How Growth Is Killing Video Games

In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by Gita Jackson and Nathan Grayson of worker-owned games site Aftermath to talk about how the growth-at-all-costs mindset is destroying games, how fandom culture naturally feeds extremism, how Aftermath does games journalism differently, and how despite everything, great games are still being made. Gita Jackson: https://bsky.app/profile/xoxogossipgita.bsky.social https://bsky.app/profile/xoxogossipgita.bsky.social https://aftermath.site/author/gita-jackson https://aftermath.site/author/gita-jackson Nathan Grayson: https://aftermath.site/author/nathan-grayson https://bsky.app/profile/nathangrayson.bsky.social Stream Big: The Triumphs and Turmoils of Twitch and the Stars Behind the Screen https://www.amazon.com/Stream-Big-Triumphs-Turmoils-Twitch/dp/1982156767 Article on Skin Deep from Aftermath: https://aftermath.site/skin-deep-steam-next-fest-demo-impressions-pc https://aftermath.site/skin-deep-steam-next-fest-demo-impressions-pc The New York Times: Video Games Can’t Afford to Look This Good https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/26/arts/video-games-graphics-budgets.html Aftermath - Fuck WB https://aftermath.site/warner-bros-discovery-games-wonder-woman-monolith-shut-down Pyre - https://www.supergiantgames.com/games/pyre/ Supergiant Games - https://www.supergiantgames.com Avowed - https://store.steampowered.com/app/2457220/Avowed/ --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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• 2:30Ed Zitron?

  Alright, I think it's time we blow this scene, get everybody in their stuff together. Okay, 3, 2, 1, let's podcast. Welcome to Better Offline, I'm your host Ed Zitron.

• 2:48Ed Zitron?

  Today I'm joined by the esteemed Gita Jackson and Nathan Grayson of independent gaming site Aftermath. Nathan, of course, has a new book out called Stream Big: The Triumph and Turmoils of Twitch and the Stars Behind the Screen. Both of you, thank you for being here.

• 3:01Speaker 06

  Thank you for having us.

• 3:02Speaker 07

  Yeah, no problem, it's super fun.

• 3:03Ed Zitron?

  Hell yeah. So today we're talking about the games industry, which I think we can all agree is going well.

• 3:08Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's going super good, bigger than Hollywood, as we all know.

• 3:11Ed Zitron?

  So, to that point, Nathan, what is actually going on right now? Because it feels like over the last few years, I used to be a games journalist, but I've kind of dropped out of the industry stuff. What's going on?

• 3:22Speaker 06

  Um, well, right now, a bunch of games companies are realizing that they, well, they've decided that what they need to do is make fewer, bigger games. Um, and so they're laying a lot of people off in pursuit of that, because games are, in their minds, a hits-driven business.

• 3:38Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 3:38Speaker 06

  And so in order to achieve that, they're just like, okay, let's put all of our, all of our eggs in these increasingly smaller baskets. And if one of these lands, then great, we have the next, like, League of Legends, or the next, like, Fortnite, or whatever. And if they fail, then it's a catastrophe, and we're going to lay a bunch of people off. And the only people who will not suffer from this are the executives who are making these bad decisions. And that keeps happening over and over and over.

• 4:01Ed Zitron?

  So what is a hit, though? Like, what, how do they define a hit?

• 4:05Speaker 07

  They've defined it by Hollywood terms, right?

• 4:07Ed Zitron?

  Which are?

• 4:08Speaker 07

  Which are, you, you want to be, uh, have a level of cultural impact, one that, uh, is inescapable. Uh, Fortnite is a very good example, because literally every child plays Fortnite.

• 4:21Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 4:22Speaker 07

  And you can play it on every device, everyone suddenly understands the terms, uh, through which that game is, is sort of, is made and played.

• 4:32Speaker 06

  At birth, every child is given an iPad with Fortnite on it.

• 4:35Ed Zitron?

  It's that or Minecraft.

• 4:36Speaker 07

  Of those two. And then also, um, there is a saying that a lot of executives love to tout when they talk about the financial success of their industry, which is that uh, video games are a bigger industry of more by more, there's more money in video games than than Hollywood. And I, I don't really think that that's true.

• 4:53Ed Zitron?

  Yeah. Is there any proof behind that?

• 4:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:55Speaker 07

  Well, I mean, they might, games that are very, very, very successful, like uh, Elden Ring is another great example of it, just a smash hit where millions of, millions of games were sold. Um, but the thing is that money that you make often goes immediately back into recouping all the cost of development because games take a lot longer to make than a movie and require a lot more people to make them.

• 5:18Ed Zitron?

  And a lot more things can go wrong.

• 5:20Speaker 07

  Yes, very much so.

• 5:20Speaker 06

  A lot of game projects, a lot of projects in this day and age are rebooted repeatedly over the course of their development. Like that happened recently with uh, Dragon Age The Veil Guard, a game that was originally meant to be like a live service multiplayer game, which is a weird time for that series to take.

• 5:35Ed Zitron?

  And for the, for the listeners who are not like avid gamers, so a live service game is?

• 5:39Speaker 07

  It's a game that sort of exists in perpetuity, right? The idea is that it has uh, seasons of narrative and and uh, gameplay.

• 5:47Speaker 06

  Not even necessarily narrative, just like new stuff coming out.

• 5:50Ed Zitron?

  Like, can you pay a monthly fee?

• 5:51Speaker 07

  Yeah. Again, Fortnite is a very good example of this. Fortnite ha- refreshes the maps that you use to play the, the game on. They refresh that every occasionally. They, they call it seasons, like seasons of television. And they, um, there's always just new skins, new items, new things to spend your money on.

• 6:10Speaker 06

  New collaborations with major brands. I just, on the way over here, there was an ad for like Cowboy Bebop skins in the game now.

• 6:16Ed Zitron?

  Which is sick. But Destiny, so Destiny two is the one I remember with that way.

• 6:21Speaker 06

  Destiny two is a live service game.

• 6:22Ed Zitron?

  And that's uh, owned by Sony PlayStation now. Well, not Sony Interactive Entertainment technically, but it, it's, and so this is kind of, from my experience at least, gaming a shit ton when I was younger, by which I mean like two years ago.

• 6:36Ed Zitron?

  But the fact is that games now aren't just allowed to be good once, they have to be good forever.

• 6:41Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 6:41Speaker 07

  Yes, you have to be the biggest game ever in order to be considered a success.

• 6:47Ed Zitron?

  Forever.

• 6:48Speaker 07

  For forever, like not just when the game comes out, but also every single month after that for the next year.

• 6:56Speaker 06

  Well, which also like I think works very much in conjunction with kind of like the line go up mentality of business in general, like your game also has to be a line that's always going up.

• 7:05Ed Zitron?

  Yes, and it can't simply be successful in a linear sense. It can't just be like a game you sell. It is a game you are constantly rebooting. Like even with Marvel Rivals, I heard, a very successful game, Bone by Netzy, Nety's even.

• 7:19Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 7:19Ed Zitron?

  And they just laid off a bunch of people.

• 7:21Speaker 07

  They laid off all of their American.

• 7:24Speaker 06

  It was like under.

• 7:25Ed Zitron?

  What actually happened? Oh, so it wasn't a huge layoff?

• 7:28Speaker 06

  Yeah. So this was also like, it was part of a larger Nety's plan to kind of divest from outside of China.

• 7:33Ed Zitron?

  Oh, okay.

• 7:34Speaker 06

  Yeah. And so like, I think they were planning to do this even before Marvel Rivals took off.

• 7:37Speaker 07

  No, but I get what you're getting at though. Cause my favorite example of this phenomenon is Bioshock Infinite, a game that was incredibly successful, hugely critically acclaimed.

• 7:47Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 7:47Speaker 07

  After the game came out, the studio shuttered. Like it was over.

• 7:51Ed Zitron?

  Immediately.

• 7:51Speaker 07

  Immediately. Couldn't recoup the costs essentially. Like there was no amount of money they could make on that game that was financially successful and was critically acclaimed to, to give back to the studio in order for making it like financially prop, like a financially stable institution. And then all those developers scattered to the winds. That was kind of the end of major game development in Boston for a very long time.

• 8:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, until like literally now with CD Projekt, uh, getting rude over there.

• 8:19Ed Zitron?

  Are they starting up a Boston arm?

• 8:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, so they're making the next cyberpunk.

• 8:22Ed Zitron?

  And what's weird is CD Projekt is like, they've, they were a very, that cyberpunk 2077, 277, right?

• 8:30Speaker 07

  277.

• 8:30Ed Zitron?

  I did play it. I don't know why I'm acting like I like, don't have a gaming PC. I have like a gaming PC with like two motherboards inside. It's beautiful. Anyway.

• 8:38Speaker 06

  Yeah. You also, sitting right behind us is one of the whitest monitors I've seen in my whole life.

• 8:43Speaker 07

  It's beautiful.

• 8:44Ed Zitron?

  Beautiful Odyssey G9 there. It's amazing. But that one was really tortured because the game was rushed out. And I don't think I've seen in a while, like a game that rushed and it ended up being dog shit.

• 8:55Speaker 06

  I mean, if we're talking about the broader state of video games, another characteristic, I think, is that most big games these days get rushed out in some capacity. It's just less glaring than it was for Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk was a lot of functional issues.

• 9:10Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 9:10Speaker 06

  Now, what you get is a lot of games that are rushed out but polished. So they have all of these like mechanical problems and like other more deep seated issues that where they could have solved it just by like, you know, giving the developers more time to cook.

• 9:22Ed Zitron?

  Hmm.

• 9:23Speaker 06

  Um, but they know that people will be off put by a game that doesn't work. So they make sure it works.

• 9:30Ed Zitron?

  But it's not good.

• 9:31Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 9:32Ed Zitron?

  What, can you give me an example?

• 9:33Speaker 06

  Um, Dragon Age, Dragon Age The Veil Guard is a basic example.

• 9:35Ed Zitron?

  Was it bad?

• 9:36Speaker 07

  Okay, so I'm a huge.

• 9:38Speaker 06

  Super duper mid.

