Triple Click - Cheating In A Video Game

Episode Date: July 25, 2024

When is it OK to cheat in a video game? When is it not OK? This week, the Triple Click gang ponders all things cheating, from codes to mods, and talks about the ethical dilemmas (or lack thereof) when it comes to altering the intended experience in a video game.One More Thing:Kirk: Twister (1996)Maddy: Suicide Squad IsekaiJason: Blink 182 (Live at Citi Field)LINKS:You Are Good’s Twister episode: https://www.podpage.com/you-are-good/twister-w-niko-stratis/Preorder Jason’s Book! https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/jason-schreier/play-nice/9781538725429/Support 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

It's like they always say, once a cheater, always a cheater. Which is why I'm actually going to be buried with my game genie manual. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week, we talk about cheating in video games. Because if you cheat in a game, you cheat yourself unless, of course, it makes the game more fun. And in that situation, it's called a mod or quality of life updates. I'm Maddie Myers. I'm Jason Shrier.

And I'm Kirk Hamilton. And hello. Hello. We made it back. Hi there. There and back again. I hope you both enjoyed your summer break away from... I did.

I spent it cleaning out my parents' house in California and it wasn't very fun. But, you know, so enjoy isn't the word I'd used. But it was nice to have a break during that otherwise very stressful week. Fair enough. I spent it just watching every television show. I've been procrastinating watching. That's like what I've been doing the past two weeks. I've had so much competition for my one more thing this week.

It was a dead heat. Just get ready, listeners. Get ready for a television show to be there. But which one? I love that feeling when I'm like, man, what's my one more thing going to be? It really matters. And then I cut to a point where I'm like, wait, it doesn't really matter. Just pick something.

It's fine. Well, Kirk, what you do is you just pick three of them and find out of time together. I think that's the same reason that I wind up doing that is I'm like, well, I got to include all these things. And welcome my one more thing. The art form of television. and then I just go on and on about everything I've been watching. No, that's not what I'm going to do. I spent my break logging on to Skype and just talking to myself for like an hour.

Oh, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. Yeah, I wasn't logged in here because that wasn't what I was doing, so I had no idea you were doing that, Jason. No, it's just me. I just recorded it. Maybe I'll run out there. All right. Send it to me, and then I'll record my end of that conversation that eventually will release it to people. Oh, right.

Isn't this an ongoing joke? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a modification of that plan. Mm-hmm. We're still working on it, but there are a few things we're doing that are in the plan. And one of those plans is this. We are playing Resident Evil 2, the remake, the recent remake of it.

And why? Because Kirk Hamilton won a bet. And that means Jason and I have to play it. And so we are. And that play-through starts with the Claire version of the game. You play through as Claire first, according to us here at Triple Click. I also agree with that. I do feel like Claire is the correct way to start the game.

So we're going to play all the way. through Claire's section and we're going to be doing that for the episode that comes out a week from today. And also, while I'm talking, I'll just remind the listener real quick, we're on the Maximum Fun Network and podcast and what that means is we are supported by you the listener if you go to maximum fund.org slash join. And of course, why wouldn't you do that? Because once you did become a member of Max Fun, you would get access to our monthly bonus episodes. And this month we're going to record one about a couple of kind of video gamey Christopher Nolan movies. We're going to talk about Inception and Tenet. And so you would get access to that episode this

month, but you'd also get a huge backlog of other episodes. We watched Psych Odyssey, which is a YouTube documentary series about the making of Psychonauts 2, really, really cool series. And also we spoiled the heck out of that series. We've also done video game ones. We've talked about Final Fantasy 7 rebirth. And I can't remember any other things. we've talked about, but there's a bunch of other. There's a lot. That's the only one. Those are a couple. I mentioned two. We're going to do Nolancast next. So maximum fund.org slash join is the place you want to go if you want to become a member. And I highly recommend doing so. It's a good deal. And plus, you're supporting us. So you get those warm, fuzzy feelings.

Okay. Kirk, what are we talking about today? Today we are talking about cheating and all of the different ways that we might think about it. This is a pretty, We're talking about all the times we have cheated on our spouses. No, we are talking about cheating specifically in games. And just all the different ways that cheating can manifest and different thoughts that we have about it. So I guess to start this conversation, which can go and probably will go in a lot of different directions, let's just establish what we mean by cheating and some important distinctions between types of cheating. I guess really just one distinction, and that is cheating in a competitive environment

versus cheating in a single player environment. Yeah, I thought you were going to say cheating in a consensual environment where everybody knows it's happening or cheating in a non-consensual environment. I realize the former example shouldn't perhaps be called cheating, but that's also part of what we're going to talk about today is the colloquial use of the word cheating to describe things that everybody knows are happening. And we're all just participating in a form of bending the rules together. And we've all agreed that's okay. So I think there are some interesting things to say and think about competitive cheating.

But for me at least, I'm much more interested in the discussion around cheating in a single player game that is modifying the game, finding some way to break the game or get around the game's stated rules in order to give yourself an advantage so that you can win more easily than you would if you hadn't done whatever it is that's being called cheating. I just think that leads to so many different interesting ways to engage with games that I think that can be really interesting. So maybe let's talk about competitive cheating first then because that I just to me is a little more straightforward.

