What's The Deal With: Mods

Kirk, Maddy, and Jason talk about mods in video games: the history of the form, their favorite mods, and how cool it is that video games can be altered, expanded, and changed by players in all sorts of ways, from DOOM to Skyrim to explicit sex scenes in The Sims.

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

• 0:04Speaker 00

  If you could change anything about yourself, what would it be? And have you checked if it's available on Nexus Mods? Welcome to TripleClick, where we bring the games to you. This week, we talk about video game mods, going back to the first time each of us ever installed one, all the way up to the current state of modding games. Some modders have even turned it into a living.

• 0:30Speaker 00

  I'm Maddy Myers.

• 0:31Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm Jason Schreier. And I'm Kirk Hamilton, and hello.

• 0:34Speaker 00

  Hello, it's us again.

• 0:37Kirk Hamilton?

  Hi, my friends.

• 0:37Jason Schreier?

  Hello. Did you guys get snow this weekend?

• 0:41Speaker 00

  Yeah, we did. And you know, we got snow yesterday, and then the plow came and they plowed our whole driveway. And then we got about six more inches overnight. And Deena and I woke up and we were like, the plow's probably not gonna come back. And so we spent our lunch break shoveling the driveway, only to have the plow return about 30 minutes later. And that was not ideal.

• 1:04Kirk Hamilton?

  It built character, then.

• 1:06Jason Schreier?

  When you say the plow, you're saying the city, like, plow's your driveway?

• 1:09Speaker 00

  No, my landlord pays for a plow to come.

• 1:11Jason Schreier?

  Oh, you're right, you're in an apartment. Okay, got it. I gotta do it all myself in a house.

• 1:15Speaker 00

  I should've believed, I should've believed in my landlord. I should've, you know, I don't give landlords enough credit. That's, that's a real flaw I have.

• 1:23Jason Schreier?

  Landlords, as we all know, are deeply trustworthy class of people.

• 1:28Speaker 00

  I can't get into that.

• 1:29Jason Schreier?

  So, so this weekend, so we had a huge trip here, where I am in suburban New York. And my kids had off of school. They couldn't go anywhere Sunday, and then they have off of school Monday. So they'd spent two days just inside doing nothing. And I got them into Animal Crossing. My, my daughter, who's six and a half, she like had never really clicked with the game quite as much. She's played some Mario here and there and been into it, but like, not really. But Animal Crossing, she wanted to play it all day. And she wanted to do, you know how in Animal Crossing, you can design patterns that you can like, put on your face and your shirt and stuff? She's obsessed with that. All she wants to do is just design patterns, which I think is pretty cool.

• 2:05Kirk Hamilton?

  Man, we, we downloaded the Switch 2 update of Animal Crossing. And Emily, who got really into Animal Crossing during the pandemic, has gotten back into Animal Crossing. And I'm a little worried about her.

• 2:16Jason Schreier?

  Oh, no, is she addicted?

• 2:19Kirk Hamilton?

  It's just that kind of game, you know?

• 2:21Speaker 00

  It's, it's got a, it's got a positive feedback loop at all times. And you know what else has a positive feedback loop? Being a fan of TripleClick.

• 2:31Kirk Hamilton?

  And There we go.

• 2:33Speaker 00

  I, you know, if you are a fan of TripleClick, then maybe you're thinking, how could I support the show? And there's an easy and wonderful way to do that very thing. You'd go to maximumfun.org/join. You'd become a member and then you would get access to our monthly bonus episodes. We've had just one a month ever since the show began. So you've got years, literal years of bonus episodes that you can listen to. The most recent one is a Beans Cast about Pluribus Season One, which we all watched and really liked. And there's a ton more in there about games, shows, movies, just stuff we like and stuff we don't like. It's great. It's great stuff.

• 3:14Speaker 00

  So whether you're snowed in or just want to support TripleClick and you want more, more of the three of us, maximumfun.org/join is the place to go to become a member and get all of that extra stuff. And before we get to the topic today, I just wanted to note that as of earlier this week, my new website that I formed, mothership.blog is live. You can go there and read articles or posting an article every day, hoping to someday grow and be able to post more, more articles per day. Who knows? Anything could happen. We've had a lot of early support so far, which has been really exciting. And it's a great, great new job that I have created for myself.

• 3:55Speaker 00

  So mothership.blog is another place you can check out if you want some cool articles about video games.

• 4:00Kirk Hamilton?

  Congratulations. I'm glad I locked in the lifetime discount before it was too late.

• 4:04Speaker 00

  It's true. That's no longer available, but Jason did get a sale discount.

• 4:08Kirk Hamilton?

  Can I confess that I didn't? I put it off and I let it go. And maybe I can speak, I can speak for the listeners out there who missed the early access discount. You can still sign up to become a member.

• 4:21Speaker 00

  We're still actually allowing people to sign up. It's true. Even if you didn't sign up during the sale, you're actually still allowed to make an account. And I think our rates are pretty reasonable. That's just one woman's opinion.

• 4:33Kirk Hamilton?

  You're offering even more support if you, if you pay the full.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  Of course. And why wait? Why not go ahead and get access to it all now? So, so Kirk, what are we talking about today?

• 4:45Kirk Hamilton?

  Today, we're talking about mods. We are gonna just talk about mods in video games. It's a what's the deal with? And this episode, we'll be answering the question, what is the deal with mods? Now, when I say mods, I'm not talking about the kind people in our Discord who keep order. I'm not talking about that kind of mod, not a moderator, but-

• 5:05Speaker 00

  Although, maybe that'd be an interesting topic to get to someday, but it's not what we're talking about today.

• 5:09Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, that'll be the next time.

• 5:11Jason Schreier?

  What if you play a game where you have a mod that lets you be a mod?

• 5:14Kirk Hamilton?

  Right. I am also not talking about people who have kind of cool funky haircuts and smoke cigarettes. Jason, you looked puzzled when I mentioned mods.

• 5:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, like the mod scene, the mod look.

• 5:27Kirk Hamilton?

  The mod squad, you ever heard of mods?

• 5:29Speaker 00

  Mod as a name of a form of fashion.

• 5:31Kirk Hamilton?

  It was like a 60s fashion movement.

• 5:33Jason Schreier?

  Okay, pre-hipster.

• 5:34Kirk Hamilton?

  I'll show you some pictures of mods. Yes, it's very kind of beatnik-adjacent, pre-hipster kind of a fashion look. But no, we're not talking about that. We are talking about user-created modifications for video games. Because mods have been with us pretty much the whole time the video games have been, and there's a lot to talk about there. I thought I'd start by just asking the two of you your experience with mods and the first times that you've maybe ever encountered them. Or how they may have factored into your earlier years playing video games. Jason, how about you start us off?

• 6:07Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I didn't play a ton of mods, although I did play around with ROM hacks and stuff like that. There were always, back in the day, there were always patches you could download to tweak things in old games and play them on emulators and stuff like that. I think maybe the most noteworthy example is Mother 3, which could not be played in English unless you downloaded a fan patch mod that essentially you had to find a ROM of the Japanese game in an emulator and download it, and then just like patch it with a mod that turned it all into English. Didn't alter the nature of the game, but still, I think, counts as a mod. But I wasn't like, I wasn't playing-

• 6:48Speaker 00

  Yeah, definitely.

• 6:49Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I wasn't playing a lot of like Doom or other games that were heavily modded. way back in the day, although I did play a lot of Blizzard games and play with custom maps, which are adjacent, mod adjacent, I would say. And then more recently, I have played around with what are called randomizers, which are super cool, which are these mods you can download for old games that will just switch them around a lot. So if you played an old game over and over again, you can download those games that'll just completely change the nature of everything. So for example, Zelda: Link to the Past is a big one that has a randomizer mod. And what it does is it randomizes the location of every item. And so you might go into one dungeon and find an item that is like for a totally different dungeon somewhere else. And you have to kind

• 7:34Jason Schreier?

  of piece together a good route. A lot of speedrunners play around with games like this and randomizers and showcase them and stuff and have optimal routes in their head for like, oh, okay, I found the hookshot over here. Now I need to go to this place and just hope that I can find this boss. Final Fantasy games have randomizers too. They're pretty cool. There's one, in fact, Matty, I don't know if you've seen this, but it smashes together Link to the Past and Super Metroid into one game, which is wild. And so like you'll go into Super Metroid and you'll find items from Link to the Past in chests in Super Metroid and vice versa.

