The Vergecast - Inside the global computer crash

Episode Date: July 23, 2024

Today on the flagship podcast of configuration changes: The Verge's Tom Warren joins the show to to talk about the story and legacy of the CrowdStrike crash.  CrowdStrike and Microsoft: all the latest news on the global IT outage Major Windows BSOD issue hits banks, airlines, and TV broadcasters What is CrowdStrike, and what happened? CrowdStrike’s faulty update crashed 8.5 million Windows devices, says Microsoft CrowdStrike outage: Photos, videos, and tales of IT workers fixing BSODs Then we talk with The Verge's Victoria Song and Zombies, Run creator Adrian Hon about making exercising fun without making it competitive and awful. Zombies, Run Adrian Hon’s Substack Finally, the Apple Watch will let you rest This walking app let me whack my co-workers with a baseball bat Ignore your fitness tracker and walk to Mordor instead Finally, we answer a hotline question about handheld gadgets for new parents — because there's a lot of time to kill when there's a baby around. Backbone One review: the best mobile gaming controller yet Handheld consoles are the future of gaming Holedown Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of configuration changes. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am in my basement, as always, doing a shipping day. So I'm going on vacation at the end of this week. I'm going to spend two weeks in the outdoors just like staring at trees and not screens. It's going to be amazing. Can't wait. But what I always try to do before I go on vacation is just like kind of get stuff together. There's nothing worse than coming home to like mess.

So trying to get everything cleaned off. And mostly what that means in my particular line. of work is just shipping things. One of the great things about this job is you accumulate a lot of gadgets. And one of the annoying things about this job is you have to ship them all back. So right now I have like, I have a bunch of tablets on my desk. I have a case for a thing. I don't even know what the thing is. I have, I have a bunch of watch boxes that I have to go back. I see one, two, three, four, five phones that I have to do something with. I have some AR glasses. I have these Amazon echo frames. I have a camera and I have a Vision Pro and I have, oh, that's another phone. So that's

six phones. I have the Humane AI pin that I keep meaning to send back. I have two rabbits. They sent me two for some reason. I don't know why. I don't want either one of them. So basically what has going to happen here is I have a very carefully organized thing of packing tape in the utility room over there and I'm going to spend all day shoving things into boxes and then I'm going to load my car, and as I do four or five times a year, I'm going to dump thousands of things into the UPS office all in once, and then it's going to feel like a gigantic weight has lifted off my shoulders. I both hate this and kind of love how it feels at the very end.

Anyway, lots to do on the Vergecast today. We are going to talk about the crazy thing that happened on Friday when, thanks to something happening with CrowdStrike and Windows, computers all over the world just went down and broke and it felt like everything from airlines to banks just fell apart all at once. We're going to talk about what happened, what it means that that can happen, and where we go from here. We're also going to talk about one of my all-time favorite apps called Zombies Run, and we're going to talk about what that app means for fitness and what it gets right about how we think about quantifying ourselves and tracking

things and gamification and everything that feels toxic and wrong with the way that our devices work now, why that app feels like none of it. We had a super fun time talking to one of the creators. It's a really good interview. We also have a fun hotline question about handheld gaming, which we've been talking a lot about on this show recently, so lots to get to. All that is coming up in just a second, but I just this second realized that I don't have anywhere near enough actual boxes, which means I have to go, I think, to like Home Depot, and pay a bunch of money for a bunch of boxes to then pay a bunch of money to ship to someone else. It's a process.

Anyway, this is the Vergecast. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in.

Build custom internal tools just by describing. what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. Welcome back. All right. So obviously, I should have mentioned this up top. The biggest news happening right now, at least in the United States, is President Joe Biden dropping out of the race for 2024 endorsing his vice president, Kamala Harris. It's just pure chaos in the American election season right now.

And we're going to spend a lot of time over the next few months covering this. But right now just didn't feel like the right moment. So we're going to come back to this. We'll probably talk a bunch about it. On Friday's show, we're going to talk a lot about politics and policy and all of this for the next several months. Keep an eye on the verge.com. For right now, I want to talk about something that happened on Friday,

which is that a lot of the world woke. up to computers that didn't work. Banks were having trouble. Airlines were having trouble. It felt like all at once, the whole world just kind of crashed. And it turns out this was something that happened because of a company called CrowdStrike on Windows computers. And it has made a lot of people feel a lot of feelings about what it means that we are so reliant on technology and not just technology, but very specific things from very specific companies. And all of it feels so important and infrastructural, but it all also feels fragile. So I want to talk about what has happened over the last few days, what we've learned and where we might go forward in how

we think about computers and how we use them for the most important things going on in the world. Tom Warren on our team has been covering all of this all weekend, I think didn't have a weekend by the sounds of things. So we're going to get into it. Hi, Tom. Hey, good to be back. So you have like an IT-ish background a little bit. Is this like the confluence of all of your interests these last few days? Yeah, this is like, I'm so glad I got out of IT more than a decade ago kind of incident. Yeah, definitely. Yeah, it seems right. So let's rewind back to Friday morning. You're in the UK, I'm in the US, so you woke up a few hours earlier than I did and got online. Like, describe to me the scenes of Friday morning as you were getting up and getting online.

Chaos. So I woke up around about 7 a.m. And I had like a couple of people, one night used to work. with and just a good friend who's like very technical message me saying if you've seen this in Australia like what's going on out there and I was like kind of what's all this and I looked at like the Reddit thread there was like loads of cisadmins complaining and usually that's a good sign of any sort of major sort of Windows outages or anything related to that is is Reddit people getting angry essentially it's a good flag yeah so I saw that and then um there's some like media reports out of Australia about banks being affected at supermarkets, airlines, you know, all the usual stuff that we've seen. But then it started to spread, right? So I turned on

like the TV, you know, quarter past seven to watch like Sky News and they weren't running the news. And I was like, hmm, this is weird. And then it came like, one of their tech persons had tweeted saying they were offline because of some tech issues. And then it started to like escalate. It was like some of the airports warning of the initial flights that started around about at that time of the day. Like 7am is kind of like the early flights of delays and stuff. And I was like, okay, right, I've got to figure out what's going on here. And then obviously we saw the crowd strike thing. And then it all kind of just started spiraling.

Like you just saw more and more. But at the same time, there was a Microsoft Azure cloud outage going on. Oh, God. It wasn't a huge one. Yeah, it wasn't a huge one, but it was kind of small. So it started out with like, everyone blaming Microsoft. for this outage to start off. Yeah, how quickly did, by the time I was online,

CrowdStrike was kind of already in the conversation. It was, there was a lot of like, right when I became aware of the story, it was kind of at that moment where it was like, okay, this is, this is a CrowdStrike thing. We hadn't quite gotten to, here's what's going on yet. But how did folks figure out that CrowdStrike was the issue here? Yeah, I think mainly because on Reddit, the people that were posting there, the sysadmins were posting the stuff from CrowdStrikes support,

which you obviously had to be a CrowdStrike customer to access. It wasn't available publicly. So then it was like, okay, this is what's actually caused it. It's obviously not a Windows problem because not everyone's waking up with this. It's like a select amount of machines, but enough to obviously be causing a problem. And obviously they issued this update. I think it was like around about like 5 a.m. UK time. And then I think it was like an hour and 20 minutes or so near enough.

when they pulled it. But that was that time when it was like middle of the afternoon or something in Australia, like the peak time for people to all have their machines on with Crowdstrike installed. And they obviously have quite a big install base there, I guess, in Australia. So they got hit the hardest, like initially. I think about that with like, you see the companies that do maintenance or software updates or whatever. And they always do them, it's almost always overnight in the US, right? So the thing you're describing like 5am, UK time, that's middle of the night in the US. It had never occurred to me before this, but that's got to suck if you live in one of these timelines that is like opposite the US and all of these things are happening in the middle of your workday all the time over and over again. So like Australia just getting screwed by software updates left and right here.