It's generally bad to cheat when everyone is competing on a level playing field because without, you know, you have to have some sort of agreed upon baseline in order to for a competition to feel meaningful. That said, you know, depending on how you define cheating, you could say that a lot of things are cheating. Like maybe it's cheating to pay for a really great tutor to make you really good at something for your entire life and you spend all this money being trained

for years and years and years to get really good at something so that you then are a better competitor in the level playing field. Right? Like there are ways that you can say people are cheating even in an otherwise even playing field. Is that cheating? Yeah, that's really stretching the rules. Just having an advantage due to time and money.

If we're kind of making definitions here, I think we can draw a pretty strict delineation between violating the rules of the game or the rules surrounding the league, the competitive league, or whatever it is you're talking about and using every possible advantage that don't violate the rules. I mean, those are pretty clear. There's a pretty clear distinction between those two, I would say. And yes, I think we can all kind of agree that if you're cheating, in a competitive environment against someone who doesn't know you're cheating or didn't agree to

that as an option beforehand, then that is a bad thing. Whether it's just for fun, like you're playing online games of Fortnite and you're just cheating just to be an asshole, or you're like actually in some sort of tournament with stakes and money prizes or whatever it is. I mean, that's no good, bad. We've decided we're against it. Triple thumbs down. Triple thumbs down. I agree. And the example I threw out earlier is a little bit more of a provocation than a deeply held belief just to be clear. And yeah, I think that's right and that video games open themselves up to cheating in a lot of really interesting ways compared with other sports, for example, just because a lot of times you are playing the game just on your own machine. And there's a whole industry out there of people who sell, you know, aimbots or other cheating tools that you can then use. And that's why all of these anti-cheet interfaces, these sort of middlemen, like, you know, whatever, all of the hated anti-cheat software, that's why that all exists is because these, you know, people are trying to keep their games fair.

I mean, that's, for example, why Destiny 2 doesn't work on the Steam deck. I believe that's the case anyways, like, they have an anti-cheat software that doesn't work in Linux and has to run in Windows. And as a result, you just can't play the game because they don't want anyone cheating. And Destiny 2 is actually an interesting example of a game that it does have a competitive aspect, but it's also just an online game. And I wonder if the two of you think, what the two of you think of cheating in MMOs, in games where you're playing online with other people, but you're not necessarily competing all the time. For example, gold farming in World of Warcraft or something like that.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, okay, so that's where you get into some interesting borders. So let's get into Blizzard, because I know that company. any pretty well. I think that it's really interesting if you look at Blizzard's history because when they released games, Warcraft, Warcraft 2, Starcraft,

a lot of their games have cheat codes that are built in into the single-player campaign and you can use those to get all sorts of fun little tricks and they all have very fun names, quick tangent. There was, back in the Starcraft days in the 90s, there was this group of fans called Operation Can't Wait Any Longer or Operation C-Wall and they were like so eager for StarCraft 1

that they would like scope out Blizzard's parking lot and like see how many people were there to see if people were working on the game which was both creepy and flattering as one person described it to me in my new book Real life data mining and so Blizzard I guess kind of honored them by putting their name as a cheat code

so if you go on StarCraft and you type Operation C-Wall it speeds up the production of your building so of course it makes things go faster because they can wait it along Anyway, what I was getting at to kind of answer your question, Kirk, is I always found it interesting that StarCraft and Warcraft had cheat codes, but Diablo and of course World of Warcraft don't. And I think the main reason for that is because one of the big motivations in a game like Diablo or in a game like World of Warcraft is even if you're not playing competitively, it's to gear up your character, to make your character really good. And a lot of the time you sink into the game is for that purpose. And if you could just kind of type in a cheat code and jump to that point, there would be no reason to actually play the game, which is to extrapolate further, one of the reasons that the auction house in Diablo 3 was such a humongous controversy is because it was seen as kind of a cheat code.

You could just enter your credit card and buy something. And so what was the point of playing to go and farm for loot and try to get new gear for your character if you could just buy it? So, yes, I think that you can get into that question. and that raises more interesting ethical questions than like I think it's pretty clear if you're competing against people cheating is a no-no. Is cheating a no-no if you're competing against people in less of a direct PVP sense and more of we're all kind of showing off our gear here sense? Then it gets a little more interesting. To me it still feels like a pretty morally dubious thing to try to cheat in a game that doesn't allow it or that strictly bans it like Diablo World of Warcraft where you're kind of like taking away from the overall competitive nature. or overall kind of fair play nature of it.

And I would certainly feel bummed if I spent hundreds of hours trying to get some cool sword and then the guy next to me just like entered a cheat code and got it for free. So yeah, destiny is the same way. Yeah, that's true. I also am realizing that I agree. Thumbs down on cheating. But I'm remembering a couple of key examples from my own team years that at the time I didn't really consider cheating, but they kind of were, which are that, so you all remember I used to play Counterstrike with my friends

and something that we would do sometimes. This was in the days before Discord. So it was really hard to chat with each other outside of the game. So there were a couple ways you could do it. One of them would be to just have a land party, and then you can all be talking with each other out loud while you're actually ganging up on some other players, and maybe they aren't aware that you're doing that. One could argue that that is perhaps cheating is certainly a little bit unfair. And then the other thing we would do that is sort of like a softer version of that is just call each other on the phone and just tell each other what we were going to do in the game.