• 8:10Speaker 00

  That's amazing. That actually rules. So you like have the hookshot and but you're Samus.

• 8:15Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, you'll find, yes, you'll find like the ice suit in like a Zelda dungeon. It's crazy.

• 8:22Kirk Hamilton?

  That approach to modding is cool. The randomizer specifically, because it's, it's like, it's not making the game easier exactly. It's not making the game, you know, whatever, look different. It's taking a game that you're probably very familiar with, in this case, you know, usually an older game, and making it unfamiliar. And that's like a really cool and specific thing for a mod to do. And like, I guess I've found that sometimes replaying games, like The Witcher or Skyrim certainly, where by installing mods, it makes a game that I've played hundreds of hours of feel new to me. And I guess a randomizer does the same kind of thing because it's no longer so familiar. You're walking into a room and you don't know what boss is going to be behind the door.

• 9:00Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, one, one other kind of mod that I played around with that you Just reminded me of, which is back in the day, I played a lot of the Infinity Engine games like Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2 and stuff. And Baldur's Gate 2, for people who aren't familiar, uh, this is pre-Baldur's, this is 20 years before Baldur's Gate 3. Baldur's Gate 2 had this very long opening dungeon that was pretty cool and served as an intro to the game, introduced you to all these mechanics and stuff. But once you played through the game a couple of times, you were just like, I don't want to deal with this anymore. And there was a mod called Dungeon Begone that let you just skip that entire dungeon and just start the game from the proper like, uh, starting point past that dungeon. Which, those are the kinds of mods that I really appreciate.

• 9:41Jason Schreier?

  I mean, lots of mods are good for all sorts of ways, but the ones that like, make, make things better for people who have played a game a bunch of times and just want a more convenient version, that's pretty cool.

• 9:51Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, well, I came up with a little breakdown of types of mods, and that is definitely one of the types of mods. I think the Skyrim one is the most, maybe, one of the most downloaded mods for Skyrim that just skips that beginning part where you're like, on the cart and then you fight the dragon.

• 10:04Speaker 00

  The most iconic part of the game, why would you skip that?

• 10:08Kirk Hamilton?

  Which is funny, right? Cause it is really iconic because everyone has seen it a million times.

• 10:12Speaker 00

  That's part of why, yeah.

• 10:14Jason Schreier?

  Well, it's that, that part is, is iconic, that first wagon part, but after that, you have to go through a whole dungeon for 30 minutes. That's the part that you probably want to skip.

• 10:21Kirk Hamilton?

  Right, where you have to kill spiders and whatever, and instead you can just sort of start the game.

• 10:24Speaker 00

  Somebody should make a mod where you still have the wagon scene, but then it just skips everything else. So you still get to hear the iconic lines, but then right after that, it just goes to the rest of the game.

• 10:36Kirk Hamilton?

  It should be like, it fades to black and it just says, "Then some events transpire."

• 10:40Speaker 00

  Sometime later, dot, dot, dot.

• 10:42Kirk Hamilton?

  Sometime later, and you're just standing out looking out over the, over the trees.

• 10:47Speaker 00

  It like creates a montage for you. This mod probably exists for all we know.

• 10:51Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, it probably does. Um, okay, well, Matty, what is your experience with mods? Where did, where did you first start using them?

• 10:56Speaker 00

  So, uh, as long time listeners know, I used to be really into Counter-Strike in my teenage years and I was gonna list some Counter-Strike mods, but it's probably worth noting that Counter-Strike itself is a mod, one of the most successful mods of all time perhaps, given that it is now a very, very Successful game still on Steam, the modern version of Counter-Strike I'm referring to here, not the one I was playing when I was 19. But we also would install a lot of mods for Counter-Strike, which, incidentally, if you're playing online, you're really not supposed to do, but we did do this from time to time. And one of them-

• 11:35Jason Schreier?

  So you're a cheater?

• 11:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, I was a cheater. I was cheating. And when you hear the mods, you're gonna really think I was cheating. So here's one of our, one of our favorite mods would simply add the queen track, "Another one bites the dust" to the game. It would do nothing else.

• 11:47Kirk Hamilton?

  An unfair advantage, obviously.

• 11:49Speaker 00

  Well, actually, I would argue it does.

• 11:51Jason Schreier?

  It pumps you up.

• 11:52Speaker 00

  It pumps you up.

• 11:52Kirk Hamilton?

  Does it play "We are the champions"?

• 11:55Speaker 00

  It should have, but no, all it did was play "Another one bites the dust."

• 11:57Kirk Hamilton?

  It plays Killer Queen whenever you get a hedge.

• 12:00Speaker 00

  It's a pretty simplistic mod.

• 12:01Kirk Hamilton?

  Under pressure if you're losing.

• 12:02Speaker 00

  Look, I think these days, these are the kinds of things people could implement. But in that time period, you would, mods would get you kicked really quickly. So it would be like, kind of risky to be using a mod and like, we were never able to do any of this for very long. So you would kind of treasure whatever you could get. Another mod that we liked even better than that was one whereby a guy had recorded versions of his voice saying, like, instead of the walk sound effect, like when you're walking down in Counter-Strike, it kind of like is brushing against sand. These are all kind of like set in the Middle East, nondescript towns in the Middle East. And instead of that walk sound, it would be a guy saying the word "walk." So as you walked, it would be saying, "Walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, walk."

• 12:45Speaker 00

  And then as you shot your gun, it would say, "Shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, reload, reload." And it was a really, another example of cheating.

• 12:53Jason Schreier?

  How many hours of the game did you play with these mods? That sounds so hard to deal with for so long.

• 12:58Speaker 00

  It was actually so great. Well, but so, you know, it was silly.

• 13:02Jason Schreier?

  That sounds so annoying. What? It was great?

• 13:04Speaker 00

  No, it was fun. And then, you know, it's sort of a more heartwarming mod. This is kind of what we're gonna get into later, is the idea, I'm describing mods that, you know, we would install at like, maybe a LAN party, for example, we could all enjoy together. But typically a mod is something that only the player sees, even if you're playing an online game, especially if it's in a pure- Experience mod, like that's not going to affect your gameplay at all. And back in this time period, I really was upset that there were no female characters in Counter-Strike. And at that time period, the only mods for women were like, oh, like sexy bikini lady. I did still install those, but like other people couldn't see that I was playing as a female character. Only I could see that. And I remember being like irritated by that at the time, which I think kind of starts to get into

• 13:49Speaker 00

  some of the good and bad things about mods. And like, they do give you a lot of freedom and they let you change the game to be what you want it to be in theory. But also it's only for you. It's a deeply personal experience and no one would ever even necessarily know that you're installing a mod, especially if you're playing a single player game. And yeah, so I also, I've talked a lot on the show about how often I play the four player Night Rain mod. My friends and I have done that. And there's also like two player Dark Souls mods. I think that's a really nice way to play Dark Souls with somebody who thinks it's difficult, who doesn't. So I definitely am a proponent of a lot of multiplayer mods. But I also think those solo mods that only you see are really fascinating.

• 14:34Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, and that's when I think of mods, that's a little more like what I think of. I think Jason, something you were kind of getting at is in the 90s, there was this kind of a whole churning cauldron, right, of different types of mod-like activity. So there were, you know, Valve was making the Source Engine open to people a few early, a few years earlier in the early 90s. id Software made Doom WODs available and then eventually just Doom Source Code. So there were so many Doom mods happening. There were so many Half-Life mods happening. Like you said, Counter-Strike and then later Gary's mod and then things like the Stanley Parable. There were a lot of games that were built out of Source. And then, you know, all of that was kind of happening while also right Blizzard was just making it possible

• 15:15Kirk Hamilton?

  for people to use dev-like tools in the game to make things. And that's like where Dota 2 came from, right? Is it was kind of, I don't know if there was anything user-generated about that or if that was just a mode that people built onto Warcraft 3. I'm actually not sure of that. Do you know, Jason?

• 15:31Jason Schreier?

