The Press Box - Ep. 219: 'Achievement Oriented' on 'The Last Guardian' and 'Westworld'

Episode Date: December 8, 2016

The Ringer's Ben Lindbergh and Jason Concepcion react to recent announcements of new installments in a few of their favorite game franchises, then call New York Times contributing game critic Chris Suellentrop (8:30) to talk about 'The Last Guardian,' the genius of Fumito Ueda (13:00), and the legacy of 'Ico' and 'Shadow of the Colossus' (19:00). Lastly, Ben, Jason, and Chris talk to novelist and 'Westworld' writer-editor Charles Yu (29:15) about the video game roots of the show's first season. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode of Achievement-oriented is brought to you by Bose. As the official sound of the NFL, Bose gets players closer to their peak performance and gets you closer to them with powerful products like their quiet comfort 35 wireless headphones. These are Bose's best headphones yet. No noise, no wires, just your music and you. Hello and welcome to Achievement-oriented Channel 33's gaming podcast. My name is Beth Lindberg, and I'm a writer for the ringer.com. And on the other line, he's promised to take me to where the mountains meet the sea. It's my ringer colleague, Jason Concepcion.

Hey, Jason. Hello. So we've got a busy show ahead of us. So we're going to be talking about The Last Guardian, the new game from Autour Fumito Ueda, the man who made Iko and Shadow of the Colossus, two of the best games we have ever played. Spoiler, not a masterpiece. Yeah, yeah. So those games were a ways in the past, and we've been waiting for the last Guardian, the follow-up to Shadow the Colossus for quite a while. It's a long-delayed game.

It's gone through many different iterations and consoles, and it has finally arrived, and we have played it. So you and I will talk about it. We're also going to bring on Chris Sullen Trot, who is one of our favorite video game writers and speakers to talk about it with us. And in the second half of the episode, we're going to be talking about Westworld with Chris,

but also with Charles Yu, who is a writer and story editor for Westworld. So we're going to talk about the video game influences on the show. Little show you might have heard about. Yeah. And first, we're just going to talk for a few minutes. The Game Awards happened since we had our last episode, and this was a very newsy game awards. And there were a few big announcements I just wanted to gauge your level of interest in.

And I should say that I'm not really one for pre-release hype. I kind of have my hands full with games that are actually out. And if you are putting out a teaser for your game that is coming out four years from now, I'm not that excited. I can kind of wait and see. I'm just in general. Like, I'm not the guy who plays the alpha and the early access. I will wait for the finish product. Let me just say that I've always been in pre-release hype.

I've been a fervent. I remember seeing the first Halo 2 trailer on like GameSpot in like 2002 and losing my mind and watching it every day for like a year. Yeah, I used to be more like that. I remember watching Grand Theft Auto previews and breaking down the geography and what is this building supposed to be. And then you do that for a while and then your enthusiasm sort of fizzles out because it takes a long time to make a good game. So anyway, just wanted to ask you about sequels or spiritual sequels of sorts in three franchises that we love. So The Last of Us, Part 2 is a game that is going to happen. and this one is very far away,

but we saw a few minutes of kind of cutscene that set it up and showed that there's going to be a time jump from the first game. We also saw that there is going to be a new uncharted game, which is sort of a... It's between DLC and a fully fledged game. It's somewhere in the middle there, and it is not a Nathan Drake game,

sort of a spinoff starring a... character from the second Uncharted. And lastly, the new Mass Effect. They showed a few minutes of gameplay from Mass Effect Andromeda. So we got a better look at that than we did at those other two games. So what is your level of anticipation for each of these? Well, let's see. I think for Last of Us, I'm incredibly excited. I think that the response to that game was interesting because there's a lot of people who are saying that Last of Us ended so perfectly, and it really did, that it doesn't need a sequel. And I think games have really entered a different sphere of popular and critical acclaim when

serious people are seriously arguing that a hit game should not have a sequel. And I agree with the line of the argument. I just think it's a really interesting. I'm very excited. Mass Effect, I'm through the roof about. There's something about that game that is, it's just, it's just, it's just, it's just, just one of the best choice and dialogue-driven games that's ever been done by where is great at what they do. And I'm extremely excited.

Uncharted, I'm ambivalent. Chloe and Nadine. Yeah, I don't know. No, not so much. Okay. But I will play. I'll play. What about you?

Yeah. I think I'm the same way. And I had those kind of conflicted feelings about The Last of Us. Not really. I'm generally in favor of reboots and revivals and all sorts of. follow-ups to things that were great because worst case, they don't ruin the original for me. And best case, they're good. And they bring back some of the magic. And maybe they even update it in interesting ways. It's like the X-Files revival, which was largely awful. But there was one episode in it that I

thought stood up to the best of the X-Files. And it was worth it just for that. It didn't sully my memory of previous X-Files seasons. Not that those were always good anyway. But right, as you mentioned, it had the perfect ending and so there's the temptation to just leave it there. On the other hand, the fact that Nadi Dog is so good at telling those stories and wrapped it up in such a satisfying way makes me think that they're going to handle it really well and respectfully and make a great follow-up that we will be happy to play. So there's kind of an opportunity cost with a really great developer where if they didn't make a Last of Us follow-up, they'd probably just make some other really good original game and maybe we'd be just as happy with that.

