Imaginary Worlds - Making History with Assassin's Creed
Episode Date: January 14, 2026Darby McDevitt is a narrative director and writer at Ubisoft . He’s worked on multiple games in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, which spans time periods from Ancient Greece to Victorian England. B...ut what does it mean to be a writer on a massive video game where your character is mostly running, climbing, jumping and fighting? The key to his work lies in historical research, but he is sometimes torn between what would actually happen and what pop culture has trained us to expect from different eras of history. We also discuss his new novel, The Halter, which imagines a future where virtual reality is so realistic and addictive that people abandon their real lives and have to be tracked down. This is the first episode in a multi-part series on video games. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
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You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show about how we create them and why we suspend our
disbelief. I'm Eric Malinski. At the beginning of the pandemic, when we were all in lockdown,
and nobody knew when it would end, I would watch videos of people playing Assassin's Creed,
but they weren't really playing these video games. They were just moving the characters all
around to explore the world. It was like virtual sightseeing and time travel at the same time.
The concept of Assassin's Creed is that there is a device called the animus, which allows
people to tap into the memories of their ancestors and experience their lives as a form of
virtual reality. You remember the animus, the machine we use to unravel genetic memories
and relive the lives of our ancestors? First, you were Altayere.
a stoic 12th century assassin from the Holy Land.
Then you are Etzio Auditori,
a wealthy Italian with charisma and a talent for revenge.
That's right, their ancestors are assassins.
But they're not villains.
They're fighting an organization called the Templars,
which wants to control the world.
Each of these games takes place in a different time period,
from ancient Greece and ancient Egypt,
to the French Revolution and Victorian.
in England. And the games have incredible attention to detail. I've also watched videos where
historians will discuss the level of accuracy in the games. And if these games sound ambitious
and expensive, they are. The game company Ubisoft has been spending over a hundred million
dollars on the more recent full-length games. There are also spin-off games and bonus content.
The franchise has earned billions of dollars over the last two decades,
and along the way, they've relied on the writer Darby McDavitt.
Darby was hired in December of 2008 to work on Assassin's Creed, too.
Since then, he has worked on some of their biggest titles like Assassin's Creed 4 Black Flag,
which is about pirates, and Assassin's Creed Baha'a, which is about Vikings.
Darby also wrote a sci-fi novel about virtual reality called The Halter,
which does not take place in the world of Assassin's Creed.
We'll talk about that later, but first, I had a lot of questions about his day job.
I assume that as a writer on video games, he mainly wrote the dialogue scenes or cutscenes,
which the player watches between levels of gameplay.
But he works with a lot of different departments at their studio in Montreal.
In fact, the first time I talked with him, he was in the middle of coaching actors on one of the upcoming games.
But the first thing he does when he starts working on a new game is to delve into historical research.
I asked him, how long does that usually take?
It depends on how long you have.
Some games, I've only had 10 months to do it.
The current game I'm working on has been quite a few years.
So it depends on how much time you have, but the general process I like,
to engage with is that I just read, I just read, read, read, read, read.
And there's a certain point at which you start to feel really conversant in the time period.
When you can just sort of off the top of your head, you can start listing dates and characters and events,
and you can put pieces together and you can, you have a general feeling for the period and who the people were
and what motivated them. It's at that point, I think, that I start thinking about story. Now,
games are made in in parallel. I'm not doing my work so that other people can do their work. I'm doing my work at the same time.
Artists are researching architecture styles and and textiles and things like that. And musicians are, our sound designers are researching the music of the time period. And it's all, so there's always a point where all this research comes together in parallel and we start sharing laterally. And a lot of times something I want to do will
sort of rub against what, say, you know, an artist wants to do.
Even if the two references that we're both using are similar,
what tent has to win out in the end is how they're used in the game.
Because when we were making, say, an imaginary world for a video game,
the number one criteria is how are we going to interact with it?
How is it going to contribute to the player experience?
And that can be quite different than, say, if you were making a film or you're researching a historical novel, where the history aspect especially is, in large part, world building and storytelling.
But the interactivity element adds a really interesting wrinkle because it's possible to add things in the world that are alluring and seem like they could be interacted with, but cannot.
So I'll give an example of when we were working on Revelations, which is set in Istanbul, Constantinople at the time, in the 16th century.
