewer, is because of how bad I am at kind of everything. Because I feel like it's worth noting, I'm also directionally challenged in real life. I wasn't just talking about video games when I said that. I meant across the board.

• 3:55Kirk Hamilton?

  It is a funny question, that there could be some ideal reviewer that's like a median gamer.

• 4:02Kirk Hamilton?

  That's the closest to the maximum number of people.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  They're just okay at every single thing.

• 4:06Kirk Hamilton?

  By and large, game reviewers are very far from the median, right? They're usually people who play a whole lot of video games and are very good at them. These days, it's usually, you know, whoever's going to review the next FromSoft game is someone who's played every one of those games a million times and, you know, then complains about how the new one is too easy and you have to kind of figure out what that means. But of course, that's not actually the ideal game reviewer. The ideal game reviewer is someone who can very clearly articulate how they experienced a game in a way that people will understand, however similar or differently they may play games themselves.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. It's a challenge, though. When I was still assigning people to review games at Polygon, I would try to do it every which way. Like, sometimes I'd have a review by somebody who's like, "I've played every game in this series and I'm an expert on this." But other times, it would be fun to tap in somebody who had no familiarity and would just be like, "Here's my take on this and I'm a total newcomer to this and it did or didn't welcome me." It's also good to do that, I think, as an editor. If the game is marketing itself as being really friendly to somebody who's a newcomer, in that case, you can have an actual newcomer try it and find out if that's true. But I don't think it is better or worse. I feel like that's part of why I tried to mix it up, is because I don't think there is one true answer to this.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  And ideally, you have a review section that shows that a whole lot of different people play games and they might not all have the same experience with it.

• 5:30Jason Schreier?

  The, I think the, the kind of, the deeper issue here is that there's always this tension in a review between recommendation and the kind of product review aspect of it and the critique and cultural criticism and the question of like, where does this game fit in society? And what does it mean artistically? And what is the experience of playing it like? And sometimes you can blend the two or take aspects of both for a strong review that tries to do both at once. But oftentimes, reviews, as we think of them, the ones that come out right before the game comes out, that have a score on them, that are aggregated on Metacritic, those tend to be more product review-y. And it's more, it's helpful if you're looking for more of a product review, it's helpful

• 6:11Jason Schreier?

  to have a review from someone who is familiar with the genre because they'll be able to offer a lot more context and kind of put it in perspective. If I want to know how Elden Ring is, I probably want to read a review from someone who has played Dark Souls games before, whether or not they're... Great at them, they have to have a passing familiarity. Otherwise, it's kind of, there's, there's not enough context for me to really know if I'll appreciate the game. If someone is like, this is my first one ever. Unless it's also my first one ever, I guess. But still, I think general, generally familiarity is more helpful for that lens of it. But from a cultural criticism and kind of like an artistic point of view, I think it can be helpful to look at it from both perspectives, or at least they can both provide a fresh take.

• 6:56Jason Schreier?

  It just might not be as useful if you're wondering about the new 3D Mario and the reviewer has never played a 3D platformer before to know like whether or not you should get it. Yeah, I don't know. I'm sure there's someone out there.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  They're 10 years old and they're an amazing writer. It's one of the greatest reviews.

• 7:12Jason Schreier?

  So, yeah, I don't know. I think it's kind of like, it depends what you're looking for in a review, I suppose. Or put, put another way, I think there are some reviews that are more, you get more out of when you read them before you play a game, and there's some that you get more out of when you read them after you play a game. And the ones that are kind of like post, post-playing, I think it can be really cool and interesting to read something from like someone who has no familiarity or is terrible at a game to read what it was like for them.

• 7:38Kirk Hamilton?

  You know, this is a thought that's gonna sound like I'm making a joke, but I'm not, but an actual, like a really great way to understand a game is to listen to three people talk about it, where one person is maybe incredibly familiar with that style of game. Maybe one person is, say, quote, unquote, directionally challenged and like struggles with some certain part of it. Another person is new to it, but is open to the experience and asks questions of the veteran. That is actually a really fantastic format that circumvents just the problem that you were laying out.

• 8:08Speaker 01

  Wow, so true. Wow.

• 8:11Kirk Hamilton?

  So, this is something that I think podcasts do really well, the kind of conversational group review does well, because it, it takes something that on a website would involve two different things and combines them into one thing. And I think if you think of, I don't know why it has to be one thing, but talking about a game review, the idea is always, it needs to be one thing, where ideally on a website... You have a review that's like kind of a short thing from someone who really knows what they're talking about and just is like, yeah, this one's a good one. Or it has this problem or whatever, like they lay out the product recommendation. And then you have an essay from another person who's like a creative, interesting writer, who isn't as familiar with it and takes a different angle on it. Like, it's two separate things and they work really well as two separate things. But it is nice to kind of blend them together and you can actually get that because on

• 8:56Kirk Hamilton?

  a podcast or something like this, because you have multiple perspectives. So you can include all of them at once. That's actually very helpful, I think.

• 9:02Jason Schreier?

  Except it doesn't really work for us because we're all amazing at video games.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah. We all know every single franchise.

• 9:08Kirk Hamilton?

  We all like the same kinds of games.

• 9:09Speaker 01

  And also, we all agree every time.

• 9:11Kirk Hamilton?

  Yes, we have very identical tastes and totally agree about it.

• 9:14Jason Schreier?

  It is true. Okay, here's the next question. This is from Andy. Andy says, "What is the funniest made up video game word and why? This question is brought to you by Bananergy."

• 9:25Kirk Hamilton?

  Banana energy. Wait, Bananergy? How do you say it?

• 9:29Jason Schreier?

  Bananergy.

• 9:29Kirk Hamilton?

  It's not Bananergy. I think Bananergy would be funnier.

• 9:33Jason Schreier?

  No, it's Bananergy.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Bananergy is also so cute, though.

• 9:36Kirk Hamilton?

  Bananergy is funny, okay. I'm revising my opinion, they're both very funny. I've got one, transferring.

• 9:41Jason Schreier?

  Very good.

• 9:43Kirk Hamilton?

  Just as a-

• 9:43Jason Schreier?

  Explain the context of that, because people might not be familiar.

• 9:46Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm gonna do my best. This was a Konami thing, I believe a Hideo Kojima thing, during a Konami press conference. The idea was transferring your save between, was it Peace Walker on PSP and on, anyways, it was like two different Metal Gear games. The idea of basically what we now think of as just cloud saves or being able to access, I suppose it's a little more complicated since it's accessing the save from one game and another game and then having the data move between them. But it is a concept that is now widespread and I think is just thought of as cloud saves. But at the time, they introduced it as this new fangled idea called transferring, which I think is like, what, it's a portmanteau of transferring and what?

• 10:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's really my question.

• 10:30Kirk Hamilton?

  Sharing, maybe?

• 10:31Speaker 01

  So when you're supposed to be pronounced transferring, then?

• 10:35Kirk Hamilton?

  Transferring, but it's got two Rs. Anyhow, it's a very funny word. It became a meme immediately. I remember seeing it for years without knowing what it was because I hadn't watched the press conference. Like, I knew it was Kojima related and had something to do with cloud saves, but I just feel I have to mention it-

• 10:51Jason Schreier?

  That's good.

• 10:52Kirk Hamilton?

  In response to this question.

• 10:53Jason Schreier?

  Maddie, do you have one?

• 10:55Speaker 01

  God, I I was trying to decide what from Destiny or Destiny 2 I wanted to choose. And it's almost impossible. Like, that entire series is just full of these. I I don't know. I they're they're all so amazing. I I really can't even imagine where to begin. I was like, looking at some of the I I mean, I I also do find the fact that like, the word shaders is overused in video games is pretty funny, though. Like, just the fact that we all have to talk about shaders all the time. I like that. I I never thought about shaders before I started playing PC games. And now I think about shaders all the time. Why do they take so long to load? I don't know. I'm always loading shaders now. It's all I'm ever doing. I'm loading shaders.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  I'm shading my weapon. My weapon is shading. It's being shaded right now, and that's what I'm doing. I I don't know. What about you, Jason?

• 11:48Jason Schreier?

  TMI. Okay, I got a couple. One is Daylife, from the video game title Various Daylife, which is a game by Square Enix. What is Daylife? What does that mean? Daylife, it's never explained in the game, as far as I know. But you you just know it. Daylife, you know, your day to day life. Yes. And Various Daylife means the days are different. Your daylives are different every every single day.

