BDS Vs TES (With Autumn Wright)

Hello, everybody, and welcome to another installment of Aftermath Hours, the weekly podcast of aftermath.site. a reader-supported, worker-owned website about video games, the internet, and everything that comes after. I'm Nathan Grayson, and today I'm joined by Riley McLeod. Hello. And special guest, Autumn Wright. Hello. And we're going to be talking about, I finally decided after like more than a year of doing this show, that it's important to tell people what we're going to be talking about.

which is the BDS movement in relation to Microsoft, especially considering that this week they surprise dropped an Oblivion remaster. And then also around the same time frame, an indie developer, Icewater Games pulled one of their games from the Xbox store in solidarity with BDS. So much to tackle there. And then beyond that, I think we're going to talk about...

Nintendo switched to pre-orders because that's what everyone's talking about, and we don't want to be left out. First, though, how are the two of you doing? Good. I went to the Botanic Gardens today and looked at all of the tulips. I woke up super early this morning and I was like, I'm going, I'm going to go outside. And I learned a lot about different kinds of tulips.

And that was fun. How were the cherry blossoms? I didn't know there were multiple kinds. The cherry blossoms were nice. They're not quite as full-bloomed. I had never really cared about cherry blossoms until I lived in D.C., where they are indeed magical. And these were not as magical. And I was like, these aren't like DC. And I had to pay for them. But they seemed nice. The Botanic Garden rules. It's a little expensive.

It's like, super cool. Also, I just realized foolishly that i did not ask autumn to autumn if you can introduce yourself and let the people know kind of what you do, where you are from, all of that pertinent information. Hi, hi, I'm Audun. I am a writer, generally call myself a critic and an essayist. I've been doing this mostly freelance for five or six years. Now, I ran all over, and I also read a column at Unwinnable, an indie... games and just art criticism.

publication. My current column there is actually an interview series about games criticisms. I'm talking to a different games critic every month. We're like three issues onto that. hopefully gone for a few more years with it. And you all just did a big issue about AI, I saw. Yes, our April issue is the AI issue. We all tackle the... abyss of what AI is and what it's doing in our own unique ways.

Unwinnable has been around for a bazillion years. I was writing for them before I got my job at Kotaku in 2016, and they had been around forever before that, too. I love to say that they're still going. Yeah, over 15 years now. Generations of writers.

Yeah. Yeah. It's a great community to be a part of as a writer and as a reader. Yeah. I feel like there are so many of these sites like... or things like that where people sort of got their start and to see some of those like still that it's still doing that and it's still going is like so awesome um i love that yeah yeah it's also one of those things where i think people are talking about the current kind of wave of independent independent media

And there was another one, too. There have been others, even focused on video games in particular. We are not the first and hopefully will not be the last. But yeah, so the reason that we have Autumn on today is that a little while ago, you wrote this really good piece for us about kind of, you know, the, I think, initial announcement that BDS was.

boycotting Microsoft and kind of the games media's responsibility within that. Do you want to kind of, you know, for folks who maybe haven't read it, sum up your piece a little bit? Yeah, sure. three weeks ago, maybe now, BDS, the Boycott Divestment Sanctions Organization. Call for Boycott on Xbox. I get into it more what exactly BDS is and why this Call to Boycott is different from other things you might have just heard online about things you can do about the ongoing genocide in Palestine.

But BDS is a very specific Palestinian organization. They're making a very direct call to action for consumers around the world to... stop giving Microsoft money in different ways. The primary way that they want people to engage with this is by boycotting xbox uh which means unsubscribing from games past not playing their live service games, which now includes Minecraft and Call of Duty and Candy Crush, means not buying Xbox hardware, stuff like that, and also other Microsoft things.

The reason BDS is calling for this is because of reporting that's published earlier this year by a bunch of publications. that revealed how Microsoft has been profiting from assisting the IDF and other Israeli forces in... conducting the siege on Gaza and the ongoing occupation of the West Bank. extremely profitable for Microsoft. They're very much willingly participating in this. I think it's sufficient to say that they are complicit in the genocide that is going on there.

And so on the days after the immediate call to boycott, there was very little coverage of it within the game space. That's when I reached out to Riley to be like, hey, this is weirdly quiet. And so the piece was kind of supposed to be like, why is it so quiet all of a sudden? Because individually, members of the games press had been outspoken about the Pasadena issues for the past few years. And then also like, okay, well, that is a lot more complicated for us.

as members of the press to engage with this boycott, so how can we think about that? And what I ultimately hoped to do was to kind of start the conversation about how can we orient ourselves to being in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement. I feel like you and I talked about this, and Nathan will probably remember. I think this sort of thing has come up a couple times in the... the arc of my journalism career where sort of things are

how you engage with things and what your professional responsibilities are versus you as a full person. I think it's always such a tough... thing to think about, and I think your piece does a really good job of balancing those two things. so i liked that yeah it was really good um and obviously food for thought for a lot of people at the time and now as of this week there's kind of this opportunity to put a lot of that into practice

And that the Oblivion remaster came out, you know, kind of the first. It wasn't the first, first big Microsoft release. I believe South of Midnight technically was. But like Oblivion is, you know, obviously a different scale. And so you have a lot of people now being like, OK, what should I do in the face of this thing?

And yeah, it's been interesting to watch. I published a piece this week basically saying you don't need to buy the Oblivion remaster. It's actually fine if you don't. Because I feel like, and this was sort of the thesis that I was coming at it from. If you want to be in solidarity with the BDS movement or to support the boycott, the Oblivion remaster is the easiest point of entry ever. It is a 20-year-old game. If you want to make it look good, there are mods for that.

It also, even though it's a 20-year-old game, it's 50 bucks. That's a lot of money to spend. You could spend that on a bunch of other stuff. You don't really need to get that one. But that ignited a lot of debate and discourse. Because, again, people are very precious about nostalgia. And so, yeah, it's been really something to witness, this kind of... I don't know, moment of people's principles colliding with their desires for a fun video game that they've already played. Yeah, it's easy to...

It's easy to not spend $50, I think. I think it gets more complicated when we talk about the press, who is like, you know, most of the games, of course, I'm engaging with this with other people who are working in games media, and so they have reason to. But by and large, something I write in the piece about this manifesto towards how do we want to engage with the industry, I... bring up Marina Kitaka's Divest from the Games Industry Manifesto from 2020.

how exploitative and extractive the tech and games industry is. And this is really like another point in that. I feel like like in my meat space life, like, you know, DDS has always been around and, you know, you never bring software to the potluck and, you know, you don't have a soda stream and blah, blah, blah. But I'm not sure to the extent that like... I mean, gamers isn't a category, but seeing so many people sort of talk about it in this space has been interesting to me.

I don't know if people were introduced to it because of the Xbox thing, or that's too broad of a category to know. Seeing it so present at the topic of conversation has been really interesting to me. Yeah, I was actually surprised. Part of the reception to publishing that piece, a lot of people I'm friends with told me that they had never heard of VGS. Just from where I grew up, that was a thing that people were aware of. if anything, getting this conversation into.

the game space is important just to make people aware that this is a thing because i think in the past two years people have probably heard about like boycotts of sabra and probably more broadly McDonald's and Starbucks, which are different things that we could maybe talk about. It's maybe part of the confusion about how to react to this Xbox called a boycott.

But yeah, so I think part of the motivation for even writing that was to make sure that there's no excuse for people not to know that there are actionable things that they can do in their lives. Yeah. Well, yeah, and it's also like, and the other like big headline of the week around this is that Icewater Games, like I was saying earlier, ended up pulling one of their games, Tenderfoot Tactic.

from the Xbox store in solidarity with BDS. And, you know, I ended up interviewing the main person who was responsible for that decision, who, like, obviously had a big hand in making Tenderfoot Tactics. That was like his game. And one of the things that came up is this notion of

Like, if you just like do if you participate in these boycotts, it's not like it's going to change Microsoft tremendously. It's not like it's going to bring them down or necessarily even make them divest from Israel. But he was pointing out that this is.

as you're sort of saying, a good opportunity to make people aware of how a lot of these things are interconnected. Like, you know, he said, normally people would not be very interested in like Microsoft's Azure cloud, you know, stuff or their AI bullshit. But this draws attention to that and shows the ways that those technologies feed into this, you know, genocidal or ethnic cleansing effort.

