Alsome Media.
All right, I think it's the time we blow this scene. Get everybody in that stuff together. Okay, three two one, that's podcast.
Welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host ed Zitchrun.
Today.
I'm joined by the esteem Geeta Jackson and Nathan Grayson of independent gaming site After Marth and Nathan, of course has a new book out called Stream Big, The Triumphs and Turmoils for Twitch and the Stars behind the Screen.
Both of you, thank you for being here.
Thank you for having us, No problem, super fun.
Hell yeah.
So today we're talking about the games industry, which I think we can all agree is going well.
Yeah, it's going super good, bigger than Hollywood as we all know.
So to that point, Nathan, what is actually going on right now?
Because it feels like over the last few years I used to be a games journalist, but I've kind of dropped out of the industry stuff. What's going on?
Well, right now, bunch of games companies are realizing that they well at least they've decided that what they need to do is make fewer, bigger games, and so they're laying a lot of people off in pursuit of that. Because games are in their minds a hits driven business, right, and so in order to achieve that, they're just like, okay, let's put all of our all of our eggs in these increasingly smaller baskets and if one of these lands, then great, we have the next like League Legends, so
the next like Fortnite or whatever. And if they fail, then it's a catastrophe and we're going to lay a bunch of people off. And the only people who will not suffer from this are the executives who are making these bad decisions.
And that keeps happening over and over and over. So what is a hit though, Like, well, how do they define a hit?
They've defined it by a Hollywood terms, right, like which which are you you want to be have a level of cultural impact one that is inescapable. Fortnite is a very good example because literally every child plays Fortnite, right, and you can play it on every device. Everyone suddenly understands the terms through which that game is sort of created, is made and played.
At birth, every child it's given an iPad with Fortnite on.
It's that minecroft, yeah, one of those two. And then also there is a saying that a lot of executives love to tout when they talk about the financial success of their industry, which is that video games are a bigger industry, more by more. There's more money in video games than Hollywood.
And I don't really think that that's true.
Is there any proof behind the well, I mean they.
Might games that are very, very, very successful, like Elderming is another great example of it, just a smash hit where millions of millions of games were sold. But the thing is that money that you make often goes immediately back into recouping all the cost of development, because games take a lot longer to make than a movie and require a lot more people to make them.
Yeah, a lot of projects, a lot of projects in this day and age, are rebooted repeatedly over the course of their development, like that happened recently with a Dragon Age The Veilguard, a game that was originally meant to be like a live service multiplayer game, which is.
A weird for that series to take.
I'm for the for the listeners, you like, avid guy, But so a life service game is it's a game.
It must sort of exist in perpetuity, right. The idea is that it has seasons of narrative and and gameplay even.
Necessarily narrative, just like new stuff coming out.
Like can you play a monthly fee again?
Fortnite is a very good example of this. Fortnite refreshes the maps that you used to play the game on. They refresh that every occasionally. They call it seasons, like seasons of television, and they there's always just new skins, new items, new things, suspend your money.
Collaborations with major brands.
I the way over here there was an ad for like Cowboy Bebop skins in the game now, which.
Is sick, but so Destiny Too is the one I remember with that right, is a lab service game and that's owned Vice Sony PlayStation now Sony Interactive Entertainment technically, but it's And so this is kind of from my experience at least gaming a shit tone when I was younger, by which I mean like two years ago. But the fact is that games now aren't just allowed to be good once.
They have to be good forever.
Yes, yes, you have to be the biggest game ever in order to be considered a success forever forever, like not just when the game comes out, but also every single month after that for the next year well.
Which also, like I think works very much in conjunction with kind of like the line go up mentality of business in general, Like your game also has to be a line that's always going.
On, yes, And it can't simply be successful in a linear sense. It can't just be like a game you sell. It is a game you are constantly rebooting. Like even with Marvel Rivals, they had and very successful game boned by Netsy Easy, and they just laid off a bunch of people.
They laid off all of their their America.
It was like unctually happened. Oh so it wasn't a huge layoff.
Yeah, so this was also like it was part of a larger Net East plan to kind of divest from outside of China. Oh okay, yeah, And so like I think they were planning to do this even before Marvel Arrivals took off.
Were getting at folks.
My favorite example of this phenomenon is BioShock Infinite, a
game that was incredibly successful, hugely critically acclaimed. After the game came out, the studio shuttered like it was over immediately immediately, couldn't recoup the costs, essentially like there was no amount of money they could make on that game that was financially successful and was critically acclaimed, to give back to the studio in order for make it like financially prop like a financially stable institution, and then all
those developers scattered to the winds. That was kind of the end of major game development in Boston for.
Until like literally now with CD project, they hadn't root over there at least thoughting up a Boston where they're making the next cyberpunk and what's where the CD brot is, like they've they were very cyberpunk.
I did play it.
I don't know why I'm acting like, I like don't have a gaming PC. I have like a gaming PC with like two motherboards inside.
Is beautiful anyway, Yeah.
You also sitting right behind us as one of the widest monitors I've seen in my.
Hole, Like it's a beautiful.
It's amazing.
But that one was really tortured because the game was rushed out, and I don't think I've seen in a while like a game that rush and it ended up being dog shit.
And they like if we're talking about the broader state of video games, Another characteristic I think is that most big games these days get rushed out in some capacity, it's just less glaring than it was for Cyberpunk. Cyberpunk
was a lot of functional issues. Right now he gets a lot of games that are rushed out but polished, so they have all of these like mechanical problems and like other more deep seated issues where they could have solved it just by like you know, giving the developers more time to cook.
But they know that people will be off.
Put by a game that doesn't work, so they make sure it works.
But it's not good exactly. What can you give me an example?
Dragon Age Dragonage of the Vilguard is facing. Was it bad?
So I'm like huge, I'm a huge dragon Age fan, and I was really looking forward to this game because I'm like invested in the narrative and the characters and dragon Age in Quisition. I think like a lot of people who if you've played are listening to this and played dragon Age Inquisition, you know the experience of you're incredibly fucking depressed.
You yeah, completely just mainline.
A game and the writing and the characters are so good it becomes your entire world and you can just live inside that fandom. And that was me for a little bit so I waited like ten years for this game to come out, and the longer a game stays in development, though, generally speaking, the worse it will be when you actually get your hands on it.
And when the.
Game came out, it worked and it functioned, but it was not finally tuned there when you could tell and feel when you played it there were things that should have been there that were not there, and it felt empty and like it was missing things.
With role playing games, it's extremely important to get the mechanics right.
Right, yeah, And like this was a byproduct of just like how the game was made. So again, it started many years ago. It's like it began development like all nearly a decade ago as one kind of game, as a multiplayer live service game, and then over time EA and bio where were like, this isn't working. Let's reboot it mid development and try something else that didn't work.
They had key personal leave. They're like, let's reboot it again into something else, and that's what became the game that came out, which is like this mishmash of all these mechanics and assets they came up with over time, and so internally the way this played out, is. They were like, well, again, it needs to reach a certain like quality and review bar from the cell. So let's just make sure that it feels polished, Like let's pop all this stuff together, but make sure it looks nice.
It has the smell and the taste of a triple A game without actually being fun. So what is it that makes so expensive though? Like, what is the cost center? Is it people?
Is it comput is something we don't know?
