Triple Click - Can A Video Game Really Last Ten Years?

Episode Date: January 11, 2024

Jason, Maddy, and Kirk open up the mailbag to answer listener questions on all sorts of things. Why do games like Skull & Bones languish in development hell forever? What makes Chants of Sennaar such a bad name? And, uh, what's the best investment advice?One More Thing:Kirk: Fargo Seasons 4 and 5 (FX/Hulu)Maddy: A Little To The LeftJason: I hate advertisementsLINKS:Reddit Personal Finance https://www.reddit.com/r/personalfinance/wiki/commontopics“Fargo Season 5 Theme” by Jeff RussoA Little to the Left Screenshots: https://bsky.app/profile/midimyers.com/post/3kib5xfds3g23Support Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinBuy Triple Click Merch: https://maxfunstore.com/search?q=triple+click&options%5Bprefix%5D=lastJoin the Triple Click Discord: http://discord.gg/tripleclickpodTriple Click Ethics Policy: https://maximumfun.org/triple-click-ethics-policy/ Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/jointripleclick 🚀  SUPPORT TRIPLE CLICK:Join Maximum Fun | Buy TC Merch💬 JOIN THE TRIPLE CLICK DISCORD🎮 Triple Click Ethics Policy📱 SOCIALS | @tripleclickpodInstagram | YouTube | TikTok | Twitch

Open up that budget spreadsheet and make sure it's up to date because it's time for triple stock. The investment advice, wait, no. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week, it's a burning questions episode where we do give investment advice, but mostly answer questions about long-running service games, projects in development hell, and so much more. I'm Maddie Myers. I'm Jason Schreier. And I'm Kirk Campbellton, and hello.

Hello. We made it back here again. Welcome back to another band. Here we are. Back here to the virtual cafe in which the three of us meet each week to discuss video games. You think it's a cafe? You don't think it's like a high-end recording studio? Is that what you picture in your mind palace?

It's a cafe with curry in it. It's like a cafe with a high-end recording studio built in. It's called Cafe Podcasts. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And no one ever interrupts us. I thought it was called Triple Cafe. Triple Cafe.

Triple coffee? I'm just adding triple to things now. Oh, triple shot's pretty good, but it does sound like it's off the hall. It's called trippio. I think can you get a triple shot of espresso? I know you can get a double shot. Trippio is what they call it at Starbucks when you get a triple shot, Annie. Oh, a tripeo.

Oh, I didn't know that, but I do know Jason's caffeine habits are terrifying, and I try not to think about them. But, hey, if you want to hear more, more extra. extracurricular triple click host information, then could I interest you in a bonus episode? But how would one obtain such a thing? One would go to maximum fund.org slash join and become a member of our wonderful network of listeners who support the show. We don't have any ads. It's just pure undiluted triple click around here. And yeah, consider going over to that sweet, sweet URL and joining and getting access to a monthly bonus episode and also support.

the show. What was our most recent bonus episode? It was Baldersgate 3. We spilled the beans about Baldur's Gate 3. We sure did. We'll do another one this month. TBD. But yeah, Maximifun.org slash join. Go there. Join. And Jason, what are we talking about today? I just want to say, so I get a four shot of espresso every morning and Maddie. You think that sounds crazy, but it actually has less, it has less caffeine than like a big Starbucks coffee. Which I also would. I also, would consider to be a lot of coffee, though. That's fair. I thought you're going to say it has less caffeine than that Panera bread,

lemonade that kills people. Well, that's guaranteed. Charged lemonade. Yeah. So today, we are not talking about caffeine. We are doing a burning question where we open up the mailbag and take out some pipe and pot, pipe and pot. Piping pot.

We're not talking about burning questions. We're hyphen pot on the show. We're hyphen pot on the show. We're hyphen pot on here. It's going good. We're off to a good start here, guys. We're doing really well. Some piping hot burning questions from listeners. As always, you can reach us at triple click at maximum fun.org.

Send over your own questions, and we will pick the best ones. Just a reminder, we like the ones that are short, short emails, and we like ones that are kind of bizarre and unique and different than questions we might get a lot. We get a lot of similar questions that we were fine hitting every once in a while, but you're more likely to get red if you have something that feels different and makes us laugh and makes us think, that's interesting. Okay, onward. Maddie, why don't you start off with this first one? Sure. So this one is from Neil, who says, so I'm reading some Bloomberg coverage of the bungee layoffs and how the player base was shrinking.

And I'm wondering if the idea of a 10-year game, like Destiny was meant to be at the outset, is feasible these days. When Destiny first dropped, it felt like the best example of the shooters of the day. The feeling of popping a vex are right in the milk is unrivaled to this day. But the games industry kept moving on. PubG, Fortnite, and Apex evolved the multiplayer shooter, and Breath of the Wild and Eldon Ring changed games in general. So it doesn't feel surprising that Destiny 2 just doesn't hit the same way in 2023. So is it possible for any game to have a 10-year lifespan without getting stale?

Well, is it? Is it? Well, World of Warcraft is still humming along. It's 20 years old. Yeah, I thought of World of Warcraft, too. I would put this question to Maddie, who just brought Dark Souls in this or one more thing yet again. I believe we are now 13 years after the release of that game.

I don't think I can do that anymore. Other people in my personal life confronted me about adding Dark Souls as my one more thing last week. They're like, Maddie, I think you have a problem. Yeah, people came to me and they were like, Matt, you can't keep bringing this up. It's just beat the game already. What are you doing? Okay, so I think, so to the question, though, I do think that a game can have a 10-year lifespan,

just because lifespan is a little bit of a loose term, but we can still be playing and talking about a game 10 years after it came out, for sure. But I don't think that's exactly what Neil is talking about. Neil is talking about, like, the lifespan of a service game. Yes. And can a service game remain relevant in the conversation for that long for 10 years? Or maybe a way to frame this would be, can a game keep growing for 10 years? Like, is that possible?

Or even hold steady, break even, if you will. Just survive for that long. So World Warcraft, the most successful MMO, and in some ways, one of the more successful service games, if you would count it as one, it kept growing for about six or seven years from 2004 until like cataclysm time. So that was 2010. And then started plummeting pretty quickly after that. Still, astronomical numbers, I think it was 12 million subscribers at its peak, which is

crazy bonkers numbers. But even the most popular, like online, one of the most popular game, online games ever just grew and then kind of peaked at a certain point. So that was seven years. GTA 5 is still going pretty strong. We don't have like exact player numbers, but it sells like five million copies every quarter, every fiscal quarter the Take 2 has. They add another five million to the sales. I think it's at like 190 million copies now, which is a ridiculous this number. And it's been on GamePath multiple times too. I don't even know how you would count that aspect of it. Oh, God. Yeah. So who knows how many. And those people on GamePass are probably still buying Shark cards. So like crazy, crazy revenue numbers. That game might be the most

lucrative piece of entertainment ever made. So it is possible. Definitely rare, though. Yeah. I think that something you said, Jason, is interesting that you said, is it possible for a game to keep changing for this long? Because I do think that change is an important part of longevity, at least with a lot of these games. It's not necessarily the only important thing that a game needs to do in order to last a long time. Dark Souls hasn't changed at all. That's a great point, Kirk. It's important. Because, you know, like I'm thinking about Fortnite, for example. Fortnite is practically defined by change. It introduces radical changes. Epic has been pretty willing to do some pretty wild stuff. And it went from a game that was just a really fun battle reaille, whatever you want to call it, extraction, PVP. game to, I don't even know what it is now. There's a Lego game. There's an Ariana Grande concert. Yeah.

