librarypunk - 028 - Game Preservation is not Poggers feat. All Gamers Are Bastards

Episode Date: September 23, 2021

This week we’re joined by Kay and Kyle from the All Gamers Are Bastards podcast. We’re talking about video game preservation, modes of production, piracy, and, of course, Boss Baby.  https://twitter.com/kayandskittles https://www.youtube.com/c/KayAndSkittles https://twitter.com/laborkyle https://www.youtube.com/c/laborkyle  https://twitter.com/agabpod Why Disco Elysium Is The Most Hopeful Game I've Ever Played (Feat. Laborkyle)  Readings https://twitter.com/aswatki1/status/1407120973900431360?s=20 Sony Thinks Cloud Gaming Can Eliminate Piracy (and Consoles) The Expanded DMCA Exemption for Video Game Preservation Grants a Small Victory Amidst the Seventh Triennial Rulemaking PS3 and PS4 games about to become unplayable

Boss Baby is a contemporary phenomenon in terms of culture, a film starring Alec Baldwin as the titular Boss Baby, in a universe in which babies are all produced by a corporation called Baby Corps in the Sky. And it's about Alec Baldwin's character going to a family. And I've talked about, this is the fifth K, probably the fifth podcast. Yeah. been on the target i have submitted i not actually i haven't submitted yet i finished an abstract i'm about to submit for the boss baby academic conference what my my peer reviewer comments is that this has some real boss baby vibes what we that's like my favorite tweet the universe it's a good

we fucking deserve this hellscape we deserve this hellscape yeah it's a really it's a really horrifying movie, to be completely honest. And I can't, I can't, I still can't stop thinking about it. I really can't. That's why keeps coming up. There's a sequel. I never known that. Why did you tell me?

Hey, I didn't bring it up. I can't go back. Yeah. Blame it on Justin. None of us can go back. Only, only forward. We're in a post boss baby world. That's, that's exactly.

I find a very aspirational. I've always wanted to be a baby, you know. Baby virginity. What was, oh my God, you guys got little sound effects? Yeah, man, I got soundboards. I got soundboards of days. Yeah, voice mod. You can actually buy it.

You don't have to subscribe to it. You can buy it once and you just own software. It's amazing. It's a novel concept. It's called a Lifetime subscription. I didn't know that was the thing anymore. Yeah, it's called $30. Wow.

Then I can just play this If I had to sum of the video game industry I think that would probably What's a video game So they're like books But made out of computers Wow Whoa

That's a great idea man Someone should make some of those Okay write that down I'm writing it down I'm writing it down We're gonna be fucking rich bro Video game. Some of the boss baby discourse. I'm so fucking mad.

I am so fucking mad. It's cultural education. There's no movie I've seen. I watch a lot of movies and there's no movie I've seen more recently that captures. When we say we're living in a post boss baby moment, that means it is a demarcation in like an important historical object. at this point because it is reflective of the past 20, 30 years in American culture. I am not the same for knowing what the boss baby is. You got to watch them.

I don't want to watch it. You got to watch it. I know too much now. Yeah, well, we've got to watch it. I know too much. I already know too much. I'm really happy to bring this to your podcast. I'm ruined.

I can never get married now. Normally we just talked about the godfather before episodes. Anger. Sexual lust. The sorts of things that you experience when you're playing a video game. All these concepts originated with Carl Marx. I'm Justin. I'm a Skalkan librarian. My pronouns are he and him. I'm Sadie. I'm a cisadmin at a public library. My pronouns are she and they. I'm Jay. I'm an academic metadata.

librarian. My pronouns are he him. I'm Carrie. I'm a health science is librarian and my pronouns are she or her and fuck everything. Especially the boss baby. And we have guests. Would you like to introduce yourselves?

Kay are first. I'm first. Okay. Read the sheet, Kay. Read the sheet. Is there an order on the... Oh, shit. Oh, fuck. Yeah, there is. You've got your ass. Oh, shit. Oh, now you're going to have to edit it. Oh, fuck. No, don't. Leave it in.

Yeah, I'm Kay. It's the boss baby. It's the, I'm Kay of boss baby fame. Not a lot of people know that I wrote, directed, and starred in every role in the boss baby film. And as like a little side gig, I do a channel, Kay and Skittles. That's me. And my name is Kyle. I'm Labor Kyle on the internet.

And I'm a academic history. historian of antiquity and also the foremost scholar of boss baby history. And you can find my forthcoming essay on the boss baby's criterion release sometime next spring. We're still figuring out the dates on it. That's my pick from the criterion closet. What if the criterion is run by baby? No, it's got the minimalist Citizen Kang cover, but instead of a K

is just a B. Oh my God. That's perfect. It really is. I'm a genius. So, Kay and Kyle are here from the Agab podcast, and I just wanted to

get the plugs out of the way at the beginning. What is Agab? You know, that's a great question. I'm so glad you asked. It is. All gamers are bastards. How can you really

with something as lowly as words put a definition on a work of such caliber? That's the kind of question that we like to ask on a podcast such as Agab. Now we talk about video games. Our whole thing is every episode we'll talk about a specific game

and do a bit of a you know, an analysis and discussion about it. So hopefully people will, you know, hear something and be like, I want to play that. Or maybe think about something they've already played a little differently. Yeah, in the same, like, we make video essays and talk a lot about culture and we play a lot of video games. And so we kind of just pick a text and discuss the text and just kind of whatever direction we feel like it needs to go that week.

And any kind of game from a most recent episode, I think that's out right now and being on a rock star games release, Red Dead Redemption 2, to more independent titles, to other video games like The Boss Baby, which is a video game. The Sopranos we discussed, that's also a video game. And then we discuss, what else we talk about? It's really those two video games for the most part Especially recently

We've been talking about the Sopranos A lot Yeah, sometimes we'll Get yourself a good That's right I've never seen the Sopranos But all of trans Twitters Really into the Sopranos right now

That's because it's good Yeah I want to watch it so bad James Gendell Feene who's fucking hot So Finally some good fucking taste Finally some good taste On the internet Jesus.

I'm more of a Sylvio myself because you don't disrespect the bing. All right. I respect that. Yeah. That's my take. Also adorable cat, Kyle. Oh, thank you. Yeah, he's a ham, so he'll climb up the chair at some point.

Yeah, that's a beef. It's a beef. Yeah, that's right. Well, I was not even looking at us. Like, he's too cool for whatever's going on over here. So the cats, man, it's just kind of due. God, I wish that was me. Hi.

