Angry Planet - Doomsday Machines With Nuclear Historian Alex Wellserstein

Episode Date: August 12, 2024

Listen to this episode commercial free at https://angryplanetpod.com/Nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein stops by Angry Planet this week to tell us all about his new project Doomsday Machines. It’s a deep dive into the weird post-nuclear futures we’ve built in pop culture.How Warcraft orcs got ICBMsMatthew confuses Camus and SartreFood poisoning as practice for the radical acceptance of death and sufferingIs there any hope in The Road?Alex is hung up on the cannibalsThe video game aesthetics of the post-nuclear worldDebunking gasoline futuresWorking for the authoritarian government to get the petroleum industry back on its feetThe Civil Defense truncheonDeep thoughts on the Fallout franchiseThe American libertarian lone survivorThis American Life - Ends of the EarthSupport this show http://supporter.acast.com/warcollege. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give, and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. So, Alex, I was thinking about you yesterday when I was watching a YouTube video about Slavjank. Do you know what this is? Are you familiar with this term? No, I don't think I do. It's a term people used to describe the way a certain kind of video game feels, ones that were probably developed in Berlin or in Ukraine. Eurojank is also another popular term. But they got into the history of the development of the video game stalker, who there's a sequel being made by the same people, if they can finish it up in the war zone that they're in. but there was an early the way they one of the the, the legend goes of the way they raised money to develop stalker, this kind of this Ukrainian video game that set the tone for a lot of other like nuclear themed of video games. Is that they had pirated Warcraft and and modded it where they added nuclear weapons to Warcraft complete with pre-warcraft.

complete with pre-rendered cutscenes where aliens come down and gift the orcs ICBM silos. And I was like, oh, well, lovely, I'm going to be talking about video games and nuclear weapons and art with you very soon. And I thought I would use that as the intro anecdote. I have no idea how much of that tracks to you or the audience or if it's interesting at all. but something about the bad 90s cutscene of aliens giving an orc and ICBM silo really struck me. That's wonderful. That's a really, I really don't know what to say about that. The high and the low of both the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, work technology and the ICBM, and the fact that we're talking about essentially a, like, Tolkienesque universe, You know, here's the segue

is that there are people who argue that the dragons in Game of Thrones are nuclear weapons. And there are dragons, I believe, in at least World of Warcraft 2, which is one of the last World of Warcrafts I remember very well. Or maybe that's not World, that's just Warcraft. Anyway,

yeah, sorry, I'm not in the, I don't do the online one. So, you know, there you go. Maybe the ICBMs were inside us all along. Do you think, do you buy that the dragons or nuclear weapons in Game of Thrones? They treat them like them sometimes, sure. And they certainly win at the controversial ending of the series. They certainly make that a similar moral coding.

The differences that you can shoot down a dragon. So, you know, it's not exactly the same. I was thought of them more as warthogs, you know, kind of up in the air, this really powerful weapon, but not quite a nuke. And they're still tactical. I mean, not necessarily tactical. I mean, they destroy a city, but they're not, as bad as the dragons are, they're still pretty small scale. Like, it takes a lot of work to destroy King's Landing. And, again, at any point, if they had gotten their act a little more together, they could have shot it down.

So, not exactly. If they just had the right ballistas in the right place. Right. Well, wait, isn't that what Reagan thought back in the 80s? You know, about nuclear weapons? Just get enough ballistas in the right place. Well, I think that's what we think about them now, too. And what would have happened then, if it had been a perfect metaphor, is instead of them being the dragons we saw, they'd be, what's that king, what's his name, dragon from the Godzilla ones that has three heads?

You'd get the Merv dragons. and then you'd have like a thousand of them, and that would be the perfect nuclear metaphor. But it also wouldn't be any fun, and this is maybe getting to the bigger point, because actual nuclear weapons in games or fiction or whatever, if they're used, like they're unbalanced. They're not actually fun.

The real world isn't balanced. It isn't fun. It doesn't make for good plots to actually usually have the nukes go off. Well, you remember if you do, like SIV 2, going back a long time. you actually could eventually develop nuclear weapons and launch them. And then you could just take, you had to have one soldier of some kind outside the city. You would nuke the town.

It would destroy all the weaponry and everything and most of the infrastructure. And then you just walk in and it became your city. And I remember doing that because now looking back on that, that seems kind of weird. But I thought it was fun at the time. It's not, it's not. I mean, you get a broken city, which is, you know, that's kind of what the U.S. did with Japan, right? We occupied these broken cities.

What I like about, I have all these issues with Sib. But I actually wrote a whole review of a SIV game for an academic journal a couple of years ago. But what I like at least about SIV, unlike most games, there are extreme diplomatic penalties for the use of nuclear weapons. So it's not like one of these games where it's like, you know, nuclear launch detected. oh, business as usual, right? Like, it's like you use them and then everybody, at least the AI characters, all immediately hate you and say you're the worst and won't do. And even that's probably not probably extreme enough, but at least that dimension is

there that they are problematic weapons to use. They're not just the tip of the tech tree. I always loved playing civ as a kid that would never always make sure to avoid democracy. because the minute you introduced democracy, I would have all kinds of problems domestically with all of my foreign policy. And I didn't understand that when I was 10 or whatever, however old I was when I was first playing.

But now it makes a lot of sense. SIV is a weird game. I think that I played a few of the SIVs. And for me, the thing that I kept coming back to in SIV is like, who are you supposed to be? because again, like democracy, you're not the president. You live for 500 years, right? You have dictatorial powers almost constantly.

You somehow run the gamut of controlling every aspect of the economy and every individual soldiers unit at the simultaneously. And when they represent other countries to you, it'll be like, you know, Gandhi or I don't remember who all the, not Margaret Thatcher, Queen Victoria, somebody like that will come But it's not actually Queen Victoria, clearly. Queen Victoria doesn't have ICBMs, right? So who is this? And the conclusion I came to is that you are Hegel's geist of history.

You are the invigorating spirit of this nation that you're playing. And that made more sense to me. As personified by their iconic leader. That's their geist. It's like India, I mean, at least for outsiders, it's Gandhi. For Britain, it's Queen Victoria. What do they get from George Washington? It's probably how their country sees us.

I think one of them, they've had Washington. They've had Lincoln, too. They had Lincoln at one point. Yeah. Yeah, they switch it around for Americans, I think, because it's made by Americans. Right. But Gandhi famously has been, I think, India for all of them. And, you know, the famous Gandhi nuclear weapons and civilization story, of course.

It was a bug that he was very aggressive with nukes, and then they just left it in because they thought it was funny. That I didn't know. We're sitting here with Alex Wellerstein. We're talking about pop art and nuclear weapons, which I would say is one of the components of your new substack. Can you tell us about it? Yeah.