Yeah. Like there's, it's the metaverse, Kirk. Right. So it's become a more of a kind of metaverse hub, which is what it is right now. But even that, it couldn't stay that forever, right? So a lot of these other platforms that have a lot of longevity, like Minecraft or No Man Sky or Roblox, they're kind of driven by player creations, which is also like a form of constant change.

So that does seem like that can really help if a game has a game has. some way that it can either, it changes built in, like players build stuff and it just changes what it is, or the developers are constantly willing to change and try new things. Yeah, that player feedback aspect seems pretty big when it comes to how people still interface with World of Warcraft and GTA online. Like having those external communities and Discord or Facebook groups where people role play or just get together with people. You don't even have to just have a couple friends you play with.

you can just log into a shared space and then have a larger group of people all over the world to potentially play with or role play with if that's your interest. And that additional aspect, like not even just the player creation part of something like Minecraft that's been going on for a while, but the constantly having a community that you can tap into or a diversity of communities with different interests and especially role playing, that just seems like something Destiny 2 never quite had. I think it'd be interesting to poke at why that is. It kind of comes down to the game, right?

Like you can role play in GTA because there's a city. There's like a lot of different ways to interact with the world. We're in Destiny 2. You're really just, you're doing whatever they set out for you. You're going on a raid. You're doing a strike. You're really doing what's on the menu in that game. Like you can't really role play as a guardian that much.

Because no one, there isn't really, as far as I know, I could be wrong about this. But when I was covering Destiny, I never really encountered like a big RP community. Like when Lance Reddick died, we covered the way that. people were mourning it in game. There were certainly some gatherings that were similar to times when notable people that are part of game development for Wow and other games like that. People tend to gather in certain ways online to kind of show grief in that way. But that's the closest thing I can think of.

And it's really not role playing in the way we think of. Pretty different than like an actual RP server. Yeah. In Destiny's case, I think very specifically players had a best. add, offered a lot of negative feedback, a lot of negative reactions to the most recent expansion lifefall. And I think that Bungie, I mean, Bungee said when it was doing the layoffs internally, as Bloomberg reported, that they missed their revenue targets by some crazy amount, like 45%. And a large part of that was due to this negative player sentiment. So I think that was a big part of

destiny specifically. But I think kind of from a bigger picture, one of the big problems with all these service games is that they all are meant to last forever and therefore they all cannibalize one another and so we're hitting this point of oversaturation in the market. I think we're ready there but we're really starting to see the results of that and we're about to hit on two games in Suicide Squad and Skull and Bones that are both service games that were kind of envisioned back when Games as a Service was this big money-making fad and now are really coming at a time when it is a scary landscape out there, which actually leads nicely into our next question. Kirk, if you want to feel this one.

Sure, this comes from Henry. Henry writes, hey, triple click, been loving this show since the split screen days, which is always nice to hear. Henry continues, I have a question about games that are in development forever at AAA Studios, e.g. Beyond Good and Evil 2, Skull and Bones, whatever Ken Levine is doing. It seems unusual that the publishers would keep paying people to work with no end in sight. Do projects like these even have people working on them? If so, how do they get stuck for so long? I hope so. Why do the publishers keep these projects going? I love the idea of a publisher just saying that a game is in development every quarter, but like having nobody working on it.

It's like Weekend and Bernie style. Like, we're just pretending. Is that a good scam? Should publishers do that? It could be. I mean, I think if you got caught, you would probably have some issues. Yeah, that's how scams work typically if you get caught. right until you get caught. That's true. Skilling Bones is like the producers of

video games. It's like we're making a bad game in touch with just kidding. Well with that game specifically they're getting paid a lot of money by the Singapore by the Malaysian government to do this game. So I think that that plays a big role in that game. I think with a lot of this it's it's kind of sorry not the Malaysian, the Singaporean government to do that game. I think with a lot of these it's sunk cost fallacy. You've already put so much money into it. You might as well see it through. But then a lot of these games also get canceled. I mean, sometimes it's like with these specific examples, I mean, yes, skull and bones, like I mentioned, beyond good and evil too. I mean, I think that game has a, well,

who knows? I don't really know what I don't put that game, but the Kenlin game game, I can say that take two from the, since 2014 when they shut down irrational and Ken Levine essentially said, I want to go make this smaller thing. Take two has always felt like business-wise, it will harm their, so it will lower their stock less to have a game perpetually in development than it would to lose Ken Levine and to have headlines about Ken Levine going to a rival and have him make the next Bioshock somewhere else. So I think that's their philosophy behind letting him just like fuck around for 10 years. Yeah, I remember this story from a while ago about Ubisoft's sort of siloing developers in between projects.

Inter-project, yeah. Yeah, so I don't know whether that's still in practice, but I do get the sense that Ubisoft is just such a large publisher and that they have so many things going, that especially a high-profile project like Beyond Good and Evil 2 that's been desired vaporware for however God knows how many years, that it may not cost them quite as much as it would someone else to just sort of have people kind of working on it

because there's still maybe some theory that it could come out at some point, and that they just kind of have a lot of projects that are sort of in that more nebulous zone. I don't really know that for sure, but I get that feeling about Ubisoft. So what you're alluding to is this thing called Interproact in Montreal. And so Ubisoft, because of their agreement, again, it's tax credits, right? They have this agreement with the Quebec government where Quebec says, hey, we'll give you these incredible tax credits as long as you employ X number of people. And so rather than laying people off, when their project gets canceled,

or something, they would send them to this building where they check Facebook and watch movies all day because it costs Ubisoft less to keep them employed and keep the tax credit than it would to lay them off. David Graber rolling in his grave right now, twirling, twirling, so upsetting. That would be such an awful purgatory for a creative person of any stripe to end up in, to just be like, I'm working on nothing. Yeah, I get the sense that working on a lot at any project like this is a pretty awful purgatory to be stuck in where you yourself, just as a creative person, say you're an

artist or something and you've been working on a game like this, you also have that sunk cost feeling where you're like, well, I really want the credit. I want to finish this game. Like, I want to be able to say, hey, I made this thing. And I'm sure you see all the ways it could be good. And then you just stay there for year after year after year. And then, yeah, maybe it gets canceled. Maybe it never comes out. Maybe it's disappointing. That's tough. It's worse than that. If you started, it's a Kemenavine's game. Let's look at that. That was announced two years ago. It's called Judas.

I wrote an article about it and how it was in development hell. But putting that aside, if you started working on that game in 2014 when it came out, and let's say you're an artist, your concept artist, and you drew a bunch of awesome concept art for it in 2014. And let's say you've been there for four years. It's 2018 and you want to go find another job. You cannot use that work in your portfolio because the game hasn't been announced yet. So you are kind of like totally screwed. You're like, what am I going to do?