So this is the thing I there There's been a lot of discourse around like the increasing, you know, level of fidelity that you need for a triple A game, and like all of these various concerns about the number of people that you need to create all these assets and maintain that. But I think that Jason Schreier in particular has done really good reporting on the real problem,
which is mismanagement at every level. Executive is making poor decisions while siphoning away millions and millions of dollars from a project.
Siphoning it from to when themselves.
Themselves, Yeah, often themselves.
How does that mean, you know, check out like the kind of money that throws sell nick.
Oh okay, So it's like the CEOs of making obscene amounts of mind in a lot of cases.
Yeah, fucking hell.
So often in uh AT E three, Rest and Peace and other video game sort of industry conferences that will make comparisons to Hollywood between themselves. In Hollywood, they want to be a part of the entertainment into say, they want.
To be paid like David Zaslaw exactly exactly.
But there's the huge differences between what how Hollywood operates and how the video game industry operates. And the main difference is there, these are not the people who work on games are not unionized craft people right, with a culture of unionization in their workplaces, so they really can
like you are a contract worker. You sign on for a gig and if you aren't there when the game is completed, you don't get your name in the credits, and you just have to move in a herd from studio to studio to studio.
And all those credits important. I'm guessing they're.
Very important in order to get better paying jobs.
Yeah, I'll just put it on your LinkedIn.
No.
I mean, especially if you're working on a project like at Monolith, the studio that's shattered this week. They were they're two years into development on a wonder Woman game and wonder Woman and I think you're a DC comics person.
I'm more of a Marvel person, but I'm familiar with wonder Woman.
Yeah, I hope so.
Well, it's like, it's interesting that you say that because, like wonder Woman in comparison to the other two big heroes at DC, I'm a big DC comics person.
Uh, Superman and Batman.
They've both had cartoons, movies the gamut, like video games, everything. Even Superman had an extremely bad series. Oh yes, a classic god. But there's with wonder Woman. There's been no cartoons. Uh, there are a couple of flagshit comics, but they've had a lot of a harder time finding really good writers to write really good Wonder Woman books. And there have been zero games. This would have been like the first
game there. They worked on it for two years and there's a lot of people now who cannot even talk about what they did on these games. It can't show the art.
That they they don't have the assets they come.
Yeah, the assets don't belong to them. They haven't been publicized. And these are also contract workers, so they don't have the rights to anything that they have worked on.
And I just want to say none of these are actionable legal threats. But mono If Studios made one of my two of my most favorite Gameskeeter. We were talking about this when we came in Lord of the Rings, Shadow of Mortal and the Shadow of War, two of the best games ever made.
I have.
Not only Hades is a game. Hades is a game I think I will be playing until I'm an old man. Yes, absolutely, but Shadow of War especially, like these are amazing games. And these are games the systems are perfect, and they're beautiful, and they.
They give you that feeling that I think these major studios are trying to chase in these enormous games like Cyberpunk twenty seventy seven and this game. This world is a living world. This world things are happening inside of it, even when you are not there is the feeling you get I'm playing that and.
The orcs are talking shit about you.
And that's the thing.
So to explain this game to people who have not even don't play games, I really recommend it. So what it is is it's kind of an open world game where you run around. You're some Lord of the Rings fellow. I do not remember the story not going to try and remember. But the big thing about it is something
called the Nemesis system. And there are these orcs and various troll creatures that will and they're all generated procedurally, even flawlessly said that word, and where they come up and they're like someone of Biles and they'll come up and they'll be covered in postures and be like, oh, man field off and then you're able to It kind of mirrors my real life and that some horrible creature comes up to me and goes off, and then I
convert them to my side. So you can convert these orcs and they follow you around and they have these or charts.
Yes of like, and if you die to an orc in a combat encounter, that orc will then go back to his little Orc friends and be like, I fucking fucked up, and they'll talk about.
Talk about it, and they'll talk to you later and they'll recount specifically, like how they killed you and stuff.
It's like they keep that in mind.
And it's quite literally what I love about video games large It's just like a weird freak system full of weird goblin creatures. You can see each other.
Have you played Dwarf Fortress.
Ever I've tried it never really stuck.
I'm gonna I'm gonna teach you how you're tea.
It's because it's this thing, right do you? There are character with memory, right, and they learn things and they have personalities, right, and that change. Like this is a game that's made by two guys of two brothers. Until very recently it was literally just the two of them, right, And like it is so fascinating how you can have that same sort of magical black box experience of there's magic inside of this, there's a personality inside of this.
One of them comes from two brothers that have worked on this thing on and off for like twenty fucking years of their life.
And the other is an enormous studio using the IP Lord of the Rings.
And I just want to be clear about a few things. One, this is one of the few games I've heard like unilaterally loved by games journalists. Like, sure, there are people who don't like the genre, but anyone who has even the smell of RPGs loves this shit.
Yeah.
I also want to add the WB Games CEO JB. Perett and WB Games former CEO David hadda do you want enemies of better offline? You want enemies of this show? Your growth all costs for economy bullshit? Will you will be by all the people who listened to the show. So the reason that this, I'm literally looking at Nathan's story about this, the reason that Monoliths got shut down is just that Warner Brothers cannot run a fucking studio.
They're stupid and bad in the industry.
Yes, yeah, like I mean you know they've also been tanking tons of like television and movie properties too.
Yeah.
No, the Warner ever since Warner Brothers Discoveries on my shit list and has been for a long time. It's an incredible It's an incredible Hollywood studio. It's so much incredible history. The whole story of Coyote Versus Acme has
been I just want to jump off for three. Okay, there is there was a movie in production, Coyote Versus Acme, an adaptation of the Looney Tunes cartoon, you know, the Coyote Roadrunner in the Coyote, And it had John Cena in it, and it by all accounts, everyone who worked on it said it was incredible.
It used the James Gunn movie.
Yeah, James gun movie. He it was also what's the movie.
James Gunn By the way, for the listeners got into the Galaxy Suicide Squad.
Having Superman movie upcoming Superman I'm freaking psyched about I love it. Yeah, but you know it was going to be a Roger Rabbit type thing, a mixed media animation and real life stuff like a lot of the stuff that moviegoers actually really really love seeing, real stunts and real effects, not CGI, not VFX, that kind of thing.
I'm chipping that the chip Dales movie did really well as well on Disney.
Plus that's a very similar thing anyway, can Yeah.
Yeah, and they the movies wrapped. It's totally fully completed.
Sheld it, sheldy literally for tax reasons.
Literally for tax reasons. No one will ever see it.
And David Zaslav, if you go back to the Shareholders Supremacy to Parter, you will learn all about him. Jack Welch, the CEO of G who created the modern culture of layoffs,
literally the guy who didn't invent layoffs. But if you go back to those episodes, there's the story of Jack Welch, c of G. Well, upcoming CEO one of the candidates for it was running several divisions and came up with this idea, what if we just laid people off to increase profits and not the time layoffs were considered something you only did as a last resort. But Jack Welch. Jack Welch thought what if we did this? He did it, and everyone else went, that's a great fucking idea. Number
go up. The reason I'm bringing this up is that David Zaslav's CEO of Warner Brothers Discovery, once referred to Jack Welch as like a big brother to him. Okay, I think I just want you to know everything I've been doing for the last few years has driven me insane.
Because truning into the Joker in real.
Time, the makeup is appearing on our faces. But Coyote versus actme was like will Forte was going to be and it was like going to be a very like it very clearly would have done really well, really really well, and they just shelled it for tax reasons. This is the same company that owns WAWB Games, which owns Monolith This is the likes.
