Hot swap your D-pad

It's a special bicoastal episode of The Vergecast, as Nilay, Dieter, Emily, and Sam are joined remotely by the one and only Casey Newton, live from the E3 convention in Los Angeles. It's been a big show, and there are some big opinions about it on display here. And while we're on the subject of opinions, Emily comes to the table with plenty of them as the discussion moves to this week's Game of Thrones season finale. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  Today's episode of The Vergecast is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the easiest way to create a beautiful website, blog, or online store for you and your ideas. Squarespace features an elegant interface, beautiful templates, and incredible 24/7 customer support. Try Squarespace at Squarespace.com and enter offer code VERGE at checkout to get 10% off. Squarespace, build it beautiful. Sam.

• 0:27Nilay Patel?

  I like the ads to end with like an aggressive call out of Sam Sheffer. I think that's the future of advertising, is Sam getting yelled at. Like Bud Light ads during the Super Bowl and with like...

• 0:37Speaker 01

  It's the final tagline.

• 0:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  Bud Light, Sam.

• 0:44Nilay Patel?

  So hello, everybody. Welcome to The Vergecast. Today is July, not July, June 18th. My calendar's open in the wrong month. Today is June 18th, 2015. I'm Eli Patel.

• 0:55Speaker 02

  I am Dieter Bone.

• 0:56Speaker 01

  And I am Emily Yoshida.

• 0:57Nilay Patel?

  And wait, wait for it, buddy. And a very special guest coming to us live from California, Los Angeles, California, Casey Newton on Skype.

• 1:07Speaker 03

  Hi there.

• 1:07Nilay Patel?

  How's it going? And then, you know, in his box, the hype box.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  Hype box, sweatbox, sweat lodge?

• 1:13Nilay Patel?

  Don't call it the sweat lodge. Sam Sheffer joins us.

• 1:17Speaker 03

  Hi. Emily, you're a camera, so I'm gonna have to do this a lot.

• 1:20Speaker 01

  Oh, no, you're a camera right now, too. I'm seeing you through a little screen.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  I have a very important question for Casey Newton. Is that a bunk bed behind you?

• 1:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29Speaker 03

  Oh, yes.

• 1:30Speaker 01

  What's the, yeah, what's the Verge E3 setup right now? How are the accommodations?

• 1:35Speaker 03

  We have six people staying inside of a two-bedroom, and I've been sharing one bathroom with five people for five days now.

• 1:43Nilay Patel?

  Oh, good. So...

• 1:45Speaker 01

  What's the best thing that you know about somebody that you work with now?

• 1:51Speaker 03

  I know that Sam Byford is a total diva who spends up to 40 minutes getting ready in the morning.

• 1:57Nilay Patel?

  Oh, this is why I demand my own hotel room wherever we go. It's because I don't want anyone to know the length of my, my hair.

• 2:04Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 2:05Nilay Patel?

  It's a, it's a long process.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  It's about, I know that process.

• 2:08Nilay Patel?

  Three inches?

• 2:09Speaker 02

  Huh?

• 2:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, it's, um, there's a lot of futzing and then a lot of like, ah, and then a lot of refutzing. Anyway, so Casey has been at E3 all week with, with the rest of the Verge team. Kind of a huge week of news out of E3. Uh, and we only have Casey for the first half hour of the show, so we should get right into it. Uh, tell us about E3. What's going on over there in our, in our war zone-like conditions that we've put you in?

• 2:33Speaker 03

  So, E3 has been a pleasant surprise in a lot of ways this year, and you're gonna start seeing some of us writing about this on the site. You know, the, the knock on E3 in recent years has been, uh, that the, the violence has just been sort of off the charts, uh, totally grim. Uh, it is like the games have not been inclusive at all. There's been no role for women either uh, in the games or on stage. And it really feels like the video game industry got the message this year in a huge way. And so everywhere we turned, uh, at the, the big keynote presentations from Microsoft and Sony and lots of the other studios, we saw women in games, we saw women on stage.

• 3:18Speaker 03

  Um, and, uh, the games look really fun. Uh, obviously there's still a lot of violence, a lot of murder and mayhem. Um, but it doesn't feel as like grim and soulless as it used to. It's not just a lot of neck stabbings. Um, a lot of the violence feels kind of more cartoonish and stylized now.

• 3:37Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 3:37Speaker 03

  And so, everybody just kind of keeps looking around at each other saying like, is it just me? Or like, are we actually having fun here? And, and what's going on with that? So, uh, so we really have been kind of pleasantly surprised.

• 3:49Nilay Patel?

  But it's, it's still kind of dark though. Most of the games feature, uh, the end of the world in some way.

• 3:55Speaker 02

  Why is that dark?

• 3:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Fair.

• 4:00Nilay Patel?

  But like, let me ask you, you know, you said there's like a big pressure on the industry, but I would say there was also, and it's hard to ignore, there was Gamergate, which was a huge outcry from sort of the other insane, not mature side of the gaming community. Has that been represented? Are people there talking about that at all?

• 4:20Speaker 03

  Well, so today, as I was walking around, some idiot Gamergaters have posted signs all over downtown that say "Fem Freak", which is a play on Feminist Frequency, the Anita Sarkisian series that sort of kicked off a lot of Gamergate outrage. And there's like some kind of quote on the, on the posters indicating that Anita Sarkisian's coming to take away all of your fun. So, I mean, it really is just like toddlers have been set loose on the streets of downtown LA because, because women demanded to be included in video games.

• 5:02Speaker 01

  It was not a safe space for toddlers.

• 5:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, so there really has been like Gamergate presence here. But I think one of the things that's interesting to think about is that video games have long production times, right? Like many of these games are in production for three years plus. And so, I actually think that a lot of the changes that we're seeing probably got started two or three years ago, and that, you know, the drumbeat of criticism grew louder and louder. Last year Feminist Frequency had this huge moment, Gamergate broke out. But the truth is that a lot of the, the changes that we're seeing today were sort of well on their way for a couple of years. It just kind of took the video game industry a while to get those games into production.

• 5:43Nilay Patel?

  Right, and like to make Fallout took six years, right? I mean.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  Well, what's the, what's the game with the giant dog?

• 5:50Nilay Patel?

  With the

• 5:51Speaker 03

  Oh, The Last Guardian.

• 5:52Nilay Patel?

  The Last Guardian, that last, and that's been around for a long time.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  I think it was announced in 2007, like people just thought it was never going to arrive. There was, of course, a very like insane quote last year. I don't, I can't remember. I think I know which studio, but I don't want to defame them if I'm wrong, but somebody just said that women's bodies were physically harder to animate, and that's why they weren't in games.

• 6:16Nilay Patel?

  Assassin's Creed.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  No, no, or was it Assassin's Creed? No, I wrote about this last year. I remember.

• 6:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, so obviously like that doesn't make any sense at all. This year, you know, magically animators had figured out how to solve the mystery of animating the female form.

• 6:36Speaker 01

  Technology keeps getting better.

• 6:39Speaker 03

  So many of the games that like I'm looking forward to playing feature female characters that are coming out. Lara Croft, Rise of the Tomb Raider, looks really, really great. One of the best demos that we've seen this year. The last game, which was just called The Tomb Raider, was a lot of fun. I know Dieter hit 100% on that game.

• 6:59Nilay Patel?

  Yes, I did.