How am I going to show people? my work. I can't. I can't. I have nothing. I have no credits. I have nothing that exists in the world that I can actually use to show people this thing that I have done. So yeah, it's really the repercussions. It just has a lot of ripple effects that can be really negative. Yeah. All right. Next question. This is from Valentin. He writes, or they write, the first time Jason talked about Chance of Sonar. He was dithyrambic. Good, great word, dithorambic. It means very enthusiastically excited about it. Great word that I didn't know, thanks Valentin.

Great word about it with good reasons. But he also said that the name, Chance of Sonar, was a terrible name and might even hurt the game, which makes you wonder, what makes a good name for a video game? What is a bad name for a video game? And why is Chance of Sonar terrible? Finally. I'll feel the last question first, real quick. A couple of reasons why Chance of Sinar is terrible.

First of all, because as far as I know in the game, you never, that's never actually explained. You have no idea what Sonaras. Second of all, because Sonara is spelled S-E-N-N-A-R, which is ridiculous, and just bounces. The name like exits your head as soon as you hear it. What you ideally want with the name is for it to be like sticking so forceful that it just never leaves your head the first time you hear it. So it reflects the game in zero ways. Like it doesn't reflect the game at all. It's hard to remember.

It's very unmemorable. Also, the first word is a homonym. Chance? Yes, the first word is a homonym. That's really tough. Is it chance with a C.E. at the end? Yeah. Is it a chance?

Go to jail. Do not collect $200? Exactly. Yeah. Or is it a chance like we're going to synagogue this weekend and going to do some chance. Nobody knows. And yeah, it's just like it doesn't have any oomph to it, right? Like with a good name, you want, God, I remember.

I'm trying to remember. I wish I could source this properly, but I saw some video or speech or something. Oh, I know what it was. It was Ben Brod, the director of Heartstone, did this kind of talk at GDC once where he was talking about names, and he was talking about how all the best names

like have a soft syllable and then a hard syllable. Like Google, Facebook, like a lot of those kind of powerful names, Apple, that gets stuck in your head, right? Triple click. And they're all just have a certain... Exactly triple click. They have a certain rhythm to him.

and how those can be really powerful words, hearth stone. And this is the opposite. It's like so like it gets lost before you even get to the end. Anyway, that's my two cents on chance of sonar. Great game. Terrible name.

I agree with you. I've been thinking a lot. I mean, I think a lot about names in general. I've always been kind of, whether it's helping other friends name their projects or coming up with names for podcasts or things. And some of it is just sort of instinctive.

But I do have a lot of thoughts about names. I'm looking at my, list of games from last year, like candidates and then the games I picked for my favorite games of the year. And I'm just chewing on which ones are good and which ones aren't. I mean, I think that you nailed why Chance of Cynar has some issues as a name. And I do think it has some problems. I mean, even just calling it Babel or Tower of Battle, like that's something like, it would have been way better. Fantastic. Yeah. Yeah, the Tower. So I'm looking up, so I think Dredge, for example, that's a great name. Great name, right? Because it's very clear. It has multiple

meanings, but both of the meanings apply to the game. I know, that's why it's so good. And it's fun to say. Right, it's fun to say. And it's memorable. It doesn't sound like anything else. Other names, I think high-fi rush, that's okay. Like, it's not bad. It's pretty good. It's memorable, I've seen, yeah, it's memorable. I think Joussaint, it struggles because it's French. So I think that for English speakers, it's just a little harder to see a French word and that they could have gone with something else. I compared it to this Oculus game or a VR game called the Climb, the Crytech made. And I think The Climb, which is basically what Jusant is, like that's just clearer. It's not a very sexy name. It's just the climb. It just is what it is,

but it is pretty clear. And then I'm looking at Lies of P. And I think that's a pretty bad name. I think that's another example of a game with a bad name. It's kind of, it's like risen above its bad name because I think just word of mouth and a lot of people like it. But Lies of P, like, given some of the teases with like what the sequel might be about, I kind of see what they're doing. Like if I could guess, I won't say the spoiler, but like I could guess what the name of the next game will be. And it does work with what they're doing. But there's got to be something better than Liza P. It just is weird. Like the letter is kind of weird. It has a weird rhythm. The letter is weird. It doesn't have a period after it. It just feels pretentious to me.

I don't know. When you say it, it kind of sounds like Liza P. Whenever you say a name, it's not clear what you're saying. If you say it aloud and it doesn't. doesn't sound like the words that it is, that's a really bad sign. Like if it sounds like you're saying something else, you've got to say your title allowed. We did that a lot of when we were choosing a podcast title. It's important for band name titles, anything else. We did. I will say, Dave the Diver, great name.

Nice alliteration there. And alliteration is always good. Yeah. Split screen, strong songs. Starfield, great name. It's a great name. Sea of Stars also. Sea of Stars, good name.

I know. Yeah. No man sky. It's pretty good. Killer. A lot of games, a lot of successful games have good names. Venba, not so good. You hear that and it's kind of soft. It's kind of like Venba. It doesn't have a good ring to it. It's tough when it's and like Chia is hard too, a great name. It's like anytime you have something that isn't in an English word or name, it's just challenging, I think, for English speakers to resonate with it, which is something to think about if you're going to have to market your game. internationally. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Audiences. But really, the best name

is, of course, a square enix creation, which is the name Various Daylife. Various Daylife. I thought you're going to say Paranorma Psychism and Mysteries of Honcho. That's up there. That's up there. All right. Let's move to the next question.

Maddie you're up. Sure. This one's from Dan, who says, hey, y'all. This isn't really meant for the pod as it's not gaming related to that Dan, we're reading it anyway. That's the message. Quite a while back, Jason's one more thing on the show was about some type of long-term investment that he had started doing.

It was very much a put the money in and in 50 years it'll pay off kind of thing. If any of you remember what it was or even what episode it was on, I'd love to know. Love the show. I love this. I think we should turn into a financial advice podcast and like how people really rang their personal finance. What could possibly go wrong? That seems like a fantastic idea. Triple stock was my suggestion for a title. So first step, if you are interested in personal finance, is to go to maximum fund.org slash join. No, I'm just kidding. Consider investing in a really cool

co-op. And then after that, what do you do next? I actually find the subject really interesting, and I wind up reading the personal finance I've read a lot, which I think is a really good resource. and they have a really good kind of primer on personal finance that I'll link in the show notes. But the short version is, let's say, I mean, first step, if you want to kind of wrangle your personal finances to, like, budget and figure out your debt and all that sort of stuff, then I'm not going to get into. But let's say you have some amount of money and you have, you want to invest it. You want to save it, you want to put it aside, and you want to watch it grow,

and you want to see it grow in the best possible way. I think a lot of people might be like, oh, should I invest in stocks? Should I go buy Microsoft or whatever? And in general, that's a really bad idea. That's essentially gambling. Like, you don't want to do that. Like, you don't want to buy and sell and day trade, and you can really fuck up your life that way. The best way to invest is, first of all, figure out what your goal is.