It's live. It's got posts. Doomsday Machines. Found at doomsdaymachines. Dot net for all your doomsday machines needs. It's plural doomsday machines, very deliberate. it, ambiguity in the plural, but it's a, it's a blog for the post-apocalyptic imagination in fact and fiction. So it's both history, it's actual plans for surviving or waging nuclear war or other

kinds of major problems. But it's also how we think about these things culturally in books. films, video games, songs, whatever. How do you think we're thinking about it culturally right now in 2024? Well, I think it depends on who the we is always in that sentence. And that's, you know, I like to keep that ambiguous. But Americans, we have an interesting view of the post-apocalypse right now, right? And I feel like if you see this, if you look at little slices of different times in the past and what they were interested in in their post-apocalypse. So, like, I feel like we are, if you look at stuff from like the early 2000s, so the whole post-apocalyptic genre, you can trace it back for a while.

The term post-apocalyptic is not really used until the 90s, interestingly enough. And you get this like boom of the stuff in the early 2000s, which is like the zombie stuff, the zombie. where you're really thinking about like people eking out a sad existence after something horrible. And that's also where you get Cormac McCarthy's The Road. You get a whole bunch of these things clustering in the early 2000s. And this feels very much like post-Y2K and then post-911 kind of thing. And most of those are like pretty bleak, right? They're like, everything's terrible and you'll be terrible and everything's bad.

And it just gets worse and worse. And of course, McCarthy is like the worst. It turns out history History didn't end and because of that everyone's going to be very sad forever. Very sad forever and you're digging into a deep pit deeper and deeper wherever you go. But a lot of the stuff that's around today that I see coming out is more, I don't know if optimistic is the better word, but like Station 11. I think of that as a very 21st century where it's like, yeah, the horrible thing happened, but we still need to live.

So let's do some plays. Let's do let's like, let's do Shakespeare. That's what people need. And there's some of that in the earlier period. There's like the postman. There's like some earlier stuff of that genre. But I feel like there's a much more conscious push in some quarters to like not just do the. And then things got even worse of the like Cormac McCarthy style.

And I wonder personally if that's sort of how we're culturally digesting climate change or something like this. I think so. I think it's one part defiance and another part I wouldn't even call it hope, but just deciding to carry on in the way that like you would answer SART. You know, am I going to drink this coffee or am I going to kill myself? Well, I'm just going to drink this coffee. We'll take that as one step and continue on. and then maybe like in Station 11 you get to do some plays along the way

and you know what, that's not so bad. That's fine. I don't love Station 11. I'll just put that out there. I think of it as like, yeah, well, I haven't seen this show.

I've read the book when I came out. And to me, it was like the most Brooklyn hipster post-apocalyptic world I could ever imagine. It was like a bunch of people. There was like no, there was barely any tension or threat. Everybody's basically just tired.

but they also love theater. And like, okay, on the one hand, yeah, people do have a much greater capacity for resilience than they imagine themselves having. Like, people survive the black plague, man, right? Like, people were still doing stuff. And I'm not saying that I don't get bummed out by everything. I'm not saying everything will be great. It'll be miserable. But people, like, have persisted through misery for most of, you know, the human existence.

And they will continue to be. miserable and still have a drive to live. And I think a lot of people, there's like literally empirical data that shows that people underestimate, what is it? No, underestimate their will to live on hypothetical bad situations. If you ask people, would you rather be dead or an amputee, a lot of people will be like, well, I'd rather be dead. And then the minute they're an amputee, they're like, no, I can keep going, right?

Like, it's a, you know, we're pretty adaptable. But that being said, so I'm not saying. the Cormac McCarthy grim grim grim stuff I find it be a little much but I also have I found really particular taste about what I find plausible about what drives that will live and also what those worlds would be like

so for me station 11 is a little bit too whimsical. Yeah that's exactly it it's post-apocalypse by West Anderson right like like which is which would actually be hilarious but like I don't think it's intentionally meant to do that. A Tweed apocalypse?

A twee apocalypse. Station 11 is pretty twee, Jason. Yeah. No, I know if I'm just trying to. I just love the concept of putting those things together. I would love Wes Anderson to do an adaptation of the road. I think that would be wonderful. I was actually thinking, you know, talking about that weird, you know,

the will to live and the weird optimism, what we, so a friend of mine, she and I agree that, you know, beyond a certain point, dementia, things like that, we wouldn't want to live. Her husband is smarter than we are. Because every time she gets a bad cold, he says, is it now? Will I take you out back and shoot you now? Is this the moment? And I just think, oh, yeah, when is that, when am I going to actually say yes to that question?

You know? You haven't thought about your clear lines? Thought about it, but I'm worried they're a little squishy. I will tell you, my favorite thing. about food poisoning because you got to find one silver lining, right? Is that like when you're lying there at three in the morning on the bathroom floor, half naked,

trying to like get cool by putting your head on the tile in between horrible things happening. And you just, you've got that feeling that it gives you, which is not even pain. It's just like extreme discomfort. And you're just like, I could die now. that would be fine. I would accept this just to end this discomfort. And you know that it's just food

poisoning and it'll be gone in the morning. And so you're not going to go kill yourself or something. But what I appreciate about that is it gives me a little preview of giving up. And I'm like, oh, maybe at the end, I'll just feel this way. And I'll be able to accept it because I can, right now, it's hard for me to imagine being in that position. But when I'm there, I'm like, yeah, if I felt like this all the time, I would be ready to be. like turn the switch off, I'm good. It's been a good run. So, you know, I hold that in my heart.

I like the idea that food poisoning is practiced for the end. The exception of death. The acceptance of death. Yeah, the acceptance of death. Yep. In the face of extreme suffering, to be clear. I do think, though,

when you're pointing out, I mean, in your hypothetical there, things like dementia to me are the trickiest of the tricky line. because you can have a person who seems like a functioning person biologically, but are they them anymore, right? And so you say, like, when would I want to? But if the eye is being destroyed in that process, the eye of me is not the eye of that biological being that may not have an opinion. And I don't know who that is, that other person. And so that to me is, I'm much more

inclined to say, that's the kind of thing where I would, you know, I don't know what I would want, but I wouldn't, I don't really want to imagine going down that path of the, of the destruction of the self. To me, that's the worst sort of torture you could imagine. I agree completely. I watched it happen to my, watched it happen to my grandmother and not pleasant. There's a really great, um, this American life episode about a woman. whose husband gets dementia and he decides while before it gets bad

that he's like, you got to help kill me. And it is about her figuring out how you do that legally in the 21st century in America and what it's like to live with a person who wants to die and is also the self is being destroyed.