And that gets them interested. Suddenly they're like, oh, I didn't know about that before, but yeah, this actually does matter in these ways that I wasn't paying attention to previously. I imagine that there are a lot of people who have felt very powerless and they cannot do anything about it. What is going on in the world? And a playcott is...

Participating in this boycott as a collective form of action is the bare minimum entry, but I think it is also kind of the test of if you cannot do this... thing you cannot live without this very basic extravagance not even comfort then what then like is there anything that you would be willing to do to stand in solidarity with House Saints 2 and to live in a better world that is not built off extraction.

oppression. Part of why companies like SodaStream are on that list is because they build factories on occupied land. And they reportedly don't treat Palestinian workers well, right? It becomes like if you still really need SodaStream specifically, never even find that there are alternatives to it, then...

That is almost like more of a rhetorical action on your part. And we need to move beyond rhetorical action. We need to move to more direct forms of action. And this is an actual material way to engage. Yeah, it's also just like... For some people, it's solidarity 101, right? Just the idea of seeing somebody do something or take a principled stand and be like, I'm going to mirror their actions because we are stronger together than we are separately. Like for a lot of people.

especially I think a lot of gamers, like that's kind of a foreign concept or they don't see that there is value in that simply on its own. And again, as an entry point, as a place to start. But I mean, just that is something. And like, you know, you get enough pieces moving and suddenly you can move much larger objects. It's useful even on that front. But it's also been...

Interesting to be because I'm a crazy person. I have notifications on for like everything that happens on both my blue sky and our company blue skies. I've seen like every response to these articles. And man, there's a lot of people being like, there's no point in this. It'll never work. It's not going to do anything. I'm going to get the Oblivion remaster anyway. It's like. Yeah, I haven't responded to anything about this, so this is also kind of me.

This is not too free for me to say stuff, but also I spell it out in the article. Grace Benfell at Paste also had a great article about why the call for boycott can work. It has before. BDS. itself has worked before. Sabra Hummus is no longer on the call for boycott because the Israeli corporation that partly owns Sabra with Pepsi…

sold its share of the company because it wasn't profitable enough anymore. Puma used to be on the list because they would sponsor athletic teams within Israel that played on occupied lands. And as we report, they don't say that they didn't renew the contract because of that. But there was mounting social pressure and awareness in the world, right?

So it works. And it's also modeled off of previous movements that work in South Africa, in America, going back to the origins of boycotts in Ireland. Right. But, you know, I think that it is... sad that people don't necessarily recognize a lot of that history or like the ways in which these things do work um and also i think that in those cases Some of those people don't want to know about that. They're just like trying to find a convenient excuse to keep doing what they enjoy doing.

You know, that's the part that's, I guess, more disheartening to me is it's like, you know, you're trying to make this argument that to you sounds good or sounds like airtight. When in reality, you're just trying to justify the decision that you either have already made or that you're going to make. And it's like, you know, again, going back to what you were saying earlier, Autumn, like if you can't even deprive yourself of this like one extravagance, then.

Like what can you do for the better of those around you?

I'm wondering, I think your article touches on this too, like does the idea of a boycott or not buying something have a particular weight in the game space? And we were just talking in Aftermath Slack earlier today about like... is writing about any game some kind of implicit, like... call to buy it like and is that the nature of what games writing was or like like i think it does touch a particular nerve maybe for for gamers and that's probably true of other

I mean, there's no community of, like, you know, Coke drinkers or something. Maybe there is. Like, does it face a particular challenge in the gaming space, like, in particular? It's also, like... I mean, I think that it's kind of interesting in the context of video games because there have been so many attempts on the part of like capital G gamers to boycott certain things. um generally because they're woke or whatever but even going further back than that there's like a really infamous meme

of like a steam group to boycott a particular call of duty. And then it shows all of them logged in playing call of duty. And it's like, that's kind of, you know, the example of like a gamer boycott. In part because like they're not really well organized and they often don't have that much of a coherent point and there's no accountability within them. So people just say like, actually, I'm going to play the video game.

And in fact, I was all just, it was all just bluster. I mean, yeah, we've seen it be wielded as like, the concept be wielded as like a hate tool as well. And obviously, That doesn't reflect on BDS, but I think it is particularly touchy in our space. Yeah, boycott can mean many things, too. It can be a disorganized thing, and I really wanted to emphasize it.

telling people what bds is that this is an organized collective action but yeah in the game space boycott does not mean that um and so i can see why when people who aren't familiar with bds and the fact that there are active ongoing successful boycott organizations uh that they hear that it's just another one and we kind of saw this with hogwarts legacy um And that's, talking about Augur things is interesting also because

There were calls to boycott on the consumer side, but in the media sphere, actually, a lot of media did not cover it or covered it in ways that reflected the materiality of how it was contributing to life. the oppression of trans people in the real world. And now we kind of have the opposite, where the media is mostly ignoring the fact that there's a boycott.

um but consumers are talking more about it yeah i mean does it sort of raise the the question because then we were talking about like south of midnight earlier and like i had played some of that um I've meant to get back to it. I meant to write about it again. But like, does, does this kind of thing then like harm that studio? And are there these where like, you know,

I can't remember who made Hogwarts Legacy. You could argue that boycotting Hogwarts Legacy harms the studio that made Hogwarts Legacy and the people who made it, and you don't want that necessarily. But in this case, it seems like a kind of secondary. knock-on that does feel complicated, though I also kind of think thinking about

your video game purchases in terms of, like, the developers it affects. I worry that you kind of start big-braining yourself into, like... Well, you also have no control over that, right? Like, as Tarithan is pointing out in chat. Like if a Microsoft boycott was to impact Microsoft such that they had to, you know, make material changes, odds are, yeah, they'd probably close some studios, but that's at Microsoft's discretion.

That's not a direct result of consumer action. That is indeed a reflection on like the way that these companies are run, which is often at the cost of people. And so they end up, you know, doing harm in this way. Does it also mean that like people are making cool games and then you're not playing them?

Yeah, I mean, this kind of gets turned at the people saying, we need to stand in solidarity with the people who are being ethnically cleansed. And they're like, well, what about the developers? I'm like, well, actually, tell Microsoft that. Tell them to stop blemishing the artistic work of these people, of thousands of developers. who they are turning around and laying off anyways. And Kel Holtner at Noescape, a gamescript blog, had a piece about this.

a day after the news because that immediately popped up and it was immediately the fault of the people who are saying, hey, we need to consider this boycott, instead of Microsoft, who is making the decision to, again, profit off of genocide. And it needs to come back to that. We cannot forget that this is about What we were all raised in believing is the absolute worst thing that someone could do.

Yeah. I mean, it's also worth keeping in mind that a lot of people who are at Microsoft do not approve of this. Microsoft is not a monolith in this regard. There are workers who have tried to demonstrate against these things. And I've even like, what, gotten fired for it, I think.

um and like especially if we're talking about you know video games even um there are a lot of like clearly left-leaning like unionized workers within microsoft specifically um i have no doubt that a lot of those people are probably talking about like okay how do we demonstrate against this how do we like use the power that we have accrued by unionizing to try to push back against these decisions that our parent company is making.