• 7:00Speaker 03

  But, but also Mirror's Edge, which is sort of a beloved game from the last decade that my colleague Eddie Robertson really loves and has written about. That's getting a nice sequel, stars a female protagonist and is notably based on something other than just like running around murdering people. And then a personal favorite of mine, Dishonored, is getting a sequel and you have the option of playing as either the hero from the, the original game or the girl that you rescued at the end of that game as kind of the protagonist of the new one. So, you know, I think that's awesome and really can't wait to start playing those.

• 7:33Nilay Patel?

  So let's go through, so that's like some of the news. There's also a bunch of VR news, right? Oculus had a surprise event that we sort of talked about last week, but then you guys got to play with a bunch of stuff as well. What, what was your take on sort of the VR element of the E3 this year?

• 7:48Speaker 03

  It's coming along slowly but surely. It feels like almost everyone is making a headset. We've done just about all of the demos. I think one of the demos that got just about everybody's attention was actually the AR demo, the augmented reality demo that Microsoft did as part of its presentation with Minecraft. They had a guy who was wearing HoloLens and was able to kind of project a vision onto a table of a Minecraft world. He was able to kind of zoom in with his fingers and manipulate it, and it looked really, really cool. And my colleague Chris Plant, who is here, did that demo yesterday, and he told

• 8:30Speaker 03

  me that that was actually the moment that he got AR, that he felt like AR will definitely be a thing.

• 8:36Nilay Patel?

  Really? Because I read Addy's piece, and Addy's piece was like, this kind of sucks.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  Well, it's definitely true that I think that the version of HoloLens that they showed us originally in Seattle was more fully featured and had like a better field of view than the HoloLens we've seen since. So that's actually really weird, right? It's hard to think of another time where a consumer electronics company showed you like a good version of something, and then like six months later it was like, and now here's a worse one.

• 9:03Nilay Patel?

  No, that's just, that's my life. I mean, that, right, I mean, that's, I don't know, I feel like with HoloLens, we're always destined to see what they could really do with, because the demo one they showed was like totally hacked together, you were tethered to a PC somewhere, and they shrink it down and make it real. They were going to lose some fidelity, right? And that's the knock. The knock is that it's a really narrow frame of AR, reality, and everything else is kind of blocked off.

• 9:31Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah, I think that's true. But, you know, the flip side of that is that they are, they're working away on this. Everybody believes in this, you know, I mean, there's just going to be such huge opportunities for whoever figures it out. So people are marching along. I did a VR demo of a game called Adrift, although the I in Adrift is spelled with a one, so we're not sure if we're supposed to call it Adrunt or what.

• 9:58Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 10:01Speaker 03

  But the game is really cool. The premise is that you sort of come to and you're on a space station and it's kind of blown apart and you're running out of oxygen and you have to like find more oxygen so that you don't die. And then you have to sort of figure out who you are and where you are and how to get back home. And so I did this demo on Oculus Rift. It's also going to come out for like PlayStation and PC. But man, like inside of Oculus Rift, like the game was actually overwhelming to the point where I was glad to be done when I died.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 10:32Speaker 03

  You know, I don't know if you guys have had any experiences with this like kind of VR sickness or like VR nausea where like it almost gets too intense. But you know, I find that like in certain moments, like I actually experienced like a shortness of breath. I feel, I find myself disoriented and it sort of depends on like, you know, what the style of game is and what's going on. But, but that said, the experience was great. The game is beautifully designed. It's very scary and it feels like a real game, you know, like you're moving around in space, like you're, you're trying to find oxygen, you're trying to hack into terminals.

• 11:06Speaker 02

  Like all space games.

• 11:08Speaker 03

  Like all space games, but you also have like no place to stand. And so, you know, you're, you're controlling it with a gamepad and you're manipulating yourself with sticks and you're just kind of, you know, you're, you're turning somersaults and you're, you know, banging into walls and I mean, it's just like a really intense, strange experience and like nothing you've ever played before, right? And like, that's where I start to get really excited is I feel like we're about to, you know, once the consumer version of Oculus comes out next year, normal people are going to be able to play this kind of crazy VR experience. And I think it's just going to, you know, trigger the next wave of creativity and game development.

• 11:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I had an argument. So Polygon has a war room here in one of the conference rooms in New York and there's a bunch of them sitting there looking very tired, just very exhausted. But I went and had lunch with them today to see how E3 is going for them. And we got in a little, little debate over whether or not everyone in the world will one day own a VR headset, right? Like, because-

• 12:00Speaker 02

  Which side, which side of the debate were you on?

• 12:02Nilay Patel?

  I just don't think it's gonna hap- like, I, I'm skeptical that everyone will own a VR headset the way that everyone owns a smartphone or that, not everyone in the world, but like, you know, the vast majority of people will own a VR headset the way that people own a smartphone or they own a television. These like, there are other dominant media experiences in our lives, right? And they're everywhere.

• 12:22Speaker 02

  But so the counter argument is-

• 12:26Speaker 02

  Everyone didn't own a PC until there were like a set of things that you could do on them besides like spreadsheets and games that made them make sense for the home user. And so the thing that's missing from VR, I'm gonna say-

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Tell her that.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Oh, god damn it.

• 12:41Nilay Patel?

  Oh, man.

• 12:41Speaker 01

  I've heard of that phrase before.

• 12:45Speaker 02

  That's it, right? Like, they know how to make games for VR and they know how to make, I don't know, the weather show up on your refrigerator in AR.

• 12:54Nilay Patel?

  Well, that's, no, I'm with you, but like the, the way the conversation started was the challenge that we are all having, Casey's having right now, describing VR games and how they made him feel and how Polygon has a challenge. And in general, when they have these press conferences, they never show you the games because at best, what they can do is put somebody onstage in a VR headset stumbling around, talking about how weird it is, or how great it is.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:20Nilay Patel?

  And, you know, Palmer Lucky's solution is like, one day, we're just gonna do our press conferences in VR. And it'll be like, you're sitting there, you know, they did the last episode, or the 50th anniversary episode of Saturday Night Live, not the last episode, but the 50th anniversary episode of Saturday Night Live was shot in VR. And you can just like, pretend you're there and like, look around and it's like a little demo for the Oculus. And like, one day, that will be the press conference experience and they'll flick a button and then you'll be in a game demo with a person, and like, and I was, you know, I was like, that's great, but that assumes that everybody has a VR headset. And I, like, how do you get to the place where, you know, everyone's watching the EA keynote at E3 on Twitch, YouTube and Spike TV or whatever, and they're watching a live stream

• 14:03Nilay Patel?

  on our site, and they're like, plugged into an Oculus Rift? And that just seems crazy to me.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  You make it cheap.

• 14:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, you make it a phone. Did you play with any Gear VR stuff?

• 14:17Speaker 03

  So, I mean, we have like a Gear VR at the office and I sort of respect what they're trying to do, but I just find it janky as hell. Like, you know, you can see the pixels individually, like, the kind of, the look is just kind of very muddy. And you know, I've been lucky enough to get to do some of the Oculus Crescent Bay experiences, where they have this kind of precision head tracking and where you're like the environments are much more lush and comfortable. And so like you put on Gear VR and it's just like a sort of awkward stopgap measure. So you know, like for the for the bleeding edge adopters, I'm glad that it's out there and maybe it's inspiring some developers out there to make

• 15:00Speaker 03

  cool experiences. But like, I would never recommend that a consumer go buy Gear VR as their intro to this new wave of VR.

• 15:09Nilay Patel?

  Did you play with the new Oculus, the final consumer version Oculus and Oculus Touch controllers and all that stuff?

• 15:15Speaker 03

  Uh, I didn't get to do that demo, no.

• 15:18Nilay Patel?