I never really thought about that for it. I'm sorry Australia. I think they got hit the hardest because I think just all the machines were online right to get this update. So if and then obviously the European machines, a lot of these machines will be just, you know, people leave the office and don't turn them off for. example. These are also critical systems that this is usually installed on. So they're pretty much always online. So that's why there was like 8.5 million machines in total affected. We saw some, I feel like there was less in the US affected in terms of like the stuff that we saw in Australia, like the supermarkets and people not be able to get groceries and, you know, all those

affecting hospital appointments and stuff. I think there was a little bit less of that in the US. The biggest thing that happened in the US, at least anecdotally, was the airline stuff. Yeah. And then there was a thing. The graphs that you could see of the planes in the sky was pretty incredible for a few hours. Which usually only happens like they grind, yeah, they grounds, right? That many flights usually when it's like something terrible happens, right? Yeah, but that's still ongoing.

I think Delta actually said yesterday that's still canceling flights and canceling some today. So that's, I think they've been particularly like worse hit than the other major sort of airlines in the US. But yeah, so that's still, there's still a bit of fallout going on there. Yeah. So with a few days of hindsight, it seems like we have a pretty clear sense of what happened. So just back all the way up, like, what happened here? What broke? And I guess start with who is CrowdStrike because I think most people reasonably do not and should not have to know who CrowdStrike is.

So like start all the way at the beginning. What went wrong here? Yeah, they're probably the only time you've ever heard of Crowdstrike is that they sponsor Mercedes. If you watch Formula One, then maybe. Wait, I knew I had heard that name before. That's so funny. Okay. That is right.

There you go. And there was that picture of the Windows machines that crashed at the Mercedes F1 garage when they were doing the testing and they had CrowdStrike on the T-shirts. It's just perfect. But yeah, on Friday morning, CrowdStrike issued what they call like a content update to their protection system. And CrowdStrike is a third party security firm that just think of it basically as antivirus. She's a lot more sophisticated than that because obviously cybersecurity these days is advanced

further. But it's a cloud-based solution that pushes updates to machines that pay for this software. And I think it's around about 50 bucks a machine. So it's not cheap to protect your system with this stuff. So it's usually on critical systems. So that's why you saw such an impact. And do you mean critical systems in the sense of like super secure government computers or just like computers that can't afford to go down? Or I guess both. Yeah, more computers that can't really afford to go down. Like you see it in all the airport screens were all Windows machines, and they're kind of critical for communications to passengers and stuff.

So it's not critical in the security side, potentially, but more the infrastructure side of things. Yeah. So yeah, they issued a regular update at, I think it was about 5am UK time around about then, which is about midnight Eastern. And then all the machines started collecting that update, because that is the way that this system, is designed so that you get these updates,

so you're protected against any emerging threats, right? Like you'll get. Right. And it's not like a button you have to click on the computer to update. Like this is one thing I think I've heard some folks having trouble understanding. Like this is not an update that appears and you click a thing in your computer reboots. This is like, and it's designed to happen in the background all the time. Right.

This is the kind of update CrowdStrike does constantly, if I understand. Yeah, it does these like, if not hourly, like daily. Okay. You know, like these are pretty frequent updates. So the way that the system works, let's explain that first, is that it runs at the very highest level of Windows. So basically in the kernel, which is like a privileged area of Windows that most apps don't touch or go near. It's like your anti-chete systems for PC games. They'll see this sort of security scanning software is allowed in there, and Microsoft allows that.

And so they have a driver that runs at the boot of Windows to protect the system. And then they had these content delivery updates that are sort of like the rules and regulations around how this driver functions and how it detect stuff. And it's that sort of update, not the driver, that caused the issues. And there was basically a corruption in the update. And then the driver's obviously gone, oh, no, what's happening. Crashed. And then Windows has gone, oh, no, what's happening? Blue screen.

And then reboot. And then it keeps doing that every time because it keeps reading that latest content update. And so they've managed to fix it on some machines because you can keep rebooting the machine. And if you're lucky, the network stack will initialize in Windows before Crowstrike does. And then you get the update or CrowdStrike starts. It's like scanning. So you get the update the latest like dictionary definitions essentially before it crashes. So some have been able to recover from that.

I'm not sure what the percentage is because Crowdstrike haven't really sort of detailed that. And they're also working on some sort of other. remediation, some mysterious remediation that they've been testing apparently over the last 24 hours. So maybe we get some more details about that. But that's essentially what happened. It was like 78 minutes of pushing this faulty update out to machines. And obviously there's a bunch of them that are virtual machines, there's servers, there's just machines that are always on, like we're talking about the airport and stuff. So they all just sort of grabbed it. If you obviously had a machine that you turned on once they pulled the bad update, you wouldn't have been affected. But it still

hit 8.5 million devices, which sounds like a lot as well, and it is. But Microsoft's point is like it's less than 1% of Windows machines. But it's the important part of Windows machines. Let's talk through that. That's the thing, right? I think it's like the percentage of Microsoft computers that have CrowdStrike is by definition going to be a very important percentage of Microsoft PCs. Right. And those matter a lot that they keep running. So this idea that like, you know, the surface laptop my wife has in her office upstairs didn't crash. It's like, I don't know if that's the victory for Microsoft that we're hoping for. But it is useful perspective. It didn't. Yeah. And I think Microsoft is trying desperately to say like,

this isn't Windows. Like we didn't, this is not a Windows problem. We didn't do it. Yeah, definitely. But can you imagine if it'd been 10%? Like, I know. It could have been like even like a lot, a lot worse. It was obviously very bad, but yeah, it could have been really bad. And it just kind of shows you like the reliance on this stuff. You've been tracking kind of the different versions of the fix that have been going on here. Because I think, walk me through kind of where we've been. Because at the very beginning, if I remember, right, one of the big problems was the fix was super manual. You had to like go into every airport kiosk computer, reboot it in safe mode, do a thing, do another thing, and then it would work again.

And it's like, fine for your computer at home, but that doesn't work for every airline and airport and bank around the world. Like, that's just not a good thing. But it seems like even just a few days later, there's a much better track for getting this to fix. So walk me through that a little bit. Yeah, kind of yes and no, because obviously we talked about the reboot thing

is what CrowdStraight's been recommended, and that's working on some. What were you saying up to 15 times you wrote, right? Just basically keep turning it off and on again Apparently, just keep rewaring. That's working for some people. It's not working for everyone. So there's still a lot of manual intervention going on.

So you still have the option of doing it manually where you'd have to start the machine in safe mode, which requires physical access and a keyboard to get this machine to go in safe mode. And then you need admin rights to actually delete the faulty file. So there's quite a lot of intervention there. It's not like just send an update, click a button and an update is there.

The other option is Microsoft created a recovery tool, which can sort of automate that process. But the only problem is a lot of these machines, because they're critical and they're out sort of in airports and stuff, they might be locked down by Bitlocker, which is disk encryption. So then that tool can't do that without you having a recovery key, which are unique for every machine. And then you have to type this long, it's long. It's like a Windows key, you know, a product key that you put in. that sort of length to then allow you access. So there's still a lot of manual intervention going along. We've seen videos and pictures of like people scaling ladders in airports and stuff

just to literally plug USBs into like these machines. It's just like it's, yeah, there's a lot that's still going on. So I'd love to know what the percentage of ones that were fixed by rebooting multiple times versus, you know, manual intervention. And also just do IT admin. just go and just blast this thing away and make sure that machine's fixed, moved on to next. You know, like, it's a choice, isn't it, for every business as well. Do you want to sit there trying to reboot it, or do you just want to fix it in the amount of time

that you could have sat there rebooting it sort of 20 times? So I think it's a choice. But, yeah, there's some more tools. And then, like we said, Crowstrikes potentially doing something. I can't remember the exact wording they've put on it. But it's like some cloud-based solution that they think they might have got this fix. But I'm not sure how that's going to work. You cover Microsoft for us.