  What do you mean by user-generated? It was user-generated in the sense that users came up with. The map.

• 15:36Kirk Hamilton?

  Right. I guess what's a good way to describe it? Like if it was a mod, it was like files were added that people made outside of the game.

• 15:41Jason Schreier?

  It was entirely made with the custom map.

• 15:43Kirk Hamilton?

  Okay, that was my understanding.

• 15:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, similar to Counter-Strike.

• 15:45Kirk Hamilton?

  So right, so it's kind of like, does that count as a mod? And then even earlier than that, I mean, for me, I was old enough to be using a Game Genie with the Super Nintendo in the NES and or to have friends who had that. And, you know, honestly, like the Konami code in Contra, I went over to my neighbor's house and we used that to make Contra playable. This was, you know, the famous code. I'm sure everybody listening knows this, up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, et cetera. Or maybe it's just left, right, once. I guess sometimes it's a little bit different. Sometimes you hit select start at the end. Anyways, the very famous code that gave you 99 lives in Contra. Contra was so heinously difficult, and we were not that good at video games. We were really young, that it made the game kind of playable for us at all, which is something I've been returning to lately and thinking about with mods,

• 16:30Kirk Hamilton?

  specifically related to Silk Song, and how like difficulty mods can also just be accessibility mods.

• 16:36Jason Schreier?

  Well, hold on, what you just described was actually interesting. The Contra code, that's something that the developers programmed in. But the Game Genie, actually, that like, if I recall correctly, went into the ROM and like edited the edited the actual ROM of the cartridge and stuff like that. So that, I think, is certainly a mod, certainly qualifies as a mod.

• 16:55Kirk Hamilton?

  I think it kind of depends. Like, I know that was at the root of that lawsuit that Nintendo filed. And I'm not sure, okay, you're looking.

• 17:02Jason Schreier?

  Galoo Toys versus Nintendo was a 1992 case, and it went up to a federal court of appeals, and they determined that it did not, in fact, qualify as copyright infringement for Game Genie to allow people to alter ROMs.

• 17:17Kirk Hamilton?

  Okay, so the appeals court ruled on it. There was a ruling there, okay. So what you're talking about is kind of like a cheat versus something that a person does outside of the game. And that's, we're not quite talking about cheats, really, like cheat codes that are, you know, backdoors built by the developers. We're talking about, you know, mods. So anyways, my actual history with mods, I played Doom mods. I would play user-created Doom levels back in the 90s, and I always felt a little disappointed by them, just because. There was that feeling that this isn't the official thing. I think some part of me always yearned to experience whatever the creator of the game had wanted me to experience and kind of wanted that a little more than just like some random level. I think part of it is because there was a lot of crap and you could just download a

• 18:00Kirk Hamilton?

  level that was just a big open room with like a whole bunch of Kakko demons in it or something and that's all it was. So it was, I wasn't like curating my experiences very well. And I remember also playing a lot of Unreal Tournament in college and downloading user-created maps and getting into that a little bit. And then really just kind of, it wasn't really until Skyrim that I really got into modding myself. And that was when I was working at Kotaku. And the Skyrim modding scene was just totally wild. It remains wild. It's still maybe the most, single most important game for modding outside of those 90s games that made their source code available, just because so many people got so into it. And it was just, I mean, it was amazing. I remember at the time, you could just run an article being like, "New mod makes Skyrim

• 18:45Kirk Hamilton?

  look like real life," with some screenshots that probably ran at like seven frames per second, but it would look incredible because they would do these re-shade or like re-texture mods that just made it look totally crazy. And then that was also, of course, when people were like modding Thomas the Tank Engine into that opening scene and making all the dragons make stupid sounds or mouth sounds mods like you mentioned, Matty, where every time you swing the sword, it's like, "Whew, whew." And it's just like someone doing every sound with their mouth. And it was very hilarious and then you had to uninstall it because it drove you crazy.

• 19:14Jason Schreier?

  Oh my god.

• 19:14Kirk Hamilton?

  So anyways, and then I guess that takes me up to today where I've been playing with more difficulty mods and I actually had a really interesting time looking into that with Silk Song. And it made me feel like, I don't know, that really opened a lot of doors with that game. And I thought it was, it was really interesting and cool.

• 19:30Jason Schreier?

  You know what's interesting about those days of like Doom levels and Quake levels and Half-Life levels and stuff is that back then, it was not very easy or even really feasible at all for anyone to just be able to make a game from scratch unless they were a wonder kid, some sort of crazy prodigy, because the tools weren't as approachable, as accessible as they are today. So back then, making mods was a really good Way to get a job in the video game industry. You could show like, hey, I made this level in Half-Life. This is what I can do as opposed to today where you can essentially create your own prototype for a game. And that can be your calling card, your resume is I downloaded Unity or Game Maker and this is what I made.

• 20:11Jason Schreier?

  But back then that was what they could do. And so that maybe the guy who made or the person who made that open room with a bunch of caca demons in it was not qualified to get into the video game industry. But maybe some other, some other monitors were.

• 20:25Speaker 00

  I mean, the guy who made Counter-Strike famously was hired at Valve after that.

• 20:29Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 20:29Speaker 00

  I mean, like, that's like a perfect example.

• 20:31Jason Schreier?

  Who made Counter-Strike? I think it was a pair of people.

• 20:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 20:34Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah. And I mean, id even earlier than that was paying people to put out, they put out official packs of user created levels that they had paid people for. And yeah, I know a lot of people got their start that way. Well, I mean, when I started at Kotaku, one of the first profiles I wrote was about Davey Redden and the Stanley Parable, which was technically like a Half-Life mod, you know, it was a source mod. He built it out of the game files for that game and it looks just like Half-Life 2 when you started it. And then he eventually turned it into its own whole thing and then it became this, this huge phenomenon. Also, when we were at Kotaku, kind of in those early days, DayZ was one of those really huge mods, which was an Arma 2, I think, Arma 3, Arma 2 mod that added zombies to this really hardcore military survival game

• 21:18Kirk Hamilton?

  and became a huge phenomenon. And then in one of the only times I can think of this happening, Player Unknown's Battlegrounds was a mod of DayZ. I think after DayZ became an official thing. And then that was also a huge phenomenon. And that like led to the Battle Royale shooter. So that kind of changed the whole video game industry.

• 21:37Jason Schreier?

  Well, it's so interesting. It also changed the video game industry in the sense that I feel like all of this is kind of prototypes to the Roblox phenomenon and user generated content, right? Like, which is the entire business model. It turns out that people have always wanted to just create and make their own things. And I think that in many ways, the fact that Doom and Half-Life and some of these other early pioneers opened up their source code and let people just take a crap. Back and make whatever they wanted, kind of set the stage for what would become this new generation of just people making stuff and entire ecosystems surrounding people making stuff. Which, by the way, I mean, is also, there are also some interesting parallels to other industries.

• 22:21Jason Schreier?

  I mean, I don't think that you can mod films or anything in any sort of viable way. But as we talked about last week, there are parallels between YouTube and Roblox. And I think, again, we're just seeing an ecosystem where like, a lot of people are making money and finding a lot of success. And then a lot of people, and getting in millions and millions of people by creating a system where you can create things. And I don't know, maybe Doom would have been as successful if not for the source code being open to everybody.

• 22:50Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I think there's an ethos that you can trace back to that time. And I think we shouldn't skip over Minecraft, because Minecraft was-

• 22:56Jason Schreier?

  Oh, sure, of course.

• 22:57Kirk Hamilton?

  Before Roblox, like, that same ethos runs straight through Minecraft. And while Minecraft is a game with a ludicrous number of options for players to make stuff, it's also a game that has been really heavily modded, and there are some incredible mods. And even now, I mean, it almost feels like there's a, this like blurring of the lines between modders and people who work on Minecraft at Microsoft, who will like, release new things they made for the game that you can add or not. Like, the game still feels remarkably open, considering that it is owned by Microsoft. And, uh, and so that, I think, is like an important link in that chain.