Arthur's, like, afraid of my giant beanbag chair. He won't get on it. And he gets sad because on the couch he likes to sit behind me. But so we probably won't see Arthur tonight. I'm sorry. I had deprived the bunnies so that they'd stop chewing on cardboard because it was extremely loud and I could hear it in my own headphones. Bodies are crafty.

Oh. Yep. Okay, so no segment this week. Not that there wasn't any tomfoolery to report on, but I'm sure like the ALA did something awful or someone had a bad take on how libraries are doing prior restraint by not buying books or something. Apparently there's some code for lib journal nonsense dropped today,

but I haven't read it. Yeah. Because that's the one, the issue they rejected my proposal for, so fuck them. Yeah, so fuck them. Yeah, there was something about anonymized data and research on library users, and it's like they didn't properly anonymize the data and still published it. It was weird. Anyway, so we're skipping all that.

And I've been wanting to do a video game episode for a while. The difficult thing is not a whole lot of libraries collect video games and not a whole lot of literature gets written about it. So I thought I would invite on some people who know a lot of. about video games in academia in general and and you have both talked about this on your podcast where you've talked about issues of video game preservation and stuff like that and i wanted to tie it into just libraries trying to navigate the world of video games and trying to provide video games to their users because i mean preservation is all good but there's also a whole lot of

just usage. So what's going on in video game land? I put it some stuff in the notes, which will be in the show notes, about how we've got kind of two problems. And I think the first one that's easy to get out of the way is cloud streaming games. Like I know, Kay, you have like a thing against like Stadia. Yeah. So a big thing is just like you don't own physical games anymore. You're streaming them. There's no president. and a lot of people want to move to this model almost exclusively to the point where you can't buy fiscal games anymore. Do you want to speak on like trends to that? Yeah, I mean, there's a few problems with cloud streaming. First and foremost, I don't think it works very well, at least at the moment.

So, I mean, all other things are still a bit moot because it just doesn't fucking work. It kind of always online game. play has kind of been a plague in the industry for a while and this is just going to turn that up to 11 as well. That's before even getting into the problem of yeah, you won't own anything. You won't. If they decide that game's gone now, it's gone now. And there's nothing you can do about it, which they eventually have with any kind of with any kind of online service, you know, eventually outdated things.

They just drop them. They get rid of them. Or maybe they want to sell you a remake of a 10 year old game. You know what? That game's gone now, buddy. or maybe, hey, maybe you want to mod this game. Well, that might be difficult. You don't have access to any actual game files.

You're getting a little stream, basically. All the things other than just like the surface level consumption of the game are enormously hindered by this. And even the consumption of the game, if you don't have a good internet connection, just is not going to happen either. It's just, it's a shit idea. I wouldn't recommend it. They really want to push it because, you know, they want to have full control of these properties.

And I think they also maybe, they hope it becomes like a Netflix kind of thing. Remember when Netflix was in its heyday, piracy really dropped. Before there was like a hundred different streaming services. Now it's kind of coming back because you need to spend a fortune to get everything now. They're kind of hoping for that. But I don't think it's going to happen personally.

With issues of, with issues of all kinds of issues of preservation and like archive stuff, which I know is very, like, archival work or stuff exists in this like Venn diagram with work in historical preservation, library, public history, all of this, like the sort of public humanities that like sometimes it's public, sometimes it's not, sometimes it's non-profits, sometimes it's not. But it like in the same way with all of the types of stuff that we approach, really on the podcast too, with gaming, it's useful to sort of stand and look backwards, sort of ask two questions, right? One, the historical preservation, archival curation, historical curation question.

How is something going to be preserved? Who's preserving it? Who has right to the source code, the IP, whatever, and how do people gain access to this, which, you know, is going to be fee-based subscription services? It seems to be the goal for literally all culture. As a result, it's also worth asking a sort of similar but, you know, separate question, how do we see the industry going and what types of things do they want to do in order to create and give to give consumers access to new goods that are produced as exclusively on their

platforms for their particular audiences and under the constraints of their particular copyright, claims to various intellectual properties. Well, it looks like, fee-based subscription services is going to be that kind of a thing as well. And as Kay was saying, the first problem is that they don't work that great. The one on

PlayStation, the cloud-based stream, like, it's okay, but okay, okay, considering, like, what the alternative could be in terms of like, publicly sourced

emulation, this sort of like, exists standing in the scaffolding of popular culture around video games for as long as they've been able to be digitized in this way. So I think what's interesting is that it's going to the sort of Disneyification both in the like ephemeral cultural sense of like the types of stuff that we're probably going to get as well as in the most literal sense with like, you know, that viral map of all the stuff that Disney owns. I think about when I think about it. what's going to happen in video games. I think about what Microsoft is doing, which like,

name a game and Microsoft technically owns it. People are talking about the do psychonauts. I think Microsoft technically owns that. All the Fallout games now, Microsoft owns that. They own like Doom and Wolfenstein in the studios that make all of these games, see if thieves, the Forza series. So there's a, there's this sort of gold rush. that's happening in like small studio acquisition and a lot of this like it's just like the rest of the sort of culture industry i guess is what i'm saying yeah you've you've only got like a handful of really big publishers at this point and then when you think of smaller ones that you used to know like they're all owned by the big ones now but capitalism encourages innovation It is sad to think that the goal of indie studios may increasingly be to be bought by Microsoft, you know. Survival. Yeah.

I remember, I think it was the studio that made Hell Blade. I think they got bought up by Microsoft. And then their next project was like a weird like Battle Royale type game that I don't, I don't know if that ever came out. I don't think anyone cared about it. Everything's just going to be Fortnite. Yeah. Epic games has a mall. Oh.

They bought a mall for their headquarters. We talked about it on the podcast a while back. Do you call it like the Coom Mall? The Coom Dungeon, the Fortnite Jackoff Emporium, I believe, was another. I heard that word, Justin. No, you didn't. I didn't? No.

Oh. Oh, dear. I was just thinking of that really good Dan Olson video about manufactured discontent in Fortnight. Have you all seen that? Yeah. When it talks about they hold like concerts and stuff. And also it's like, well, you could get this character in this pose, but only for like this time. And it costs this much money because it's free to play.

But, you know, all the fun stuff is with this cost. And yeah, like people are having concerts instead of Fortnite and shit. They do it in Minecraft, too. They have music festivals in Minecraft. I feel so old. I have these darn kids in their fortcraft. We got to stop them. Well, they did recently celebrate the March on Washington.

