The Vergecast - Hot swap your D-pad

Episode Date: June 19, 2015

It's a special bicoastal episode of The Vergecast, as Nilay, Dieter, Emily, and Sam are joined remotely by the one and only Casey Newton, live from the E3 convention in Los Angeles. It's been a big show, and there are some big opinions about it on display here. And while we're on the subject of opinions, Emily comes to the table with plenty of them as the discussion moves to this week's Game of Thrones season finale. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today's episode of the Vergecast is brought to you by Squarespace. Squarespace is the easiest way to create a beautiful website, blog, or online store for you and your ideas. Squarespace features an elegant interface, beautiful templates, and incredible 24-7 customer support. Try Squarespace at Squarespace.com and enter Offercode verge at checkout to get 10% off. Squarespace, build it beautiful. Sam. I like the ads to end with like an aggressive call-out of Sam Schaeffer. I think that's the future of advertising. Is Sam getting yelled at?

Like Bud Light ads during the Super Bowl and with like... It's the final tagline. Yeah, exactly. Bud Light. Sam. So, hello, everybody. Welcome to the Vergecast. Today is July, not July.

June 18th, my calendar is open to the wrong month. Today is June 18th, 2015. I'm Eli Patel. I am Deidabon. And I am Emily Yoshita. And wait, wait for it, buddy. And a very special guest coming to us live from California, Los Angeles, California. Casey Newton on Skype.

Hi there. How's it gone. And then, you know, in his box, the hype box. Hype box, sweatbox, sweat lodge. Don't call out the sweat lodge. Sam Schaeffer joins us. Hi. Emily, you're a camera, so I'm going to have to do this a lot.

Oh, no, you're a camera right now, too. I'm seeing you through a little screen. I have a very important question for Casey Newton. Is that a bunk bed behind you? Yeah. Oh, yes. Okay. What's the, yeah, what's the Verge E3 set up right now?

How are the accommodations? we have six people staying inside of a two-bedroom and I've been sharing one bathroom with five people for five days now Oh good so What's the best thing that you know about somebody that you work with now? I know that Sam Biford is a total diva

who spends up to 40 minutes getting ready in the morning Oh, this is why I demand my own hotel room wherever we go It's because I don't want anyone to know the length of my hair Oh, it's a long process. It's about three inches. Huh? Yeah, no, it's, there's a lot of futzing and then a lot of like, and then a lot of refutzing. Anyway, so Casey has been at E3 all week with the rest of the verge team.

Kind of a huge week of news out of E3. And we only have Casey for the first half hour of the show, so we should get right into it. Tell us by E3, what's going on over there in our war zone-like conditions that we put you in? So E3 has been a pleasant surprise in a lot of ways this year, and you're going to start seeing some of us writing about this on the site. You know, the knock on E3 in recent years has been that the violence has just been sort of off the charts, totally grim. Like the games have not been inclusive at all. There's been no role for women either in the games or on stage. And it really feels like the video game industry got the message this year in a huge way.

And so everywhere we turned at the big keynote presentations from Microsoft and Sony and lots of the other studios, we saw women in games, we saw women on stage. And the games look really fun. Obviously, there's still a lot of violence, a lot of murder and mayhem. But it doesn't feel as grim and soulless as it used to. It's not just a lot of neck stabbing. A lot of the violence feels kind of more cartoonish and stylized now. Right.

And so everybody just kind of keeps looking around at each other saying, like, is it just me? Or are we actually having fun here? And what's going on with that? So we really have been kind of pleasantly surprised. But it's still kind of dark, though. Most of the games feature the end of the world in some way. why is that dark? Yeah.

Fair. But like, let me ask you, you know, you said there's like a big pressure on the industry. But I would say there was also, and it's hard to ignore, there was GamerGate, which was a huge outcry from sort of the other insane, not mature side of the gaming community. Has that been represented? Are people that talking about that at all? Well, so today, as I was walking around, uh, some. Some idiot Gamer Gators have posted signs all over downtown that say Fem Freak, which is a play on feminist frequency, the Anita Sarkesian series that sort of kicked off a lot of Gamergate outrage. And there's like some kind of quote on the posters indicating that Anita Sarkisian's coming to take away all of your fun.

So, I mean, it really is just like toddlers have been set loose on the streets of downtown L.A. because women demanded to be included in video games. It was not a safe space for toddlers. Yeah. So there really has been like Gamer Gate presence here. But I think one of the things that's interesting to think about is that video games have long production times, right? Like many of these games are in production for three years plus. And so I actually think that a lot of it.

of the changes that we're seeing probably got started two or three years ago and that, you know, the drumbeat of criticism grew louder and louder last year. Feminist frequency had this huge moment. Gamergate broke out. But the truth is that a lot of the changes that we're seeing today were sort of well on their way for a couple of years. It just kind of took the video game industry a while to get those games into production. Right. And like something fallout took six years. Right. I mean, well, what's the, what's the game of the giant dog? with the Oh, the last guardian.

The last guardian. I knew that last in it. That's been around for a long time. I think it was announced in 2007. Like people just thought it was never going to arrive. There was, of course, a very, like, insane quote last year. I can't remember. I think I know which studio, but I don't want to defame them if I'm wrong.

But somebody just said that women's bodies were physically harder to animate, and that's why they weren't in games. That was, I think. Assassin's Creed. No, no. Or was it Assassin's Creed? No, I wrote about this last year. I remember. Yeah.

So obviously, like, that doesn't make any sense at all. This year, you know, magically, animators had figured out how to solve the mystery of animating the female form. Technology keeps getting better. So many of the games that, like, I'm looking forward to playing feature female characters that are coming out. Laura Croft, Rise of the Tomb Raider, looks really, really great. one of the best demos that we've seen this year.

The last game, which was just called the Tomb Raider, was a lot of fun. I know Dieter hit 100% on that game. Yes, I did. But also Mirror's Edge, which is sort of a beloved game from the last decade that my colleague Eddie Robertson really loves and has written about. That's getting a nice sequel. Stars a female protagonist and is notably based on something other than just like running around murdering people.