Do you need this money? Like, could you potentially need this money next week? In that case, keep it in cash. But in a high-yield savings account, I think these days you can get like four and a half percent or five percent, which is pretty good. Do you need this money in two years because you're planning on buying a house? Then you maybe put it in a seat. or something that's a little more short term. But if you're thinking long term, you're thinking like, this will be my retirement money,

this would be my nest egg, and you've already kind of looked into all of your 401ks and IRAs and other kind of retirement tax benefit sort of stuff, the best thing to do is to open a brokerage account, go to like Vanguard or one of those other sites, I forget the rest of them, and find a mutual fund that invest, essentially invests in the S&P 500, which are like the the top 500 stocks in the S&P, or some other equivalent of that, where you're essentially investing in the stock market. And that way, you are essentially, instead of putting all your eggs in a single stock basket, you're just throwing eggs all over the place. And historically, we don't know how the good that is. Exactly. If you throw eggs, then you get an omelet.

No, and historically, the stock market goes up over time. I think it's an average of like 10% a year over time, although it obviously fluctuates last year, 2022 was a terrible year was like down 18% of them, 2023. It was up 20 something percent. So it fluctuates. But if you're looking at a long-term horizon, short of like total economic collapse, you are going to win in the long run by doing one of these long-term investments. And we're talking about like, you have to have the appetite for like 20, 30 years, which is why professional financial investors might recommend different kind of mixes of stocks and bonds and safer bets based on what your goals are. But if you're in your 30s right now and you're like, this is money I can afford to just put aside and never touch until I'm 65 and I'm ready to go travel the world or whatever.

Take it and just put it in one of these brokerages and find one of the mutual funds that I'll like, that'll go, be diversified across the entire market and just sticking in there and don't think about it again. That's my advice. You went past the retirement part of it pretty quickly, but I would add that that is worth looking into first. because if you put your money into a 401k or an IRA, there are a lot of tax implications for that. Yeah, yeah, 100%. You know, you can get that before it gets taxed and put it into retirement, which, and you're basically doing the same thing Jason is advising.

You are investing the money in the stock market and you'll get it in 30 or 40 or 50 years. Yeah, I was thinking of this hypothetical person as like having like 10 grand that they have in a savings account or something and they're wondering what to do with it. Whereas with a 401K, typically you're like investing on a monthly basis, like you put aside some amount of your paycheck every month. I think you can invest also lump sums every year, but I was just thinking in terms of that. Yes, 100%. It depends on like if you're like self-employed or employer.

And then with IRAs, you could just put that 10K into an IRA, like no problem. And it would probably be a good idea. Yeah, you can kind of make your own version of a retirement fund if you want to, if you don't have the option to do that by doing essentially what Jason's suggesting. Yeah. And that's why it depends on your goal is. And also if your goal is like saving for your kids college, you can open a 529 fund. And that's another like big tax incentive type thing. So yeah, I mean, this has been an episode of triple stock.

Thank you so much for listening. Personal finance subreddit though. That's a good. Yeah, that is a good tip. It doesn't surprise me that that's a good place to check out. It's really good. I find that in general, like if you're looking for kind of life advice, subredits for like fitness and personal finance, they always have really good advice

because it's so heavily aggregated that like the actual, the wisdom that becomes common tends to be the good stuff. And there's this primer. It's really fantastic. It's like, here's what you should do. Like here, if you have X amount of money, what should you do with it? Or how should you handle things? And it's like number one.

We can link that for people in the show. Yeah, we'll like it. It's really cool. Yep. Nice. That's good. All right. Next question.

Kirk, you're up. David writes, high triple click. I don't know how many times I've picked up a AAA video game and felt that I have played this game before. Then there are these indie titles like the Case of the Golden Idol, Oberdin, etc., which are so inventive and novel. Back in the day, I played Sierra games like Kingsquest, the original Castle Wolfenstein, Zork, etc. They were novel at the time.

Most of the video games that I played in the 80s and 90s do not hold up over time. They don't pass the test of time. Measured against the modern indie titles that I mentioned above. Technologies were available to make Case of the Golden Idol or Return of the Oberdinn or overboard 30 or 40 years ago. why didn't I play games of that quality back in the day? Kind of an interesting question. Yeah. Did technologies exist to make Case of the Golden Idol 30 or 40 years ago?

I think so I think what David is asking is basically, yeah, when you look at a game like Case of the Golden Idol, there's the sense that, okay, this isn't doing that much sophisticated in terms of the tech. Though it could be that behind the game, like the thing connecting the story maybe is a little more complicated than that. But assuming that that's the case, my main thought on this would just be that because it is so much less expensive to make a game that looks like that now than it would have been 30 or 40 years ago when that technology was cutting edge, it's just easier for more people to explore more ideas. And that makes it more likely that you're going to get more experiments like those games. Or at least that would play a role, I would think. Well, I think the biggest thing, actually two big things come to mind. One is that the games we're playing now are games made by people who have learned from 30 and 40 years of game development to like figure out. Yeah, to figure out how to make cool stuff.

So it's naturally going to evolve. And 30 years from now, we'll be playing games that would blow our mind if we played them today. Hopefully, hopefully we're not playing Kola D. 400. That's exactly the same. Well, that'll probably still be available. But then the other stuff. I think the biggest thing is that back in the 80s or 90s, if you, if I, if I, Jason Trier wanted to go make a game in my garage, there was no way for me to really sell it.

Like I could try to find a publisher and send them a bunch of floppy disks. But even then, like getting it into stores was such a difficult thing. You needed to really rely on retailers. And a lot of people were gatekeeping what you wanted to put out there. And that was the case until very recently, until only a few years ago, when it became a lot more possible for anyone to make a game and put it out there. And so, in case of the golden idol is a good example of that. I mean, these are two people who are in Latvia, and in the 90s, there would have been, like, no way that we would have been able to play a game from these two guys who just made this kind of as a hobby in Latvia.

But nowadays, the cream can really rise to the top no matter where you live, which is really cool. Yeah, and so that diversity of game developers is so much more widespread and, like, higher than it ever was. And also computer literacy and computer access just in general is more possible around the world. Like even in countries where you might not think that's the case, it is almost everyone has smartphones. And that in and of itself, you can develop games on tablets and using that technology. And that's always really exciting for me to think about just how many people around the world have the ability to use tools that are pretty inexpensive to make games. and have a small team or just a one-person team where they're making something like that.

So it's not even just, oh, a person grew up on King's Quest. So now they're iterating on designs they saw when they were younger and there's that additional level of innovation that's possible when you see something for years and you think, but what if it did this or that? It's also just a massive diversity of people around the world that are capable of doing that same thing and coming to totally different conclusions about what that could be.

So really the question, is how do we ever find anything? Because there are so many games out there that sometimes that's overwhelming to even think about, like all the indie games in the world that might be as cool as case of the Golden Idol, you know? Well, people can come to triple click and get the because we know everything. Definitely don't just play things they hear about from our friends. I like reframing this idea away from technology and toward creativity because I do think that's a big part of it. Like, technologies were available to make these games, but the people hadn't come up with the ideas yet. Because we needed time. We needed to play the original games. We needed to play

Monkey Island and think, well, this is cool, but... I mean, that's very true. Like, across all industries, I mean, why is it that early movies were so boring? Well, because we were still figuring out how to make a movie. Like, we were still figuring out how to use film. And also, film was really expensive, similar to how computers used to be really expensive. And over time, the tech becomes more accessible to people and more financially attainable for people because it just is mass produced. And then also creative ideas built upon what existed before. And games haven't been around that long. That's the other thing I thought reading this question is like, we can only go back to the 80s here. Like there wasn't even a video game that we can't

really talk about before that. You know, it's crazy. Some of those things are really basic, like really, really simple. The games industry is so young that like nobody even realize this or nobody even thinks about this and it kind of would blow young people's minds to think about this 20 years ago let's say 25 years ago there was a belief industry wide worldwide that you cannot play shooter games on consoles that a shooter could only be on a PC 25 years ago games had different versions for each console like the super nintendo version of a game would play completely differently than the Sega Genesis version of the game like the The way that the games industry has changed in the last 20 years alone is kind of mind-boggling.