But I am not sorry to see it. And I think my level of enthusiasm for the other two games is roughly in line with yours. So speaking of some of our favorites, we did an article today. We did sort of a Google Doc's dialogue about The Last Guardian and we're about to talk about it. But if you want to go read that in written form, you can. And at the end of that article, we sort of stuck in a top 10 for 2016, which is, of course, a tremendous mistake. because as soon as you identify your favorite something, we are already getting tweets about things that were left off the list.

I should say that for most of this year, I was not in the mindset of someone who would have to produce a top 10 list at the end of the year. But I think that's what, but it's, it makes it authentic. That's why it's an authentic list. Right. Now that we have this podcast, we play more games. I think we feel obligated to play all the big games in a way that we didn't when we were just sort of writing about games sporadically and,

having them be more of a hobby. So these are the games we came to organically and naturally and not because we felt pressured to. So we mentioned our 10 there. You can go find it at the ringer.com. And you wanted to give a quick shout out to one that just missed the cut. Yeah. And I feel really bad about it because I think it's an incredible achievement. Star do Valley by chucklefish games. It's really just one guy, Eric Barone, aka Concerned Ape on Twitter. It's a passion project of his. It's very much like Harvest Moon, if you've ever played that, a farming simulator. Yes, I did have a Harvest Moon phase. I recommend anyone to play this game.

You can get it on console from the game stores, and you can play it on Steam. It works on Macs. I played on my Mac. There is so much content in this game, so many things to do, that you will be shocked. It's shocking that one person made this game. And it's just incredible and very, very charming to look at Play Star Do Valley. All right. If you're vouching for it, I will pick it up.

So let's discuss Last Guardian and just to set things up, we're not going to spoil anything. But basically, this game puts you in the shoes of an unnamed, mostly silent, or at least not decipherable language-speaking protagonist who is thrust into a abandoned ruin with this griffin-like creature called Trico. And essentially you progress. You just go from one room to another. The goal is not entirely clear, but it's more about the experience of it more so than the plot and the aesthetics of it. Oeda is, of course, a master of that.

So we are now welcoming in Chris Sullen Trop, who is one of our favorite voices on video games. He is a contributing game critic at The New York Times and many other outlets. He also hosts, Shall We Play a Game, which is one of our favorite video game podcast. So it's nice to have him on ours. Hey, Chris. Hey, thanks for having me. It's an honor. Thanks for coming on. Pleasure for us too. So you are also playing The Last Guardian as we are or just were. And you have written extensively in the past about Ueda and Ueda's previous games. And you have very illuminating opinions on him and his work. So I imagine that you have been eagerly anticipating this game for many, many years as we have. Yes. I mean, I've been extremely excited to play this game. There's almost no way this.

game could live up to the anticipation, right? Right. Even if it were a third masterpiece, which I'm not ready to say, you know, it's just, it has, these are not good examples to cite, but it has the weight of something like the Phantom Menace or the Godfather Three coming to it, where it's just been so many years and it's been so long. And to be honest, it's not worth the 10-year weight, right? It's super interesting, but it's not worth the weight.

Well, would you say that he has developed any new tricks in the intervening years? I think that this game is pretty clearly a blend of the core mechanics of his previous two games. So you have the companionship and the bond between these two unspeaking outcasts who are kind of thrown together. And then you have a giant animal creature. So it's taking something that was really attractive about each of his previous games and putting them together, which in theory might make an even better game, but I don't know that it does in practice. I felt as I played it and I liked it a lot

that I had sort of seen this stuff before. I was happy to see it again because it's been a while and I don't know that anyone does what Uwaita does or has topped him in the time that we've been waiting. But do you think he has picked up any new tricks or is this sort of the same old artistry? I mean, I've been binging this game and I don't feel. think this is a really bingeable game. I think I would like it. I almost liked it better as I was

not playing it overnight and thinking about it than when I came back. I mean, I smile all the time. There are all these little great moments. You know, Trico just jumped into a pool of water and then got out and shook himself off like a dog. And it's, it's incredibly delightful. But you're Right. It almost is just, what if Eco were Shadow of the Colossus were one game? Like, what if what if the Colossi were Eco, or actually were the boy and you were Eco, right? Yeah. And that's super interesting, and it's more interesting if you've played the other ones, but it's recognizably one of his games. I'm not sure that's a bad thing. I mean, a Scorsese movie looks like a Scorsese movie, even if it's an Edith Wharton novel. Right. A hallmark of Oweida's games is kind of like, ruthless simplicity of play that is like it's almost anti-game it's almost anti-video game and just like how

simplistic the puzzles are and my theory is that what makes that so effective in the context of the game besides the way like the art works together with the story and is just that he i believe he intentionally makes the game controls clunky in order to create a level of frustration almost that that elicits an emotional response and just on a more obvious level kind of delays the player's ability to engage with these very simple puzzles. Do you agree with that or do you think that that's crazy? I'm ascribing way too much or tour ship to Ui to it. I mean, I want to say it's right. I mean, everything else in his game is so well designed. It would be insane if he didn't realize that, you know, making the triangle, the jump button wasn't.