  There's a great video of Addie doing it. I think Addie should only make VR demo videos for us. Because she, I don't know, she obviously doesn't know this and it'd be terribly embarrassing when she listens to this, but she listens to this. But she, she has a particularly precise facial expression. Like, she's always moving her hands in very, like, very precise, very measured ways. And she just has this look on her face that's always like, now I'm picking up this box. I'm putting this box over here. And then she considers it and she like does it again. And like, I would just watch hours of that video. I think it's, I think it's the most endearing thing. But anyways, there's a great video on the site of Addie demoing the Oculus Touch, which is really great. That's the stuff that I think is wild, right?

• 15:59Nilay Patel?

  The, how do we do extra kinds of control? How do we integrate the head tracking? And it's just everything that you add to it. That's what, that's my question about VR is, you're like, you'll make it cheap, we'll do it on our phones. And then all of the experiences that are truly next generation require you to like strap things to your hands and put a camera in your house to track your head. And it, it just feels like a lot of other problems have to get solved for this to get truly mainstream.

• 16:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think so, but like, I'm just not even tripping about that.

• 16:32Speaker 03

  It's an incredibly hard, technical problem. They're inventing a new medium from scratch. Like, when was the last time you were present at the birth of a medium?

• 16:39Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 16:40Speaker 03

  Of course, it's gonna be, it's gonna be rocky, and they're not gonna have figured out the hardware right away. And like, there's gonna be shitty stuff. But like, I have seen stuff in VR that if I were just like, an eight-year-old child, and you showed it to me, I would make you let me do it 15 times a day, because it was so cool. So like, it's already crossed some sort of threshold where it's awesome. How that eventually gets to people, like, we will figure it out. I, you know, the thing that I keep thinking about is like, just VR arcades. You know, like, you will pay five bucks, and you'll get to go walk around for a couple hours, and, you know, try out five or six different experiences.

• 17:11Nilay Patel?

  You know, I did that, I did that when I was 12.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  No, but that sucked.

• 17:15Speaker 03

  And did you love it?

• 17:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I know, it sucked. Yeah, of course I loved it.

• 17:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. Like, arcades were amazing.

• 17:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:24Speaker 01

  I have like, a very tangential thought about VR that I thought of today. And it's just, it was, it's more about the film side of it, obviously, because that's what I ended up thinking about with VR. But, um, that, you know, like, we've seen in the past year or so, and we'll definitely see with Star Wars this year, like, an overall push towards more practical effects. I think if VR becomes a more common, not even like, fully adopted by everybody, but it's at least something that majority of people have tried. Practical effects are going to be back in a major way, because nobody wants to experience it. It's going, the, the, the difference between a computer-generated environment and a real environment is going to be night and day in VR.

• 18:02Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 18:02Speaker 01

  And I think that that's going to be really exciting then. But yeah, that was all my.

• 18:07Nilay Patel?

  That's wild. But how would you do like, miniatures in VR? I mean, that would, that, all that seems crazy.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  I think, well, yeah, you could do miniatures in VR.

• 18:15Nilay Patel?

  Sure. But then you couldn't, because, because don't you stitch together miniature effect shots? Like?

• 18:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you'd have to be creative with it. I don't know. I mean, I was just thinking about it. I was thinking about it in terms of Mad Max.

• 18:27Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Like Mad Max, the VR version of Mad Max, which is most like, there was very, very little in the way of like, computer effects and that. That was a bunch of cars in the desert, like actually there. If you were in like suspended in that environment, 360 degrees, like shot on film, like that would look incredible. I think that you'd see like that the more personal the medium gets, the more in front of your eyes, the more fully immersive, the more that our kind of little, I don't know. Stopgap is too janky sounding for it, but like just our short, kind of shortcuts with effects and, and environments is going to be more apparent.

• 19:07Nilay Patel?

  Huh. I mean, I just keep thinking like all, I don't know.

• 19:13Nilay Patel?

  What Casey's saying is right. This is a birth of a new medium and like the problem between, or not the problem, the disconnect between the people who are going to invent the first language and the people who grow up with that language and invent the good language. I'm wondering how long it's going to be, right?

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:31Nilay Patel?

  The people who grow up knowing sort of what the medium can do instinctively and start to push it versus the people who are like, let's apply filmmaking to this.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 19:41Nilay Patel?

  And you just wonder how long, how long it will take before the true potential of VR comes out because the people who are making this stuff like really understand it.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Well, the whole point of VR is like that there's, the device becomes invisible ideally, right? Like that, the, the perfect VR situation is that you don't, you forget that you're wearing a headset and you're in some other room, like you are completely transported. So I feel like it's, it's going to be more about things that actually feel transportive then. Like, you know, when people talk about taking kids on field trips with, with, with VR, like that, that kind of experience is going to be the real, like jump forward, I feel like.

• 20:20Nilay Patel?

  Man. Yeah, I have such conflicted ideas about VR. I just.

• 20:27Speaker 03

  Do you think that they should just stop, Neelai? Do you think that like, it's just never gonna work, so why even bother?

• 20:32Nilay Patel?

  No, I don't know. I do think it's gonna work. I completely think it's gonna work. It's just, I don't know what I want it to do. And I don't know that, like, we should be that alone together. Because that, what VR, like, the ultimate, if the kids on a field trip.

• 20:48Speaker 04

  It's not a world we're going to live in, though. It's an experience that you get to have. Right? It's like going to the movies.

• 20:54Speaker 01

  Who knows, though? I think, yeah, I feel like it could be either. But I think, like, if it's networked VR, where you're able to be in another place together with other people.

• 21:04Speaker 04

  That's like what the internet is, though, isn't it?

• 21:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, so.

• 21:06Speaker 04

  Like, we're all behind, we all work on computers, we all sit at desks.

• 21:08Nilay Patel?

  Right now, and I want to say this, right now, to the audience, Walt Mossberg is in our Slack.

• 21:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:14Nilay Patel?

  That's true.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  Like, if this is a distracted Vergecast, that's why.

• 21:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. If Deeter and I keep anxiously looking at our computer screens to make sure no one's, like, putting porn gifs at Walt, that's what's happening.

• 21:26Speaker 03

  Also, can I just say, he's really good at Slack, like, he's very funny, he's, like, cracking jokes. Like, it's amazing.

• 21:34Nilay Patel?

  He's in the mix, yeah.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  So, let me ask you, since you're on Skype, and I feel like I have to, let me ask you, like, the morning zoo kind of questions that you get when you do a Skype interview, Casey. So, this is a giant games convention. Who won, Sony or Microsoft? What is that voice?

• 21:52Nilay Patel?

  It's a radio voice.

• 21:55Nilay Patel?

  Sam doesn't know what the radio is.

• 21:56Speaker 03

  It was a big win for Microsoft.

• 21:57Nilay Patel?

  You think so?

• 21:57Speaker 02

  You think so, huh?

• 21:58Nilay Patel?

  Why?

• 21:59Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, they won because they actually have games coming out between now and December, which is not really something that Sony can say. They made an incredibly fan-friendly move in saying they were going to make at least some Xbox 360 games work on your Xbox One, and just deliver those to you as digital downloads. It was almost the exact reverse of last year, when Sony had all these fan-friendly announcements, and Microsoft was still, you know. Terrified that you were gonna play their games while you were disconnected from the internet. So I think they learned a big lesson from that backlash. Their present, like, we all left that that presentation looking at each other saying like that.

• 22:43Speaker 03

  Like, we can't remember the last time we saw an E3 presentation that had that many, like, cool games and had, like, nothing actively offensive in it.