I'll put it in the show notes. Really good episode. the blog is not usually this dark by the way the blog is a more lighthearted take on many not lighthearted but it's deliberately not about just steeping in the worst most uncomfortable aspects though you know i don't know at least i don't unfortunately i do want to talk about the road a little bit more that's fine which you you've got as uh i would say like one of the big pieces up on theirs is this is this is this you know talk about the road

and its importance to post-apocalyptic fiction. You don't, which is, I see it by, because of its last five pages, I kind of see it as a hopeful story.

And one about persistence in the face of destruction. Yeah. I'm wondering what your thoughts are. I think one can read it that way. I think it's ambiguous. I, say in the post. I mean, my wife and I've been, we read it when it came out now some years back,

and we've been constantly like, the back and forth is, is there any hope in the road, right? Is there any hope in the road? And it all comes down to your interpretation of those five pages in the end, which is, you know, I don't, should we spoil it? I don't know. Yeah, it's, it's been like 20 years. The guy dies, but the son gets put with some people who don't seem like cannibals, right? That's basically it, right? They get to the end and it's like, hey, we have a couple people here in a hot dog. I haven't read it in a while. But like, you know, all right. And my question is, is this not just delaying the inevitable? There's no, this world is dead that they've described. There's no way to grow anything. There's no way to make food except for, you know, tying people up in basements and hacking their legs off one piece at a time. Like, there's no signs that you can do anything here. And this little tiny, it's not like they put them with heroes are thriving community that has a nuclear fusion reactor

and a giant greenhouse in the basement that's going to survive and persist. It's like, yeah, here's a couple other, here's the last dozen decent people in the world. Good luck, kid. And like, what kind of life is that for this kid? How long is it until he gets eaten by cannibals? At least before the dad died, the dad always keeps one bullet in the chamber so he can shoot his kid in the head in case the cannibal slash pedophiles are about to get him, which which that's love.

But like, what? He's not there anymore. You think they're going to shoot that kid with the cannibal pedophiles? Do you think they're going to value that kid as much as the father did? This is the anti-hope argument. See, but I see the, I think McCarthy took pains to describe that the flickering flame,

right, that gets passed to the kid and the kid is going to be able to take into that home. And that, like, That image of the light, the defenders of the last little bit of light that's flickering in the darkness, I think is really important to that story. And is a little bit of hope that you're going to get at the end. And I would say that is in, is an image that reverberates in other pieces of his work. Most famously, it's at the end of no country for old men. So it's the last thing that, it's like in the movie Tommy Lee Jones is, it plays this character.

whose name escapes me and describes like his, the dream, seeing his ancestors also like tending that flame there at the end. And I think, and like, I think that that's part of the project is that you live in these harsh and terrible conditions,

but you can't let go of that little bit of fire. Until, until the cannibals get you. Until the cannibal. You're so focused on. Do you think that guy who's tied to a bed in the basement who's had one of his legs hacked off and eaten, Do you think he's holding the fire?

Does he got the flame going? No, that's what he gets for not being the protagonist of the story. He's doomed to be set dressing, unfortunately. And possibly later dressing. I mean, I think one of the things about the road that's tricky, and this is one of the things I wrote about it, is if you read anything about what McCarthy is intending for that book, it is absolutely, at least by not saying authority. intention is everything. But like, it's absolutely not some sort of big allegory about human nature. It's absolutely not meant to be some allegory about humans in the post-apocalypse. It's really meant to be just focused on this core relationship between the father and the son, which is fine,

welcome, you know, good for him. But of course, all of us, that's not what we're probably reading it for. And I think that's why some of these discussions don't have any kind of resolution, because I don't think McCarthy, I don't like he's thinking about what happens after the book, right? He doesn't, he famously does not really give a shit about, about all of that stuff, right? Constantly turned down speaking engagements.

I think one of my favorite stories is, James Franco is making a movie out of one of his lesser known books, and they call him and they're like, Rick, why did you write this? He says, like, I don't know, James. Probably some dumbass reason. And that's all he said.

That's all the comment that he would get. I mean, and some of this is probably, was probably an act, right, a schick, right? Because that became, he clearly didn't like talking about having people dissect his work and his person and all that kind of stuff. And I can probably, I can get that. He also just famously would, he doesn't plot his work out in advance. He would sort of sentence by sentence, see where the story takes him. And you can tell when you read, I mean, I like his works, but you can see. tell that these are meandering.

One of the other authors I read a lot of is, or I have read a lot of them, the path is James Elroy. And James Elroy is like exactly the opposite. He plots out meticulously every detail before he sits down so that everything fits together like some

complicated little trap in the end. And you can tell when you read that that he's not winging it. And I don't have a problem with McCarthy. I think he does really, I find some of his book's really amazing. But I also feel like, again, it's like if you're looking for, I think it's fine for us to argue about whether there's hope. But I also think it's one of those things where it's like,

clearly he isn't like putting an answer in there for us to find. He doesn't care what we think. No, but it's fun to sit and argue about it after the fact. Yeah. I'll say if you, even if you take any hope from that book, it's a pretty small. scale hope. It's not like it's not like David Brins the postman which got made to a not great movie Kevin Costner. It's not like, yes, now we're rebuilding.

But it's also not now I've got, we've got the safe bunker and we're in the safe space and everything is great until the next movie or whatever. It's something a little bit. It's pretty bleak. On the scale of hopes in the ends of books, maybe it's not

the absolute and then everybody died like nadir, but it's also pretty, it's hard, you have to be pretty hopeful to imagine that that situation's going to carry on. You're given a small chance. The world is given a very small chance at the end, a small hope, a flickering flame in the darkness. But that's it. Surrounded by catamites and cannibals.

There's also a forgotten chapter where he says, and then the cannibals came and ate all of them, actually. that cut out of the last version of the book. No, I'm no. No, but I think,

I think, you know, you overlook when you're talking about how he writes. It's like, that's just where he found himself. Yeah. You know, that's what he discovered as he got to the end.

I mean, you know, sometimes not comparing myself to him, just saying sometimes when I write, it's the same thing. It's this like discovery as you're working through something. And just like, oh,

that's something sort of surprises. me, but I like it, you know. It is interesting to think about what we, this is one of the things I think about with this book in particular, because there's so much ambiguity in the ending, in the cause of the apocalypse, right? He doesn't really spell that out. And if you're looking for it as an allegory, the cause matters a lot, right? If it's human folly, if it's natural disaster.