Now, I feel like for the average listener, they'd be like, well, that's not cheating because Discord exists. And like, what are you talking about? Of course, talking during a game of Counterstrike is how you would communicate with your team. But at that time, we did kind of consider that to be like a way of getting a leg up on the other team that was like a little bit in a gray area. So that's one thing that I'm remembering where I'm like, but that seemed okay to me for whatever reason with my morals. I think because even at the time I was like, it's stupid that this isn't normalized. And there is team chat in the game. You can type.

It's just easier if you're talking out loud. And like that's software. Wait, they're over here. Exactly. Exactly. I mean, and also like, e-sports teams do that. So I'm also like, that's not really cheating. But oh, and the other thing that we would do that is absurd is that we would set up like Halo land parties because enough of us had

Xboxes that we would just bring all the Xboxes to one person's house. And then, of course, you could play a Halo multiplayer match and just immediately talk to each other and say what you were going to do and where you were. But even that is like, it's not really cheating per se. It's more just like playing the game in a different way. And you could always call your friends on the phone even back in the day. And like that was always kind of known as something that you could do, which is why Discord is so popular now. I don't know if any of that counts as cheating. But it definitely felt like we were getting one over on the game. What about Halo screen peeking? What about when you're playing the screen and you look over at where people.

Screen peeking. Screen peaking is a colloquialism of its day that I feel like I haven't heard for years and now you've brought it back to mind again. Am I sending the nostalgia flooding through your hand? You really are. You really are. Screen peeking. Wow. I mean, that still comes up. So you're talking about kind of information, like information you weren't really supposed to have. There have been, I can't remember if it was League of Legends. One of those competitive games, there was a scandal where a player was looking at the screen, like the main screen in the tournament to see the map, to see. see what was going on. Or I know this is a thing, it's been a thing in the past with Destiny 2 raids where different raid groups compete to get first.

And as a result, they don't always like to stream because if you're doing the raid and you're trying to get first, like your clan is going really hard at some difficult challenge, you could just turn on Twitch and look at what your competitors are doing. And if they've already solved the puzzle or figured out what step you're on, you can just do whatever they're doing. So it's the same idea as screen peeking. you're competing in a different way, right? Like, again, a Destiny Raid Clear competition is very different than, you know, a PVP match where you're using an AIMB or something.

Right. But you could say that that's not sportsman-like. It isn't, I would say. It's dishonorable in a way. I think that a lot of players would agree with you, yeah, that you're supposed to do it totally clean. And circling all the way back to Jason, what you were saying earlier about working really hard to get, you know, the sword that's the reward for beating the quest and then seeing somebody else who, Maybe if you're talking about World of Warcraft, they paid someone who just got that sword on their account and sold it to them for 50 bucks. Or going back to Destiny again, Jason, you and I played trials of Osiris all the time.

And at the time, the trials of Osiris was this tournament that three players would compete. And it was really, really tough competition. It was a PVP 3V3 tournament. And you had to make it all the way through nine matches. And if you could go undefeated, you then unlocked a bunch of really sweet stuff that you could only get. get by going undefeated. And we at least, Jason and I teamed up with Todd. Was that his name? He was a really great player. We met him on at the time, Neo Gaff, the forum, and he's a really nice guy, and he was really good at destiny. So he was like a ringer. Basically, you enlisted a ringer.

He was a ringer, yes, and he carried us. So you were cheating, is what you're saying. Well, so that's one, that, now were we, where we, I don't really think so, but, you know, like, we definitely brought in someone who was there because he was good. He was also a fun guy to play with, but we started playing with him because he was really good and was like, oh yeah, I can totally carry you guys. It'll be fun. But in the world of destiny, there were also people selling paid carries because there were players who were so good at destiny that just two total strokes.

Yeah. Yeah, they could just pay them, whatever, 50 bucks. And they'd be like, I'll totally get you to Mercury and you can get all the chest opens you want for this week for this amount of money. And that's also like, I don't know, it's a weird gray area because with Todd, he was very good, but he couldn't quite carry us. Like, Jason and I did have to compete and play, and we did make it to Mercury, and it was really fun, and I felt good about the prizes. I think I got some terrible gun because I didn't get the one, the messenger, the one that everyone wanted.

But anyways, bygones. I'm clearly over it. Yeah, it's so over it, and you didn't remember it at all. I'm slowly accepting that I never got the messenger in destiny 10 years ago. Yeah, who cares? Anyways, so I think that that is all really interesting and, like, all fits along this spectrum of, if not, cheating than just sort of stretching outside of the established method of play in order to increase your chances of victory. Yeah, I feel like I'm okay with that, which I don't know why

I'm clarifying what I am and I'm not okay with. I'm clearly the arbiter of all of these things in my own mind. But yeah, it's always an interesting question to ask. It is. I mean, it is. And I think I'm not to just transition us, I'm so much more okay with it in a single player. game, that it's kind of comical. Like as compared to this conversation we're having about competitive games where I'm like, okay, like how far do I feel like I need to go? And also, I do feel like I'm competing with myself. So I have my own standards of like, is this still fun for me?

Did I get some type of challenge out of this? But then when we get to single player games, I'm so much more willing to be like, this isn't fun anymore. It's going to be so much more fun if I have infinite gold or whatever it may be, whatever thing there is in the game that's holding me back and I can just tell that that's the one thing that's rankling me, I will be like, yeah, okay, it's time. The time has come to engage in sheets. And I just, I don't know.