• 22:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 22:52Speaker 03

  So, you know, I don't think that Sony had a terrible showing. I do think it sucks for them that they don't really have any big titles coming out anytime soon. But most of their announcements were geared toward, like, the hardest of the hardcore fanbase. You know, like, you have to be a little bit of a video game nerd to get excited about what's going on at E3. But like, you know, their announcements were like, alright, so if you owned a Sega Dreamcast, you're probably, you probably remember this Japanese RPG. And I'm like, I'm on Wikipedia being like, what is the, what's going on? That there's a Kickstarter for it? Like, I don't know.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  What about the Final Fantasy VII reboot?

• 23:34Speaker 03

  I am like, again, like, Final Fantasy was never my jam. So I'm like, asking around about this and people were explaining to me that it was like the most emo RPG ever released. Like, one of my colleagues here described it as the My Chemical Romance of video games.

• 23:47Nilay Patel?

  Oh my god, that's wow.

• 23:50Speaker 01

  Ooh, man, I don't even like My Chemical Romance, so yeah.

• 23:55Speaker 03

  So I, so I guess I'm looking forward to playing it. But, you know, based on what they've said, it sounds like we won't see it before 2018.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, I also kind of assume they're gonna screw it up. I don't know why, but, I mean, I'm a final, I mean, I just, I'm just saying.

• 24:10Speaker 01

  I mean, that's my only, one of my few entry points for games is Final Fantasy, particularly Final Fantasy VII. And I don't, I don't know.

• 24:17Nilay Patel?

  Can one of you just quickly give me the plot of Final Fantasy VII?

• 24:20Speaker 02

  No.

• 24:20Nilay Patel?

  Yep, no, Emily, go ahead. Emily, here, hit me, hit me.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Dystopia, terrorists, uh, she dies at the end.

• 24:31Nilay Patel?

  Rough, rough.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  No, but it's great. I mean, it's like a very, it was a very special, I didn't. And the weird thing is that I didn't go from that to being a full-time gamer. Like, I played that. I loved that. I played like the next couple of Final Fantasy games and I was like, that's it. I'm cool.

• 24:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I feel like I did that with Metal Gear. Like, I really burned through Metal Gear. Really dystopia, terrorism, he does at the end. It's very much the same game.

• 24:57Speaker 04

  Casey Newton, what was the favorite thing you played on E3?

• 25:02Speaker 03

  Um, my, so they actually, like, all the stuff that I wanted to play, they did not let me get my hands on it. So I did not get to play Uncharted 4. I did not get to play Deus Ex: Mankind Divided. And I didn't get to play Tomb Raider. But those three things were my favorite demos. They're just absolutely in my wheelhouse. I hate that I'm just telling you about sequels to games that will all sell millions. Like, I do not have a hipster answer to this question for you.

• 25:32Speaker 01

  Oh, what about that cup, that cup game?

• 25:34Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, Cuphead.

• 25:35Speaker 01

  Cuphead. That looks great.

• 25:37Speaker 03

  So Cuphead, it's, it looks adorable. Actually, I would love to play that, too. It's sort of based on the 1930s cartoon style that, it was sort of like the old Steamboat Willie cartoons from Disney, except it's like a side-scrolling platform game. And based on the demo they show, it actually looks really hard.

• 25:54Speaker 04

  Casey, will it play, will it play the way it looks aesthetically? Because it really looks like a cartoon.

• 26:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, it looks like you're in, it has like a film effect on it.

• 26:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Which is cool.

• 26:06Speaker 03

  I think it's, um.

• 26:07Speaker 04

  Did you see gameplay or just, you know, or just like demo footage?

• 26:12Speaker 03

  They showed demo footage. And it, you know, it looks like it'll move a lot faster than any Steamboat Willie cartoon that you ever saw. I mean, like, um, but, but I love the idea. Like, the style's really great and a lot of people were, were talking about that game.

• 26:29Speaker 01

  Oh, go ahead. No, sorry.

• 26:31Speaker 03

  Well, I was gonna say, if you do want one sort of like indie hipster answer to what's a cool thing you played, I did get to play a game called Abzu, which I wrote about. It's up on the site, and it's from the art director of Journey, which is, you know, this beloved, critically acclaimed indie hit game for PlayStation. And in this one, like, once again, you're this kind of solo figure. You don't really know who you are. You wake up in the ocean, and you're a diver, and you can just sort of dive down and explore the world and try to figure out who you are. And they've, you know,

• 27:04Speaker 03

  animated just tens of thousands of fish, and you can kind of like, you have infinite air supply. And so it's like this really kind of calm, meditative game. And I played it after, you know, dying as an astronaut in virtual reality. So it was a very needed tonic.

• 27:18Nilay Patel?

  But you love chill games. Let me tell a story about Casey. Here we go. So Casey and I were at the Code Conference, and I was sitting several rows away from Casey. And Casey had been blogging for like, I don't know, 11 hours straight. We were exhausted. And like, the CEO of Target is just like, droning on about the future of retail. And I look at Casey. Casey's straight up just playing Alto's Revenge on his iPad. Just doing some flips, just like, bringing it down. Just like, just snowboarding down the mountain. And finally, you know, he's like, ah, and finally, he dies. And he looks up, and he like, looks around, and he looks back longingly at his iPad to see if he should play again. And he like, puts it away, like, opens it up. It was a real moment. I wish I'd

• 28:02Nilay Patel?

  captured it all. I didn't ruin it. I didn't even tell him about it at the time. It was just one of those, like, you watch somebody else doing something, and you're completely in their headspace. You know, I knew all of Casey's emotions throughout that entire process, because I too was watching the CEO of Target and wishing I was playing a snowboarding game on my iPad.

• 28:22Nilay Patel?

  And then he was just like, well. Go ahead.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  Full disclosure, that's also me on almost every Verge conference call. I actually do find there's like, there's something like, I don't know, you just like kind of keep your hands busy and it actually helps me focus sometimes a little bit better on what's being said. Although I will cop to completely ignoring the Target presentation.

• 28:44Nilay Patel?

  So were there a lot of indie games at E3? I feel like the indie game roller coaster is kind of in a down moment and the mobile game roller coaster is at a down moment. And we're all about the big console launches right now.

• 28:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would say like the mobile game stuff in particular, you're absolutely right. There was just not a ton of mobile stuff to look at and you know, that's fine. Like the monetization schemes on mobile games are so gross that it's like, it's hard for me to get excited about them. But you know, on the indie front, I actually thought that for the, for the two biggies, Microsoft and Sony, they gave a good amount of screen time to independent games. You know, Cuphead was one of them, Abzu, I guess Abzu, I can't remember if that got shown at the Sony presentation or not, but you know, both of them set aside time during their, their presentations, showed off some stuff. And a lot of those games looked really good. So, you know, I don't know that indie games had some sort of like crazy breakout year, but they're clearly like part of the mix now.

• 29:41Speaker 03

  And companies like Microsoft and Sony feel like they have to showcase them to kind of send the right message to, to developers and fans that they are about more than just the AAA stuff.

• 29:52Nilay Patel?

  Right. I think, I mean, it's just so funny to watch Microsoft, and you're saying Microsoft came away the winner. Just how far backwards they've walked from the Xbox One, which is supposed to be this like living room bundled with Kinect. And it's going to like watch your TV for you and like read your emotions and then maybe like change the, you know, it's like all the stuff it was going to do. And now it's like a console game with a bunch of AAA titles and they're really giving time to indie developers because that, that's the true promise of the console, right?