And then a personal favorite of mine, dishonored, is getting a sequel. and you have the option of playing as either the hero from the original game or the girl that you rescued at the end of that game as kind of the protagonist of the new one. So, you know, I think that's awesome and really can't wait to start playing those. So let's go through, so that's like some of the news. There was also a bunch of VR news, right? Oculus had a surprise event that we sort of talked about last week,

but then you guys got to play with a bunch of stuff as well. What was your take on sort of the VR element at the E3 this year? It's coming along slowly but surely. It feels like almost everyone is making a headset. We've done just about all of the demos. I think one of the demos that got just about everybody's attention was actually the AR demo, the augmented reality demo, that Microsoft did as part of its presentation with Minecraft.

They had a guy who was wearing HoloLens and was able to kind of project a vision onto a table of a Minecraft world. He was able to kind of zoom in with his fingers and manipulate it, and it looked really, really cool. And my colleague Chris Plant, who is here, did that demo yesterday, and he told me

that that was actually the moment that he got AR, that he felt like AR will definitely be a thing. Because I read Addie's piece, and Addie's piece was like, this kind of sucks. Well, it's definitely true that I think that the version of HoloLens that they showed us originally in Seattle,

was more fully featured and had like a better field of view than the HoloLens we've seen since. So that's actually really weird, right? It's hard to think of another time where a consumer electronics company showed you like a good version of something. And then like six months later it was like, and now here's a worse one.

No, that's just, that's my life. I mean, that, right? I mean, that's, I don't know. I feel like with HoloLens, we were always destined to see what they could really do with, because the demo one they showed was like, totally hacked together, you were tethered to a PC somewhere, and they shrink it down and make it real, they were going to lose some fidelity, right? And that's the knock. The knock is that it's a

really narrow frame of AR reality and everything else is kind of blocked off. Right. Yeah, I think that's true. But, you know, the flip side of that is that they are, they're working away on this. Everybody believes in this, you know, I mean, there's just going to be such huge opportunities for whoever figures it out. So people are marching along. I did a VR demo of a game called A Drift, although the eye in a drift is spelled with a one, so we're not sure if we're supposed to call it a drunft or what. No.

But the game is really cool. The premise is that you sort of come to and you're on a space station and it's kind of blown apart and you're running out of oxygen and you have to find more oxygen so that you don't die and then you have to sort of figure out who you are and where you are and how to get back home. And so I did this demo on Oculus Rift.

It's also going to come out for PlayStation and PC. But man, like inside of Oculus Rift, like the game was actually overwhelming to the point where I was glad to be done when I died. Whoa. You know, I don't know if you guys have had any experiences with this like kind of VR sickness or like VR nausea where like it almost gets too intense.

But, you know, I find that like in certain moments, like I actually experience like a shortness of breath. I find myself disoriented. And it sort of depends on like, you know, what the style of game is and what's going on. But, um, but that said, um, the experience was great. The game is beautifully designed. It's very scary. And, uh, and it feels like a real game, you know, like you're, you're, you're moving around in space. Like you're, you're trying to find oxygen. You're trying to hack into terminals. Um, and, like all space games. Like all space games, but you also have like no place to stand. And so, you know, you're, you're controlling it with a game pad and

manipulating yourself with sticks and you're just kind of you know you're you're turning somersaults and you know banging into walls and i mean it's just like a really intense strange experience and like nothing you've ever played before right and like that's where i start to get really excited is i feel like we're about to you know once the consumer version of oculus comes out next year normal people are going to be able to play this kind of crazy VR experience and i think it's just going to you know trigger the next wave of creativity and game development yeah and i had an argument. So Polygon has a war room here in one of the conference rooms in New York.

And there's a bunch of them sitting in there looking very tired, just very exhausted. But I went ahead and to lunch with them today. Just see how E3 is going for them. And we got in a little debate over whether or not everyone in the world will one day own a VR headset. Right? Like, which side

of the debate were you on? I just don't think it's going to have. I'm skeptical that everyone will own a VR headset the way that everyone owns a smartphone or that not everyone in the world, but like, you know, the vast majority of people own a VR headset the way that people own a smartphone or they own a television. There are other dominant media experiences in our lives, right? And they're everywhere.

But so the counter argument is everyone didn't own a PC until there were like a set of things that you could do on them besides like spreadsheets and games that made them make sense for the home user. And so the thing that's missing from VR, I'm going to say. Oh, God, damn it. Oh, man. I've heard of that phrase before. Oh, man. That's it, right?

Like, they know how to make games for VR. And they know how to make, I don't know, the weather show up on your refrigerator in AR. Well, no, I'm with you. But like, the way the conversation started was the challenge that we are all having, Casey's having right now describing VR games and how they made him feel and how Polygon has a challenge. And in general, when they have these press conferences, they never show you the game. because at best what they can do is put somebody on stage in a VR headset, stumbling around talking about how weird it is or how great it is.

And, you know, Palmer Lucky's solution is like one day we're just going to do our press conferences in VR. And it'll be like you're sitting there. You know, they did the last episode or the 50th anniversary episode of Saturday Night Live, not the last episode, but the 50th anniversary episode of Saturday Night was shot in VR. And you can just like pretend you're there and like look around. And it's like a little demo for the Oculus. And like one day that will be the press conference.

offense experience and it'll flick a button and then you'll be in a game demo with a person and like and I was you know I was like that's great but that assumes that everybody has a VR headset and I right how do you get to the place where you know everyone's watching the the EA keynote at e3 on Twitch YouTube and Spike TV or whatever and they're watching a live stream on our site and they're like plugged into an Oculus Rift and that just seems crazy to me you make it cheap Yeah, I mean, you make it a phone. Do you play with any gear VR stuff? So, I mean, we have like a gear VR at the office and I sort of respect what they're trying to do, but I just find it janky as hell.

Like, you know, you can see the pixels individually. Like the kind of the look is just kind of very muddy. And, you know, I've been lucky enough to get to do some of the, the Oculus Crescent Bay experiences. where they have this kind of precision head tracking and where you're like the environments are much more lush and comfortable. And so like you put on gear VR and it's just like a sort of awkward stopgap measure. So right, you know, like for the for the bleeding edge adopters, I'm glad that it's out there.