• 9:39Speaker 07

  I'm a huge Dragon Age fan and I was really looking forward to this game because I'm like invested in the narrative and the characters and Dragon Age Inquisition. I think like a lot of people who if you've played, are listening to this and played Dragon Age Inquisition, you know, the experience of you're incredibly fucking depressed, you completely just mainline a game and the writing and the characters are so good, it becomes your entire world and you can just live inside that fandom. And that was me for a little bit. So I waited like 10 years for this game to come out. And the longer a game stays in development, the, generally speaking, the worse it will be when you actually get your hands on it. And when the game came out, it worked and it functioned, but it was not finely tuned. There were, you could tell and feel when you played it, there were things that should

• 10:24Speaker 07

  have been there that were not there. And it felt empty and like it was missing things.

• 10:30Ed Zitron?

  Like, and with role playing games, it's extremely important to get the mechanics right.

• 10:33Speaker 06

  Right. And like the, this was a byproduct of just like how the game was made. So again, it started, it started many years ago. It was like, it began development like all, nearly a decade ago as one kind of game, as a multiplayer live service game. And then over time, EA and BioWare were like, this isn't working, let's reboot it mid-development and try something else. That didn't work. They had key personnel leave. They're like, let's reboot it again into something else. And that's what became the game that came out, which is like this mishmash of all these mechanics and assets they came up with over time.

• 11:04Ed Zitron?

  Hmm.

• 11:05Speaker 06

  Internally, the way this played out is they were like, well, again, it needs to reach a certain like quality and review bar for the cell. So let's just make sure that it feels polished. Like let's cobble all this stuff together, but make sure it looks nice.

• 11:18Ed Zitron?

  It has the smell and the taste of an AAA game without actually being fun. So Nathan, what is it that makes them so expensive though? Like, what is the cost center? Is it people? Is it comput- is it something we don't know?

• 11:31Speaker 06

  So this is the thing. I, there, there's been a lot of discourse around like the increasing, you know, level of fidelity that you need for a AAA game. And like all of these various concerns about the number of people that you need to create all these assets and maintain that. But I think that Jason Schreier in particular has done really good reporting on the real problem, which is mismanagement. At almost every level, executives making poor decisions while siphoning away millions and millions of dollars from a project.

• 11:58Ed Zitron?

  Siphoning it from, to where though?

• 12:00Speaker 06

  Themselves.

• 12:01Speaker 07

  Themselves.

• 12:02Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 12:02Speaker 07

  Often themselves, yes.

• 12:04Ed Zitron?

  How does that work?

• 12:05Speaker 06

  Go check out like the kind of money that's from Zelnick.

• 12:07Ed Zitron?

  Oh, okay. So it's like the CEOs are making obscene amounts of money.

• 12:11Speaker 06

  In a lot of cases, yeah.

• 12:12Ed Zitron?

  Fucking hell.

• 12:13Speaker 07

  So often in, at E3, rest in peace, and other video games sort of industry conferences, they will make comparisons to Hollywood between themselves and Hollywood.

• 12:23Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 12:24Speaker 07

  They want to be a part of the entertainment industry.

• 12:27Ed Zitron?

  They want to be paid like David Zaslove.

• 12:28Speaker 07

  Exactly, exactly. But there's huge differences between what, how Hollywood operates and how the video game industry operates. And the main difference is there, these are not, the people who work on games are not unionized craft people.

• 12:42Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 12:43Speaker 07

  With a culture of unionization in their workplaces. So they really can, like, you are a contract worker, you sign on for a gig. And if you aren't there when the game is completed, you don't get your name in the credits and you just have to move in a herd from studio to studio to studio.

• 13:01Ed Zitron?

  And all those credits important, I'm guessing.

• 13:03Speaker 07

  They're very important in order to get better paying jobs, you know?

• 13:06Ed Zitron?

  Just put it on your LinkedIn.

• 13:08Speaker 07

  No, I mean, especially if you're working on a project like at Monolith, the studio that's shuttered this week, they were, they're two years in. To development on a Wonder Woman game and Wonder Woman, I, I, and I think you're a DC Comics person.

• 13:21Ed Zitron?

  I'm, I'm more of a Marvel person, but I'm familiar with Wonder Woman.

• 13:23Speaker 07

  Yes, I hope so. Well, it's like, it's interesting that you say that because like Wonder Woman in comparison to the other two big heroes at DC. I'm a big DC Comics person. Uh, Superman and Batman, they've both had cartoons, movies, the gamut, like video games, everything. Even Superman had an extremely bad series of video games.

• 13:42Speaker 06

  Superman sixty-four.

• 13:43Speaker 07

  Oh, yes.

• 13:44Ed Zitron?

  A classic.

• 13:45Speaker 07

  Uh, God. Um, but there's, with Wonder Woman, there's been no cartoons. There are a couple of flagship comics, but they've had a lot of a hard-earned time finding really good writers, write really good Wonder Woman books. And there have been zero games. This would have been like the first game there. They worked on it for two years and there's a lot of people now who cannot even talk about what they did on these games. They can't show the art that they made these games.

• 14:07Ed Zitron?

  Is it NDA? Is, oh, well, they don't have the assets. They can't.

• 14:10Speaker 07

  Yeah, they, they, assets don't belong to them.

• 14:12Speaker 06

  Publicized.

• 14:13Speaker 07

  They haven't been publicized and these are also contract workers, so they don't have the rights to anything that they have worked on.

• 14:17Ed Zitron?

  And I just want to say, none of these are actionable legal threats, but Monolife Studios made one of my, two of my most favorite games, Gita. We were talking about this when we came in, um, Lord of the Rings, Shadow of Mordor, and then Shadow of War, two of the best games ever made. I have not returned, only Hades is a, Hades is a game I think I will be playing until I'm an old man.

• 14:38Speaker 07

  Yes, absolutely.

• 14:39Ed Zitron?

  But Shadow of War especially, like, these are amazing games and these are games that the systems are perfect and they're beautiful.

• 14:47Speaker 07

  And they, they give you that feeling that I think these major studios are trying to chase in these enormous games like Cyberpunk twenty seventy-seven. This game, this world is a living world.

• 14:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 14:57Speaker 07

  This world, things are happening inside of it, even when you are not there is the feeling you get when you play them.

• 15:03Speaker 06

  Oh, the orcs are talking shit about you behind your back.

• 15:05Ed Zitron?

  And that's the thing. So to explain this game to people who've not, who even don't play games, I really recommend it. So what it is, is it's kind of a open world game where you run around, you're some Lord of the Rings fellow. I do not remember the story, not going to try and remember, but the big thing about it is something called the Nemesis system. And there are these orcs and various troll creatures that will, and they're all generated procedurally, even flawlessly said that word. And where they come up and they're like someone of bile and they'll come up and they'll be covered in pustules and they'll be like, oh, man. You pissed me off. And then you're able to, it kind of mirrors my real life in that some horrible creature comes up to me and goes, you don't, you pissed me off, Citron. And then I convert them to my side. So you can convert these orcs and they follow you around and they have these orc charts.

• 15:50Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 15:50Ed Zitron?

  Of like-

• 15:51Speaker 07

  And if you die to an orc in a combat encounter, that orc will then go back to his little orc friends and be like, I fucking fucked up, Ezitron.

• 15:59Ed Zitron?

  And they'll talk about it.

• 16:00Speaker 06

  And they'll talk about it and they'll talk to you later and they'll recount specifically like how they killed you and stuff. Like they keep that in mind.

• 16:06Ed Zitron?

  And it's quite literally what I love about video games writ large. It's just like a weird freak system full of weird goblin creatures. You can send them to kill each other.

• 16:15Speaker 07

  Have you played Dwarf Fortress ever?

• 16:17Ed Zitron?

  I've tried. It never really stuck.

• 16:18Speaker 07

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna teach you how to play Dwarf Fortress. It's because it's this thing, right? There are characters with memory, right? And they learn things and they have personalities that change. Like this is a game that's made by two guys, two brothers. Um, until very recently, it was literally just the two of them.

• 16:37Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 16:38Speaker 07

  And like, it is so fascinating how you can have that same sort of magical black box experience of there's magic inside of this. There's a personality inside of this. One of them comes from two brothers that have worked on this thing on and off for like 20 fucking years of their life. And the other is an enormous studio using the IP Lord of the Rings.

• 16:58Ed Zitron?

  And, and I just want to be clear about a few things. One, this is one of the few games I've heard like unilaterally loved by games journalists. Like, sure, there are people who don't like the charmer, but anyone who has even a smell of RPGs loves this shit.

• 17:09Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 17:09Ed Zitron?

  I also want to add the WB Games CEO JB Perret and WB Games former CEO David Haddad. You are enemies of better offline.

• 17:19Ed Zitron?

  You are enemies of this show. Your growth at all costs for our economy bullshit will, you will be hated by all the people who listen to this show. So the reason that this, I'm literally looking at Nathan's story about this. The reason that Monolith got shut down is just that Warner Brothers cannot run a fucking studio. They're stupid and bad in any industry.

• 17:37Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 17:37Speaker 06

  Yeah. Like, I mean, you know, they've also been tanking tons of like television and movie properties too.

• 17:42Speaker 07

  Yeah, no, the Warner Brothers-

• 17:43Speaker 06

  It's just been their MO ever since that.

• 17:45Speaker 07

  Warner Brothers Discovery is on my shit list and has been for a long time. It's an incredible, it's incredible Hollywood studio with so much incredible history.

• 17:52Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 17:53Speaker 07

  The whole story of Coyote versus Acme has been, I just want to jump off a bridge.

• 17:57Ed Zitron?

  Can you run me through that for the listeners?

• 17:59Speaker 07

  There is, there was a movie in production Coyote versus Acme, an adaptation of the Looney Tunes cartoon, you know, the coyote, Road Runner and the Coyote. And it had John Cena in it and it, by all accounts, everyone who worked on it said it was incredible. It used the.

• 18:17Ed Zitron?

  It's a James Gunn movie.

• 18:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, James Gunn movie. He, it was also, um, what's the movie?

• 18:24Ed Zitron?

  And James Gunn, by the way, for the listeners, Guardians of the Galaxy, Suicide Squad.

• 18:28Speaker 07

  Upcoming Superman movie.

• 18:29Ed Zitron?

  Upcoming Superman.

• 18:30Speaker 07

  Which I'm freaking psyched about.

• 18:32Ed Zitron?

  I love it.

• 18:32Speaker 07

  I'm so excited.

• 18:33Ed Zitron?

  Anyway, sorry.