• 23:33Speaker 00

  Yeah, we live in a pretty cool time. I mean, I, I do think, I mean, I, it's partly because I recently read Masters of Doom. But like, there was, there were some specific chapters about John Carmack's decisions. And not just him, but like, him in particular, being like, really from a hacker community, and just having that specific political ethos of wanting information to be free. And being like, that should actually be part of the ethos of the art that we make. And getting into little tiffs with their publishers over the years about how difficult that made copyright for Doom. And like, I think we can look to that and be really grateful for it now. And I think it's resulted in a version of the video game landscape that-

• 24:14Speaker 00

  That's pretty cool. I mean, you know, I think we could certainly have our complaints about some things about user created content and whether those users who are creating it are actually getting paid fairly and like, are these platforms actually sustainable and all of that. But the fact that it's possible and that we live in a time where people who make games are trying to make it possible for somebody who makes a mod to make money off of their mod. I feel like that history is only possible because of decisions that were made by young guys in like the eighties, you know?

• 24:51Jason Schreier?

  To that point, Matty, I think if anything, today's system, Roblox and whatnot, is kind of the opposite of that ethos because it's taking that concept of like, we're letting users generate stuff, but putting it in a closed system. It's not like anyone can access Roblox games wherever they want. You have to play them within Roblox. And that, I think, is the fundamental problem with Roblox and one of the reasons it's got so many problems and that one of the reasons I would never let my kids play it is because it's a closed system. And so therefore only Roblox can control so much of it that it's very much the anti kind of hacker hacker ethos.

• 25:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, we got to get back to the hacker ethos.

• 25:27Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, that's what we do. I mean, it's kind of like, it's like consoles versus PC, right? Like the appeal of PC for everybody or for a lot of people was always that it's, it's open. You can do whatever you want to your PC. You own it. Whereas your console is just like so restricted because you're in this closed garden. And you can only play games in a certain way and you can't crack them open and mod them and stuff. And so, uh, yeah, I mean, it's, it's a very, very like bifurcated world, the Roblox's of the world and the other mods of the world.

• 25:59Kirk Hamilton?

  I think this is a tension that's just always been there and probably always will be. It's between closed and open systems and between, yeah, people who want control and people who are willing to cede that control. And it's just, it's been there since the nineties. It was there in the two thousands, you know, during the kind of low ebb for PC gaming, when console gaming was really taking over in the two thousands. And even into the 2010s, modding really just kind of fell into the Wayside, like it was just much more common that a game would come out and you would be playing it on Xbox 360 or something, or playing it on a PS4 and just, there wouldn't be any options for modding it because you're playing within a closed system. And then you saw these attempts, you know, Bethesda has really tried to bring that PC modding ethos over to consoles where

• 26:43Kirk Hamilton?

  they'd say, oh, we're gonna have a, you know, an official mod workshop and even try to figure out ways to pay people for mods so that we can, you know, support what they're doing. But it just has never really been the same. Like when you go to Nexus Mods and you're on PC and you're playing Skyrim, like that's what it, that's what the, the peak of what modding can be, right? It's just a jillion things that you can do. You do whatever your heart wants. You can break the game. You can brick your PC probably in some ways. You can do all kinds of crazy stuff. Hopefully not, but um, but you know, there's like, the sky is the limit and that's really sort of the ideal, as far in one direction as you can be. And then the other direction is like, maybe a Nintendo console, like playing a game on a Nintendo console where like, you can't even talk about it online.

• 27:29Kirk Hamilton?

  We'll like send you a season of Sisletter, like.

• 27:32Jason Schreier?

  Didn't Bethesda also like do a mod? They played around with various iterations of mod marketplaces over the years, allowing people to sell their mods and, and put them like in official capacity. I think like even a couple of years ago, there was like an official Skyrim marketplace put up that maybe people are making money on. I'm not sure.

• 27:50Speaker 00

  Yeah, I think it's notable though, that so many mod makers still have Patreons on their Nexus Mods page and that some of those Patreons are quite successful. I mean, it's not to say that I don't think that video game makers should consider having mod marketplaces. I think there's a benefit to that and it's, it's, has potential for the mod makers to make money. But I also think it's cool how normalized it's become for modders to just have another way that they can essentially accept donations. Like that's kind of the, the way that they're getting around it because they're like, well, I don't own anything, uh, but if you just happen to like me and want to give me money for an unrelated reason, but here's a way that you can do that. And there, there are some

• 28:31Speaker 00

  very successful modders who maybe don't want a career in the games industry or aren't even angling for that, but are just like, I'm a career Skyrim modder and I'm making hundreds of mods and, and really just perfecting them and making money from doing that as a hobbyist income source.

• 28:48Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, Special K comes to mind as someone who, I think it's just one guy who makes mods for, typically it's a lot of console games that are ported to PC. And to my memory, it's like a lot of Japanese console games that like come to PC with weird frame pacing issues and just performance issues. And then people will just be in the Steam forums being like, where's the Special K mod? And usually like 12 hours after the game comes out, there is one and it gives you all these controls to like dramatically improve gameplay. And like everyone just kind of counts on Special K. And then there will be times, you know, where he'll be like, oh, I can't mod this one because whatever, they've locked this file or they've made it impossible for whatever reason. And it'll be really disappointing because people kind of count on this totally unrelated

• 29:31Kirk Hamilton?

  person to come in and fix the game, usually really quickly. It's kind of amazing. So I made a little breakdown of like types of mods. Okay, it's not little, it's actually quite long and I'm not going to read the whole thing to you, but I thought it'd be helpful to at least go through the three main categories of mods as I see them. Taxonomy? Because that could give us a little bit of a framework.

• 29:50Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, we always need a taxonomy.

• 29:52Kirk Hamilton?

  It is a taxonomy. And I'll give those three, and there's a couple of subcategories that we could talk about. But the three big categories are gameplay mods, expansion mods, and cosmetic mods. I kind of see those as the three big categories. So gameplay mods are like difficulty mods, you know, it makes it easier, it changes the game speed, unlocks a bunch of weapons for every character, things like that. Bing! Kirk here as I'm editing the episode and I just want to have a complete taxonomy here and I forgot to mention this when we were recording, but one subcategory of gameplay mods is the quality of life mod, which we alluded to earlier. That's a mod that it does technically change the gameplay, but it's a little more just about making it easier to play, you know? Removing some animation or something that wastes your time, making the inventory easier to deal with.

• 30:37Kirk Hamilton?

  Sky UI, the Skyrim PC interface that overhauled the UI and made it way better to play with a mouse and keyboard, that's an example of this. Just anything that improves quality of life, technically changes the gameplay, so it's like a type of gameplay mod, but it's more, a little more gentle than that and a little bit more just about the overall experience. So just wanted to acknowledge that subcategory. Bing. And then expansion mods make the game bigger. So either like restoring cut content sometimes. I know KOTOR 2 is a game that has famously been improved by modding because it was released in what people describe as a kind of unfinished state, though I never played that game. And then, of course, like total conversion mods and things like Skywind or Sky Oblivion,

• 31:19Kirk Hamilton?

  where they're like, I'm gonna remake Oblivion in the Skyrim engine, or I'm just gonna build a whole new game out of this, you know, out of this mod. And while it's like a little debatable whether something like the Stanley Parable is like a mod exactly, that is like the, you know, a total conversion mod, like just using the game as a base to build something completely new. And then there's cosmetic mods, and that's just mods that change the way the game looks. I was talking about those Skyrim mods earlier. Those like really proliferated in the 2010s where it just would change the reflections so that everything looked amazing, or added HDR lighting, or, you know, whatever else to the game. And then there's like, the subcategories of cosmetics are partly, they're like joke mods, like you were talking about mouth sounds mods, Macho Man Randy Savage like becoming

• 32:03Kirk Hamilton?

  Mr. X or whatever, or Thomas the Tank Engine from Mr. X in Resident Evil 2. And then there's a whole separate subcategory that I think we could talk about now that is just horny mods, because that is a really substantial portion of the mod market, especially for any game with a female main character, or really any game with like female like body models in it.

• 32:25Speaker 00

  With humans in it, or animals, animal, humanoid?

• 32:28Kirk Hamilton?

  I would say humans. I do wanna say that there is a very strong bias toward changing the way the women look in these games, even though there are also horny characters for the male characters. We don't want to.

• 32:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're finally see, I feel like that's how you know.

• 32:40Kirk Hamilton?

  Yes, more lately.