And you know, maybe it's inspiring some developers out there to make cool experiences. But like I would never recommend that a consumer go by gear VR as their intro to this new wave of VR. Did you play with the new, the final consumer version Oculus and the Oculus Touch controllers and all that stuff? I didn't get to do that demo, no. There's a great video of Adi doing it. I think Addie should only make VR demo videos for us. Because she, I don't know, she obviously doesn't know this and it would be terribly embarrassing when she listens to this. But she listens to this.

But she has a particularly precise facial expression. Like she's always moving her hands in very, like very precise, very measured. ways and she just has this look on her face that's always like now I'm picking up this box I'm putting this box over here and then she considers it and she like does it again yeah and like I would just watch hours of that video I think it's I think it's the most endearing thing um but anyways there's a great video on the site of adi demoing the oculus touch which is really great um that's the stuff that I think is wild right the how do we do extra kinds of control how do we integrate the head tracking and it's just everything that you add to it that's what that's my question about

VR is you're like you'll make it cheap. We'll do it on our phones. And then all of the experiences that are truly next generation require you to like strap things to your hands and put a camera in your house to track your head. And it, it just feels like a lot of other problems have to get solved for this to get truly mainstream. Yeah, I think so. But like, I'm just not even tripping about that. It's an incredibly hard technical problem. They're inventing a new medium from scratch. Like when was the last time you were present at the birth of a medium? Right. Of course it's going to be, it's going to be rocky, and they're not going to have figured out the hardware right away.

And like there's going to be shitty stuff. But like, I have seen stuff in VR that if I were just like an eight-year-old child and you showed it to me, I would make you let me do it 15 times a day because it was so cool. So like it's already crossed some sort of threshold where it's awesome. How that eventually gets to people, like we will figure it out. You know, the thing that I keep thinking about is like just VR arcades, you know, like you will pay. five bucks and you'll get to go walk around for a couple hours and you know try out five or six different experiences you know i did that i did that when i was 12 no but that that's and did you love it i know it sucked yeah of course i loved it um yeah like arcades were amazing

yeah i have like a very tangential thought about VR that i thought of today um and it's just it's more about the film side of it obviously because that's what i end up thinking about with VR, but that, you know, like, we've seen in the past year or so, we'll definitely see it with Star Wars this year, like an overall push towards more practical effects. I think if VR becomes a more common, not even like fully adopted by everybody, but it's at least something that the majority of people have tried, practical effects are going to be back in a major way because nobody wants to experience it. It's going, the difference between a computer generated environment and a real environment

is going to be night and day in VR. Right. And I think that that's going to be really exciting then. But yeah, that was all my... That's why... But how would you do, like, miniatures in VR? I mean, that would... That all of that seems crazy.

I think... Well, yeah, you could do miniatures in VR. Sure. But then you couldn't... Because don't you stitch together miniature effect shots? Like... Yeah. I mean, you'd have to be creative with it.

I don't know. I mean, I was just thinking about it... I was thinking about it in terms of Mad Max. Okay. Like, Mad Max, the VR version of Mad Max, which is most... Like, there was very, very little. in the way of like computer effects and that that was a bunch of cars in the desert like actually

there if you were in like suspended in that environment 360 degrees like shot on film like that would look incredible i think that you'd see like that the more personal the medium gets the more in front of your eyes the more fully immersive the more that are kind of little uh i don't know stopgap is too janky sounding for it but like just our short kind of shortcuts with effects and uh and environments is going to be more apparent. Huh. I mean, I just keep thinking, like, all, I don't know. What Casey's saying is right, this is a birth of a new medium,

and like the problem between, or not the problem, the disconnect between the people who are going to invent the first language and the people who grow up with that language and invent the good language, I'm wondering how long it's going to be, right? Like the people who grew up knowing sort of what the medium can do instinctively and start to push it versus the people who are like, let's apply filmmaking to this medium. Right, right. And you just wonder how long it will take before the true potential of VR comes out because the people who are making this stuff like really understand it. Well, the whole point of VR is like that there's the device becomes invisible ideally, right?

Like that the perfect VR situation is that you don't, you forget that you're working. wearing a headset and you're in some other room. Like you are completely transported. So I feel like it's going to be more about things that actually feel transportive than like, you know, when people talk about taking kids on field trips with VR, like that that kind of experience is going to be the real like jump forward. I feel like. Yeah.

I have such conflicted ideas about VR. I just do you think that they should just stop Nelai? Do you think that like it's just. ever going to work, so I even bother. No, I don't know. I do think it's going to work. I completely think it's going to work. It's just, I don't know what I want it to do. And I don't know that like, we should be that alone together. Because that, what, what VR, like, the ultimate, if the kids in a field trip. It's not a world we're going to live in, though. It's an experience that you get to have, right? It's like going to the movies. Who knows, though? I think, yeah, I, I feel like it

could be either. But I think like if it's networked VR where you're able to be in another place together with other people. That's like what the internet is though, isn't it? Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. Like we're all behind, we all work on computers, we all sit at desk. Right now, and I want to say this right now, it's the audience,

Walt Mossberg is in our Slack. Yeah. That's true. Like, if this is a distracted verge cast, that's why. Yeah, if Deere and I keep anxiously looking at our computer screens to make sure no one's like putting porn gifts at Walt. That's what's happening. Can I just say he's really good at Slack?

Like he's very funny. He's like cracking jokes. It's amazing. He's in the mix. So let me ask you, since you're on Skype and I feel like I have to, let me ask you like the morning zoo kind of questions that you get when you do a Skype interview, Casey. So this is a giant games convention. Who won Sony or Microsoft?