I'm sure at some point in my past, I had some type of turning point, but I don't remember it. It was like just a thousand tiny cuts. At some point, I just have become the person I am today who no longer cares about any of that. Do you know what I'm saying? Like, I just, I don't care anymore. I'm like, yeah, I'll just install sheets.

Well, a lot of older games had cheat codes built in. That's true. We should explain that. I mean, the Konami Code is an iconic example, probably the most iconic example. A lot of games, especially older ones, well, Game Genie, although that was their party. I'm talking about what the game developers intended. So a lot of these games, I mean, people, the people who made them put in ways for you to very easily just type in a couple of words or letters and access God mode and make yourself invulnerable or give yourself unlimited money or whatever it was. So it's not like the developers wanted you to be able to experience this if you wanted to. So it's not like even the makers of the games were being super precious about how, no, you, Maddie Myers, you must complete this the way that it must, you must complete this in three lives and only three lives.

And otherwise you will fail, you will not be a true gamer. Right. No, the developers wanted people to be able to do cool stuff and play games however they wanted. And for a lot of people I imagine, like, they just wanted to experience. the story of a game, so playing through God mode was totally cool, and it was the only way they could if it was a hard game or something like that. Yeah, I think that some of those developer shortcuts that give you God mode were also just for testing the game because it was kind of hard, and you just needed to run through and make sure that whatever this door worked because

the door hadn't been working. Well, that exists in every game, but most developers turn them off. Like back then, a lot of developers would just leave in those controls. Yeah, where I'm going with this, though, is there is, I see that, those kinds of causes a little bit different from something like Metal Gear or Resident Evil, games that build in items that basically let you cheat, that you unlock through gameplay, that then actually exist in the game. So like in Metal Gear, you get a bandana that gives you infinite ammo once you've beaten the game once, I think.

Or in Resident Evil 2, actually, you unlock a bunch of really powerful weapons. I think in a lot of Resident Evil games, they give you an infinite ammo rocket launcher that you can then take through a new game plus. and as it starts giving you very different goals, like speed run the game, like beat the whole game as quickly as possible, it also starts giving you tools to let you do that and that don't lock you out from those achievements.

In Resident Evil 2, we'll talk about this more next week, but I actually really like using the infinite combat knife, which is a knife that you can equip that then, at least for me, like it kind of changes up the way that I play because I can shoot out of zombie's legs and then just walk up in really quick, just permanently kill it, and ammo becomes much less of an issue for me because I have this knife that never breaks.

And it's like, it's cheating. I mean, I am robbing myself of the experience or whatever that meme says. Like, I'm not having the truly intense survival horror experience of like always running out of ammo and not being able to kill every zombie because I just have to run around them because I don't have enough bullets.

But at the same time, it makes the game more enjoyable for me. And it was intended by the developers. They put it in there as something that someone like me can use, like in my inventory that I've unlocked to make the game play differently. I think that's really cool, like that kind of cheat. That's not even just like a code that you need to know, but is actually an item in the game that they give you. I've been thinking about that a lot with the Eldon Ring DLC,

especially because Miyazaki did an interview where he talked about how he takes advantage of every single possible thing in Eldon Ring, and he described himself as bad at games and was like, I will use every summon. I will use like every possible tool at my disposal. And like that's how he sees the game as being played. And like that's also what I do. And it's part of what I enjoy about those games.

And so I don't actually install cheese for Eldonring, but I do socially cheat in the sense that there are certainly people who are like, I don't believe in using summons. We don't need to talk about those people. It doesn't matter. But I engage in every possible thing. at my disposal that the game will give me if it's going to make the experience

more fun for me, which I agree with you, Kirk, like any type of thing that's like an infinite ammo bandana or whatever, I'll try it and be like, is this making the game more fun? And sometimes it's super does. And it like actually feels really attuned to how the game feels to play and almost is like,

even calling it a cheat seems like a misnomer because it's actually how the game should be played and makes it feel better to play it that way because it's like, oh, this prized item is your reward for having dealt with some difficult thing. And it almost feels like cheating. You almost feel like you're in God mode because now you have this great item. But actually, there's still enough of a challenge that it's fun. You know what I mean?

Yeah, for sure. Well, it's hard to tell sometimes. There's some games when what you're talking about. I mean, the infinite ammo bandana, that's not really intended to be like you played through the whole game and have a proper challenging experience with this. And in some games, it's just a matter of balance. Alden Ring is a good example. If you play that game with some weapons, you're going to have a much different experience than if you play with others, just because of the balance, the way the game is balanced, intentionally or not.

The one I always think about is Final Fantasy Tactics. That is a game that I believe you have played. Also, Kirk, where kind of maybe two-thirds into the game, you get this character named Orlando, and he just, like, so is completely overpowered. Like, he is 100 times more. powerful than like even the other, the second strongest character and playing through the game with them really feels like you're breaking it like you've ruined it for yourself. And actually, Maddie, I find that like sometimes taking advantage of that sort of thing makes the game way less fun.