Yes. I feel like over the last 72 hours, this has gone from being a Microsoft disaster to not really being a Microsoft disaster. It's kind of a Microsoft adjacent disaster, I would say. But what is your sense of what, A, kind of how this looks for Microsoft and B, like if you're Microsoft and you're a company that obviously is responsible in some ways for these kinds of crucial machines and the way that these systems work.

Is your sense that anything changes here? Is this just like a bad thing that happened and we all recover and move on? Or does this feel like it might change things? Yeah, I feel like it might change things. I think there's a lot going on here. It's obviously Crowstrait, which is a third-party vendor. They get privileged access to be able to run this software

in the way they do. Which is not normal, we should say. It's a pretty big thing to give somebody essentially that kind of access. It's like being inside of your computer in a very real way. Yeah. And Microsoft allows it. And I think there was a statement where Microsoft said that essentially that they have to give this access because of a ruling by the European Commission in 2009.

Which I think is like, yes, true, but also, you know, they could possibly do what Apple have done and create an architecture where they have their own API set and then vendors plug into them. that. But yeah, I don't know. I need to look into that more fully to see the legalities on that. But yes, they do have to keep their kernel open. And it's essentially, it's not necessarily that they have to keep the kernel open. It's just that they can't privilege their own security software over other vendors seen as anti-competitive. And they've tried to lock down Windows a bunch over the years to sort of secure things up. And they always do get accused of being, you know, anti-competitive, whether it's like through really dumb ways, like S-mode or, you know, some more ways like TPM chips on Windows 11.

There's always going to be a pushback because people see Windows as this open system and they do not like it when Microsoft tries to lock it down for whatever reasons they might be doing it. But I feel like this might trigger some sort of change. The only thing is that the Mac like way of doing, it hasn't been perfect. It actually sometimes the security software that runs there

does cause panic errors on MacOS. So there's no like, perfect way of doing this. And I think Microsoft's kind of stuck in this weird situation where it's like they kind of should take some of the blame here because should we say if there's a driver that's faulty and stopping Windows from booting or crashing at boot, why does Windows not unload that after it's done that like five times or whatever?

I have a long you want to say, but it should be intelligent enough to be like, something weird's going on here. Because as a human, if something was crashing, you'd just stop it, wouldn't you? and be like, let's see what's going on here. But it just allows that behavior to happen. So I feel like they need to address some of that

to stop this sort of thing happening in the future as well. But again, it's not their update, so it wasn't their fault. But they can help, if you know what I mean? So yeah, but I think it's going to trigger a lot of conversations around this. And it's just interesting because CrowdStrike obviously competes with Microsoft. And Microsoft has its own endpoint stuff like in tune, that it sells to customers.

and competes with CrowdStrike on the sales team. And the CEO of CrowdStrike regularly goes on TV broadcasts and interviews and bashes Microsoft Security Record, which obviously has not been great over the past few years. So there's a lot of stuff going on here. And I think there was something about how there was an incident that happened, I think it was in 2010, when McCaffey sent out an update similar to this

and it crashed a bunch of Windows XP machines. And the CrowdStrike CEO was the CTO at McCaffey at the time. So it's like, yeah, there's a lot of history between security vendors and Microsoft and all this stuff where they want it to be open. Microsoft's like, yeah, but you should trust us. And everyone's like, well, look what's happened when you trusted you for the past couple of decades. I think there's going to be a lot of conversations around that. Yeah, I mean, it's such an interesting microcosm of both sides of the debate here, right? Because like if you want to argue for the closed ecosystem, it's so that things like this,

don't happen. And if you want to argue for the open ecosystem, it's that mostly things like this don't happen, right? Like, part of what's so interesting about this to me is it's, it is on the one hand, sort of remarkable that like the McAfee thing was in 2010 and this is this year. And these things don't actually happen all that often. And yet, when they do, they literally, like, set the world on fire, right? Like it's, yeah, it's catastrophic. Right. And we're, we're so reliant on this stuff now. And I think it comes to a point where, and like you said, nobody is perfect. I don't think there is a version of this that is perfect. And it just makes you wonder like, okay, how do we, how do we even think about our reliance on this stuff as people,

as businesses, as like society? Like the fact that a, what it amounts to like a security update to your computer could prevent you from flying to your vacation is just like a weird thing nobody thinks about. And I have spent now a lot of time thinking about it, and I still don't know how to sort through it, because it's not like, get rid of all the computers, pen and paper will fix it. It's like, that's clearly not the answer. But yeah, I've seen some people tweet, like, maybe people should use endpoints and, like, point of sales devices in supermarket should be iPads, you know? It's like, yeah, but that's expensive for supermarkets. They can't afford that. Well, and I don't know that iPads are like famously perfect technology.

Yeah, there's so many different solutions. But I think, I think really what it should highlight is that these companies like Crowdstrike and Microsoft need to definitely work a lot closer together. Rather than being this competitive force against each other because it's no good going on TV and bashing your competitors and stuff. And they both do it. So it's like that I think in cybersecurity in general at the moment, there needs to just definitely be a larger thing. on the joint customers. Who knows whether that happened. But yeah, the fact that this sort of stuff

can take down so much stuff, and it was only less than 1% of Windows machines. That should be a major red flag. If this was 10% upwards, it would be, you know, who knows? If it was a Windows update, they'd done this as well. I was just going to say, you talk about nobody's security record as perfect.

Like, if this is something Microsoft had pushed, and there's not necessarily a good reason it couldn't have been Microsoft that pushed it. The scale would have been dramatically different. Like, part of what I think, and you've probably seen more of this than I have, but to me at least it seems like

the question of what went wrong at CrowdStrike that allowed this to happen is going to be the big question. Why wasn't it tested, right? Right, or was this the kind of thing that they do a million times a day and so somebody got sloppy? Was this a failure of process?

Was this? Did it follow the and sometimes bad things happen. That to me feels like the kind of core piece of this that we still haven't really seen is like what or who screwed up that this could happen. And is it a thing we can fix or is this just like a thing that's going to happen every once in a while and we have to figure out how to live with it.

Yeah, I think what it created was like a basically a sort of memory panic. So it was like this file calls the driver to be like, try to write to a part of memory that it shouldn't be. And then Windows is obviously, obviously like, no, you can't do that. Let's kill this driver or the driver crashed and killed Windows with it. I think when it comes to like, this is going to be obviously a lot of pointing fingers and

who takes the blame for it. But I think there's definitely Windows should do a better job of this. But there's also Crowdstrike should do a better job at testing its update. Like how has that gone out to 8.5 million devices and not being spotted? Like, why don't they automate that testing or something like that? short, there's going to be questions about how that actually happened. But yeah, I think Microsoft takes probably like, I don't know, 10 to 20% of the blame here or something. And I just hope that they both look at it and come up with a solution that stops this from ever happening again.

Because I don't think the solution is rip these guys out the kernel because Microsoft doesn't do a ton of innovative stuff with Windows at the moment. So allowing people to have kernel access allows for some of that innovation. and some like crowd strike pushes that security innovation where Microsoft might not take it like internet explorer back in a day if we just let Microsoft define the web, we wouldn't have had Chrome, we wouldn't have had all that competition. So it's like, I don't want to see it swing one way or the other.