And we all went down to E3, the Electronic Entertainment Expo, which is defunct now.
But at the time, you know, it's a place where you take your game, you show it off for journalists.
And we were really proud that in like eight months we'd made this recreation of Istanbul, just, you know, 70 years or so after the Ottoman takeover.
So it was a, you know, it was a Greek city, a Byzantine city, now it's a Turkish city.
And so it's really vibrant and wild.
And my friend Kama, she's the, she was the animation director.
She's demoing the game for an Italian journalist.
And this journalist doesn't seem to be to know that much about games.
I think he was sent by a newspaper in Italy.
And he's really, he's looking at this game with wide eyes.
He loves this recreation of Istanbul, where we're navigating Etzio through a little spice market that's got fish and textiles.
and spices on display.
And he just stops.
And he says, can I, can I eat those spices?
And Cam was like, which spices?
He goes, those ones right there in the little, in the little bin next to the guys,
you know, under the guy's tent.
He says, oh, no, no, those are just for display.
Oh, those fish.
Can I eat the fish?
And he says, no, no, those are just decoration.
And he just, well, what can you do in this game?
As if everything on display was somehow actually there for you to be,
you know, to be interacted with.
But she had to explain to him, no, this is a combat action adventure game.
What we do is we kill people and we climb on buildings and we hide in hastacks.
And that's about it.
There's some doors you can open.
There are some, let's say, collectibles to pick up.
But by and large, the world is a gigantic, let's say, dead diorama, right?
It's there for immersion, I guess.
That's not to undersell the purpose of immersion, but,
certainly when the designers are looking at this game and they're saying, you know, we're making
this world, but what can you really do in this world? The other thing is what's satisfying for you as a
player? Because, you know, because I always read this on message boards, and people are always like,
why can I do this? Why can I do that? Why can I do that? And it's just like, okay, let's say you
can eat the fish. What does that mean? You say, you click, you say, click this button to eat the fish.
Bling, you ate the fish. Yeah. Like, was that really as satisfying as eating a piece of fish?
You know, like, yeah, it has to have some sort of use or purpose in the long run.
Like, there's a kind of almost that we could invent an almost corollary where the more things you can interact with in the world, unless you have a budget of 30 years and $17 billion, right?
The more you can interact with, the lower the realization of it's going to be.
Like you just said, it's like you could have an animation where he picks it up.
He looks at it.
He puts it into his mouth.
He choose it or whatever, right?
That would take an enormous amount of programming, art, animation resources, and to what effect?
I don't know.
There are games that let you do that.
There are games like dwarf fortress and Rim World, which are deep, deep, deep simulations.
Skyrim.
Skyrim has a tremendous amount of things you can interact with in the world.
But the realization is very, very low.
When you eat a, let's say, a cheese wheel in Skyrim, it just disappears from the world.
And then your health goes up a little bit maybe.
or you and it makes a satisfying little crunching noise.
In Dwarf Fortress, I don't know if you're familiar with that,
but it's a game that's made entirely of Asky characters.
Of what characters?
Aski.
You know, the little, you know, text file characters,
little at symbols and hashtags.
It's really low-res.
But it's, the simulation is incredibly deep.
But the realization of that is, like I said,
you're just reading text.
It's not happening on screen.
in front of you in a way that like an Assassin's Creed game would.
So there are also, weirdly enough, this is one of my favorite stories of working on Assassin's
Creed Valhalla, which is a game set during the Viking invasion of England.
So we recreated all of England in the 9th century.
So you can ride your horse from London all the way up to York and anywhere in between and east
to west.
And so we filled this world with flora and fauna.
And one of the things you see a lot of is sheep, because the,
Anglo-Saxons at the time, they raised a lot of sheep. So sheep dot the hills everywhere.
Sounds like a sheep. I'm not a happy one. And you can interact with these sheep. You can kill them.
You can kill most of the animals in the game. Now, I came into work one day and the game director,
a guy named Eric, he was puzzling over a problem. The problem was is that in our game,
when you got injured, your health bar went down and you can heal it. You could heal yourself by
finding berries on bushes that were scattered around the world.
But he was thinking, should there be more ways to do that?
Well, so we put in like little pots of food that you can find in camps and you can eat from that.
Great, you get some health back.