automatically. That's what's the tell to me. See, those are the things that are the tell, because he's intentionally contravening this kind of mechanical play language that's been set up in platformers for years. You know, he's intentionally using the wrong buttons that you would expect, and I feel like there's no way that's not intentional. I mean, it has to be, right?

I mean, on some level, it dovetails with this desire for it to be naturalistic. Well, of course the triangle should be the, jump button, right? It points up, but it is not how we talk with our fingers with our video games, and that makes it distancing and awkward and weird. But there is a perverse way as you learn that language that you become attached to the characters. I certainly found myself very distanced from the game and the opening moments, and now that I'm many, many hours in, I have a sort of patience where I know, oh, okay, I know we just, I just sort of need to coax Trico like you coax a dog, you know, to jump to the next place. And he may not do what, like my dog, he may not do what I want him to do all the time. But he'll get there. Right. Yeah. I mean, my opening moments with the game were press pause and try to figure out why it feels like that. I thought, am I inverted? Am I not inverted? Should I be the other way? And I went into the menu and tried to find, some setting that would explain why it felt the way it did. There's a clear, noticeable lag when

you try to move your character or move the camera. There's just a delay that disconnects you from your avatar. And I found the camera very frustrating. And I'm with Jason on the controls. I think there's sort of a thematic union there between what he is trying to accomplish, what he's trying to elicit in the player. And as you mentioned, Chris Trico is really tough to control at times. And so when you actually manage to make him do something that you want him to do, it's a real feeling of accomplishment. And I think you get a sense of investment in him because you are pulling spears out of his side or you're finding food for him or you're opening locked gates so he can go through

or you're just trying to get him to do something that you want him to do for once. But the camera itself, particularly in the indoor areas, is just a constant serious obstacle that I don't think serves any sort of narrative. purpose that I can discern. I think the camera is objectively terrible. I mean, I just don't, there's just no way around it. And it's, and it, you know, you're, you're riding Trico and he's, in fact, the camera, they try not to make it fill with cutscenes, but, but during the most dramatic moments, these sort of slow-mo jumps when Trico saves you or you cling on to his tail, they take you out of the game camera because the game camera doesn't work well enough to

support those moments. I'm going to make an, here's my, other crazed tour argument for the camera, which I agree is objectively terrible. I do wonder if some of the ways that the game tries to be anti-game, for instance, like, you know, the puzzles are so simple that one of the ways the game keeps you from just finding them and solving them right away is just making them very hard to find. Everything looks like everything. There's plenty of climable ledges and these blue doors that are glowing and different glowing items that in any other game would signal to the player, hey, here's the way you go. Here's the thing that you need to engage with.

All these red herrings. And the way the camera is like basically uncontrollable, in certain situations when the game is working, eliciting a real emotional response, the camera not being focusable kind of helps hide those puzzles in a way. Like it makes you have to kind of look at this entire environment and walk around, explore it. in ways that are kind of like unfocused. That's, and I think that's kind of what he was going for. That said, yeah, I mean, I had a situation where I was riding on Toriko in a hallway,

and the camera just went black because it couldn't figure out. It couldn't figure out what to show, you know. And there's plenty of times where the camera will just cut and then come back from an opposite angle or a different angle, and it's just very, very, very disordial. I mean, I agree. It feels like a real space, which is funny because it's incredibly linear. and there's sort of nowhere to go. Like, it's both really obvious where to go in the way that a design space is,

but it also doesn't feel super designed. It doesn't feel, I guess what I mean by that is it doesn't feel contrived. When you're playing even a well-designed, you know, naughty dog game or Ubisoft game, there are these really clear indicators of what's interactive in the world. And that's just not true in this game. And that's what's really remarkable. about it. And they're also, and this is a hallmark of all of his games, outside of the barrels, which are not really collectibles, there are no collectibles. There are no little mini games to

entertain you as you're moving from place to place. There's no sort of like coins. It's just, that's why it feels sort of like an ungame. Right. It's, it's completely anti-skinner input in a way that is so unlike anything really that's, that's coming out right now. And it's the same thing with Colossus and Eco. Like, it's the best experience I had with the game, game was, I had just gotten in a fight with Trico, I just killed all these sermons. It's a minor spoiler. And, you know, the narration says, you need to calm Triko down. He was very agitated after this fight and barking and jumping around.