Like, these are different stories, right? it's interesting to imagine what would happen if you would change that. Like, what if he says it was a nuclear war versus it was aliens versus it was yellow stone exploding or a meteor or something versus we polluted everything and it was climate change. Like that would change every other aspect of the story, even if that was just the only change. And similarly, what if the ending, what if there was a final chapter in which you see the key? kid now 15 years down the line and he's got a family of non-cannibals and like they're having a nice non-cannibal existence versus the next scene is, you know, a mass grave or something like this and you see the kid's name or something. I guess he didn't have a name. But like, would that

change the entire piece and how so? I kind of like playing around those kind of hypotheticals with something that's ambiguous. I think the ambiguity, I think the ambiguity gives it power. though. I agree. I'm not saying you should. Those are all terrible ideas, by the way. Don't do that. It is one of the reasons why one of the reasons why we still talk about it today and why kind of catapulted him,

you know, is that some people saw something in that ambiguity. And maybe you could ask themselves questions about, well, what if we did this to ourselves or what if it was chaos and how does that change everything? Right. I always got the impression, both from the,

I always got the impression that we've done it to ourselves. I know it's ambiguous, but I seem to remember some lines from the father where he's like, he's talking about it's either climate or nukes or some combination thereof.

You've probably read it more recently than I have. Probably not. I mean, well, no, I don't know. I've read it for a few times because I teach it sometimes.

I give it to freshmen just to see what happens. What happens to freshmen? Well, they don't love it. There's a lot of reasons for that. They get hung up on the cannibals, which is probably why I'm hung up on the cannibals. But they find it to be challenging and depressing, which is, that's yes, correct.

Good read. But I like seeing, they get hung up also on things like the punctuation. And this is not any shade on kids these days. it's, it's, you know, we make them. We give them the educational system. But my sense is that your average college freshman is not super comfortable with things that are literally challenging in even the slightest superficial way. They get really thrown off by in media res.

They like, you know, if a story starts and it's like in the world and doesn't say the world is something, something, they're like, it just started. And I was like, this is. like the most common thing in the world in most almost all stories begin. Right, right. And it's just to me, it's a sign of like,

oh, I don't think they're reading as much. And I'm not, again, I don't blame them. It's, it's the world we've made for them. All right,

Angry Planet listeners, want to pause there for a break. We'll be right back after this. All right, Angry Planet listeners, welcome back. I wanted to say that one of the things that, um,

one of the reason of doing the blog and one of the, the reasons I've been rethinking over all of these books and media and things the last couple years is that I've been working on this video game. And the blog, initially I was imagining it as like a dev blog for the video game. And then I realized like, oh, there's like way more stuff going on in here than just like how my coding is going or something like this. Like, I could do a whole thing with this. And the video game takes place in a post-apocalyptic United States after a nuclear war in 1983, basically. And one of the things that's been fun for me, I write a lot, but I write nonfiction almost exclusively. My whole, I don't think I've written

any fiction ever since high school or something. And but the game is obviously fictional, even though it's set in a very real world. And so this question of like, what should you keep ambiguous? What should you spell out? How do you, be interesting in your post-apocalypse, I find this all really not only interesting to engage with on a literary level, but in thinking about, when I'm now going back over all these things, I'm thinking, well, what lesson can I take from this if I'm trying to craft my own little post-apocalypse as somebody who's really never done that before? Tell me about Oregon Road 83, right?

Yeah, right, right. Tell me about the aesthetic of the game. It's a retro, let's say, if I was being, it's probably late 80s, really 90s inspired aesthetic, but it's the way I think of it is like retroesque. So we are doing things that are in the aesthetic of what a game in the late 80s and 90s might feel like, but we're not limited, obviously, by the same requirements or color palettes or things like this. So in actuality, it's sort of a blend of different eras of older games because we have a more limited palette, but it's definitely not the limited palette that was available at the time, and it's a little less limited. The game is sort of one part Oregon Trail inspired, but I have to admit, I never really liked Oregon Trail's game, gameplay wise. So a lot of the actual gameplay is more of a mixture.

It's more like a choose your own adventure book, but mix with Oregon Trail-esque elements of moving around and managing resources and things like that. So you're basically on a road trip? It's a post-apocalyptic road trip, which, you know, is a rich genre. And the name Oregon Road is meant to evoke both the road and Oregon Trail. And, yeah, the basic idea of the game is. is as with Oregon Trail, 1985, you start in Independence, Missouri,

and you have to go to the, I'm never going to say it, right, Wilhelmette Valley and Oregon. There's an H in there somewhere that I always got. Willam it. It's actually Willam it. Willam it, damn it. That's how you remember.

I'm perfect. That's what I was told. No, I'm, that's exactly what I need. This is a mnemonic to remember. Wilhamut Valley in Oregon. And in the process, you pass through the, what is, it takes place a week or two after the war has happened. So you're going through what would the United States, Western United States look like a week or two after a full scale war with the Soviet Union in 1983.

And along the way, you need to, like, you know, at the minimum, your car does not have enough gasoline to go that far. you have to get fuel. So there's where are you going to find that in this world? You're going to need to find food. There's radiation issues. There's people along the way who you can interact with. There's people you can actually invite into your car and take with you and have further interactions with them if they are interested in accompanying you in your voyage. And my goal here is to make the world.

as plausible as I can do it in every respect within the, you know, limitations of it. It has to be fun and all that kind of stuff. It has to be playable. You can't track every little detail because it just is unfun. But like, what's the level of plausibility based on my knowledge of nuclear weapons effects and radiation and things like this and targeting plans? and also like what we now know about what the Soviet arsenals were and what they might have been aimed at. And as a historian of nuclear weapons, somebody who's really gone through the kind of different official imaginations of what that world would look like and then thinking about, okay, well, does that make any sense?

What would it actually be? So it's trying to be very grounded. There's no giant ants. There's no super mutants, right? And also it's not a hazardously radioactive Wasteland two weeks later. Like the decay of fallout is

pretty steep. So it's chronic risk rather than acute risk in most places, things like this. So that's the basic gist of the game in a nutshell. Why a video game? I mean, why not? But I'm I mean, there's probably 10

different possible answers to But one of them is I'm very interested in communicating about nuclear weapons non-didactically, so not lecturing people about them or writing a book about them. Like, I do all these things, of course. But I'm interested in seeing if you can, when you play a game, you are to some degree like learning how that world works, right? So if it's a world where jumping on a mushroom guy kills him and hitting your head against a big block with a question mark on it, gives you a mushroom, which gets you bigger. Like you learn the mechanics of that world. So if you make the mechanics of that world somehow mirror the real world, then you can potentially learn things about the real world while playing a game. So that's the sort of like theory of change that goes into these.