I just want to see cooperation really. Yeah. This never happens again. Well, and especially in these moments where these things are not allowed to fail, right? I think part of what was so eye-opening, I think, about this whole thing was just realizing, how much of the world runs on Windows computers. And not even different Windows computers,

just Windows computers. The signs you see at the mall are just Windows computers. And I think... You go to an ATM and take out cash is probably Windows. Yeah. And so I think to me, this question of, okay, we have these operating systems, we have this software. Do we need to think really differently about the ones that are like modern infrastructure

in a way that isn't just functionally a Windows computer. I don't know. The fact that it's basically just a bunch of crappy little PC boxes that keep our banks running is one of those things I think a lot of people sort of intellectually know, but it's actually probably not how it should work.

And I don't know, this is where I get in, like, way over my head on how all the technology of this actually works, but it does feel like we are at a point where there is a set of computers in the world that just cannot fail and that maybe having them be just computers is not the right way to think about it.

Yeah. I don't know what the alternative is. That's the thing. I don't need it. That's the thing. They're just cheap, right? It's cheaper for them. What is the alternative, really?

They're not going to go MacOS. They could do Linux, but then that could be complicated. Yeah, that has its own mess. Yeah. So it's like, I don't know. There's no, I think that's the biggest problem is that there is actually a monopoly here, right? At play with Windows and it was husband. And it's like there isn't really a good alternative.

And the alternative to security these things are now causing issues. So it's like, yeah, like, where do you stop at this? But I mean, maybe the alternative is Microsoft creates a lockdown version of Windows for these sort of devices. I think they've done similar sort of stuff in the past. But the problem there is that then you get complicated apps that want to do stuff on these. And then you have the same things. Like, okay, well, we just need to give them Windows. And you get to the point where there's only two people on Earth and one vent.

that know how to service these things and that causes its own problems. And it's a tough thing, but it feels like I wonder if this moment ends up being a kind of a blip on the radar or if people start to talk seriously about like, okay, how do we make these things work the way that we need them to going forward? And I have no idea what that'll look like, but I think it'll be fascinating to watch. And the fragility of the situation just reminds me of like when I used to be an IT admin, we literally had like a ticker that would go around in Canary Wolf. and it was powered by spreadsheet and Excel spreadsheet

and I'd input data into it myself and maintain it and if I'd put in something wrong you'd crash the whole ticket and it'd be like flashing and going crazy like that's just you know that's just like the perfect example of how you see this stuff out in the world like the screens at airports and you just don't realize that usually it's some crappy software

and just the most basic stuff powering that thing probably from like 10, 20 years ago I keep thinking about for whatever reason I think it was when Oppenheimer was out. And there was that picture somebody posted of the IMAX theater with a palm pilot powering it. And we went and found somebody who ran the theater. And they were like, look, it works. Nobody touches it.

It's been there for years. Like, no one understands it. It's just this weird little thing that keeps the plate spinning. So we keep it running. And I feel like more of the world works like that than any of us would like it do. Oh, yeah. It's all like held together by string. That string started going apart on Friday.

Exactly. So it seems like most of the worst of this is, if not over, then kind of on the way to recovery. Yeah, I think so. I think because if you're an ITM and in a business, you're going to prioritize the people and systems that matter the most. First of all, we get those backup running. Yeah, there are a lot of people who worked all weekend, I suspect. So to all of you IT folks listening, we love you. Yeah, that's a tough one, especially on Friday when you think, oh, nice, chill Friday. to the weekend. What fallout is left here? What are you keeping an eye on this week? I'm definitely keeping on the Delta situation

because they seem to be the most impacted by this in terms of airlines, hospitals, because we've seen people not being able to get their appointments and stuff to see because in schools, I guess, as well, though certainly in Europe and the UK, a lot of kids are out of school now for the summer holidays. So we'll see.

It's where there's typically less investment in infrastructure where it kind of matters, like schools and hospitals and stuff, where they just don't have the budget. So it'd be interesting to see where those go, and there's still some sort of lingering issues today and tomorrow. But I feel like we'll hear less about this as the week goes on, for sure. It's definitely, yeah, it's getting better out there. In some sense, thank God it happened on a Friday and not on like a Tuesday morning and we would have felt the full effects of this for like a couple of days in the middle of the week, yeah. see. Yeah. Yeah. It's on its way to being fixed now anyway. That's good. Well, yeah. As always,

computers are terrifying, fragile things. The funniest thing about it, though, was like, one of Microsoft's fixes was like literally have you turned it off and on 15 times. Unreal. It's like, it's the meme coming true. It really, like, it is astounding how much of the world is just unplug it and plug it back in again. And it's, I mean, it goes back to the same thing, right? Like, these things are fragile and simple in, in so, so many ways that we would, Like maybe it's scary that they're that fragile and that simple, but that is, that is where it definitely is. Yeah.

All right. Tom, thank you as always. No worries. Thanks for having me. All right. We got to take a break and then we're going to come back. Talk about fitness, but like in a fun way. We'll be right back.

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into a thriving business with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash Vergecast. Go to Shopify.com slash vergecast. That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. All right, we're back. So Victoria's Song at the Verge,

we all call our V, has been on the show a few times recently talking about wearables and rest days on the Apple Watch. And one of the things that I've discovered in talking to her over the last couple of months is that she and I have really similar ideas about fitness and the quantified self and the idea of tracking yourself, which mostly is to say we have very conflicted relationships with these things. The idea of having these streaks and leaderboards and you should always be aspiring to be an elite athlete, it's just a lot.

And another thing that V and I have in common is that, our journey as runners, hers much more successful than mine, started in the same place with an app called Zombies Run. So what she and I are going to do at a couple of different points over the rest of the summer is talk about what I've come to sort of tentatively call the super chill exercise system. Basically, she and I have both been exploring ways to exercise more, do better, get in better shape, keep track of how you're doing without all of the stuff that feels gamified and toxic and like it's always pushing you to do more and incentivizing you to go do crazy things when it might hurt you or you're sick or like if I just have the Apple Watch

yell at me for not closing my rings when I'm sick one more time I'm going to lose my mind. You know what I mean? So to kick off our discussions about the super chill exercise system, real name pending, we'll see. I wanted to talk to the person who made zombies run. So V and I called up Adrian Hahn, who is a, writer and developer and story seller and worked on Zombies Run from the very beginning until very recently. He spent more than a decade writing this game.

And Zombies Run, if you've never played it, is, I don't know how to describe it exactly. It's an exercise fitness app that is also narrative. So when you're running, it's tracking you and it's aware of what you're doing, but it weaves a story in. Basically, it's a zombie apocalypse. you're in a place called Abel Township and you are a runner. That's your job, right?

You go out into the barren wasteland of the post-apocalyptic world and you do quests. You have to go find something or you have to go rescue somebody or you have to go to another place and learn about something. And it's all incentivizing you to run

and be active and be out. But the idea is to make it fun with story, right? You're picking it up every morning to see what happens next, not to not break some streak. This app worked really well for me. Just having a thing that pushed me out, that gave me something fun to do while I was running,

sometimes it'll just be like, oh, no, zombies, and you have to run faster. It was awesome. Like, I've always been a person who likes sports more than I like just running, because in sports, like, there's something to do. I have a purpose for why I'm moving fast. This felt like that.

And it's kind of like immersive in the way that listening to podcasts is immersive. it sort of distracts you from running while also having you run. The story is great. You get to know the characters. There's just something terrific about this game, but I haven't really seen replicated elsewhere. And Adrian was one of the people who built this thing from the very beginning.

So V and I called up Adrian to get a sense of how a game like this comes together, why it's hard to do, and what it took to really pull it off. And we just started at the beginning. We asked him basically, you know, over a down. decade ago, you're thinking about building a fitness game. This is like in the early days of the iPhone. Where do you even start? I'm Adrian Hahn. I ran Six to Start and co-founded it for 17 years, and so we made Zombies Run. I left about three months ago, four months ago. So that's probably the most well-known thing that I've done, made Zombies Run. And also I wrote a book

critiquing gamification, called you've been played. So that's fun. So, you know, when we came up with the idea for zombies run, it was myself and novelist Naomi Alderman.