• 12:12Speaker 01

  Do the characters really say Daylife?

• 12:14Jason Schreier?

  Or? I have no idea. I've never played that game.

• 12:18Jason Schreier?

  The other one is Immersive, which is just a made up puffery word for video games that has zero meaning. Like visceral, these are words that are just invented. Just invented for.

• 12:28Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. This is like, a game reviewer word is immersive, really.

• 12:33Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, it's so immersive. This game is so immersive.

• 12:36Speaker 01

  By the way, Jason, you've cursed me with Bombastic. I see it misused everywhere now. It's upsetting. I feel like we're losing that battle, just by the way.

• 12:45Jason Schreier?

  Oh, yeah, we've been losing that battle for years. It's been used in video. I do see it correctly used occasionally.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  I do, too.

• 12:50Jason Schreier?

  It makes me very happy.

• 12:51Speaker 01

  It's it feels like we're losing ground. I'm just noting it.

• 12:54Jason Schreier?

  It's correctly used in, like, the New York Times and video game websites. It's misused every single day. And and actually, my one more thing, the book I was reading.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  It's coming out in movie criticism, too. It's happening. It's everywhere now.

• 13:06Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I mean, it's just, yeah, it's embarrassing. People see Bombastic and they're like, oh, explosive, without actually knowing what that word means. Kirk, what's the next question?

• 13:17Kirk Hamilton?

  All right. This next question comes from Ivan, who writes, hello, Jason Kirk and Maddie. With Hollywood obsessed with tech-focused biopics. Biopics? It's biopics, right?

• 13:28Jason Schreier?

  Biopics?

• 13:29Speaker 01

  Both are acceptable.

• 13:30Kirk Hamilton?

  I think when I, I think there was a time where in my head I pronounced biopic.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  There were people out there saying biopic. Now, do I agree with them?

• 13:37Kirk Hamilton?

  But it's a biopic.

• 13:38Jason Schreier?

  It's a biopic.

• 13:39Speaker 01

  I agree. I'm glad all three of us agree on this. It's biopic.

• 13:43Kirk Hamilton?

  Ivan's question, how do you pronounce biopic?

• 13:45Jason Schreier?

  It sounds like those people are getting myopic about biopics.

• 13:48Speaker 01

  Oh, boy. No.

• 13:50Kirk Hamilton?

  So Ivan writes, with Hollywood so myopically obsessed with tech-focused biopics, who would you cast in the lead roles of a Play Nice movie? And who would direct the film? Fantastic question. Jason, I'm sure that you have fan casted and fan crude the adaptation of this, of your bestselling book. And I'm curious, what do you think?

• 14:13Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, Play Nice is, of course, my new book about the rise, fall and future of Blizzard Entertainment. I think for the purposes of this discussion, we can just limit it to the three kind of key characters in the book, which I'll say in a second. Yeah, here's what I'm thinking. I think my ideal director would be David Fincher, director of The Social Network.

• 14:33Kirk Hamilton?

  Of course.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. I agree.

• 14:35Kirk Hamilton?

  Being adapted by Aaron Storkin.

• 14:36Jason Schreier?

  And my, Aaron Storkin writes it. And my three main characters are Alan Adham, the, one of the two founders of Blizzard, Rami Malek, played by Rami Malek.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  That's what I was gonna say. I was, I thought of Rami Malek heading into this. I was like, Rami Malek, perfect. I saw him in my mind when I was reading the book and I was fan casting the book.

• 14:54Jason Schreier?

  It's a good, it's a good one.

• 14:56Kirk Hamilton?

  He could nail it.

• 14:57Speaker 01

  Because it's a very cinematic book, parentheses complimentary.

• 14:59Jason Schreier?

  Thank you. Mike Morham, the other co-founder of Blizzard, Jesse Eisenberg.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Do you think he's old enough? I mean, I guess we need everyone to be kind of Rami Malek's age so that we're like in the right zone.

• 15:09Jason Schreier?

  Well, it depends when the book takes place, but it would be over the course of a few decades.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. So we're gonna also age them up using all that cool technology that they have now.

• 15:18Jason Schreier?

  Yeah. Also, Morham, in the, in the 90s, when Blizzard had started, he had this nice Jufro. That would be perfect for Jesse Eisenberg. And here's, here's my most inspired casting choice. You guys ready for this? This is amazing. You're gonna love this. Bobby Kotick is played by John Lovitz.

• 15:36Kirk Hamilton?

  I thought you were gonna say played by Bobby Kotick.

• 15:39Jason Schreier?

  John Lovitz. Think about it. Just think about it. Just like Google their pictures side by side.

• 15:43Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 15:44Jason Schreier?

  Think about the voice.

• 15:44Kirk Hamilton?

  He has a similar, similar profile.

• 15:46Jason Schreier?

  They have.

• 15:46Speaker 01

  I couldn't get it.

• 15:47Kirk Hamilton?

  Because you know Bobby Kotick, pretty good actor, uh, pretty.

• 15:49Jason Schreier?

  That's true. He could play himself.

• 15:51Kirk Hamilton?

  Could play himself.

• 15:51Jason Schreier?

  But I don't think that would work so well in a biopic.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  No.

• 15:54Kirk Hamilton?

  Might be challenging getting him on board for it.

• 15:55Speaker 01

  Don't want him to play himself, no. John Lovitz is a good, is a good choice. It's hard to think of somebody else now that you said that.

• 16:02Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah. Is Lovitz acting? Is he like in this stuff?

• 16:05Speaker 01

  I don't think he's really doing anything anymore.

• 16:07Kirk Hamilton?

  I haven't heard of him really doing anything lately.

• 16:08Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  He's gonna come out of retirement just to do this.

• 16:12Jason Schreier?

  I, I bet, I, I bet I could convince him.

• 16:14Kirk Hamilton?

  I could see it. Well, I would see that movie for sure.

• 16:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, that would be amazing.

• 16:17Jason Schreier?

  Do you guys have answers or should we move to the next one?

• 16:19Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, no, I can't beat those.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  I came in with Rami Malek and that's all I had, but I'm glad we agree.

• 16:24Jason Schreier?

  Okay. Uh, all right. Let's get to the next question. Maddie, why don't you read this next one?

• 16:29Speaker 01

  Sure. This one's from Zeno who writes, "I just finished listening to Jason's three books on the video game industry and they've solidly crushed any lingering aspiration I had to shift from UX design of apps and websites to game design, parentheses, lol. UX pays the bills, but for the eight years in this career, I failed to find satisfaction, which I've come to learn is crucial for my silly little brain. With a second burnout looming, I want to know, do you have any advice on finding work that makes one happy? How might I balance the search for satisfaction with the need to maintain financial stability for my expensive equine son?"

• 17:03Jason Schreier?

  Is that like a metaphor?

• 17:05Kirk Hamilton?

  All right. We spent a minute pondering this. So I think we did get a little sidetracked on the expensive equine son and we're assuming that this is a horse.

• 17:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 17:14Kirk Hamilton?

  That they have a horse.

• 17:15Speaker 01

  Zeno, do you have a horse?

• 17:16Kirk Hamilton?

  If you had a son who was really into horses and that was an expensive hobby, that would be true.

• 17:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 17:21Kirk Hamilton?

  But I believe you would then use equestrian for, for your son's interests.

• 17:25Jason Schreier?

  Right. Okay. So.

• 17:27Kirk Hamilton?

  So with that said, let's try to answer.

• 17:29Jason Schreier?

  That said, it's an interesting question. It's a really interesting question because like this is something every single person on this planet has to think about at some point or another.

• 17:38Kirk Hamilton?

  Especially millennials.

• 17:39Jason Schreier?

  And also, yeah, it is a very millennial thing because a lot of millennials, I don't really know how Gen Z or if Gen Z are kind of growing up with the same thing ingrained in them, but a lot of-

• 17:47Kirk Hamilton?

  They're all just like vaping lead and losing their minds and becoming Trump conservatives.

• 17:51Jason Schreier?

  I don't know if this kind of carried forward, but millennials, a lot of us, many, probably most of us grew up being told you should like major in whatever you are passionate about and you should want to do what you're passionate about because a lot of us grew up raised by baby boomers, a lot of whom were in positions where they like had to take whatever jobs were available and maybe they found themselves soulless and crushing and they wanted their kids to go and like pursue passionate careers. And a lot of millennials wound up majoring in the arts and humanities and theater and film and-

• 18:22Speaker 01

  And that went great for us.