So my personal sense is that most people have a very limited imagination about what nuclear war looks like. And so creating a very rich world that you can interact with and having that be the, quote, message of the game, that was sort of the intellectual goal. Personally, I find it fun and interesting. And it's an excuse to dig into things in a way that I've never dug into them before. And honestly, building up this kind of highly grounded fictional world has gotten me to think about a lot of issues. about nuclear war that I would not have thought about before because you don't need to for most discussions of it. So I mentioned the gasoline. How much gasoline would there be after a nuclear war in 1983? Well, there are ways to estimate that. There were studies done on this in the 70s and the 80s because everything was running on different types of gasoline back then.

cars, diesel, trains are running on diesel back then too, airplane fuel. And if you're going to imagine, as the government hoped it could, that it would, like, reconnect the country and, like, feed people and all that kind of stuff, you need fuel. You need logistics. And so there's big detailed reports on, like, what this thing of gasoline is. And it turns out it's really interesting. Like, I didn't really realize, because I don't know anything about cars. gasoline has a shelf life. It's a volatile chemical.

Yes. So these Mad Max movies or anything where it's like years later, they find gasoline, no way, right? Gasoline is a shelf life measured in months usually, right? The petroleum industry would be presumably targeted by the Soviets because that's what we would target over there. There's a very limited amount of refineries in the United States. They're gone. So they estimated 80, 90% of the infrastructure destroyed along with the pipelines. They also estimate all the ports would be destroyed.

So no more fuels coming in. There's going to be a lot of gas in gas stations that don't get newt. They might get followed out. They might just be ignored, but they're still like tanks. If you add all that up, how much gasoline? And this is an estimate from the 70s. They guessed it would be several, maybe three billion gallons, I think, was the estimate, which sounds like a lot.

And then you run that through the, well, what's the consumption rate of gasoline? And at normal times, that's 10 days of gasoline. And you're like, all right. I mean, this wouldn't be normal times. Not everybody's driving around. But like that puts a real finite. You have probably a couple weeks of usage before you're probably not getting any more gasoline back for a long time. And so like that by itself, one, useful for the game and figuring out how do I position gasoline in this world and what's its value?

things like this. But also, too, what does that tell you about what any recovery efforts would be and what they would look like? And there's like a ticking timer above everybody's head of after this point, it's going to be very hard to move things around in a nation that only exists because we move things around constantly. And so that's the kind of detail I'd never really thought about before trying to build up a world like this. So even just for me, intellectually, it's been really useful, even if it he plays the game or it never comes out or something like that. I've learned a lot just trying to think about that world. From what you're saying, totally makes sense to me. But it doesn't sound like it's possible. I mean, you couldn't keep the United States together, right? I mean,

what was their optimistic estimate? Were there people out there doing these studies who said, oh, yeah, we can pull this off? Well, they're optimistic estimates. Yeah. there were. I mean, but they are very odd. So I wrote about one recently, which is one of my favorite studies. This is a study from 1976. And the people doing it, by the way, are pretty top-notch people. One of them was Eugene Wigner, who was a Nobel Prize winner, right? These are not morons. And they were asked to give the study about how the United States would rebuild after this full-scale attack, but they were told that the parameters of the study were such that they had to assume that 90% of the United States population had been evacuated from all urban areas and had sufficient radiation protection and food and things like that.

And you're like, okay, that's a big caveat, right? Like, that's a big, big if. And even they seem to recognize it was a big if. There's a little hints in the report where they're like, we were required to make this assumption. And then occasionally we'd be like, if we just for the sake of argument, ask what happens if this doesn't occur? And it's like, okay, that it's like terrible. So basically my reading of this is that they conclude that it's possible, especially if you evacuate 90% of the population, though interestingly that presents its own problems, aside from the logistical impossibility of doing that. Like, where are you evacuating them to?

Who's feeding them? How are they sheltered? How is this going to go down? How is security provided for these people? And this is, you know, you can't, they literally are talking about moving 90 million people over the course of a. few days or maybe a week or so. And just for point of reference, I looked it up, that's, that's several more tens of millions more than the partition of India, right? Like, which killed a million people in the process of doing that over months, right? Like, this is a mess,

you know, it's hard to imagine this happening. But what this requires is for them to essentially assume that the vehicles have also been saved. And that the first thing that everybody is going to be on board with doing is restoring petroleum infrastructure because that has a bigger logistical problem than the food does. We actually have lots of stored food. We are a nation of Twinkies and things that can last a long time. And food is kind of, you can have food sources in various places and storages and it does not have the same shelf life as gasoline. But if you can't move it around, then it's worthless. Right. So my reading of all this, The game has multiple endings, by the way.

And some of these are still getting worked out. So anything I say is very tentative. But one of the endings is essentially like you join up with whatever the remains of the U.S. government is trying to do to rebuild everything, the civil defense ending, basically. And this is probably something like, congratulations, you're now being forced to go help rebuild petroleum infrastructure because that's what we need right now. and we don't have an economy. We're not going to pay you, right? So now it's like forced labor to build refineries because that's the number one priority

and you need to do that ASAP. And I don't know. I mean, all of this is kind of implausible, but like that's the optimism. And I find it fascinating that that's the optimistic. To me, that's the fact that you have to make those assumptions and that the consequence of them is like, we have to live under martial law. law for the next 30 years. But if we do that, we'll be back to 25% of our original state of happiness. Like, oh, boy, that's really optimistic, guys. But like, that's where you are with

that. I'm imagining the civil defense truncheon that's, uh, they had them, by the way. Just like imagining, uh, people rounding up other people in civil defense branded, uh, riot gear. It's no good. Not pleasant. When can we play it? Well, that's a, I mean, when it's ready. This is a not-for-profit thing. So I'm not under a gun of like having to release it by a date. But what I'm hoping for is that by the end of the goal for the summer. So I should also say I'm making this, but I have had, I've been working on this for several years and a lot of the work is done by students a month. So this is a student. A lot of the labor, a lot of the ideas. I'm very involved all aspects of it. But I also have. I'm really happy to seed creativity and ideas and some of the actual work to these younger people, both because they're a different generation and also because it's a lot of work. So we're working a lot right now, and the hope would be that by the end of the summer, early fall, we'd be in a place where we'd have a game that we can release in a sort of public alpha type of thing,

where we're not saying this is a done early access, right, like, This is not a done thing, but we would like feedback and to see how people are playing it and whether it breaks on everybody's computers or whatever. So what we're doing is focusing right now on like what's the bare minimum that is not embarrassing or does not look like obviously broken constantly because these things are really complicated, of course. So hopefully this fall, that'll be available. And depending on how that goes and what the reception is, if people are like, like this is the stupidest thing ever, you know, we'd have to retool things. If people are like, yeah, this is pretty good. Or we, you know, we could imagine expanding. There's a bunch of content that will be sort of partially, we'll be missing and we can add that back in. Our ambitions are,

of course, like overly wild, right? Like there's scope creep constantly and something like this. And I'm a scope creep person by nature. And again, we're not doing this under some kind of firm deadline with a boss who's saying, we're burning this much money. We're doing this like on shoe strings anyway. And it's in a like, you know, there's some grants, but nobody's going to make any money off this deliberately. And so like, you know, we'll see what happens. But, but that's their hope. That's the goal.