And the uncontrollable camera kind of hedged towards this tunnel that I had not yet explored. So I was like, okay, the game is telling me that I need to explore the tunnel. I explored the tunnel, and it led to other areas. There's a chain you can climb to a meadow, and I walked around the meadow, found nothing, backtracked several times. And then the answer was simply that you are supposed to pet Tariko and you just hold down circle. And that was an amazing moment for me because in real life, if you're with an animal companion that's agitated, what are you going to do? You can try and pet him, right? Talk soothingly to him.

But in a game, that's never the answer, right? You know, the answer is you've got to find some potion or something. And it was so fantastically anti-game that I thought this is how the game at its height is supposed to work. It's just that I'm not sure they were able to calibrate all the elements. elements for all the environments in a way that makes it not really frustrating at times. That's my theory. You are a fantastic Uyeda surrogate. Yes.

They just put you in the spin room after the debate and you explain why everything made sense. So, yeah, I agree. I think it's so impressive. The puzzles really keep hitting that sweet spot, even though he gives himself so little to work with. There are very few items. There are very few enemies.

And yet he manages to do so much with that. And I got stuck several times, but never really in a frustrating way, except for a couple times where it was kind of camera and control related. But most of the time you have that satisfying epiphany where you realize what you were supposed to do and you actually feel like you could have figured that out earlier if you were just a little bit quicker on the uptake. And I love that the whole world is not explained very much. It's just this beautiful, mysterious, dreamlike place. And we never find out who built these abandoned soaring ruins and what these designs you come across in the environment that Trico is scared of for some reason. You just have to sort of infer why that would be. And that is fine.

I don't need to know all the answers. I don't need to know exactly how this world works. I can just enjoy the scenery and the whole experience of it without needing to know the details. Yeah, no lore, no sort of compulsive. game aspects. It, you know, I once wrote... No audio logs. No audio logs.

It's almost silent. You know, often it's just you and the wind, which is what Eco and Shadow the Colossus were like. There is a score, but it's used very sparingly. And, you know, I once wrote an essay in the New York Times about the relationship between, actually it was a bear with me, but it was a relationship between dog walking, child rearing, and video games, and how affection is created by these rote activities. you do and it's just sort of the doing of them. But this game, as Jason was saying earlier, eliminates some of those road activities and says, actually, no, what you need to do is crawl

up on the very top of Trico's head. And if you pet him right there, he'll lay down and he'll put his head on the ground. And that was an incredible little discovery for me that was just prompted by the fact that the narrator says, oh, if you scratch him in different places, he'll do different things. How much of the last guardian you think is a direct response to the fact that you're just kind of like a natural wonder murder machine in Shadow of the Klossus? Like it's, it strikes me that like you spend Shadow of the Klossus just remorselessly slaughtering these wonderfully gentle creatures that are hurting no one. And then in this game, it's almost like the answer to it. Like, oh, actually, you know, just be kind to this creature that's an obvious amalgam of several kinds of like, animals. Yeah, and he could protect you. Right. It's definitely in keeping with the themes,

as we said at the outset of all his games. I guess it's too much, I guess, to say I wish it was a masterpiece. It's not. It's just, it's really interesting. I wish he made more of them. I wish I could get, I mean, maybe it's impossible, but I wish I could get a game like this from him every, you know, every five years, every three years. And then we wouldn't put so much, so much weight on it. We wouldn't say, oh, it needs to be everything to us. Why are Eco and Colossus masterpieces? I guess explained for people who maybe haven't played those games since their 10-year-plus old games now, why those are so beloved and so culturally important.

Yeah, I mean, Eco is just a game about holding a girl's hand and trying to escape a castle. And there is some combat in it. And you're trying to Eco, who's the Princess, gets sort of like sucked down into this black vortex. if you lose the fight, and it makes you feel guilty and weak instead of, you know, exhilarated and strong. And there are Baroque puzzles in Eco. Don't get me wrong. There's one involving a windmill that I was nearly impossible to figure out.

But it's what's unique about both of them, or not unique, but what's most strong about them is the fact that your relationship with the character in the games, whether it's the colossi that you're defeating or Eco the Princess, is conveyed almost entirely. through interaction, almost entirely through this, what's happening between you and the screen, not through dialogue, some through animation, but really it's through

the interaction between the player and the character, and that, it's so unusual and so strong and well done, that's what makes the masterpieces. Yeah, Colossus for me is the more consistent masterpiece just because it takes so long to kill these things, you know,

with the bad controls and everything that when you actually do it, there's a real feeling of exhilaration that you kind of persevered through these terrible mechanics to kill this giant beast. And then as soon as you do, and there's that feeling of that rush of satisfaction, you know, the creature lets out this really baleful moan, death moan, and the music turns sad. And there's no, it's absolutely inarguable that you did a bad thing. The game is telling you, you just did something wrong. And that mix of feelings is unlike anything else that you'll get in a video game. Yeah, from the outset, the game tells you you're on the wrong side here.