It is like the tech industry ification of the entire entertainment industry. Everything just disastrous for art in general. You can see it very visually in film, in cinema just sort of. I used to be a person that just fucking loved blockbuster action movies.
I love them.
That's losings wrong with that.
In the summer, when it's hot out, nothing better you can do than go to a theater for two hours with air conditioning and just enjoy mindless action. Except they all started to suck when Disney realized that you can feed people like not like the suggestion of a plot, but not actually a story. Essentially, you just sort of allude to things that will happen in the future, and you can make billions of dollars off of that. And
you don't actually have to shoot on sets. You can just put people in front of a green screen and then ununionized VFX workers can fill in everything else for you.
Right, And this is also something that fed into the creation of one of the worst things fandoms.
Yeah, I mean, I love the experience of being in a fandom, but there is this tribalistic thing that is disturbing to me.
Let me be a little more specific, because I'm a huge fan of many things. Yeah, like I've seen Queen to the Stone Age sixteen times. I'm like, I'm a nasty freak when it comes to a person of interest, Like I really love my ship. I consider fendom, or at least perhaps I'm just describing the worst elements of it as something separate where it's not really about liking something, it's about memorizing facts.
It is about being a defender of the thing I.
Say, it's about being in a tribe. And like, this comes up a lot in my book, is like, you know, the ways that fandoms can behave. One of the things that I found especially interesting in the course of reporting it is that there are also fandoms around, just like pure hatred. One of my chapters tell Me is about Keffel's, who is a streamer.
Oh yeah, it's pretty controversial.
You know, did some dumb bullshit, but also like managed to attract this hate mob from Kiwi farms right, and when I interviewed her while she was still like on the run was ky FHMs.
Sorry.
They are an online forum dedicated to like dosing people, so finding their personal information and you know, outing it and then.
Coming in and like of course they particularly target marginalized people because they the goal and the goal of most hate fandoms is to get a reaction out of the person that you want. It is like to cause them pain and then to use that pain as your personal source of entertainment.
What I was gonna say, yes, yeah, is that in her particular case, you know, she was like showing me some of the things that these people were doing in their free time in addition to directly harassing her, and these involved like making what were effectively like fan art and even fan songs about her, just from the perspective
of someone who despises her, who likes her. But the mechanics were all really similar, and so like fandom can be this thing that coalesces using the exact same again, like sets of tools and behaviors, but around despising someone as opposed to liking them.
So this is the thing that really gets me because I have to wonder if the reason that brought up fandoms, other than just despising them is I have to wonder if they're not part of not saying that it's the fold, but I feel like the entertainment industry, and by extension, the game's industry, is really trying to sell to them when Marv I love the first run of Marvel movies.
I'm a little pig. Show me if it's the charming people.
Ironman movie is fucking amazing.
It is a really great film, and it's because they let Favro be Farro.
You had the charming people doing the things and they were talking and it was enjoying, enjoyable to watch them. But it feels like it really got into the hog slop era where it's just you, like this guy, look at this guy. Look, we've got Jack Black and we've got Lizzo in the Mandalorian. Look you remember that thing from that thing? Look it's it's the Dark Troopers from the Star Wars game. You remember Dark Forces.
So it's a frend. They fly now, blah blah blah.
You know it's like yes, But it's the reason I bring that up is that's a commodity at this point. It's if it stops being about telling a story when it's more symbolic, when it's more about just people being factions against or for something, it's just can I sell you a fucking product? And when it comes to I actually wanted to ask with Twitch the cultures around streamers. Are those different to like forums culture or social media culture,
like the more I synchronous culture. Is there something about the live experience that changes things?
Oh?
Yeah, completely, because I mean, for one, there's just the basic fact that if you are in a twitch chat, you can say something that the person who's on screen might immediately react to, right, and that people in that chat might immediately react to, And that immediacy changes everything about it, because I mean just think about like how we have conversations. If somebody is able to immediately react, they are not going to consider what they're saying very right,
They're just going to go for it. Especially if it's like a fast moving Twitch chat. Everyone's just trying to say the most incendiary thing possible because that's all that gets noticed. Yeah, something measured or interesting.
Perfect example of this is hasan piker saying off the cuff America to serve Tin eleven.
Yeah, which I know is not what he meant to say.
Well, but he meant to say, America created the conditions that created the people that right to us.
Yeah, in that right, like he explained that during that same stream happens well, and also what happens is that people then clipped that out of context. Yes, and then you know, surfaced it on all.
These other and now this clip will haunt him forever every time someone is mad at him. He has a similarly sized, like hate fandom that is constantly, constantly trying to get a rise out of him, and it really Yeah.
Find destiny, different kind of destiny to the game.
Yeah, destiny that sucks.
I'm going to get him. And Norman Finkelstein.
When you you when you speak, it's like Wikipedia.
It to be by satandibly.
I've been thinking about that too much.
It's funny as well because as a just a gentleman podcaster with a decent sized fandom, I don't get as many insane people. I don't get people threatening or hating me other than everyone because.
They wish I was dead.
But it feels like there's something altogether different, specifically about games because I left games journalism in like two thousand and eight. Oh no, no, I like and even then someone fucking doxed me. I got dogs because there was someone I reviewed a game I'm not even gonna name, just because it also leads to the funniest YouTube in the world.
But there was an MMRP.
I reviewed that fucking sucked, and they claimed I didn't play it, of course, And then someone posted my parents' address and I'd moved to New York, and I really had to stop myself being like, missed me, bitch. But then I emailed the developers and I was like, fucking take this shit down now, but now it's constant.
I reviewed the most recent Final Fantasy game, Final Fantasy sixteen, which is a game I said has some of the In the review, this is what I said. That the combat was thrilling and incredible. You fucking go to space and punch a dragon in the head, like, it is so fucking cool. But the story is dogshit and I hated it. I hated it every second.
I'm going to say that most stories that involve going to space and punching and dragon like don't really cohere. Otherwise, Yeah, it's hard to make that into a compelling narrative.
Yeah, and I especially like it was a game where there was a subplot with slavery and it was handled really, really, really poorly.
I personally thought the whole game was bad. But that's why I don't review games.
No, I just like, when you give me a combo meter. I just go into stickomad. It's something that just happens to me. But no I said those things, and I tried to be fair and complimentary to it. The first thing that happened was someone found my email address and told me to kill myself Jesus.
Yeah.
Well, it's like I similarly gave the Harry Potter game a pretty dismal review, and there is a reaction. There is an entire culture devoted to trying to seed reactionary politics into young minds through the fandom.
Of video games.
It's like games are like the easiest mark for that because I think that. I mean, for one, a lot of people have based their identity on games. That's the starting point, right, And then the other element of that is that a lot of that identity comes out of this perceived persecution complex. Right, games were once for nerds who are bullied.
Content only that though there was a real reactionary movement against video games post Columbine right with Jack Thompson, their congressional hearings about whether or no or not games were evil and we're destroying the minds of youth, which is obviously not true. When I recently went to the UN.
Look at us.
Yeah, you know, we're normal people.
I mean, my mind has been destroyed.
My mind was my mind's perfect.
Yeah.
Anyway, so you went to the UN.