Do you have thoughts on the fallout franchise? I have so many thoughts on the fallout franchise. Yeah. Yeah. I've been thinking about it a lot. the game is in part conceived of it was my answer to the anti-fallout

not that I hate fallout but it was like Fallout is so bad at depicting what the remains of a nuclear war would look like what would a more accurate look or grounded look like that was part of one of the several threads that led me to this game idea

which fallout are you talking about or just writ large it's writ large Ritherto. Now, are you just a Bethesda fallout person? Have you played the originals? There's a TV show now. I don't disagree with you that it does a terrible job of depicting on what a post-apocalypse would look like. I've been thinking about this a lot. To its defense, it's not trying to do a good job. Like, we acknowledge this. Right. I think that there was there was something in the first and the second one before Bethesda bought it where there was, some of that, obviously made by very different people from a different generation. And now it's become a post-nuclear theme park. Yeah. And is very interested in its own aesthetics and kind of perpetuating those as like a brand.

But I'm wondering, like, did you see the TV show? I have played all of the, I can't remember the any of the company, the previous as the one. I played interplay. Interplay. I played Fallout 1, follow out 2, what's the Brotherhood of Steel or tactics or whatever it is.

Okay. So you're, wow, have you played, did you play the, the really bad, I think it was like an Xbox 360 game, squad-based action combat thing?

I think they played the PC version. I think that's the tactics one, right? No, I don't know. I played all the PC ones. And I played four, three, I think four.

The newer ones kind of run together in my head. I played New Vegas for sure. That's its own distinct thing. So I played a bunch of them. I don't know if I, I'd ever played 76 because that looked terrible and was multiplayer and I hate multiplayer. And I don't want to play with other people, man. That's not what video games are. No. I'm a person. There was no multiplayer was a person sitting next to you when I was growing up. It was a whole different. I don't want to listen to some kid talking to me on the internet, man. Anyway, and I don't think I don't, I played some of the latest one. But I, I was so bored by it that I honestly dropped it, five or whatever we're up to four or five.

Four. Yeah. I got, I found it so tedious and so just the same that I really, I, and this was not like a conscious effort, but I played a little bit and then I like moved on and never really went back. I probably ought to go back, but that was, that was my, my vote on voting of my feet. And I've seen the TV show. I recently watched it. which I sort of did with a heavy heart because I think like a lot of people who have been playing the games for a long time are knowing about them have pretty mixed feelings about Bethesda's treating of the IP and Bethesda in general and just the endless regurgitation of the IP with very little innovation. And so I really almost didn't want to watch the show. I just sort of felt like a professional obligation. But my wife has no knowledge of games at all, much less the fallout games.

And so she expressed some interest in seeing it. And I was like, really? You want to see that? She doesn't like to watch like superhero stuff. Right. So I was like, I mean, so it was almost more interesting for me to watch my wife watching it than for me to watch it because I was like, my biggest annoyance with it with the show. This is a little thing is there's so many little winks to the fan people who know. Like, that's from the game.

I'm like, I know it's from the game. The whole thing is from the game. You don't have to constantly make references, little subtle references of the game. What do you think I am? Like, that's not making me happy. But my wife didn't know any of that stuff. And so she didn't know what vaults were.

And she didn't know. And so for her, you know, I didn't spoil anything. But, you know, I'd ask her, what are you thinking? She's like, you know, I think there might be something up with these vaults. I'm like, yeah, could be. Who knows? But that to me was more interesting to see how somebody not, multi-decade steeped in this world reacted to it.

She reacted to it pretty positively, which was interesting to me. The reaction of that show has been super fascinating to me in general, because it is this old, this decades-old nuclear war video game that has become a giant media force. This television show has been nominated for Emmys. It's one of Amazon's most popular shows to hear them tell. it. Obviously, there was a lot of like online discussion and memes and thirsting over some of the actors. Do you think that, why do you think that it's hitting right now? Why is Fallout having a moment? That's a hard question. I feel like I'm not qualified to answer. I feel like I'm too close to fall out.

You're, you're a nuclear historian. I know. Who has played most. of the Fallout computer games. You were the most qualified. No, but I don't really know why other people like. This is one of these things. It's almost like the Oppenheimer movie, where I'm like, I am not, I don't know if I am the target. I might be the target demographic for the Fallout show, but I'm like, wasn't the

target demographic for the Oppenheimer movie. So my feeling about the Oppenheimer movie, while fascinating, is not at all indicative of what most people would think about it because they haven't spent their lives like going through Oppenheimer's FBI files and, you know. personal letters and things like this. Yeah, I think, so I've gotten interesting, so people have written to me who I know about the Fallout show. And I've talked to my colleagues who are not nuclear historians, but are, you know, smart people

and savvy people. And some of them have played the games a little or know a little bit about them. But most of them are not, have not been as obsessed with this stuff as me. And their reactions have been more like, well, it's all right. So they're not like, yes. this is the best ever. I don't think it's that kind of thing. I don't hear people saying things like the way I would talk about the wire or the way people talk about the Sopranos or Breaking Bad or they're like, oh, my God, this is one of the all-time greats.

It's like, yeah, this is like pretty watchable. A lot of the people who don't know that much or aren't as familiar with it, they seem more turned off by the amount of violence, which, you know, it's not surprised if you know the games at all. of course, they're very violent. And I think the look of it is very good. I do feel like, especially if you're not super familiar with all of the tropes, the tropes are not inherently, like, bad or uninteresting, right? Like, the vault is an interesting idea the first time you hear it.

if you've been heard it for two decades, you're like, oh, yeah, yeah, I know. I know all, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, you know, and if you're like, all right, what's the dark sinister secret? There's going to be a dark sinister secret because they're all experiments, blah, blah, but if you don't know that going in, it's, it's, it is a very fully formed world. It's just a fully formed world that hasn't changed that much over a long time. And so there's some of us who are already, have been in that world, but I think for the many, many, many people, who probably are the real target audience in a way, who are not already tired of fallout people. That would make a better target audience than the ones who are.

That's probably pretty fun, right? It's a whole IP theme park that was created over a long period of time right under your nose and is complicated and rich and weird. I could see that. I've got, you kind of spoke to one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot with this show. because I watched it and I loved it. I'm a huge fallout fan.