And I had just kind of like really gotten into running at that time. And I had a Garmin four runner 205, 201. So if you remember this, this is a massive, like chunky. It's not a watch.

I mean, it's like a forearm bracelet. And it could track you by GPS. and I got this as a kind of way to make myself run more. And it actually did work because it was cool to see, like, numbers and to see that I was getting better every day, every time I ran. And it had this thing called, I think it was like the virtual racer, a virtual runner, which is like what it sounds like, it's like ghost racing in Mario Kart where you're racing against yourself.

So you can go and go out for a run and it will show you yourself versus yesterday's self. and it was kind of really cool to see myself like in this very proto-gamification thing getting better each time. But then there was a moment where I stopped getting better and I started getting worse and like my past self started beating myself and I was like, this sucks.

This is not motivating anymore because that only works on the way up. It doesn't work on the way down or when you plateau or if you're ill. And so then the iPhone came out and then the app store came out. And we had RunKeeper. There were even some smartphone running games, actually.

There was one called Cash and Seek made by Korean developer, I think. And the idea is that you'd run around your neighborhood and you see a map and they'd be like little treasure there. And it was actually like multiplayer because other people can leave treasure for you. And I started playing that and I was like, I actually just don't want to run to these places that's telling me to run to because it's like not very safe or it doesn't look nice. And so we started thinking about like, well, how could we make a good running game? Because people are trying to make these running games.

I mean, one of the problems of a lot of them actually was you had to look at the screen when you're running, which I think for people who have not run before, that sounds cool. Like that sounds like a good idea. And if you've ever run, then you're like, this is not just terrible from a kind of safety point of view, but also. if you stop every like two minutes, to look at your phone and then start running again. Like how are you really going to do that? Like that's not really practical. So the idea kind of came from,

look, we have this amazing piece of technology, which is like a sort of like handheld computer, which is brand new, really. It's got internet connection. It's got GPS. It's got sound. People are used to use in their headphones.

What can we do of this to make a game? And so that's a lot of constraints, but it was also like really interesting from a game design point of view. Well, and I think somewhere in there, you're also having to make a lot of decisions about, like, the mechanics of the game, right? Because you're talking about, like, I think about all those early games and there were all those early running apps. And a lot of them were just like, track your run, right? Like, there's a subset of people who just, like, want to know how far they run.

But then, like you're saying, there were others that were starting to play with this, like, how do we get you to run more? And this is when everybody was starting to experiment with all these new ways of gamification and leaderboards and all these different things. And I feel like from the very beginning, you kind of went the other direction of a lot of that stuff. Yeah, there was a lot of, you know, to the extent that they really thought about motivation, I think it was basically competition, right? So it was like, we have a leaderboard and can you get to the top of the leaderboard? So like I was using the Fitbit at the time and everyone was trying to get to the top of the leaderboard. And then the leaderboard would never move each week because you'd have the people who like are in Europe and they walk everywhere. And you'd have the people in America at the bottom who drive everywhere.

and they don't climb. And so it's just like, this is not really motivating anyone, actually. Another aspect of that, kind of parallel to that, there'd be these territory capture games where you'd have, like, you'd divide the world up in hexagons or squares, and it'd be like, can you go and capture enough space?

And that's kind of like a leaderboard where it's just whoever runs the most, you know, or has the most free time wins. And again, for some people, that's really motivating. I don't really think there was anything beyond that, not even kind of exploration. And so we want to do something completely different, which was storytelling, basically.

It was like role play, which I didn't think had been done before in that aspect. But it really came from the idea that people were already listening to podcasts and audio books when they're running. So we weren't asking people to do anything new. And I think I still have this idea for a game. Someone feel free to steal it if you want,

which was, there's the bit in the Bourne ultimatum when Jason Bourne is guiding this person through Waterloo Station and he's like, okay, turn right now, turn left here, okay, pause for five seconds and Bourne goes and murders them. And I'm like, oh, that's kind of like a really,

that's a very like interesting, like dramatic thing which is just entirely voice based, basically. And it's like, oh, we could do something like that where you have this audio story which is telling you basically to run. and when you're running crucially, you don't look at the screen, you don't tap on anything. So it's not really interactive game. You're just choosing or able to run fast or slower.

And the story in the game kind of adapts to that. The zombies came into it because Naomi, my co-creator, she had just joined this running club, and they'd said, why do you want to run? And some people wanted to lose weight and other people wanted to get fit. And one woman said she wanted to survive the zombie apocalypse. And I was like, oh yeah, that's funny. But then I was kind of sick of zombies at that point. This was like 2011, 2012.

And we had the Walking Dead and we had, you know, 28 days later. And I kind of thought zombies were over, which was wrong. They're still here. But from a storytelling point of view and from a gameplay point of view, especially for a running game, that that's actually really, really nothing better that we found because zombies, everyone knows how they work. You just have to kind of move faster than them. But also the great thing was zombies is that most zombies don't actually run. So, you know, your classic zombies, your non-28 days later zombies, they just walk

or they shamble. And so that was kind of a really clear thing for us, which was you don't actually have to run in zombies run. You can just walk if you want. And the game will not give you a hard time for that. There is nothing gated in zombies run based on your distance or your pace. So if you even want to do it sitting on a couch, you can do that. And some people do it, like doing chores or whatever, and the most people do run or jog. And so the crucial thing there was we're not measuring your performance. Like you can measure your performance. We give you stats and things like that. But actually, we're not rewarding that in a way what we're doing is we're saying, we're just going to make it more fun. Like, you know, we don't want to make it, like, we don't want to reward you

for doing a run. We want you to be rewarded while running, which is a really important difference. And I think it's so, like, what makes for good gamification, that good gamification means where you're having fun while you're doing it, not after you've done it, which is really hard to do. I actually, this is, my, my running journey began with zombies run. Oh, wow. Because I, you know, I've been running for a long time, but I was, not a natural runner in any form. I was the person who is very much like my natural form is a couch potato. You would have to be chasing me, basically, for me to run.

But it was a type of thing where I was like, oh, I have like a metabolic thing. I need to actually run. Running is one of the cheapest ways that you can exercise, but it is quite miserable when you're starting out. Yeah. So, like, I think the thing that really resonates with me here in terms of like just talking about the chillness of things is like actually having fun while you exercise, because I think with fitness tech and like with the gamification of it, I don't know why,

but we just decide to invite so much anxiety into the process. Like leaderboard, oh, I feel terrible about myself because I'm not number one. And then if I am number one, I have this intense pressure to stay number one. And so then that's that's not fun anymore. I've turned the exercise into work. And then also, just as you said, like it really kind of resonated with the whole idea of the virtual runner and you're running against your past self who is better than you. I'm at that stage because if you do it long enough, if you do it long enough, you are going to plateau. You are going to have a slump.