So I'm like, there are a lot of moving parts here. And just because you choose not to play or buy a video game doesn't necessarily mean that you're working against the people who made that game. You might in some ways even be helping them out. I haven't seen if any of the Microsoft unions has said anything about it. Have you? I don't think they have. I think I definitely would have seen that. Good thing to look into. But like as we.

included that there is the Nozor and Apartheid campaign that is being organized from within Microsoft. And they were gathering signatures in a petition that they wanted people

outside of the company design, like they do want to combine internal labor pressure with consumer pressure to try to change these things. Yeah, which also makes, I think... the again act of um of ice water removing their game from the xbox store interesting because that's another form of external pressure um that is not necessarily like bds didn't necessarily say for anyone to do that that's a little different from like the consumer boycott they're proposing

But again, the developer who did it was like, You know, I think that showing solidarity in this way, especially if like a bunch of smaller indie developers who are not extracting their lifeblood from Microsoft.

do it like where you know it's a bunch of us who are all making like a few hundred dollars from xbox anyway if we each do it then that you know builds to this louder voice um because like a thing that you have to keep in mind about xbox is that for for a company that big like having all these indie games be part of your service

is i mean it bolsters things like game pass um but then also like it's mostly it's mostly marketing after a certain point like nobody's making a ton of money off these games being on xbox specifically and so if you start to turn that marketing against them, then like that hurts them in ways that are bigger than just like,

indie games x y and z are no longer on the platform it's like oh there's this whole movement of them and they're leaving the platform and like all over the same issue um so like it does build to something i think that's also why you know, the angle of the piece was like Games Media has a role in that to make sure that like... consumers, gamers are. keeping that in mind, but it's also in how we orient how we talk about games.

And I think that's part of the point I was trying to make about divesting from the games industry is like, are we here reifying these tech companies that are too big to actually do anything about, and they just get to enact their will on the world no matter how harmful it is. And so I think the biggest thing about this this week for me was just the reaction to oblivion in the media space. Because I have to say, I understand.

I wrote in detail about how there's conflict and how I professionally work and engage with Xbox now. And in ways I feel cross the boycott, but I'm being very vocal and aware of that. but other people are seemingly ignoring it. And there's no reason that these people have to tweet about what they think about the graphics of the Oblivion remake. We never need to post about that. But for some reason, we are.

starts to become like a bigger issue of what is games media what are we doing here if we cannot help ourselves from engaging with something in a way that is purely about hype yeah and again a thing that like um it's totally optional like it is a game that again it's a remaster of a game that's 20 years old um it's the talk of the town right now

but I do not imagine it will stay that way. There are a lot of new games still to come out in the near future. The hype cycle will move on. Like you can, you know, not... You cannot be in those minds for like a couple of days. It's actually all right. And it won't really like it's not going to fucking like.

ruin your website traffic or whatever um so yeah it has been i don't know eye-opening if nothing else to see people just jump on the hype train anyway i mean i i think it's tough though because like like we've talked about when this is kind of coming from the past, I mean, but it is a thing that's happening that your readers are talking about, right? And is there the argument to be made that you're doing a disservice to your readers by not...

Writing about it, the flip side of that is you're not... you know, they're going to know it exists without you. You're not breaking, you know, you're not sitting on news, the cardinal sin of journalism. Right, right. But if you do see your role as part of that, like... I get the, it is, I think it is like a, this is like editor brain talking, but I do see that it is kind of a push and a pull, right? Yeah. No, I mean, I think that that's a good question to ask.

um i i think that it's more just that like you need to if you're doing this coverage It can't just be hype and nothing else. If you are writing a piece about the Oblivion remaster, it is not that difficult to insert a graph saying, also, there's a BDS boycott going on. That is part of the crucial context of this game.

And like it only just began. This is kind of the first major Microsoft release to come out after it. Like, here's how people are reacting. Here's what people are talking about in regard to that. You can do that in like one paragraph. Yeah, I think I want people to be more thoughtful about their work. And this is an opportunity to ask, well, okay, should I post about this? Should I post about, oh, these graphics that I'm seeing in this trailer right now?

And like, just think like, oh, that's actually just advertising. I'm not being paid to even write about that now. And something I point out in a sentence, but what I'm really worried about is this becoming a land acknowledgement, like is common in Australia and Canada, where you say, well, we're on stolen land right now anyways and more like we need to orient how we're talking about this game and so that might also mean being suspicious of what we're being sold. Nathan has been

saying and like what Nathan wrote about like, why are we being sold this old game for $50? Why? are we talking about it? This would be talking about Jane Eyre and talking about the glue binding of a new print that Penguin put out, right? Not about the actual content of what it's in. And why would we?

Why is that what's important to consumers? Yeah. And I think that it's kind of weird to see because I think that divorced from BDS-related stuff, there is a contingent of people, even within the games press, who have been vocally suspicious of remasters.

And I'm like, yeah, you know, do we really need a remaster of this game, of this Last of Us entry so soon? Like, do we need that? Is this really going to change anyone's experience of this game? Or are they just trying to extract another $60 from us? And you can carry that spirit over to these sorts of things as well. Like that level of, I think, criticality is very good to have. And it's what keeps you from just being another kind of like element of the advertising arm.

That that's where your brain should always be. I think when you're in the press for anything consumer facing is like, why is this here? What are we doing? Like, what is my role in all of this beyond being just. marketing yeah i mean i think we're lucky at aftermath that we don't have that same the kind of pressure to cover everything that people are talking about the way that other sites surely do.

Yeah, I don't know. I've never understood. I feel like if remasters aren't like the game is unplayable and now you can play it again, I never totally understood what they're for. I get that I can't tell when graphics are improved, so I'm not a good judge. I mean, again... It's money most of the time. Right, true. quicker way to make more money than to develop a whole new video game which especially in this day and age and at the scale they are made can take you know between five and eight years

I was just saying this. I was talking to some people last night who've only seen The Last of Us show. which I have not really watched. And I was trying to explain how many last of us's we've had and how to me, it's like the TV show is just like another freaking remaster. And I'm just like, they've made so they've only made two, two and a half. Last of Us games, but they've made so many. And my friends weren't really gamers, and they were like, what? And I was like, oh, it's a whole thing.

which is sort of interesting to explain remasters to people. Yeah. Actually, do you all respond to the chat at all? Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah, we've been, yeah. Yeah, jump in. Is it whoever's posting as Aftermath.site? That's Chris. Yeah, Chris, Digital Foundry absolutely doing work there. But those are analyses. They're going in and really looking at things. And part of games journalism comes out of tech journalism, which is just even verifying that a thing works and runs properly sometimes.

But I think that is categorically different from just tweeting about your reaction to a thing. And I think that is just advertising or marketing for this corporation that does not need it, right? Yeah. Yeah, I mean, again, I think that in these cases, the bare minimum is centering what you're writing in the context of this larger movement or this larger moment.

Games journalists are finding that it's increasingly impossible to divorce what they're writing from this moment, if only because of tariffs and things of that nature that like impact the price and the ability of people to access.

these particular goods and like after a certain point you have to talk about price because that's all anybody is talking about anymore when it comes to things like the switch to they're like well yeah i can't get this because i don't have the money why don't i have the right amount of money to obtain this oh because of the current political situation like these things are just

You know, the knock-on effects have never been clearer, and you just sort of have to talk about it. Yeah, Geo at Digital Trends had a really great piece about walking out of, like, switch preview stuff into the tariff news and the weird dissonance. that was happening. And we're seeing, I think part of why I wrote a piece at the time was also because people were immediately talking about the tariffs that were not talking about the call to boycott.

And so the question became, well, why are we allowed to talk about one political thing but not the other? And that is the Palestinian exception, which we have all been witnessing in some way for the past year and a half, and also for the past 80 years. Yeah. And it also just feels very like in line with the priorities the gamers have, which is, you know, here is new product. I want new product. And then following that, is new product good? Well, but is that a little cynical?

I mean, yeah, but I don't think I'm wrong. Yeah, I mean, I try not to. I mean, we've used the word gamers a lot, and I tend to always try to remind myself that gamer is not a category of person.

You know, I think the tariff news was like news was widespread news and like that it did the questions of its material effects felt immediate to people like I don't I think that people were covering that and talking about it and it wasn't solely motivated by like some kind of consumerism i feel like i'm advocating all these like well but like um things

I mean, I don't think that it was solely that. I think just that, you know, that element of things was more compatible with how we typically talk about video games than, you know, the context of. genocide in Palestine. Yeah, I think it's something that, again, I feel like we've been talking about a lot is like... is is games media even if you're i don't know us or unwinnable or a bunch of

places that aren't just, you know, peppering blogs with affiliate links and SEO. Like, is it inseparable from marketing in some way? And my gut would be that it's just kind of the perception, but then I don't know. Like, right, is writing about a game an inherent, like... call to buy it like but then i don't know i don't think the same like like when i read a movie review i don't always think oh they're trying to get me to go see that movie um and i don't know if

if games yeah the people who aren't gonna buy the game read the game review i don't know that's where the problem because the only people reading games writing are right already really deep into something whereas more people might read movie criticism we see the numbers um i do think games writing is not inherently a part of the industry itself, is not necessarily consumers, but in most circumstances as it exists in the world.