What is that voice? That's a radio voice. Sam doesn't know what the radio is. Microsoft. You think so? You think so, huh? Why? Yeah. So they won because they actually have games coming out between now and December, which is not really something that Sony can say. They made an incredibly fan-friendly move in saying they were going to make at least some Xbox 360 games work on your Xbox 1 and just deliver those two as digital downloads. It was almost the exact reverse of last year when Sony had all these fan-friendly announcements and Microsoft was still, you know, terrified that you were going to play their games while you were disconnected from the internet. So I think they learned a big lesson from that backlash. They're present, like, we all left that, that presentation looking at each other saying like that, like, we can't remember

the last time we saw an E3 presentation that had that many, like, cool games and had like nothing actively offensive in it. Right. So, you know, I don't think that Sony had a terrible show, I do think it sucks for them that they don't really have any big titles coming out anytime soon. But most of their announcements were geared toward like the hardest of the hardcore fan base. You know, like you have to be a little bit of a video game nerd to get excited about what's going on at E3. But like, you know, their announcements were like, all right, so if you owned a Sega Dreamcast, you're probably, you probably remember this Japanese RPG. And I'm like, I'm on Wikipedia being like, what is the, what's going on? but there's a Kickstarter for it?

What about the Final Fantasy 7 reboot? I am like, again, like, Final Fantasy was never my jam, so I'm, like, asking around about this, and people were explaining to me that it was, like, the most emo RPG ever released. Like, one of my colleagues here described it as the My Chemical Romance of video games.

Oh, my God, that's perfect. Oh, man, I don't even like my chemical romance, so yeah. So I guess I'm looking forward to playing it. But, you know, based on what they've said, it sounds like we won't see it before 2018. Yeah. I also kind of assume they're going to screw it up. Yeah.

I don't know why, but I mean, I'm a final. I mean, I'm just saying. I mean, that's my only one of my few entry points for games is Final Fantasy, particularly Final Fantasy 7. And I don't. Can one of you just quickly give me the plot of Final Fantasy 7? No. Yep.

No, Emily, go ahead. Emily, hit me. Hit me. Distopia. terrorists she dies at the end wow rough rough

no but it's great it's like a very it was very special I didn't and the weird thing is that I didn't go from that to being a full-time gamer like I played that I loved that I played like the next couple of Final Fantasy games and I was like that's it I'm cool yeah I feel like I did that with metal gear

like I really burned through metal and really dystopia terrorism you dies at the end it's very much the same game Casey Newton what was the favorite thing you played at E3 my

so they actually like all the stuff that I wanted to play they did not let me get my hands on it so I did not get to play Uncharted 4 I did not get to play DeusX Mankind Divided and I didn't get to play Tomb Raider

but those three things were my favorite demos they're just absolutely in my wheelhouse I hate that I'm just telling you about sequels to games that will all sell millions. Like, I do not have a hipster answer to this question for you. Oh, what about that cup, that cup game? Oh, yeah, Cophead. Cuphead.

Cuphead. That looks great. So, Cuphead, it looks adorable. Actually, I would love to play that, too. It's sort of based on the 1930s cartoon style that it was sort of like the old Steamboat Willie cartoons from Disney, except it's like a side-scrolling, a platform game. And based on the demo they show, it actually looks really, hard. Casey,

will it play the way it looks aesthetically? Because it really looks like a cartoon. Yeah. It looks like you're in. It has like a film effect on it. Yeah. Which is cool. Yeah.

I think it's, did you see gameplay or just, you know, or just like demo footage? They show demo footage. And it, you know, it looks like it'll move a lot faster than any

Steamboat Willie cartoon that you ever saw. I mean, like, but I love the idea. Like the styles. really great and a lot of people were talking about that game. Well, that's like, I said it. Oh, go

ahead. No, sorry. Well, I was going to say if you do want one sort of like indie hipster answer to what's a cool thing you played, I did get to play a game called Abzu, which I wrote about. It's up on the site, and it's from the art director of Journey, which is, you know, this beloved, critically acclaimed indie hit

game for PlayStation. And in this one, like, once again, you're this kind of solo figure. You don't really know who you are. You wake up in the ocean and you're a diver. And you can just sort of dive down and explore the world and try to figure out who you are. And they've, you know, animated just tens of thousands of fish. And you can kind of like, you have infinite air supply. And so it's like this really kind of calm, meditative game.

And I played it after, you know, dying as an astronaut in virtual reality. So it was a very needed tonic. But you love chill games. I mean, let me tell a story about Casey. Yeah. Here we go. So Casey and I were at the code conference. I was sitting several rows away from Casey.

And Casey had been blogging for like, I know, 11 hours straight. We were exhausted. And like the CEO of Target is just like droning on about the future of retail. And I look at Casey. Casey's straight up just playing Alto's revenge on his iPad. Just doing some flips. Just like bringing it down. Just like snowboarding down the mountain.

And finally, you know, he's like, ah. And finally he dies. And he looks up. and he, like, looks around, and he looks back longingly at his iPad to see if he should play again, and he, like, puts it away, like, opens it on top. It was a real moment. I wish I'd captured it all. I didn't ruin it.

I didn't even tell him about it at the time. It was just one of those, like, you watch somebody else doing something, and you're completely in their head space. Like, you know, I knew all of Casey's emotions throughout that entire process, because I, too, was watching the CEO of Target and wishing I was playing a snowboarding game on my iPad. And he was just like, well, go ahead. Full disclosure, that's,

that's also me on almost every Birch conference call. I actually do find there's like, like, there's something like, I don't know, you're like, you just like kind of keep your hands busy and it actually helps me focus sometimes a little bit better on what's being said,

although I will cop to completely ignoring the target presentation conference. So were there a lot of indie games at E3? I feel like the indie game roller coaster is kind of a downman. moment in the mobile game roller coasters at a down moment and we're all about the big console launches right now yeah i would say like the mobile game stuff in particular you're absolutely right there was

just not a ton of mobile stuff to look at and um you know that's fine like the monetization schemes on mobile games are so gross that it's like it's hard for me to get excited about them um but you know on the indie front i actually thought that um for the for the two biggies microsoft and sony they gave a good amount of screen time to independent games uh you know cover was one of them. Abzu, I guess Abzu, I can't remember if that got shown at the Sony presentation or not, but both of them set aside time during their presentations, showed off some stuff, and a lot of those games looked really good. So, you know, I don't know that indie games had some sort of like crazy breakout year, but they're clearly like part of the

mix now, and companies like Microsoft and Sony feel like they have to showcase them to kind of send the right message to, uh, to developers and fans that they are about more than just the AAA stuff. Right. I think, I mean, it's just so funny to watch Microsoft.