• 18:34Speaker 07

  Yeah, but you know, it was a, gonna be a Roger Rabbit type thing, a mixed media animation and, and real life stuff. Like a lot of the stuff that moviegoers actually really, really love seeing real stunts and real effects, not CGI, not VFX, that kind of thing.

• 18:48Ed Zitron?

  And Chippendales movie did really well as well on Disney Plus, did a very similar thing. Anyway, continue.

• 18:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. And they, um, the movie's wrapped, it is totally, fully completed, shelved it. Shelled it.

• 18:58Ed Zitron?

  Literally for tax reasons, right?

• 19:00Speaker 07

  Literally for tax reasons, no one will ever see it.

• 19:02Ed Zitron?

  And David Zaslove, if you go back to the shareholder supremacy two parter, you will learn all about him. Jack Welch, the CEO of GE who created the modern culture of layoffs, literally the guy who didn't invent layoffs. But if you go back to those episodes, there's a story of Jack Welch, CEO of GE, well, up, upcoming CEO, one of the candidates for it, was running several divisions and came up with this idea, what if we just laid people off to increase profits? And at the time layoffs were considered something you only did as a last resort. But Jack Welch, Jack Welch thought, what if we did this? He did it and everyone else went, that's a great fucking idea. Number go up. The reason I'm bringing this up is that David Zaslove, CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery, once referred to Jack Welch as a, like a big brother to him.

• 19:45Speaker 07

  Oh my fucking god.

• 19:46Ed Zitron?

  I think, I just want you to know, everything I've been doing for the last few years has. Driven me insane.

• 19:52Speaker 07

  I'm turning into the Joker in real time.

• 19:54Ed Zitron?

  No, the makeup is appearing on our faces. But Coyote versus Acme was like Will Forte was gonna be in it. It was like gonna be a very, like, it very clearly would have done really well.

• 20:02Speaker 07

  Like, really, really well.

• 20:04Ed Zitron?

  And they just shelved it for tax reasons. This is the same company that owns WB Games, which owns Monolith, which shut down Monolith.

• 20:11Speaker 07

  This is the, like, it is like the tech industry-ification of the entire entertainment industry.

• 20:19Speaker 06

  Right, of pretty much everything.

• 20:20Speaker 07

  Which is just disastrous for art in general. You can see it very visually in film, in cinema, just sort of. I used to be a person that just fucking loved block, like blockbuster action movies. I love them.

• 20:32Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that.

• 20:33Speaker 07

  In the summer, when it's hot out, nothing better you can do than go to a theater for two hours with air conditioning and just enjoy mindless action. Except they all started to suck when Disney realized that you can feed people, like, not, like, the suggestion of a plot, but not actually a story.

• 20:50Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 20:51Speaker 07

  Essentially. You just sort of allude to things that will happen in the future and you can make billions of dollars off of that. And you don't actually have to shoot on set. You can just put people in front of a green screen and then un-organized VFX workers can fill in everything else for you.

• 21:05Ed Zitron?

  Right, and this is also something that fed into the creation of one of the worst things fandoms.

• 21:11Speaker 07

  Yes. I mean, I love the experience of being in a fandom, but there is this tribalistic thing that is disturbing to me.

• 21:19Ed Zitron?

  Let me be a little more specific, because I'm a huge fan of many things. Like, I'm, I've seen Queens of the Stone Age 16 times.

• 21:25Speaker 07

  Bullshit.

• 21:26Ed Zitron?

  I'm, I'm like, I'm a nasty freak when it comes to the person of interest. Like, I really love my shit. I consider fandom, or at least perhaps I'm just describing the worst elements of it, as something separate, where it's not really about liking something, it's about memorizing facts.

• 21:39Speaker 07

  It is about being a defender of the thing you like.

• 21:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, I was gonna say, it's about being in a tribe. And like, this comes up a lot in my book, is like, you know, the ways that fandoms can behave. One of the things that I found especially interesting in the course of reporting it is that there are also fandoms around just like pure hatred. One of my chapters is about Kefels, who is a streamer.

• 22:00Ed Zitron?

  Oh, yeah.

• 22:00Speaker 06

  Controversial, you know, did some dumb bullshit, but also like managed to attract this hate mob from Kiwi Farms.

• 22:07Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 22:08Speaker 06

  And when I interviewed her while she was still like on the run.

• 22:11Ed Zitron?

  What was Kiwi Farms? Sorry.

• 22:12Speaker 06

  Um, they are an online forum dedicated to like doxing people. So finding very personal information and you know, outing it and then coming after people.

• 22:20Speaker 07

  And like, of course, they particularly target marginalized people because they, the goal and the goal of most hate fandoms is to get a reaction out of the person that you hate.

• 22:29Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 22:30Speaker 07

  And it's like to cause them pain and then to use that pain as your personal source of entertainment.

• 22:34Speaker 06

  But uh, what I was gonna say.

• 22:36Ed Zitron?

  Be careful, yes.

• 22:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, is that in her particular case, you know, she was like showing me some of the things that these people were doing in their free time. Um, in addition to directly harassing her and these involved like making what were effectively like fan art and even fan songs about her. Just from the perspective of someone who despises her instead of somebody who likes her, but the mechanics were all really similar. And so like fandom can be this thing that coalesces, um, using the exact same again, like sets of tools and behaviors. But around despising someone as opposed to liking them.

• 23:11Ed Zitron?

  So this is the thing that really gets me because I have to wonder if, the reason I brought up fandoms other than just despising them is, I have to wonder if they're not part of, not saying that it's their fault, but I feel like the entertainment industry and by extension, the games industry is really trying to sell to them. When Marvel, I love the first run of Marvel movies. I'm a little pig. Show me, if it's the charming people.

• 23:32Speaker 07

  The first Iron Man movie is fucking amazing. It is a really great film and it's because they let Favreau be Favreau.

• 23:39Ed Zitron?

  But that's the thing, you had the charming people doing the things and they were talking and it was enjoying, enjoyable to watch them. But it feels like it really got into the hog slop era where it's just, you like this guy, look at this guy, look, we've got Jack Black and we've got Lizzo in the Mandalorian. Look, we got, you remember that thing from that thing? Look, it's, it's the dark troopers from the Star Wars game. You remember dark forces? We were making dark sources suck it.

• 23:59Speaker 07

  Knights of Ren, they fly now, blah, blah, blah. You know, it's like.

• 24:02Ed Zitron?

  Yes, but it's, the reason I bring that up is. That's a commodity at this point. It's if it stops being about telling a story when it's more symbolic, when it's more about just people being factions against or for something, it's just, can I sell you a fucking product? And when it comes to, I actually wanted to ask with Twitch, the cultures around streamers, are those different to like forums culture or social media culture, like the more asynchronous culture? Is there something about the live experience that changes things?

• 24:33Speaker 06

  Oh yeah, completely. Because I mean, for one, there's just the basic fact that if you are in a Twitch chat, you can say something that the person who's on screen might immediately react to, and that people in that chat might immediately react to. And that immediacy changes everything about it. Because I mean, just think about like, how we have conversations. If somebody is able to immediately react, they are not going to consider what they're saying very much. They're just going to go for it, especially if it's like a fast moving Twitch chat. Everyone's just trying to say the most incendiary thing possible, because that's all that gets noticed. Saying something measured or interesting.

• 25:05Speaker 07

  The perfect example of this is Hassan Piker saying, off the cuff, America deserved 9/11, which I know is not what he meant to say, but he meant to say, America created the conditions that created the people that delivered 9/11 to us.

• 25:23Speaker 06

  Even that, right? Like, he explained that during that same stream.

• 25:26Ed Zitron?

  But it already happened.

• 25:28Speaker 06

  Well, and also what happened is that people then clipped that out of context, and then, you know, surfaced it on all these other platforms.

• 25:34Speaker 07

  And now this clip will haunt him forever. Every time someone is mad at him, he has a similarly sized like hate fandom that is constantly, constantly trying to get a rise out of him. And it, it,

• 25:46Ed Zitron?

  Really?

• 25:47Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 25:48Speaker 06

  Ethan Klein, Destiny.

• 25:49Ed Zitron?

  Oh god.

• 25:50Speaker 07

  Really wild.

• 25:52Ed Zitron?

  Different kind of Destiny to the game.

• 25:53Speaker 07

  Yeah, Destiny that sucks. Destiny that infuriates me for other reasons.

• 25:59Ed Zitron?

  I'm gonna get him and Norman Finkelstein on.

• 26:01Speaker 06

  Mr. Boyadi. When you, you, when you speak, it's like Wikipedia read to me by Satan. Holy shit, that was incredible.

• 26:14Ed Zitron?

  I've been thinking about that too much.

• 26:23Ed Zitron?

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• 27:08Ed Zitron?

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• 28:33Ed Zitron?

  It's funny as well, because as a, just a gentleman podcaster with a decent sized fandom, I don't get as many insane peo- I don't get people threatening or hating me, other than everyone, because they wish I was dead, but it feels like there's something altogether different specifically about games. Because I left games journalism in like, 2008.

• 28:53Speaker 06

  Oh man, you've-

• 28:54Ed Zitron?

  And no, I like, and even then, someone fucking doxed me. I got doxed because there was someone, I reviewed a game, I'm not even gonna name, just because it also leads to the funniest YouTube in the world, but there was a MMORPG review that fucking sucked. And they claimed I didn't play it.

• 29:09Speaker 07

  Of course.

• 29:10Ed Zitron?

  And then someone like posted my parents' address, and I'd moved to New York, and I really had to stop myself being like, "Miss me bitch", but, um, but then I emailed the developer, and I was like, "Fucking take this shit down now", but now it's constant.

• 29:23Speaker 07

  I reviewed, uh, the most recent Final Fantasy game, Final Fantasy XVI, which is a game that I said has some of the, in the review, this is what I said, that the combat was thrilling and incredible. You fucking go to space and punch a dragon in the head, like, it is so fucking cool. But the story is dogshit, and I hated it, and I hated every second of it.

• 29:46Speaker 06

  I am gonna say that most stories that involve going to space and punching a dragon, like, don't really cohere otherwise. It's hard to make that into a compelling narrative.

• 29:54Speaker 07

  Yeah, and I, I especially like, it was a game where there was a subplot with slavery, and it was handled really, really, really poorly.

• 30:02Ed Zitron?

  I personally thought the whole game was bad, but that's why I don't review games anymore.