Absolutely is. Yeah. There's also just that kind of top level issue of, you know. Most marketing is just trying to get something in somebody's face as often as possible and from as many different angles as possible. And so you are kind of always serving that part of marketing just by mentioning something. But that's also sort of unavoidable. And again, if you're contextualizing it right, then you're doing as much as you can to sort of avoid simply aiding marketing.

But yeah, I mean, it's hard. It's a weird spot to be in. And I agree that like in a better world, people would be more often reading games writing just for, you know, the craft of it or just to like.

be able to better critically unpack something like i mean i read i read writing about movies all the time that i'm never going to see um in fact that's the way main way that i engage with movies i don't watch them very often but i am like curious to know what big new movies say about culture and like or smaller new movies or whatever i'm just like huh this seems like it's interesting um and yeah with games you know i think there's

there's some of that i i think i like to hope that some people visit aftermath for things of that nature but i don't i don't know there's also as uh apple cider which points out uh the history of access And an easy answer would be to say that, well, there's a lot of games criticism being written without access. but also most of what's being read on day one is reviews that are necessitated by Early Access. And I'm sure that there is in some editors weighing how to talk about this.

the threat of being blacklisted because Bethesda especially has blacklisted sites before. You'll be fine without them. But at that time... GamesMedia did not stand in solidarity with their own colleagues because someone was being blacklisted. And so now the ground is fertile for companies to use blacklist. to start to shape the conversation. And that should be, you know, throwing alarm bells about like, what is the press at this point? Is there really a games press?

So if that is always a threat. And we're also having conversations about access journalism right now in like the actual press. Well, I mean, it's also in the games press only gotten worse over time since like that initial kind of, I think.

since the initial alarm bells about blacklisting were sounded, in that the industry has become so much more reliant on guides since then. And if you want to win the guides race, you need to be there on day zero. You need to, as soon as embargo lifts, have all your stuff ready to go. So that then SEO grabs onto that and not somebody else's guide. And if you don't do that, then you kind of have lost the race before it even began.

people giving you review codes or giving you a pre-release code, then you can't even play that part of the game or you can't even like. be in the mix for that whole thing yeah um so yeah it's like yet another means by which uh publishers can exert control but what our guides do

What are they surfing? And they do have very practical things. They do actually help people. They also fund websites. That's cool. But also in this broader conversation about... moving towards a world where genocide does not happen. what our guides doing and these are conflicting. And that means some of us have to live with those contradictions but we should not excuse those contradictions away.

We should live with and work to live in a world where we do not have to sit with that anymore. Yeah, I liked that about your piece because I think like you point out and like you're saying right now like it isn't it isn't for everybody just a question of like i can and can't do this and and i know like For myself, having been the guy who talks to the bosses, if guides are funding your website and not getting early access and not running guides means...

your boss is going to close your website and everyone's going to be out of a job. It's complicated. And everyone losing their job is not as big in the grand scheme of things as genocide. But at the same time, your job is to... keep your employees from losing your job. And like, and so I think. being able to yeah like you say to sit with that push and pull i think that sometimes i'm gonna sound like an asshole i think sometimes on the internet

things can be very black and white. And there's an interesting way in which the situation is black and white, but people's... where people sit within it is sort of not, and being able to hold that complexity, I think. Right. Is it really valuable? Yeah, I don't want us to say that this is gray. Yeah, no. That it's too complicated. It is black and white. I think we just need to stop making these excuses.

Yeah. And try to shape the world into something that's not. It is very black and white. And that's okay that we are living with contradictions. Yeah. Yeah. Contradictions is a better phrase than gray, I think. Yeah. Or even just like, I've thought a lot about this recently because I think that, you know, people are generally... more prone to living with contradictions than they like to say they are.

Or even with like open hypocrisy, they just if they see it in somebody else, they're like, how dare you? Unbelievable. You are definitionally a hypocrite as a person. But when I do it, it's fine. I have my reason. And I do wish that we more openly conversated on those terms that we're just like, yeah, these are the things that I'm just like totally at odds with myself about because I'm a human being and we're all kind of like this.

And there's some discomfort to it. And yeah, like instead of trying to bury that, acknowledge that discomfort, acknowledge that like the situation that we are in right now, especially with regards to something like this is untenable. And then the question becomes. Instead of how I'm going to hide this, what are we going to do about it? Yeah, and I think your piece did a good job of that, too.

being upfront with where you sit and with what you're struggling with anything to like Nathan says not hiding it which I think would be easy And is definitely like, I mean, we've seen this with, you know, like other games that are like Hogwarts or Kingdom Come Deliverance, like things that are hard to write about. You just kind of.

pretend it's not happening. Yeah. I mean, I did want to touch on that a little bit because, you know, as we were saying earlier, like Hogwarts legacy, there was, I think more acknowledgement of kind of its place within this. sphere of potential potentially doing harm um but then you look at like the wider conversation around that game and it was sort of like

The press saying, hey, I don't know about this. The like anti-wokes being like, we're going to turn this into a giant crusade. And in the game selling like 13 million units or whatever. Because a lot of people who like would have cared in either direction just never heard about any of this. And so it just it kind of all was not awash necessarily. I think that there was there was an impact. But.

Like, I guess, what does that kind of say about the press's role in all of this? Because then also, you know, you have people in chat right now saying, oh, yeah, most of my friends don't read articles. They just like watch a stream. um or watch a video or whatever else and so like so much of the conversation around games is happening over there most of it even and with that as kind of the backdrop for all this like

How important is our role in all of this, I guess? I haven't seen, I don't know if you all have with the UK stuff and then the... Harry Potter TV show. I've seen people be upset about all of that, but I haven't read TV write-ups of it. I don't know if TV coverage is having the same. I think that's such a...

JK Rowling funded something super bad. And it seems like such a clear line where you could argue if you had to, if you felt so called that like the line from Hogwarts legacy to JK Rowling to hatefulness is like you could. I don't think you would be correct, but you could argue that it's not a direct line. But in this case, it's like, come on.

We just had this thing. And I haven't seen, I don't know that I've seen TV writing about it, but I don't read a ton of TV writing. I guess it doesn't exist yet, really. Yeah, I think that's also going to change very quickly now because of the news out of the UK last week. I see someone in the chat getting into the weeds, the technicalities. about like, well, okay, first of all, there was an actual organized call to boycott. Hogwarts, I could say it was a very different kind of boycott.

But, you know, you don't give money to it because it's on PS Plus anyway, so you play it, okay, cool, whatever. But again, like the broader thing about orienting how we live to get to a world. people don't live under someone else's boot. Why do you want to engage with Hogwarts? Have you noticed the amount of antisemitism and classism in there? And I don't mean that to talk down to you, but just… Think about like, why do you have to play that game specifically?

And if you really do dig into it, you will start to see that it is itself creating a world. don't exist, actually, where there are higher art views, where people do live under boots, but they're called Hapsolves, so it's fine. Like, whatever. So let's really think about how we're engaged with that. Art does influence the world, and it does tell us who gets to be human in fiction, which then shapes reality.

Shapes. Politics. You know, I was reading just this past week The Message. Ta-Nehisi Coates came out last year, waited at the library for six months. Yeah. about just writing and what art can do. And I would recommend it to every writer, just to read it, really invigorating the actual importance of what we can do. But then we were talking, you know, five minutes ago about how like, well, yeah, writing art can do all this stuff. But like, if no one reads it, then what's the point?

At that point, I don't know. Yeah. I mean, I think that like... My kind of solace is that all of these things can serve as building blocks over time. even a handful of people read my thing well then that could filter up to other people who then like maybe they don't internalize all of it but they carry some seed of that forward that ends up somewhere else and over time you have this groundswell of like either thought or opinion about something in a way that didn't exist before.