The problem he was trying to puzzle over was whether or not killing a sheep and looting the mutton
would also give you health back.
Because he realized that there was a perverse incentive in offering this to players,
which would be that if players were low on health and they saw a field,
of 20 sheep. They would just go slaughter all the sheep. And realistically, in real life, right,
that would be possible. If I were wandering around Anglo-Saxon England, I might want to,
and I was hurt and hungry, I might want to kill a sheep. But the ease of which you can do it
in our game, which is like a couple axe swings, would turn people into basically serial killers,
Sheep serial killers.
So this is the kind of perverse incentive that you could, if you add the ability to do things in these interactive worlds, not only do you need a use for it, but you also need to make sure that you're not creating a perverse incentive to abuse it.
But these are the kinds of things you have to think about when you create these fictional worlds.
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Earlier, Darby mentioned that
when different departments at the studio
are working on a game simultaneously,
sometimes they realize that they've gone
in different directions, and they have to reconcile their ideas pretty quickly.
I asked him to give me an example.
One thing that I really remember was in Black Flag, there were, historically, there were
two very well-recorded instances in the Atlantic Ocean.
There are more in the Pacific and the Indian Ocean, but in the Atlantic Ocean of two women
who were pirates, Anne Bonnie and Mary Reid, and they both appear in Black Flag.
And the story, especially about Mary Reid, was that she disclosed.
guys yourself dressed as a man so she could fit amongst this company and without being hassled or
whatever whatever her motivations were, you know, there's very little about her actually. But what we do
know is that she, um, she dressed as a man and passed as a man for quite some time. And Bonnie came
into the picture a little later. They apparently sailed together with a guy named Calico Jack.
For the story team, we were really like, these women have to look like they're dressing like men.
because in fact, as part of the story,
we want you to be fooled by Mary Reid.
We want you to think maybe she's just a young man that's,
we gave her a fake name, James, James Kidd,
to be like the bastard son of Captain Kidd,
who sailed 10 years earlier.
And when we saw the first concept arts,
they're like, look at these badass women pirates.
They look like women.
They were very cool looking, but they looked like women.
And we said, no, but the story needs them to pass.
And in fact, we want to fool the audience, hopefully.
And, okay, we'll make some adjustments.
And the adjustments, it took a while for those adjustments to really swing it to the other way to make sure that, yes, this is plausible.
This woman could plausibly walk amongst all these grizzled bearded men and pass as a man,
because a lot of earlier versions didn't quite live up to it.
And it was probably because maybe there was in the artist's mind, there was a more stylized thing,
going like, let's stylize these. These are the, these are two women pirates. Let's make sure that
the women who are playing or the people who want to see women in this role, they're interested
and they're impressed by this character. There's nothing better sometimes than just great
character design in games, a game where you can get a new outfit and put it on. I'm like,
look at how great my character looks. That's a big, it's, it's, it's cosplay in the digital
sphere. And that's important. But at the same time, for our story, it was important that it's worked
for the story.
Cheery bunch of mates you've got.
You deserve scorn, Edward.
Prancing about like one of us, bringing shame to our cause.
And what is that?
Your cause.
To be blunt, we kill people.
Templars and their associates.
Folks who'd like to control all the empires on earth.
Claiming it's in the name of peace and order.
Sounds like to cast his dying words.
You see, it's about power, really.
about loading over people, robin us of liberty.
So have you, and I believe I've read or heard this,
that there are moments that you were researching games,
researching time periods,
and you discover that there are things about this time period
that are historically accurate,
but if that's the way the game played out,
it would contradict every movie, TV show, or novel we have
that takes place within this time period.
Like, what are some examples of that?
Well, my favorite one is definitely when we were working on,
on Black Flag, our pirate game.
The typical image of a pirate is of a swashbuckling,
a sailor with a bit of grease on the face
and maybe a little smelly,
but with a brace of guns and a sword.
And that he's firing cannons at ships,
and he's swinging aboard and sword-fighting and getting the loot that way.
It turns out the reality of pirates was much, much less exciting.