Oh, for sure. Sometimes I really don't enjoy it when a game has something like that because I always feel compelled to use it, but also using it makes battles such a breeze that I've been, I'm just not enjoying myself anymore. So it's always kind of an interesting balance. to strike there. But I don't think that's a matter of cheating, nor would I call it kind of an intentional sort of thing. It feels like a balance issue more than anything, at least in the games that I mentioned. Yeah, I think that there is an interesting trajectory with anything that is considered cheating, where it starts as a cheat. It starts as being seen as outside of the intention of the game. But then over time, it can become normalized and even be built into the game

and eventually just become part of the expected experience. Like some of what we're talking about here now just manifests as accessibility settings, like difficulty settings. Or even like Discord existing so you can call people when you're playing CounterStrike. Sure, of course. And yeah, that is a good example, actually. And when you were talking about that earlier, I was having the same thought that at one point it was seen as sort of transgressive to talk to people while playing Counterstrike.

But now, of course, that's just the norm because the technology caught up with it. But if you look at the accessibility settings for something like Nine Souls, which is a recent, very difficult Metroidvania game, there's actually really cool difficulty sliders in that game that make it much more approachable. And you can adjust the amount of damage that you take or the amount of damage that you deal. And I really like having those sorts of granular controls. Horizon, actually Horizon Forbidden West is a similar game where I find it fun to have to take a lot longer to kill the dinosaurs in that game, like the monsters. but I don't like taking a ton of damage when I get hit. So being able to control that kind of thing makes me almost feel like I'm using something like game genie,

which now we can talk about because that's kind of like that's a different angle on the idea of cheating in single player games. So the game genie, the game genie was made by Galube, which is something I had completely forgotten and was a name that I had not heard since I was a young man. Galube the makers of micro machines, among other things. So, bing, slight correction here. The game genie was actually made by Codemasters, and it was sold by Galube and Comerica. So Galub didn't actually make the game genie, like I said in the episode.

They just sold it. But still, remember Galub games? Remember Micro Machines? Remember the Micro Machines man in the commercials? He talked really fast, man. The machines were pretty micro. Okay, back to the episode. Bing!

They made the Game Genie, which went on top of a cartridge and sort of existed in between the car. cartridge and the console and change the game's code to allow you to do all kinds of things. It went below, below the cartridge. But yeah. I mean like in between the cartridge and the cartridge and the console. You plugged the cartridge into the game genie and then the game genie to the console. So it was like interfaced in between the two. It changed the game's code. So it was essentially, you know, mod DB. It's just that it worked on a Nintendo. And Nintendo actually sued Galu over the game genie saying this is infringing

on their copyright and they lost because the court ruled that no, this is just modifying something that players already own. They own the game. So they have the right to modify it, which wound up being, I think, an important ruling for the whole idea of modding games in the future, which is still something that's protected that we're allowed to do. And now, of course, PC games are modable all over the place. And a lot of the mods that I really like, they aren't even doing things like granularly changing the amount of damage I take or the amount of damage I do or giving me more ammunition. They're doing things that just make the game more pleasant to play, like they're improving the user interface, like SkyUI and Skyrim, or they're giving me

infinite inventory space, which I've totally done in games. Oh, yeah. It can kind of break games sometimes, where the whole idea of, I don't know, like Star Dew Valley, for example, you have pretty limited inventory, and like part of the rhythm of that game is that you can only carry so much, so you have to go home and drop things off in your chest, so you have to play in your schedule a certain way, but if you use a certain mod with that game, you can just access your chest from anywhere. So suddenly you just don't have to think about that anymore.

And the game becomes very different to play. But I think to a lot of people, it becomes more enjoyable. And especially a game like that, which people play for years and years and years, mods like that, they're not really cheating. They're just changing the game to your taste, which I guess it's maybe like a semantic distinction, but it feels meaningful to me. Yeah. How is that not cheating if that's designed around, like if you're changing the balance of the game

in such a way to make it easier for your sense. How is that not cheating? It is, right? It's just like, I think we, maybe the word implies negative. Like, the word cheating, it sounds like you do a situation. It has a negative connotation for sure. I think, yeah, and I think mods is a much better neutral word because when you're modding a game, it's like, well, that's your game.

You can do what you want to it. But if I said, oh, I'm modding my destiny too, so I can cheat everyone much, much quicker. I'm using an aim mod. A mod? Yeah, an A-M-assist. Well, that is what it's called an A-assist mod. So, yeah, it would be. But yeah, no, it's interesting. We hear cheats and think of, but I don't really see a difference between changing your inventory size and Stardue Valley and turning on God mode and Doom so you don't have to worry about getting hit and having a more frustrating experience because you died. To just think it throughout loud, I think the difference is at least partly that you're

changing the interface of the game rather than the gameplay experience. Or at least I think that's maybe a distinction. Someone might try to draw between something that changes the map to just make it easier to read, for example, or it changes your inventory to make it easier to use versus something that gives you infinite life. Or it makes it so that your weapon just one shot's boss. Well, but in Sturdy Valley, it's gameplay affecting because it makes it so you don't have to spend the time to go back to your house. And so it's not just changing the UI in a way that makes it. Like if you're playing Skyrim or something and you do an unlimited weight mod, which is great and

probably very useful for a lot of people, it changes the gameplay because it means that you don't have to worry about improving your strength, for example. And so it does have an impact as opposed to just an aesthetic difference in that you just like move to the UI so it's a little bit bigger or something like that. And I do think there's a distinction there. And this is not casting judgment. Like I think it's totally cool if people want to play a single player game and whatever the way they want. but I do think it falls in the same category for me if it's impacting the gameplay in some way or another. So what I like about that is that it allows an insight

into how the game works and what it is that you're doing when you're playing the game. Because I think you're right. I mean, it does affect the gameplay, but the gameplay in Stardue Valley is picking things up and carrying them around and putting them in a chest, right? Like, that's what that game is. And so the minute you change the way that works.