Yeah. And even if you just play something from the early 2000s where it's like, oh, I can't aim a gun and move at the same time. Like that was just the way it was. Like people were still figuring it out. And that's only like 20 years ago. A timeline is interestingly compressed too compared to other media. Like if you think about, so if I showed someone in the year, 1998 or say

1999 the year the Matrix came out if I showed them whatever everything everywhere all at once some really amazing movie from now they'd be like oh that was great like maybe they'd think the special effects were cool but they would really just kind of be like oh yeah it was a movie where if you showed someone in

1998 or 1999 like The Last of Us Part 2 or like Red Dead Redemption 2 they would just be like what what the fuck? Yeah have you ever seen like on Twitter people posting like magazines that are like the next generation of graphics.

Right, and it's a picture of... Like a pixelated monkey. So if I think about showing someone from, say, 1945, everything everywhere all at once, then you would have a kind of similar reaction. So you have to go way farther back to get a relative reaction, an imagined relative reaction, compared to what you just 20 years ago,

you would get with video games. Same thing with music, where, you know, go back to the 80s or 90s, play someone something modern. They'd be like, oh, that's interesting. Like, there's some stuff I've never heard, but mostly, I understand. understand what this is.

Go back to before microphones existed when we had to just figure out acoustics such that vocalists could sing louder than the instruments. Like that was a huge part of music history, was just not having microphones. When people are like singing into a pipe onto a wax cylinder, right? Where now it would mostly just be impressive to people where you'd be like, yeah, someone made this in their bedroom. They'd be like, oh, what? Wait, that is kind of impressive.

But the actual quality of the art itself is like pretty relatable. So, yeah, a lot has changed in a short amount of time. So it's interesting that the games industry is very young, as we've said, but also it has changed super dramatically in that time. I don't actually know what that means. I think it's because even in the 80s, like movies were pretty freaking cool. And so people who were making games then really wanted to make a game that looked as good as Red Dead Red Dead Redemption too. They just didn't have the graphical capacity to do that with those projects. But it's not like you weren't imagining it if you were looking at a game back then.

you could fill in the blank. And of course, there's really beautifully done artistic pixel art that was just your eye is capable of filling in the details. But I feel like even then, if you're telling a story or depicting an environment, like, if you play Super Metroid, like, that was inspired by the alien movies and you can super tell. And it's why it feels like a natural evolution for Metroid to look cooler and cooler as time goes on, because that's what it was always supposed to look like on some level. Not saying that pixel art isn't so awesome. but it's clearly intending to evoke something that could also be created in a more photorealistic way. Yeah, and I mean the technology advanced so much more rapidly with computers and like Moore's law, this idea that like the number of, what are they called transistors and semiconductors will double every two years and chips getting so much faster over the last two decades. I think that's the biggest part of it.

And video games are all a fundamentally computational medium in a way that film and music are not. Yeah, that is true. But just another crazy kind of contextual thing here, contextual thing here, is the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which I think anyone who watches it today would agree it looks as good if not better than any movie made today in terms of computer graphics and just the way it all looks and comes together. That came out, the first entry, Fellowship of the Ring, came out in 2001 the same year as GTA3. Halo 1 Final Fantasy 10 Advance Wars

Devil May Cry The leaps and bounds we've made in the games industry is just yeah Really wild All right Let's knock out one more question Before we say goodbye

Here's a question from Craig Craig says Longtime listener since the split screen days And first day supporter of Triple Quick Thank you Craig With the increase in cyber attacks And most recently the insomniac hack, how do you choose what to cover from a news perspective?

The stolen documents released are clearly newsworthy, although not obtained by legal means, leaks, or accidental disclosure. Should reporting stick to the specific ransomware event or cover the exposed documents and by proxy promote the leaks? Just a quick, easy one that we're answering last for some reason. The context here is that, of course, there's this massive hack of insomnia at games. 1.7 terabytes of data, something crazy like that happened a few weeks ago, and a whole bunch of game footage and Insomniac's future plans and also just like slides

showing Sony's business strategy. A ton of stuff got leaked in addition to personal details affecting insomniac employees, people's passports and social security numbers and all sorts of stuff that an employee database would keep. So a pretty brutal, brutal leak for Insomniac and its employees. Yeah, I mean... Are you waiting for me to answer? No, my thought, I'm happy to go first.

I'll jump on the bullet for this one. I mean, yeah, there was a lot of discourse. After the hack, people saying, we won't be covering this or like, this should not be covered. And while I understand the instinct to want to kind of show solidarity with people who were affected by this awful hack, it's not, that's not a serious stance. a reporter is going to report public information no matter where it comes from. It doesn't matter if it's a hack or someone sending you stuff and breaking NDA or just being publicly released via official press release. Like information that is public is not something you would be doing a disservice to your readers to pretend to close your ears and eyes and pretend that it's not

actually public. You have to make like a newsworthiness judgment, right, in that and to sign among the information what is newsroom? Yeah, that goes without saying every outlet is constantly doing that. I'm talking specifically about people who are like, we will not cover this because it came from a hack, which to me is kind of an unsurious stance as a newsroom or as a news reporter. Where it gets a little more interesting to me and where you really have to kind of weigh the news value versus the harm

is if the leak is sent privately to you, and then you have to think about what this means and what that would look like and what the ethical and legal ramifications are. It's a pretty straightforward question if it's out there. If information is out there, no reporter that is doing their job would pretend that it's not out there. I empathize with it because it's very easy to be like, hey, I know people there. And especially with Insomnia, because so many of them are on the West Coast and are, like, friendly or friends with people who are in the games press, as opposed to, like, when the Capcom leak came out a little while ago.

And it was like, oh, people don't talk to Capcom Japan developers, so they're not going to be as inclined to take this big moral stance in the same way. So, yeah, it's pretty messy. Which kind of says it all, doesn't it? Yeah, I mean. Okay, well, maybe you're evaluating this in a different way because it's a developer based in the United States. Yeah, I mean, reporters who are doing their jobs are going to use whatever information they can. And again, that doesn't mean just publishing everything you heard that might be

interesting to readers. And I think that ultimately Polygon and Bloomberg and every website that is doing the work and taking it seriously is just going to set their own standards of newsworthiness and what's worth covering. But yeah, yeah, it's, I actually don't think it's that tough, a tough dilemma. Okay, cool. On that note, let's take a break and we'll be back for one more thing. Oh, welcome everyone. Step right up. We're going to heal you. We are the healers, Ross and Carrie. Yes, yes. You there. You look like you're upset. Come up here. Yes, you are healed because you've listened to our podcast. Yes. Have you been having trouble with demons? Are you sleeping too much? Too little, just right? We have the solution. It is to listen to

Oh no, Ross and Carrie. A show where we examine unusual claims. We show up so you don't have to. Find us on maximum fun.org. We won't actually heal you. The human mind can be tricky. Your mental health can be complex, your emotional life can be complicated. So it helps to talk about it. I'm John Moe. Join me each week on my show, Depression Mode with John Moe. It's in-depth conversations about mental health with writers, musicians, comedians, doctors, and experts. Folks like Noah Khan, Sashir Zameda, and Surgeon General Vivek Merti. We talk about depression, anxiety, trauma, imposter syndrome, and perfectionism.