• 30:06Speaker 07

  No, I, I just like, when you give me a combo meter, I just go into sicko mode, it's something that just happens to me. But no, I, I said those things, and I tried to be fair and complimentary toward it. The first thing that happened was someone found my email address and told me to kill myself.

• 30:19Ed Zitron?

  Jesus.

• 30:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, no, it's like, I, I similarly gave the Harry Potter game a pretty dismal review, and there is a reaction, there is an entire culture, uh, devoted to trying to-

• 30:33Speaker 07

  Seed reactionary politics into young minds through the fandom of video games.

• 30:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, and games are like the easiest mark for that because I think that, I mean, for one, a lot of people have based their identity on games. That's the starting point.

• 30:47Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 30:47Speaker 06

  And then the other element of that is that a lot of that identity comes out of this perceived persecution complex.

• 30:53Speaker 07

  Well, there was.

• 30:54Speaker 06

  Games were once for nerds who were bullied constantly.

• 30:57Speaker 07

  And not only that, though, like there was a real reactionary movement against video games post Columbine, right? With Jack Thompson, there were congressional hearings about whether or not games were evil and were destroying the minds of youth, which is obviously not true. When I, um, I recently went to the UN.

• 31:15Ed Zitron?

  Look at all of us.

• 31:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, you know, we're normal people.

• 31:18Speaker 06

  I mean, my mind has been destroyed.

• 31:19Ed Zitron?

  My, my mind was, my mind's perfect.

• 31:22Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 31:23Ed Zitron?

  Anyway, so you went to the UN?

• 31:24Speaker 07

  I went to the UN and I was on this panel to talk about, uh, terrorism and extremism in gaming spaces. And the one thing that many of the panelists made sure to say was that this, this idea that it's violent, video games that cause violence is not true. And in fact, often games are pro-social spaces. They encourage isolated people to interact with other people and, and form friendships. It's just that those people are so vulnerable and people, extremists know how vulnerable these people are. It's very easy to say, join a Discord server and then start spreading dog whistles about like, uh, extremist, like white supremacist thought.

• 32:05Speaker 07

  Uh, and then you normalize these things, these expressions and these phrases and these images. And then you can take those people out of that bigger Discord server and funnel them into more and more extremist spaces.

• 32:17Ed Zitron?

  What's insane is it seems, to get back to a, a point I was getting at as well, is that they've, they're trying to monetize this. They're trying to monetize it by making the games less about being good games, but symbolic of stuff. And then the right wing types seem to see games that are not doing that, like Dragon Age, the Veil Guard and being like, ah.

• 32:33Speaker 07

  Woke.

• 32:34Ed Zitron?

  Wokeness has begun. It's purple.

• 32:36Speaker 07

  Get woke, go broke.

• 32:37Ed Zitron?

  It's purple, which means black, I guess, like, like it's just.

• 32:40Speaker 06

  Well, no, there's a, there's a new one every week too. Like there's a new DEI in video games controversy every week.

• 32:45Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 32:46Speaker 06

  And like, it wasn't always this way. Um, but after like, there, there was a conspiracy movement last year around a consulting firm called Sweet Baby Inc.

• 32:54Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 32:54Speaker 06

  That is when this sort of became a well-oiled machine.

• 32:57Speaker 07

  I like Sweet Baby Inc.

• 32:58Speaker 06

  Content creators started latching on to this constantly.

• 33:01Speaker 07

  Their biggest crime essentially was that the head of the company, Kim Belair, is a black woman. And like, that's it. That's literally just it.

• 33:08Ed Zitron?

  Something she controlled.

• 33:09Speaker 07

  Yes, absolutely. She chose at first to be a black woman.

• 33:13Speaker 06

  The character creator.

• 33:14Ed Zitron?

  So what were you saying about as well?

• 33:16Speaker 06

  But yeah, and so like, now you just have these people, um, you have content creators who've made this their entire identity and like their entire brand. And so like Gita was saying, you know, games can be really pro-social, but you'll have these people come in and sort of say, okay, well, these games that you like are being taken away by this evil D E I woke mob.

• 33:35Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 33:35Speaker 06

  And so your purpose, the underlying purpose that maybe you as a person have been looking for, is now to fight a battle against these people who are taking your toys away. And like, that works really well on a lot of people who, you know, feel purposeless, directionless, always that we all commonly feel under capitalism.

• 33:50Ed Zitron?

  And I feel like, and I feel like as well, games are an incredible vector for that, not just because there's things to rely around, but also there's a satisfaction to them. The reason I play Hades all the time, I have Hades on my, I'm not playing it right now, I promise. Um, but I would though. The reason I play Hades is it feels good. It feels like you have industry over something. You have, you can get good at something when you.

• 34:10Speaker 06

  I'll take this a step further.

• 34:11Ed Zitron?

  Please, please.

• 34:12Speaker 06

  I think that the core fantasy of a lot of video games, no matter what their setting is, whether they are sci-fi or fantasy or set in the present day, is what if capitalism was fair? What if every input gave you a fair output?

• 34:23Ed Zitron?

  A consistent one.

• 34:25Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 34:25Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 34:26Ed Zitron?

  Oh, I like that.

• 34:27Speaker 06

  You get better and better over time.

• 34:29Speaker 07

  Look at like a SimCity, right?

• 34:31Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 34:31Speaker 07

  You, in SimCity, you are essentially the mayor of a city, you are the developer of the city, you're the engineer of the city, you design the entire city. And you also have control over its taxes. And it is, it is like just A equals A shit, basically, when you look at how the tax system works in SimCity. It assumes that taxes are always fair.

• 34:50Ed Zitron?

  Right, and consistent.

• 34:51Speaker 07

  And consistent, and they don't, you won't get a huge lobby from the people in the highest tax bracket asking for their taxes to be lowered.

• 35:00Ed Zitron?

  I wonder if they would add that. There should, there should be just a SimCity which is real.

• 35:04Speaker 06

  I mean, I'm sure the modders have gone into like the tax system and just like torn out all the wires.

• 35:08Ed Zitron?

  What was that, City Skylines?

• 35:10Speaker 07

  Oh, City Skylines. Lines, uh.

• 35:12Ed Zitron?

  I love watching the cities by Diana, cities by Diana, one of the endorsed better offline best Instagram accounts.

• 35:17Speaker 07

  I do love cities by Diana so much. I've wanted to interview her for a long time, but just the same shit she does.

• 35:23Ed Zitron?

  She's amazing. Diana, you're always welcome on the show.

• 35:25Speaker 07

  A beautiful and unique mind. I love her.

• 35:28Ed Zitron?

  So let's change, change topics to something that actually really, a positive thing. Aftermath.

• 35:33Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 35:33Ed Zitron?

  So how long have you been going?

• 35:35Speaker 06

  A little bit more than a year.

• 35:36Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 35:36Ed Zitron?

  So how is the company structured exactly?

• 35:39Speaker 07

  Um, well, we, okay. So it's called aftermath because we all used to work at Kotaku, right?

• 35:44Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 35:45Speaker 07

  And none of us really had much editorial control at Kotaku, even Riley, who was a managing editor there, like he was, his like, the story of his life is having strong opinions and wanting to enact the plans based on his opinions and then being told no, that he can't do it essentially. So we are the aftermath of all of that. The slow dissolution of Geo Media and our own, just losing our brains working there with the conditions there.

• 36:12Ed Zitron?

  Geo Media was the former holding company of Gizmodo, Kotaku, I O nine.

• 36:17Speaker 06

  Basically came out of Gawker being sued into oblivion.

• 36:19Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 36:19Speaker 07

  Yes. Um, and we, we own the company and we try to structure it in such a way where we all have a relative amount of control over the work we do and what we want to do. We are not technically a co-op, but we try to behave as if we're a co-op.

• 36:35Speaker 06

  But also, a fun fact is that a lot of, a lot of like co-ops are not co-ops because it's weird on taxes and everyone's just like, yeah, morphing into one, takes too much work and it's better to just be an LLC or something else.

• 36:47Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 36:47Ed Zitron?

  But it's worker owned.

• 36:49Speaker 07

  It's worker owned. It's a hundred percent worker owned.

• 36:51Speaker 06

  We have no outside investment, no outside capital. We literally just rely on subscriptions and nothing else. For now, we might incorporate a small amount of ad based stuff in the future, but that'll just be on like a podcast.

• 37:02Ed Zitron?

  And there's nothing, and there's nothing wrong with ads. I mean, I definitely can't because some, someone listening to this is probably going to email me and be like, Ed, did you hear there's an AI ad? There's an AI ad that ran. Did you hear the AI ad? It ran after AI ad? If you are emailing me or messaging me about the AI ad, I have heard you over a hundred and fifty times. And every single person, I'm not bitter. I'm just like, at this point, if you think it's novel to mention this to me, it isn't. And every time I kind of roll my eyes and if you're trying to hurt me, which you would love. Then keep going, but please don't. But nevertheless, it's good that it's good that this exists, though, because my experience of games journalism was Future Publishing and Dennis Publishing.

• 37:43Speaker 07

  Oh, no.

• 37:44Ed Zitron?

  So I was a little bit of Zitron Law for all of you. So I was a games journalist from the age of 16. I interned at Computer and Video Games Magazine, esteemed out there, owned by Dennis Publishing, sold to Future Publishing, really like out of the toilet into the toilet situation.

• 37:59Speaker 07

  The worst, shittier toilet, yeah.

• 38:01Ed Zitron?

  And I worked at PC Zone as well, and it was definitely, and there's British libel laws, which will stop me being fully honest here. It was a challenging corporate environment with many incentive structures that affected the output and structure of the work regulated. And it's funny, because games journalism feels like something that could be bigger and better than it is, but it just won't be.

• 38:24Speaker 07

  Okay, so like the example that I think is really useful is Kotaku, essentially. We all worked there in a certain era where we had an editor in chief who was like an old school magazine guy, like went to the Columbia School of Journalism, really wanted us to get scoops, and we had, for at least a short while, management that understood the value of actually reporting news and not caring about the reaction from quote unquote gamers.

• 38:51Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 38:52Speaker 07

  However, that did not make us very advertiser friendly. So now where we are at with Kotaku, after everyone that we worked with has left, essentially, they're in an environment where they're like, what advertisers want is not news on how badly the industry is doing. What they would prefer is guides and hype and what are gamers want, what are gamers talking about, you know? I like reporting on fandom because I do think that the cultural impact of gaming is really fascinating and frankly, I did not realize when we started Aftermath that we'd be doing journalism that is actually quite important in understanding the slow dissolution

• 39:36Speaker 07

  of democracy in America, but it certainly seems like it has been.