I mean, and again, you've seen that with like, I think that there is more open opposition now to somebody like J.K. Rowling than there was a couple years ago, even when people were upset about Hogwarts Legacy. And like one of those almost certainly had a direct impact on the other. And so there's some of these things that you just got to keep chipping away at, even if like, you know, your pick is incredibly tiny.

You do it because if you're not doing it, then you're doing nothing, and then nothing happens. Yeah, you are creating the world that you want to live in, in very small actions, and that does. fill it out to people like it makes me think of how like

When you talk about the manosphere, and people are like, guys, you gotta tell your friends that the thing they just said is really weird when they say it, you know? And it's like, we're doing that in small ways, like, by saying, like… It's weird that you are really invested in this thing over the material harm.

gone and it's just weird that you don't see that. And we should live in a world where we see oppression and we react to it and we don't just live with it. And we do take injustice anywhere as a threat to justice everywhere, right?

Yeah, Treethan and Chad just pointed out that yeah, today, Pedro Pascal called JK Rowling a loser. And I'm just envisioning now that meme of like, you know, the series of like... whatever dominoes or whatever lined up and the first one was like me saying that hogwarts legacy is bad and then pedro paschal calls jk rowling a loser um i i directly caused that actually

But no, yeah, I mean, I think that's all you can do. I'm shocked that people are still, I was like not the right age for those books, so I don't care about them at all. And so it's easy for me to be like, oh, she sucks. But it shocks me that that juggernaut is still going at this point. Stalgia's a hell of a drug.

It is, again, as demonstrated also by the Oblivion remaster. Like, you know, people have all of these preconceived notions or principles, and the second the nostalgia enters the picture, they just go out the window. Like, yeah, but this makes me feel like a kid again. tangentially related. Can I talk about a game I just played? i just played lost records bloom and rage uh don't nod montreal it's a spiritual successor to life is strange like from the actual devs there

I wrote a review for PC Gamer. That game is actually about, like, it starts very nostalgic for this, like... the material of 90s girlhood, and you have your Trapper Keepers and your Tamagotchi and your VHS rentals, and everything is so artfully, meticulously recreated. Very warm and cozy and rosy. And the course of that game is saying, remember what else was in the 90s, right? It was queer bashing. It was abuse. It was isolation. It was getting called fatso and lesbo and freaking dyke.

very explicitly on those terms. I just thought it was... beautiful rejoinder to a very present strain of nostalgia that is kind of fueling the reactionary conservative movement within games right now that really misses playing SNES. generates ai images of those good old days and they but they really they they remember what else was good about those days and they miss that They miss that violence, too. Yeah. Yeah, that's what they're really harking back to. But is it? I've always found it weird.

How many games have you playing as a teenager? I figured this is just me being trans, but I don't want to revisit my youth at all in any way. I have no interest in anything about high school. I'm like, the whole thing is a blank to me. But I feel like there are a lot of games where it's like, you're a teenage girl returning to town. I'm always like, what? Why?

And maybe it's, you know, it's a high stakes, low stakes kind of, you know, a lot of things happen when you're a teenager and there's lots of feelings involved. Yeah. I will say like I was the kind of trans person I am and I've seen a few, many other trans people have actually like really found this resonant. for their particular experiences, just how it engages with nostalgia and how off-kilter it is. There's something that they missed there, but also that they never really had.

Yeah, also, and maybe this is a spoiler, but Taritha and Chet says part of the game You Were 40. It's perfect for you, right? Yeah, that's part of the premise too. You were talking about the last summer you all had when you were 16, 27 years ago. It's also set in the Upper Peninsula. Such a nice little hyper-local locale. Yeah, I do like that. I do like when games are in a very specific place. It's very fun. Autumn Tree Thin in chat asks, did you like the ending?

This is going to be spoilers. If you can describe it without spoilers, which I know is incredibly hard. There's a moment. so throughout the game you're like taking videos and like you get this like you need to film like this many birds and you unlock a video that you can put together uh you unlock the narration to it basically of swan talking about like all the birds she grew up with. And there's a moment at the very end where you finish a video you had started.

And I thought that was just like this wonderful mechanical confluence, especially how it treats the camcorder as this like narrative device about like... swan looking at other people, looking at herself and finding herself. That was really cool. Also, it's very Life is Strange in doing the paranormal, supernatural stuff. Blintian, even. explicitly that

Got messy. Messy finale, but so much heart, so much stuff to like about it. Interesting. It's making me think a lot, right? Because all the parts of it are out now, is that right? Yes. Let's see. Speaking of things that are not out, I think it's time to talk for a little bit at least about Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders. which is the other kind of, I guess, big story of the week. I find it interesting both in terms of how much trouble people are going through to pre-order the console itself.

And also just like the place that any of this occupies in, I guess, my own life. And I kind of get the impression, like maybe the lives of other people at Aftermath as well. Like none of us pre-ordered one, right? Or even tried. And I see a lot of other people, even in the games press, being like, yeah, I either refreshed my web browser for hours last night, or I physically got in line today at GameStop.

Like, you know, really went for it and like saw all these people, which is an interesting experience. Like it is kind of. I've seen a lot of people go in person. Yeah. And like, that's compelling to me because like, I remember when I was a kid, I lined up to get like the original Wii.

And like, you know, I remember being outside of like a Walmart. People like had all of their little like like camping chairs and stuff like that. They're playing video games together. It was very communal in this way. That was kind of nice. But at the same time, I do not feel compelled at all to do that now. And yeah, I don't know. I just I think part of it is that I don't really.

have that much of a desire to get a Switch 2 immediately. I can wait. But if you were still at Kotaku or we were at the post and we... I guess Kotaku would be a different... If you were still at Kotaku and it was the past where Nintendo... would only give us a certain amount or something like would you have done it then i mean like i i think this is both general and specific um specific to the switch too and that i'm like

Yeah, you know, Donkey Kong looks cool, but not so cool that I've got to like spend $450 on something. And then the other part is just. And I think this also links back to what we were talking about earlier with Oblivion and with other games that you might like, you know, boycott as a result of various movements or like your own principles or whatever.

even compared to a handful of years ago, there's just so much now. Like, I don't need to buy a whole new platform to play Donkey Kong or Mario Kart because I have a thousand other games that I either need to get to playing or they're going to come out. And like, that's enough. Like I already, in terms of hardware, have enough. I don't need to buy another thing for a long time. And so I'm just like, it's okay.

If I never play Donkey Kong, I'll live. Yeah, the Switch 2 doesn't feel necessary to me professionally, even if I were in a different position, I think, than... then the switch one you know you had the switch one you had zelda and it was like well if you're going to cover zelda which everyone's going to be talking about you have to have a switch which i i did not have till you know six months later or something um

I'm so fascinated by the way that Nintendo has talked or not talked about all of this and the way that so much of this information has filtered out from statements to websites that they should have like we were saying before about consumerism like boring consumery stuff about like when and how you can buy it and how much it costs that like you only find out about on news sites, which I find, like, bizarre. I think I blogged that on my camera.

So at least in this case, I'm like, all right, now Nintendo has some kind of problem. Because they also had a big problem with the pre-orders in Japan. Is that right? I feel like I saw that this morning. Yeah, they just like...

way more than they expected and they said that they will probably not be able to fulfill all those pre-orders by the release date a lot of people want it no way yeah right i do have to admit that i did pre-order switch to last night how did it go for you what was it like uh i was like I was just up after 11 and I was like, sure, I'll wait up till midnight. I had already made the decision that I would do this because I'm going to get it eventually.

for games that I personally like, and then also professionally. Might as well try to review stuff early if I can. But so I wait up till midnight. spent get to the end of like target checkout uh and then there's like a thing where it says like oh this couldn't go through there's a whatever uh and a lot of people seem to have this uh all of games media was posting on blue sky like the 10 minutes beforehand and then like posting at the bucks they were

interacting is there's some karate uh for the first time uh but um eventually you know best buy opened their pre-orders like 20 minutes late and there was a virtual line and i waited like an hour in that just, you know, looking at people should post on blue sky about this. And it went through. And I'll pick it up on a Thursday morning in a few months. and hope that I can find enough work about covering the new Kirby DLC to justify it.