Yeah. But you really want to save this girl. And if you want to bring her back to life, which you probably shouldn't do, you need to go kill these beautiful creatures. And then you're right. It's totally thrilling to do it. You're clinging from them. I mean, some of them are like more than an hour. I'm like hanging like I'm some sort of action hero dangling from a helicopter.

And much like The Last Guardian, you often know what you have to do, but it becomes difficult to do. But it definitely, Shadow the Colossus is the gamiest of his games. And maybe that's what makes it the most successful. It's certainly the most popular. I have a soft spot for Eco just because it's so much more, so it's more different, more unusual. But Shadow the Colossus is unquestionably, totally brilliant. Yeah. I don't think The Last Guardian quite came together in the way that those did, or at least

the expectations had been raised to the point that it didn't exceed them to the extent that those did. But if it's not really one of my very favorite games of the year, it's definitely going to be one of the most memorable, I think, and even just the attachment to Trico and how well animated he was and the emotional bond that you form. And we won't spoil anything, but I spent the entire game dreading that something bad would happen to him and hoping that that wouldn't be the case. And so I found it a pretty fulfilling, albeit frustrating experience. And video games are very unforgiving as a medium to slow workers, I think, just because the ground shifts under you so much while you're trying to finish your game. Even if it's a normal development cycle, the evolution is so much more rapid than it is in more established media or less technology-dependent media. And so if you are developing a game over multiple hardware generations, it's really hard, I think, to produce something that everyone will be satisfied with.

But this came close in enough ways that I wouldn't consider it a let down, really. I'd be more forgiving of it. And I am forgiving. One, I'm not finished with it, but there's so much to admire in it. But I'd be more forgiving of it if it wasn't filled with on-screen text prompts, which seemed a total violation of it. of his design philosophy. Yeah. And extremely unnecessary because there are only about three things you can never do.

Yeah, right? I mean, if you compare it to, I don't know if you guys played inside, which is Playdedds platformer that sort of Super Mario Brothers Meet the Road, which is similar to this game in a lot of ways. That game is totally wordless. And you walk up to objects and you press a few buttons and you quickly figure out what it is you need to do. And in The Last Guardian instead, it's like, hey, hey, don't you need to grab this, grab

it, grab it. And you're like, well, I know I need to grab that. Do you have any insight on to, into what these delays were about? I mean, I kind of get the picture that, you know, obviously he is a perfectionist, and it seems as if he was developing a game that there was no way the PS3 was ever going to be able to run. Does that sound accurate to you? It seems accurate to me. I mean, I have no reporting to back this up. But just having played the game, which I played on a PlayStation 4 Pro, and the game strains my PlayStation 4 pro, like Trico has so many feathers and he's so beautiful and he's leaping and then the frame rate starts chugging. And I'm like, really?

Like, this was a game we were going to run on a PlayStation 3? You know, I didn't play Shadow the Colossus on PlayStation 2, but some, you know, that was a game that came out late in that cycle. And I guess it pushed the limits of that. I played it on PS3 when it came out in the HD remaster, the Eco and Shadow the Colossus. And so I didn't have those issues when I played it. This is a game that, like, is pushing the limits of the console that was just released. All right. So let's take a quick break for a word from our sponsor.

And then we'll be back with Charles U to talk about Westworld. All right, it's time to remind you about Bose. As the official sound of the NFL, Bose gets players closer to their peak performance and gets you closer to them with powerful products like their quiet, comfort 35 wireless headphones. I have a pair of those bad boys and I can confidently say that they're Bose's best headphones yet. No noise, no wires, just your music and you. For more information, visit bows.com. All right, so we are back now.

Chris is still with us, and we are also joined by Charles Yu, who is an author. He wrote a great novel called How to Live Safely in a science fictional universe that I really enjoyed a few years ago and definitely had some video game DNA in it. And now he has transitioned to TV writing, and he was the story editor for the first season of Westworld. Also co-wrote episode 8. 8 with Lisa Joy. Charles, hey, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me.

So we want to talk about video game parallels and influences in Westworld, and we should be clear that it seems like a lot of that comes from the showrunners, Jonathan Nolan and Lisa Joy, and I imagine that you inherited it to a certain extent. So at what point in the process did you come on board and how explicit was it from the beginning that, hey, this is a video game influenced show, so we shouldn't shy of it. away from that. Right. So I came on along with the rest of the writing staff that Jonah Nolan and Lisa Joy, they hired us. So there was a room and we came on after they had written and shot the pilot. So they already had, you know, as you put it, the DNA in their pilot and conception of the show for sure.