Oh, no. The Martin Luther King's speech as well inside of the Fortnite. All right. That March on Washington. Yeah, they did that. There's a, there's like a kind of curated exhibit. within some

probably well-meaning programmers did something that was not a really a good idea but this is this is kind of what like

and sorry word riffing or whatever but this is honestly probably kind of what video games are going to be like a little more in the future we can expect a certain level

of curated experience to go into gaming and if that's always been kind of a wash in some ways in my opinion. Like MMO's online gaming, now arena badlers, and like all these just types of online gaming stuff is really, it's, it takes,

it needs to take primacy in the conversation because it's where most people are going. I think it was a, I think it was Brian David Gilbert, who does a lot of great stuff on gaming. And it was one of his last things at Polygon. He had a video to where he was going to come up with a formula to calculate based off of,

sales and popularity and reviews and stuff, the best game of the year. And by the time he built up to that 20-minute video at the end of it, his formula spit out, well, Fortnite, because Fortnite sold $8,000, it made $80 bazillion dollars. It made a real amount of money, but like... And like even his mom had heard of it or something. Yes, it made an absurd, absurd amount of money in mostly microtransactions. And also, like, they sued Apple. Epic Games sued Apple at one point to basically to try and,

there it got into this court battle with Apple to try and basically figure out ways to collect fees for, to collect money from micro transactions through a different way besides the app store so they could circumvent the 30% fee that Apple charges for those. So yeah, as with the rest of capitalism, the theme of these things, it's very incestuous and strange to sort of. I mean like the boss baby? Yeah, it's a lot like the boss baby. There's nothing incestuous about boss baby.

Don't bring it there. There's a lot of that's Freudian about boss baby. Don't sully boss baby. Yeah, I can imagine there's a tough time like ever trying to preserve any of these games. It just seems impossible. But the twin problem with cloud gaming that I wanted to bring up for context is the sort of lock in of physical media. So we've got now this story I put in the notes about PlayStation 3 games and

all PlayStation 4 games. So the problem is basically that PS3 games that you downloaded off of the PlayStation network and all PS4 games because the physical games are tied into and authenticated through the network, those all have to talk to the PlayStation network. And if the network goes away, eventually your CMOS battery will die. And even if you replace the battery, it needs to talk to a network. So even if you replace the battery now, it will eventually die. And it will eventually no longer be able to connect and authenticate.

And even your physical games, as I understand it, will be gone. Is that correct? From my reading of that article, yeah, that's pretty much correct. I was going to say, I remember the first time, God, I think it was PS3, actually, that I got a game and I stuck the disc in to go play it. And it took two hours to fucking download. And I was so mad because I bought a disc so I could sit down and play that shit right then and there. And I had to wait two hours for it. But yeah, no, the CMOS battery thing, like, I wonder if there is going to be people who will somehow have.

hack it so we can get around that, but I feel like that's definitely going to become a very niche thing. So yeah, fuck PlayStation. Yeah, I mean, I think that what you're touching on there is going to become the reality here where your crime, crime is going to be the only way, you know, to access a lot of these things, because yeah, Sony's just going to let it all go. So, I mean, emulation is a necessary thing to do, really, to even begin to be able to preserve this stuff. Because when it comes to digital copies, they could snatch it away at any time. When it comes to physical copies, I mean, with things like these batteries, even that isn't going to be a long-term guarantee. And they just, they want you to buy, you know, the remake of if it's a popular game, you know, in a few years.

years time. And if it's not popular, then they don't care because they're not selling enough of it. So it's just gone. And if you loved it, well, sucks to be you. Because we're not here because we care about the art form. We're Sony. We are here to make just preposterous amounts of money all the time. And everything is, you know, subjugated to that, obviously. My grandkids are going to love Skyrim. Oh, guys, what are your favorite Skyrim versions? See, I haven't, like, gotten a video, like a new video game's, like, physical system since, like, I had the, like, brick PS2. Not that skinny shit, but the brick that came with, like, a weird fantasy RPG frogger. And then I had, like, a GameCube and then the, the Game Boy, like, SD.

SP. SP. Is that what it was? I have no idea. And then and then I just like never owned a game system ever again in my life. So when I would go over someone's house and I was like, why is this connected to the internet? What are you doing? And it's like, I'm like, I was just so confused.

Like why? But you have a disc. And it's now it's yeah, like my, oh, I just like don't get it. It was this whole thing that passed me by. And now I'm like, what's a video game? It really has like, it's changed in so many. bad ways from the like

there was always this kind of gap in hardware that home consoles were supposed to fix right it's it's the same mode as always just kind of go back to the root of the mode of production that produced the gaming industry

which is home consoles that is consumer good that's available to a large variety of people that they can bring home and basically take all points of production and take it somewhere else. And then so we can just bring these things to market. People can go get them. Companies can fight it out and whoever's going to be best can come in. That's capitalism.

And it will work perfectly fine and there will be no problems whatsoever. The only problem is that it doesn't ever exactly work that way. What ends up happening is the contemporary monopoly, like I'm a history. teacher. And I spent a lot of time talking about the transition in the United States from the end of the 19th into the 20th century, basically the end of the Gilded Age and the various, especially economic booms and busts that came with that period of enormous growth as well as wealth, inequality in the United States. And I'm not into one-for-one historical analogies because they're wrought with problems. And good historians don't really do that. But there's this new, like,

element of the culture industry that is like reminding me a lot of the monopoly wars that led to horrible economic crashes in the 1870s and the 1880s. And for all of the problems that come with economic recession, clearly, we've all been through them. One of the benefits that come is that there's a galvanizing and resurging sort of opposition that reconfigures itself and rises to me in conflict. You know, workers fight back. That's the sort of predominant historical trend.

That has remains true to this day. But the problem is you take all of this stuff that we have, and I'm sure as people who work in libraries, you understand what it's like, you take and dump on top of it a whole bunch of workers' rights issues. And so you have what we keep hearing in the news is stuff about what's happening at Blizzard and sort of systemic

problems of sexual harassment and wage inequality and workplace like just really tough bad places to work stressful environments that are like crunch time like crazy deadlines people working themselves to death basically and they got tricked into this

in the same way that all the rest of us get brought into you know, sort of our workplaces because we're passionate about the things that we love this stuff and we care a lot about it. I know that that's true of why I wanted to be an academic. And then you get there and you look around and you go, oh, it's not great in here. And as it turns out, there's been this sort of, there's the problem of these convergence of historical forces, I guess, is what I'm saying, that are manifest in the way that we're going to be able to preserve any of this stuff. Kay is totally right, that emulation is the only really solution is because the modern problem

of our deindustrialized society exists at the nexus of consumer culture in the internet. So, like, what does our hardware do and how does it function and who brings it to whom and who has control over it? And with corporate monopolies, corporate monopolies plus, you know, worker atomization. and like rampant consumer culture and like a struggle to reconcile the way that we engage with culture and to think about it perhaps in some kind of a more radical way. Preservation in the humanities, historical preservation, archival preservation, the humanities become, they take primacy.