We have the kind of conversations that a lot of folks are hesitant to have themselves. Listen, and you won't feel as alone, and you'll have some laughs too. Depression Mode for Maximum Fun at MaximumFund.org or wherever you get your podcasts. And we are back for one more thing. Kirk, why don't you start us off? Sure, I will start us off with a TV show that I've been catching up on and really enjoying, a show that I've always enjoyed, and I'm still enjoying, and that is Fargo, which airs on FX and is easiest to watch via Hulu, or at least that's how I've been watching it.

So I knew there was a new season of Fargo coming out. I had seen some positive early buzz about season five, which is currently airing. And I realized I never watched season four, which is the season with Jason Schwartzman and Chris Rock. That's actually set in Kansas City and not in North Dakota or Minnesota, though there is some overlap with some characters who turn up in other seasons of Fargo. So I watched season four as well. So I watched all of season four and then have been watching season. season five as it is aired.

There are two episodes of season five left, but it's almost done. I thought season four was pretty good. I loved season three of this show. That was the season with Carrie Coon as the lead. And just really, Ewan McGregor was also in it and was fantastic. I really, really liked that season. What's the villain's name? I'm forgetting his name, but he's basically like the devil.

He's from Harry Potter. Oh, that's right. David Thulis, is that his name? Yes, David Thulis. He was absolutely incredible. Yeah, it reminded me of Billy Bob Thornton in season one. So I've really liked every season of this show. I thought season four was a little weaker.

I gather that's kind of the critical consensus. It felt a little far outside of the Fargo template. But then again, I think that's what I really wanted to talk about here, is that I think it's remarkable and so weird, honestly, just weird, that there is a Fargo template and that this show exists. So this guy, Noah Hawley, who is clearly an incredible, incredibly skilled director and writer, like a visionary creative person. He also made Legion, which is a great show. He has like, the dude has ideas. And he has just dedicated a really

wild amount of his life to taking a Cohen Brothers movie and then building it into this mythos that can carry across an anthology series where every season of this show is a different decade, a whole different cast. But there are these echoes, right? Like in the new season, like there are always two assassins that show up and one is really quiet and one is loud and and it's like these these sort of reverberations of the original Fargo, which by the way, also an incredible film that I recommend everyone go and watch every so often because it's one of my favorite Cohen Brothers movies. So it's just wild that that is a thing at all. And then I would then watch season four of a show called Fargo that's still really good and be

like, well, this really deviates from the Fargo template. What is going on? Like how did we get here? It's just a really good fan fiction. You can say it. It kind of is. I mean, from the beginning, I remember with season one being like, what? Like, is this an adaptation of the movie?

And then I watched it. I was like, no. This is like an echo of the movie. And it was very good. And I was like, oh, okay, well, this is great. And I felt that way ever since. And then even though they're all kind of short stories, the end of the fourth season, ties into the second season.

Right. Right. There are these ways where you're like, oh, so that's who that character was, you know, whatever, 20 years earlier. So anyways, it's really interesting. I really respect Noah Hawley and all of the directors that he works with Dana Gonzalez and he's a great director and Donald Murphy

these directors who have been coming back and making the show they've really got the Cohen house style down they're very good at capturing a lot of the sort of drama and the directorial and like the cinematographical I guess flair of Cohen Brothers films

the music is always terrific that like Maine Fargo theme is so freaking cool Hey everyone I just wanted to credit the composer Jeff Russo, who wrote a great main theme for Fargo, but really just this show is musically very, very cool throughout. So I liked season four, even though it was a little bit unusual. It's kind of this gangster story.

I thought Chris Rock was actually really good in it. There's a very cool black and white episode toward the end of the season that's a riff on the Wizard of Oz in some clever and sometimes kind of grown-worthy ways, but really, like, it's very, very cool. And it's just a lot of big swings in season four. And then season five, I've been watching, and it's really very good. compelling. I've got some complaints with it. Like there are things that happen

I don't know. There's always kind of one high concept episode and I thought that the high concept episode for this season was kind of like it was a little unsatisfying. It's called Linda and whatever. Anyone who's watching will know the episode I'm talking about. It's about the CEO

of Twitter. It was a little no, not named for Linda Yakorino. But to give a really brief summary of it It's basically about domestic abuse, which is kind of interesting and pretty intense. I would say that as a warning to anybody watching it, like it really is about that in a way that feels very different from the other seasons. So I guess it's also a departure in that way, even though it's very set in like North Dakota

and Minnesota. And it really has a lot of those same echoes, the police officers that are trying to do the right thing, the unstoppable killing machine villains. And then it introduces to the middle of it. Juno Temple is the lead, who I think. most listeners would know from Ted Lassow as Keeley from Ted Lassow, who's this little kind of pixie-ish English gal who was so charming on that show. But in this show, she's playing a kind of Minnesota mom. It begins with the definition of Minnesota nice and how Minnesota nice is like

not really nice. You're just kind of pretending to be nice, which my mom's whole family is from the Twin Cities. So I'm very familiar with most Minnesota things. It's the opposite of New York where everyone's pretending to be mean, but they're really nice. It really is the opposite of New York. in so many ways, and everyone is actually nice in New York. Yeah, so, and she is, of course, being pursued by John Hamm, who plays her absolutely terrifying ex-husband, who is this, like, total abuser, like, sheriff militia leader from North Dakota, and he's the villain, and he is, like, a bad dude, and the whole time, you're just like, I cannot wait for this guy to get whatever's coming to him, because presumably he will.

And she is, like, this incredibly resourceful, like, Rambo lady, as you learn in the first few episodes. It starts out, you're like, oh, that's just like some mom in Minnesota. And then very quickly, it's like, oh, wow, okay, no, she is much more than that and has a whole dark past that she's trying to escape. So anyways, I found it to be really compelling. I mean, I very much want to know what's happening next, even though there's some tough stuff in it. Like, it really gets into this fact that she was in this abusive marriage. And it's like, that stuff is kind of realer in a way, I think than Fargo sometimes is. But I found it to be a really good season. I think she is amazing. It's funny, I almost think of Juno Temple as being Keeley because I only know her as Keeley.

I know she was like, she's been in a lot of stuff before that. No, I know what you mean. It's tough if you see somebody on a TV show where it's like a lot of episodes and that's like the first time you see the actor. It's hard to divorce that. And like Keeley from Ted Lassow is like wants to be kind of an entertainer and you can think of her as like, oh, like Keeley got her big break and she's going to be on Fargo. She's an actor. And doing such a great job on the Minnesota accent.