• 39:42Speaker 06

  I think that it's worth contextualizing that gaming has often been a canary in the coal mine for the slow dissolution of democracy and of, you know, these cultural movements that.

• 39:52Ed Zitron?

  Can you elaborate?

• 39:53Speaker 07

  Well, Elon Musk, Gamergate.

• 39:55Speaker 06

  Yeah. Literally Gamergate.

• 39:57Ed Zitron?

  And actually, Nathan, and both of you split this question, I think would be good. Can you describe Gamergate for people that were outside of it?

• 40:07Speaker 06

  Gamergate was kind of the first, like, real reactionary movement in video games, basically. I mean, I had a lot of personal experience.

• 40:14Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, you, you had a little bit of a part of it.

• 40:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 40:16Speaker 07

  The eye of Salrod gazed upon you.

• 40:19Speaker 06

  There was a, you know, prominent indie game developer named Zoe Quinn. And she and I ended up dating for a minute. And gamers took this to me, well, not gamers, basically she had a jilted ex who published a manifesto about her.

• 40:34Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 40:34Speaker 06

  In which he claimed, among other things, that she had, you know, effectively slept with me for positive coverage of her game.

• 40:41Ed Zitron?

  Oh, fucking.

• 40:42Speaker 06

  When that never actually happened, there was no such coverage. It was all bullshit. But a lot of people, a lot of gamers who were already after her, there, there had been this whole, like, hate movement against her even before this. But they latched on to this and it became their plausible deniability. And so they started saying, oh, it's about ethics and games journalism. We got to fix this. And then all of these other people from outside of video games latched on to that. That's where you got people like Milo Yiannopoulos. That's where you've got a lot of, like, Breitbart's notability in that era.

• 41:11Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 41:11Speaker 06

  And I think that's when a lot of these people in the conservative movement realized, oh, like, this is a perfect seedbed for the future of conservatism.

• 41:20Ed Zitron?

  And the future of harassment.

• 41:21Speaker 06

  People right here.

• 41:22Speaker 07

  No, you can literally brute force a reality, is what they learned. You, the things that they claim, and you will still see people claim these things on the internet. None of these things are true. None of them are approvable. None of them are anywhere near provable. There is no review of Zoe's game that Nathan wrote.

• 41:41Ed Zitron?

  Yep.

• 41:42Speaker 07

  It does not exist and they will never show it to you.

• 41:45Ed Zitron?

  And what's, what's insane as well is there are actual issues in games journalism.

• 41:49Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:49Ed Zitron?

  Like, I mean, like, I, I've, I'm not saying what magazine I'm talking about or indeed who this was said to, but I know multiple different games covers of games magazines for certain PC games magazines that were bartered with drugs. And that where scores were raised to please publishers.

• 42:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, the publisher, of course.

• 42:05Ed Zitron?

  And raised to please advertisers. These are the actual fucking issues.

• 42:09Speaker 07

  Or even just sort of the, like, parasitic relationship. Game devs, especially the higher up in management you go, they consider the game's press to just be a PR wing.

• 42:19Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 42:20Speaker 07

  Their same industry. So the idea that we are journalists and we do not have the same goals as they do, which is to please developers and help make sure that their games sell, that is considered like really, really hostile. And it is something that you have to explain and re-explain over and over again. I don't care if your game sells well. Like, I'm sorry, I want games to do well, but I'm not doing PR for you. That is not what I want to do.

• 42:45Speaker 06

  Also, there's already, like, a lot of these games already have these massive marketing budgets anyway. And it's like, the, the press is not a big needle mover there. But what a lot of people want the press to be, whether they are executives or whether they're gamers, is this like mouthpiece for the industry.

• 43:00Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 43:00Speaker 06

  Like, going back to, you know, those like law, or those court cases against games as a whole and things like that. They want industry advocates. They're still stuck in this mindset from like thirty years ago of like, the industry needs defending. It's just a little guy. And it's like, no, it's not.

• 43:14Speaker 07

  No, you can't simultaneously be quote bigger than Hollywood and just be a little guy that needs me.

• 43:19Speaker 06

  This little small bean, yeah.

• 43:21Speaker 07

  You know, I love video games. I love the culture of video games in a lot of ways. I love, I think play is a fundamental part of human life that we all need more of, especially the more bleak. If you have imagination, then you can imagine a better world.

• 43:35Ed Zitron?

  It also feels like we fundamentally got away from the thing that games is, which is escape.

• 43:40Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 43:40Ed Zitron?

  Like, I don't, I, it's not that I'm ashamed of being a gamer. I have plenty of other things I'm ashamed of. But it's this sense that like, I do this to try and not, like, not think about it. I will say, however, like Bellatro, if anyone knows the Bellatro developer, Bellatro developer, welcome on Better Offline. Official endorsement. Bellatro is incredible.

• 43:57Speaker 07

  Such a fucking good game.

• 43:58Ed Zitron?

  Bellatro, I also like, got me through like, mental health things, just I was able to, there's an EMDR effect, I think. But nevertheless, these games are meant to be, if not a distraction, something you escape into. If it's, even if you're not escaping life, but it's like people, people want them to mean something else, almost.

• 44:15Speaker 07

  Fiction is, fiction is transformative. Like, I was thinking, there's a big indie game hit that is really de- depressing and sort of about the experience of living under late capitalism mouth washing. It's an indie game. It's a visual novel. It's not mechanics heavy. It's very story heavy, but it became an enormous indie hit with a very big sort of unexpected fandom.

• 44:38Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 44:38Speaker 07

  Because it describes an experience that people have and they love feeling like the misery and stress and pain that they are trying are being told by so many different forces doesn't exist and doesn't matter. They love being told, yes, it does matter. Your personhood does matter.

• 44:56Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 44:56Speaker 07

  The things you experience in the world do matter and have significance. Being able to experience that is something that brings us closer together as a society and allows us to again to start to imagine, what if the world didn't have to be like this?

• 45:14Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 45:15Speaker 07

  You know, that's what all media, all enter forms of entertainment can give you. And I do feel like by becoming an industry that is chasing a bigger and bigger number more than anything else, you do lose sight of that, that like art can't just be measured in dollars. Art is something that touches you and changes you.

• 45:36Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 45:36Speaker 06

  I mean, I think that the, yeah, the, the big issue is that games aren't supposed to be anything, especially not at this point.

• 45:42Ed Zitron?

  Like, it's a form, an art form of sorts.

• 45:45Speaker 06

  And also like, there are so many of them. So

• 45:47Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 45:47Speaker 06

  last year, almost 20,000 games came out on Steam.

• 45:50Ed Zitron?

  Jesus.

• 45:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, 20,000. And with that in mind, like the fact that there's this reactionary movement going around saying, oh, you know, this game can't be this. It can't have like a black person. It can't portray trans issues. It's like, well, why does that matter to you?

• 46:06Ed Zitron?

  Also, why can't it?

• 46:09Speaker 06

  There are 19,999 more games over there that aren't doing that.

• 46:13Ed Zitron?

  So we have like 30 years of games which were not that.

• 46:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:17Speaker 06

  On top of that, you were talking about this idea of games as escapism. And it's so funny because this reactionary movement essentially posits that yes, games should only be escapism and nothing else.

• 46:25Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 46:26Speaker 06

  They shouldn't have quote unquote, political topics in them.

• 46:28Speaker 07

  Oh.

• 46:28Speaker 06

  For example, trans people or black people.

• 46:30Speaker 07

  No, a game stops being.

• 46:32Speaker 06

  Their lives to fighting a political battle about games, in effect, shoving their politics into games. That's all they do anymore.

• 46:39Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 46:39Speaker 06

  And so they're like, games should be escapism, no politics, except for all the time on my terms.

• 46:44Speaker 07

  You know, for me, a great level of escapism would be imagining a world where I don't have an annoying conversation with a white person. It like, you know, like that would be.

• 46:52Ed Zitron?

  That is completely imaginary, my friend.

• 46:55Speaker 07

  You know, that would be a wonderful escape for me, but you do, when you get down to, when you see one of these viral posts that comes across your dash about, or, you know, whatever social media figure you're on. And they are so upset about a promo image for a game because the example character they've shown is a black person. You realize that the escapism that these people want to experience is an escape from black people. And it's just, they don't want to have to see a black person. And that is like an inherently political things to say, and that is an endorsement of white supremacy.

• 47:27Speaker 06

  Yeah. It's an endorsement of an ethno state.

• 47:29Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, it's, it's very fucking frustrating as well because, I don't know, maybe they could learn to be in a situation with a black person, but like, no, no, I couldn't possibly. Wait, wait, wait, there's an option buried in these menus that allows me to have trans-like features and fuck no.

• 47:44Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 47:45Ed Zitron?

  I can't even consider a world where that's an option.

• 47:47Speaker 07

  Being given the choice of a they/them pronouns is something that just terrifies them. Just seeing it, yeah.

• 47:54Speaker 06

  No, like, there are YouTube videos where these people, yeah, are reduced to like actual tears because of how upset they are.

• 48:00Ed Zitron?

  I love how masculine that is as well.

• 48:02Speaker 06

  Oh, it's crazy. I mean, I could like go off on it.

• 48:04Ed Zitron?

  So, so back to Aftermath though, on a more positive note, what are you trying to create with it? I don't, you don't need to have like a big vision, but what are you trying to do differently to like Kotaku, for example?

• 48:16Speaker 07

  Not destroy our brains and bodies, number one.

• 48:18Ed Zitron?

  Sure.

• 48:19Speaker 07

  Yeah. Um, I also think we want to acknowledge, like, and embrace the.

• 48:29Speaker 07

  Both editorial and hard scoops and reporting. That was not something I think we did very well, like embracing the duality of that. You need news and then also you need to help people interpret and understand the cultural impact of this news.

• 48:43Speaker 06

  Right.

• 48:44Speaker 07

  Nathan has been doing an incredible job reporting, like just really fucking killing it. I currently have two full-time jobs, so I've been writing less than I'd love to, but really my interest is understanding industry trends and looking at them as sort of long-term research projects and understanding the way that the world moves as we understand how money flows and moves.