The reality of pirates was that they were,
armed to the teeth, but on very small boats, they would usually drive up alongside merchant ships
who didn't have a lot of ways to defend themselves. They would scare them, maybe fire a few
shots across the bow, but they would essentially just browbeat them into giving over their
stuff. And if the Royal Navy showed up, they would skid-addled because a little tiny schooner,
pirate schooner, is no match for a gigantic, you know, galleon or, you know, with 40 guns or 60
guns or whatever. But we thought, what are we going to do? Make a pirate game where you just sail
around scaring people? Like, is there a scare meter? Is there a button to make faces or shout?
You know, like we actually considered it. We tried to brainstorm what that could possibly be.
But in the end, the fantasy of firing cannons and hear the roar of those cannons and feel the smoke
and, you know, swinging to the deck of another ship and having a sword fight, that, that,
fantasy, the pull of that fantasy is too much. And we had to do that. So that's one where we really
leaned into the myth. You tend to sail around in Black Flag attacking the Navy, the British Navy,
the Spanish Navy, even the Portuguese Navy in some cases, because that brings the action level
up higher. Again, it all gets back to interactivity. What are you going to ask the player to do?
And also the question of what do we want from an immersive experience?
Because part of the appeal of the Assassin's Creed franchise has that going back in time feeling, and yet it's still a fantasy.
And so it sounds like you guys often have to ask yourself, what do people want from this immersive experience?
Do you want the fantasy of what it would be like to go back in time, or do we find some happy medium?
Yeah.
We thought a lot about this on the Viking game as well.
there was a very short period, all things considered, with the Roman Empire, where they were in England.
They pulled out because of trouble at home, but for a few hundred years, they had a foothold in England.
And they captured a decent part of the island.
On the whole, they didn't leave a lot of ruins.
They didn't leave a lot of their footprint on the island.
If you took a trip by car around England, you wouldn't see much.
We wanted to give the feeling of, because our game is set in eight, I think it was eight,
eight 80 AD.
So about four or five hundred years after the Romans left, we wanted to give players the feeling
that they were kind of walking around the footprint of an expired empire, almost post-apocalyptic.
So from an art standpoint, we decided that we would exaggerate the Roman ruins.
We would put more of them.
We would make them larger than life.
That way, anybody wandering around our land,
landscape would see this sort of like crumbling aqueduct in the background or a crumbling Roman
Coliseum in the middle of London. It wasn't really as, let's say, magnificent as that,
but we had to decide with the limited time that we have our players for, let's say you play our game
for 50 to 100 hours, we really wanted to make sure that you understood that this was a, this was
a, this was the dark ages. This is the age where the Roman Empire pulled out and now there's no
written history. There's the technology available to people is is much reduced. Some historians when
they wander around say like there's no. This did not happen. There was not this level or this amount
of Roman ruins, but we aired on the side of the immersive aspect or the immediacy of like,
wow, look at that. You know, that's a that's a bygone age. And then through the writing, we would
sometimes, we would have characters say like, do you know these, those aqueducts were built by
giants because that's what they actually thought.
They didn't know who this culture was.
It was 400 years later.
And they thought, oh, it was a race of giant men and women who built these.
So we exaggerate strategically to give you the intended effect.
It sounds like, you know, every one of these problems you're talking about it,
from the way you're describing it, it sounds like it was a fairly quick and,
relatively quick and easy solution you came up with.
Were there some big challenges, thorny issues with like Vahala or Black Flag?
where the creative team really, like, struggled to figure out the answer.
Yeah, I mean, I won't go too much into it because it was a very long discussion,
but definitely like figuring out how to treat slavery in these times.
The Vikings were, I mean, everybody, I think, in the ninth century was slavery was practiced.
It was one tribe enslaving another.
And we would talk long and hard about how we depict that.
And do we, you know, is there a character that represents that?
Is there a deeper system involved?
And especially once you get into the idea of systematizing and gamifying something
in an institution like slavery, you're really, you're like treading on thin ice because
there's a lot of wrong ways to do that.
So we generally, we didn't, we didn't ignore it completely, but we would tend to just put
it in narrative.
if we would have a character who was represented the idea,
but we would try to stay away from depicting it as a gameplay system.
The closest we got was there was a DLC for a black flag called Freedom Cry,
which dealt head on with slavery.
And that wasn't made by the studio in Montreal.
That was made by the studio in Quebec.
And I know they put a lot of thought into that one.
That term, he mentioned,
DLC is short for downloadable content.
It's like a shorter bonus game.
Freedom Cry takes place in what's now called Haiti
when it was still a French colony.