• 18:23Jason Schreier?

  That did not steer a lot of them super well. Maybe some of us, I mean, including the three of us, were lucky enough to have jobs that are creatively satisfying and allow us to do interesting things that we care about. But a lot of other people had to make sacrifices and compromises and give up on those dreams. A lot of people I know certainly did. And sometimes like having to make a choice of like for the bigger paycheck over the creative satisfaction is necessary and also allows you to be satisfied in other parts of your life. So yeah, it's a really interesting question that doesn't really have a one answer.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Well, I have, I have something I can recommend at least, which is an exercise that I invented for myself like 12 years ago when the Phoenix went out of business and I was on an existential journey for what I would do next. And something I did was I made a list of everything I really liked to do work wise, just like basic things like managing people or writing, that kind of list. And then I made a list of things I think I'm- Good at. And those two things are not the same. There are work tasks that you like to do and there are work tasks that you are good at. And then I tried to find the overlap between those two things. Like there, there weren't, there were things that I think I'm good at that I don't really like to do.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  And it was an interesting exercise to divide up those two categories of work tasks and be like, "Okay, I'm actually good at a lot of stuff, but do I enjoy doing that enough to have that be my entire job? Maybe it could be some percentage of what I do." And that was a good starting point. It's also funny to go back and look at that list because it's changed a lot. Like every few years, I feel like I, I've looked at it as like a joke with myself, just to be like, "Oh, it's funny what I thought I did and didn't like and what I thought I was and wasn't good at at this specific era in my life." Because you learn a lot. And sometimes, in my case, I learned I liked things that I didn't like at that time because I tried them in a different workplace and they were totally different there. And also what I'm good at and what I'm not good at,

• 20:26Speaker 01

  that also changes over time as well. But I think it's a good preliminary exercise for yourself to just be like, "What do I like? And also, what am I good at? And where's the overlap?"

• 20:36Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I think that's a great exercise. That'll get you a lot of helpful answers and perspective on sort of what you do and what you like doing. I'm trying to think what advice I would give here. It's helpful that Zeno is not in school or trying to figure out what to major in. To your points, Jason, about majoring in what you love. Of course, I majored in music. I always loved music. That worked out. So you can choose a thing that you really like doing and then keep doing it. But it didn't work out in the way of, you know, I majored in jazz saxophone performance and now I'm Michael Brecker over here. I'm a jazz saxophonist and that's how I make a living. It worked out in a much more broad sense and in a way that I use all of the stuff that I learned in school now in what I'm doing and have found success with that.

• 21:19Kirk Hamilton?

  But it's, it required a kind of different philosophy. And I think that maybe that would be a helpful thing for Zeno to keep in mind. It kind of dovetails with what you're saying, Maddie. The advice I got from this really amazing saxophonist named David Leidman, he's like a old school, just jazz master. I drove him to the airport when I was in high school because he was the guest at our jazz festival in Bloomington, Indiana. And we talked about all kinds of stuff. It was pretty cool. And the big piece of advice he gave me was that you gotta, you gotta just put stuff in your bag. I wound up calling this the bag theory. This is something my dad really loved. The bag theory of advice, which is, he was talking as a saxophonist, but as a jazz musician also. And also as a writer, because Dave Liebman is a really great writer.

• 22:02Kirk Hamilton?

  And he's written some really cool nonfiction books or sort of almost philosophical texts. He's just a very smart writer. And I kind of asked him about that. I said, well, you know, I like to write too. How do you think about yourself as a writer in addition to being a saxophone player? And he said, well, I kind of take all the things that I like to do and that I'm good at. So writing saxophone, he says, you know, maybe you're really good at doubling. You're really good at flute and clarinet. You put it all in your bag. And then over time, your bag kind of fills up with stuff. And as long as you keep thinking of everything as like the kind of totality of the things that you like to do, the things in the bag will start to kind of play off of one another. So Xeno mentions their expensive equine son.

• 22:44Kirk Hamilton?

  And that makes me think, I mean, having a horse and riding horses, if that is in fact what you're referring to there, but let's just say that it is, it could be anything. That is like a hobby. That's a really cool thing that you're doing, but that's really involved and it's a whole world. And there are so many different ways you could go in the world of like equestrian interests and horse ownership that might be interesting, that could fit in with UX design and some of the other things that you've learned. And I think it can be helpful to just think very broadly about your skills and your interests, to do the exercise, Matty, that you're laying out and to put all of those things together and to see how they might inform one another and to try not to think too narrowly. Because for me, for example, I am not a jazz saxophonist.

• 23:25Kirk Hamilton?

  I use all of that along with the writing that I like to do, that I turned into a job at Kotaku, that then led to podcasting and led to all these different things that like all feed off of one another. And I think that wound up being a kind of a unique skill set, or at least a distinctive one, which is also going to be very helpful, especially in our kind of AI dominated future when it comes to actually making money and having work that you're doing. So that's just something to think about. Is that like bag theory? Theory as a, as a compliment to Matty's approach of listing out the things you like to do and the things that you're good at.

• 23:57Jason Schreier?

  I remember you mentioning that bag theory before when we talked, I think that someone asked us once a while back, like, how to get into games journalism or something like that. And it was kind of a similar thing.

• 24:07Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I talk about it a lot. It's one of my big theories, one of my go tos.

• 24:10Jason Schreier?

  I think, yeah, I think those are good points from both of you. One thing I'll add though, and Matty, you have to tell me if you've found this over the course of your career. But one thing I'll add is that I think if you're good at something, you tend to, it tends to grow on you. Like you tend to wind up liking it, even if you don't think you will at first, when you're kind of sorting out like, what do I like doing? What am I good at? Because if you're good at something, you will be able to find satisfaction in it most likely. I don't know, unless it's like, you're really good at, um, I don't know, killing people or something. Clearly gonna make the same. If only I weren't such an excellent assessor. Well, hey, man. I mean, some, everyone's gotta make their nuts somehow.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it can. It depends on what it is, but I, I know where you're going with this.

• 24:55Jason Schreier?

  But I, I just, I think that like, that to me is a lot more important if you're trying to build a career and have it be sustainable and hopefully lucrative and tenable over, over the course of 30 years or whatever, is that it has to be something you're good at. Because if you just like it, um, you are not gonna, yeah, it's really just not enough and you may not find success.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  This is why it has to be a Venn diagram.

• 25:15Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I think it's, well, no, but I, I'm saying, I don't think it does. Cause I think that like, you can, if you pursue something that you're good at, I think you can grow to like it because you will like what it becomes for you and what it gets you and what like, like even if you don't find a ton of personal satisfaction in like being the best spreadsheet maker at the office, I think you can get a lot out of that because the more you do it, you might get compliments. You might like rise up the career ladder. You might get promoted quicker than your peers because you're better at them than doing it. I think you can grow to like that because you're so good at it. So, I don't know. I mean, okay, here's a good example of this. Uh, there's an NBA player named Nikola Jokic,

• 25:57Jason Schreier?

  and he is generally considered the best NBA player and the best basketball player in the world right now. He also appears to, from all accounts, hate basketball. He appears to not enjoy it at all, but he's so good at it that he's used it to make hundreds of millions of dollars and like won a championship and is just like the best player in the world. Um, and it's so funny, there's like footage of him like, uh, raising horses and racing horses, uh, as, as hilarious as it is, as coincidental as it is for this. And he's like so happy. And then there's footage of him winning an NBA title and he like barely cracks a smile. Um, but he has used that as a career to make hundreds of millions of dollars. And I'm sure he gets a lot of satisfaction out of it despite not like maybe not enjoying it quite as much as he enjoys his horse breeding hobby. And

• 26:41Jason Schreier?

  now he has so much money that he can race horses and maybe retire in a couple of years to go play with horses all day. So even if you're thinking of it as like, if I'm good at something, maybe I can make more money and therefore enjoy my hobbies a lot more. I think that's the most important. Like, I think the most important thing when trying to find a career and trying to find a way to get by in the world is what you're good at, rather than what you like necessarily. Because what you're good at will, especially if it's something specialized or something that not everybody is good at, that will take you a lot further and therefore make you a lot more satisfied in the long run than just trying to pursue what you're, what you like.