• 49:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 49:05Speaker 07

  And I think that those, both of these things are equally important. Essentially, just even though video games tell, like as an industry, people just lie about how, how much money they make and how culturally important they are. They are now a massive and indelible part of the American entertainment industry and our economy. They are mainstream.

• 49:26Speaker 06

  Especially for like, you know, Gen Z, millennials. Like, we all grew up playing them. They are as much a part of the cultural fabric as any film, as any TV show, as anything else.

• 49:35Speaker 07

  Yeah, you know, that also-

• 49:36Speaker 06

  And they need to be covered that way. And it's so weird to look at like, major publications, major papers, having almost nobody dedicated to them.

• 49:42Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 49:43Speaker 06

  Like, Washington Post has one person.

• 49:45Ed Zitron?

  Gene Park.

• 49:46Speaker 06

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

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• 51:09Ed Zitron?

  Well, something I like about, like you did this one about Steam, the Steam users and AI.

• 51:13Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 51:13Ed Zitron?

  And it was specifically the stories about how, actually, you know, walk it through the Next Fest games part. Why would I read your story to you?

• 51:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, so basically, right now Steam is running this promotional event called Next Fest, where there are a ton of demos. Everybody like is getting prominent placement for the demos, which will in turn cause people to go check out their games and maybe buy them. That's really important.

• 51:36Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 51:36Speaker 06

  And so this time around, people have been scrolling through and seeing a lot of AI art. And they're like, oh, that's not good, because that means that a bunch of like AI slop is potentially crowding out deserving good games that have been in development for a long time, and that, you know, have a chance of attaining real success. And so the thing about that is that, yes, it looks bad, but then at the same time, Steam has this hyper complicated algorithm that they've been tuning over the years. And so they basically tuned it to change the way that games are seen in the first few days of something like Next Fest.

• 52:09Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 52:09Speaker 06

  So that you end up seeing like a random kind of scattering of them in the first few days, then it becomes personalized. And so basically, that sorts out the AI garbage, because those games, people don't really interact with much. They see them, they move on. And so like, they've built a system that sort of anticipates AI slop, which is good, but they still have this larger problem that I think that you see in a lot of industries now, in this era of peak content, which is that there's tons of good stuff coming out on Steam all the time. Too much of that for most people to like, find what they're really looking for, and then... On top of that, you're also competing with all of the old good stuff, which is still on Steam, constantly goes on sale, has bigger name recognition than you do.

• 52:52Speaker 06

  And so like, that's the real battle that people need to be fighting. Whereas I think looking at AI on Steam is like this major issue is tempting and it is to an extent, but it's not kind of the core problem that a lot of developers face.

• 53:06Ed Zitron?

  So the reason I brought up this story was to compliment you. It's because this is exactly why Aftermath rocks and why I actually think the future of journalism is more, yeah, it's like better offline, of course it is, but it's things like Aftermath as well. Because this isn't just a story about games culture, which is the anxiety over AI slop. Also the anxiety over indie games not getting the attention they need. It's also an industrial analysis because you've got fucking numbers here and actual view counts. And actually, because to cover the games industry, it seems like much like tech, you need true domain expertise, but you also need industrial Jason Schreier style.

• 53:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 53:41Ed Zitron?

  And Jason Schreier, by the way, over at Bloomberg Legend, got to get him on the show. It's my fault, Jason.

• 53:46Speaker 07

  Do you want to know something amazing about Jason?

• 53:48Ed Zitron?

  Yes.

• 53:48Speaker 07

  This one great Jason story that he told me right before we left Kotaku. I used to sit next to him every day and he told me when he first started there, he asked if there was a dress code and his boss told him no.

• 53:58Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 53:59Speaker 07

  So to that effect, he wore basketball shorts literally every single day. And at his yearly review, his boss came up to him and said, Jason, I did not know that I had a line for dress code, but I realized that my line is, please don't wear basketball shorts literally every day.

• 54:16Ed Zitron?

  If anyone.

• 54:16Speaker 06

  Didn't he counter this one online at some point? I feel like he added some particulars that muddy the waters of that story a tiny bit.

• 54:23Speaker 07

  Oh, I see, I see. I just love, every time you see Jason tweet something that pisses you off, I just love imagining him in basketball shorts, that's all.

• 54:31Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, but also I'm remembering if any of the British games press are listening to this, we don't, we never dressed that. I dressed like a, I was in like a dirty jeans and actually in dirty jeans now I realize this. We just like, people dress like, I guess we didn't see their legs because it's England and it was cold. But I feel like that, that's the difference to the British gaming press. They would just look like creatures.

• 54:54Speaker 07

  What Kieran Gillen said is about, I love Gillen, he's such a sweetie pie. He, he said, in what, when his little manifesto he wrote, like, I don't know, it's like 20 years ago.

• 55:05Speaker 06

  New games journalism.

• 55:06Speaker 07

  He said.

• 55:07Ed Zitron?

  I love Kieran, but I fucking hated him.

• 55:10Speaker 07

  He said something about, there were two models of games journalism when he was working there. And it was the, the US model, which was a lot like car journalism, which is like also pretty fraught. And there was the UK model, which is a lot more like music journalism, which now does not really exist in America anymore.

• 55:28Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 55:29Speaker 07

  And the US model, which was all about stats and statistics and numbers and

• 55:35Ed Zitron?

  Products.

• 55:35Speaker 07

  And products. That model won out eventually. And you can see how much it has went out because now it's, it's only about toys. Like, we talk about games as if they are toys and disposable and nothing else.

• 55:48Speaker 06

  And you make guides about them, and that's pretty much it.

• 55:49Ed Zitron?

  I remember why it pissed me off, because he fucking worked at PC Gamer, which was exactly what you just described.

• 55:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, that's why, that's why he left and made Rock Paper Shox.

• 55:58Ed Zitron?

  And now, and now he fucking writes amazing comics.

• 56:00Speaker 07

  Oh, God, the power fantasy is so fucking good.

• 56:03Ed Zitron?

  I haven't read it yet.

• 56:03Speaker 07

  It's really good. It's great.

• 56:05Ed Zitron?

  But yeah, sorry, we've

• 56:06Speaker 06

  But no, I was going to say, in line with a lot of that, and the way that I think games journalism kind of, you know, continued to mature along those lines, and mostly considering games to be these disposable products and like, you know, a lot of sites consider like, posting about a trailer to be news. The thing that I think Aftermath does, that we really focus on doing, is contextualizing a lot of the news, especially the harder news, something like WB layoffs. And contextualizing it, I think, with the kind of feeling it deserves. Something that I think you also do really well with all of your different projects.

• 56:39Speaker 07

  You know, well, people, people find it very cathartic to have people confirm what they feel about the world, which is, things are stuck and are bad.

• 56:46Speaker 06

  They sometimes don't, yeah, with facts. But also sometimes they don't recognize how bad things are. They need to be told. That was my point in that WB piece, which I, the headline, for those who don't know, is just fuck WB.

• 56:58Ed Zitron?

  And fuck WB, by the way.

• 56:59Speaker 07

  Yeah, literally just fuck WB, like

• 57:01Speaker 06

  And it goes into all the reasons why they deserve to be fucked. Because they've been mismanaging their business horribly and treating people and their various properties as disposable, and like, doing it in these ways that are very avoidable.

• 57:12Speaker 07

  They are an expression of the way that the tech industry as a whole has changed how employment works, and changed how Companies understand value and it is disgusting to watch it happen in something that's very important to me, which is the world of art. Like I, I was a cinema studies major in college. I had these old highfalutin dreams of being a, a gallery curator, et cetera, et cetera. These things really matter to me. Like human expression really, really matters to me. And they're, they, the wonderful history of American cinema is just being flushed down the fucking toilet.

• 57:47Ed Zitron?

  And, and it feels like they're, they're doing the same thing in games and in tech and everything. Cause not to tie it back to my own bullshit, but it's, it's the Google search thing. It's the Facebook thing. It's the thing that we fell in love with the idea of games. I guess it's more what, it's more death by a thousand cuts with games. Except sometimes the cuts are larger, but it's like watching, like Monolith, for example. Monolith also, I like, I swear Monolith had something to do with like free space as well. It was like bullish and entertainment. Like we've watched it. It's been this slow burn where you'd see these amazing games come out and then the studio would just disappear or they'd make dog shit. And it seems like it's just this problem of CEOs. It's these executives who have nothing to do with games. They don't play games.

• 58:28Ed Zitron?

  They wouldn't dare touch these games. They've got important things to do, like go to lunch and write emails.

• 58:33Speaker 06

  Or, I mean, okay. So actually this is a good example. Um, there are CEOs who at least like pretend to or do, but they still make the same decisions. Somebody like Phil Spencer is a great example of this. He's like the gamer CEO. He's at Microsoft.

• 58:44Ed Zitron?

  But is he actually like a gamer though?

• 58:46Speaker 06

  Yes. I mean, he like, hi, his Xbox live stats were like public for a long time. You could see how many hundreds of hours he's putting into games.

• 58:53Ed Zitron?

  That makes it worse.

• 58:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, exactly.

• 58:54Speaker 07

  It does make it way worse.

• 58:56Speaker 06

  Because what that suggests is that like, the problem is that these, is not that these people are not gamers.

• 59:01Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 59:01Speaker 06

  The problem is the structural incentives that accompany being an executive, that you will still, even appreciating the art form, cut thousands of people loose from their jobs.

• 59:10Ed Zitron?

  Right.

• 59:10Speaker 06

  Um, and like make decisions that actively harm games and their quality.

• 59:14Ed Zitron?

  Isn't the problem also that games are just insanely expensive to build though? The AAA gaming is, are we not running towards this unsustainable point?

• 59:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, that word has to be. It's already unsustainable.

• 59:25Speaker 07

  There was that New York Times article about graphics in games that I, I read. A few weeks ago, maybe last month, that was about like, there is so much money being pumped into these Spider-Man games for as an example. Realistic one-to-one fidelity of the world we see outside of our window, including physics systems that replicate real-life physics. Right. And there, we are at a point where that last 10, it's like self-driving cars, that last 10% may never be solved because our human brain interprets and processes things so much faster than a computer program and a computer can, just in general. And we, these studios put so much money into creating that thing and players don't notice or care.

• 1:00:10Speaker 07

  Players literally don't care.

• 1:00:12Speaker 06

  There is documentation about this for Spider-Man 2 in particular.

• 1:00:16Ed Zitron?