The main character in Freedom Cry was a supporting character
in Black Flag.
Perhaps our needs may align for a time.
What do you need?
Recruits, liberated slaves.
The warriors among them join me.
The others grow the community for which we fight.
Tita Fsi, war's office on me.
I suppose I might lend a hand for a time.
Let's he passion.
I will see that you are rewarded for whatever you can give.
Outside of his job at Ubisoft, Darby wrote a sci-fi novel called The Halter,
which doesn't take place in the Assassin's Creed universe.
Although his experience working in the game industry did have an influence on the novel.
The Halter takes place in a future where virtual reality has become incredibly realistic and addictive.
One of the characters believes that this technology could be used to close the empathy gap,
which is a term that people use in the real world.
I asked Darby why that was important to the story.
Well, I needed a character.
There's a character in the book called Delia.
She gets her start working in.
In the book, it's called a surrogate reality because it's even more immersive.
It sort of takes over your brain rather than we want to differentiate it between the virtual reality we have now, the R.
So surrogate reality is shortened to SR or Surreels in the same way that movies, the word movies was coined.
I think of Delia in this book as she's faced with this incredible technology that really absorbs and can almost take over a brain and transport somebody into a complete and total simulation.
And she wants to figure out, I can't let this just be escapist.
because what she says at some point in the book is she's noticing that every
time a new medium comes, it hijacks another one of our senses.
This is even going to go further.
And indeed, like, it's a world where people get so addicted to surreality
that there's a whole class of people called halters who are paid to go in and pull people
out, people who are addicted.
You know, they might be logged in from a storage unit somewhere,
hiding from their family because all they want to do is stay in this world until
maybe their body wastes away.
And so halters go get these people.
Well, Delia recognizes this.
And she says, the only use that she can see that's going to avoid this is to try to connect
with people on an empathy level and how hard it is.
And she has some pretty interesting conclusions by the end of it, not to say that they're
correct, but she has some conclusions that, like, maybe a lot of the assumptions about
art and about media and about especially video games.
are actually what's hurting us, the idea of giving people agency.
Maybe agency in some sense is actually preventing empathy, which is a weird thing to say,
because I think everybody values their own agency.
But I think if you have agency, if you're hearing somebody else's story and you have agency
to judge it from whatever angle you'd like to judge it, it's always possible to just dismiss
that story for whatever reasons.
So a bigot could be forced to experience life as a person from a marginalized group for a period of time.
Or someone convicted of fraud could be sentenced to experience the life of somebody they cheated.
I told Darby, this reminds me of Assassin's Creed, because of the game,
people use a device to experience the lives of their ancestors and walk a mile in their shoes.
Or run across rooftops in their shoes.
Yeah, one of the premises of Assassin's Creed is that,
that you're a person in the present day reliving the life of a historical person.
But there's always a remove.
In fact, many times in the games, you will see the historical character talking,
and then you'll actually hear the present day person commenting on what's happening in the...
So there's always almost a double consciousness in a weird way.
But there's definitely this feeling of like going into a world and being able to be somebody else
or act in a different way
because you don't have the constraints
of the real world
to sort of lock you down anymore.
But the halter, I guess,
is kind of written as a response
to things I couldn't really explore
an Assassin's Creed
in terms of simulation.
I was going to say,
in terms of written as a response,
I mean, you know,
I feel like art is always
in a long conversation with itself.
You know, genre is in a long conversation with itself.
So there's been a lot of stories about VR,
a lot of sci-fi stories.
There's Ready Player 1, Neuromancer, The Matrix, Black Mirror, Snow Crash.
Were the things that you wanted to do differently, that you're like, okay, those are all great,
many classics there, but you were like, but I'd like to do this.
I'd like to this to be my statement about what I want to do differently.
I think it really just gets down to the effect of the technology rather than the promise of it.
It's taken as a given in my world that people are going to use VR for,
entertainment, that they're going to use it to distract themselves and to have fun. And that's
perfectly legit. And I almost imagine that Ready Player 1 could happen in my universe, like the whole
thing could happen. But what I was really interested in was what's the effect of that long term?
After 20, 30 years of fully 100% immersive VR, what are the pathologies that pop up? Who gets
hurt by it? How does it disrupt things like people's employment, education?
who gets addicted to it.