I mean, it is such an interesting, right? Like you do need these things professionally. And I think I've... always been privileged in a way that as someone who's usually been the boss, it's like, I don't have to play it. I just have to know what people are saying about it to tell one of you to write something about it. So I sort of get the best of both worlds where I have to know what's happening with the Switch, but I don't actually have to have one.

That's a little bit facetious. But yeah, I imagine for you, especially as a freelancer, it's like you've got to be thinking ahead in that way. you really mean it, sort of. Yeah, I'm going to be honest. The calculus for me is really simple because whenever monolith soft releases their next game i am going to play it like i am just a i really like those games critically and yeah like as a fan, I guess.

So I'm like, okay, well, like, you know, and I like playing Mario Kart. I don't know if I'll like write about that critically, but like. you know, I can try to pitch off reviews about it. Like, it'd be interesting to write about Bravely Default. It'd be interesting to write about the new Kirby stuff, because I also just really like Kirby, and I think those are really interesting games. And so, like, I'm like, okay, well, I can maybe just find this. It's gonna happen anyways.

In some ways, the future seems uncertain, although I guess I don't expect the price to actually increase at this point based off what they've said. But yeah, just when I, I've said when I could get it, I would get it. So that became simple for me, but also I don't think anyone like should buy this. Right. And like everything y'all said. We don't really need this to do much work because the Nintendo platform is so decentralized too.

what we do even as freelancers if you want to work as a freelancer you should get like a decent pc yeah because very few games come out console exclusive and the ones that do that have been worth covering in my experience coming out on the playstation um and i still don't own one but i did borrow one to review some stuff in the past And yeah, so there's not really good reason to own a Switch professionally. Yeah.

Or, again, like you're saying, a decent PC is your best bet. I mean, I waited forever to get a PlayStation 5 and only got it for Final Fantasy Rebirth. and then played part of Rebirth. And I was like, oh, I didn't need that after all. I actually could have just waited another year and it would come out on PC and then... that would have been fine too um so yeah i mean i don't know it's it's weird in that regard um

But yeah, I'm going to be content just continuing to play other things that come out, which as you were saying, Riley, I think we are like very fortunate being at Aftermath to be able to sort of pick and choose our battles in that way. Yeah. But also there's just so much happening. I think that even if you're at other websites, there are interesting ways to cover a lot of other games that are not getting enough coverage. And you can do that too. Like there are all these.

You know, I wish the people, which the websites had more budgets because now it's like a would be a golden age of like freelancers covering. shit in all sorts of interesting ways if there was money to fund that yeah i mean ig and you know the big sites used to just cover anything they could we are

so completely opposite of that now. And there's an interesting thing where a game has to be notable enough that people already know what it is enough to click on it. But how are they going to become aware of that? And it kind of feels like editors and the press are relying on the marketing and word of mouth to get to a critical mass before we bring something to someone's attention critically.

And freelancing this year has been just very weird because jobs have been dwindling, budgets have been dwindling, but we've hit this point where it's just... I cannot tell an editor this game's really cool and interesting to do something crazy. Because people won't read it, right? There's very few opportunities to really bring something new forward. Yeah, I was going to say, like, yeah.

Do you feel like it's changed? I mean, I know for me, I think that sometimes when indie, big sites covering indie games gets talked about, it's easy to just be like, they don't care about it. Again, as the person with so much freelance budget to spend and then the boss cuts it in half, if you're like, hey, I want to write about this indie game no one's heard of, I do have to do the calculus of nobody's going to read that and I'm going to spend my precious money.

it does become hard to justify even if you do care. And I think we've been saying this whole time, all of this kind of trickles down. But do you feel like freelancing has gotten harder or worse in the last... Oh, absolutely. Harder just in the past year. I mean, I started this, you know, I was like, I graduated in 2020. Oh my gracious, gosh. There was a dramatic shift then. There had already been a decade of the press dwindling. So I've been in this... industry throughout the state of decline.

But it's changed in the past year, in the past half a year especially. And there's a lot of stuff I could go off about it. But I really do think it's just that it is the critical mass. of what kind of conversations can we be even having about this. That goes back to editors just can't, it doesn't matter if a game's interesting and cool, editors can't necessarily cover it. And I just...

You know, I have reviewed past Xenoblade games. I've read about them a lot. It's like, okay, well, I'd probably review Xenoblade X, right? But... you have a limited budget right now we have a ballooning release schedule of all of like many great games that

demand attention um i couldn't review xenoblade a lot of the major outlets i have worked with um several just did not cover it at all because you had i forget like everything's coming out but it's like pirate yakuza i think there was some elder ring thing and like there's a million games coming out in February, March, right? And so that was really weird. And also, editor relationships have changed a lot. There's very few...

working relationships I have with editors now, and fewer editors reaching out to me for things. Did they get laid off or leave? Yeah, they get laid off, they leave. the industry runs so much on relationships also that I think just developing that relationship is hard. Also, in the other's perspective, there's trough.

in charting something around quickly like doing the good work but you know in my position I feel like well I have this portfolio right is that not justification enough and I get it complicated but It feels like, well, I have years of work behind me and that actually doesn't mean much right now. That's what's really a predicament. For me, it's just like, well, it's not going to go anywhere. So I need to primarily...

get money to pay rent from elsewhere at this point. There's no hope of being picked up. at this point and going into stuff. That's just not going to happen. It's hard. I mean, it felt like it was so open. I mean, when I was freelance games writing, I also had another job that paid the bills. And I never even imagined like, oh, and then I got a job and it was like, oh, this is a thing that can happen. And it seems like.

yeah that's hard that's not really a thing that can i don't want to say never but yeah yeah that path no longer exists no that was like when i um when i when i spoke uh When I went and did a speaking engagement at a university for my book, and somebody asked me about my job, and I was like, well, the career path that I took to get here no longer exists.

This is just not a thing that you can do by putting in the exact inputs that I did. You won't get this output anymore. Yeah. And so, you know, then it becomes that question of. We want more people or we want like fresh blood. We want new perspectives and more people doing this. But you can't in good conscience say, and also you should do it.

Also, those people are being exploited more, right? They're settling for lower pay. They don't know what is reasonable to expect, and they can throw themselves at things to get a quicker turnaround on stuff that is completely unreasonable to us. Yeah. Yeah. And like my standard is probably remarkably different from Variety's alone. But now I see new writers who do stuff and I'm like, that's insane. Why would you write a review that quickly for that much money? Yeah.

Like, that's right. If the only opportunities are these, you know, scuzzy content melt kind of opportunities, like... I mean, I feel like it's hard. I feel like I've been... I've had a full-time job in games journalism for like 10 years, and I feel like I had a high level, and I feel like I should be able to dispense advice for getting a job. And it's like, I have no idea. I have no idea what I would tell.

what to tell people now about how to do it. I think, Nathan, like you're saying, it's like, it just doesn't happen the way that it happened for us. But I hate this idea that it worked out just because, you know, oh, I was lucky that I needed a job when jobs still existed. Like, that sounds super depressing. Man, but I think that's part of it, unfortunately. Like, so much of just getting any kind of job or long-lasting career is luck.

being in the right place at the right time. And like, that's just kind of how it is. Yeah. On that bummer note, let's transition to the mailbag. And then, let's see, going from a bummer to a very complex question. Okay, from Treethan, who's also been in chat. This question spanned from a channel in the Discord discussing PDF.

They're boycotting the film. BDS is boycotting the film. No other land. This film is important in showing what is going on in that region and boycott, boycott, a boycott for it seems a bit out of touch. I was wondering if boycotting that film that was courageously made by a group of talented and brave individuals makes sense to anyone. And then Doogie 2K added on to this.

I think to contextualize it a bit further, does BDS calling for a boycott of no other land specifically, and their reasoning for doing so, undermine their credibility on what should be slam dunks, like Microsoft being the official cloud computing sponsor of the idea? I've thought about this. I read up on this while I was researching for the piece. Yeah, I'm not familiar with this. Is there a quick version you can explain?