  Which is a really good game.

• 1:00:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's a good game, but Insomniac, the developer of that game, suffered a leak a little while ago. And in some of their own conversations about the game, they're like, yeah, our budget for this, the sequel was $300 million or somewhere thereabouts. Almost double what the original game cost, but we don't think that players actually notice just how much better the graphics are. We actually think that they like, they'd take either version and be fine with it. And so at that point, why are we spending all of this money on increasing the fidelity? What, what is the end that we're trying to achieve here?

• 1:00:49Speaker 07

  And then meanwhile, the other, the other wild part of all of this to me is that the current like video game juggernauts for Gen Z are like Minecraft and Roblox.

• 1:01:00Speaker 06

  These games do not have high-fidelity graphics at all.

• 1:01:03Speaker 07

  Yeah, no, Roblox, in fact, it is a kind of disgusting exploitative model where they rely on community developers to make games for them.

• 1:01:11Speaker 06

  Oh yeah, they got child labor.

• 1:01:12Ed Zitron?

  And children.

• 1:01:13Speaker 07

  And children mostly.

• 1:01:14Ed Zitron?

  Literal children.

• 1:01:14Speaker 07

  Yeah, and the split is one of the most predatory in the industry in terms of how much money Roblox will make off of your game versus how much money you make off of your game.

• 1:01:21Ed Zitron?

  What's insane is Roblox only loses money as well. They're horribly unprofitable.

• 1:01:24Speaker 07

  It's just ridiculous.

• 1:01:25Ed Zitron?

  I feel like we need to like, have a referendum on the CEOs on a very basic level of put aside all the moral stuff that's very obvious. Let's just be like, you fucking suck at this.

• 1:01:36Speaker 07

  Right, no, when we started our own company, what, I, we. Marvel that for a long time was like, no, we don't have MBAs. And yes, the money stuff is kind of difficult. But actually getting people to visit our website and trust our reporting was extremely easy. Like the actual like day to day, put blogs on the site, run a business, promote ourselves. That's so, so, so easy. And there were so many people at Geo Media that made so much money that couldn't do things like. There was a HR lead that couldn't attach, she couldn't put an attachment on an email. And she made a quarter million of a dollar, a quarter million of dollars a year.

• 1:02:11Ed Zitron?

  That's insane.

• 1:02:12Speaker 07

  I hated her so much.

• 1:02:13Ed Zitron?

  That is insane.

• 1:02:14Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:02:15Ed Zitron?

  It seems like.

• 1:02:15Speaker 06

  Well, being a published author and not even making close to that is so cool.

• 1:02:19Ed Zitron?

  And what's fucking insane as well is it's like, this is the larger problem. This is, I know that someone's gonna email me like, the problem's capitalism. Wow. By the way, if you're one of the, I don't know, I'm acting like I have derision, but I love my listeners. Like for the most part, it's just I get one person.

• 1:02:34Speaker 06

  I'm gonna start emailing you like this all the time. Uh, actually.

• 1:02:37Ed Zitron?

  It's a Philly capitalism. I fucking know. But it's just, this is actually something that really frustrated me at a former games publication, I may have been at. Where it was just like, the people writing were fucking amazing. They loved games. I mean, I can talk about Log, for example, disappointment on Blue Sky or Steve Hogarty at PC Zone.

• 1:02:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:02:57Ed Zitron?

  Will Porter as well, like loved games, was so, it was a real joyous energy to it. And then there was just this mandate from above where it was just, yeah, well, we gotta make sure we sell more issues. So you gotta put this on the cover. It was never something fucking interesting. You get an occasional one, like I did my one cover about the third World of Warcraft expansion. That was fun. But it's like the thing, the incentives, the people driving the incentives are not people that even understand the customer so much. They're just like, I need to resemble the thing that my boss wants me to. And then I will be the best at my job, even if I'm not good at it at all. Like David Zaslav, I have a lot of thoughts about what could happen to him that I won't be sharing.

• 1:03:38Speaker 07

  Have I introduced you to my concept of the well-based system of justice? You got a deep, deep well.

• 1:03:44Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 1:03:44Speaker 07

  And like you just throw them down there. I mean, like Samara from The Ring, like she lived down there. She didn't die right away, right?

• 1:03:50Ed Zitron?

  She had a nice time down there?

• 1:03:51Speaker 07

  You know, we'll just feed him sandwiches, a little picnic basket every once in a while. And he can try to get out, maybe he'll succeed, but he'll just have to just repent.

• 1:03:59Speaker 06

  This is all happening in Minecraft and or Roblox.

• 1:04:01Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, this is all parody. This is parody.

• 1:04:04Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:04:04Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, this is parody, but it's just fucking frustrating as well because. Despite all this frustration and annoyance, we've had some incredible fucking games the last years, like Hades and Hades 2.

• 1:04:15Speaker 07

  Hades, man, Super Giant is just an incredible, incredible studio.

• 1:04:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, they're having like a weird dust up about voice acting and not working with like SAG for reasons that they won't explain.

• 1:04:25Ed Zitron?

  Oh, Super Giant.

• 1:04:27Speaker 06

  A bit of quick insight, I like, because they put out this statement, basically a voice actor came out and said that Super Giant was considering not renewing with them over like their insistence on having a SAG contract. And so then Super Giant put out a statement saying like, actually, we have some of the best protections against AI and things like that in the industry. And like, we're just not working with SAG for reasons. And they did not state those reasons, which is insane to me.

• 1:04:51Speaker 07

  And SAG currently is on strike specifically in the video game industry over AI protections and voice acting.

• 1:04:56Ed Zitron?

  And just reading this statement, we have respected and will continue to respect any actor needing to pause work during the ongoing SAG-AFTRA video game strike, while none of our games have ever been subject to the SAG-AFTRA contracts for a variety of reasons.

• 1:05:09Speaker 06

  There we go, which, what does that mean?

• 1:05:11Ed Zitron?

  We wish SAG-AFTRA the best.

• 1:05:12Speaker 06

  And so I reached out to Greg Kasavin, who's the like creative director over at Super Giant and who I've known for a lot of years, and asked that. I was like, can you provide any of the reasons? And he was basically like, no.

• 1:05:25Ed Zitron?

  Oh, thank you, man. I appreciate the comment. And it's just like, it's frustrating because Super Giant, I assume, makes a shit ton of money.

• 1:05:35Speaker 07

  Oh, I mean, Hades was a massive hit for them.

• 1:05:38Speaker 06

  They're also a very small studio relative to, I mean, they have like 30 people.

• 1:05:40Speaker 07

  So there's not a lot of overhead, essentially.

• 1:05:42Ed Zitron?

  Who's receiving the money there? Where's that going? It's not even like the CEO makes more money if they, if they do that. It's.

• 1:05:49Speaker 07

  It's confusing.

• 1:05:51Speaker 06

  Well, and also, it's like, it's a real bummer because otherwise they've been amazing in terms of like making games the right way. Like, they are a very people-focused studio. I interviewed them years ago about like, all the ways that they, like, for example, they have mandatory vacation. So if you reach the end of the year and you haven't taken your vacation time, you have to just like take a month off. And they do that kind of a thing.

• 1:06:10Ed Zitron?

  And just to describe for the listeners who haven't played Hades or Hades 2, which is coming out next year, probably.

• 1:06:15Speaker 07

  Yeah, it's in really access right now.

• 1:06:16Ed Zitron?

  You can play it.

• 1:06:17Speaker 07

  Can play it.

• 1:06:18Ed Zitron?

  This game is both mechanically perfect. Hades 2, I would argue, isn't. I think Hades 2 tried.

• 1:06:23Speaker 06

  I actually really like Hades 2.

• 1:06:24Ed Zitron?

  I love it. No, I love it. I love it. I love it in that there are some bits that.

• 1:06:28Speaker 06

  Also, Hades 2 isn't finished yet.

• 1:06:29Ed Zitron?

  Yeah, yeah. Nevertheless, the point is, these games are mechanically perfect. They sound incredible. Voice acting's amazing. They look, they feel amazing. There are tiny little systems. And on top of that, they're incredibly diverse. Like, they proved that you can do diversity in this way that's very, like, sincere, and it doesn't feel.

• 1:06:47Speaker 06

  And it fits the setting. And the setting is like Greek mythology.

• 1:06:49Ed Zitron?

  And it's really cool.

• 1:06:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, yeah. The whole plot of Achilles and Patroclus in, in Hades just melts my heart. It really is affecting. Nathan and I are both big fans of the game Pyre, which is the game that came out right before, which is like.

• 1:07:04Speaker 06

  Still the best Super Giant game.

• 1:07:05Speaker 07

  NBA Jam, essentially.

• 1:07:07Speaker 06

  With wizards.

• 1:07:08Speaker 07

  With wizards. And then also, it's a story of sincere revolution that asks you, the player, what it would mean to overcome oppression and why you would fight for it. And it is a really affecting and meaningful storyline. One of the most amazing things about Super Giant is they have this bespoke relationship with Darren Corp, a singer-songwriter.

• 1:07:30Ed Zitron?

  Oh, my god.

• 1:07:31Speaker 07

  The music he makes for these games drive me to tears. I love them.

• 1:07:34Ed Zitron?

  I actually really want to talk about Darren Corp real quick. So, Hades 2 has a boss against this band of sirens.

• 1:07:42Speaker 06

  Still in the siren.

• 1:07:43Ed Zitron?

  And there are two different metals, like, like metal-adjacent songs.

• 1:07:48Speaker 06

  One, that's about how much they hate you for killing.

• 1:07:50Ed Zitron?

  And how bad your hair looks and what they're going to do to you. Like, and these songs are fucking bangers.

• 1:07:56Speaker 07

  They're so good.

• 1:07:57Ed Zitron?

  They have blast beats in one. It's fucking sick.

• 1:07:59Speaker 06

  Bear in mind, too, that they had to write these songs with the expectation that because of the game's run-based structure, that you, like, do the same thing over and over and over.

• 1:08:06Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:07Speaker 06

  That you will hear these songs like 100 times. So they got to write something that they know you're not going to be irritated by hearing this many times.

• 1:08:14Speaker 07

  No, and they're catchy.

• 1:08:15Speaker 06

  Which unto itself is this, like, level of craft that's so different than just writing a song.