• 32:41Speaker 00

  That times have changed, is that you have like, say, Mr. X in a Speedo mod or whatever. Like you have like, that kind of mod is emerging on the scene. That's how, that's how you know that gender equality, we're getting closer every day, people.

• 32:54Kirk Hamilton?

  Right, everyone is being rendered naked in games. But Maddie, you just wrote an article about modding, like one of the first articles on mothership is about modding. So why don't you talk a little bit about that and about the modders that you talked to?

• 33:07Speaker 00

  Sure. So this was. Uh, article in which I talked to the creator of Wicked Wims, uh, among two other modders. But Wicked Wims, I think, is really worth shouting out by name because this is such a famous mod pack. Specifically, it's for The Sims 4, and it's not just cosmetic mods. It's also systems level mods that add in sexual content, just as sort of a blanket statement to The Sims 4. And there's a very good reason why it's one of the most popular mods for The Sims. It's extremely comprehensive and effectively implemented. And part of that is because in talking to the guy who creates it, he described how users tended to want more cosmetic freedom, actually,

• 33:52Speaker 00

  but that his priority had always been making the mod technically perfect. And that's just, I think, That's funny. kind of a sign of what kind of personality he has, which is respectable. And the result is a mod that includes like menstrual cycles, birth control, like you name it. It like complex relationships. He's, there's a whole like strip club voyeurism, like any, any kind of like, kind of baseline normative fetish that you can imagine as part of this mod. And it's really impressive and famous. So it was cool to talk to him. But I also talked to a couple of other people who just do kind of basic appearance based mods for other games, like Skyrim and Bethesda Games were the two other creators that I talked to. And those were predominantly the games that they were working on.

• 34:34Speaker 00

  And they also told me that the feedback that they get the most is people wanting even more customization for their characters and not necessarily like sexy customization, but like, can you make this character's eyes look like my girlfriend's eyes? And can you make this character's eye look like my eye after I've suffered an injury to my eye? Like that kind of extreme customization. And that became really fascinating to me because I went into this article being like, I just want to talk to people making sexual mods. Like, this is going to be like fun and interesting and like, I'm gonna get fun stories from them about the kinds of wild requests they get. And instead I like got all these heartwarming responses from them about like people just being like, I actually just want my character like look more realistic.

• 35:20Speaker 00

  And that's interesting, but Cute. I also think it's self-selecting, though. Like, I think the people making really whack mods just didn't want to get back to me. So that's one of the troubles of being a reporter.

• 35:30Kirk Hamilton?

  It's self-selecting? It totally makes sense to me that it became a much more human subject, only because like, I don't know, you know, we live in a fairly sex-negative society, like, any sexual content in games is seen as like unbelievable, even though, especially in a game like The Sims, it is actually a glaring omission. When you think about it, just sort of, you think about what's in that game and what's not, like, it is a game that is supposed to be simulating the entire life of these people. They can have romantic relationships, they can get married, they can have kids, and then it just like snips out anything sexual. And so, it totally makes sense that there's this like hole in the game, there's a need, there are definitely people who want the game to feel more like a comprehensive life simulator,

• 36:12Kirk Hamilton?

  so someone's gonna show up and be like, sure, I can add that in. And then, once you get started, you get something like Wicked Wims, which, you know, you, you mentioned it, but like, anyone listening to this, if you, it's worth just seeing a little bit of this. I know it's basically looking at porn online, but everyone should see what this mod looks like, because it is unbelievable.

• 36:30Speaker 00

  I mean, the website does like blur out the actual pictures of the mod, so you can actually pretty safely navigate the Wicked Wims website and just get a sense of everything that's available in the mod without necessarily seeing how it looks. And like, some of it, like the menstrual cycles mod is like, it's just a cool system to include in the game. Like, why not, you know? And like, that and like the birth control mod and stuff, it's like, that's, that's just like interesting kind of narrative tension, quote unquote, that Sims players enjoy. Like, that's what makes The Sims fun as a life experience, life emulation experience, is that characters have problems, including like, things with their health that happen. They are more human, and that is what makes the simulation fun

• 37:11Speaker 00

  and interesting. Are those tensions and those disadvantages to being human? Like, this is why it's fun to like, remove the ladders in the pool, or like, you know, lock your sim out of the bathroom or whatever. Like, people think it's comical to like, introduce these kind of body horror slash body-based tensions to The Sims. So why not include even more of them?

• 37:30Jason Schreier?

  Can I just say, I think Wicked Wims is harmless, but like, if you were to do this with a more realistic game that had like a mocapped like actor that looked Like the actor and you like make a sex mod with the actor like looking like themselves. That's it. It gets a little bit into.

• 37:47Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, I mean.

• 37:47Jason Schreier?

  Ethical question.

• 37:48Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 37:49Jason Schreier?

  Ethically questionable territory.

• 37:50Kirk Hamilton?

  If you play any of these Resident Evil games, yeah, like the the new Jill Valentine is based on an actress. And there are certainly mods of that Jill Valentine character naked or whatever. And so you're essentially one step removed from like deep fake, making deep fake porn of a, of a, you know, of an actual person. So, yeah, I mean, those, those lines, I guess that introduces a much more, I would say stark moral line in the decision that you're making to make a mod. In The Sims, I mean, I don't know, like.

• 38:21Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's whatever.

• 38:22Kirk Hamilton?

  It is, it is like, I get why you would use that to sort of pivot to something much heavier and more morally complex. But to me, Wicked Whims is like about as harmless as it can get.

• 38:31Jason Schreier?

  No, that's, I mean, that's the word I used before is harmless. Yes, The Sims, when it's like abstract representations of people, then I don't think it matters quite as much. But it's very clearly a cartoon, although there is also cartoon porn of like Family Guy and stuff out there. So that's also ethical dilemma. If you play a game and they mod Family Guy porn in there. Well, I don't know, we have to, we don't have to go down that rabbit hole.

• 38:56Kirk Hamilton?

  How it is.

• 38:57Speaker 00

  Isn't it an ethical dilemma?

• 38:58Jason Schreier?

  The real Peter Griffin might.

• 39:00Speaker 00

  Yeah, he might sue. He might consider suing and that's up to Peter. Who can say what he'll decide to do? I mean, I do feel like there is like a larger ethical question about mods, though, that we haven't yet gotten to, which is the kind of question of our thorough intent, right? I like, I mean, I find this like, it's like almost old hat to talk about this. But we have to, right? I mean, the, the game makers created the game in a certain way. And yet players have the ability to modify it endlessly. And The Sims is tea for teen. There's a reason why there's no sex in it. It's because it's a more family friendly game and that's what EA wants it to be. They sure don't want every single character to have like modifiable nipple sizes and all the stuff that Wicked Whims has to offer, right?

• 39:44Speaker 00

  So what, what do we feel about this? I mean, I, I tend to be like of the mind that. Especially if it's a mod that a single player only can see. I'm like, well, whatever you do, privacy your own home. You know what I mean? But once you're posting a mod online to share with everyone, it does start to get complicated.

• 40:04Jason Schreier?

  I'm a little more empathetic to that argument surrounding cut content because sometimes, as in Coach or Two's case, cut content is cut because the game doesn't have, they, developers didn't have enough time to finish what they wanted. But sometimes it was very deliberate that they cut content. And sometimes it might be in the game's files for whatever reason. And so people still discover it.

• 40:23Kirk Hamilton?

  Hot coffee, right? In San Andreas.

• 40:24Jason Schreier?

  Right. And people might, well, that's an extreme example. But like, I was thinking about Baldur's Gate 3, which I believe data miners like discovered all this stuff in Baldur's Gate 3. And they were like, oh, my God, this should have been in the game. Like, this is so much bigger, blah, blah, blah, blah. And the developers had to come out and be like, no, that stuff was cut for a reason. And it just happened to stay in the game files for whatever technical reasons. But I think when you get into that territory of being like, I'm going to restore this cut content because it deserves to be in the game because the game is unfinished and we, we should be preserving this. I think that's when you get into some interesting ethical questions. I don't know if it's wrong necessarily, but if I were a creator, I would not necessarily want that to be done in a way where maybe I would care a little bit less about just kind of

• 41:06Jason Schreier?

  outlandish adding Thomas the Tank Engine or porn to, to my creation.