• 30:22Speaker 03

  Well, it's true. And like, I mean, you know, so I'm somebody who enjoys like playing AAA games and who doesn't watch all that much TV and. So the like Xbox One as it described was not a thing that I wanted. I didn't want to connect. I didn't want to talk to my TV. I didn't want a DVR. Like I wanted something that would make the next Tomb Raider look incredible. And they finally started to build that. So, you know, I maybe it's a it's like a strategic loss for them that they weren't able to take over the living room. But if you love to play video games like I like I I don't know how you are going to be too disappointed with what's going on at Xbox right now.

• 30:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I I mean, and that's just there's like a little bit of more Microsoft news. We I actually, we have to read an ad, Casey. We've got to let you go. Um, and we talk about Mike the next bit of Microsoft news. Yeah, but before before all of that, that elite controller. Oh, controller. Did you play with it?

• 31:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. Uh, uh, no, I stood next to it and like watched a guy kind of play around with it like my my own suspicion like if I had it is that I would like swap those buttons around three or four times. And I would say like, I've only managed to confuse myself and then we just go back to the default configuration. So like, if you're an elite like Call of Duty player and you need to like be able to hot swap your D pad, like go for it. But otherwise, like to me, it just looked like a fetish object for game obsessives like.

• 31:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a fetish object where you hot swap your D pad.

• 31:49Speaker 02

  Hot swap your D pad.

• 31:50Nilay Patel?

  That's a that's a fetish. John, I think we got the episode title. Just putting that down. All right. Um, okay. Well, Casey, uh, thanks for joining us. We'll, uh, you know, we'll have you on the show some other time. We love you, Casey.

• 32:03Speaker 03

  It was my great pleasure.

• 32:04Nilay Patel?

  Enjoy hot swapping. Enjoy hot swapping your D pad, bro. All right, here we go.

• 32:11Nilay Patel?

  All right, let me read this thing.

• 32:14Nilay Patel?

  Here's a thing that I'm going to tell you about building the Vurch. It was hard. Yeah. No, it's the idea that I'm gonna I'm gonna like move into we should have done on Squarespace. I don't think it's gonna play. But I built my own website before. Have you built a website? I have of many. I I've actually built a number of Sam Schuffer fansites, um, hand coded, of course, lovingly. Uh, it was difficult, but here's the thing. You can just use Squarespace and it'll be easy and that'd be great. And you'll get a site that's professionally designed regardless of your skill level. You don't need to do any coding. The tools are intuitive and easy to use. There's state of the art technology powering your site. And so you get security and stability right away. And it's trusted by millions of people and some of the most respected brands in the world. It's only $8 a month.

• 32:57Nilay Patel?

  You get a free domain if you sign up for a year and you can just start your free trial today. We don't even need a credit card. You just go to Squarespace.com. When you decide to sign up for Squarespace, you can use the offer code VERGE to get 10% off your first purchase. So Squarespace, build it beautiful.

• 33:13Nilay Patel?

  All right. So just really quick to before we go, there's a bunch of entertainment stuff we have to talk about. Microsoft at E3 was like the big winner, but at the end of E3, they announced that they're like, they're shaking up their entire leadership. They fired Mark Penn, who was the head of advertising. They fired Steven Iop, who was the CEO of Nokia and they bought Nokia. They fired their head of, they fired Joe Harlow. So this, Microsoft is like contracting. There's not a lot to say, like this is all expected.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. So the, the ruthlessness with which they kind of like excise the leadership of Nokia out of Microsoft's leadership was interesting.

• 33:55Nilay Patel?

  It took a while.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  It took a little while, I guess. But so I have feelings about what they ended up with, which is they've got like a Windows slash stuff that runs Windows division under Terry Myerson. They've got like a enterprise cloud division for cloud stuff and Azure. And they've got like an apps division for like office stuff.

• 34:19Nilay Patel?

  That all makes sense to me.

• 34:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's like, that's how it should be. And like, I couldn't have told you what their organizational structure was before, but like, that's how it should be now.

• 34:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:30Speaker 02

  And it makes perfect sense to me. And I, it seems like everything seems like a good move to me.

• 34:34Nilay Patel?

  Because I want to mention the fact that Steven Iop, usurper, is my new favorite character in all of technology. The man who, the locust who destroys your world. And that's it. That's really all I wanted to mention. I think Steven Iop should take over more companies and sell them to Microsoft.

• 34:49Speaker 02

  Did you see that Mark Penn is now going to hang out with Steve Ballmer?

• 34:53Nilay Patel?

  That doesn't, none of those words make any sense to me. Okay, Emily, there's a bunch to talk about, but I think most importantly, we should talk about Thrones.

• 35:01Speaker 01

  Oh, oh, yeah. I mean, what are the other things to talk about?

• 35:04Nilay Patel?

  We have Jurassic World on this list. I mean, a bunch of stuff.

• 35:08Speaker 02

  Hey, guys, we're gonna, we're gonna spoil.

• 35:09Nilay Patel?

  If you are listening to Vergecast and you haven't seen the end of Game of Thrones, I don't say to you.

• 35:13Speaker 01

  You're in a very particular demographic that we have not plotted for.

• 35:18Speaker 02

  No, really?

• 35:19Nilay Patel?

  Our producer, John, hasn't seen it. John, what are you doing, man? All right, well, I'm sorry, bro.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  All right, so the next, the next 20 minutes of the Vergecast are going to sound terrible because our producer's gonna run out of the control room.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  Dystopia? Terrorism? He dies.

• 35:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I have read and listened to a lot of recaps and, and analysis of this, this finale of, of Game of Thrones since, since, even since doing my final scoring of the game of Game of Thrones. And obviously, so, so I think now, and I was, I was misled because I thought this, I thought this, um, this season was partially, partially feast of crow, feast for crows and partially dance, dance with dragons.

• 36:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Dance around dragons.

• 36:11Speaker 01

  Dance around the dragons. But I guess.

• 36:15Nilay Patel?

  The new George Michael dance track.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  But is there any, like, you've read the books, Dieter, is there anything that has not been covered yet?

• 36:22Speaker 02

  Like, there's a bunch of, like, side stories that they could get to, uh, but in terms of chronology of, like, what's happening in the plot, they've pretty much reached the same point. There's a bunch of stuff that obviously happened in the books that hasn't happened, and some of that stuff has been alluded to by the show.

• 36:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:40Speaker 02

  Where they started some things and then left, let it off, let go of it. So there's still a few things.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Talk about the Brotherhood Without Banners?

• 36:46Speaker 02

  I might be.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 36:48Nilay Patel?

  I mean, dude, we're in the spoiler zone, just put it out there. It's fine.

• 36:51Speaker 01

  No, no, don't spoil the books.

• 36:52Nilay Patel?

  Oh, well.

• 36:54Speaker 01

  Well, but there's nothing else to spoil now. That's my, that is my main question.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  I don't know. Yeah, I think that we are.

• 37:02Speaker 02

  I'm not worried about spoilers generally.

• 37:05Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  And I don't think that there's anything in the books that it's gonna like spoil the show at this point, except for like two.

• 37:12Speaker 04

  Having the books diverge or the show diverge from what the books.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's also that.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  I'm also like not like a perfectly cataloged expert on what is in the books. I've got vague memories because, man, they're, they're long and they're kinda bad.

• 37:27Nilay Patel?

  We have some like, yeah, that's the thing that's kept me away from the books is every time I see an excerpt of the books or like a teaser of the new one, I read it. I'm like, these are not written terribly well.