But it's stuck in my brain and there's like that there's something wrong with it. And I've been kind of churning it over in my head. And I think it's this idea that it is arrested in place. It's like one, two and New Vegas have this arc. It is telling the story of the world after the bombs fall. And you see the growth and change. of like a civilization. It kind of starts out with the

vault dweller in the first game, founds a city that becomes like a regional power. And that regional power is facing like an expansion crisis by the in New Vegas, right? And a lot of the aesthetic in New Vegas is different. The level of technology is different. We're having a different kind of conversation around things. The television, and Bethesda's goes to the East Coast, different setting, kind of really keeps it in that kind of first game mode where it's vaults and it's super mutants and it's, you know, all those kinds of tropes.

And the show is made by people who, if you're a big fallout head and you've watched the show, very clearly these people have played the first couple of games and are familiar with that history and are interested in it. But what do they have to do to keep everyone in blue suits and keep the cannibals around? They drop a nuke again and destroy that civilization to almost reset things back to fallout one. And I think that's what's bothering me is this idea that to keep the story from moving on and to keep the world in the same place that it was is. got to drop another nuke. And it feels insidiously close. It feels like Bethesda, even though they're not the ones that wrote it, but, you know, their games certainly are kind of locked in that world.

It feels like Bethesda making the decision to hold back progress in the same way that the group of corporate people are sitting around that, you know, that big table and deciding to run experiments with the vaults and that nuclear war is good because it's good for business. I imagine that in Bethesda's world, it's similar, right? The fresher the nuke,

the closer we can keep it to that original vision and sell you more pit boys. Yeah, I think that's a really interesting way to think about it. I mean, the way in which the need for the recycled IP leads to the need for a cyclical

story that doesn't even it's not even really allowed to go that far down the path of the cycle. I was thinking, we were thinking about the canical for Leibowitz, which is one of these cyclical nuclear

narratives where it's about like the war happened and then we rebuild and then we nuke ourselves again because this is what we do. They don't even go that far. The world is so static between even Fallout One and the show,

which is supposed to be like a pretty far span of time. right, but the technology hasn't changed. The social interactions have barely changed. It's just what costume are you wearing today, right? Not that I would expect there to be a lot of technological development in this world, obviously, but the culture hasn't changed, and that is something you would probably expect to change over the course centuries.

Yeah, I don't know how you advance that world, keep it that IP though. I mean, in their defense, like that's... That is the problem. Yeah. Yeah, it's not a world with with a teleology to it, a progress. It's not, they're not rebuilding, really. They're not, uh, they could descend further, I guess, but like, but I agree. I thought the nuke thing at the, the, the, in the show was like, I don't know, maybe the laziest way you could deal with that. Like, okay. if it was another nuke.

Like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And it could be, I guess, right? And there is some of that in the games. Isn't there a town Megaton and Fallout 3? Yeah, Megatown. Yeah, I mean. Yeah, but again, that's, that's Bethesda fallout too. Yeah.

That's kind of them to a T. Yeah. Is the, here's a choice that doesn't really matter all that much. Yeah. And is undertaken essentially, the whole reason the guy wants it gone is it just, it disrupts his view from his tower. I was, you know, this is an issue with the games, too, in a way, right? Because you do have some factions of the games that are trying to reestablish something.

And the two ones are the enclave, right, who are the sort of vestige of the U.S. government in a way. Though their reestablishment, isn't like, essentially we need to genocide all the mutant people or something like this. It's a, yeah, it's like an extreme fascist interpretation of, America. Yeah. And then you have things like the Brotherhood of Steel, which is, again, all these things are, like, Brotherhood of Steel is like totally cannibal for Leibowitz ripoffs, right? Like, I mean, it's fine. I don't mind that they're recycling lots of ideas from other post-apocalyptic. That's the whole point. The whole original world is this retro futuristic world that's deeply indebted to the imagination of the 50s and 60s about the nuclear. War. And so it's all like an auroboros, cultural oraboros. Maybe that's one of my issues with the per, it going on. Like the first game, and I love the second game too, but like the first two games are these

like perfect riffs on what people in the 50s or 60s might have imagined a nuclear apocalypse to look like and, but like dialed up to 11, right? And they've got the giant ants, which is from the 1954 movie, Them, and they've got the super mutants, and they've got the zombie. Like, they've, they pull it all together.

Good for them. It's great. But then to just perpetuate that on and on and on, and now present it as like, look, look at this universe we've got. And you're like, that's just a, it's like recycling on top of recycling, on top of recycling. I don't see

the, how you make that go in a direction narratively. And I think this is one of the reasons I ended up sort of bowing out when I was playing Fallout 4 was like, oh my God, I have to be the wasteland wanderer guy again who has to go around and help people. Oh my God, it's the same game. It's the same game. And I'm not saying you can't do more with that.

I think New Vegas is justly praised for finding ways to have different kinds of plot lines and different kinds of complex interactions between communities. but it's tough. I think it's a tough setup. Well, what I was wondering, well, I've been trying to figure out why I didn't finish watching it. I actually, you know,

for a lot of television programs that I like or I, you know, I hadn't had time or whatever. This is not that case. I've had lots of opportunities to turn it back on. I mean, I watched like the first,

for I thought I liked it. I guess I didn't really like it. I mean, you know, it's sort of funny. It sounds a little bit like what your experience was with playing fallout for. You know, it's like, oh, I get it. Oh, there's going to be more blood. Oh, okay. And then just somehow I just never turned it on again.

And I just, I was surprised by that. There's a great William Gibson short story called the Gernsback continuum. which is about like a guy haunted by a vision of like a retro 1950s future. I keep thinking about that story as I pondering fallout, this idea that you're, you know, as you said, Alex, there's this nightmare vision of those retro future fears of atomic power that fall out like beautifully riffed on. And the longer that franchise goes out on,

and the more it stays in that kind of aesthetic mode, the more I'm feeling like I'm haunted by that nightmare world. And that we got to do something. We got to dream of a better post-apocalypse, a different post-apocalypse, the one where we're rebuilding the petroleum infrastructure of the United States to get things back up and running. I mean, it's an interesting, the Gibson is a really interesting reference, right?

Like, that's Gibson, I've been rereading a lot of Gibson recently. And I think it's really easy to underestimate how different Gibson was from a lot of what was going on when he started the whole cyberpunk thing, essentially. And the Guernsbeck continuum is kind of him riffing in a way on like how stale a lot of science fiction futures have become and how, you know, you can trace this back to these early origins. And Gibson's like basic idea, which is like, okay, what if the future is great, grimy, but also high-tech, kind of obvious in retrospect, but nobody else is doing it that way, and it's just such a, like, comparing Gibson the like Asimov or something. It's just like miles of different approach.