• 41:12Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I think that, uh, games are so, it's so deep in games DNA that we tweak them and change them. You know, they have, they give us variables, they give us ways to play them differently that a lot of mods to me just seem completely in keeping with that. And if anything, there's actually just, they're part of the same continuum. Mods are in conversation with games and games have learned many things from mods. I actually had some, we had some friends over and they brought their daughters to just hang out and have pizza and play video games because we have all the video games at our house. And one of their daughters was playing Celeste. And it was actually an interesting second part of a story. So the first part is that she loved Hollow Knight because she's watched a lot of YouTube videos about it, but had never played.

• 41:54Kirk Hamilton?

  And so they came over and we, I turned on the switch and they were looking at all the games I had. And she's like, oh, you have Hollow Knight, can I play? I was like, sure. And she starts playing and then like is just getting absolutely wrecked because it's so hard. And she's, she's like, I think 11. And she's like, this is really hard. Geez, like I, and then kind of stopped and we went and did something else. So then a little later, we're playing Celeste, a game that is similarly difficult to Hollow Knight, another 2D platformer. And I was like, you know, there are a whole bunch of assist options that you can get into in this game where you can change how many air dashes you have and how fast the game moves. And at first she's like, no, I don't want to tweak it. And she's playing and it's really hard. And then she starts messing around with it. And it was so cool to watch her like, realize, oh, I can just like,

• 42:37Kirk Hamilton?

  totally change this game to like, be whatever I want it to be. I can have infinite air dashes and like Superman around these maps. Like, I can make it move at 60% speed and have no trouble like navigating all these really tricky platforming sections. And it was very cool to see that and then to be reminded of how Celeste is, I guess, still an unfortunate outlier and how it embraced what feels like mods. I mean, those feel like mods and there are mods like that for other similar games. But it's just actually in the game and it's right there in the menu, which gives you a kind of a permission to do it that I think is really cool. And that like relates to difficulty and it's something that we've talked about before. But I think it is neat how games can learn from mods and how the two worlds are like, really just all part of the same world.

• 43:22Speaker 00

  Yeah, I, I do think it is related because of the conversations that we had about Silk Song and the idea of whether a developer quote unquote, wants the player to have a difficult time when they're playing a game versus not. And like it, when you allow, I'm really putting bigger quotes around all of this. When you allow the player to change something to like, slow down the speed, give more dashes, make hits harder, hit harder, or you know, make your health not regenerate as quickly or regenerate faster, any of these options. If you put them into the menu, then people kind of perceive it as being quote unquote, "part of the game." And that has a different meaning that is socially constructed, sure,

• 44:04Speaker 00

  but it's still there in contrast to how you'd feel if you were to download a mod from an external site. At that point, you're taking this additional step where you're admitting to yourself that you need more health in order to play Silksong. And I mean, I don't think there's anything wrong with that. We didn't get into it, but I did actually end up, maybe I said this on the episode, I did install that health bar mod that I actually think is really great for Silksong, especially for like the really hard parts at the end of the game where I was like, I just want to know how much health these guys have.

• 44:35Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, like to just show how much health.

• 44:37Speaker 00

  Yes, just with health bars on the screen. It's pretty simple. But just that alone, I like psychologically, I was like, okay, now I just know how many hits this is gonna take. And like, I think it'd be nice if that was in the game, but also they, Team Cherry chose not to have it there. And what does that say? I don't know.

• 44:54Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I mean, adding that extra barrier eventually where you have to go and download a mod. Also, the flip side of that is that it makes it less likely that most players will do it. And therefore it makes it more likely that most players will try to overcome the difficulty.

• 45:09Speaker 00

  Or stop playing, though.

• 45:11Jason Schreier?

  Or stop playing, sure.

• 45:12Kirk Hamilton?

  But I mean, also, like, a huge percentage of players are on systems that can't be modded. Like, also bear in mind, like,

• 45:18Speaker 00

  That's true.

• 45:18Kirk Hamilton?

  By putting it, by not putting it in the game, you're just, you're blocking out completely what percentage, like everyone who's on consoles. So that is a really significant percentage of people who can't, don't even have the option.

• 45:29Jason Schreier?

  Right. But I mean, I asked Team Cherry about mods specifically a little while ago, and their response was essentially like, we built this world and we want people to like, experience the world as close, as immersively as possible and not be able to just go and change settings to any real extent.

• 45:46Kirk Hamilton?

  You know, it really is interesting how like my thinking has changed as my body has begun deteriorating. Because when I played Hollow Knight, I was 37 years old, and now I'm playing Silksong at 45. And the fact that my body physically can't keep up anymore actually did change my thinking related to this. And I think your thinking does change as you get older and you start to run into these limitations.

• 46:08Jason Schreier?

  That's good to know. Maddie and I are 39 and 38.

• 46:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, because we're so much younger than we're.

• 46:13Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, we got, we got more flexibility, more joints.

• 46:16Kirk Hamilton?

  Well, you're as old as I was when I played Hollow Knight. And I am telling you that from that time. To forty-five. My body, like, your forties are where your body actually hits these physical limitations and you start to not be able to do things.

• 46:27Jason Schreier?

  Well, that, that makes me sad.

• 46:29Kirk Hamilton?

  Sorry. Yeah, your forties suck. I don't know what to tell you.

• 46:32Speaker 00

  This is why we need mods for real bodies to be introduced. Like, when are we gonna introduce, like, a Nexus Mods, but like, for Kirk's hands?

• 46:40Jason Schreier?

  Well, that's just Cyberpunk.

• 46:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 46:42Jason Schreier?

  Cyberpunk twenty seventy-seven is you got mods on your body.

• 46:46Speaker 00

  That's right. And don't they actually call it mods in that game, too?

• 46:49Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, something like Augments Mods.

• 46:50Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, that'll be our fourth. So, we're gonna talk about Ma- moderators. We're gonna talk about the fashion movement. And then, we're gonna talk about Night City and changing your body with cybernetic implants.

• 47:00Speaker 00

  Can't wait.

• 47:00Kirk Hamilton?

  This'll be our future mod episodes. This has been a lot of fun, though, for this first discussion of mods. And, uh, yeah, there's, I'm sure, plenty more we could talk about, but, uh, let's call it there. And, uh, and yeah, let's, uh, take a break, and then we'll be back for one more thing.

• 47:17Speaker 03

  Sleep is important, but it's difficult sometimes. I'm John Mo. On Sleeping with Celebrities, famous people help conk you out by talking in soothing voices about unimportant things. Maria Bamford on parking.

• 47:33Speaker 04

  I parked in a bus stop. That's just not right. I am not a bus.

• 47:38Speaker 03

  Roxane Gay on airports.

• 47:40Speaker 05

  My favorite airport is Indianapolis. It has a really smart layout.

• 47:45Speaker 03

  Alan Tudyk on yardsticks.

• 47:48Speaker 06

  You hand somebody a yardstick, yardsticks become part of the family.

• 47:52Speaker 03

  Granted, it's a weird idea, but it's lots of fun, and it works. Listen wherever you get podcasts.

• 48:03Speaker 07

  Hey, it's Sue the Subway Train. Hey, guess what, Sue? I just inherited a game show, and I have to continue it because there are people out there who like to curl up into a ball and listen to it. Yeah, it's a podcast where listeners submit game show ideas for others to play on air. Well, it is. In fact, the dumber, the better. Right, right. It's called Dr. Game Show. Some curled up balls consider it a tradition, while others call it a train wreck. No, not you, Sue. It's Dr. Game Show. If you're the sort that likes to listen to people competing for refrigerator magnets, then curl up into a ball and listen to Dr. Game Show every other Wednesday at MaximumFun.org.

• 48:48Kirk Hamilton?

  And we are back for one more thing. Jason, you're playing a game. So what's your one more thing?

• 48:53Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, I played this game a few weeks ago, actually. So Inkell just released a new game. Inkell is the company behind 80 Days and Expelled and Overboard, a lot of other cool narrative games. And this new one is called TR49, and it is a narrative deduction game in the vein of many games that we all love, such as Oberdin and The Root Trees Are Dead and other kind of interface-involved games, Her Story. And in this game, you, your job, you play as this kind of like lab assistant whose job is to open up this big machine and try to figure out the mysteries inside of it.