• 37:39Speaker 01

  I, so I've only read the first one and I read it after I'd seen the first season of the show. And so I could read it like I was sleepwalking. I was like, I remember all these things. Like now I'm just getting more details. Like when I, like, I always compare it to reading the novelizations of the Star Wars movies after seeing them because the first one was actually written by George Lucas and it has all sorts of nerdy details that you would not have known just watching the film. So I got like a lot of my nerd background knowledge from, from just reading the novelizations. But yeah, so that was sort of what reading, Game of, is the first book called The Game of Thrones?

• 38:14Nilay Patel?

  No, it's a Song of Ice and Fire.

• 38:16Speaker 01

  No, that's the name of the series.

• 38:18Speaker 02

  Oh.

• 38:18Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  I think the first one is A Game of Thrones.

• 38:24Nilay Patel?

  So many people are freaking out right now.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 38:27Nilay Patel?

  We just caused a car accident.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  What's the name of the show that I like? What's the bad guy on it? Yeah, no, I, so yeah, that was my main.

• 38:38Nilay Patel?

  More accidents, by the way.

• 38:40Speaker 01

  My phone starts, no, it's just emails from Casey.

• 38:45Nilay Patel?

  Casey's emailing you.

• 38:45Speaker 02

  It's A Game of Thrones.

• 38:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 38:47Speaker 01

  I was right. I knew it had an extra particle in there.

• 38:51Speaker 04

  I was just reading it in 96.

• 38:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, these things are old. So, so, yeah, I mean, my main, so, so an interesting thing to me is that people who read the books knew that. Spoiler alert, Jon Snow dies at the end of A Dance Drag.

• 39:08Nilay Patel?

  Emily just made extremely sarcastic scare quotes with her hands. Everyone listening to know that. She said dies. She literally brought up her hands and then went like, like waved them like velociraptor claws.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  I wish I had the velociraptor claw that Jurassic World sent us upstairs for any time I do scare quotes.

• 39:27Nilay Patel?

  I've never seen scare quotes more sarcastically deployed.

• 39:30Speaker 01

  Well, it's just because I wrote that he died. I didn't even comment on it in our recap because I have read so much of people saying, oh, he's not dead. He's not dead. But all I have to work with is what's in the episode.

• 39:42Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, if you technically want to, you could go to Kit Harrington's own comments on it outside of the show. And wherein he, he could be trying to deek us out, but he did say, I'm dead. You think he's deaking us out?

• 39:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it's like when Benedict Cimberavatch said that I'm not Khan, like, you know, it's a, they are, that's part of their job. That's like probably part of their contract. Like you will tell whatever lies to the press. We need you to tell in order to keep this dream alive. Yeah, no, because it's like, because at that point, it becomes then a spoiler for the next book, which then is a spoiler for everybody.

• 40:16Nilay Patel?

  They're not worried about spoiling the books anymore from the TV show. They've like, they've said, look, like, we're just going to keep, we know where the books are going. We talked to George R R Martin. We're just going to go forward.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  We're like in the nerdy weeds of the books versus show.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  Should I just say exactly what happened?

• 40:32Nilay Patel?

  No, no.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  Say what you think of this series, this season.

• 40:36Nilay Patel?

  I'm just like, aren't we all murdered out on this show?

• 40:40Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 40:40Nilay Patel?

  Is there anybody left to die? Like, do you care about anyone anymore?

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, yeah. I have to say, I think a lot of people were kind of grossed out or like over it with, when Arya killed Meryn Tran. And I thought it was kind of awesome. And I thought they actually managed to not make it gross the way that I thought it was going to be gross. I mean, she's undercover as a child prostitute, but luckily we don't really see that. We see a little bit of that being extremely unpleasant. But mostly she just pops up and gouges his eyes out, which is kind of great. And I didn't, yeah. And that was such an unconflicted feeling of satisfaction, that scene where it's like, yeah, I'll watch this guy get a towel shoved down his throat. I don't care.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  Whereas, you know, something like Cersei doing her big walk of shame, that's something that just gets very, very punishing after a while. But I think like, I think to good effect, though, I think that that was like, an interesting thing for her character to go through, as opposed to some other bad things that have happened to other characters on the show that don't seem as interesting, or don't seem like they're actually going to lead to a big change.

• 41:50Speaker 02

  Well, and I mean, at the end of that walk, it was, it was acted incredibly well, because she could have just done her, like, her resting Cersei face, where she's like, resolved and angry.

• 41:58Speaker 01

  It's too Cersei.

• 41:59Speaker 02

  But she didn't. Like, there was, there was like, there was like, more than the usual amount of like, I don't know, uncertainty in her expression when she got picked up by the mountain.

• 42:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 42:10Speaker 02

  Or whatever we're calling him now.

• 42:11Speaker 01

  She was just like, a broken person, at the end of it.

• 42:12Speaker 02

  But she like, tried to have resting Cersei face. She tried to be resolved, but like, couldn't quite pull it off.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  And she tried, she managed it for a really long time. And that was, that was kind of incredible to see. Like, you know, I think that's something you kind of wonder abstractly about that character. Like, how deep does her evilness go? Like, how long could she just hang on to that? Turns out, a really long time, while walking naked through a street while people are throwing food at her. She kind of maintains her face.

• 42:37Speaker 02

  Right.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  And then, you know, the last, whatever, 17 minutes, or however long that was, she kind of breaks down. But that, I mean, I mean, the thing about the mountain being brought back to, that's not in the books, right?

• 42:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  It is?

• 42:52Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:53Speaker 01

  Oh, I was told it wasn't.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  Well, he might not actually be back yet, but like, the dude is performing the dark experiments, and you can like, see it coming.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  Um, I'm into that. I'm into, yeah, I'm into, I mean, I'm into a new kind of weirdness on the show, or a new kind of like, vaguely magical weirdness.

• 43:11Speaker 02

  But we've been hinting at a different kind of vaguely magical weirdness, and like, this show, it just keeps building to resolutions that never arrive, or that get thwarted, and that's its only move.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 43:24Speaker 02

  There's never- No, its only move is to, I mean, you never get the resolutions. They either get thwarted, or you keep waiting. But the other thing that I'm tired of, is just oppressively, just- Throwing in our face, this is a bad dude.

• 43:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  Did you know that dude was bad? Let me show you again how bad that dude is. Oh, yeah, that dude that you heard was bad? Guess what?

• 43:44Speaker 01

  Still bad.

• 43:44Speaker 02

  Really bad.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  Well, this is something that comes up also in this, this, this weekend's premiere of True Detective.

• 43:53Speaker 02

  Oh, really?

• 43:53Speaker 01

  I don't know if you guys want to talk about that or not.

• 43:55Speaker 02

  I do.

• 43:55Speaker 01

  I realized that I had a very loud conversation with Lizzie in the office about an hour ago.

• 44:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, I put on headphones.

• 44:04Speaker 01

  Because we've both seen the, the first few episodes of it. And so I was like, oh, and when Colin Farrell, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And it was like, and then I felt really bad about that afterwards. But, um, but yeah, I mean, that's something that, you know, it can say, I can say in the broadest strokes is something that comes up in the reviews I've read for that so far. Just like, we get it. The world is, is dark and full of shadows. You know, it's, there's, there's not, it's, it's really hard to tell what the ends are of that. Aside from being, I guess, like, surface level interesting, just because it's, I, I guess we still think of it as being unexpected to see people that we root for doing bad things, even though that is the majority of entertainment now.