And you're saying Microsoft came away the winner. Just how far backwards they've walked from the Xbox one, which is supposed to be this like living room bundled with connect. And it's going to like watch your TV for you and like read your emotions and then maybe like change the chance. You know, it's like all the stuff it was going to do. And now it's like a console game. with a bunch of AAA titles,

and they're really giving time to indie developers, because that's the true promise of the console, right? Well, it's true. And, like, I mean, you know, so I'm somebody who enjoys, like, playing AAA games and who doesn't watch all that much TV. And so the, like, Xbox One, as it described, was not a thing that I wanted.

I didn't want to connect. I didn't want to talk to my TV. I didn't want a DVR. Like, I wanted something that would make the next Tomb Raider look incredible. And they finally started to build that. So, you know, maybe it's like a strategic loss for them that they weren't able to take over the living room. But if you love to play video games, like, I don't know how you are going to be too disappointed with what's going on at Xbox right now.

Yeah. I mean, and that's just, there's like a little bit of more Microsoft news. I actually, we have to read an ad, Casey. We've got to let you go. And we talk about the next bit of Microsoft News. Yeah, yeah. But before all of that, that elite controller? Oh, we didn't talk about the controller.

Did you play with it? Yeah. No, I stood next to it and watched a guy kind of play around with it. Like my own suspicion, like, if I had it, is that I would, like, swap those buttons around three or four times, and I would say, like, I've only managed to confuse myself and then we just go back to your digital configuration.

So, like, if you're an elite, like, call of duty player and you need to, like, be able to hot swap your D-pad, like, go for it. But otherwise, like, to me, it just looked like a fetish object for, game obsessives. Like, more than anything practical. Where you hot swap your D-pad. Hot swap your D-pad. That's a fetish.

John, I think we got the episode title. Just putting that down. All right. Okay. Well, Casey, thanks for joining us. We'll, you know, we'll have you on the show some other time. We love you, Casey. It was my great pleasure.

Enjoy hot swapping. Enjoy hot swapping your D-pad, bro. All right. I'm going to do it. All right, let me read this thing. Here's a thing. that I'm going to tell you about building the verge. It was hard.

Yeah. No, the idea that I'm going to, I'm going to move into we should have done on Squarespace, I don't think it's going to play. But I've built my own website before. Have you built a website? Of many. I've actually built a number of Sam Shuffer fan sites, hand-coded, of course, lovingly.

It was difficult, but here's the thing. You can just use Squarespace, and it'll be easy, and that'd be great. And you'll get a site that's professionally designed, regardless of a skill level. You don't need to do any coding. the tools are intuitive and easy to use. There's state-of-the-art technology powering your site. And so you get security and stability right away.

And it's trusted by millions of people and some of the most respected brands in the world. It's only $8 a month. You get a free domain if you sign up for a year. And you can just start your free trial today. You don't even need a credit card. You just go to Squarespace.com. When you decide to sign up for Squarespace,

you can use the offer code Verge to get 10% off your first purchase. So Squarespace, build it beautiful. All right. So just really quick, before we go, There's a bunch of entertainment, so we have to talk about. Microsoft at E3 was the big winner, but at the end of E3, they announced that they're like, they're shaking up their entire leadership. They fired Mark Pan, who was the head of advertising.

They fired Stephen Eop who was the CEO of Nokia and they bought Nokia. Yeah, they fired their head of, they fired Joe Harlow. So this Microsoft is like contracting. There's not a lot to say. Like, this is all expected. Yeah, so the. The ruthlessness with which they kind of like excise the leadership of Nokia out of Microsoft's leadership was interesting. It took a while.

It took a little while, I guess. But so I have feelings about what they ended up with, which is they've got like a Windows slash stuff that runs Windows division under Terry Meyerson. They've got like an enterprise cloud division for cloud stuff and Azure. and they've got like an apps division for like office stuff. That all makes sense to me. Yeah, that's like that's how it should be. And like I couldn't have told you what their organizational structure was before, but like that's how it should be now.

Yeah. And it makes perfect sense to me. And I think everything seems like a good move to me. Because I want to mention the fact that Stephen Elop, Usurper is my new favorite character in all of technology, the man who, the locust who destroys your world. And that's it. That's really all I want to make.

mention. I think Stephen Yonov should take over more companies and sell them to Microsoft. Did you see that Mark Penn is now going to hang out with Steve Balmer? That doesn't, none of those words make any sense to me. Okay. Okay. Emily, there's a bunch to talk about, but I think most importantly we should talk about Thrones. Oh, oh yeah. I mean, what are the other things to talk about? We have Jurassic World on this list. Spoiler. I mean, a bunch of stuff. Hey guys, we're going to, we're going to spoil. If you are listening to Vurchast and you haven't seen the end of the game of Thrones. I don't know what to say to you. You're in a very particular demographic that

have not plotted for. Oh, my God. Our producer John hasn't seen it. What are you doing, man? All right. Well, I'm sorry, bro. All right. So the next 20 minutes

of the Vergecast are going to sound terrible because our producer is going to run out of the control room. Dysopia. Terrorism. He dies. Yeah. So I have read and listened to a lot of recaps

and analysis of this. finale of Game of Thrones since even since doing my final scoring of the Game of Game of Thrones and obviously so so I think now I was I was misled because I thought this I thought this this season was partially Partially Feast of Crow's and partially dance with dragons Dance around dragons Dance around the dragons But I guess

George Michael dance track. But is there any, like, you've read the books, Deeter. Is there anything that has not been covered yet in? Like, there's a bunch of like side stories that they could get to. But in terms of chronology of like what's happening in the plot, they've pretty much reached the same point. There's a bunch of stuff that obviously happened in the books that hasn't happened. And some of that stuff has been alluded to by the show. Right.

Or they started some things and then let it let go of it. Uh-huh. So there's still a few things. Talk about the Brotherhood without banners? I might be. Okay. Dude, we're in the spoiler zone. Just put it out there.