It was baked in there and we inherited it. And it was really exciting because I think it's something that was, you know, you can see elements or ingredients of it in the pilot, but I think it wasn't until getting a chance to hear more of their vision for how the show would unfold that we understood how much it was, you know, sort of part of, an important part of what was the story going forward. I'm reading your story, Hero Absorves Major Damage right now, which is really great. It's kind of like this POV, you know, from the point of view of a video game character in a, action slash RPG game. And it seems like video games in fiction, merging of video games in fiction is really starting to

happen now is like the video game generation transitions into the wider media world. How does your own gamerness influence your writing on the show or did it? You know, I think that having some familiarity with games certainly help. I'm not, I would describe myself as sort of casual plus, I think, is, you know, I've probably more familiar with games being, you know, a dude who grew up in the 80s for the most part, than, you know, most of the population, I would say. But I'm not, but like the, in terms of the bell curve distribution of hours spent playing games, I'm still probably in a fairly fat part of the curve. I'm not, I'm not a serious, serious gamer. The game that, besides Tetris,

the game that probably obsessed me the most in my life was Street Fighter 2. So, but that said, I enjoy reading about games weirdly more than I enjoy playing. The main part of it is just I don't have a ton of time having kids in a job and all that. And so not that you couldn't make time. I just don't. This is one of my favorite things about video games, which is that even people who play them, which Charlie does, are like, well, now I don't really know anything about this. Yeah, yeah.

Having spent a couple of days over. Thanksgiving playing Minecraft with my son. I'm pretty much lying right now. I'm going to bust you on this casual gamer stance because I dug up an old tweet of yours from six and a half years ago where you wrote, and I don't know whether this is still true, but you said video games are the governing framework for my mental representation of the world, which sounds pretty core to your being. So what did you mean by that and is that still the case? I think so. I mean, so I guess this is a lesson for me. So I guess this is a lesson for me to not tweet things because having a six-year-old tweet quoted back at you is always a lesson of some sort. But I think what I meant and still think about that is it's that growing up with

games sort of permeating my consciousness, it's first person versus a kind of third-person experience. I think, you know, when you watch stuff in a movie or TV show, it's a mirror essentially. When you play a game, it's an avatar. And I think that does different. things to your brain. I don't know the science of it, but I feel it. I feel like it does different things to me psychologically, even emotionally. You know, there's that weird little tick that I used to have, my friends would have. Sometimes you'd want the character to go left so bad that you would actually be moving your hands left or your whole, you'd lean left. And I don't know what that means, but I think that says something. And, you know, the other part of it, I think, is that there's,

you know, when you're watching a show or a film, it's a world that's already been made for you. You know, it's past tense versus the present tense of a game. And when you're playing a game, you're not, you can be in a world that someone's made for you. You are, I guess, but you can also be given a vehicle or a tool to explore a large number of potential worlds. And that's, that's another thing that I think that has stayed with me and including in my own fiction. And Chris, you've written and talked about the video game parallels that you saw in Westworld, and you talked about it after the first episode, I think. when we were just introduced to Westworld and, okay, this seems to have some open world game parallels.

And then you also followed up on that after the season was over. So was your initial impression that this was a very video gamey show backed up by the rest of the season? For you, did it go beyond that kind of initial? This reminds me of a video game to commenting on video games in a certain way or kind of going beyond the superficial. resemblances? Oh, I think so. I mean, I think I'm stealing this from Laura Miller, but Laura Miller wrote in Slate that, you know, it's a show that meditates, among other things, on video games and what it means when we are cruel, even when no one gets hurt. It's so obviously inspired by Skyrim and Grand Theft Auto 3 and Open World Games. I guess my question for Charlie is, to what extent there was

talk among the creators about the role of the players and if there's any way to play this game virtuously because by the end of the show, the game makes monsters of everyone. Right. That is a good question. I think that the idea of your moral choices, or just choices, right, in a game following you within the life of, you know, that game before you hit reset and try again. It's the idea that you're, you're going to have to carry around the baggage of that. That was a, I think that was a really important idea and one that I'm guessing, I don't know, but I'm guessing a lot of people that don't have familiarity with games may not realize that games, you know, have come to have that ability to have the complexity, right?

And so I think that was a really interesting idea for people. As to whether or not people could play virtuously, I mean, we have Dr. Ford in episode four talking to Teresa Cullen about, the idea that early on, they did try to have storylines that were, you know, that were hopeful, is the word he used. And so I think that, you know, what we're seeing is the cumulative effect of a lot of gamer hours in the park and the designers of the game realizing that the empirical data kind of doesn't lie. That humans seem to like to play the game a certain way. One of the big discussions around games over the last 10 years has been the kind of tension between story and play and whether those two things can work together. I think what's interesting about Westworld is it's an immersive live action video game in a sense.

But there are these written narratives that are part of how the NPCs, quote unquote, the hosts comport themselves within the world. Do you have any thoughts on how story would work in a quote-unquote real Westworld situation? How tightly written could a host narrative be and how much of it would just be letting people find story on their own? Right. I think that was a fascinating area for me. And Jonah and Lisa had this concept built in from the pilot of these narrative loops. And the tension between the constrained kind of on-rail's nature of, of a loop just for logistical and technical practicality, right?