Even the people who are trying to do something more,
I would say more interesting with it,
but let's say like to close the empathy gap,
how do they get derailed from that process?
Who stands to make lots of money off this?
So it was really more like taking as a given.
I didn't want to focus too much on,
look what virtual reality can do
and look how much fun it's going to be.
I think there's been enough of that
and I think that's taken as a given.
but what are the
knock on effects?
What are the perverse?
What's the blowback?
And that's where I wanted to situate myself.
Is there a virtual world
that you would love to lose yourself in
even if it's a guilty pleasure?
Oh my, oh my.
In my novel, there's a brief mention
of one of the first popular serials,
which was that it allowed you
to explore the entire universe
by increasing your scale.
You could be a one-to-one,
me and then you could grow and you could you could jump over to Mars and you could grow up you
now now the planets are basically just basketballs in your hand and you could grow and grow
because since a very young age I'd always been really into astronomy and I just love and I remember
feeling a great deep deeply pained by the fact that I can't go visit another planet that I can't
go visit the black hole at the center of the Milky Way I would love to be able to explore the universe
in a way that was as accurate as possible
so that I could get some sense
of the scale of the place.
I'm not somebody who thinks that we're actually
going to live on Mars.
That's a part of my novel.
But the parts in the novel in the halter
where the main character is dreaming
about maybe taking a trip to Mars
represents an older version of me
that would have liked to have done that, but I don't
think it's either possible or feasible
or even necessarily
a good idea.
That subplot was partially
inspired by a certain billionaire who is heavily invested in going to Mars. Darby had also heard
arguments that if life becomes unbearable on Earth because of climate change, virtual worlds will be
more tempting than ever. And so I wanted to dramatize that where there is a simulated world
in the halter, and there is simultaneously people at the very first steps of colonizing Mars.
There's only been a few trips. It's a very tiny little colony. It's not like there's a
you know, a whole city on Mars, just the first couple trips have gone.
And it's to represent this idea that, okay, we could go either way.
So I just thought, what if there was a guy like me, he was like the 10-year-old me,
he was like, I would just love to get off the planet and start a new, start a new,
because that's the dream that's been sold.
But by the end of the book is like, maybe that's a little bit overblown or maybe
that's not actually going to happen.
Well, I keep thinking about, you know, in terms of going to Mars,
escaping Earth going to Mars or the
Surreals that the problem in
both cases the old saying that no matter where you go
there you are, it seems like that
seems to be the problem in the end. Yeah, yeah.
Exactly. Like that's, yeah,
there's this one theater in my book
where a person goes in
to it to
befriend an identical copy of
themselves so that they can try to get this
objective sense of themselves
and yet it just
devolves into sort of abuse and like, I hate
this person. I hate this.
And so, yeah, the best laid plans.
There isn't a single answer as to what we want from an immersive experience.
Different people want different things.
And sometimes what we want changes depending on what's going on in our lives.
We'll keep exploring this question in the next episode,
but we will scale down from a billion-dollar franchise
to an indie video game that's hand-drawn.
That is it for this week.
Thank you for listening.
Special thanks to Darby McDevitt.
His novel The Halter will be out in February.
My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman.
We have another show called Between Imaginary Worlds.
It's a more casual chat show.
It's only available to listeners who pledge on Patreon.
In the most recent episode, I talked with Richard Bartle.
In the 1970s, he was a pioneer of text-based computer games.
His computer program was called a multi-year-old.
user dungeon, or mud for short.
And he developed mud as a reaction against the British class system.
I could see all these friends of mine around me being forced to live lives that
fitted other people.
They were like liquids being poured into a jar and they had to fit the jar.
The idea of the hope was that by playing mud you could pretend to be somebody else,
your character.
and through pretending to be somebody else,
you would find out who you yourself really were,
and then you could bring that back into the real world with you.
Between imaginary worlds comes included with the ad-free version of the show
that you can get on Patreon.
You can also buy an ad-free subscription on Apple Podcasts.
If you donate to the show on Patreon at different levels,
you also get either free imaginary world stickers, a mug, or a t-shirt,
and a link to a Dropbox account,
which has the full-length interviews of every guest in every episode.
You can subscribe to the show's newsletter at imaginary worldspodcast.org.
This show is supported by Odu.
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