I went to the UN and I was on this panel to talk about terrorism and and extremism and gaming spaces. And the one thing that many of the panelists made sure to say was that this idea that it's violent video games that cause violence is not true, and in fact, often games are pro social spaces. They encourage isolated people to interact with other people and form friendships. It's just that those people are so vulnerable, and people extremists know how vulnerable.
These people are.
It's very easy to say, join a discord server and then start spreading dog whistles about like extremist like white supremacists thought, and then you normalize these things, these expressions and these phrases and these images, and then you can take those people out of that bigger discord server and funnel them into more and more extremist space.
And what's insane is it seems to get back to a point I was getting as well, is that they're trying to monetize this. They're trying to monetize it by making the games less about being good games but symbolic of stuff. And then the right wing types seem to see games that are not doing that, like Dragon Age the Veil God and being like, ah has begun it's which means black I guess, like like just.
Well, no, there's a there's a new one every week too, Like there's a new DEI in video games controversy every week, and like it wasn't always this way, but after like there there was a conspiracy movement last year around a consulting firm called Sweet Baby In and that is when this sort of became a well oiled machine. That's when all of these content creators.
Started trying it was constantly.
Their biggest crime essentially was that the head of the company, Kim Bellair, is a black woman, and like that's it.
That's literally just it something she controlled.
Yes, absolutely to be a black woman creator.
So what we're saying about as well, but.
Yeah, and so like now you just have these people, you have content creators who've made this their entire identity and like their entire brand, and so like Geta was saying, you know, games can be really pro social, but you'll have these people come in and sort of say, okay, well, these games that you like are being taken away by this evil dee I woke mob. And so your purpose, the underlying purpose that maybe you as a person have been looking for, is now to fight a battle against
these people who are taking your toys away. And like, that works really well on a lot of people who you know, feel purposeless, directionless, always that we all commonly feel under.
Capitalists, and I feel like and I feel like as well.
Games are an incredible vector for that, not just because there's things to a lie around, but also there's a satisfaction to them.
Yeah.
The reason I play Haides all the time, I have Haides on my I'm not playing it right now, I would. The reason I play Hades is it feels good. It feels like you have industry over something you have you can get good at something.
I'll take this a step further, please.
I think that the core fantasy of a lot of video games, no matter what they're setting is, whether they're sci fi or fantasy, are set in the present day, is what if capitalism was fair, if every input gave you a fair output, a consistent one.
Yeah, yeah, oh I like that.
Thing you get better and better over time.
Look at like a sim city, right, Yes, you in sim city, you are essentially the mayor of a city. You are the developer of the city. You're the engineer of the city. You design the entire city, and you also have control over its taxes. And it is is like just a equals ash. It Basically, when you look at how the tax system works in some city, it assumes that taxes are always fair.
Right and consistent and consistent, and they don't.
You won't get a huge lobby from the people in the highest tax bracket asking for their taxes to be lowered.
I wonder if they would add that they should there should be just the same city, which is real.
I mean, I'm sure the matters in the taxes. City's like torn out of the wires.
The city skylines, the city skylines.
I love watching the Cities by Cities by Diana, one of the endorsed Flying Best Instagram accounts.
I do love Cities by Diana so much. I wanted to interview her for a long time.
But she's amazing, Diana, You're always welcome on the show.
A beautiful and unique mind. I love her.
So let's change change topics to something I actually really opposed a thing often off, So how long have you been.
Going a little bit more than a hear? So?
How is the company structured? Exactly?
Well?
Okay, so it's called aftermath because we all used to work at Kataku, right right, and none of us really had much editorial control at Kataku, even Riley, who was managing editor there, like he his like the story of his life is having strong opinions and wanting to enact the plans based on his opinions and then.
Being told no that he can't do it.
Essentially, so we are the aftermath of all of that, the slow dissolution of Geomedia and our own just losing our brains working there with the conditions there.
Geomedia was the formal holding company of Gizmoto dot I nine and.
Came out of Dowker being sued into oblivion, right, yes.
Yeah, And we we own the company and we try to structure it in such a way where we all have a relative amount of control over the work we do and what we want to do. We are not technically a co op, but we try to behave as if we're contact.
Is that a lot of a lot of like co ops are not co ops because it's a it's weird on taxes and everyone's just like, yeah, dwarfing into one whenever it's got to work and it's better to just be an LLC or something else. Yeah, but it's worker own outside investment, no outside capital. We literally just rely on subscriptions and nothing else for now. We might incorporate a small amount of ad based stuff in the future, but that'll just be on like a podcast.
And there's nothing and there's nothing wrong with ads.
I mean, I definitely can't because someone listening to this is probably going to email me and be like, did you hear there's an ai AD as an ai AD that ran Did you hear the ai AD? It ran off the ai AD? If you want emailing me or messaging me about the ai AD, I have heard you over one hundred and fifty times, and every single person. I'm not bitter. I'm just like, at this point, if you think it's novel to mention this to me, it isn't.
And every time I kind of roll my eyes. And if you're trying to hurt me, which you would love, then keep going, but please don't. But nevertheless, it's good that it's good that this exists, though, because my experience of games journalism was Future Publishing and Dennis so I won a little bit of Zitron law for all of you. So I was a games journalist from the age of sixteen.
I interned at Computer and Video Games Magazine is steamed out there, owned by Dennis Publishing, sold to Future Publishing. Really like out of the toilet, into the toilet.
Situation worst or toilet.
Yeah.
And I worked at PC Zone as well, and it was definitely and there's British libel laws which will stop me being fully honest here. It was a challenging corporate environment with many incentive structures that affected the output and structure of the work regularly. And it's funny because games journalism feels like something that could be bigger and better than it is, but it't.
It just won't be.
So like the example that I think is really useful is the Kataka. Essentially, we all worked there in a certain era where we had an editor in chief who was like an old school magazine guy like went to the Columbia School of Journalism, really wanted us to get scoops and we had for at least a short while management that understood the value of actually reporting news and not caring about the reaction from quote unquote gamers. However,
that did not make us very advertiser friendly. So now where we are at with Kataku after everyone that we worked with has left, essentially they're in an environment where they're like, what advertisers want is not news on how badly the industry is doing. What they would prefer is guides and hype, and what are gamers want? What are gamers talking about? You know, I like reporting on fandom because I do think that the cultural impact of gaming
is really fascinating. And frankly, I did not realize when we started Aftermath that we'd be doing journalism that is actually quite important in understanding the slow dissolution of democracy in America. But it certainly seems like it has been.
You know, I think that it's worth contextualizing that gaming has often been a canary in the coal mine for the slow dissolution of democracy and of you know, these cultural movements that can.
You elaborate.
Gamer Gate literally, gamer Nason and both of you split this question, I think would be good. Can you describe game and Gate for people to outside of it.
Gamer Gate was kind of the first like real reactionary movement video games. Basically, I mean I had a lot of personal experience.
You you had a little bit of a pot.
There was a you know, prominent indie game developer named Zoe Quinn and she and I ended up dating for a minute, and gamers to this to me and will not gamers. Basically, she had a jilted X who published a manifesto about her in which he claimed, among other things, that she had, you know, effectively slept with me for positive coverage of her game, when that never actually happened. There was no such coverage. It was all bullshit. But a lot of people, a lot of gamers who are
already after her. There had been this whole like movement against her even before this, but they lashed onto this and it became their plausible deniability, and so they started saying, oh, it's about ethics and games journalism, we got to fix this, and then all of these other people from outside of video games lashed onto that. That's where you've got people like Miley Ianopolis. That's where you've got a lot of
like Breitbart's notability in that era. And I think That's when a lot of these people in the conservative movement realized, oh, like this is a perfect seed bed for the future of conservatism, and the future can grab people.