• 1:08:19Speaker 07

  There's like a little bit of a crossover with, like, musical theater with Darren Corp, where the songs are, people sing in these games when they are called. To such a high level of emotion and then they anticipate that a level of emotion also from you the player so that by the time you get to Silla and the sirens in your run again you will be your blood will be pumping so hot that you just want to hear them burst into

• 1:08:41Ed Zitron?

  And it's fucking great and also that I'm ranting about this I don't care you little pixel slop this up but what's also great about this boss fight is it's three different things you're fighting and as you one is the drummer one is the guitarist one is the singer and if you kill off the drummer you no longer hear the drum beat or when they do and it's like

• 1:08:59Speaker 07

  It's beautiful.

• 1:08:59Ed Zitron?

  And the reason I bring this up as well is it's proof of what you can do in games and with technology when you just fucking think about what the medium is and it's so expertly done and it shows so much love and it frustrates me because I know we've been quite negative today but there are so many signs that games can be so much better and that there are these incredible like Hades 2 is even in early access has so many bits to it you're just like wow not only do you love games but you want this to be cool you have genuine creative expression that cannot be done anywhere else.

• 1:09:33Speaker 07

  Yes in no other form like I mean this is why I talk about Dwarf Fortress like near constantly is like this is a game made by people that are clearly just obsessed with Lord of the Rings but they also are obsessed with fantasy and building a world and just native narrative experiences like the way that you as a human being create a story inside of your mind.

• 1:09:56Ed Zitron?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:56Speaker 07

  Like you you have this little group of dwarves and they all have distinct personalities that are all procedurally generated they all have memories they have all lived in a world that has built itself up over you know in game like 250 in-game years so there is history when you ask your dwarves to engrave carvings into the fortress you build inside of a mountain they will build carvings of things that they remember from life like when your mayor got elected etc etc so as

• 1:10:23Speaker 06

  That's what I'm gonna do before I die I'm gonna carve Eric Adams into something.

• 1:10:26Speaker 07

  Oh god yes just carve this uh

• 1:10:28Speaker 06

  My main memory.

• 1:10:30Speaker 07

  My memory is Eric Adams but no I remember I played a game once and there was a dwarf child that was just mad all the time. And I was like dwarf child, you can't, you can't keep hitting people with an axe like you have, what's going on with you?

• 1:10:44Ed Zitron?

  Wokeness gone wild.

• 1:10:45Speaker 07

  Well, it was because after a big orc attack at my fortress, a goblin attack. His father had been in the military and his father died and there weren't enough dwarfs after this attack to clean up all the corpses. So this dwarf child had to watch his father rot away at the floor. And that permanently changed his personality. So now he's angry all the time.

• 1:11:08Ed Zitron?

  All within this game, Dwarf Fortress.

• 1:11:09Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 1:11:10Ed Zitron?

  And I think that this is the thing, I, I refuse to be fully nihilistic about this stuff because even with the slop kings in power, it seems like cool shit is still being built. And so as we wrap up, data first, is there anything you're really looking forward to? Is there like a game coming out or something very recent you've played, you've kind of?

• 1:11:28Speaker 07

  I mean, it's avowed. I'm playing avowed nonstop. Avowed is the new game from Obsidian, the most recent game that people remember from them. And they've made tons of incredible RPGs.

• 1:11:40Ed Zitron?

  Oh, I'm sold.

• 1:11:41Speaker 07

  Is, I mean, Fallout New Vegas is just a precious jewel. I love that game. It is, I, it is worth, Fallout New Vegas is worth the three hours I spent modding the game so it would not crash when I tried to play it on my PC. I.

• 1:11:54Ed Zitron?

  So it wasn't an Obsidian game anymore?

• 1:11:57Speaker 07

  Sorry. But it, avowed is, it takes a lot of the systems that they developed for the outer, the outer worlds and refines them. And then also you get really, really excellent character writing all of the time. There's a character you meet right away in avowed named Kai, who is like a fish person. And he's always got a little sarcastic quip to say about something, but he's also like a deeply empathetic, like he has like a real tangible personality traits that make me excited to talk to him and hear him react to the things that I do. And another wonderful thing about this is the combat stuff is really, really fun, but the choices in the quests that you're forced to make, they do not present a path to you that will not piss someone off. So you have to sit there.

• 1:12:41Speaker 07

  Yeah, sorry. This is the fate of the smiling man. You just have to think to yourself, what are my convictions? And that is something that games can really make you confront within yourself. What do I believe about something? And you play as an envoy of an empire. And I've found that what I have been doing in this game is just, you know, I met up with the rebels, I had the option to kill someone who attempted to assassinate me or not. And when I heard that he realized that assassinating me wasn't the right choice to then write the right way to defeat the empire that is trying to take over the living lands. He, I decided to forgive him because I don't actually have any beef with them. And I don't think the things that the empire are doing in this land, me, the person, me, Gita.

• 1:13:25Speaker 07

  I don't think the things that they're doing, they're attempting colonizing this beautiful lush landscape that is fighting against them. I don't think that that is right. And so other characters have judged me for this, but I decided, you know what? I side with the rebels. I want the empire to dissolve. And that is how I'm going to play this game. That's the way this character is going to play this game.

• 1:13:44Ed Zitron?

  And this is on PC and Xbox?

• 1:13:46Speaker 07

  Yes, it's fantastic.

• 1:13:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's really good.

• 1:13:48Ed Zitron?

  So Nathan, what about you? What game?

• 1:13:51Speaker 06

  So I recently played a demo for a game called Skin Deep. And so Skin Deep is, I would describe it as a like slapstick stealth immersive sim game. The idea being that like you are somebody who works in a very wacky form of insurance, where basically you get frozen and stored aboard ships that have important cargo on them. And if somebody breaks into that ship, then they unfreeze you and you run around and take care of whoever's on there.

• 1:14:17Ed Zitron?

  Okay.

• 1:14:17Speaker 06

  And it's really, it's just really clever. It's one of those games that again, it could only be a game. So like it thinks about all these things that other games of this sort don't. So like, um, your character is barefoot for whatever reason. And so like if there's glass around, you can step on the glass. And then you can like pry it out of your foot and use it as a weapon if you want to.

• 1:14:36Speaker 06

  But also like the combat is so different from what you expect in these games. And that like, instead of you being this master of like martial arts, you have to like briefly incapacitate somebody with any number of comedy items. Like you can throw a banana peel and they'll slip and fall on you. And then you like go jump on their back and like you're trying to wrestle them into something and they're like trying to push you off. You're not like physically stronger than them. And so it descends into just like lunacy and madness almost every time that you are trying to bring somebody down.

• 1:15:05Ed Zitron?

  And just to be clear, what what platform is this on?

• 1:15:07Speaker 06

  It's PC.

• 1:15:08Ed Zitron?

  So it's not VR or anything. You're just doing this with.

• 1:15:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:15:10Ed Zitron?

  That's fucking bonkers.

• 1:15:11Speaker 06

  And it's from this one studio that actually they're they're called Blendo. They've been around for a while.

• 1:15:15Speaker 07

  I love Blendo games.

• 1:15:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, they're amazing. And they they they've always been really smart about like integrating cinematic techniques that other video games don't. They made this one game forever ago called Thirty Flights of Loving that relies a lot on like jump cuts.

• 1:15:28Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:15:28Speaker 06

  In a first person setting, which feels, I think, unnatural to gamers who are used to continuity in a first person game.

• 1:15:34Speaker 07

  Thirty Flights of Loving is an experience worth having. It's a very short narrative game. And I, if you want to understand just like how games work, how the moving image creates narrative, creates associations. It is very instructive and it's also really affecting.

• 1:15:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, cool. And so these developers are also really good, surprisingly good at not making just like on rail cinematic experiences. But also like these really intricate systems. And that's what Skin Deep is. It's this game where so many funny weird things can happen. Like, you know, and you can you can replay levels and figure out all this stuff. Like, the first time that I played the demo level, I nearly like lost. And, you know, I sucked at it. And the second time I realized, oh, man, I can break the glass on this spaceship and open it to the vacuum of space. And so I can go around like wreaking havoc on these guards by just like subjecting them to sudden.

• 1:16:26Ed Zitron?

  Like a James Bond, like a Moonraker situation.

• 1:16:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:16:29Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:16:29Ed Zitron?

  That's so beautiful. So, and that's the thing. I really want to leave the listeners here with the sense that there's still cool shit happening.

• 1:16:36Speaker 07

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:16:36Ed Zitron?

  Everywhere. And there is hope to be had. Gita, where can people find you?

• 1:16:41Speaker 07

  Oh, you can find me on Aftermath outside, mainly. I'm XOXO Gossip Gita on social media, Instagram and Blue Sky, basically is where I post at this point. But yeah, everything I write will be on Aftermath, so look after me there.

• 1:16:56Speaker 06

  Nathan Aftermath dot site as well. And then I'm at Nathan Grayson on Blue Sky. I'm glorious curly mop on Instagram. And then I also have a book called Stream Big, The Triumphs and Turmoils of Twitch and the Stars Behind the Screen. And you can get that wherever books are sold.

• 1:17:11Ed Zitron?

  Now, I'm gonna kind of force you all to do this. I need you to go to aftermath. Dot site. I need you to pay them. I need you to buy Nathan's book. Ideally, I need you to go and make your friends buy it as well. And also subscribe to Aftermath. I say this from the bottom of my heart to leave this episode. Games journalism. Yeah, Jesus Christ. I'm not cutting. I'm not cutting it. Games journalism genuinely made me who I am. And like, people like Will Porter, Steve Hogarty, and Log, of course, John Byth, really changed. And even Kieran Gillan, who's become more a friend since I left, anyway. And it's lovely to have you two here, because games journalism is very meaningful. And I still don't think it's where it needs to be. But I think the aftermath's bringing it there. You all love

• 1:17:53Ed Zitron?

  me, though, so you know where to find my shit. Please keep downloading this show. Please tell people to download it, too. I need the downloads. If I don't get them, I'll die. I love you all.

• 1:18:04Speaker 07

  You keep wasting away in front of my eyes.

• 1:18:06Ed Zitron?

  I'm literally dying, but I do love you all.

• 1:18:17Ed Zitron?

  Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M A T T O S O W S K I dot com. You can email me at [email protected] or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and, of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot where's your ed dot at to visit the Discord and go to r slash better offline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 1:18:49Speaker 07

  Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:19:23Speaker 02

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• 1:20:28Speaker 00

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