• 44:48Speaker 01

  It's, yeah, it's, it's hard to tell what thing the creators are trying to convey.

• 44:55Speaker 02

  Right, other than just general dystopia terrorism.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  And I'm not saying that.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  He dies at the end.

• 44:59Speaker 01

  Yes. And I'm not saying everything has to have a message. I'm like, I'm very, I, at the same time, I don't want to have like a moral to every episode of Game of Thrones. But, you know, I, a lot of Game of Thrones to me remains interesting because it's so massive that you can actually see these very incremental cause and effect things ripple throughout the world. And that's just satisfying, no matter what the thing is that happens. But, you know, bigger picture, like, why? Like, zoom way out and ask George R R Martin, okay, so you could have written anything that you wanted. Why did you choose to set your story in death and rape land? Like, is that a place you enjoy hanging out? I don't know.

• 45:43Speaker 01

  It's, it's, I mean, it's a matter of taste for sure, but it, and it's not something you can say is wrong or amoral to portray, but you can question the artist for wanting to spend time in that world.

• 45:54Speaker 02

  And who he chooses to redeem, right? Which is, the thing about the bad people in Game of Thrones is like,

• 46:00Nilay Patel?

  The people who were relentlessly portrayed as bad during the first season, almost all of them have experienced redemptive arcs. So like you feel really bad for Jamie Lannister in this last episode.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  Right.

• 46:12Nilay Patel?

  But in like the third episode, he's like killing a dude, you know, like,

• 46:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:16Nilay Patel?

  That's rough. That's a crazy arc for that person. But then other people, like Ramsey Bolton is never getting a redemptive arc. It's never gonna, we're never gonna feel bad for that guy.

• 46:27Speaker 02

  Right.

• 46:27Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, why do we choose, why, like, how are you making these choices?

• 46:31Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, and I think a thing that came up, I think somebody in the comments on one week compared it to the Joker, which I haven't read enough actual Batman comics to know about, but apparently that's a character that the authors of that comic have always gone out of their way to protect or let him win or have victories.

• 46:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 46:50Speaker 01

  To like, you know, supposedly to counteract the expected thing of having the hero always win and come out on top in the end. But after a while, and this is also something Addie kind of wrote about in her thing about kind of being overthrown, it's like, it's just as predictable and stereotypical at a certain point to have Ramsey Bolton always get his way.

• 47:12Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 47:12Speaker 02

  Right.

• 47:13Speaker 01

  There's nothing, you know, subversive about that anymore.

• 47:15Nilay Patel?

  Especially when you're saying that's like the dominant mode.

• 47:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:17Nilay Patel?

  Storytelling right now.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:19Nilay Patel?

  Which is like, bad people are doing stuff.

• 47:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. If, if somebody really, if somebody good had a baggage free, not even if there was baggage, I don't know, say if somebody just had a victory, a good person had a victory on the show, it would feel genuinely shocking at this point. It would be really surprising and you would keep checking to make sure there wasn't some kind of catch.

• 47:36Nilay Patel?

  Well, maybe, maybe this is all just an elaborate setup.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, I mean, you hope, you would, I mean, if that's how it ends, where everybody dies and everybody loses, and that, then it's a failure as a piece of storytelling.

• 47:45Nilay Patel?

  Who's left that's a good person in this story?

• 47:47Speaker 01

  Um, Arya, Tyrion, Daenerys, and her crew.

• 47:52Nilay Patel?

  Is Daenerys a good person?

• 47:54Speaker 01

  Daenerys is problematic, but I think she's ultimately a good person. Uh, I mean, she's somebody that is, has been presented to us as a protagonist.

• 48:03Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  She is flawed, for sure. Who else is good? I don't know.

• 48:09Nilay Patel?

  Jorah.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  Tommen.

• 48:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean.

• 48:12Speaker 02

  What's, what the little, little tree kid, little Bran.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  Little tree kid, yeah.

• 48:16Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, tree kid.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're gonna go back and visit him next season, apparently. He's gonna probably have completely gone through puberty, so it'll be weird.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  Hey man, when you, when you, when you mind meld with a tree, strange things happen to your body.

• 48:27Nilay Patel?

  I think it's, I think it's wild to watch this show, cause I, you know, I'm sure a lot of people do this. I watch Game of Thrones and I, I watched Silicon Valley. And Silicon Valley has the exact same narrative structure.

• 48:38Speaker 01

  Which is worse.

• 48:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but it's like, but it has the same narrative. It's like, oh, they're gonna, oh, they, oh, they fucked it up again.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:44Nilay Patel?

  Uh, oh, they got their own way. Oh, this totally predictable disaster has occurred. And it's just, it's just this drumbeat of like, they keep mining failure for humor. And, and like, the characters actually, I think, in this season of Silicon Valley got better.

• 48:59Speaker 01

  Oh, really?

• 48:59Nilay Patel?

  They got, yeah, they're like ever so much more developed. Like, you understand why they do some things sometimes. Many times you don't, but, you know, like, it's just funny because most of what they do is still coming so close to a victory and then like literally hitting the delete key in all of their code. It's like, why did you, why?

• 49:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's like, it's, it's, comedy is such a different thing to judge things by, though. I think we expect, or like, I don't know, like, how many times does, like, Jerry win in Seinfeld, you know, or, or, you know?

• 49:33Nilay Patel?

  Kind of a lot.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  I mean, he always gets girls. Yeah, yeah, but the George is like usually the funnier character Kramer is too.

• 49:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's true.

• 49:42Speaker 01

  Like, they become, they come off looking foolish in the end. Like, everybody looks like a jerk and they're like foolish. And that's, you know, why we laugh at them. Whereas if that's like set up for dramatic effect, it's sort of, I don't know, it can feel more repetitive.

• 49:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I think maybe that, it's just the watching them back to back where it's like, here's the exact same narrative structure being mined to make me laugh instead of to make me feel really bad.

• 50:05Speaker 02

  That's by design. That's, it's the, HBO understands that you need the unicorn chaser. I was not gonna say this, cause I was gonna write it after seeing how it goes with True Detective and then what's the new show, Ballers?

• 50:15Speaker 01

  Ballers and the, oh my god, ballers. Ballers and the brink, which looks terrible.

• 50:23Nilay Patel?

  The brink looks awful.

• 50:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:24Nilay Patel?

  The brink was one of those movies with Richard, Robert Downey Jr. in blackface. That's what the brink looks like to me.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Tropic Thunder.

• 50:31Nilay Patel?

  It looks like Tropic Thunder, but with like the UN.

• 50:34Speaker 01

  The best part of Tropic Thunder was the trailers. I think everything, that was the flaw of that movie is the trailers, the beginning of that movie are so good that the rest of the movie can't possibly like match up to, although it's been a while since I've seen it, so maybe I'll take that back.

• 50:48Speaker 02

  No, but so when you watch a really dark show, especially if you're like with somebody, you don't want to just, you might not want to sit there in that bummer zone. You might want to like watch something light to like cleanse your palate. And so HBO intentionally takes some like ha ha lighthearted thing and puts it after the dark thing.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:05Speaker 04

  To go on that, Dieter, um, props to the HBO scheduler planner, cause Game of Thrones ended one week ago and now True Detective season two is starting.

• 51:14Speaker 01

  They do that every year.

• 51:14Nilay Patel?

  That's just how they're doing it. I mean, that's just, that's.

• 51:17Speaker 04

  That's my contribution.

• 51:17Nilay Patel?

  You know, it's interesting about this, that thesis is that it is the exact opposite of Netflix's thesis, which is you watch the terrible torture porn of Daredevil and then you like.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  You keep doing it over and over and over again.