It's fine. No, no, don't spoil the books. I mean. Well, there's nothing else to spoil now. That's my main question. I don't know. Yeah, I think that we are, I'm not worried about spoilers generally. Okay.

And I don't think that there's anything in the books that it's going to, like, spoil the show at this point, except for, like, two things. How have the books diver or the show diverge from what the books? Yeah. Yeah. There's also that. I'm also not like a perfectly cataloged expert on what is in the books. I've got vague memories because, man, they're long and they're kind of bad. But we have some like, yeah, that's the thing that's kept me away from the books is every time I see an excerpt of the books or like a teaser of the new one, I read it. I'm like, these are not written terribly well. So I've only read the first one and I read it after I'd seen the first season of the show.

And so I could read it like I was sleepwalking. I was like, I remember all these things. Like now I'm just getting more details. Like when I like I always compare it to reading the novelizations of the Star Wars movies after seeing them because the first one was actually written by George Lucas and it has all sorts of nerdy details that you would not have known just watching the film. So I got like a lot of my nerd background knowledge from from just reading the novelizations. But yeah, so that was sort of what reading is the first book called the Game of Thrones? No, it's a song of ice and fire. No, that's the name of the series.

Oh. Oh, yeah. Oh, God. I think the first one is a game of thrones. So many people are freaking out right now. Oh, my God. We just caused a car accident. What's the name of the show that I like?

What's the bad guy on it? Yeah, no, I, so yeah, that was my main. More accidents, by the way. My phone starts, no, it's just emails from Casey. Casey's emailing you. It's a Game of Thrones. I was right. I knew it had an extra particle in there.

I was written in 96. Yeah, yeah. These things are old. So yeah, I mean, my main... So an interesting thing to me is that people who read the books knew that... Spoiler alert, John Snow dies at the end of a dance of drag. Emily just made extremely sarcastic scare quotes with her hands. I just want everyone listening to know that.

She said dies. She literally brought up her hands and then went like, like, wave them. Like, like, velociraptor-Claughts. I wish I had the Velocir-Ecter Cloth that Jurassic World sent us upstairs for any time I do scare quotes. I've never seen scare quotes more sarcastically deployed. Well, it's just because I wrote that he died. I didn't even comment on it in our recap because I have read so much of people saying,

oh, he's not dead yet. But all I have to work with is what's in the episode. I don't have... Yeah, if you technically want to, you could go to Kit Harrington's own comments on it outside of the show and wherein he could be trying to deke us out, but he did say, I'm dead. You think he's deacon us out?

Yeah, I mean, it's like when Benedict Kimbrayevatch said that I'm not con, like, you know, it's a, they are, that's part of their job. That's like probably part of their contract. Like, you will tell whatever lies to the press we need, we need you to tell in order to keep the stream alive. Yeah, yeah, because it's like, because at that point, it becomes then a spoil. for the next book,

which then is a spoiler for everybody. They're not worried about spoiling the books anymore from the TV show. They've said, look, like, we're just going to we know where the books are going. We talk to George R.R. Martin. We're just going to go forward. We're like in the nerdy weeds of the books versus show.

Should I just say exactly what happened? No, no. Say what you think of this series, this season. I'm just like, aren't we all murdered out on this show? Yes. Is there anybody left to die? Do you care about anyone anymore? Yeah, I mean, yeah.

I have to say, I think a lot of people were kind of grossed out or like over it when Aria killed Maren Trant. And I thought it was kind of awesome. And I thought they actually managed to not make it gross the way that I thought it was going to be gross. I mean, she's undercover as a child prostitute. But luckily, we don't really see that. We see a little bit of that being extremely unpleasant.

but mostly she just pops up and gouges his eyes out, which is kind of great. And I didn't, yeah, and that was such an unconflicted feeling of satisfaction in that scene, or it's like, yeah, I'll watch this guy get a towel shoved down his throat. I don't care. Whereas, you know, something like Circe doing her big walk of shame, that's something that just gets very, very punishing after a while. But I think, like, I think to good effect, though, I think that that was like an interesting thing for her character to go through, as opposed.

to some other bad things that have happened to other characters on the show that don't seem as interesting or don't seem like they're actually going to lead to a big change. Well, and I mean, at the end of that walk, it was acted incredibly well because she could have just done her like her resting surcey face where she's like resolved and angry. She did like there was like more than the usual amount of like, I don't know, uncertainty in her expression when she got picked up by the mountain. Yeah. Yeah.

She was just like a broken person at the end of it. But she like tried to have resting surcey face. She tried to be resolved but like couldn't quite pull it off. And she tried. She managed it for a really long time. And that was that was kind of incredible to see like, you know, I think that's something you kind of wonder abstractly about that character. Like how deep does her evalness go?

Like how long could she just hang on to that? Turns out a really long time while walking naked through a street while people are throwing food at her. She kind of maintains her face. Right. And then, you know, the last. whatever, 17 minutes or however long that was, she kind of breaks down. But that, I mean, I mean, the thing about the mountain being brought back to, that's not in

the books, right? Yeah, it is. It is? Oh, I was told it wasn't. Well, he might not actually be back yet, but like the, the dude is performing the dark experiments and you can, like, see it coming. I'm into that. I'm into, yeah, I'm into, I mean, I'm into a new kind of weirdness on the show or a new

kind of like a vaguely magical weirdness. But we've been hinting at a different kind of vaguely magical weirdness. And like, it just keeps building to resolutions that never arrive or that get thwarted. And that's its only move. Mm-hmm. There's never, its only move is to,

I mean, you never get the resolutions. They either get thwarted or you keep waiting. But the other thing that I'm tired of is just oppressively just throwing in our face, this is a bad dude. Yeah. Did you know that dude was bad?

Let me show you again how bad that dude is. Oh yeah, that dude that you heard was bad. Guess what? Still bad. Really bad. Well, this is something that comes up also in this weekend's premiere of True Detective. Oh, really? I don't know if you guys want to talk about that or not.