They're one of the founding signers of the BDS organization. There's like over 200 organizations signed on to create it. It was PACB, the academic and cultural boycott. And they are the people who have... I don't know if they've technically, I don't remember off the top of it if they've officially called for a boycott, but their outstanding academic and cultural boycott, modeled off of the entire apartheid movement, says that you blanket ban on working with

cultural institutions in Israel unless we can verify that they are not complicit in genocide. A lot of that has to do with propaganda. justifying Israel's right to occupy this land. And the Netherlands filmmakers did work with one of these institutions. really think that they have strongly said, don't watch this movie. I don't think they've actually called for that. But I think they have publicly criticized these filmmakers.

for working with an institution that does, in other work they do, promote Zionism. Yeah. And there's the, I think that like the big kind of pillar of their criticism is normalization.

um normalization specifically like they contend that no other land normalizes the idea of israel as like a settler colonial state without necessarily saying that this isn't this shouldn't be or like that this is actually an unnatural state of being And so, yeah, that's I think like because I also did some reading on this because I saw the question get posed earlier and I was like, hmm.

And it seems like what they contend is... you know, because No Other Land is so prominent now, because it won an Oscar and because it got all this attention, this is a good opportunity to call attention to the idea of normalization in general, something that a lot of people may not be familiar with. And they may not understand just how much it can impact.

um people's perception of something like israel and help propagate it and allow it to persist in these ways even as it's committing genocide um and so people say like oh well you know they're going too far and like perfect is the enemy of good here blah blah blah and it's like

I don't know about that. I get what they're trying to do. And like, I think to answer the question directly, like, just because maybe I don't 100% agree with their method here doesn't mean that that spreads their credibility on all these other issues. Like, you know, that I think is perfect being the enemy of good.

Like, here's this organization that otherwise is doing really good work, has had a pretty tremendous positive impact, and is being led by actual Palestinians who know what their needs are. I'm going to ignore them because they did this one thing in a way where I don't entirely agree. Like, no, of course not. BDS is not above reproach, and there have been critiques of it by Palestinians. notable figures in other movements, but I'm not in the position to reproach BDS. Right.

Yeah. Well, and also, again, it's this thing of Like, I think that there's the whole cliche of like leftist infighting. And I think that's just kind of a natural outcropping of the fact that The goal of a lot of leftist movements is to include as many people as possible, and those people are going to have different needs or different views on how certain things should be accomplished.

And that's just kind of the nature of the beast. And you navigate that as you can, I think, on a case-by-case basis. And you say, yeah, okay, we'll figure it out. And again, a partner organization of BDS. critiquing this Palestinian-Israeli film does not change the fact that Microsoft is actively aiding and abetting genocide. Exactly. All right. Next question from I Once Was A Cat. Anyone checking out the Marathon Alpha? Any thoughts or interest in the game?

I don't think that anyone at Aftermath currently is. Autumn, are you looking into it? I have not touched it. I did watch the short film that they made to announce it. Have you all seen that? I've seen little snippets from it. It looks really cool. Just that film alone, it's like eight minutes long. If that's all we get because Bungie implodes in two months, then worth it. Very cool. I love cyberpunk, and this reminds me a lot of Armored Core in some ways. It's kind of like this tone piece.

getting into a setting, the weird cyberpunk-y body cloning going on in the soldiers you play as. But it's set to this actor, I don't remember who, but this man who's giving his life to read Ozymandias by Chrissy Byron Shelley. and it's just timed with the action in such a sweet way uh very moving and evocative piece of cinema yeah well then i'll at least watch that um because yeah i mean like

I have not played an extraction shooter. I've watched streamers play them. It doesn't really seem like a genre for me. And there's been tons of discourse about this.

um bungie is the first like kind of major triple a developer to make an extraction shooter and like can they get it over will people find it compelling enough to get past all the complexity or all of the like just general difficulty and frustration that i think can be associated with that genre um and like we'll see um i think that from a personal standpoint

Like I might play it to check it out just to understand better what it is exactly. But nothing that I've seen makes me think, oh, yeah, I'm going to get super into this and, you know, play it for hundreds of hours. Riley, on the other hand, I'm sure he'll play it. No, I think I played part of Destiny 2. Briefly. I've never really been to those kinds of games. I briefly played Destiny and the guns feel good.

Oh, the guns feel amazing. That could be fun for Marathon. Yeah, that will forever be kind of, you know, Bungie's, I think, core selling point. beyond anything else, beyond any of their trappings of genre. Like, they have always known how to make guns feel really, really good. Better than probably any other developer. Like, I can't really think of anyone that compares in that regard. But, you know, we'll see. And like that could actually be.

defining factor here is that maybe a lot of people have tried something like Tarkov. They don't really love it. And just the feel of something made by Bungie is enough to make them kind of, you know, be willing to deal with everything else about the genre. Like, that could actually be enough. We'll see. All right. Next question from Sin.

What is a piece of media or genre that you felt your relationship change with due to age? And not necessarily I liked it when I was younger, but rather different pieces or moments standing out to you. I mean, I think an easy one. For me, it's probably like Final Fantasy VII. When I was a kid, I did not really understand or care about like the environmental overtones. I was just like, oh yeah, whatever, you know, guy with big sword.

And now, like I see that the game was, you know, depicting a, what would be considered by the world government, like terrorist movement, but like fighting for valid causes, all these things that we see mirrored in real life and that were being mirrored in real life at the time too. And that's always been interesting to me because I believe in the ability of art to change people's views or to help them explore these things.

But it does, it's not lost in me that as a kid I played all these games that had a lot of different overtones. Some of them like thuddingly obvious. And just because I was a child and my priorities didn't have anything to do with any of that.

none of them really landed for me and i was just like oh yeah i think this character is cool and that's why i like this character um and so like by the time that i started to recognize these things and a lot of the stories that i experienced my views were already solidified, but, you know, from the real world, from things that were actually happening, from stuff I could read about or touch or see or feel.

And so maybe that's just the me thing. I don't know. I feel like this answer is going to be the opposite of how I'm currently dressed. But I've been going to the opera a lot lately, and I used to go. And I dress just like that. Yeah. I used to go with my dad. I would make my dad take me. Yeah, my dad would take me as a kid. He didn't like it, but he would take me. And it was always, you know, I got to wear my pretty dress and it was really fun for me.

And it's been weird to go back to like the Met where I used to go with my dad. And for some reason, even though we're just talking about nostalgia, it's made me humongously nostalgic, but in a very confusing way, because part of that was putting on my pretty dress and going with my dad. And I'm like, this is very complicated. But I feel like now that I've been going as a grump, I think when I went as a kid, I'd like... Like a teen. I was like, I'm at the opera. Like, I'm smart. Look at me.

And I was taking Italian at the time so I could understand it and stuff. But now I'm quite shocked to find it quite moving. It feels like a dramatic experience in a way that maybe it's just a sign of maturity where I'll just be like, oh.

god i'll tear up or like i just find it very very moving as a theatrical experience and not so much as like i'm at the opera and that is like a very pretentious answer you can get like 40 seats at the met way way up at the top which is like a bargain And if you live in New York, you should totally do it because it rules.

so yeah that's my very uncool answer yeah very moved by opera in my 40s probably better than blowing 50 and magdalena bay tickets and not being able to literally being unable to see the band which was my experience last night. Anyway, I'm doing it again on Friday, but I'm doing it right this time. This happens to me sometimes in the nosebleed seats, because if somebody tall sits in front of me, sometimes I can't see the stage, and I recognize that this is a problem of being 5'1".