• 27:18Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah. There's a lot of crossover. I mean, like you said, if you like doing something, you'll probably practice it and get better at it. You know, I mean,

• 27:24Jason Schreier?

  That's also true. Yeah. If you really like something, you can also use that the other way around.

• 27:28Kirk Hamilton?

  If you're really good at something, like you said, a lot of times, there's a lot of satisfaction just being skilled. Yeah, they, they overlap.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it's all, it's all interrelated. I mean, I, I will just say, I think it depends on why you don't like the thing. Like if you, that might be worth listing out too. If you're like, these are the things about my job that I really dislike. Like dive into why you dislike them because it might be, oh, because I really don't like the company, culture, people, whatever it is. And that's fixable. Like, that's just one example. So I feel like this is part of the exercise is a little deeper than I make it sound. Like it's, it's like a free writing exercise. Like really think about what you like and dislike about what you're doing now and also what you're good at and bad at and why, and do you want to get better at those things? I think I may have even made a list of like things I was neutral on. It's been a while since I opened this document, but I've been

• 28:15Speaker 01

  thinking about it a lot lately for obvious reasons. Uh, but regardless, I feel like,

• 28:22Speaker 01

  As long as you just figure out what compromise you're willing to strike, because every job is going to include some stuff you don't like. I mean, that goes without saying, right? But I'm going to say it anyway. There's always going to be parts that you don't like, no matter what you do. The idea is just to have those not be such a high percentage that you can't freaking stand it.

• 28:39Jason Schreier?

  One other thing I'll say is that UX design, I think, is so widely applicable to so many different

• 28:43Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 28:43Jason Schreier?

  careers that I think it's something you could definitely take around. All right, let's get to the next question. I'll read this one. This is also from Zeno. They sent in two good questions, so we wanted to get them up.

• 28:56Jason Schreier?

  Dear Triple Click, I've decided to write a book, a biography about my dad who played drums at Woodstock, didn't quite get famous and survived to tell the tale. It'll be about disability, addiction and recovery, toxic masculinity, and how an old dude ended up expanding his inner world for the sake of his non-binary kid. That's me. I think it could be compelling and I need to get started before it's too late. My pop is 76. So, any advice from three writers and producers in media and how I should start this? Where do I begin with research? What are my first steps?

• 29:25Kirk Hamilton?

  Man, it's so, this is a very timely question because I just put out an episode of Strong Songs about my dad who died last year, who was a drummer. The Strong Songs episode is very special to me. I'm very proud of it and happy with it. It is about his old band that he played with in the 60s when he was in school. And it was a really emotional and rewarding and intense experience making it. And I'm super glad that it exists and is out in the world.

• 29:49Jason Schreier?

  Make sure you link it in the show notes for people.

• 29:51Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I'll link it in the show notes. And Zeno, I would, I mean, I'd recommend listening to it. It's sad, but it's, it could give you some ideas because there's a lot of similarity with the story that you're telling. For the book writing, I guess I would defer to Jason for just like basic book writing tips. So maybe we can get to that in a second. But a couple of thoughts, having just done something like this. One is that if you're into it, I mean, you could make an audio version of this. I only mention it because music is a part of this. And if you have any recordings of your dad, that could be a really interesting way in. It was for me. I don't actually have. A lot of recordings of my dad talking or videos. And as it turns out, this recording that he made of his band in the 60s,

• 30:34Kirk Hamilton?

  it's like the longest contiguous recording of him that I have, audio recording, that is. It's great, though, that your dad is still alive. So of course, you can still interview him, which is terrific. You're starting this at the right time. I certainly wish I had been able to do that with my dad. So one piece of advice I would give in terms of where to start is if any of his former bandmates are still alive, you could start by talking to them. I spoke with two guys from my dad's band who reached out after he died and kind of became the germ of this. I always knew I wanted to make an episode about him, but when I heard from them, I was like, oh, man, these guys are still alive, they're still around, they're engaged, they were friends with my dad his whole life, and they played in this band with him. So I just want to talk to them right now. And I got on Zoom with them and recorded it, and we had this great conversation.

• 31:18Kirk Hamilton?

  And then they, of course, are in the episode that I made. And I think talking to his band might give you some good stuff to work with from the start. If you're listening to any recordings of him, you're talking to them, you're kind of getting this picture outside of talking to him because he's your dad. And when you talk to him, that's going to be a very familiar dynamic. And he's someone that you've just been talking with your whole life and have this whole rapport with. When you talk to them, you'll get a perspective on him that you don't always get. So it almost suggests talking to them separately from him, and then maybe talk to him, and then maybe talk to them all together. But I think that that, thinking of it that way, and maybe starting with them would be a good place to start. So that's just some, some broad thoughts, having just done something very similar to this.

• 32:00Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I can see to the book writing aspect of it. So two kind of big topics I would hit. One is, first of all, ask, try to figure out how you want to publish this. Do you want to have this be a traditionally published book ideally? And have it be published by a publisher and put in bookstores and stuff? Or do you want to self-publish it? If you want to self-publish it, there's really no barriers for doing that. You just write it, and then you go through a service, like through Amazon Creates or something, and then you publish it. If you want to traditionally publish, you need to go through a lot of hoops, and you need to find an agent and talk to them about whether this is a viable memoir or autobiography, or however. If you want to frame it in the market and figure out how to outline it and so on and so forth. And then the next step I would take, once you've kind of answered that question,

• 32:44Jason Schreier?

  is when you're actually trying to figure out where to start with research and writing it, is I would try to figure out what are the questions that I want to answer in this book? And then who are the people I could talk to you to answer those questions? And your dad's old bandmates are a perfect starting point for that. But also, if you want to dive into disability and addiction and recovery, maybe you want to talk to experts surrounding those. Maybe you want to answer some questions about like, how your dad's personal experience intersected with like, other Woodstock musicians or other musicians who like, maybe made it to a certain level of success, but didn't take it to the next level. Maybe you want to find other people like that. So that's how you can kind of start branching out in terms of the researching and writing stage. I'd also recommend doing a lot

• 33:29Jason Schreier?

  of research before you even start thinking about writing, because the research can so drastically change the way you want to tell this story.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, like reading other books, probably, right? Like, other books about either Woodstock musicians or other people who played during this time period would even tell you, especially, if you don't like them, you can be like, well, this isn't how I want to structure my book. That can be very instructive.

• 33:53Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, and this kind of story where it's not going to be a story about Jimi Hendrix, someone super famous who played at Woodstock. So it's not inherently got that hook, but instead, it's about a normal person who just, you know, almost made it like you described. And yeah, I would say, I guess, one last thought is that because this is about your dad, because this is something that you'll always have, even if this doesn't become anything, if you start on it, and you or you don't find a publisher for it, doing the work is so good. I'm really just glad to hear that you're doing this. And so I just want to really encourage you to follow through and do it. You know, I say this with the full weight of someone whose dad died unexpectedly, and who thought I would be able to talk to him at some point. And then now I can. And I think

• 34:37Kirk Hamilton?

  that just, once your parents are in their 70s, I know it's like, hard to think about, but there will come a day when you can't talk to them anymore. And so like, just doing this, talking to him, writing the book, doing the work, like, it'll feel so good, and you'll be so glad that you did it. So I just want to throw that out there, like, just as an end unto itself, this is a terrific thing that you're thinking about doing, and I really hope that you do it.

• 34:58Jason Schreier?

  Okay, next question. Kirk, you want to read this next one?

• 35:02Kirk Hamilton?

  Yes, this question comes from Marcus, who writes, "Hey, Jason Kirk and Matty, there's a lot of debate about generative AI in game development right now, particularly the use of AI to create art, audio, and copy," by which Marcus means writing scripts. "It seems that there's less controversy when it comes to using AI to write source code. Lately, I've seen this in some of the big game jams, where AI-generated art is forbidden, but AI code is supported." That's very interesting, Marcus. Marcus concludes, "Where do you think the line is when it comes to using AI in game development? And why do you think people are more concerned about some applications of AI than others? P.S. Have you thought about organizing a triple-click game jam?"

• 35:40Jason Schreier?

  I think-

• 35:42Kirk Hamilton?

  Let's do the P.S. first. We haven't, but that would probably be cool.

• 35:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, it would probably be really cool.

• 35:46Kirk Hamilton?

  I think we could just say that. That would probably be neat.

• 35:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, we hadn't thought about it.