You're just not, you're just, you age. And you know, as you get older, you're not going to be quite as fast as you were when you're younger. So I think with the game, you want people to keep playing. So what were some of the things that you tried that you just realized was like, oh, this is actually making the game less fun or, oh, this is making the game more fun? Yeah, I mean, you know, people come into it with different, like, motivations and different expectations. So we did this Kickstarter right at the beginning, and there were kind of two strands to it. One was there's going to be an amazing story by an amazing storyteller. and for a lot of people, possibly even most people, that's like the big motivation, which is,

I go out for a run. It's kind of told, like, in first person, so they're talking to you as if you're, like, you know, a real person. It's not like an audiobook. It has amazing characters. It's got, like, cliffhangers at the end of every mission. So you kind of want to know what happens next. And for us, that's a big thing where it was always, you know, we want you to get up on a rainy Sunday morning. and actually be excited to find out what's going to happen next, rather than be like, is there any excuse I can use not to go to rock? So I just want to push back on one piece of that that I think is really interesting that you said,

which is the idea that you can, like, you could just sit on your couch and play the game, and it would still be very fun, right? I think that there's probably some truth to that, but also if that were true, you would have just made a game that you can play sitting on your couch, right? And part of the reason I think this is the thing V and I keep talking about is like gamification,

when it's like, Monopoly Go trying to get your money, I have pretty unconflicted problematic feelings about. But this one is so different, right? Because the thing that you're doing creepy things to incentivize people to do is like ostensibly a good and healthy thing. And so you're in a position of saying like, okay, we built this cool game that people like because it's a game, but they also like it because it makes them exercise

and because it makes them do a thing that is good for them and it makes that thing more bearable. Like, does that change the balance of just like, if the goal was to just get more microtransact, from people you would play it one way. But when it's like, okay, we actually want to have you do something that in moderation, even at greater intervals than you're currently doing it, is a good thing. Like, does that change the way you think about that balance?

Yeah. I mean, I think that, you know, by trying to design it in the way we did, we left money on the table. Like, you know, we could have had more engagement if we sent people notifications saying you're going to, everyone in your base is going to die if you don't give a run tomorrow. Right. I mean, that's what, like, most games sort of done, you know, or we would say, like, if you go and do, like, a three-mile run now, then you'll get double, like, you know, supplies, right? Duolingo style stuff. And that all this stuff is, like, really well documented. And it does work, like, in terms of increasing engagement and conversions. But I think that that's the nice thing about owning a company and having a small company is that you can just say, we're not going to do that because we don't think that's going to be a good experience for people in the long term. So we would get people saying, oh, but like, can't people just cheat?

And it's like, yeah, people can cheat about anything. Like, people can cheat in Dance, Dance Revolution. Right, you can cheat at Guitar Hero, you can cheat all these things. And it's like, if you get a cheated Dance Dance Revolution, don't play Dance Revolution. Like, no one's making you do that. It doesn't really bother me as a designer because it just shows that you kind of need to do it a little bit differently.

And I think that, you know, the other thing is I see it as a kind of accessibility mode mostly, rather than people cheating. So, you know, we don't know what situations people are in in terms of their ability to move. We call it like simulate running when we do this. It might be that you can't use your legs, you know, then you're going to do another exercise while you're doing this. And so we've had, you know, people say, you know, they'd like it, that we offer these options. So having said that, like most people do actually run. So it's fine.

It's a really interesting thing to me because it really just hits home with the whole one size does not fit all, but especially with fitness. Because we all have different capabilities, as you mentioned, with our bodies. We have different skill levels, different circumstances, but I find a lot of times I burn out when testing wearables and fitness tech. Because they are just kind of pushing you towards more. And it sometimes does feel like part of this is late stage capitalism because they need to make money. off of this thing and they need to keep user bases so they need to get us addicted to these platforms. Like keep your streaks going. Sometimes it really does feel like streaks can be insidious just because, like, oh, I know you're getting me addicted to this, but actually what my body is saying is I need to rest.

I actually, so like it's a tricky thing, right? Because if you want to stay injury free, you can't constantly do more. You do have to take days off and that's good for you as well. So I think the big metric with gamification and fitness is streaks. And I was just curious, like, what your thought process was towards streaks and, like, do you have feelings towards it? I hate them personally. I hate them. I don't like them. I mean, you know, you will see people talk about how it motivates them to sort of go and how, if they're doing like nanorimeo, national, you know, novel writing month. It's like nice to have a streak where you're writing for 30 days in a row, right? Or you've got like a calendar and you mark it with an X every time you, you know,

do something useful. And so I always kind of think it's about like, how can you get the incentives aligned correctly, right? And so I think that the issue with like fitness is that, you know, you see this with the Apple Watch. You see it with Peloton in particular. There are a lot of stories about Peloton where people were just completely burning out and like really injuring themselves. I just don't think this is like the way to the good health and fitness, actually. A lot of these companies, along with like trying to get you addicted, they're trying to sell this idea of you becoming like an literal elite athlete, like as if like that is like a good thing to be.

Like if you want to be elite athlete, that that's fine. But like it's not really a good idea, frankly, for most. people. Like, you know, most people have got jobs and they've got families and it's very hard to maintain that. You know, it can be, it can actually be quite, quite damaging. And I see that with a lot of the marketing. I mean, they've changed it a bit now, but like Nike and a lot of these other apps were like made by people who used to be athletes or who just like incredibly fit, right? And so they'd be like, wow, you've got to go and break through the pain barrier. You've got to go and do all this stuff. It's like, you don't, you don't actually need to do that. Like, you're just

saying you have to do that. So I don't. I don't like streaks. It can be done in a way that's, like, less bad, right? But I think that when I look at the best games and the best apps out there, like, and Nintendo doesn't, like... I mean, Nintendo does actually have streaks in Animal Crossing, but, like, it's very small. It's really small stuff, and it doesn't...

It's not punishing at all if you don't match it. Like, you know, there are streaks in some video games, but, like, you play Elder Ring or you play, you know, like, Leningers and Zelda. That's not, like, a streak for playing a two days and a round. They don't need that because it's a really good game. Right. And so I think it's just, you know, it's an excuse for not making something that is as targeted or is interesting for people.

It's very difficult because, you know, if you're running a company, like, I do have a lot of sympathy for people. Like, we didn't take investment when we started and so, like, well, we have very little investment. So they were, like, really patient and they were not giving us a hard time. You know, people will call us like a lifestyle business, I guess. but it does mean that if you take investment and you kind of have to take investment if you're a startup, because otherwise you'll just be outgunned

by all the other startups you take investment, right? You don't really have a choice. They need to see the line go up and one of the easiest ways of getting the line to go up is by adding in streaks, is by adding in notifications and making people feel bad about not using it. So, you know, I can blame individual, like, you know,

designers here, but it's like they're in an arms race. It does feel like a much harder bar to set for yourself, though, because essentially what you're describing is that instead of punishing me for not doing the thing that you've already given me, you have to keep giving me new things, which is a lot of work for you. Like, it's much easier to just yell at me for not closing my rings than it is to like, like, you mentioned Eldon Ring. Like, people play Eldon Ring because it's a great game. Like, it's really hard to make a great game.

And it's much easier to build a mechanic that requires me to open the app every day or my little character dies than it is. to keep building a great game for 11 years. Yeah, that's really true. Yeah, it's definitely not easy. I mean, when you make a fitness game that's based around like narrative, you just need to keep on making more narrative, right?

And so we turn from being a sort of tech company almost into like a content company. And if you open up like Zombies Run or ZadrX now, it kind of looks a bit like Netflix. Like it has these carousels of those, and you can like choose different stories, which is, shows how the company kind of evolved over time from a triangle these different gameplay mechanics,

some of which worked and some of which didn't, into like, okay, what we're doing is we're creating a process to try and make as many consistently good stories as possible, like every week, multiple, multiple stories a week. And so we ended up with like writers' rooms and just sound designers. and, you know, like it's games as a service, as software as a service, and a lot of companies try and transition from making like a one-off game or one-off tech product into making constant, you know, content,

and it's just really difficult to do, especially when you're making, like, specialized stories that are, like, about you running. You know, like, that's a different kind of storytelling. And, you know, the team did it really well, but I think that that's actually not something that tech companies are really set up to do. It reminds me of Peloton because they too have become a media company without, I think,

necessarily intending that. Yeah. So, you know, is this just then the challenge of gamifying fitness? Because I don't know. Like, I don't have an answer, but it's just like I constantly have to find new ways to motivate myself. Or sometimes just like let myself have permission to be bad at fitness, which is. opposite to what all these devices are doing, which is to optimize yourself to be the best version of yourself. I feel like there's conflicting narratives here where like, I think David

and I just want to like be slightly healthier and not beat ourselves while doing it. But then, you know, these watches, these rings, these games, not yours, but some of these games are just like, here's how to be the best version of yourself with metrics and numbers and get you addicted to it. So how do you like... I mean, they're sort of creating goals for you that maybe you didn't have when you began, right? Which is like, you know, the longest I've ever run is a half marathon. And everyone's like, oh, so why did you do like a marathon?