I do. I realized that I had a very loud conversation with Lizzie in the office about an hour ago. Yeah, I put on headphones. Because we've both seen the first few episodes of it. And so I was like, oh, and when Colin Farrell, then I felt really bad about that afterwards. But, yeah, I mean, that's something that, you know, I can say in the broadest strokes is something that comes up.

And in the reviews I've read for that so far, just like, we get it. The world is dark and full of shadows. You know, it's, there's not, it's really hard to tell what the ends are of that. Aside from being, I guess, like, surface level, interesting just because it's, I guess we still think of it as being unexpected to see people that we root for doing bad things, even though that is the majority of entertainment now.

It's, yeah, it's hard to tell what thing the creators are trying to convey. Other than just general dystopia, terrorism. And I'm not saying that, yes. And I'm not saying everything has to have a message. I'm like, I'm very, at the same time, I don't want to have like a moral to episode of Game of Thrones, but, you know, I, a lot of Game of Thrones to me remains interesting because it's so massive that you can actually see these very incremental cause and effect things ripple throughout the world. And that's just satisfying no matter what the thing is that happens.

But, you know, bigger picture, like, why? Like, zoom way out and ask George R. Martin, okay, so you could have written anything that you wanted. Why did you choose to set your story in death and rape land. Like, is that a place you enjoy hanging out? I don't know. It's a matter of taste for sure, but it's not something you can say is wrong or amoral to portray, but you can question the artist for wanting to spend time in that world. And who he chooses to redeem, right?

Which is the thing about the bad people on Game of Thrones is like the people who are relentlessly portrayed as bad during the first season, almost all of them have experienced redemptive arcs. So like you feel really bad for Jamie Lannister in this last episode. Yeah. Right. But in like the third episode, he's like killing a dude. You know, like, yeah. That's rough. That's like, that's a crazy arc for that person. But then other people, like, Ramsey Bolton is never getting a redemptive arc. It's never going to have. We're never going to feel bad for that guy. Right. And it's like, why do we shoot? Why? Like, how are you making these choices? Well, yeah. And I think a thing that came up, I think somebody in the comments on one week

compared it to the Joker, which I haven't read enough actual Batman comics to know about, but apparently that's a character that the authors of that comic have always gone out of their way to protect or let him win or have victories. Yeah. To like, you know, supposedly to counteract the expected thing of having the hero always win

and come out on top in the end. But after a while, and this is also something Addy kind of wrote about and her thing about kind of being overthrowns. It's like, it's just, as predictable and stereotypical at a certain point to have Ramsey Bolton always get his way. Right. Right.

There's nothing subversive about that anymore. Especially when you're saying that's like the dominant mode in storytelling right now, which is like bad people are doing stuff. Yeah. If somebody good had a baggage free, not even if there was baggage. I don't know. Somebody had just had a victory,

a good person had a victory on the show. It would feel genuinely shocking at this point. It would be really surprising. And you would keep checking to make sure there wasn't some kind of catch. Well, maybe this is all just an elaborate setup. Well, yeah, I mean, you hope. I mean, if that's how it ends where everybody dies and everybody loses, then it's a failure as a piece of story line.

Who's left that's a good person in this story? Arya, Tyrion, DeNaris, and her crew. Is DeNaris a good person? Deneres is problematic, but I think she's ultimately a good person. I mean, she's somebody that has been presented to us as a protagonist. She is flawed, for sure. Who else is good? I don't know.

Jora. Tomman. Yeah, I mean, what the little, little tree kid, little brand? A little tree kid, yeah. Oh, yeah, tree kid. Yeah, we're going to go back and visit him next season, apparently. He's going to probably have completely gone through puberty, so it'll be weird. Okay, man, when you, when you, when you, when you, when you mind meld with a tree, strange things happen to your body.

I think it's, I think it's wild to watch this show because I, you know, I'm sure a lot of people with this. I watch Game of Thrones and I watch Silicon Valley. and Silicon Valley has the exact same narrative structure Which is worse Yeah but it's like But it has the same narrative It's like oh they're gonna oh they fucked it up again

Oh they got their own way Oh this totally predictable disaster has occurred And it's just it's just this drumbeat Of like they keep mining failure for humor And like the characters actually I think In this season of Silicon Valley got better Oh really? Yeah they're like ever so much more developed

Like you understand why they do some things sometimes. Many times you don't. But, you know, like, it's just funny because most of what they do is still coming so close to a victory and then, like, literally hitting the delete key and all of their code. It's like,

why did you, why? Yeah. It's like, it's, it's, it's, a comedy is such a different thing to judge things by, though. I think we expect, or like, I don't know, like, how many times does like Jerry win on Seinfeld, you know, or, or, you know.

kind of a lot. I mean, he always gets girls. Yeah, yeah, but George is like usually the funnier character Kramer is too. Yeah, that's true. Like they come off looking foolish in the end. Like everybody looks like a jerk and they're like foolish. And that's why we laugh at them. Whereas if that's like set up for dramatic effect, it's sort of, I don't know.

It can feel more repetitive. Yeah, but I think maybe that it's just watching them back to back where it's like, here's the exact same narrative structure being mine to make me laugh. instead of to make me feel really bad. No, that's by design. It's the HBO understands that you need the unicorn chaser. I was not going to say this because I was going to write it after seeing how it goes as a true detective.

And then what's the new show, Ballers? Ballers. I'm super excited for Ballers. Oh my God, ballers. Ballers and the brink, which looks terrible. The Brink looks awful. Yeah. The Brink.

What is the movie with Richard, Robert Downey Jr. in Blackface? That's what the Brink was like. Tropic Thunder. It looks like Tropic Thunder, but with like, the UN. The best part of Tropic Thunder was the trailers. I think that was the flaw of that movie is the trailers at the beginning of that movie are so good that the rest of the movie can't possibly match up to,

although it's been a while since I've seen it, so maybe I'll take that back. So when you watch a really dark show, especially if you're like with somebody, you don't want to just, you might not want to sit there in that bummer zone. You might want to like watch something light to like cleanse your palate. And so HBO intentionally takes some like, ha-ha, lighthearted thing.