• 35:48Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I mean, I think, I think there's a, in our Discord, I think there's like a game dev chat channel, so if people wanted to organize, I don't know if the three of us are going to be doing that anytime soon, but if people wanted to organize something like there, that would be a good place. As far as this question, I mean, I do think it's worth noting here that the big difference between AI-generated art and audio and copy versus source code is that source code is not visible to the player. And there's a big difference between stuff that is seen by the player and stuff that isn't. And oftentimes, it's noticeable when it's seen by the player. This is all very relevant, because I just played through the campaign of this game called Stormgate, which is a successor to Starcraft II, made by a bunch of ex Blizzard people.

• 36:33Jason Schreier?

  And they used AI for these kind of portrait animations, making the, kind of that little portrait that you see like before missions, making it move around. They used AI to do that. And it is so uncanny that it's a little off-putting when you watch it.

• 36:49Kirk Hamilton?

  It has AI look.

• 36:50Jason Schreier?

  It has that AI look. It feels like something is off when you're watching it. And I asked, I asked Tim Morton, who's the producer of that game, co-founder of the studio, he said that basically it was a choice between using AI or not having it all. And so they wound up choosing AI. But it is interesting to see that. And thinking of that on a broader scale, it would certainly be noticeable and off-putting from a player's point of view. Whereas if AI is used to write code, the player probably isn't even going to notice it. So that, to me, seems like the biggest difference from a player's point of view.

• 37:24Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, there's a, I'm thinking of a few differences. I mean, also, the like AI art, AI music, and when I say AI, I mean generative AI, is all more clearly, or at least more, like, people are more familiar with the fact that those models are using stolen art. And so there's the fact that when you're looking at a piece of AI, like generative AI art, it is likely that you're looking at art that was created via someone else's art that was taken without permission, or music, or writing. And it's interesting, partly because like I don't know how like Copilot or code writing AI works. You know, a lot of these AI models, though, were trained on just these vast amounts of data, and a lot of it was taken without permission, even if it's just writing code.

• 38:08Kirk Hamilton?

  So I don't fully know how that works, but maybe that actually like illustrates the point that I don't know how that works. So writing code, I'm like, sure, I don't know. But when I see stable diffusion art or something, and it's just very clearly taken from something else, or when I hear, God, when I hear like that Tsunami music where they just fully reverse engineered a Mariah Carey song or whatever, like, it's just very evident to me that there's been this transgression, and I don't like that. So maybe that's part of it.

• 38:34Jason Schreier?

  Well, let me, let me speak to that for a second. I think that's a good point, and actually, you can take that a little bit further. Not only is, so, so when you're using Gen AI to make art or music, you are straight up stealing from other people, because an AI cannot create art or music on its own. It is physically incapable of doing that as a computer program. So if you tell AI, draw a person, it is taking ideas from all over the internet, all over its, whatever its data set is, and using that to channel some sort of like person-shaped thing, or same with music, you say, create a song, and is taking things from the internet and using that to create a song. Whereas if you use an AI to say, hey, we have a one in one and need them to make two, it is just following a rule set for that and saying one plus one equals two.

• 39:18Jason Schreier?

  And that is a little bit more equivalent, or from a code perspective, if you want, if you want AI to say, hey, I have person, this little sprite here that needs to get over there, and it is writing the code for that, it can do that by just following the rules of C++ or Python or whatever, and Writing a code based on those rules without having to take from any human creation. Because all it needs is the rules of the programming language to be able to do that. So we're talking about art versus kind of like.

• 39:45Kirk Hamilton?

  But an interesting difference, so like ChatGPT does all of these things, for example. And it was trained on data taken without permission.

• 39:54Jason Schreier?

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:54Kirk Hamilton?

  But at the same time, it can also do those basic calculations. So the question is sort of, well, you're using this one tool that has definitely crossed ethical boundaries that a lot of people aren't happy with. And I certainly am not. And like, you're using it to do things that don't obviously demonstrate that transgression. And I think that's kind of where some of what Marcus is asking about is like, people seem upset about this one type of AI art or music. But they don't get as upset about this other thing, or was that a game jam where they made a rule? You can't use it for this, but you can use it for this, which is like a kind of interesting and tension and something that people are trying to reconcile at the moment.

• 40:29Jason Schreier?

  Well, let me, let me kind of frame it in my own, in terms of my own work, right? Like, I don't really use AI very much. I've been playing around a little bit with ChatGPT recently to see what it could do for me. I haven't found it super useful, but I've thought of a couple of ways where maybe it could be useful. And so here's kind of the two extreme examples. One is if I told AI, write a chapter of a book for me. I don't think anyone would be pleased with that. I think no, everyone would boycott me. People would never read the book. Like, it would just be a disaster and it would come out like garbage. But if I said to AI, hey, make a spreadsheet out of this research that I have accumulated. Or make a spreadsheet out of the people I have reached out to so far.

• 41:08Jason Schreier?

  So I can easily reference like all of the sources that I've tracked down, all the people I've interviewed for this story or for this book. Would anyone care if I did that? Like, that is a functional tool that is essentially.

• 41:19Kirk Hamilton?

  Would anyone know if you did that, I think is related question.

• 41:22Jason Schreier?

  Well, but even, but let's say they didn't know. Let's say they didn't know, like, would anyone care if I used AI as like a more, a time-saving version of Excel? Or if I used AI to like, um, uh, like, take my data and organize, take my notes for a research project? And like, put them in chronological order or something like that, if that was possible. I don't know if that's how realistic that is, but. As a tool for efficiency, or a better example, actually, I do use AI for this. We have a Bloomberg tool that takes audio files and then uses LLMs to transcribe them into into text files and they're pretty good. I usually listen to the audio while I'm reading over it just to make sure it hasn't made any typos or stuff, but it's not making things up. It's just like straight up transcribing.

• 42:06Jason Schreier?

  That's a perfect example of like AI being very useful for our work in terms of efficiency. And that, I mean, maybe in its dataset, it's still stealing from people, but it's not creating things. And I think the difference between AI being used as a tool and used to create things is a pretty profound difference. In programming, it's a little bit more squishy because there's a lot of programming that gets, especially when it gets more advanced, where you could approach things in a lot of different ways. And so it's not like if you are trying to get from point A to point B, a lot of times in programming, you can do that in like a million different possible routes. So AI having to pick one, it might not go well for you guys. So it's, it gets a little more more complicated in there.

• 42:48Jason Schreier?

  And so I'm not saying that my examples are a good one to one for programming necessarily. But I do think that there are some significant ethical differences between using AI to make you more productive, make you more efficient in a non-creative way versus doing it in a creative way, doing it artistic way.

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I mean, I think one of the problems I have with AI is that it talks to me like it's pretending to be a person, but that's not really what this question is about.

• 43:16Jason Schreier?

  I super agree with that though, for what it's worth.

• 43:19Speaker 01

  I'm really against that.

• 43:19Jason Schreier?

  When it is like, great idea, like you definitely do that.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  An actual ethical issue, but regardless, to get to the coding part, I read a pretty good, I mean, I can't call it an article because it's a compilation of other people's essays essentially, but Brian Merchant, who writes Blood in the Machine, it's a blog, it's an AI skeptic blog, just to like mention his accolades.

• 43:41Jason Schreier?

  Also, a good book, Blood in the Machine.

• 43:43Speaker 01

  Yes, also a book of his. He was a recent recently featured on Hard Fork as an AI skeptic. If people are familiar with that podcast and its politics, they they kind of know Brian and know him as one of their skeptics and they featured him on there.

• 43:56Kirk Hamilton?

  Casey was on TripleClick.

• 43:58Speaker 01

  That's right. So people might remember Casey from when he was on our show. There's a lot of overlap in that world. So anyway, Brian Merchant did a story. He's a journalist and he did a story whereby a lot of tech workers who use AI to code have just submitted testimonials about how that's going for their jobs. And a lot of testimonials were pretty concerning to me. I admittedly, I'm not an expert in this. So this is truly just me reading these testimonials from a self-described AI skeptic and forming my own conclusions. And but they did worry me because some of them were from people who were saying that the AI written code was pretty poorly done. And yet they were being pressured to code a whole lot faster than they used to be because their bosses are saying, well, this is going to make it work a lot faster. So now your deadlines are way shorter and we're expecting

• 44:43Speaker 01

  everybody to operate in this way now. And folks don't have time to edit the code. And that concerns me. I so I think it is maybe worth reading some of the testimonials if you're somebody listening and you're curious about how that's going in some of the areas of the tech sector where people are trying to implement AI. I do think that it's being implemented as a cost cutting measure pretty often and sometimes in ways that

• 45:06Kirk Hamilton?