• 51:31Speaker 04

  Not to get on this, not to get on this hard, but I'm curious to hear Emily's thoughts on this, cause I don't know if I ever have. Emily, how do you feel about like what has happened to the idea of gathering together and watching a TV show versus just like binge watching the shit out of something, you know? I feel like it's sort of ruined like the water cooler conversation and this is just going to keep continuing with Netflix.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  Oh, you mean like binging something?

• 51:53Speaker 04

  Where they just dump, they dump the episodes on Netflix and you just watch it whenever you want versus like, oh, did you see Game of Thrones last night?

• 52:00Speaker 01

  Oh, I think that there's something very, very flawed with Netflix's model. I mean, I think that they, I don't see a situation when which they'll stop. I think there's some other kid's shows they roll out week by week or they do a couple of episodes at a time, but like.

• 52:13Speaker 04

  What are your thoughts, bad or good?

• 52:15Speaker 01

  So you didn't mean, you didn't mean watching together like watching in a room physically with other people?

• 52:20Speaker 04

  I meant, here, let me rephrase. Is it?

• 52:23Speaker 01

  Cause that's weird. That's gross and weird.

• 52:27Speaker 04

  It is a very simple question. Do you, do you like the fact that Netflix dumps seasons at a time?

• 52:33Speaker 01

  No, I don't. Yeah, no, I think it makes it, well, I mean, and I've only experienced that from the perspective as somebody who has to either edit things that people write about that or write about those things. So that makes it hard because it's like, what do I do? When do I put this stuff out? And I mean, I guess the only right answer is to watch all of those things as quickly as you can. And then write apparently you're very clear headed, good, well perspective thoughts about the show, which is just isn't going to happen after like bleeding your eyes out from watching like 12 hours of House of Cards. I mean, I don't, I don't know. There's, I think that they do, they, they produce the, the shows differently.

• 53:16Speaker 04

  Interesting.

• 53:16Speaker 01

  From, yeah, on Netflix versus HBO. I think, yeah. And it's funny because you don't think of TV as an episodic format anymore when you're watching things on Netflix. It's not good or bad. It's just like the difference between an episode written by one person or directed by one person. Or like, it all kind of bleeds together. You're like, oh, when did that happen to Piper? I can't even remember.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  If we're going to talk about random Netflix things, can I just say that?

• 53:43Speaker 04

  Go for it.

• 53:43Speaker 02

  I really, there's something I really miss watching on Netflix. Movies.

• 53:48Speaker 01

  I watch movies.

• 53:49Speaker 02

  They don't have movies. I don't know. The, the catalog just seems like, there's like one thing a month that I like discover is like, oh yeah, that that's worth watching. But it's just a, it's all TV. That's all they push it on me is TV, TV, TV. And like, the whole reason I signed up for Netflix was for movies.

• 54:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I think, I think Netflix is just morphing into an all online version of HBO or HBO is morphing into semi TV version of Netflix because you're going to have these cycling through of different movies, which is exactly what HBO does. I mean, I watch movies on HBO Go sometimes. Like, I mean, I watch movies on both HBO Go and Netflix, like, just depending on, you know, how much housework I have to do or how many dishes I have to wash.

• 54:33Speaker 01

  But, yeah, I mean, it's, but it's the same thing. It's like a cycling through of a different catalog of movies every month or couple of months. And then, uh, and then your big shows, your big shows you have to watch so you can talk to your friends and maintain a social life.

• 54:45Nilay Patel?

  I just think the thing, hmm.

• 54:49Nilay Patel?

  I have so many thoughts.

• 54:49Speaker 04

  You could do it, Neelai.

• 54:51Nilay Patel?

  No, it's just, it's, Netflix had this line, they just kept, Reed Haskins kept saying, we have to come HBO before HBO becomes us, right?

• 54:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:58Nilay Patel?

  And what HBO did was they tried to become Netflix. They hired a guy from Microsoft. They built this huge tech platform. And they're like, you know what? This blows. Like, this is awful. This is a huge waste of money. Screw it. They threw it all out. They hired MLB Advanced Media to build HBO Now. It's a commodity. That company will just build it for you. And now they have it. And now they're spending all of their money on Game of Thrones and Ballers and True Detective.

• 55:24Speaker 02

  And marketing.

• 55:25Nilay Patel?

  And marketing, but they're better at it.

• 55:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:27Nilay Patel?

  Like, I would say that the average HBO show is better plotted and paced and makes more sense than any Netflix series that I've seen so far. Except perhaps the first, the first season of House of Cards.

• 55:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, well, HBO still has to deal with a slate of, of shows or like a schedule. Like, so they can only really run, like, four shows maybe at a time, like, weekly. Usually three though, because it's like one big drama, or no, two big dramas and then, uh, two comedies. That's usually what they have. Uh, at any different, any given point of the year. Whereas I feel like Netflix keeps piling on the shows. There are so many Netflix shows now. Most of them I've never seen before.

• 56:10Nilay Patel?

  Right. But I always say that there's one main Netflix show that you're supposed to watch.

• 56:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:14Nilay Patel?

  Any given, like, Orange is the New Black, like, that's what I'm supposed to be watching right now.

• 56:17Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I don't know. It's also like, it's also just a, I mean, HBO's been around for a long time and they kind of have always had a little bit of a patina of prestige to them. Like, that's even before they started doing, like, TV shows or doing original series. It's been, uh, it's been like a thing, a fancy thing that rich people have to have HBO, so.

• 56:38Speaker 02

  I didn't have it growing up.

• 56:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I don't know anybody. Again, it was not a normal thing.

• 56:43Speaker 04

  Been around for?

• 56:44Speaker 01

  Eighties.

• 56:45Speaker 02

  Nothing.

• 56:47Nilay Patel?

  My sister had given the choice between MTV and HBO and we picked HBO.

• 56:52Speaker 04

  1972, wow.

• 56:54Nilay Patel?

  I really wanted MTV, my sister was older and she got whatever she wanted, stupid.

• 56:59Speaker 04

  Oh my god.

• 56:59Nilay Patel?

  I've been told that, I've been told that this story.

• 57:01Speaker 04

  Now that we spoil the crap out of Game of Thrones for Jon, he's like, "Stop Vergecasting."

• 57:06Nilay Patel?

  I've been told that my stories of sibling rivalry with my irritatingly perfect sister are not great Vergecast material. Jon's literally telling me to shut up. Alright Sam, do the social, do the social work here.

• 57:17Speaker 04

  Okay. Snapchat, TheRealVerge, add us there, because Snapchat is where it's at. You should follow us on Periscope, because we Periscope quite frequently. We're youtube.com/theverge also. All of our videos hit there as soon as we post them, and there are great things coming, so look out for them.

• 57:35Nilay Patel?

  Cool. And then hit us up on iTunes. Emily has a great show called Verge ESP, along with Liz Pato. You had an episode this week or next week?

• 57:44Speaker 01

  Next week.

• 57:45Nilay Patel?

  Next week, any episodes coming out. That's a great show. What's Tech with Chris Plant, also on our iTunes page. That's just iTunes.com/theverge. Sam is Sam Schaefer on Twitter, Dieter is Backlon, I am Reckless, Emily is Emily Yoshida. Thank you so much for listening. That was The Vergecast, rock and roll. Paul? Oh my god. And Walt Mossberg on The Vergecast next week. Get ready.

• 58:05Speaker 04

  What?

• 58:05Nilay Patel?

  Get ready.