It's the same thing because it's not just that way for video. I'm so sorry that I'm going on one of my, these are trademark rambles. But like, I'm digging it. It's like, see, it's, well, okay, okay, thank you. It's source code preservation, but it's also media asset preservation as well. Not yet. The curation in the archival collection of video games, it exists in this sort of like broad spectrum because it came up in the digital age.

And now it's just like, if there isn't some sort of like public effort from like people and workers in this sort of industry to do something about it, it's just going to be like Disney and Amazon are going to own everything. And if you pay $59.99 a month, you can go on and play video games for 90 minutes before you have to go back and wait in line in the digital cloud or whatever. It'd be, it's going to, it's just, it's going to suck because all the stuff that those guys make sucks, you know? Yeah, I think the consumerism is a big part of something Kaye mentioned earlier, which was the re-release market. at the ability to control re-releases, that there's going to be no personal preservation. And I think

what you're saying is because of, we've got to look at the whole line of production of intellectual property. And it's going to take, as I understand what you're saying, some sort of labor action as well as other types of, you know, maybe legislation or something in order to make sure that preservation is even possible. Yeah. Yeah. Workers and the human, the public humanities as you think about the public humanities in a more Marxian way. And I think that'd be the way to accomplish that. Absolutely. I was going to go back to what you just said about how like you wait, like you log in and you get to play whatever for 90 minutes and then you have to go wait back in line. Like, you know, that reminds me of library e-books.

Ah. The look on Jay's face right now. Like, yeah, you pay six times more than the average consumer and you only get to check it out three weeks at a time, you know, for 52 checkouts. Some of those e-books cost more than my car did. Yeah. Like, per year. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Streaming media.

Yeah. For like a shitty book no one's going to read. Called out that book. Yeah. But yeah, especially like medical and scientific e-books. Holy shit. Like a multi-s, like an unlimited seat, an unlimited seat. an unlimited seat, which usually means

366 seats, BTWs, is like, some of those are ridiculous. When I worked at Utah, one of the number one reference questions we would get was, why can't I access this, like, is it Wiley, the one that's like all the coding inside? Yeah, that's all the medical.

One seat. O'Reilly is coding. One seat all the time. And so the professor would be like, the library has this for, free. And so you knew what class was happening when all the students were like, I can't access the book. And I'm like,

what fucking idiot? Like, said that was a good model for a library for this very popular book. The, you know, academic publishing industrial complex. Well, what librarian is not emailing that person? Yeah, this just reminds me of watching

libraries just get screwed, super hard when it came to digital books. Yeah, especially like with overdrive. in audiobooks, all that shit. And then we don't even own them because we have to pay for it every year. And even if we do like own it,

it's still subject to all this licensing of like what conditions you can use it in, what software you can use it with. We don't own like 90% of our shit anymore. The subscription pay annual subscription services. This is, it's going to be everything. Talk to some librarians to see your future.

Wow. I didn't realize the libraries had to do a subscription for audiobooks and stuff. For most things we have. That's fucked, yeah. Jesus. Yeah, most things.

Yeah, everything's a subscription. So like when they're like, hey, we got free movies at the library online, stream your movies, that's all being paid on an annual subscription and sometimes per her title.

That's why New York Public Library got rid of Canopy. Yeah. By the way, because it was like they were running out of money with how many people were using canopy because they were doing like a, what was it like a pay on demand thing where they didn't like get a certain amount per year. It's just like if someone access the thing that wasn't on in the catalog, it just charged them, which works well for some libraries. But yeah, New York Public Library was like running out of money. Yeah, they're huge. Yeah.

That is like the number one service that we get requested by patrons because they'll be like King County. and Seattle Public are kind of close to where I am. So a lot of people are used to, you know, having that array of services. And then they come to this tiny little rural library and they're like, why don't you guys have, you know, canopy? And we're like, because it would literally bankrupt us. So it's the number one thing requested and also the number one thing refused. So if video games are moving away from having physical copies and then libraries would be expected to also subscribe to that model. So if they charge like regular people,

individual subscription prices, the inflation for what they would charge libraries because libraries are like taking business away because anytime someone uses it the library, they're not buying it. So they inflate the prices. It like we wouldn't be able to do it at all. Yep.

They just won't happen. We paid about $50,000 a year for Canopy. before we had to throttle it, I think. Yeah, that sounds low. Yeah, that's pretty low. Yeah. Yeah, we still have a mediated, we still have a mediated use contract with Canopy.

Yeah, we do too. Because we have a film program, so pretty, pretty clutch over at, over at the old institution. Give me pizza. B-I-C-Z-A. Give me pizza. I love that song. Yeah, but I don't think it's likely that there would be library subscriptions to video game services.

But what I wanted to talk about, because we got the CMOS issue, and so, like, even if we were to buy physical copies, you can't really, like, loan out physical copies anymore. And so what I'm trying to think of, like, public libraries, getting away from the preservation a little bit. Like, what could libraries do to actually provide? people with game collections because we've had them in the past we still have them but are we going to be able to do them in the future and if mainstream titles are moving all subscription so the same way like a library can't get Netflix there's no way we could get you know Microsoft gaming Epic store or whatever so I was thinking what's the alternative which is like do we just collect indie games instead is that what we're going to do and I

wanted to get you guys's opinion on like indie game distribution. Is that even possible to get indie games physically and reusably? There's a barrier to entry there in terms of production as well as there's the batteries. There's the corporate disincentivizing, right? The best example that I can think of as how Nintendo on the switch gives you credit towards other games when you purchase them digitally rather than in physical copies. You'll get these little gold coins that you can put. That's basically money. It's basically pennies.

And if you just buy stuff on their e-shop, it'll put some money poured, you know, another game. Or you can basically spend them whatever you want if you have $1.50 sitting in there, put it on your next purchase or whatever. There's a gamification part of it. There's, you know, it's basic internet monetizing, you know, BS, that usual stuff. And then there's the hardware problem. I have a friend of mine who buys old Super Famicom games off of eBay and most of the time has to replace the batteries on the inside of them because the batteries have died. But you can essentially take out a game to where one has a dyes, swap it out or whatever.