So sometimes I can't see, and I'm like, oh, I can't see. Just sad. Yeah, I actually... similar to Riley, have this relationship to classical music. Suck it, Nathan. I grew up…

studying classical trumpet. Oh, cool. Oh, yeah. Nice. You're in a band with my friends, which is very exciting to me. Yeah. And I... developed performance anxiety and burned out of that in high school uh so i didn't pursue it in college um but in college i discovered the world punk hell yeah and that kind of really helped alleviate a lot of the performance anxiety and just like perspective on the world that

develops in classical music deeply into a conservative place um it would also just this idea of like perfectionism in that is so rampant and you know i'd go to bars in orlando and you hear people play simple baselines a little bit out of tune. And I was like, well, this is still making me feel so many amazing things. And so that helped me learn to see like DIY art.

in a new way uh but now i'm coming back to it um and you know i play in a brass band uh that is punky uh but i am also like i as like a hobby i study trumpet still and like Diving into the classical craft of it, I think there's a lot of stuff I've gotten out of that that I can apply to my writing and other arts and crafts in my life.

I think about what is a long tone for writing. So I started doing morning pages, and that's been really helpful. But also I see the conservatism of the classical music space is unchanged glad that i was not there in college when i like figured my whole shit out because your your band is in the same kind of space as i used to be in the rude mechanical orchestra which is an activist

And I had studied saxophone in high school and blah, blah, blah. And I think that one of the ethoses of the ARMA was, and I assume still remains, that people could join kind of regardless of their experience level. And I think similar for me, having to let go of some of what I believed being good enough to be in a band was. And that wasn't always great. Sometimes there was conflict. It was hard to learn.

songs? Could people read music or not? We made some albums, and recording an album with people with different abilities is hard. But ultimately, the political project of that, I think, was so valuable.

like making music fun even if you're not like good at it or making it making making learning it approachable and and not you know my cello teacher slapping my hand you know it's like it's like very cool yeah and actually playing in a punk band is also like making me reassess these values and like seeing that i do still have some ingrained

ideals about what music is and how it has to be that I'm still holding to myself and kind of breaking those apart. And it's been really good. People should go make art, go make music poorly. Go dance badly, you know? Go to a feng shou and nosh. I've had this problem because I've been learning the mandolin, and I've gone to some Irish jams, and I've never been in a jam culture, which in this space is like...

you don't have to be good. Like, I think when I think, oh, I'm bad, I imagine I've ruined the song because I am so bad. But here it's like, as long as you're not like... being so loud or disruptive that the song grinds to a halt. You can just sit there and play one or two notes and it's okay. And I have this really bad problem with, like, I want everyone to know that I know I'm bad. And I find myself, like, performatively acknowledging that I'm not good at this. And I'm like, this, like, stop.

Like you don't have to tell everybody how inadequate you are. You can just be in the space with your mandolin and it's going to be like a fine. And I feel like it's a lot of like, I'm learning a lot about myself. While being terrible at the mandolin. Because the mandolin is too fucking hard. Speaking of learning a lot about yourself, the final question focuses on that. From Jason Sanz Argonauts. Is there anything you've discovered about yourself in adulthood that has made you question the path?

The last year or two, we've realized that I'm some flavor of colorblind, and it makes me wonder what things I just experience differently than most folks. I mean, I think that um you know we culturally recognize more and more that like there is a lot of types of like neurodivergence or non-neurotypicality um and that You know, many people kind of inhabit those head spaces and maybe didn't have language for it early on.

So I think probably something like that. I don't know what I would be classified as because I've never gotten any sort of diagnosis, but I think that I have spent long portions of my life. Always being like, man, I feel weird as shit talking to any other person because I don't really feel like we're inhabiting the same brain space. But I didn't really think about that beyond.

sort of the bounds of just like well i guess i'm just a weird person or like you know i'm being insecure or whatever um and only in recent years have i thought like hmm it's probably just like you know something more along those lines and maybe i should get that looked into but I got other stuff to do. Boring answer for me, but I've had very similar thoughts, experiences to you, Dathan, with that. There's a reaction to the growing awareness of neurodiversity and the spectrum of that.

am I self-diagnosing something? Kind of like an imposter syndrome thing? Yeah, and it's like, you know, you can only have so many friends who actually do have diagnosis. who you were friends with long before they had diagnoses. We're like, I wonder why we get along so well. But the main thing is I think back to my childhood and just how... uncomfortable I was so much of the time and how I felt like I had to perform humor and social interaction. And I never thought of that as masking.

I have language for that now, and it does help. And I do find my ability to control being in spaces and community of people who would nab at the same frequency as I do has been deeply rewarding. I can definitely tell when I am on same frequency as someone else, and I don't know what exactly that might be, but I'm also not interested in defining it. It's not prescriptive. Um...

This is too complicated to tell the whole story about a very wryly way to start a story. Is it time for some wryly war? No, no, I can't go. Many years ago, I was part of a project that was really important to me with a person who was very, very important to me. don't speak anymore and that remains a long-standing trauma in my life um but i think that like starting aftermath has brought a lot of that stuff up because we worked together and a lot of the things that were

difficult about our relationship or related to work. And I think that I both like. thinking or behaving in ways that that he did and i get very like frightened where i'm like oh god is this you know how trauma is passed down um and i think sometimes on the flip side because he handled all the business stuff for our business and i think

Part of the reason I think he did that was to control all that information. I think one of the reasons that at Aftermath, I'm always like, let me tell you everything, is because I saw how toxic that was. So you want to make sure that everyone has all available information so you're not like... quietly controlling it. Yeah, like I think. Yeah. Part of that relationship is very much that you know.

he could turn the spigot on or off because he had all the keys and all the buttons. And so it's very important to me not to do that. But I think doing that stuff for us has in some way shown me a lot of the pressures that he was probably under. And I think even if he used them...

to control and manipulate me and the people around me. I'm like, gosh, I bet that that was a lot, though. And so it's just kind of like... I feel like I do a lot of thinking about my traumas, and then it all gets very complicated, but has sort of shown me different sides of that experience. That's not a fun answer. No, no, that was a laugh and a half.

Writing about yourself is hard. Yeah. Yeah. And you, unfortunately you never get to stop. They don't like give you a diploma and say like, okay, you learned yourself. You're done. Yeah. It's so obnoxious. Real bummer. Yeah. I know. It's like, yeah. Well. With all of that said, we have reached the end of the mailbag. And so...

That's pretty much our show. I feel like we ended on my past trauma. Someone said something funny or something. Riley, we both had very easy answers to this question that we did not use. No, yeah. No, that stuff is... That stuff's easy. I was going to say, I had to do my hormone shot today, and for some reason it just went wrong. It's just something was wrong. It felt weird. And then I turned it into a whole disaster, and I was like, what?

Like, does this happen to anyone else? You know, sometimes you're doing it. It's just weird. It just felt weird, you know? And I was like, this is embarrassing. I've been doing this for, you know. 22 years. It feels weird. That's the thing I haven't learned about myself despite time passing. I still don't actually know how to get hormones in my body despite having done it for 22 years.

That's also depressing. No, it's all good. So not that note. Yeah, on that note. See, here's the thing. We don't have to end on a sad note. Instead, we end on an add note. Because if you want to contribute to the mailbag, you just need to subscribe to Aftermath to gain access to our Discord, specifically at our reader tier. That's $10. In general, if you enjoy what you've heard today, please consider subscribing. We are entirely subscriber-based. That's our lifeblood. That's how we survive.

So every subscription really matters. There are only five of us. This is not some massive news organization. Yeah, so it'd be much appreciated. We record this show every Thursday at 4 p.m. Eastern time. Do it live on Twitch. And we'll be back next week. But, oh, wait, before we go. Sorry, Autumn, where can people find you? Sure, you can follow me on Blue Sky at The Autumn, right?

And you can also find a lot more of my writing and my ongoing column at unwinnable.com. Hell yeah. Shoutouts to Unwinnable. Heck yeah. Yeah, shoutout to Unwinnable. Shoutout to, wait, is Stu? Yeah, Stu's still running it, right? Wow. Stu is technically our publisher. Our editor-in-chief is David Shimomura. I believe it kills screen that.

from that era yeah is kill screen still around again it wasn't it wasn't it wasn't then it wasn't there's like a weird shell of it that didn't it become like a consulting firm or something yeah yeah something something very strange um well anyway that's a digression uh so sorry with that said with everything said and done That's been our show for the week. Thank you for tuning in and we'll be back next week. But until then, have a good one.