• 49:33Jason Schreier?

  And this machine, which is called TR49, eats books and digests them and has them in a big catalog and maybe even alters the state of reality with them in some way.

• 49:45Kirk Hamilton?

  Sounds like a metaphor for something.

• 49:48Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, AI, I mean, I guess it's a little bit there, but it's got some really interesting questions about more. It's more about the way that words alter reality and the way that books kind of change our lives and the way we perceive the world and the way we think about the world. And so the way that the interface works is that you type in two letters and then two numbers, kind of like TR49, and that will bring up an entry in this computer, like a database entry. And you can read it and learn more about this world and the literature. And it will give you hints or lead you down a road to get to other entries.

• 50:33Jason Schreier?

  And over the course of the game, you have to find all these entries. And then you have to figure out what they're called and kind of match them together. In your interface where you say, oh, okay, I found this entry. This is a book about such and such, and it's called this by this. And so therefore you match the name and the author and you do it that way. There isn't really a ton of deduction in this game. I wouldn't say it's quite as intellectually taxing as something like retreat or deductively taxing as something like retreats are dead. Because a lot of it just holds your hand along the way. And it's more about just discovering and figuring out what the deal is with this book eating machine and why it is doing the things it's doing and the story about the people who created it. And it's really cool. It's a really fun game.

• 51:17Jason Schreier?

  It's small. It's also very cheap. I believe it's only $8 and you get a few hours of gameplay out of it. So pretty good value there. And I really enjoyed playing it through. It's really cool to just kind of like discover this world of books and what they all mean and the people behind them and who's researched what and who's had an affair with whom. And you meet some interesting personalities along the way. There's some fun voice acting, a lot of people having interesting conversations. And yeah, I really, I really got a lot out of this game. So yeah, once again, it's called TR49. I recommend it. Go check it out, download it, play it. It's cool.

• 52:02Speaker 00

  It sounds really cool.

• 52:03Kirk Hamilton?

  Nice, I have this downloaded and yeah, I have been looking forward to checking it out, so I'm glad to hear it's good. All right, well, I will go next. My one more thing is a book that I finished last week that I really liked by Joe Hill, the son of Stephen King, who has been discussed in Jason's One More Thing recently for his recent book, King Sorrow. This is an older book of Hill's that I read called The Fireman from 2016. And it's a lot of fun. I really, I really enjoyed it. It did have that Stephen King-y sense of propulsion where you just, I just wanted to know what was happening, like what was going to happen next the entire time.

• 52:39Jason Schreier?

  Just like King Sorrow.

• 52:40Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, I was, I read it in just a few days because I was like, well, I, I need to keep going here because I want to know what's going to happen. It's also interesting because it's in pretty direct conversation with the state. Stand, Stephen King's famous, one of his most famous novels, in a way that I just thought was really interesting. And I haven't read a whole ton about afterward. I just haven't found too many analyses beyond people just pointing out, you know, Easter eggs. But it's really interesting that Joe Hill wrote a book that's really directly kind of in conversation with one of his dad's biggest books. And like, what was he going for there? I don't really know. Like, it's a really entertaining book in its own right. So it's not that important. But I do think that that was an interesting thing about

• 53:23Kirk Hamilton?

  it. So I don't want to say too much about it. I will just give it a broad recommendation. It is a really fun read. And the basic premise is it is about a viral outbreak. It's actually very interesting. I suppose it's a bacterial outbreak, not viral. It's about a pandemic that essentially ends the world. It's or at least, it seems as though the world is on its way to ending, much like in The Stand. It's very interesting that it was written in 2016, because it imagines a world where a horrible disease outbreak is killing everyone. And it gets some things very right, I would say. And and just, I don't know, that was kind of a striking thing about it, that it was published in 2016, just before the actual

• 54:05Kirk Hamilton?

  pandemic hit. So it is a pre pandemic, but just pre pandemic pandemic book. It is the difference here, and I guess I'll give this one thing away, which is made clear very early, is that this bacterial infection, the reason that you die when you get it is that you burst into flames and like, just burn unbelievably brightly with fire. And so the world is just burning. So that is the like, big idea here. So it isn't just like, people get sick and then pass it on to other people and die. It's not like Captain Trips in The Stand, where it's just like a really bad flu. It's like incredibly dramatic and almost magical seeming. It's called, they refer to it as dragon scale. It covers your skin in this in these like, black marks that are occasionally quite beautiful. And

• 54:50Kirk Hamilton?

  then over time, it starts to react to unclear inputs, and then people just burst into flames. It can cause chain reactions. So like, whole cities are burning, the world is burning. And then we kind of go from there. Unlike The Stand, which is about a whole cast of characters, this book is about one person, Harper. She is the main protagonist. I would say a very good protagonist. I found her very likeable and interesting. A not rare, but it's just nice to read a well-written female character when you have a sort of male writer in this space. I think Stephen King sometimes broadly gets a bad rap for his female characters, but I actually think he's written some incredible female characters, so.

• 55:31Speaker 00

  Yeah, every now and then he frickin' nails it. And then it's like disappointing when he does it.

• 55:34Kirk Hamilton?

  The dude wrote Dolores Claiborne or Cujo. I mean, there are a lot of books with.

• 55:38Speaker 00

  Carrie?

• 55:39Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, sure. Like, yeah, his first book. Great. That's a great example.

• 55:43Jason Schreier?

  Holly.

• 55:43Kirk Hamilton?

  Yeah, Holly. I do like Holly, too. So anyhow, it is something that Hill has sort of gotten from his father, or at least shares in common with his father. And actually, something else that's funny that I just, I kind of just want to mention is he shares this Stephen King-ism that is so particular to Stephen King. And that's that there are all these young characters in this book, and they all listen to music that's like one generation removed from the music that most people their age would be listening to. And it's not just a one-off. It's like everyone's shared frame of musical reference is the same as the author's. In this case, it's like The Cars and U2 and Dire Straits. It's a bunch of kind of rock music from the 80s and maybe the early 90s. But these characters are mostly in their 20s or 30s, and the year is presumably 2016.

• 56:28Kirk Hamilton?

  So it's just really funny. And it reminds me of how in so many Stephen King books, you'll have little kids making references to like 1950s bands, even though it's the 1980s, which is just an interesting tic that he seems to have carried on from his father. And so then there's the Stand part of it that I just think is really, it's really funny. There are just all these little echoes. I'll give a couple of examples. Like, at one point, Nozola turns up. Or there's a character named Harold Cross, which if you've read The Stand, you'll remember that Harold is a character and Nadine Cross is a character, and they're together. So this guy Harold Cross is always getting referenced. There is a deaf character named Nick, just like in The Stand. There's little references to, I don't know, Watership Down, for example, a book that appears in.

• 57:12Kirk Hamilton?

  Both books, there are a lot of other like surnames that are just Stephen King-esque surnames. We were like, wait a minute, I know that. And even like the main character, Harper, like she has a lot of parallels to Franny from The Stand. And really, it's almost like Joe Hill asked himself, maybe The Stand would have been a better book if Franny had been the main character. If it hadn't like tried to go across the whole country, if we hadn't been jumping to Las Vegas and back to Colorado and doing this whole kind of stilted thing that even King kind of admits that The Stand falls apart in the back half and he didn't know how to end it. So he just kind of blew up a bomb like, and Hill is a little like, what if I took another whack at this? And there was just one character and it was Franny who, you know, I don't know, I've gone on Just King things a couple of times to talk about stand adaptations.

• 57:57Kirk Hamilton?

  I'm like their go to stand adaptation guy. And so I've thought a lot about The Stand and I would say that Franny is maybe the best character in that book. And by best character, I don't mean that she's the most fleshed out character. She actually kind of gets abandoned halfway through. I mean, she's like the richest character. She has potentially the most interesting arc. And because she's like a pregnant woman at the beginning of the end of the world, she's just in a really interesting position, like dramatically. It's like very challenging. She's dealing with all these like really existential questions about her and her unborn child. And it's the same for Harper. Harper is also pregnant in the, in the firemen and is just like Franny and is kind of following a similar trajectory.