I'm like, why would I do a marathon? I don't want to do a marathon. Yes. That seems like... That seems like a bad time for me. I love it. I'm glad for you if you've done a marathon. You know, I know someone who did like an ultra marathon, you know, she's great.

But like, it's not for me. And so I think when you start, you know, these applications, it's all games, it's always like, so what's your goal? And you've just got these like massive goals, right? You know, like, oh, do I really want to do that? Or do I just want to do something else? Just be a little bit healthier. So a big part of it is, you know, again, I just come back to like, how can we make it fun?

How can we make it a little bit more bearable? You know, you mentioned V, like, when you start out running, you know, it was the same for me. It's just horrible. It's so painful, like, sweaty. It's just like, you know, you get a stitch. I just can't, like, bear it. But then, you know, the thing is, when you've done it a lot, you get good at running. And now I don't need, like, a game to go running.

Like, I just go out running to music or podcasts. And it's actually pretty easy for me, right? And so, like, can we get people into that situation where they don't need us anymore? Of course, like, from a business point of view, you know, you want people to keep on paying. and hopefully you're fun enough. But that's where you want to get people to, because it's the same with like a lot of stuff. When you get to a good enough point,

it actually becomes way easier to maintain it. I do think it's going to be a challenge for a lot of gamified fitness apps, like because you just need to keep on providing the content. Like some of them, you know, will just become basically gym instructor classes, like Peloton, you know, or like a lot of VR stuff.

You know, some of them will just be, constant competition, like the cycling, you know, things and Strava. And that's fine. You know, if you like that sort of thing, you should do it. I do think there's still more room for companies, especially as AR becomes more of a thing to do, like, even more fun ways of making, like, sports and, like, competitive sports and cooperative sports. I really want to make, like, a cooperative fitness game. I think it would be, like, so fun to do that. So, yeah, like, I think there's a lot we can do there. Like the kind of original gamified fitness is just playing like soccer. So like, you know, maybe we just do more of that, but they can make a bit more convenient. Are there any

fitness apps or just like services out there that you see and you're like, oh, I kind of dig what they're doing then because we have seen so many of them just kind of take the same leaderboard and competition approach to it. So is there anyone out there that's doing it in a way that you're like, oh, that actually seems like that's a cool way for us anxious people out here. I have my list, but like us anxious people out here to actually take a step back and like build the foundational habits and get to the point where you're saying like you actually don't need it because I too am at the place where I'm like, oh, I'm a week without a run. I feel bad. I need to like actually go out and do it. I actually just use the Apple fitness app and the health app a lot to go and track

my stuff, you know, like particularly things like sleep and like heart rate recovery. So these are like more kind of technical like things. I don't like have like a third party app that I use to track that. But it is useful because I've noticed it does correlate actually with like when I've got more energy. And I do use, I use like the platform stuff because it just like integrates the best. So if I'm going for a run or for swim. I just use whatever's on the Apple Watch, which is boring. But I kind of don't want to, I've sort of seen pass a curtain, I guess, fought for a lot of the stuff. And I kind of a bit, I'm a bit worried about what people would try and do to my experience if I let them, you know, I'm quite vulnerable to gamification. I like, I like extending streaks, you know, if you let me do it.

But even though I know it's not good for me. And so I try and actually stay away from a lot of that stuff. So going for the more vanilla Apple Watch stuff is what I tend to stay on. Do you think about things like sleep tracking and we're getting to these smart rings and all this stuff and what we're getting to a point where there is this kind of like second by second 24 hour long ability to understand how you're doing? And I'm like, somebody is going to make the next version of zombies run that is not like an episodic thing that you put on headphones and listen to while you go exercise. It's going to be like a lifestyle game. And part of me wonders if that is super cool or totally dystopian.

And the idea of like, I'm going to get a thing at, you know, 2 a.m. that's just like zombies because it understood that I'm like in the right sleep zone for it. And like, this is coming. We have the data to do this now. And it feels like it's coming. And I can't decide if that's good or bad. People keep on trying to do this. And we tried to do it with a game called The Walk, which was kind of like an all-day, like, you know, walking pedometer kind of thing.

and I think in practice it's quite hard to do because people we found don't really like to be interrupted with like gameplay and story. It's kind of annoying. And so the issue is that like third party developers generally do not have enough contextual information about like what the person is doing to make sure that the interruptions work. But of course you want to interrupt people like if you're like a line goes up. business person. But then that usually gets too annoying. So we did try and make like two or three times to go and make these games, which would be kind of ambient. And I think at the point at which using AI or using just more sensors, devs have that ability, then you will see more of that stuff. And I think it will actually end up looking really interesting and looking more almost like

role playing, right? It'll be like an even richer experience. And I know that people, actually want to play these sorts of games where they're kind of more into it. At the same time, I think people probably be a little bit nervous about what that means because you know that if it's really good, it just actually takes over your life. Right. And so do people really want that just to get fit? I don't know. As you look around this space right now, do you see any other things that feel kind of spiritually similar to zombies run? I think about like we've all at the Virgin been using this app called Stompers, which is basically, it's like a, it's a sort of silly pedometer game and I think it has hooked a lot of people in the same way that it's it's not even accurate but

being accurate is not the point. Like do you do you see anything that feels like it's sort of doing the same thing the similar way? I mean like one of the other things which I know viz written about was the whole fantasy hike thing where and like you know and and like before that it was just a direct rip off you know Lord of the Rings where you're like walking from the Shire to like Mordor and I think actually at the start you would just type in, like how far you'd walked into like a web page and then it worked it out and it got slowly more more interesting. And that's cool. Like that's a fun thing. People have done various things like that. There's a website or an app called The Beautiful Walk, which was kind of synced

up to your fitness apps and would do that. Like spiritually, like a lot of the VR stuff and AR stuff I think is interesting in the sense of, you know, I come back to, I want people. to be having fun when they exercise. And so I used to play like Hollow Point a lot, which was this old Steam, like, Five game. And it was like an archery game.

And basically you were just shooting, you're just shooting at, you know, enemies in virtual reality, you know, arena with archery. And the cool thing was because the arrows kind of like move slowly, then you could dodge them. Like you can't dodge bullets in real life.

right, but like in super hot with other games, you can dodge these. And so you're always just like rolling around the floor and jumping up and down and like it's just so energetic in a way that like you could never get me to do that in real life. Like if you told me, okay, go and go and fall over sideways and then go and scramble and roll back and jump up, it's like, no, I'm not doing that. But like you go and put me in VR and there's like arrows coming at me and I'm like shooting people of arrows. I'm like, this is the most fun I've ever had. But I don't have room for it, so I can't play with that anymore. So, That's kind of the problem, like, what I think.

And I, and I do see, like, the, you know, Beat Sabo and FedExR and things like that. And, like, it seems a bit boring to me. You know, I want something a bit more involved than that. First of all, how dare you? Beat Saber's amazing. This is, that's, that was outrageous. But no, I, I'm glad you actually mentioned Super Hot, because Super Hot is one of those games that I found to be, like, accidentally a surprisingly good workout.

It's like, time only moves when you do. So I'm doing a ton of, like, very deliberate, intense movement. and I'm like, I'm sweating at the end. And it's like, all right, this is what I'm going for. This is like a fun thing that made me sweat, not a thing that bullied me into exercising, which feels very different. I think when we get the glasses, you know, which we all want and not the heads, you know, the VR headset, this is going to be the way people exercise.