Right here now.
You can literally brute force a reality. Is what they learned, the things that they claim, and you will still see people claim these things on the internet. None of these things are true, none of them are improvable, none of them are anywhere near provable. There is no review of Zoe's game that Nathan wrote. Yep, it does not exist, and they will never show it to you.
What's insane as well, is there are actual issues in games like I mean, like I'm not saying what magazine I'm talking about or indeed who this was said to, but I know multiple different games covers of games magazines for certain PC games magazines that were bartered with drugs and that where scores were raised to please publishers and raise to police advertisers.
The actual fucking issue.
Even just sort of the like parasitic relationship game devs, especially the higher up in management you go, they consider the games press to just be a pr wing their same industry. So the idea that we are journalists and we do not have the same goals as they do, which is to please developers and help make sure their game sell. That is considered like really really hostile and it is something that you have to explain and re explain over and over again. I don't care if your
game sell as well. Like I'm sorry, I want games to do well, but I'm not doing pr for you.
That is not what I want to do.
Also, there's already like a lot of these games already have these massive marketing budgets. Anyway, Yeah, like the press is not a big needle mover there. But what a lot of people want the press to be, whether they are executives or whether they're gamers, is this like mouthpiece for the industry. It's like going back to you know, those like law or those court cases against games as a whole and things like that. They want industry advocates.
They're still stuck in this mindset from like thirty years ago of like the industry needs defending.
It's just a little guy.
And it's like no, no, you can't simultaneously be quote bigger than Hollywood and to just be a little guy. That makes Yeah, you know, I love video games. I love the culture of video games. In a lot of ways.
I love.
I think play is a fundamental part of human life that we all need more of, especially the more bleak it. If you have imagination, then you can imagine a better world.
It also feels like we fundamentally got away from the thing that games is, which is escape.
Yeah.
Like, I know, it's not that I'm ashamed of being a gamer. I have plenty of other things am ashamed of. But it's this sense that like I do this to try and not like not think about it. I will say, however, like Balatro, if anyone knows the Balatro developer, Bilatro developer, welcome on Better Offline official endorsement is incredible fucking Blatro. I also like got me through like mental health things just I was able to. There's an emdr effect, I think.
But nevertheless, these games are meant to be, if not a distraction, something you escape into. If it's even if you're not escaping life. But it's like people people want them to.
Mean something else. Almost fiction is.
Fiction is transformative.
Like I was thinking, there's a big indie game hit that is really depressing and a sort of about the experience of living under La capitalism, mouthwashing it's an indie game, it's a visual novel.
It's not mechanics heavy, it's very story heavy. But it became an.
Enormous indie hit with a very big, sort of unexpected fandom because it describes an experience that people have and they love feeling like the misery and stress and pain that they are trying are being told by so many different forces doesn't exist and doesn't matter. They love being told, Yes, it does matter. Your personhood does matter. The things you
experience in the world do matter and have significance. Being able to experience that is something that brings us closer together as a society and allows us to again just start to imagine what if the world didn't have to be like this?
You know.
That's what all media, all enter forms of entertainment can give you. And I do feel like by becoming an industry that is chasing a bigger and bigger number more than anything else, you do lose sight of that that, like art can't just be measured in dollars or it is something that touches you and changes you.
Yeah, I mean I think that the Yeah, the big issue is that games aren't supposed to be anything, especially not at this point, like and I'll give you, and also like there are so many of them. So yes, last year, almost twenty thousand games came out on Steam
Jesus twenty thousand. And with that in mind, like the fact that there's this reactionary movement going around saying, oh, you know, this game can't be this, it can't have like a black person, it can't portray trans issues, It's like, well, why does that matter to you?
Why there are there are nineteen more games over there that aren't doing that, thirty years of games which would.
Not Then Yeah, on top of that, you were talking about this idea of games is escapism. And it's so funny because this reactionary movement essentially posits that, yes, games should only be escapism and nothing else. They shouldn't have quote unquote political topics in them. Trans people or black people. People have dedicated their lives to fighting a political battle about games, in effect, shoving their politics into games. That's
all they do anymore. And so they're like, games should be escapism, no politics, except for all the time.
On my terms.
You know, for me, a great level of escapism would be imagining a world where I don't have an annoying conversation with a white person, like you know, like.
That would be that is completely imaginary.
You know, that would be a wonderful escape for me.
But you do when you get down to when you see one of these viral posts that comes across your dash about or you know, whatever social media figure you're on, and they are so upset about a promo image for a game because the example character they've shown is a black person, you realize that the escapism that these people want to experience is an escape from black people, and it's just they don't want to have to see a black person. And that is like an inherently political things to say.
That is an endorsement of white supremacy.
Yeah, it's an endorsement of an no state. Yeah, it's it's.
Very fucking frustrating as well, because I don't know, maybe they could learn to be in a situation with a black person, but they're like, no, no, I couldn't post it. Wait wait, wait, there's an option buried in these menus that allows me to have trends like features and fuck no, yeah, I can't even consider a world where that's an option.
Being given the choice of a They them pronoun is something that just terrifies them, just like.
They're YouTube videos. Are these people? Yeah, are reduced to like actual tears. How upset they are? Love Yeah? Oh it's crazy, I mean I could so.
So back to aftermath though, on a more positive note, what are you trying to create with it? I don't you don't need to have like a big vision, But what are you trying to do differently to like Kataku for example.
Not destroy our brains and bodies?
Number one?
Sure?
Yeah, I also think we want to acknowledge, like and embrace the both editorial and hard scoops and reporting. That was not something I think we did very well, like embracing the duality of that you need news and then also you need to help people interpret and understand the cultural impact of this news. Nathan has been doing an incredible job reporting, like just really fucking killing it. I currently have two full time jobs, so I've been writing
less than I'd love to. But really my interest is understanding industry trends and looking at them as sort of long term research projects, and understanding the way that the world moves as we understand how money flows and moves. And I think that those both of these things are equally important. Essentially, just even though video games tell like as an industry, people just lie about how how much
money they make and how culturally important they are. They are now a massive and indelible part of the American entertainment industry and our economy.
They are mainstream, especially for like you know, gen Z millennials, like we all grew up playing them. They are as much a part of the cultural fabric as any film, as any TV show, as anything else.
Yeah, and that they need to.
Be covered that way.
And it's so weird to look at like major publications, major papers having almost nobody dedicated to them, like Washington Post has.
One person game Park. And even then Gene doesn't really do hard report.
He just does like criticism, which is important, but it's not the whole thing, Like.
I had a team for that.
Well something I like about, like you did this one about Steve the Steam uses n ai Yeah, and it was specifically the story is about how actually you know, won't get through the next Fest Games pod.
Why why would I read your story to you?
Yeah?
So basically, right now, Steam is running this promotional event called next Vest where there are a ton of demos everybody like play is getting prominent placement for the demos, which will in turn people cause people to go check out their games and maybe buy them. That's really important.
And so this time around, people have been scrolling through and seeing a lot of AI art and they're like, oh, that's not good, because that means that a bunch of like AI slop is potentially crowding out deserving good games that have been development for a long time, and that you have a chance of it attaining real success.