How many moves down a decision tree or how much complexity could you have in a storyline before it would get exponentially kind of insane, right? Right. And so we wrestled with that because, and yet at the same time, we have the luxury of, it's a TV show, not a game. We didn't actually have to code or even present an actual framework. So the tension is in finding something that is, I think a defensible conceptual thing.

Like this is, you know, X years in the future and X decades in the future probably. And so we've got an opportunity to sort of project forward and extrapolate what could be possible. And I think what was really interesting to me on the kind of individual host level is the kind of what is their algorithm for improvising? What's the range of possible things that they can understand or pretend to understand? And, you know, this gets back to the sort of possibility space thing. Like, how can they move into sort of an adjacent thing that they may not quite understand? And how would that fuel growth in sort of hosts learning? Because I think we had this idea that you go through these loops.

It's built into the, you know, and it certainly comes out a lot in the finale. And Ford says it in a number of ways, I think, that it took time. Like, it actually mattered the paths and the learning that they did. And humans were kind of this fuel for the, for the host. host's learning curve. And the host needed to go through decades and decades of this pain and suffering, which was actually improving, I think, their algorithm to the point where, and this is me a little bit putting, you know, I don't want to put too much of a fine point on it because I think it's already in the show, but this is the way I really enjoyed thinking about what's

going on in all those years that they're going through this stuff. How technical was the writer's room's knowledge of Westworld and how the hosts function. Because if you are watching the show, a lot of that is sort of left out, left to the imagination. I know there are many supplementary materials online, but for the show Bible or whatever you were referring to, did you all have a very clear idea in mind of how exactly everything functions in this world, even if it's not necessarily on screen? Yeah. I mean, I think technically, you know, it was important. I think Jonah and Lisa are both incredibly, they have a very detail-oriented. They can be very sort of meticulous about, and they want to be.

I think they wanted to, even if it's just the tip of the iceberg and 95% of it's never going to surface on the screen or even in backstory, it's, I think they knew that they'd have to build a kind of structurally, you know, they'd have to build something that could withstand scrutiny because people would, and it proved to be true, people have read it and people all over the internet would try to figure out what was going on. And even if you can't see it in the surface level of the story, I think you can feel it, whether or not it all holds together. And of course, like any endeavor, there are going to be challenges. They're going to be times when it's a story still.

But I think it was very important to them. And I think the Bible, for me, the technical Bible I always assumed was in their heads. And I think it really was. Like they knew coming in that they had this conception. we built a lot of details together as a team. And what was remarkable to me was in watching the finale a few days ago that it stayed pretty close to it's, it was, you know, a lot of the really like big visions they had, they kind of aimed for, you know, a couple years ago when they were doing the pilot that they were still there at the end. So that was really cool to see. So how much thought goes into, I'm sure it's a lot, the answer is a lot, but how much thought goes into what is this world outside of the park like now?

How does that influence morals inside the park? How deep does your show Bible go when you guys are putting that together? Pretty deep. I mean, you know, Jonah ran another show, co-ran another show called Person of Interest on CBS. And he's, you know, if you sort of look at his career in terms of things that he's clearly interested in. And same with Lisa. I mean, she's got a TV background, but has also written sci-fi features. And it's, they really sort of wanted to have this kind of big concept that we may or may

not see ever unfold. And if we do see it, it'll, it'll unfold over seasons. So we were kind of just playing with the park this season. And I, I'm excited to see what's going to happen in future seasons. I think it's, in terms of what we're going to see, I really have no idea. I think it's going to be amazing, but I just can't even predict. It's funny how we've become accustomed now, you know, in this sort of like post-game of Thrones world where, of course, season is a total has new characters and new settings and new plots like that that's just not how tv worked for for generations yeah it's so true it's it's like oh more of this you know more of this amazing thing that it's like why didn't like it's funny how fast our expectations get raised to the level of

whatever we just last saw but yeah it's it's it's really true when you were working on this i mean i think that west world definitely shows us sort of this this this monstrousness in the guests that comes out when they visit Westworld. On the other hand, I sort of sympathize as a player of video games who comes into a virtual world and is told that the people I am harming are not actually suffering and do not have free will and do not have a sort of concept of self. And so I imagine that when suddenly all of these hosts attain consciousness, there will be some soul searching among people who frequented Westworld and committed some acts that they might

not have otherwise. And so I'm kind of wondering, you know, what I should be feeling now playing games post Westworld. Should I be feeling some greater guilt than I did before? Or should I not? Because in our world, these really are simple AI routines and not complex machines with their own humanity. Right. It's weird because I never saw myself as this kind of person, but I'm going to throw my son under the bus. He's seven.

And he's like a really sweet kid. So let me just preface this. But he has a particularly, like, he's particularly talented at finding creative ways of torturing, like, you know, very passive creatures in Minecraft. and I have started to, you know, I think he's turning me slightly black hat in that regard. I'm like, I'll just do things. I'm like, why am I doing this thing?