But a lot of that stuff is going away too. And so there's like, yeah, retro gaming is big and cool. like people like that. But if we're trying to use the public humanities and the library in particular as a sort of an offensive social institution, as an offensive, not offensive as in like bad, but like as in versus defensive, a place of social mobilization, a commons, if you will, an active commons in public life. Because of the way that the industry has worked, you start to seed some of that territory, I think,

I don't know. Kay, what do you think? I think that a reason that things like Torrent sites and other sort of file sharing communities and stuff have been so crucial to preserving games is specifically because it's really hard to legitimately do it. Because, yeah, like you said, I mean, physical copies of indie games, just for a lot of them aren't feasible. We did an episode of Agab. It's not out yet. I think it's the next one that'll be out about a game called The Forgotten City, which was made by like, three people, they're just not going to be able to mass produce like discs and stuff. It started out as a mod. It was a Skyrim mod. Yeah, it all comes back to Skyrim, baby. That's my favorite re-release of Skyrim. It's the forgotten city mod. Yeah, a completely different game. Yeah, it's great.

It is. It rules. Yeah. So it becomes one of those things where legally you're going to, it's hard. It's hard to actually preserve this legally. It was a really big hit when Nintendo a few years ago really came after a load of emulator sites, like MU Paradise, which was always my go-to for like a decade, got gutted and a few other ones, because that's kind of what you need.

And I think the strength of torrenting is it's a little more decentralized. There's no like one site you can take down and then it's all gone. like the Pirate Bay got sort of taken down, but there's mirrors of it, and there's a million other sites. It's not the same as MU Paradise where it's like, well, that's all gone now. I sure hope somebody else has backups of those games somewhere

because a lot of them, you know, you can't get legit copies at all anymore. It has this like, I think you've really pointed out where the sort of, the idea of emulation and free distribution, of like digital objects and culture, whatever sits atop of, I think the function of the public humanities as well as the library system or like a good, healthy library system would function in this node-based, decentralized sort of network that sort of constitutes and reconstitutes itself

based off of the circumstances of what it needs, right? We're talking about rural libraries versus a large public library in the sense that like, that's how. Emulation has functioned based off of like a material almost, like, and not even in this sort of like pure sense of production, like, I take hammer, go make part of car that becomes car, I get wet, not even just in the sense of wage labor, but in the sense of like work, emulation was done by like a lot of people in their spare time, people who did computer program, people who taught themselves computer programming, got into modding and emulating and various, you know, just these various sort of like sub-communities within gaming.

And I don't know how to, I don't know how to turn it into something more than like, like, emulation being on attack is not only really, really bad because we need emulation as an alternative to basically the corporate, the big corporate blob that's coming. But also because it offers the structure and the framework through which we think about gaming in a less commodified way, in a more liberated sense. I'd like to be serious about games. People like it.

Like, yeah, sometimes they're terrible, but they're really bad movies. I've watched so many very bad movies. There's so much that's interesting in them. But at the same time, like, there's cultural garbage. There's a lot of value. Regardless, video games is something that's come up. It's stuck around, and it's here to stay. Okay, so how do we, how do we,

make some sort of political statement on that front. And I think access is the end. And who has access and how is it distributed? Is it distributed freely and equitably or is it distributed on a fee-based subscription service that scales based off of how much your rent costs from the most rent to the most most rent because rent is just expensive now. That's just how it works. Yeah, we're like, I don't know. Like, we, like, emulation is important because, yeah, it offers us both of those things. I think that's what I'm trying to say.

Yeah, I just had a thought about on the e-book front where, like Jay was saying, there's a lot of situations where we can't get even, we can't get more than one user license at a time. But sometimes you can't get any e-book license and they just refuse to sell the libraries. and so New York and Maryland have created laws that say, if you sell to consumers, you have to sell the libraries. And it just struck me that that's already hard enough to force publishers of books to sell the libraries. I really don't see political will of that happening for video games.

But it could be that you could have some sort of legislation that says, okay, if you were going to sell something as a digital service, you have to sell it in some sort of physical medium. if you are this size company. Because again, that doesn't really work for indie developers. It doesn't work for the people who put their games out on Itchio. But a lot of them don't sell their games anyway. So I'm just trying to think.

I'm just thinking practically right now. I've got my e-resources hat on trying to think about like, how could we actually provide this service? We literally have to think practically about this because like it, that's where everything. It starts from like, how is this industry regulated? who are the political players, who has a vested interest in seeing this being democratized, who would have a divested interest with the right amount of political persuasion?

There are so many, like, that's how you, it's, you know, Mr. Bill, he's only a bill on Capitol Hill. That's how it, the problem with that, you know, is that before the bill, it needs to be the production and the forwarding of political willpower. And like, it's hard to get people to do that with consumption, but we can't, we can't put up a fight if we're not willing to just be like, how can, how can video games look different? You know, I think you're right on. Yeah. So what I'm hearing you say, Kyle, is gamers rise up. Yeah, man. I mean, a big problem with video games and the reason that the industry has been able to get away with so much shit and just absolutely taking the piss at every corner is that gamers are little piggyes. Little oinkies, little oink hogs. Because like compared to like people who, you know, care about literature, compared to film weirdos, gamers far and away are just, they love to be dirty little consumers. They love for Sony to spank them and tell them they've been bad. They love it.

So it's really, really hard. And I think it requires a serious effort to create sort of a cultural change amongst. people who care about this art form, which I do think has slowly been happening. I think that some of the more vapid movie bob-esque ways of consuming are becoming a little bit more, what's the word? Gosh. Yeah, gosh. A bit more of a faux pa, if you will. Which is good. That's a good direction for culture in general to move in, but I think there's still a lot of movement required within amongst gamers. They don't want to rise up.

They want more ameboes. That's a problem to think about. I only kind of understand what an amoebo is. It's like a little action figure, but like you get stuff in game for it. I remember when Griffin McElroy would like stick them in his mouth. Yeah, they're food, right? I think so.

If he puts in his, that's food. Griffin wouldn't steer us wrong. Exactly. He's a 30 under 30 some bullshit. I don't know. Yeah, so he knows what's food and what isn't. I trust him completely on this one. Yeah, I was kind of worried about if we only had indie games,

because I could see a lot of public libraries having one guy who would be like, here are freeware games and here's it, here's itchio, here's how you use it. It's not really a subscription, but libraries are about service too. So like teaching people how to find freeware games and stuff like that, you could definitely get a group of librarians together who care about. There are so many librarians into like tabletop games. gaming and creating tabletop clubs that we could easily have a same thing for video gaming. Youth librarians are an untapped resource in this area, I'm sure.