And so.
The thing about that is that, yes, it looks bad. But then at the same time, Steam has this hyper complicated algorithm that they've been tuning over the years, and so they basically tuned it to change the way that games are seen in the first few days of something like Nextfest, right, so that you end up seeing like a random kind of scattering of them in the first few days. Then it becomes personalized, and so basically that sorts out the AI garbage because those games people don't
really interact with much. They see them, they move on, and so like they've built a system that sort of anticipates AI slop, which is good, but they still have this larger problem that I think that you see in a lot of industries now in this era of peak content, which is that there's tons of good stuff coming out on Steam all the time, too much of that for most people to like find what they're really looking for.
And then on top of that, you're also competing with all of the old goods stuff which is still on Steam correctly goes on sale, has bigger name recognition than you do, and so like that's the real battle that people need to be fighting, whereas I think looking at AI on Steam is like this major issue is tempting, and it is to an extent, but it's not kind of the core problem.
That a lot of developers face.
So the reason I brought up this story was to compliment you, because this is exactly why After Moth rocks and why I actually think the future of journalism is more. Yeah, it's like Batter off line, of course it is, but it's things like after Moth as well, Because this isn't just a story about games culture, which is the anxiety of rai slop, also the anxiety of a indie games not getting the attention they need. It's also an industrial
analysis because you've got fucking numbers here. In actual view, he counts, and actually because to cover the games industry, it seems like, much like tech, you need true domain expertise, but you also need industrial Jason Shryer style and Jason Shryap by the way over at Bloomberg Legend got to get him on the show. It's my fault, Jason.
So you want I know something amazing about Jason. Yes, just one great Jason story that he told me right
before we left Kataku. I used to sit next to him every day, and he told me when he first started there, he asked if there was a dress code, he said, and his boss told him no, right So, to that effect, he wore basketball shorts literally every single day, and at his yearly review, his boss came up to him and said, Jason, I did not know that I had a line for dress code, but I realized that my line is, please don't wear basketball shorts literally every day.
If anyone didn't he encounter this one online at some point, I feel like he added some particulars that muddy the waters of that story a tiny bit.
Oh, I see, I see it.
I just love every time you see Jason tweet something that pisses you off. I just love imagining him in basketball shorts.
That's all.
Yeah.
But also I'm remembering if any of the British games press are listening to this, we don't. We never dressed that. I dressed like I was in like a dirty jeens.
And actually dirty genes.
Now I resist.
We just like people dressed like I guess we didn't see their legs because it's England as it was cold, but I feel like that that's the difference of the British gaming press.
I guess they would just look like.
What Kieran Gillan said is about I love Gillan, He's such a sweety pie. He said in what When his little manifesto, he wrote like, I don't know, it's like twenty years ago.
Journalism, he said.
I love Karen, but I fucking hate it.
He said something about there were two models of games journalism when he was working there, and it was the US model, which was a lot like car journalism, which is also pretty fraught. And there was the UK model, which is a lot more like music journalism, which now does not really exist in America anymore. And the US model, which was all about stats and statistics, statistics and numbers
and products and products. That model won out eventually, and you can see how much it has went out because now it's it's only about toys, like we talk about games as if they are toys and.
You guys, and that's pretty much it.
I remember why it pissed me off because he fucking wroked a PC game which was exactly what you just described. That's what he left and made rockets and now and now he fucking writes amazing comedy.
God, the power Fantasy is so fasy and it really good.
It's great.
I'm sorry, but no, I was going to say, in line with a lot of that and the way that I think games journalism kind of you know, continued to mature along those lines and mostly considering games to be these disposable products, and like you know, a lot of sites consider like posting about a trailer to be news.
The thing that I think Aftermath does that we really focus on doing is contextualizing a lot of the news, especially the harder news, something that you be layoffs and xtualizing it I think with the kind of feeling it deserves, something that I think you also do really well with all of your different projects.
You know, well people people find it very cathartic to have people confirm what they feel about the world, which is things are.
Also sometimes don't yeah with facts, but also sometimes they don't recognize how bad things are.
They need to be told.
That was my point in that wbpiece, which I then the headline for those who don't know, is just fucked WB.
And fucked w Babe on the way.
Yeah, literally just fucked WB.
Like and it goes into all the reasons why they deserve to be fucked, because they've been mismanaging their business horribly and treating people and their various properties is disposable, and like doing it in these ways that are.
Very avoidable are an expression of the way that the tech industry as a whole has changed how employment works and changed how companies understand value. And it is disgusting to watch it happen in something that's very important to me, which is the world of art. Like I was a cinema studies major in college. I had these old, hyphalutant dreams of being a gallery curator, et cetera, et cetera.
These things really matter to me, like human expression really really matters to me, and they're the wonderful history of American cinema is just being flushed on the fucking toilet.
And it feels like they're doing the same thing in games and in tech and everything. Because not to tie it back to my own bullshit, but it's it's the Google search thing, it's the Facebook thing, it's the thing that we fell in love with the idea of games. I guess it's more what it's more death by a thousand cuts with games. Yet sometimes the cuts are larger. But it's like watching like Monolith for example. Monolith also, I like, I swear Modelf had something to do with
like free space as well. It was a volition entertainment, like we've watched it. It's been this slow burm where you'd see these amazing games come out and then the studio would just disappear or they dog shit, and it seems like it's just this problem of CEOs. It's these executives who have nothing to do with games. They don't play games, they wouldn't dare touch these games. They've got imported things to do, like go to lunch and write emails or.
I mean, okay, so actually this is a good example. They're CEOs who at least like pretend to or do, but they still make the same decisions. Somebody like Phil Spencer is a great example of this. He's like the gamer CEO's at Microsoft, but he's.
Actually like a game.
Yes, I mean he like his Xbox Live stats were like public for a long time. You can see how many hundreds of hours he's putting into games.
That makes it worse.
But yeah, exactly it makes is What that suggests is that like the problem is that these is not that these people are not gamers, right, The problem is the structural incentives at a company, being an executive that you will still even appreciating the art form cut thousands of people loose from their jobs, right, and like make decisions that actively harm games and their quality.
Isn't the problem more so that games are just insanely expensive to build? Though the triple A gaming is are we not running towards this unsustainable point?
It's already unsustainable.
Well, there was that New York Times article about graphics and games that I read a few weeks ago, maybe last month, that was about, like, there is so much money being pumped into these the Spider Man games, for asn example, realistic one to one fidelity of the world we see outside of our window, including physics systems that replicate real life physics, right, and there we are at a point where that last ten it's like self driven cars that last ten percent may never be solved because
our human brain interprets and processes things so much faster than a computer program, and a computer can just in general, and we these studios put so much money into creating that thing, and players don't notice or care.
Players literally don't care.
For Spider Man too in particular, really insane. Yeah, it's a good game, but Insomniac, the developer of that game, suffered a week a little while ago, and in some of their own conversations about the game, they're like, yeah, our budget for this this sequel was three hundred million dollars or somewhere there, almost double what the original game costs. But we don't think that players actually notice just how
much better the graphics are. We actually think that they like they take either version and be fine with it. And so at that point, why are we spending all of this money on increasing the fidelity? What what is the end that we're trying to achieve here? And meanwhile, look at the other wild part of all of us to me is that the current like video game Juggernauts for gen Z are like Minecraft and Roadblocks. These games do not have high fidelity graphics.