And that works, right? And I just thinking of other games, I mean, I played the cyberpunk game not too long ago, which, of course, got all this bad press when it came out because of all the bugs, but it's pretty patched up now. And like, that felt very, very fun and fresh to me, even though constantly as I'm playing at every aspect of the IP, I'm like, well, they got that from Gibson and that from Sterling. Like, it's just a callout. They

named the corporations after the same ones in Gibson. It's very winky to people who are sci-fi nerds, which I am. And yet, it still didn't feel stale. It felt like a world that could move. It felt like a world. I also like that even in the course of that world, in that game they occasionally have you like go back in time 50 years or whatever how many years it is to Keanu Reeves and Johnny Silver Arm or whatever and the technology is different the world is different the politics are different the looks a little different and then they jump back there's this sense that if they set another game 50 years in the future it would not be the same universe it would be some of the same but different and it's hard for me to imagine a fallout game how would you pull the same thing off. How would you actually make that other than like, well, the NCR ain't around no more? Like other than like that kind of blunt, now we have a different name for the faction. Like what how do you change, how do you have time, I guess, is what we're getting at, right? There's no sense of movement in the fallout world.

I don't think they, I think that Bethesda has very specifically built a franchise where there can be no movement. I liked Fallout 76 for a lot of different reasons. I understand why people didn't. But I also think it is the like that is the

best example of kind of what they're trying to do with the franchise which is keep it locked in to that very specific aesthetic mode and let people play in that playground and not really advance like there's Brotherhood of Steel

here. There's Super Mutant. don't think about too much why they're still here and why you're fighting them. Just keep burning the tickets and using them to buy little widgets and whatnot that you can decorate your house with. And so it was a franchise that had, I think had interesting things to say

and was moving forward and was doing interesting things with video games and I think no longer is. And I think it took the TV show to really make me realize that because I've been defending it for a long time. I think I'm going to stop now. Well, it's okay because they're, what,

10 years away from developing the next game? I think you're good. I think you're good. Yeah, I think the show caught them a little bit off guard, I think. And they're obsessed with making sure people love Starfield and play Starfield. So it'll be, it's going to be a while before we see another fallout. Yeah. So you're right.

There's this mod that people have implying, and I haven't played, the Fallout London one. Have you heard of this? Oh, I've been reading about that. Yeah. It just came out. I have not, I've not messed with it yet. To me, that, I mean, points at what a source of new inspiration and diversity could be would be change context. You don't have to, don't move in time, move in space. And that works in many worlds, right? Move from one end to another.

What does that, of course, is still limited. They're building it within the same game. I haven't looked at it, right? But like there's London is not such a big jump as imagine fallout, I don't know, Mumbai, right? Like that would be a big jump. Yeah, that would be amazing. That would be awesome. Fallout Tokyo or something.

I don't know, right? Like you start throwing in other, that could be a, because those are, they don't have vault core, vault tech or whatever. I don't know, right? Like, you break out of the mold. But again, that would require a lot of work. and reconceptualizing. And Bethesda, like, famously doesn't even, like, update its engine.

So I don't know if they're going to, like, get to that. I mean, I don't know. I don't want to hate just totally on Bethesda because they have made some products that I'm impressed by. And I think they did help create a model for not just a certain type of action RPG for better or worse, but for this, like, open world where it's sort of endlessly interact. and you can often come up with alternative methods. And of course, you know, Skyrim is such a good example of that for a game that has, you know, terrible combat mechanics. It's still like really has a vibe that you can't get rid of of this like this world is gigantic and full of stuff.

And every time I look in somewhere, I feel like the Fallout ones, eventually you start to realize that there's crates everywhere and they're just full of. junk, right? Like, there's not, it's not actually that fun. The, the, the mystery goes away, but I kind of, I respect them for that. I just wish that, like most of these companies, they didn't just see this as an endless money machine that they can now add endless ways of making more money with, I don't know, not loot boxes. I don't know if they do that, but like, you know, skins and things. And to me, that's like, okay, stagnation. There's nothing happening here anymore. stagnation is always a fun place to end. I think it's perfect.

Alex, where can people read Doomsday Machines? Well, they can read it at Doomsday Machines.net, which is on the computers, on the internet. And you can get on your phone. It's great. Yeah, check us out. It's a lot of fun. It's free. There is a paid upgrade if you really need more writing from me.

You can do that, but it's absolutely skippable. So, you know, not necessary. are you working on? What's next? I usually, I have I have many that are sort of in the hopper and we'll see where my mood takes me. I have a

series on it where I'd like to interview. I have people I'm interviewing and talking to, which is not something I've usually I've usually been on the other end of that. And so that's been fun to play with. So I'm hoping to get one of those up soon. I will probably write up something on the fuel issue.

I may write something on why the Oregon Road, why Oregon? Why do this at all? Like write a little bit about what the genesis of the project was because it's, I don't know. I like reading about where other people get ideas from. So maybe people would like that too. Have you played Pacific Drive?

I have not. I should check that out. It's kind of a not explicitly nuclear. It's more, think like roadside picnic stalker kind of post-apocalyptic, Apocalypse, but you're in a car in Oregon. It's like a terrible rundown car, and you're doing excursions into the zone to improve your car and ferry things across for people.

People love it. I don't think it's even a year old, but a nice little vibes piece, maybe. I think one of the things I'm interested in, and I'd be interesting in seeing this, a lot of especially American post-apocalyptic, everything, but especially games, because this works for games, especially, is about you, the lone person who is going through this world. Like, the U.S. has this very, like, libertarian bent to its lone survivor post-apocalypse, as opposed to the U.K. is a whole different vibe for their kind of output, usually. And to me, in making a game, I really didn't want to, I don't endorse that as a good way of

thinking about the post-apocalypse or the future. like you on your own against the elements. You will get eaten by the cannibals or you'll probably just starve or get sick or something, right? But how do you do a game that is centered around you as a person making choices and not like the geist of history or some godlike planner or something? Moving through a world in which you are not the guy with a gun who is able to, you know, dish out pain to anybody who bothers you? How do you get away from the control fantasy but still giving you control? And for me, that's been a fun intellectual challenge. And there are some games that get at that a little bit.

But that's sort of what I'm trying to do with ours, but also feeling out what that even means. And is that fun? That's, of course, the other difficulty of a game. It's so deeply bred into Western video game mechanics and storytelling. How do you get away from that? What does the design even look like? It's an interesting question.

And I'm excited to see how you answer it. Yeah, we'll see. Alex, thank you so much for coming on to Angry Planet once again. Thank you so much. That's all for this week. Angry Planet listeners, as always, Angry Planet is me, Matthew Galt, Jason Fields, and Kevin Odell. If you like us, if you really like us, please go to Angry Planetpod.com and sign up for

the substack, kick us $9 a month. You get bonus episodes. You get early versions of all the mainline episodes and they're commercial free. Again, that's at Angry Planetpod.com. We will be back soon with another conund. about conflict on an angry planet. Stay safe until now.