Man, it's like the Minnesota accent's fun. It's nice that she can kind of disguise her accent with another accent. But she rules. I mean, she is crushing it. And then John Hamm, of course, I already knew is a great actor. The two of them, I mean, he is so scary on this. And she is so good and intense. And like between them, they finally had some scenes together in this recent episode.

And like, wow, it's really impressive stuff. So I'm really enjoying it, even though it is a pretty intense and dark season. And I really just kind of wanted to mention that I watched both of those. And they're definitely a cut above most of the TV shows I've been watching lately. So really good stuff. And yeah, shout out to Noah Hawley on this bizarre, quixotic mission he appears to be on for, like, his whole life. I guess, like, go with God, man. I'm glad you're, yeah, respect and shoutouts.

Amazing. Maddie, what's your own more thing? Mine is a video game. I'm playing for PC, although it's on some other platforms. It's called A Little to the Left. And it was recommended to me by a few people just kind of in the vein of unpacking, which is a game where you unpack a series of apartments. And it's very, you know, just buzz brain activity. It just feels good to put the shoes away.

You turn your brain off. A little to the left is not that. And it is making me mentally ill. I'm already mentally ill. It's exacerbating my mental illness. And I'm not sure I'm going to keep playing it. But I want to describe it anyway. So I'm on chapter three.

The first chapter is so cute. You are putting things away, and often it's things that your adorable cat has ruined. Like, there's no dialogue in this game. It's just a series of, like, messes that you clean up and you click on stuff, and you get to see, like, your cat, you know, the tail swishing over your desk, and then you have to put your desk back in order. Sometimes the puzzles are pretty archaic where, like, it doesn't tell you what you're supposed to do ever. It just presents you a messy desk or like a stack of books.

and is like, figure it out. And usually- I'm watching it right now. Yeah, you kind of figure it out at first. And you're like, okay, I guess I'm supposed to stack the books according to size or and then later it's according to color or according to a secret pattern that's on the books. And once you look at the books, you're like, oh, there's actually a pattern there. Those puzzles made me kind of crazy, but like, it's fine.

Then I get to like chapter three. I think this may have started in chapter two, but I have now hit a wall with this game where I'm like, I don't understand what's going on. I'm pretty sure that I am. playing as a serial killer in this game because the stuff I'm organizing is totally unhinged. Like I have organized a drawer where there is a perfect compartment that fits a human tooth inside of it. And like every compartment fits like I this is one of those, I hate to do this on a podcast, but like I'm going to have to include some screenshots for Kirk to like put in a link to

in the episode description because I did share it on my blue sky account so you can link to that. it's like as though somebody took a bizarre series of objects like a tape measure a whistle one fondue fork a human tooth two buttons four paper clips and they were like going to a custom carpenter and they were like i'm going to need you to make an inset for my drawer that fits these 17 items precisely like no one would do that and also if you went to someone's house and you like saw them open a drawer and they had done that, you would think I need to get out of here. Like, I'm, I'm in a horror movie right now. And I was, like, waiting for the game to get to, like, the next level. And I'd be like, put these body parts in the bag and see if you can fit them all perfectly. Like, I was like waiting for the horror. Yeah, I was going to say, so wait. So, Maddie, is this like a Daniel Mullins thing where it's like, there's a big twist and it's like not what it seems? No. No, it's a cozy game. And I'm like, this ain't cozy. I am not coased. I am not cozied. I am not. I'm not swaddled by this. I'm deeply upset. I don't understand what is going on. Anyway, it's called a little to the left. I am really upset by it.

Are you sure it's not supposed to be like a subversive thing? I'm positive. I'm positive, Jason. It is something that other people like. And you know, I talked about it at work and there were a couple of my coworkers that were like, I really like putting something into the like bespoke drawer. And like it's not realistic. And I understand that. Like that's not the point in the game. It's just that you're fitting. like a tape measure into a slot that it perfectly fits. That would never exist in real life. But imagine if it did. Imagine if you had a perfect slot for your tape measure and your whistle. You know, all these objects you have. Like, instead of the junk drawer that you probably have in your house

where everything's just stacked up and it's absurd and it looks like crap because everybody has a junk drawer, or at least goodness knows we do and you guys are nodding. So you know what I'm talking about? But like what if it were perfectly organized, you know? I mean, I don't know. I get that only in that that. We do have junk drawers, but also are on an endless quest to kind of organize them. And I can see someone finding kind of like coziness or like reducing their anxiety by taking that messy drawer and like somehow imagining a world where you can have perfect little bespoke containers for all the things in your door.

I mean, I get why that would be appealing. It certainly is for someone who is not me because I find it really upsetting. But it's kind of like when you see those like Instagram reels when you're. scrolling or whatever and it's like a person like, you know, organizing a bunch of spheres and a perfect formation or like something that is totally irrelevant to real life. But like it's just for the purposes of like a soothing video. It's kind of supposed to evoke that sentiment. But because it has real life household objects that you would never organize in that way, I find it completely maddening. And often I don't know where I'm supposed to even like put the

objects or what I'm even doing and it makes me existential. But hey, if all that sounds good to you, It's called A Little to the Left. And they have like daily challenges. So the tooth is just never explained. The tooth is never explained, Jason. I don't know why the tooth is there. Why would you save one tooth? If this game started off as a cozy organizing simulator and gradually reveal that you were a serial killer, that would be really clever.

In fact, it's a terrific idea for a game. Yeah, it's a terrific for anyone who wants to make that. I want to do it. You start noticing things that are a little bit off like a tooth here. Or like, like, and you're like, huh, they have like a lot of peroxide, like a lot of stuff for cleaning up with. Like, wait a minute. This ID doesn't actually look like my character. Why is he putting it in a truck?

Oh, why does he have so many IDs like so methodically organized in his firebox? What is that? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this sounds like it's not that and that's too bad. It's not bad. But it maybe should be. I don't know. All right.

I will close this off. So my one more thing as, uh, people might have seen if they looked in the show notes just says, I hate advertisements. I have a little bit of a rant to go on today. Great. The other day I was filling up my gas, and as I'm filling up my gas, there is this panel attached to the gas pump that just is playing a nonstop barrage of advertisements.

And I'm used to that sort of thing in a cab in New York, and a cab you always get those, but you could always mute them. You can always press the move button. Here, you cannot do that. You can no longer mute these advertisements. You just have to listen to them while you're pumping. your gas. They're unavoidable. I'm already paying for my gas and I still have to listen to ads in my ear while I am filling my gas tank. Okay. That was incident number one. Incident number two. I was working on my book,

working on edits for the next draft of my book, which is getting close to the finish line, when I wanted, and I wanted to listen to the Octopeth Traveler 2 soundtrack, which is full of bangers, one of last year's best. But Square Inix does not put it on like Spotify or SoundCloud or YouTube or anything like that. But I did find it on someone else's SoundCloud, so I opened it up and started listening to it. And then, much to my dismay, every single track was followed by a 30-second ad that I could not make go away. Okay, more advertisements. Then, get this, guys, over the holiday season, I realized that I had only read about 20 books last year. And I like to read more than that. I know that sounds like a lot. Large part of that is because I was writing a book. And so I'll

probably read more this year, but I was also thinking, hey, I want to try getting a Kindle because I feel like I'll read a lot more if I could just flip out the Kindle and scroll through it, and that seems like a really good way to fit more books into my life. So I bought a Kindle. And when it is not in use, I don't know if you know, you guys know this, if you use a Kindle, but when it is not in use, you know what's on it and unavoidable and cannot be turned off? Ads. So I look into this, and I find out that a Kindle by default comes with book ads that Amazon puts up on your home screen. It's like imagine if your iPhone

when it was not in use just displayed ads, that's what the Kindle is. And the way to get rid of them is to go on Amazon.com and go to your device and pay a $20 fee to make them go away. I don't know how the world has just accepted this that the Kindle will have ads unless you pay to make them go away.