At all ye Roadblocks.
In fact, it is a kind of disgusting exploitative model where they rely on community developers who make games for them.
Yeah, they got child labors and children and children children, and.
The split is one of the most predatory in the industry in terms of how much money Roadblox will make off of your game versus how much money you make.
What you're saying is Roadbox only loses money as well. They're horribly unpossible.
It's just ridiculous.
I feel like we need to like have a referendum on the CEOs on a very basic level. Have put aside all the moral stuff that's very obvious. Let's just be like, you fucking suck at this right.
No, When we started our own company, what we marveled at for a long time was like, no, we don't have MBAs, and yes, the money stuff is kind of difficult, but actually getting people to visit our website and trust our reporting.
Was extremely easy.
Like the actual like day to day put blocks on the site. Run a business promote ourselves. That's so, so, so easy. And there were so many people at TiO Media that made so much money that couldn't do things like there was an HR lead that couldn't attach. She couldn't put an attachment on an email, and she made a quarter million of a dollar cordon million of dollars a year.
I hated herself.
That is insane.
Yeah, it seems like this is being a published author and not even making close to that.
It's so cool.
What's insane as well, is it's like this is the larger problem. This is I know that someone's going to email and me like the problems capitalism. Wow, by the way, if you're one of the PI, I don't know. I'm acting like I have derision, but I love my listeners. Like for the most part, it's just I get one person and.
I'm gonna start emailing you like this all the time. Yeah, like actually killy capital I fucking know.
But it's just this is actually something that really frustrated me at a former games publication. I may have been where it was just like the people writing were fucking amazing.
They loved games. I mean I can talk about log for example, disappointment on Blue Sky or Steve Hogarty at Pieces on Yeah, Will Porter as well, Like Love Games was so like it was a real joyous energy to it, and then there was just this mandate from above where it was just yeah, well we got to make sure we sell more issues, so you got to put this on the cover.
It's never something fucking interesting.
You get an occasional one, like I did my one cover about the third World of Warcraft expansion.
That was fun, But.
It's like the thing the incentives, the people driving the incentives are not people that I even understand the customers so much. They're just like I need to resemble the thing that my boss wants me to and then I will be the best at my job, even if fun not good at it at all. Like David Zaslav, I have a lot of thoughts about what could happen to him that I won't be sharing.
How do I introduce you to my concept of the well based system of justice? You got it a deep, deep well, okay, and like you just throw them down there. I mean, like Samorrow from the Ring, like she lived down there. She didn't die right away, right.
She had a nice time that you know, we'll feed them.
Sandwiches a little picky basket every once in a while, and you can try to get out maybe he'll succeed.
But disclaimer, this.
Is this is all happening in Minecraft and or Ro.
Yeah, this is all parrot. This is parody. Yes, this is parody. But it's just fucking frustrating as well, because despite all this frustration and annoyance, we've had some incredible fucking games the way she is, like Hades and Hades Too.
And super Giant, it is an incredible, incredible.
They're having like a weird dust up about acting and not working with like SAG for reasons that they want, and I actually super Giant a bit of quick insight, I like, because they put up this statement. Basically voice actor came out and said that Super Giant was considering not renewing with them over like their insistence on having
a SAG contract. And so then super Giant put out a statement saying like, actually, we have some of the best protections against AI and things like that in the industry, and like we're just not working with SAG for reasons, and they did not state those reasons, and SAG.
Currently is on strike specifically in the video game industry over AI protections and voice acting.
I'm just reading this statement.
Yeah, we have respected and will continue to respect any act in needing to poost work during the ongoing sag aff Aftra video game strike. Well, none of all games have ever been subject to the sag Aftra contracts. For a variety of reasons. There we go, which means we wish the best.
And so I reached out to Greg Kasavin, who's the like creative director over at Super Giant, who I've known for a lot of years, and asked that. I was like, can you provide any of the reasons, and he was basically like no.
I was like, oh, thank you, man, I appreciate the comment.
And it's just it's frustrating because Super Giant, I assume makes a ship a ton of money.
Oh I mean haities was a massive a.
Small studio relative to I mean.
They's not a lot of overhead essentially.
Saving the money there, where's that going. It's not even what the CEO makes more money if they if they do that, it's it's well.
And also it's like it's a real bummer because otherwise they've been amazing in terms of like making games the right way, like they are very people focused studio I interviewed them years ago about like all the ways that they like. For example, they have mandatory vacation, so if you reach the end of the year and you haven't taken your vacation time, you have to just like take a month.
Off and do that kind of a thing.
And just to describe for the listeners, you haven't played Haydas or Haidi's two, which is coming out next year, probably.
Isn't early access right now, and you can't.
Play this game is both mechanically perfect. Haities two, I would argue, isn't I think Hades to.
Really like Haites?
I love it?
No, I love it, I love you. I love it in that there are some bits that also isn't finished yet. Yeah.
Nonetheless, the point is these games are mechanically perfect. They sound incredible, voice acting is amazing, they look, they feel amazing. There are tiny little systems, and on top of that, they're incredibly diverse. They prove that you can do diversity in this way that's very like a sincere and it doesn't feel it.
Fits the setting, and the setting is like Greek mythology, and it's really cool.
Yeah.
Yeah, the whole plot of Achilles and Patroclus in Hades just melts my heart. It really is affecting. Nathan and I are both big fans of the game Pire, which is the game that came out right before, which.
Is like still the best Super Giant game NBA.
Jam essentially with Wizards, and then also it's a story of sincere revolution that asks you, the player, what it would mean to overcome oppression and why you would fight for it, and it is really affecting and meaningful storyline. One of the most amazing things about Super Giant is they have this like bespoke relationship with Darren corr a singer songwriter, Oh my music he makes where these games drive me to tears.
And I love them.
I actually really want to talk about Daryn Corb real quick. So Hades two has a boss against this band of Siren and they're all two different metals, like like metal adjacent songs.
And that's about how much they hate you for killing.
And how Badjo looks and what they're going to do to you, like and these songs are fucking bangas they're great.
They want they have bloss bets.
And one also bear in mind too that they had to write these songs with the expectation that, because of the game's run based structure, that you like do the same thing over and over and over. Yeah, but you will hear these songs like a hundred times, So they got to write something that they know you're not going to be irritated by hearing this many times, which to itself is this like level of craft is so different than just writing a song.
There's like a little bit of a crossover with like musical theater with Durincorb, where the songs are people sing in these games when they are called to such a high level of emotion, and then they paint that a level of emotion also from you, the player, so that by the time you get to Sylla and the Sirens and your run again, you will be your blood will be pumping so hot that you just want to hear them burst into some minds And it's fucking great.
And also that I'm ranting about this, I don't care. Your little pigs will slop this up. What's also great about this boss fight is it's three different things you're fighting and as you one is the drama, one is the guitarist, one as the singer, and if you kill off the drama, you no longer hear the drum baby or when they do, And it's.
Like, it's beautiful.
And the reason I bring this up as well is it's proof of what you can do in games and with technology when you just fucking think about what the medium is. Yeah, and it's so expertly done and it shows so much love, and it frustrates me because I know we've been quite negative today, but there are so many signs that games can be so much better and that there are these incredible like Hades two is even in early access, has so many bits to it. You're just like, wow, not only do you love games, but
you want this to be cool. You have genuine creative expression that cannot be done anywhere else.