  Personnel replacing measure, like a huge cost cutting measure in that way.

• 45:10Speaker 01

  So I don't I'm not worried about it in the context of something like a game jam or it's being used to like write code for a character to walk across the screen or whatever. That's not really what I'm talking about here. But I do worry about it becoming a huge force in game dev in the same way that I worry about it becoming a huge force in any technology whereby it could result in sloppy code because human beings still actually need to work on some of these things to make them good.

• 45:34Kirk Hamilton?

  There's also the, there's a different way of using AI that I think exists outside of how people usually think of this question where, you know, in Marcus's framing, it's typically, we're thinking of someone having an AI do art, you know, create art or write the script for the game. Where also you can just talk to ChatGPT and have it give you advice or tell you how to do something in some application you're using. Like it can just be a kind of a help guide or a little helper as you're working. And I would imagine that a lot of people have used it that way. I've certainly experimented with that. And it can be very helpful. And I think if you're using a lot of different technical tools, it's basically, it's over there. It's like the most environmentally costly FAQ.

• 46:17Kirk Hamilton?

  It's like this thing that is, it's, I mean, obviously it's more useful than, it's faster than an FAQ. It's giving you the answers really quickly. But I think that is an invisible use of AI that I would just guess is a lot more prevalent than people think because a lot of people don't talk about it. Because it's still very controversial and because as we've seen, when a video game comes out and is on Steam, this happened with the Alters, if you remember that game. It was revealed that that game had some AI art in it that wasn't initially revealed when it, when it came out and they had, there was like a big controversy. People got super mad. I think they got some review bombing. It's a placeholder, placeholder text or something like that.

• 46:55Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, there was like, it was pretty minor, but it was generative AI and it hadn't been, you know, there was no transparency around it when it first came out, which like now I believe on Steam, games with AI assets. That is like disclosed in somewhere on the, on the store page. They added it. So anyways, point being, it's like a very controversial thing. And I get the feeling that as AI just works its way into everything, that there are a lot of people out there. Who are just using it in this, as this kind of helper that isn't doing the work for you, but it's just there as you're doing the work. And then Matty, as you say. As that makes people more productive and working, you know, they're able to do more. We're seeing this like very negative side effect where from the top, there's then a demand for more work.

• 47:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 47:36Kirk Hamilton?

  And of course, like the future where AI does everything and we can all just chill is like totally not currently with where the trajectory is.

• 47:43Speaker 01

  For some reason, that's not happening.

• 47:44Kirk Hamilton?

  It's going the other way, right? Where it's like, oh, well, now I can do so much more. So you need to do so much more. And so every job is just going to become even more demanding. And that is like a very negative outcome, considering the possibilities.

• 47:55Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, just having the experience of like typed in some, some question on chat GPT for research purposes and seeing the number of mistakes it makes and like things it totally makes up. It does seem very problematic when you're trying to use it to, to write like good, efficient code that will create a function for you. So yeah, it's hard to imagine working at scale. It's also telling, I think, and it's interesting and it makes me a little more optimistic about the future that like, there's always this promise that like these LLMs are getting so much better, Gen AI is improving so much more every day, but the hallucination problem still has not gone away and is still massive and still just like they're unable to fix that despite the fact that these tools are getting better and more powerful at what you ask them

• 48:39Jason Schreier?

  to do. They're still just making things up constantly, which I say it makes me optimistic because it makes me feel like it's never actually going to viable the replace a lot of these jobs, even if companies wanted to or trying to force it down people's throats. Eventually they will get to the point where they realize, oh, okay, this is not actually a viable replacement for most jobs. But yeah, there are a lot of fields where I think people are being encouraged to use AI and experiment with it, including at my company, we, we have AI tools that we're encouraged to experiment with. And just like that, they're very limited in how they can help. Like I mentioned before, I found a couple of like places where like they can create things that are helpful for me, but it's, it's very limited. And I think

• 49:20Jason Schreier?

  with code, it's going to like turn out to be pretty, the, the scope is going to turn out to be pretty narrow in what they can actually do in terms of replacing workers. That said, I mean, I think that like to get at Marcus's original question, I really, I think that ultimately people are going to be judging these games more based on the front end, what they can see and what they can feel and what they can read than what's on the backend. And so it's a lot easier to get away with doing backend stuff using AI than it is with frontend stuff. I think, uh, concept art is. Is something that a lot of you're going to see a lot of AI replacing concept artists and the ethics of that are a different question than the

• 50:03Jason Schreier?

  practical viability of that. But that seems like an area that that is, is, if it's not already, it's certainly, or like placeholder art for presentations, like PowerPoint decks that will never be seen by the world, but are used a lot internally at game companies. That sort of thing is again, like I can see a lot of companies using AI for that in an attempt to save time and because it's on the backend and players will never see it. Even that placeholder stuff, I mean, a lot of placeholder stuff like is meant to never be seen by players, but it will. But yeah, I mean, I think people in general will just be more concerned about what they can see than what they can't. Okay, let's take a break and then we'll come back with one more thing. Thanks to everyone who sent in questions.

• 50:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks.

• 50:52Speaker 03

  Hello, I'm John Luke Roberts and I would love for you to give my podcast, Sound Eat with John Luke Roberts, a try. It's basically a parody of every type of podcast imaginable, made up with loads of brilliant comedians. It was named the best scripted sketch show by the BBC Audio Drama Awards, was a finalist for Best Comedy Podcast at the New York Radio Festival, and it has just been nominated for Best Comedy at the British Podcast Awards. Surely, if there are three things you can trust, they're the BBC, New York, and Britain. So give Sound Eat with John Luke Roberts a go today. Available from Maximum Fun in all the best podcast apps.

• 51:28Speaker 04

  Hi, I'm Alexis. And I'm Ella. And we're the hosts of Comfort Creatures. We could spend the next 28 seconds telling you why you should listen, but instead, here's what our listeners have said about our show, because really, they do know best. The show is filled with stories and poems and science and friendship and laughter and tears sometimes, but tears are from your heart being so filled up with love. A cozy show about enthusiasm for animals of all kinds, real and unreal. If you greet the dog before the person walking them, or wander around the party looking for the host's cat, this podcast is for you. So come for the comfort and stay for Alexis's wild story about waking up to her cats giving birth on top of her. So if that sounds like your cup of tea. Or coffee, Ella, we're not all Brits. Then join us. Every Thursday at MaximumFun.org.

• 52:10Jason Schreier?

  And we are back. Kirk, Matty, it is time for one more thing. Matty, start us off.

• 52:15Speaker 01

  Well, I'm reading a book that I think is pretty good. It's by this woman named Sophie Lewis, and she has been doing the rounds advertising her book. And I saw a video of her talking about it. And I was thoroughly charmed. And I was like, I want to check out this book. It's called Enemy Feminisms. And in the clip, she was talking about TERFs, who are trans exclusionary radical feminists. People probably know J.K. Rowling is one. And she was just kind of talking about how as feminists, like, we can't just ignore that these people, you know, say they're feminists. And she talks at the very beginning of the book, and in a lot of clips about the book, about how, you know, if you're a feminist, you're like, oh, well, those other people, they're not real feminists,

• 52:58Speaker 01

  not like me, like the no true Scotsman theory. And her ethos in the book is essentially like, no, I don't think we can say that. And there's also like, a really strong history of white supremacist feminism, especially in the suffragette movement. We're going way back. And that's how the book begins. I'm only on chapter three, but I'm really digging it. So I feel comfortable recommending it. And I've learned a lot. It's been many years since I was in college. And there's a lot of just historical stuff in here that's new and has been discovered since I was reading anything about this sort of thing. And I'll share a fun fact, just as sort of like a little recommendation for the book, that I had didn't know, because this is recent scholarship. So you two are probably familiar with Sojourner Truth's anti-woman speech. I learned about it in middle school. I think

• 53:43Speaker 01

  most people learn about it in middle school. I did not know until I read this book, because this is pretty recent scholarship, that she not only never said that, Truth didn't have that accent at all. She didn't have a southern accent. She didn't say ain't, she didn't speak that way. And that entire speech was written by a white lady later on, who was kind of transcribing it from memory. But historians think probably she did that because she thought the speech would be more marketable that way, and more easily understood as like, a strengthening of Sojourner Truth's message. And it's unclear whether Sojourner Truth knew that and was okay

• 54:24Speaker 01

  with it. But regardless, I just thought that was really interesting, and was kind of speaking to some of the early kind of suffragette movements and women's movements in the books whereby White women were very much at the foreground of those movements and really simplified the messages of the women of color that were just sidelined, obviously, for many years, didn't get the vote until way, way, way later in our country's history. So anyway, it's an interesting book and it's written in a very conversational tone. It's not like a big academic text that's going to overwhelm you. It's funny, it's got jokes, and it's also got some cool historical tidbits that include stuff like that that was discovered in like the past 10 years about history we think we all know. So anyway, it's called

• 55:09Speaker 01

  Enemy Feminisms. This was really hard for me to Google. I forgot the name of the book and I was like, how do I find this?