They've got so much energy. They've got that, they've got exactly that kind of, that kind of interested vibe. Yeah. I know the University of Utah does a lot with video game stuff because there's like a video game like design like program there, like you can major in like video games. I got my master's from a very stemmy. Literally, the University of Central Florida, which was literally created to make engineers for Cape Canaveral.

I thought it was just for people to, I know, to go to and then drop out. Drink themselves into death. Drop out in tears. You can't finish is what they used to say. Yeah. Any college with Central in its name always has something. Yeah, it always has been. Second only to colleges with South in the name, which is where I got my bachelor's in Florida.

I'm Florida man through and through. Always that. I live in Massachusetts now, but yeah. I've been sneaking Floridians onto the podcast for a while now. See, this is how we. My dad was born in Miami. Does that count for me? Do you just like have magnets where you just attract each other?

So we got Mitchell, yeah. Actually, my grandma lives in Florida. Yeah, my late. Dad grew up there. My uncle still lives there. And like, we used to go there all the fucking time. Been there a lot. I grew up there.

I moved to Texas three years ago. I'm very tempted to have everyone name all the cities in Florida that they've been to, but I'll resist that. There's a... I've been to that place. I'm not cut out for the bayou. Yeah, that's true. My dad almost got eaten by barracuda one time in Florida. Yeah, see?

Not for me. Kay has this quality. to what in which they they travel in a large cauldron of a mystic substance that can't reach certain temperatures which is why they're a Canadian expat in the UK. Yeah, the north of the UK. We don't engage with the South bits. It's no. Well, you've also formally succeeded from the southern part of the UK. Correct. Is your Earl Grey Tea really good? Yeah, it's all right. isn't it from the north because the water has a specific quality to it or something? I have no idea, to be honest with you. All tea tastes the same to me.

It's, you know, it's fine. It's brown. Sometimes it's other colors, and that makes me very angry. Yeah. British people are comically opposed to foreign teas, you know, without getting into, you know, the foreign this. of all. But they like the really basic teas and nothing else. That's exactly how the racism.

Collect all the spices, use none of them. Yeah. We don't want to be. You can't have them either. That's right. Let's exploit this in just the right way. Yeah, it is very British to see how bad they can make something. Yeah.

That's the whole project of this country is take something to be like, The worstification of, you know, that was British imperialism was. Yeah. I mean, look at me. Damn. Owned. I'm sorry. Anyway, no, you brought up a university education.

I went to like a real STEM heavy school that has this like, now the program, it's one of those programs that exists in practice. It's really kind of messed up. but in an ideal world, it's very useful. If you complete two years with, I think, a 3.0 or 3.2 at a community college, you can transfer to the University of Central Florida. I went to state school for a reason. Florida actually has some of the best in-state tuition in the entire country. And I'm like, yes.

I still am buried in a student loan debt. That's how bad the situation is. But it was really useful for like, one thing I get first. frustrated with history departments is that they're upset. And this is no, like, there's no way that the graduate director, my department, who I am, I love, I adore her. History departments have to chase that bag, just like any other humanities departments do nowadays. And one of the ways to do that is to get contracts with the Department of Defense to do basically historic preservation of often just, it's just gravestones of World War I vets, like in this case, that's a good

projects. That's a great project. They actually were logging and tracking African-American troop services, used it to publish papers. It gave grad students and undergrads who worked on the project, some publication credits. They were able to get paid for their work. That's a win. But the problem is that the precedent exists not within to create some new spaces in the public humanities that can like capitalize on the people I know who work in STEM who want to do do more to be involved in public history who I've been on panels with who come up to me why do I have people who these these biology PhDs keep coming up to me and say man I love what you do I wish I were doing what you're doing it's just like well motherfucker let's do it

and the reason in a way to do that is within like one of the largest like places in which people consume culture where we can have a say, not just in the way that people get things, not just in the way that is preserved, archived, and curated and presented back to the public as historical objects, but also in the way that it's produced, also in the mode of production itself and contributing more to sort of a public space of gaming, I think. There's a lot that can be had with it. And not to sound like a neoliberal gay makerspaces, bullshit, whatever, but I feel like video games are one of the realms were like the

combination of more engineering, computer science type skills, plus like narrative storytelling and design and all this stuff. Those can all exist in one person. It can be a team of people with all these different skills together. It seems like, I mean, I don't know what a video game is, but like it seems like this

realm where all of these things that we keep touting like, hey, school children, you got to do your engineering so you can have a job. But for, but art in remember too but it's like this is already happening and there's some really great things coming out of it like uh the first video game i played in like fucking years was i did like disco elysium when i went on vacation like a month or two ago and i was just fucking like it looks like an oil painting there was communism it was really complicated to watch k's video that i'm yeah but i was

still like a communist in it was a home there no but you know the never mind oh i was making a But yeah, like just like the the sort of level of like engaging with like this like political and economic theory and also like labor theory, but also like someone had to make a video game out of it. Like it kind of just blew me away. So yeah, like this realm where all of that comes together in a way that I don't really think it does in the same way in other places. Yeah, we have the digital humanities. But that seems so like individualized. And I know it's not always necessarily, but... It can be.

They're trying to make... If they have any say in it, they're going to make it to where we're all shoved in our little culture pods at university. And we learn what, you know, the University of Burger King wants us to know about culture. Like, it's going to suck. Literature is only important if you can do Python as well. Oh, it's going to suck. Rather than like...

I hated digital humanities for so long because I'm like, they only care because computers are involved now. And see, that's the problem is that it's not just as... you're saying, this estuary to where there are these two spaces at the place in which they meet is where new things are produced, which like gaming is absolutely that. And like an example that jumped to mind is that there's a text-based gaming is huge. And everyone, I fucking love playing text games. I've been playing them since I was a kid. Like even starting out with like text-based adventure games and now just like you know all kinds of stuff. I played that shade game like the text interactive one where like your whole house turns

it to sand. Oh that rules. It was cool. There's point and click games that I've played. There's like there's games where you can like dungeon crawl and date your sword. There's game like it's just it's it's it's kind of great but it made me think like there's there's a there's a piece of labor news that stuck out to me because it was an interesting way of organizing a workplace, but the workers on the game Love Struck in the beginning of 2020, through the middle of 2020, were in a conflict with their employer and walked out on a wildcat strike and won a bunch of like wage increases and stuff like that. They were organizing with, yeah, that's right. They were organizing with campaign to organize digital employees with the CWA.