Yes, in no other form, Like I mean that, this is why I talk about Dwarf Fortress like and you're constantly it's like, this is a game made by people that are clearly just obsessed with Lord of the Rings, but they also are obsessed with fantasy and building a world and uh, just native narrative experiences, the way that you, as a human being create a story inside of your mind.
Yeah, Like you you.
Have this little group of dwarves, and they all have distinct personalities that are all procedurally generated. They all have memories. They have all lived in a world that has built itself up over you know, in game like two hundred fifty in game years, So there is history. When you ask your dwarves to engrave carvings into the fortress you build inside of a mountain, they will build carvings of things that they remember from life, like when your mayor got elected, et cetera, et cetera.
So as what I'm gonna do before I die, I'm gonna carve Eric.
Adams in this Why oh God, yes, this carve is a my main memory memory.
Eric Adams.
But no, I remember I played a game once and there was a dwarf child that was just mad all the time, and I was like, dwarf child, you can't. You can't keep hitting people with an axe like you have.
What's going on, God, Woke has gone wild?
Well, it's because after a big orc attack at my fortress, a Goblin attack. His father had been in the military and his father died, and there weren't enough dwarfs after this attack to clean up all the corpses. So this dwarf child had to watch his father rode away at the floor and that permanently changed his personality. So now he's angry almost shiite.
Within this game Dwarf Fortress.
Yes, and I think that this is the thing.
I refuse to be fully nihilistic about this stuff, because even with the slop Kings in power, it seems like cool shit is still being built. And as we wrap updata first, is there anything you're really looking forward to? Is there like a game coming out with something very recent you've played, You've kind of and it's Avowed.
I'm playing at to stop.
Avowed is the new game from Obsidian, the most recent game that people.
Have died for them.
I mean, they've made tons of incredible.
Vegas is.
I mean, Following New Vegas is just a precious jewel. I love that game. It is. It is worth.
Following New Vegas is worth the three hours I spent modding the game so it would not crash when I tried to play it on my PC.
I so it wasn't an Obsidian game anymore.
Sorry, but it Avowed is It takes a lot of the systems that they developed for the Outer the Outer worlds and refines them, and then also you get really
really excellent character writing all of the time. There's a character you meet right away in a vowed named Kai who is like a fish person and he's always got a little sarcastic quip to say about something, but he's also like a deeply empathetic like he has like a real tangible personality traits that make me excited to talk to him and hear him react to the things that I do. And another wonderful thing about this is the
combat stuff is really really fun. But the choices in the quests that you're forced to make, they do not present a path to you that will not piss someone off.
So you have to sit there.
Yeah.
Sorry, that's the fate of the smiling man. You just have to think to yourself, what are my convictions? And that is something that games can really make you confront within yourself.
What do I believe about something?
And you play as an envoy of an empire, and I found that what I have been doing in this game is just you know, I met up with the rebels, I had the option to kill someone who attempted to assassinate me or not. And when I heard that he realized that assassinating me wasn't the right choice to and then write the right way to defeat the Empire that
is trying to take over the living lands. I decided to forgive him because I don't actually have any beef with them, and I don't think the things that the Empire are doing in this land me the person me Gita, I don't think the things that they are doing their attempt at colonizing this beautiful, lush lance gap that is fighting against them. I don't think that that is right, and so other characters have judged me for this, but I decided, you know what, I side with the rebels.
I want the Umpire to dissolve, and that is how I'm going to play this game. That's the way this character is going to play this game.
This is on PC and Xbox.
Yes, it's fan tactic.
That's really good.
So it's nice. What about you? What game? So?
I recently played a demo for a game called skin Deep, and so skin Deep is I would describe it as a like slapstick stealth immersive sim game. The idea being that, like you are somebody who works in a very wacky form of insurance where basically you get frozen and stored to board ships that have important cargo on them, and if somebody breaks into that ship, then they unfreeze you and you run around and take care of whoever's on there, okay,
And it's really it's just really clever. It's one of those games that, again it could only be a game, so like it thinks about all these things that other games of this sort don't. So like your character is barefoot for whatever reason, and so like if there's glass around, you can step on the glass and then you can like pry it out of your foot and use it
as a weapon if you want to. But also like the combat is so different from what you expect in these games, and that like instead of you being this master of like martial arts, you have to like briefly incapacitate somebody with any number of comedy items, Like you can throw a banana peel and they'll slip them all on, and then you like go jump on their back, and like you're trying to wrestle them into something and they're
like trying to push you off. You're not like physically stronger than them, and so it descends into just like lunacy and madness almost every time that you are trying to bring somebody down.
And just to be clear, what platform is this on. That's PC, So it's not VR or anything you're not doing this with.
Yeah, that's and it's from this one studio that actually they're called Blendo. They've been around for a while. Yeah, they're amazing, and they they've always been really smart about like integrating cinematic techniques that other video games don't. They made this one game forever ago called Thirty Flights of Level that relies a lot on like jump cuts, yeah, in a first person setting, which feels I think unnatural to gamers who are used to continuity in a first person game.
The Thirty Flights of Loving is an experience worth having. It's a very short, narrative game, and I if you want to understand just like how games work, how the moving image creates narrative, creates associations. It is very instructive and it's also really affecting.
Yeah cool.
And so these developers are also really good, surprisingly good at not making just like on rail cinematic experiences, but also like these really intricate systems. And that's what skin Deep is it's this game where so many funny, weird things can happen, like you know, and you can you can replay levels and figure out all this stuff. Like the first time that I played the demo level, I nearly like lost, and you know, I sucked at it.
And the second time I realized, Oh, man, I can break the glass on this spaceship and open it to the vacuum of space, and so I can go around like wreaking havoc on these guards by just like subjecting them to.
Like a James Bone, like a moonrak Is situation. Yeah, yeah, that's so beautiful.
So and that's the thing.
I really want to leave the listeners here with the censor, there's still cool shit happening. Oh yeah, everywhere, and there is hope to be had. Geeta, where can people find you?
Oh, you can find me on Aftermath that site totally. I'm exo Exo gossip gita on social media Instagram and Blue Sky basically is where I post at this point. But yeah, everything I write will be on Aftermath, So look after me there, Nathan.
Aftermath, do's say as well? And then I'm at Nathan Grayson on Blue Sky. I'm glorious curly map on Instagram. And then I also for a book called Stream Big the Triumphs and Turmoils of Twitch and the starts behind the Screen, and you can get that wherever books are sold.
Now I'm going to kind of force you all to do this. I need you to go to aftermath dot site and need you to pay them. I need you to buy Nathan's book. Ideally, I need you to go and make your friends by it as well, and you also subscribe to Aftermath. I say this from the bottom of my heart to leave this episode games show them, Jesus Christ.
I'm not I'm not cutting it.
Games journalism genuinely made me who I am and like people like Will Porter, Steve Hogarty and log of course John byThe really changed and even Kieran Gillen, who's become more of a friends since I left anyway, And it's lovely to have you two here because games journalism is very meaningful and I still don't think it's where it needs to be, but I think the aftermaths bringing it there. You will love me, though, so you know where to
find my shit. Please keep downloading this show. Please tell people to download it to I need the downloads if I don't get them all died, I love.
You all away in front of my eyes.
I'm literally dying, but I do love you.
Thank you for listening to Better Offline.
The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Mattasowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at Mattasowski dot com m A. T.
T OsO w s Ki.
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