But I was like, well, I guess I'm giving Amazon another $20 to make these frigging ads go away. And I started thinking, as all three of these incidents kind of happened in a very short period of time. And I know gas stations, I don't know about you guys, but near me. They've been doing the ads for a while, but I just started thinking about it recently. So I started thinking, hey, it kind of feels like that dystopian future that like games like cyberpunk have promised us is already here.

And it's been here. And we've all just kind of accepted it. It's like the metaphor of the frog slowly getting lower, or in water that is slowly turned up. they don't even realize that they're boiling to death. I feel like we've already hit that point with advertisements. And it made me feel all sorts of frustration and rage about the world and especially about the fact that, like, the media business is so relying upon advertisements

and just this incredibly dystopian world of commercialization and sales and people just trying to show you things all the time. And it made me kind of vowed to myself. Like, I don't know if I can actually stick to this, but I want to, like, be able to create things forever, if possible, without having ads. Like I love so much that triple click doesn't have ads

that we don't have to succumb to that and I hope that's possible forever. I hope that whatever I do in the future if I ever launch more businesses or do things for myself, they can just involve selling something directly to people without like forcing them to have to listen to me,

shill my pillow or whatever in order to enjoy something. But how do people find out about your book or your hypothetical product? That's a great question. Hopefully through, organic word of mouth in my social media field. Not on the Kindle.

How effective are they? I mean, like the gas station ads, a lot of them are for like cheddar and I'm like, I will never ever listen to cheddar or watch cheddar because of this, because this is so like that's, I've gotten to the point where ads just make me like anti that thing. Yeah, these ads driving crazy. There's also not actually a lot of good data about the effectiveness of various kinds of ads. It's fascinating to. look into that and like how little we really know about why people buy things. Like we know a little

bit. Like, oh, if you hear about it multiple times and you already wanted it, yeah. But I don't know how effective this gas station is. Well, the ironic thing is that what actually makes we want to buy things is hearing about it multiple times, but it's from people who are normal and are just talking about it organically. Well, this is the theory behind the influencer economy, right? Right, right. And then you start getting into territory of like, to you, is this actual natural actually organic or not and yes of course it is a whole again dystopia we're we're living in it we just don't know it it feels like to to further the frog boiling thing like for a while it was possible to pay more money so if you had more disposable income you could like your frog could

be a little higher than the other frogs yeah and it feels it does feel like over the last couple of years all the frogs are now increasingly in the boiling advertising water they're all boiling i mean the kindle thing is is that essentially and also amazon just announced that on Prime TV, if you're watching their shows, the default option now, what you pay for now is just going to have ads. And you have to pay even more. You have to pay an extra. You know, you're already paying for Prime.

Right. Yeah, there have been a lot of things like this lately. Just all the streaming services, adding ads. The Roku screensaver on my TV just as has ads for TV all over. Sometimes it's sponsored. It'll be like taken over by some promotional thing. And like, so it's this kind of cool screensaver with all these little Easter eggs from movies in it that used to be fun to look at and now it like there's all these ads and like there'll be a new building that's like themed after you know whatever whoever they're sponsors and I'm like oh right this is just a vessel for advertising into my house that's like sitting on the TV because we paused it for 15 minutes and the screens they were turned on or here's a thing that I've been noticing lately every time I fly anywhere when you land the poor flight attendant has to get on the PA and just give a like 10 minute pitch for credit cards I don't know if you've noticed this but like on Alaska I'm

on like so many different airlines. They're like, all right, well. Right for their credit cards. Just so you know. And it's like they have a gun to their head. They're just like reading a script. They're like, well, you know, if you spend $3,000 in the first three months, you get a free flight next year.

And what a deal that is. So anyways, if you want a credit card application and you're just sitting here, like, while they're using the same PA that they use for, like, security announcements to, like, sell you credit cards. They can save your life in the event of a crash, but also they're there to tell you. By the way, the airlines are not doing well financially. So they need to show,

Frederick. Right. They're desperate and it just the whole thing does feel very, uh, very unfortunate. Yeah, but what's Jeff Bezos's excuse? He's doing just fine. He is. And the Kindle, man, the Kindle really feels like it crosses the line for me because it feels to me like when an electronic is off, it should just have a blank screen. And the fact that the Kindle, when it's off, it just feels like such a violation. It's like my, my device is sitting on my nightstand. When they're off, they should not be doing anything. They should not be selling me things. That just feels like it really crosses the line. Same with the gas stations just because it's so unavoidable. Yeah, no, I was going to say, like, it's very similar. Where it's like those didn't used to have screens and they don't need screens.

They don't need that. Well, and you can feel how it creeps, right? How did we as a society, like, let these people get away with this? Well, it creeps slowly. It really is a slow thing. Like the home screen on a game console will have ads for games. So then it's like, okay, my TV, when I go to the home screen, there's an ad. So now the screensaver comes on.

Well, that's passive. The Kindle thing I had forgot. and I think I probably bought the more expensive than I bought it because mine doesn't have ads on the weight stream. I'm sure I would have bought it. I love being the top frog. I'll pay anything to get rid of it. So the upgrade,

what I was talking about is essentially paying for the more expensive version like that. I didn't even know that was an option. But yeah, it's... Well, and like when you're in a cab, in the back of a cab, and the fact that you can't mute the ads and some of these things, yeah.

So it really just feels like it's a constant kind of pushing the boundary and pushing the boundary. And you do start to imagine those, you know, I don't know, where we're all wearing like our augmented reality glasses and there's just ads everywhere. And then they're like, you can't actually see what you want to see until your eyes are open

for the whole ad. I mean, these are like things we've seen in sci-fi media. This is the future. Yeah, but we're already here. Any dystopian feature you can imagine, we're already there. Anyway, this episode of Triple Click has been brought to you by Jeff Bezos. Thank you, Jeff. No, in fact, this episode of Triple Click has been brought to you by no ads.

By listeners like you. No ads. And by a worker-owned co-op that is. Max. Hell yeah. That we love very much. And you know what? We can say that without being paid to do so. We can just say that with nothing being held over our heads at all. Yeah, we leave money on the table, and we are only able to do that because of all of you fine supporters out there. So thank you so much for your support and making the show happen. All right. Kirk, Manny, it's time to say goodbye. I will see you both next week. Yeah, see you both next week. Bye.

Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddie Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network, and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at Maximumfund.org. Find us on Twitter at Triple ClickPod. Send email the triple click at maximum fun.org

And find a link to our Discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Maximum Fun A worker-owned network Of artist-owned shows Supported directly By you