It's going to be amazing. Like, it's so cool. But, like, it's just not there at the moment. Like, it's just, like, I don't know. It's like sweaty. Like, I know people do use these things, but it's, like, for most people, it's, it's, it's, It doesn't seem to be a good experience. So I think that's going to be great.

I think, you know, make believe and like role play and sports, like that's one of the best ways of getting fit. I think giving my self-permission to do the fantasy hike to whack my editors with baseball bats and stompers has really just kind of made it easier to be like, oh, it's okay if I'm not so fast. It's okay. You know what?

Just give yourself the participation trophy. That's the only real badge that you need. It's okay. Maybe it's because I'm a millennial, but the participation trophy is good enough. Well, I mean, you know, the way we put it in Zombies Run is as long as you can boo faster than a slow shamble, then, you know, you're good for us. So keep on trying things until you find something that's fun. And if it's not fun, that it's not just that it's like, oh, well, boo-hoo. It's more like if you find something fun, you're going to keep up with it and it's going to work better, like, in the long run. And it might be something really weird, which people don't talk about, you know, or it might be kind of a more niche sport. But you will find something that you like eventually, and then you should do that.

And maybe there's an app for that as well. All right. We've got to take one more break, and then we're going to come back. And we're going to take a question from the first cast hot. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts. But time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates.

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Terms and conditions apply. All right, we're back. Let's do the Vergecast hotline. As always, the number is 866 Verge11. The email is Vergecast at the verge.com. Send us all your questions. We try to answer at least one on the show every week. This week, we have a question about handheld games.

Hey there. This is Keaton from Seattle, and I just listened to the handheld episode. And I'm about to have a baby. And so I've been thinking about what am I going to do for the endless hours sitting in a nursery with a child possibly on me. And I've been thinking about a handheld, but I've also kept myself from buying one because I think about the possibility of just using

my iPhone with a backbone or my iPad with an Xbox controller. Is there an advantage to having a handheld over that situation if I've already got something like a GamePass subscription? Thanks. Appreciate it. Bye. I should say, by the way, before we get started, thank you to everybody who responded about our segment last week about gaming handhelds.

I got a ton of good ideas from people. I got a lot of people who just felt my pain about wanting to play FIFA and not having a good device to do it on. People are mad at EA. I'm also mad at EA. Thank you to everybody who reached out. I have a lot of gadgets to try.

I haven't bought anything yet, but I'm committed to answering this question for real at some point very soon, and I'll get back in touch. But thank you to everybody who reached out with suggestions and ideas and commiseration. I appreciate it. My answer for this question is actually pretty simple. I just went through this recently.

And I initially, I just went through this recently. My kid is about a year and a half old at the beginning of 2023. I was in that like sitting up at night for four hours while a small child sleeps on my lap vibes and you're like, what do I do with myself? I tried all the things for a while. I was carrying a switch around with me that I would use in those moments. I had a couple of like tester things. I got one of the slightly sketchy things from Amazon that you can buy that have a million

retro games on them. I think the answer is just your phone. And I think this for a couple of reasons. One, and this is the key one, your phone is just there with you all the time. One of the things that happens when you're a new parent is that you just suddenly find yourself frozen to a place because your child just fell asleep. And you can plan ahead to some extent and say like, okay, I'm going to leave the switch. in the room with the chair where I'm probably gonna be

while the kid is sleeping or whatever. But your phone is just dramatically more likely to be in your pocket, right? And it also has a lot of retro games now, especially, which are really great to play A on silent and B for a couple of minutes at a time when you're in those moments where you're like, I don't know how long I'm gonna have to do this.

You can just quickly fire up Delta or one of the other emulators. And I played, I would say, maybe an alarming amount of like old Mario games, a few minutes at a time with one thumb on the joystick and one thumb on the buttons, kind of wrapped my arms around the kid. It's a, it's a, it's a scene, but it works. The other thing is it's really malleable, which I like, right? So I have a backbone controller, which I like very much. And when I was able to sort of plan for it, I would use the backbone.

I would bring the backbone with me. I would plug it in. I would have the full better controller, and that worked great. Works really well with a lot of. of games on iOS and Android, highly recommend a backbone as a sort of addition to all of this. But when you don't have that, you can just use your phone, right? And so having something that you're not stuck because you forgot one piece of it is really helpful. The other piece of it is that you will find yourself needing your phone for all kinds of other things, right? Maybe you're going to be one of those parents like I was who has a spreadsheet of like every time your kid eats and sleeps and goes to the bathroom. And having that with you at the same time that you have your

thing you want to play games on, super helpful. If you are the type of parent who is going to be texting your partner or taking lots of pictures or whatever, again, your phone just becomes like the center of your baby universe in a very real way. And so not adding another device to the equation is sort of useful. There are good reasons to get a dedicated device. Like I've talked to a lot of people who bought a switch, put like Zelda on it, and then left it in the baby's room. And that becomes the like, I am in the baby's room. This is the thing I'm going to play. There's something to that. But I think for me, having fewer batteries to worry about having the thing that's probably in my pocket be the thing that works and having kind of the one device to rule them all wound up being

really helpful. Also, there are a lot of games that I played that I would call like deeply boring, repetitive games that are actually perfect for mobile. Because you're in this headspace when you have a newborn where you're just exhausted and you're like, okay, I want to play a game. I don't want to use my brain at all. And I'm going to need to play this game for somewhere between one minute and five hours. Games like hold down, which is basically a, it's like reverse snood. You shoot a ball downward and you try to remove all the stuff down at the bottom and the

further you go down, the more points you get. Endlessly repeatable games. I probably played a hundred hours of that. game. And it's a perfect little mobile game. You can play it with one hand, which is another victory given baby's sleep situations. Having something you can do with one hand is pretty helpful. I did a lot of like crosswordy kinds of things when I was like, okay, I actually need to use my brain a little bit. I did a lot of those like temple run kind of endless runner games because again, super easy, super repetitive doesn't require any brain power. Those are the kinds of games that I ended up

playing way more than I expected. I was like, oh, I'm going to play a lot of like fun old PS2 games because now I have all this time to kill. And I ended up playing like infinite hours of hold down because it's just what happens in those moments. You're tired. You have one hand to spare while there's a human sleeping on top of you. And that just is what it is. So I think the answer is probably either a switch for the games or your phone with a backbone or some other kind of controller. But I would start with your phone because there's a lot of games. It's super easy. It's super accessible. And odds are it's going to be right there with you, which is pretty important. I hope that helps. Let me know. And again, I've gotten tons of really good handheld

recommendations over the last couple of weeks. And if you have good ones for me or for Keaton here, please let me know. All right. That's it for the Vergecast today. Thank you to everyone who's on the show. And thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about from the Microsoft CrowdStrike Chaos to V's great reporting on wearables and rest days in the Apple Watch to lots of stuff on gaming handhelds on the verge.com. I'll put some links in the show notes, but also read theverse.com. There is a shocking amount going on right now for it being like late July. So keep an eye on the website. And as always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or gaming handheld you think I should buy, email us at vergecast at the verge.com or call the hotline

866, Verge 1-1, keep sending us questions. We've got lots more stuff to talk about this summer. Please keep all of your questions coming. And like I mentioned last week, I want more like teeny tiny weird tech mysteries. So if you have a teeny tiny weird tech mystery, send it to us. Can't wait to hear it.

This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Will Poor, and this episode was edited by Zander Adams. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Nelai, Alex and I will be back on Friday to talk about more of the Microsoft Crowdstrike mess, some AI news, some new gadgets, and Lord only knows what else between now and then.

We'll see you then. Rock and roll.