Oh, that's just after the dark thing. To go on that, Deeter, props to the HBO scheduler planner because Game of Thrones ended one week ago

and now True Detective Season 2. They do that every year. That's just how they're doing it. I mean, that's just, that's, that's my contribution

because I watch. You know, what's interesting about this, that thesis is that it is the exact opposite of Netflix's thesis, which is you watch the terrible

torture porn of Daredevil and then you, keep doing it over and over and over again. I go back there. Not to get on this, not to get on this hard, but I'm curious to hear Emily's thoughts on this, because I don't know if I ever have. Emily, how do you feel about like what has happened to the idea of gathering together and

watching a TV show versus just like binge watching the shit out of something? You know, I feel like it's sort of ruined like the water cooler conversation. And this is just going to keep continuing with Netflix. Oh, you mean like binging something? Or they just dump the episodes on Netflix and you just watch it whenever you want versus like, oh, did you see Game of Thrones last night? Oh, I think that there's something very, very, very. flawed with Netflix's model.

I mean, I think that they, I don't see a situation in which they'll stop. I think there's some of their kids shows they roll out week by week or they do a couple episodes at a time, but like... What are your thoughts? Bad or good? So you didn't mean, you didn't mean watching together like watching in a room physically with other

people. I meant, here, let me rephrase. Is it... Because that's a really simple question. That's gross and weird. It is a very simple question. Do you do you like the fact that Netflix dumps seasons at a time. No, I don't.

Yeah, no, I think it makes it, well, I mean, and I've only experienced that from the perspective as somebody who has to either edit things that people write about that or write about those things. So that makes it hard because it's like, what do I do? When do I put this stuff out? And I mean, I guess the only right answer is to watch all of those things as quickly as you can

and then write, apparently, you're very clear-headed, good, well-perspected thoughts about the show, which just isn't going to happen. after like bleeding your eyes out from watching like 12 hours of house of cards. I mean, I don't know. There's, I think that they do, they produce the shows differently. Interesting. From, yeah, on Netflix versus HBO.

I think, yeah. And it's funny because you don't think of TV as an episodic format anymore when you're watching things on Netflix. Right. It's not good or bad. It's just like the different. between an episode written by one person or directed by one person or like it all kind of leads together you're like oh when did that happen to piper i can't even remember like if we're

to talk about random netflix things can i just say that i really there's something i really miss watching on netflix movies they don't have movies i don't know the the catalog just seems like there's like one thing a month that i like discover it's like oh yeah that that's worth watching but it's just a see it's all tv that's all they push it on me is tv tv tv tv tv tv And like the whole reason I signed up for Netflix was for movies. Yeah. Well, I think I think Netflix is just morphing into an all online version of HBO or HBO is morphing into a semi-TV version of Netflix because you're going to have these cycling through of different movies, which is exactly what HBO does. I mean, I watch movies on HBO Go sometimes.

I mean, I watch movies on both HBO Go and Netflix, like just depending on, you know, how much housework I have to do or how many dishes I have to watch. But yeah, I mean, but it's the same thing. It's like a cycling through of a different catalog of movies every month or a couple months. And then and then your big shows. Your big shows you have to watch so you can talk to your friends and maintain a social life. I just think the thing. I have so many thoughts. You could do it, Eli.

No, it's just, it's Netflix had this line. They just kept retesting, kept saying, we have to come HBO before HBO becomes us, right? Yeah. And what HBO did was they tried to become Netflix. clicks. They hired a guy from Microsoft. They built this huge tech platform. And they're like, you know what? This blows. Like, this is awful. This is a huge waste of money. Screw it. They threw it all out. They hired MLB Advanced Media to build HBO now. It's a commodity. That company will just build it for you. And now they have it. And now they're spending all of their

money on Game of Thrones and Pollars and True Detective. And Marketing. And marketing. But they're better at it. Yeah. Like, I would say that the average HBO show is better plotted. and paste and makes more sense than any Netflix series that I've seen so far, except perhaps the first season of Hasso Cards. Yeah. I mean, well, HBO still has to deal with a slate of shows or like a schedule. Right. So they can only really run like four shows maybe at a time, like weekly.

Usually three though, because it's like one big drama. Or no, two big dramas and then two comedies. That's usually what they have. at any given point of the year. Whereas I feel like Netflix keeps piling on the shows. There are so many Netflix shows now. Most of them I've never seen before. Right.

But I always say there's one main Netflix show that you're supposed to watch. Yeah. Like orange and black. Like that's what I'm supposed to be watching right now. Right. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know.

It's also like, it's also just a, I mean, HBO's been around for a long time and they kind of have always had a little bit of a patina of prestige to them. Like that's, even before they started doing like, TV shows or doing original series. It's been, it's been like a thing, a fancy thing

the rich people have to have HBO. So, I didn't have it growing up. Yeah, no, I don't know anybody. It was not a normal thing. How long has it been around for? 80s.

Nothing. We didn't, my sister are given the choice between MTV and HBO and we picked HBO. Wow. Wow. Wow. I really wanted MTV.

My sister was older and she got over where she wanted. Stupid. Oh my God. I didn't told it. I've been told this story Now that we spoil

the crap at the Game of Thrones for John he's like stop verge casting I've been told that my my stories of

sibling rivalry with my irritatingly perfect sister are not great birdcast material John John's literally

telling me to shut up all right Sam do the social do the social work here okay Snapchat the real Verge

at us there because Snapchat is where it's at you should follow us on Periscope because we periscope quite frequently

we're YouTube dot com slash the verge also all of our videos hit there as soon as we post them and there are great things coming so look out for them. Cool. And then hit us up on iTunes. Emily has a great show called Verge ESP along with Lizepato.

You had an episode this week or next week? Next week. Next week. Yes. That's a great show. What's Tech with Chris Plant? Also on our iTunes page. That's just iTunes.com slash The Verge.

Sam is Sam Sefer on Twitter. Dieter is Backlorn. I am reckless. Emily is Emily Yoshita. Thank you so much for listening. That was The Vergecast. rock and roll. Paul. Oh my God.

And Walt Bosberg on the Word Chast next week. Get ready. What? Get ready.