• 58:37Kirk Hamilton?

  So I think he's like approached a lot of these questions about like The Stand and reapproaching that idea. It's really cool. Like if you like The Stand, I absolutely recommend this book. And if you've never read The Stand, I still recommend it because it's like a totally cool read. It's funny that it demands comparison to one of Stephen King's most famous books. And I'd say, you know, as a narrative, it is stronger. I think the fact that it stays more focused, it just has a much stronger and more well-defined narrative. And I do like that about it. I really dig the, um, the way that the apocalypse here, this, this dragon scale outbreak is depicted. I think it's just really interesting and it leads to a lot of really evocative scenes. I think that Hill's weakness is probably his dialogue writing. There were just a lot of times where characters would speak.

• 59:22Kirk Hamilton?

  In ways that I didn't find totally believable or natural. It just was a little overwrought or overly written. Characters just talk in these full paragraphs at times where I'm just like, I don't think people in this circumstance would be talking that way. And moreover, it's not like, you know, he's a, he is a good writer, but Stephen King does have this ability to, I guess, as they say on Just King Things, to just do the thing. He has an ability to evoke these turns of phrase that become iconic. There are so many of them in the stand, you know, My Life for You, Everything the Trashcan Man Says, so many ways that the world is described or just, you know, turns of phrase that get repeated over and over again.

• 1:00:02Kirk Hamilton?

  King has this way with words and with, you know, shaping them into, I guess, like shibboleths or something, or like, almost like a memetic quality to the way that he writes dialogue that really causes these ideas and these sentences to stick with you. And it's just something that, I mean, really no other author has, so it's not a huge shock that he'll can't quite pull it off. But since the book feels so much like reading a Stephen King book, that aspect feels a little bit like it's missing, I guess. And then I did kind of notice sometimes the dialogue writing just wasn't quite there. I'll be really interested to read King's sorrow, since, you know, it's a later book, to see how he's developed that, because it's totally something that I think he could improve. And overall, the book, I think, is really well-written, and in particular, it's very well-structured and very well-paced.

• 1:00:47Kirk Hamilton?

  I really liked it. It's a, that's a big recommendation from me for The Fireman, a very interesting book by Joe Hill. All right, Maddie, you're up. I'm excited for your one more thing, so let this happen.

• 1:00:59Speaker 00

  My one more thing is a TV show that I just found out Kirk and I have both been watching. It's called Platonic, and it's actually been on for a while. It's from Apple TV+. And it's in its second season, actually, the second season's done, and I am only now getting around to it. But the first season was in 2023, and I loved the first season, and I kept meaning to talk about it on this show, but then, you know, other stuff happened. There's always, there's always competition for the one more thing category at the end of the show, we all know. But the show's so great. So this is- Is much like the studio. This is another Seth Rogen vehicle. He stars in this show, plays a completely different character that is maybe,

• 1:01:43Speaker 00

  I don't presume to know the man, but maybe seems a little closer to the Seth Rogen character that he plays in most things, in that he is kind of man child-ish and like wears some pretty cringe outfits all the time, but is extremely likeable and endearing. And his best friend is a woman, and these are both straight characters. I feel like this is, this is the premise of the show. It's called platonic, straight man, straight woman. They have an actual platonic friendship. And the premise of the show is not that these two characters are going to start dating. They will never do that. But instead, everyone else in their lives will be completely baffled that they are in a platonic friendship. And

• 1:02:25Speaker 00

  that is what causes a lot of the comedy and sitcom setups of the show. But mostly, it's a vehicle for Seth Rogen to be hilarious. And it is also a vehicle for his best friend, played by Rose Byrne, to be hilarious. I think of Rose Byrne as a dramatic actress, and I did up until I watched platonic.

• 1:02:43Kirk Hamilton?

  Yes.

• 1:02:43Speaker 00

  And now I think of her as a comedic actress purely because she's so hilarious on this show. She gets to do so much slapstick and like sight gag stuff and her facial expressions when she's like staring at Seth Rogen's character, like what decision have you just made with your life are iconic and incredible. And I, I, it's kind of hard to like summarize the plot of this show because it's just a series of bizarre setups that these two get into that are pretty normal, ordinary life setups. But they're so great. And I just, I don't know, if you think Seth Rogen's funny at all, and if you're like, I don't know, I've never seen Rose Byrne be funny. Like, how, how could that be true? It's such,

• 1:03:26Speaker 00

  it's so good. It's, I'm like, I don't even want to spoil anything about the show because it's just a series of dumb things that happen to these normal people. But it's great. I really, really recommend it.

• 1:03:36Kirk Hamilton?

  Emily and I have been loving it as well. It's interesting. It's like kind of in line with shrinking. As another, which is another Apple show.

• 1:03:44Speaker 00

  Yeah, which I haven't seen.

• 1:03:46Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, it's kind of like another hangout show about people, you know, who are married or in kind of middle age and it has that kind of comedic vibe. This one's like, some of these people are like Apetow adjacent people. Carla Gallo is in this, she was in Undeclared. I think Nicholas Stoller, one of the creators, directed Neighbors, which I believe is where the movie where Rose Byrne and Seth Rogen met and became real life friends. So it's like, got that kind of Apetow thing going on, like a little bit of that raunchy ridiculousness. And the thing about this show compared to something like Shrinking for me is that it is really funny. Like, they're just the, I didn't know how funny it would be. I thought maybe, oh, it'll be maybe a dramedy or it'll be kind of.

• 1:04:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, I had no idea what to expect, yeah.

• 1:04:31Kirk Hamilton?

  And then like, there's an episode early on where Rose Byrne's character is looking to buy a new house because her family is, they're kind of, they've gotten too big and they need a bigger house. And like, she's touring horrible properties of Los Angeles, looking for somewhere they can afford. And like, her realtor takes her to this abandoned, like, retirement home that was like, it was abandoned after the pandemic because everybody died.

• 1:04:55Speaker 00

  But it's up for sale.

• 1:04:57Kirk Hamilton?

  And so it's like, they walk in and it's like, full of just like, unused walkers and lifts and like harnesses and there's like mold on everything. And like, it's her and Seth Rogen just looking through this incredibly haunted cursed house. And I was laughing so, like, by the end of that sequence, I was like, oh, so this show is like hilariously funny. And then it just does that throughout. I mean, it's a show that every time I watch it, I'm like laughing out loud. So I will co-sign your recommendation. It's a very, very, very funny show.

• 1:05:25Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's, it's great. I, I feel like I've, I don't think I can truly think of a show that actually presents a man and a woman being friends and it doesn't actually end up that they're gonna date. So that in and of itself is amazing. So yeah, of course, since that's the premise, it's called Platonic and it's on Apple TV+

• 1:05:41Jason Schreier?

  I too have watched Platonic.

• 1:05:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, you like it?

• 1:05:44Kirk Hamilton?

  Oh, you have?

• 1:05:44Jason Schreier?

  Yeah, enjoyable show. And yes, Matty, that's the thing that really is, stands out about it, is that there isn't even a tendency. There it's just they're just friends.

• 1:05:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know. But you get why other people would be like, but why are they so into hanging out with each other? But then you get to watch the scenes where they do. And you're like, well, because no one else would understand any of these stupid conversations. And like, they clearly need this outlet to hang out with each other so that their significant others or other people in their lives don't have to put up with whatever is wrong with them.

• 1:06:15Kirk Hamilton?

  I wonder if it's because they're real life friends, but they definitely convey the fact that you can hang out with someone of the opposite gender from you and be both be straight and like, just not have any sexual chemistry and like, sort of just be having fun, like, which they do in every scene that they're in, very effectively.

• 1:06:31Speaker 00

  It's great. It's just a really nice, nice hangout show.

• 1:06:35Kirk Hamilton?

  Agree. Cool. Well, this has been a nice hangout podcast where we've hung out and laughed and had a good time. Yeah, let's call it for now. And I will see the two of you next week.

• 1:06:46Jason Schreier?

  See you guys next time.

• 1:06:48Speaker 00

  Bye.

• 1:06:51Kirk Hamilton?

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

• 1:07:49Kirk Hamilton?

  Maximum Fun, a worker owned network of artist owned shows. Supported. Directly. By you.