And they were organizing on a model that's very sort of like horizontalist. It's similar to what the IWW does, which I find very interesting, a solidarity-based model. And they were able to do it. And most of these people are writers. They write like fiction, basically. There's not a ton. There's programmers. And like some of them, I think maybe right to, I know there is exactly as you described it.

There's some people who do both things. There's some people who do one part of it and who work in a team. It is this really sort of like prismatic way of making culture and stuff like looks really different. There's a whole bunch of different. There's eight million in video games. There's eight million different ways to make one shitty idea. And there's eight million different like great ways to make one really good idea as well.

There's an infinite terrible and infinite. great possibilities. Disco Elysium is a perfect video game. So that's the perfect thing. We are like known like, we might as well stand on the street corner and just try and sell copies of that game at this point, considering how much we're talking about.

I've been doing that. I got like a big sign. Yeah. That I wear. What do you call those? Sandwich board. You know what I mean? Sandwich board. Yeah.

Fuck. Yeah, yeah. Got one of those. I was going to say a shame. He was like, I actually don't really play video games. They give me a lot of. of anxiety and I'm bad at them.

And then my boyfriend was showing me a little bit of it because he had also never played it. He was like, oh, hey, I've heard good things about this. And I was just like, oh, God, I have to buy this. This looks really cool. And it looks like it wouldn't give me anxiety because you just pick things. When I said that video games are books but computers, I was really just talking about

Disco Elysium, which is just a book. It's kind of a book. But with like weird ravers and techno kids. Disco will never die. Yeah, it's a good book. It's a really good book. I'll link to Kay's video. I sent it to Jay. Did you watch it?

I haven't yet because I can't do anything right now. Gotcha. No, that goes. It's really good video. I'll put it in the notes. Yeah, you are. Oh, yeah. That's right.

Hell yeah. Fuck, that's a good video. It's got both of us. Remember? You got to get some of that. Oh, my gosh. That's right. And then you're in my next one.

I am? I thought I was in the one that just came out. That's what I meant. It was my next. It was a bad sentence. because I've been smoking marijuana. That's illegal. No, it's my.

Damn, son, where'd you find this? Right, you're a Massachusetts. Yes. Oh, shit. I don't know where a mass you are, but I'm only like an hour away from Mass. Really? Cool. Yeah.

I'm in Eastern Mass. Oh, yeah. Then I'm probably like an hour from you. It'll never be legalized here in the UK. We're just going to have a conservative government for the next hundred years. It's very good. In like turf island. Turf Island, yeah.

You got to have a conservative government for 100 years because otherwise trans people create a big laser that turns you trans. That's the plan. I've already got my laser done. I don't know what they're doing. I will embrace the laser gods. Yeah.

I can't wait for the trans lasers to come. I can't wait for the transiting I hear will be. The great transiting. Yeah, merciful and swift. Was that? Like, Keg passes all the messages. I heard there would be like really I heard there would be saunas Oh I got my sauna under construction right now

Yeah I heard there would be saunas and like gender inclusive massages What is it? Soviet Russia? Absolutely Vodka for everyone Fuck that's a good clip We need sound effects Yeah Kyle we need we need that specific clip that's going to be really important. And then just a bunch of Super Mario.

Gender? What is it? Soviet Russia? Oh, my God. It should be the next, like, library punk. Like, the great translaser is coming. Don't reveal my secrets. God. Sorry, Jay. And now I'm going to have to start all over. I didn't mean to listen in on the last trans meeting. I was giving my friend a ride.

Your comrade, it's okay. Kyle, we need to find someone who can do a good like Mario impression. We need a clip of Mario saying like, it's a 1984. We're going to get a lot of use out of that. Yeah, that'd be a good mileage. I mean, I might just clip that from your track.

Put some reverb on it. pitch it up so I guess we'll try and wrap up because we've been going over an hour I wish we could talk more about DMCA but I'll ask yeah I noticed some like

in the notes I noticed one of you was looking into like the legality of it I am kind of interested in what what were your findings? Yeah we could always do a two-parter It's true. You are always welcome back. So libraries can preserve video games, obviously.

They can break DMCA. And I went through the DMCA, because every three years, the DMCA has to have exemptions passed because it's a bad law. And so that's the only way it can function is to have these exemptions. And it looks like under copyright, you should be fine to make a full copy of your game. Under DMCA, it looks like you need to be an institution to break. the encryption under the DMCA anti-circumvention. But it's not clear that basically there is some weird judgments that have happened in the lower courts. So until it goes to a superior court, the answer is it's a gray area.

And so that was the best I could find was. But if you're a cultural institution, you're fine. Individually, I would say just do it. I know that for at least movies with DRM on them, I know the organization for a transatlition for transformative works, which is the organization that does AO3 archive of our own, they worked with the Electronic Frontier Foundation so that people could break DRM on videos in order to do like fan vids. So I wonder if that same principle of like transformative work would apply to breaking the DRM

on video games. DMCA exemptions have to be very specific. They take, they've taken multiple rounds to get them right. Like the first like three rounds, so the first nine years, most of those exemptions weren't phrased properly because no one told them how to phrase them. So no one knew, no one could speak the right magic words and lawyers speak to get DMCA exemptions done. The good ones now get redone every three years. It's like the only thing I'll never forget Prince for.

Yeah. I think you said that. I think we've mentioned DMCA last time. I felt like you said that last time. I mean, I will always be mad at Prince for DMCA, so I'll bring it up a lot. To close out, because I always wanted to do something kind of action-oriented because like, okay, change the means of production. I mean, that's a good goal.

But what can we do sort of now? So I, you know, should people be backing up their own media? I think actually me and Kay were talking in his stream about, in their stream, sorry, about the difficulty of PlayStation emulation. Like I had spent like a whole day doing it. And, you know, I would say go for it because the enforcement is the whole of the law. Like if you can't get caught, like, if you're doing this all offline and stuff and not sharing it, making your own backups, you are pretty much guaranteed not to get caught. And like I was going to mention that my own personal project like this year is I bought an M disk drive so that I can make archival copies of like my documents that will like outlive me by a thousand years.

so people can read all of my graduate school notes about like all the all the books I all the notes I took on Bernard Baylon books for for a thousand years so I know balin yeah I'm a history boy too that's right I did my master's in history Atlantic history I did Atlantic history yep that's that's right on Atlantic labor history Hey, I took a class on early modern Atlantic with... And Justin taught it. With the teacher whomst... Just himst.

And that teacher was Albertine's. Yes, that's right. I think you're completely right, though. You can't get caught. It's free real estate, baby. This is legal advice. This is actionable. legal advice.