And then I'm like, well, but that's like this chunky, blocky thing. Like, what do I care? And then I imagine, like, there's somewhere in the multiverse, that thing's soul is just, you know, waiting for an eternity to, like, get revenge on me. And then, like, there's going to be, like, when I die, there's going to be this long line of video game characters just waiting to, you know, torture me for eternity. Many, many street fighter characters waiting at the pearly gates. Have you ever done anything in a game? I'll throw this out to the entire panel because it's

definitely a weird feeling when it happens to you. Have you ever done anything in a game that you immediately felt like, oh, that was, I feel bad about that, but I'm not sure why. When I killed the last Buffalo in Red Dead Redemption, I felt really terrible. And I got the, and I got the achievement for it. I felt really bad. Manifest Destiny. Yeah. That's the name of that achievement. Yeah. It was, I felt, I felt an overwhelming sadness after killing the last one. We were just talking about Shadow of the Colossus and how it prompts that feeling in you,

but I tend to be more of a young white hat, William, in my gaming. Well, this is a question I have for, for Charlie, which relates to both questions, which is that inside the writer's room or just inside your story editor's brain, is there any sympathy for, for the man in black? because the show paints him as essentially depraved, but he's also just an extremely high-level player. Like, he's the one who's pushing the limits of the system. He's the one who's discovering things that the designers maybe didn't intend,

like the maze, which isn't designed for him, but he is cracking these secrets and finding these things. And on some level, that's just a demonstration of player creativity. Right, yeah, no, that's a great way to pose it. It's like, there's two ways. of looking at him. If you look at him strictly as a gamer, then, in fact, you could argue that he's done more for the game and for the park and for the host than any other human by by virtue of his advanced and depraved playing. He's given them an input in their processing algorithm that

has allowed them to improve themselves by being a high-level opponent. And that's sort of the way I'm thinking about it. But in terms of as a human, you know, whether, and it goes, yeah, you're right, it goes to the both questions is, does it matter what we do in game? and will it ever matter? Might it someday matter? Or even if it never does in that sense, let's say, does it matter now? Like, does that say anything about you if you play, you know, relatively peacefully or if you, if you have morals when you're, you have a controller in your hand?

I don't know. I don't know. I think it's interesting, though, to, you know, the idea of the character, and I hope this comes across, I think it does, is that you see him, that he is very much a good, guy in the beginning. He's wearing the white hat, but he's also a pretty normal guy. It's not just that it's not that he's, you know, a saint. It's just that this is kind of every man in a way. This is, you know, the way I'm thinking about it again. So not to speak for the whole writer's room, but that this idea of him thinking he's in, he's player one, right? He's always got to be the

protagonist. And that idea that as humans, it's hard for us to see any anyone else, other than as an NPC. Even other humans, our NPCs in our lives, sadly. And I guess in some ways, that's a pretty bleak way of putting it. But in other ways, isn't it just, I think, a function of like our own cognitive, you know, kind of machinery? Is that we're evolved to look at things, you know, literally from our perspective, but also kind of psychologically as well.

I mean, as a gamer, his mistake is he's playing for the last cutscene or he's achievement, or he's achievement hunting, you know, and he's thinking there's going to be some great reward when, in fact, the reward is the lifetime he's been invested in this game. Right. I would compare it to vanilla World of Warcraft's end game, which was decidedly content light, but very grindy. We had a recent thing where we updated Minecraft on our Xbox and there was a 48-hour period where we were pretty sure that a world we had spent, you know, hundreds of hours on making was all gone. And it was interesting as my son and I tried to process, I took it much harder than he did. And I was like, I was doing these weird things. I was like grieving this kind of lot. My wife was looking at me like, you're insane. And she was very sad, but she was more like, is he okay about it?

it because, you know, this was our world and we'd made it together and it was probably gone for, it did end up coming back. So there's a happy ending of the story. Now we don't even go in it because we don't care. But I think the idea of something you put in so, you know, so much of your actual life into and what does it count for other than the time you actually spend in there? I think that's, you know, that's well put. It's like, if you're not, if you're playing just for that final cut scene, then it's, it's hard to imagine you won't be disappointed. at the end. All right.

Well, I think Jason and I would have enjoyed Westworld anyway without the video game influences, but being able to pick up on those things, I think, only enhanced the experience for us. So we hope that it continues and that there's even more depth to it as the show goes on. And you should all read Charles's writing and watch his writing and editing on Westworld. You can find him on Twitter at Charles underscore you. Charles, thanks for coming on. Thanks so much. And Chris, thank you for steering this thing with us.

So you can find Chris on Twitter at Sullen Shop. That's S-U-E-L-L. And you can also find his podcast at shall we-show.com. Chris, thank you. Thanks for having me. All right, so we will wrap it up there, and we'll be back with another episode next week.