• 55:15Kirk Hamilton?

  That's a great name. Enemy Feminisms is just fun to say.

• 55:18Jason Schreier?

  It's very hard to say.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  I was Googling like, bad feminism, evil feminism. It was not coming up. Eventually, I just read an article where somebody else mentioned the book and I was like, thank God, I can find this book again. So yeah, that's what it's called. Enemy Feminisms.

• 55:34Kirk Hamilton?

  Nice.

• 55:35Jason Schreier?

  Kirk, what's your one more thing?

• 55:37Kirk Hamilton?

  My one more thing is another Brandon Sanderson doorstopper. This is a book called The Words of Radiance that I am nearing the end of and is the second book in his Stormlight Archive, which I believe is his best-known and most celebrated series. This is an epic fantasy series. There are five books in. My phone thinks I'm talking to it because I was talking about a S-E-R-I-E-S. And when I said that-

• 56:06Jason Schreier?

  Oh my God.

• 56:07Kirk Hamilton?

  It misheard me.

• 56:08Jason Schreier?

  This is like-

• 56:09Kirk Hamilton?

  Technology is great.

• 56:10Jason Schreier?

  Do you remember, it was years ago, your Alexa kept going off in the middle of our show. You kept like, I don't know if it was because you'd say Alexa or like-

• 56:17Kirk Hamilton?

  Apparently my stupid phone. So anyways, this is a Sanderson fantasy world. He's five books in. It's going to be 10 books long. Each book is really long.

• 56:26Jason Schreier?

  Of course it is. It's Brandon Sanderson.

• 56:28Kirk Hamilton?

  He is, yeah, he is a very prolific writer. I've talked about him in the past that I've sort of been reading his stuff over the past, I don't know, year and change. And actually, I'll mention up top, speaking of him, since I know a lot of our listeners really like him- Uh, one of our listeners named Graham reached out to see if I would go on his Brandon Sanderson podcast, which is called A Green of Sanderson.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 56:48Kirk Hamilton?

  Where they're reading all of Sanderson's books.

• 56:49Speaker 01

  Good name.

• 56:50Kirk Hamilton?

  And I went on to talk about The Emperor's Soul, which is a short story of his that I read just for this podcast. That's very good, or I guess a novella more than a short story, though a Sanderson novella can be still quite long because he's very, he can really write. I really liked The Emperor's Soul, so I'll just shout that out. I'll put, we'll put a link for it in the show notes since it's a Brandon Sanderson podcast. And, uh, and if you want to hear people talking about Brandon Sanderson, go check it out. So Words of Radiance, book two of the Stormlight Archive. The first one is called The Way of Kings. I read that as well, and I thought it was pretty good, but I wasn't crazy about it just because it's very slow paced. There's one character who is very exciting and another character who not a lot was happening with her. And I was like, man, every time we're reading about her, I want to be reading about the other guy. And that's never a great feeling in one of these books.

• 57:35Kirk Hamilton?

  It's like in some of the Song of Ice and Fire books where you're reading about Tyrion and you're so into it, and then they cut to like Sansa or something. And you're like, oh, man, I just, can we go back to Tyrion? It's that, it's a familiar feeling. So that was happening in that book. And it just really takes its time, that first book. It's establishing this incredibly complex and large world that he's built for this series. But I was, I really liked it in the end. I mean, it's, he, he knows how to write a book that's just a page turner. But it wasn't until Words of Radiance, the second book, that I was really like, okay, man, this rules. Words of Radiance is awesome and very much worth reading Way of Kings so that you can fully enjoy Words of Radiance. It kicks ass.

• 58:18Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm near the end of it and I've just been super into it. Uh, I'll explain a little about this world. So Sanderson's thing is, or his great skill is that he can imagine these wonderfully complex worlds and magic systems and really interesting, just kind of fictional mechanisms, I guess, that he, he builds these wonderful contraptions that he then puts his stories through. And I actually talked about this on that Sanderson podcast, that he is, he is smart about borrowing narrative structures. That are familiar and then putting them into these mechanisms that he's built. Mistborn, for example, the first Mistborn book really feels like the Matrix at times. It has all of these echoes of the Matrix.

• 59:00Kirk Hamilton?

  But I think that's actually a great strength because he's introducing this really complicated magic system and all this other stuff. This big world with all these proper nouns. He is a proper noun freak, Jason. He's just there everywhere. Each book opens with like four maps.

• 59:12Jason Schreier?

  I know, I know, I know. I've tried to read some of his, like, Sid.

• 59:17Kirk Hamilton?

  It's a lot and when you start.

• 59:18Jason Schreier?

  Can I just stop you for one second? The Matrix framework is also hero's journey, which is like the ultimate Joseph Campbell, like the monomyth. This idea that it's gone from everything to Star Wars to like.

• 59:28Kirk Hamilton?

  Yes, and to be clear, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. But when I say that it echoes the Matrix, I don't mean that it's just the hero's journey. I mean that it is like the setup of the world, this like omnipresent unstoppable entity overseeing everything. There are these guards in Mistborn who are like exactly agents. And the whole time, all of the Mistwalkers are like, she's learning her powers. And it's like, you never fight one of those guys. Like, they will just destroy you because they're so powerful. And then there's like the scene at the end where like one Mistwalker like stops and like faces one down. And it's like this fight, like it really feels like the Matrix in that way. Like these narrative beats that match the Matrix. But that's fine because like the Matrix rocks and Mistborn also rocks.

• 1:00:11Kirk Hamilton?

  What I would say about Mistborn to compare it a little bit to Words of Radiance is that Mistborn blows it all out in the first book. The first Mistborn is great and I believe that he did not intend to make it into a trilogy. And then he had more ideas and he kept going. And it kind of feels that way where the second two Mistborn books, which I read, they're fine. They have their moments, but it really feels like, kind of actually like the next two Matrix movies.

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  Well, we had a couple more ideas.

• 1:00:37Kirk Hamilton?

  The first one was really awesome and like, I don't know. I mean, I'm fine with being with these characters some more, but this is kind of undermining a little bit of what I liked about the first one. So the Stormlight Archive does not have that problem. And then that led to the fact that the first book felt like a lot of setup where I was like, geez, we are really taking our time with some of this stuff. This is a world where. It's not like Mistborn where it's like a horrible ruler and everything is kind of intense. It's actually just a functioning kingdom. There's a lot going on, but it's like, I shouldn't say kingdom. It's a functioning world. I mean, there are many, many kingdoms and, you know, all kinds of different political and different wars going on everywhere.

• 1:01:16Kirk Hamilton?

  And it follows four or five, maybe, main characters and a huge variety of side characters. He does this thing where in between acts, he'll just cut to three characters you've never heard of before, who are living in kingdoms you've never been to before with like different kinds of magic and different histories. And like, you're just thrown into the deep end for one chapter and then it just goes to another one. And there are these kind of interludes in between the, the big sections of the book. It's really cool and it gives you this sense of like, wow, this guy really thought through this unbelievably vast fantasy world. But the broad story is there are kind of these three or four main characters. There's Kalladin, who begins as a slave. He's like a great warrior who is then enslaved as punishment or just kind of through this horrible series of events

• 1:02:00Kirk Hamilton?

  that you learn over the course of the first book. And he, it's very much Gladiator, I would say, if we're talking about the narrative beats that are borrowed in Way of Kings. His is the story of Gladiator, of the great warrior who is cast down. And then through sheer, like the power of his honor and his abilities and some magic that is also on his side, he kind of works his way back up and like makes it out, you know, and becomes a hero again. And that's the most familiar story. And there's also this young woman named Shalat, or at least I think that's how her name is pronounced. And in Way of Kings, her story was really kind of, it just takes its time. It's very slow. She's like going to be a scholar. She's studying a bunch of stuff. It's fine, but she's like very timid and kind of, you know, always gets embarrassed and doesn't like standing up to people. And I was like, man, I don't know.