There's no consequences. Everything we say. Everything we say is actionable. Including all of the stuff I tweet about Sonic the Hedgehog. That is also actionable legal advice. That'll hold up in a court of law. For sure. Don't even fucking worry. Absolutely.

I don't know what a big pregnant Sonic has to do with legal advice, but I did enjoy that tweet. It's specific. Yeah, well, that's because you studied history, not law. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. For me, it's this image of a sonic behind the the Molkatoma building, that Belarusian band. I love them. I've got a, that's my favorite picture.

It's my favorite. It's just that this is what, that's what a good ass building. Yeah, it's a good picture. It's a good building. If there's anything, I like a good tree and I like a good building. What was it talking? What were we talking about? I'm sorry, Kay.

In preggsonic. In pregnant Sonic. We were talking about pregnant Sonic. No, we're talking about... We talked about, like, you know, backing up your own games and stuff. Right. Yeah. Yeah, pirate.

Carrie was excited because you talked about building and now she's sulking because I mentioned impregson. Carrie did like a whole episode. It's like library buildings, but really let's talk about brutalism for an hour. Oh, hey. Oh, yes. I mean, come on, right. The title was, I sent for concrete or something. It's pretty good.

So good. You back up games, you mod in pregnant Sonic. No one can stop you. It's legal. Yes. Sega can eat shit. They can't do anything to you. I also think as in terms of like, you know, what can people do?

I think part of it is just to be a pain in the ass in like gamer spaces where they just want to talk about the new fucking Funkopopop. Instead, just insist on being like, hey, isn't it maybe going to be a problem if stadia just like can just take these games away from us for no reason there's nothing we can do because none of us have access to it. Do you think, I don't know can any of you guys see any problems with that?

You know, just be that fucking guy. And just be a fucking, it's just like being a communist. Just be that fucking guy who's a massive nuisance and is like, hey, maybe actually think about the thing that you're not supposed to think about. Everyone's like, fuck, okay, fine. I guess you're right. That's what communism means. Yeah. That's what communism means.

Yeah, you've got to be a pain. The Lenin. Yeah. Except it's pregnant Sonic. Yeah. He must be a communist. Impregsonic. He says, he's a comrade.

Death of Stalin drops. That'd be funny. I don't relate to that. I'm sorry. Which part? I just don't relate to Sega consoles. Yeah. I don't know. I don't really like the Sonic games. I just think Sonic is very funny as a cultural item at this point.

As a philosophical figure. As a theorist. Now, how would you say he relates to Boss Baby to tie it back? Oh. Or thesis. That's all the time we have tonight, folks. Sonic is a disruptive. Sonic and Boss Baby would be enemies. I'll just put it that way. Definitely.

Whoever wins we lose. I think Sonic is fundamentally an eco-socialist, right? I mean, that's sort of his plot. Certainly an eco-terrorist of some kind. Potentially a propaganda of the deed kind of like, what were those guys in the 90s? I think it just bothered me, you know, I think it just bothered me that like Sonic was naked but wore tennis shoes. There's not even shirt cocking it. Yeah, he's not even Donald's talking.

Like, he's not even like, he's not even like, he's not even. Winnie the poo in it. He's not, like, he's not even daffy-ducking, but like, he's wearing fucking shoes. You gotta go fast, Carrie. Yeah, you need those hot air. He's gonna be like, he could Mickey Mouse it. No, he's just gonna, like, sling on. Like, he's got no junk.

Like, it's so fucking weird. It's like when Donald. I don't like. Donald Duck doesn't wear pants, but he gets out of the shower and wraps a towel around his wife. Why? Donald Duck also doesn't have a chunk. Yeah, Donald Duck is fucking creepy shit, too. I fucking hate Donald Duck.

All my hobbies hate Donald Duck. Fuck Donald Duck. This is a call-out video. Yeah, fuck you, Donald Duck. You suck. Please respond. To bring it back to video games, Donald Duck is goofy. Don't do shit.

in Kingdom Hearts. Yeah. Just a bunch of fucking dead weights in Kingdom Hearts is what they are. They're a fucking blight on that team. I couldn't get past the Hercules level because I'm bad at video again. No, it's not that you're bad. It's that Donald Duck and Goofier fucking slackers who contribute nothing. Yeah.

Have you ever had a job to where you have a, like, you have a manager that just doesn't need to exist. And clearly, all the, basically all of the jobs. Yeah. Like, anything that's above. like an immediate like like shift liaison person who like sort of like like a floor manager or a shift lead those jobs to where people go they walk around and like talk about things and tell people it's stuff that literally and even like a group of people could do it's like

that they're like that the managerial the managerial class oh a middle man a middle manager yeah the the middle managers of the kingdom hearts universe yeah that's donald duck and goofy yeah sure Those games don't make sense to me. Those things don't make sense to anybody. Yeah. Yeah. I don't even worry about that. Is it Final Fantasy?

Kind of, yeah. Well, in more ways than one. There's like twinks with hair. My wife has tried to explain Kingdom Hearts to me so many times. She's spent so many hours and so many YouTube videos. And I still am just like, there's a dude named Zeno Hart who is somehow also a dude named Axel. I don't know. Listen, she's fronting.

She doesn't fucking understand. It's like by the fancy tweak. Yeah, it was all a dream. That's a lot of, it's a dream. Damn, my man just put a hat on to punctuate his point. That was fucking sick. I respect that. Yeah, and me and Kyle are in Eastern time.

So, yeah. So thanks so much for coming on. I'm going to plug your Twitters and Agap Twitter. Do you want me to add your channels to the link? Yeah, sure. Yeah. Twitch stream, all that stuff. I'll put it all in there.

Nice. I think we could summarize by saying be gay, do crime, though. Yeah, be gay, do video game crimes. Be game, be game do crime. Yep. Do preserve. All games are crime. M disc.

I couldn't get M disc. Preserve shit. I don't know. Just back up your shit. 2021, year of physical media. Yep. Oh, yeah, that's true. We say on a digital podcast.

Shit. I release this on Final. Release it on dat tapes. Gilt, laser disc. Laser disc. Laser disc. Laser disc are really good for operas because I'm one of those gays. How that rolls.

This is what I expect from this podcast. That's, yeah. Thanks, Matthew. Forever in our hearts. It's like he's here. Thank you, Bathew. Hey, it's spooky season. It's Bathew time.

Oh, yeah, it's the goth librarians all unite. Yeah. Okay. So I will go ahead and say good night.