In a very cozy way. Yeah. Right. You're actually changing the mechanics of the game, where in a game like, I don't know, Skyrim, your inventory, like if it's just easier for you to access your inventory, like, is the game really about that? Does it really make a huge difference if you remove incumbrance, for example, from Skyrim? Like, yeah, you're changing the game, but how fundamentally are you changing the experience? Maybe if you do that actually thinking it through, you are actually really changing the experience if you remove incumbrance for similar reasons.

But, you know, each change to each game, it kind of raises new questions and makes you wonder. what it is that you're getting out of the game in the first place and how the game works. Well, so, yeah, that leads to something I've been thinking about, which is that a lot of remakes or remasters or new versions of old games add, quote, unquote, quality of life features that are there in the beginning. This phrase that we all know, quality of life features. Was that sarcasm? No, I think it's hilarious.

I mean, really what the quality of life features are is cheats in the old and days would be, like, inventory improvements. It's not as difficult to carry as much. many things. Like, those are the kinds of quality of life changes. All right. So, so Maddie Myers says quality of life improvements are cheating. It's cheating. I mean, sometimes they are. But what I'm talking about are cheats. So like, for example, in

the new, like the remastered modern ports of Final Fantasy games, you can turn on modifiers to turn off random encounters or to make all your party super powerful in like Final Fantasy 7 and 8 and 9, you can make it so everybody's super jacked and just destroys enemies

in one hands. It's the same exact thing as when you could enter cheat codes in games, in PC games in the 90s. So this is kind of, it's interesting because it's kind of saying a couple of things at once. One, it's saying, it's a developer saying you can do whatever you want with this game here, enjoy, modify it all you want, but it's also saying we need to have these cheats to make up for some gameplay that feels antiquated today to a lot of people. And that I think is really interesting as well. And that's one of the reasons mods are so prevalent is because so many of these games are so tedious and frustrating in so many different ways,

Bethesda games being a really good example, that people feel like, okay, I need to get some mods in here to make this a much more pleasant experience for me. Right. To the point that remasters incorporate mods, right? Yeah. They actually do that. It's an interesting thing because there's so many gameplay, like, verbs

and kind of the language of how we play games has changed so much over the last 30, 40 years that it feels like we kind of, we, today's, standards need to be or the old games need to be updated to keep up with today's standards and in some cases that's by using cheat codes which I think is really interesting

you know it's also I mean this is similar to what happens sometimes when games are just updated like not even remastered but just they put out an update that adds quality of life settings or even just nerfs an enemy that essentially can make people feel

as though anyone doing you know fighting Radon now is kind of cheating and they're not getting the true experience of fighting him back when the game came out. The quote unquote true experience, even though there is no true experience. The true experience being the subjectively true experience that I had when I fought him and he was really hard, right? That's what people are really saying. There's journalist mode, which is super hard and then gamer mode. It kind of is, though, because we are playing an advanced version of the game.

We're playing the version that isn't balanced. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I wasn't kidding. Okay, so this feeling, I think, lets us transition into the final subject here, which is the feeling of I did it the hard way, and that was the real way, and anyone who does it in an easier way isn't really doing it. Because I think that some of this, some of what we're talking about here actually applies to a lot of life and a lot of things that we do.

I think about this a lot in music, and I get a lot of questions about particularly artificial intelligence in music these days. And that causes me to look back at the history of technology and music and the ways that musicians have cheated, big air quotes that I'm doing right now, cheated over the years, right? Drum machines for a long time were seen as cheating because suddenly everyone was like, oh, you're not going to play drums anymore. You can just have a little machine do it perfectly. And no one needs to learn how to play or mic or mix or produce drums. They're just going to have these machines. Of course, that didn't happen. No, nobody plays drums anymore.

That happened. No, right, they just stopped because drums are boring and lame and no one likes them. But they, so people did use drum machines, but they used them to make all kinds of really interesting music. I mean, that's where, like, electronic music came from, for example. Samples were a really similar thing where it's like, oh, so you can just sample music that you could never play on your own. You can sample some great musician, and then you can put it into your own music, and you, like, say that you're making new music, but really, you could never play that thing that you sampled. But people just use the samples to make something new. And on and on and on down the road.

And I kind of have a feeling that something similar will happen with AI-assisted music, at least, with people using AI to help them come up with sounds and ideas and weave it into something that they are actually overseeing. That's different from like AI-generated music where the AI is just writing songs. That's kind of a separate thing. So that's like one avenue along which I kind of see this. But you can see it everywhere. I mean, every single human endeavor really.

any kind of work, any kind of creative work, there soon becomes this like a change where people start using technology to do it more easily or to bypass certain processes. And then some people say, oh, well, you're cheating. You're like, you're not learning the fundamentals. You know, you didn't, you're using a digital camera so you don't have to go to a dark room and like spend all the time, like, developing these things. You're shooting on digital so you don't have to set the camera up and worry about the light and on and on and on. It's funny you say that because in college, I took a class where we had to not only shoot on film, we had to, edit, like, by cutting up the film strips and piecing them together using a micro-fiche.