• 1:02:45Kirk Hamilton?

  This is all just kind of not my thing. So Words of Radiance is her book. And by that, I mean Words of Radiance is there are flashbacks and they tell her story, her whole story, where Way of Kings was Kalladin's book. So this is very focused on her and suddenly now she has something to do. And because of the events of Way of Kings, Words of Radiance brings everyone together. So now suddenly all your main characters from the first book are finally in scenes together and like. Shit is going down. And I just gotta say, all that buildup really makes it satisfying when stuff really starts to go down in this book. And I've just been having a blast with it. I mean, I could go on and on and on. It's like part Mecha anime. These guys wear these suits of armor, the shard plate that's kind of like a mech. So it has overlaps with

• 1:03:27Kirk Hamilton?

  like some story beats from Mecha. They like summon these cool sores. There's this whole mystery history of the world. There's like spirits flying around. There's really complex magic. There are like a variety of other species that are just these super interesting that communicate with rhythms and like with music. He's it's far more ideas than he's had than any of his books that I've read. There isn't like one central idea. There are just so many. And really, it's just, it's very fun and very good. I'm really impressed with it. It's the most I've liked anything that he's read. It's his best imagined world. And he's very good at this stuff. So I've, there aren't any of his books that I've really read and been like, ah, I just didn't like that at all. Like they're always pretty enjoyable

• 1:04:08Kirk Hamilton?

  in the end. But this one, I would say is like very much worth the investment. And I can see why it's the one that's, you know, the number one bestseller. It's the one that's the biggest deal. Because it really gets cooking by this second book. So that's a big endorsement of Words of Radiance. I'm gonna keep these ones going, but it's a quite, quite a fun book.

• 1:04:27Jason Schreier?

  All right. My One More Thing is also a fantasy book, but this needs no caveats because this might be the most approachable, accessible, and also some of the most brilliant fantasy books that I've ever read. This is a book called Six of Crows by Lee Bardugo. And I also read its sequel, Cricket Kingdom, the two are part of a duology. And if that sounds familiar, it's because Kirk recommended it a couple of years ago and said that I would really like it. Said both of us would really like it, but especially I would because I really enjoyed Lachlamora, which is a very similar style of book. And so I finally read these books and they are phenomenal. They are incredible. They are, they need, they

• 1:05:10Jason Schreier?

  like, unlike the Brandon Sanderson stuff, you don't need a caveat of like, oh, it's got a slow start. Oh, it's a little bit meandering. Oh, too many proper nouns because.

• 1:05:18Kirk Hamilton?

  Proper nouns.

• 1:05:19Jason Schreier?

  There are, but the characterization is so good from the outset that you don't bounce off of it. Or at least I didn't, and I bounce off proper nouns pretty easily.

• 1:05:28Kirk Hamilton?

  It just grabs you.

• 1:05:29Jason Schreier?

  These books are soundingly good. Also, books where it alternates point of view characters, but they're all so good that you never are like, oh, man, one of these is, oh, no, we're up to the boring character now. Because it does leave our do good as a remarkable feat in these books of creating six main characters that are all incredibly fascinating and entertaining and have their own flaws and distinct characteristics and are all very lovable. The core of this story is that it revolves around this group of thieves per going or this group of outcasts, I suppose, criminals who are on this impossible heist that they have to perform. And then things, things go awry from there.

• 1:06:14Jason Schreier?

  The first book actually follows a lot of the same beats as Ocean's Eleven, but then things get out of control. And then the second book continues that story. I won't really say much about what happens and it's incredible. The characterization is, is top notch. And that's really the reason to read these books is because the characters are so good, especially Kaz Brecker, the kind of the leader of the gang, who is really a fascinating character in so many ways. And I really, I can't recommend these books enough. Also hilariously, they're characterized as like young adult books in the bookstore, which is funny because they do not feel like young adult books. Either that or young adult books can be really mature.

• 1:06:55Kirk Hamilton?

  No, it's funny. I just read Ninth House, her, which is billed as her first adult book. And it is quite adult. I mean, there's like a lot of sex and like sexual violence and stuff in that book that is a level beyond anything in the, in the Crows duology. But the Crows duology is like pretty horny and pretty violent.

• 1:07:12Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I would say, I mean, the romance in the Crows duology is pretty light. It's pretty tame stuff. There's no like graphic sex or anything like that. It is definitely violent and there's definitely blood and death and stuff. It doesn't feel YA, but I don't know. I haven't read YA books in a long time. I guess, except for these. But anyway, point being, these are incredible. I recommend them wholeheartedly. Like, I had talked about Ninth House a couple of months ago, and that's what kind of got me on this kick of reading Leigh Bardugo. And yeah, these two books are amazing. I'm probably gonna read the rest of her books, even though I know that the, there's the Shadow and Bone trilogy, which came before this, which I know is not as good as these. And then she has another set of books that are more recent about one of the characters in the Six of Crows books

• 1:07:57Jason Schreier?

  that I'm looking forward to reading as well. But man, these two stand out, really. Some of the best fantasy that, that, that you'll read. Really incredible stuff.

• 1:08:08Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I've mentioned this before, but the Shadow and Bone books get better as they go, which is just an interesting thing about them. They're certainly not bad. They're just not as irresistible as the Crows duology. And man, the main thing about Six of Crows, I'm so glad that she read it. The thing that I take out of that book now, when I think back on it, is that the heist itself rules, and the way that it plays out, and like, the climax of that book is so awesome. And that was my, I just remember reading it, and you never know with a heist, if it's gonna be maybe deliberately misdirected, or anticlimactic, or it's all gonna go off the rails, and we're just gonna get character beats. The way they get through it is just incredibly awesome. So that is like, that is a really cool thing about the book, because it's very satisfying in the end.

• 1:08:49Jason Schreier?

  There are two things that Leigh Bardugo is phenomenal at, that she is like, some of the best, one of the best to do it at. One is pacing. The pacing of these books is just astounding. It is like, the, the perfect balance of like, action, like, quiet moment, action, etc.

• 1:09:04Kirk Hamilton?

  Ninth House was like, phenomenally paced as well.

• 1:09:06Jason Schreier?

  Her pacing, her instincts for pacing are just top, top tier. And the other thing she's really good at is creating these scenarios that subvert themselves. And it turns out that this plan that seemed like a failure is actually what Kaz Brecker wanted to happen all along. And then also-

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  Ah, the Xanatos Gambit is what that's all about.

• 1:09:25Jason Schreier?

  And then also, also subverting, subverting that again, and being like, oh, actually, the, the bad guy's on smarter than him this time. And so you never really know. Once a plan unfolds, you never really know if things are going awry because Kaz wanted- ...it to be, or things are going awry. And actually Kaz is unhappy about this turn of events. Really, really good books. Highly, highly recommend them. Start with Six of Crows by Lee Bardugo and then get into, I mean, once you finish that, of course, you'll go pick up Crooked Kingdom. You're just gonna read them all, I guess? Yeah. Maddie, you would love these books. I gotta read them. They're awesome.

• 1:09:58Kirk Hamilton?

  They're super good.

• 1:09:59Jason Schreier?

  Really amazing characters. All right, that was it for this week's episode. Thanks again to everyone who sent in questions and Kirk, Maddie. Oh, we won't see you next week because we're off next week.

• 1:10:08Kirk Hamilton?

  That's true. Yes, we'll be off next week.

• 1:10:11Jason Schreier?

  So you'll, you'll get a bonus. We'll probably throw in a bonus app in the feed.

• 1:10:15Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:15Jason Schreier?

  And then we'll back the week after that.

• 1:10:18Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, well, I will see both of you then.

• 1:10:21Jason Schreier?

  Bye.

• 1:10:24Kirk Hamilton?

  Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddy Myers and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network. And if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join. Find us on Twitter at TripleClickPod, send email to [email protected] and find a link to our Discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time.

• 1:11:22Jason Schreier?

  Maximum Fun. A worker-owned network. Of artist-owned shows. Supported. Directly. By you.