It was, like, it was hardcore. Yeah, it's interesting. I think about this as it applies to my own life, and that is in transcribing interviews, which is something I always do by hand, but a lot of people do using automated transcription software. The reason that I do it by listening and typing up my interview is because, A, I'm just kind of anal about mistakes and stuff, but B, more importantly, it helps me to listen back conversations and type them out and see what I did well and see what I didn't do well for future

interviews. I feel like you miss out on a lot of the learning experience by having an AI transcribe your interview for you and then not getting a chance to listen back. They're not very good at it yet either. Well, that's, yes, the mistakes. They'll get better. I usually end up having to listen back to most of the interview in order to fix the AI's mistakes for now. Yeah, but you're right. I'm saying, assuming that it was all perfect. I think that getting to listen to it is a helpful thing. And there are a lot of things. But then on the flip side, there are a lot of mundane tasks that it's nice to see automated.

I'm sure that, like, factory workers are perfectly happy to, like, not have to piece together things by hand in the same way that they used to. And there are a lot of kind of, I mean, technological advancements over the years that I think have objectively improved things. Like sewing machines is a huge one. And like, that's kind of my go-to example mentally. It's like, okay, yeah, sewing by hand is really hard. There's sometimes you have to do it.

But, but yeah, I mean, I remember I learned to type really young and I had access to computers at home because my dad brought them home from work. And so I was printing out papers for school relatively young because I just really liked typing. And I remember even then being like, oh, like taking notes by hand versus typing. And like when I started taking my laptop to call. which I'm sure for the listeners now, they're like, well, of course you're going to take your laptop with you to college. But like, that was an actual debate when I was in college where people were like, well, I remember everything better when I write down all my notes by hand.

And I don't know if that's true or not. I haven't read the studies. But like, I've always preferred typing. So for me, I was like, well, I'm going to type it every time. I'm faster. And this is just how I've gotten used to doing it because I learned to type so young. But even that, I think about it now. And I'm like, yeah, I was cheating.

My whole life's been to cheat, and it's great that I'm finally coming clean about it. I've been typing this whole time. I haven't been writing by hand. Yeah, I think that it's really interesting. The way that cheating can actually just be progress in disguise. Yeah. I think a lot about score writing. When I was in school, I took arranging classes where we had to write arrangements for a big band, like an 18-piece big band.

A lot of my friends were writing by hand, but I had Sibelius. And so I was one of the only ones of them who was writing it out on a computer. And I've always been really quick with score writing software because of this. I started on it when I was, you know, whatever, 20 years old. So I would watch a lot of my friends write these scores out by hand and then write the parts out by hand. You had to write each part out where I would write the score and then press a button and would just export it to the parts. Now that's really great, but there were certainly arguments against doing what I was doing.

Like, for example, when you write the parts out by hand, you can see if you've transposed wrong and you've got the saxophone playing a note that it can't actually play. Like, that kind of stuff becomes clear to you, where if you export the part, especially in earlier versions of Sebelius, you can wind up with totally effed up parts that you're handing out to people without realizing it. Also, one really big difference there is that in the software, it plays back to you what the arrangement sounds like. Like you get MIDI notes.

So you can just hit spacebar and it plays you your arrangement. And you can hear like, oh, wait, I've kind of got a funky note down there in the second trumpet. If you're writing it out by hand, you don't get that. You have to sit at the piano. It's a completely different process. So if I had like come up in the 70s and just been writing everything out by hand, I would look at someone doing that on computer and be like, this is ridiculous. You're bypassing the entirety of the process. Like you're totally changing what you're doing and doing something completely different.

And that's true. It's like you're cheating and in cheating effectively inventing a new way of doing something, which is kind of true with some things in video games as well. I just, I feel like at some point a cheat just becomes an advancement. And then cheating just becomes progress. And it's the most kind of provocative and incomplete thought that I've come up with while chewing on this topic for us to talk about. A cheap, wait, a cheat becomes progress. Yeah.

Like a cheat can become progress. Yeah, I think that, well, okay, so going back to the Final Fantasy example I brought up before, removing random encounters is now like oh okay well maybe we shouldn't have random encounters in the first place to be removed so I do think that yeah you can look and I'm sure plenty of game developers look at what's modded as kind of like a useful lesson of like okay this is what people want this is like the way we should be headed and I think that's kind of an interesting thing but can you go too far can you automate everything and then just kind of remove the kind of the fun for yourself or the progress for yourself. To me, it's a little less

important in video games because in a video game, most of the time you're just playing for the satisfaction of completing that game and for your own kind of personal enjoyment and value, as opposed to for some loftier goals of wanting to write the next great novel or write the next big orchestra piece or whatever your personal ambitions are. So to me it seems like less of a big deal as far as kind of cheating yourself if you do it in a game. But I don't know. I mean, I guess if you're, uh, if you're hoping to be the next big counterstrike player, you shouldn't talk to your friends because of all right. No, you have to now actually. You have to. It would be crazy if you didn't. It would be very, very weird if you didn't. I just, I just have a confession to

make before we conclude the cheating, which is way back when we were all playing Final Fantasy six together. I got stuck during the first. Phantom train section and my last save was way, way, way back and I installed a cheat so that I'd have infinite items so that I could resurrect my party. And I didn't confess it on the episode. And I just felt like I needed to come clean with you. I'm surprised you did that, but not turn off random encounters. No, that's, see, that's just not the one I installed. And even at the time, I was like, am I changing how I feel about Final Fantasy 6? I mean, people can go back and listen the episodes and they can, they can judge for themselves as to whether that truly

changed my experience or not, but I think it was important that I did it because I never would finish the game otherwise. I mean, I had to finish the game, but I did feel weird about it. And I was planning to tell you guys at the time, but I didn't. You're not only cheated the game. You cheated yourself. I did. And I feel better now that you too know. That was the main thing coming into this episode is I was like, I have to tell them about that time I installed that mod. I'm glad I did. It's good that you finally came clean. Yeah, got it out there. So yeah, this is a thing. I think just a really interesting topic that's led me to some very interesting places that are

currently live conversations that are happening in the worlds of art. I mean, this is a really live thing in music right now, just talking about, is music too easy to make? Is there a such thing? Does that lead to degraded music? That's amazing. What a conversation. Yeah, there are a lot of people talking about this. It's a good question. If you can go in an AI machine and just type in, write me a song that sounds like Kanye West, then that's kind of a crazy concept. Yeah, it is. It's an interesting conversation for sure. Right. And then all the gradients in between that and, you know, sitting down and writing something out by hand and having people record it, you know, in a studio onto tape that you then have to cut together to add it. Like there's, you know,

there's this whole, this whole vast middle ground. There are certainly no hard and fast answers. Anyways, this has been a fun topic and I'm sure a lot of our listeners will have some interesting things to say. So yeah, that is our hot topic conversation on cheating. Let's take a break and come back for one more thing. Hello, sleepyheads. Sleeping with celebrities is your podcast Pillow Pal. We talked to remarkable people about unremarkable topics, all to help you slow down your brain and drift off to sleep. For instance, the remarkable actor Alan Tudek. You hand somebody a yardstick after they've shopped at your general store. The store is name is constantly in your heart because yardstick's become part of the family.

Sleeping with celebrities hosted by me, John Moe, on Maximumfund.org or wherever you get your podcasts. Night night. The following are real reenactments of pretend emergency calls. There are plenty of podcasts on the hunt for justice, but only one podcast has the courage to take on the silly crimes. Judge John Hodgman, The only true crime podcast that won't leave you feeling sad and bad and scared for once. Only on maximum fun.org. And we are back for one more thing. Maddie, why don't you go first?

It's my long-awaited television show selection. Could have been anything, but I'm going with Suicide Squad Isakai, which is an anime that I'm watching on Hulu right now. You know, Hulu aggressively marketed this towards me, and I was like, Hulu, stop doing this. I engage with superheroes all the time. I just, I don't know if I could deal with another suicide squad property. How many times can I see Harley Quinn in something?

I don't, I don't know. I don't know if I care. But I'm really glad I gave it a chance because it's actually really funny. And I think more people should watch it because it's not what I expected. So the name Isakai refers to, I mean, this is a Japanese word, but it refers to a storytelling trope. This is very important. So I have to actually explain this. This does matter.

Yeah, go for it. It refers to a storytelling trope where a character, or in this case, a group of characters and ensemble cast, get taken out of the world that they know and transported to an alternate universe that's completely different in every way. And in this case, and this is kind of like an Isakai stereotype, but it's very funny to see the suicide squad in this scenario. They are in a medieval world. So there's like orcs and princesses and knights and just.

fantasy magic and shit and like just stuff that is absolutely nothing like the world of a typical suicide squad comic or story that I have seen many times before and it is so great to just see these characters just get plucked out of Gotham City where they're you know running around doing shenanigans and you know fighting with goons and bad guys in Gotham and then just suddenly be fighting a dragon and it's it's really good I don't know who came up with this idea But it's extremely funny. And I now think that all superhero stuff should be like this. It should be just completely different from anything we've ever seen before, which is remarkably

difficult to do. But Suicide Squad Issaquai has pulled it off. And I'll also say the Clayface characterization on this is really good. I usually think Clayface is a really funny character because he's like a shape shifting character and he's a failed actor in a lot of interpretations of him. and he is the character in this anime who knows the word Isakai is familiar enough with the circumstances to like repeatedly refer to it. He's kind of like the one who the one who's capable of identifying storytelling tropes. And that is always like a funny character to me.

So I just I really like Clayface. But just in general, I think Suicide Squad Issaquai is a really fun example of a way to do a different kind of superhero show that I've never seen before. Sounds like that. It should have been the video game. Maybe yeah. Maybe yeah. That would have been weird and fun. Is it in Japanese with English subtitles or is it in English?

They have Japanese, but I'm actually watching the dub because I think the English voice actors are really, really good. So it's originally in Japanese. Yeah. You can watch it either way if you want to. I just think the dub is really fun personally. But they're both good. Isn't there a new kite man show also? There is.

Yeah. I haven't seen that. Like Kite Man has his own show. Kite Man does have his own show. DC is out here. They're doing a lot. We've made a DC stuff, yeah. Yeah.

Nice. Jason, what is your one more thing? I went to a concert on Sunday for the first time of like five years. Can't imagine why you wouldn't have gone to a concert for five years. Well, I have a child five years ago. Yeah, it was more the child than the pandemic, I would guess. Yeah. Yeah, I'm explaining it for the listeners.

Sure. In case, some of our audience doesn't know. So I went to a concert. I went to see Blink 182 at City Field. Was everyone else your age in the audience? Well, that's part of what I wanted, I was curious. That's like the thing my wife and I were talking about. Like, do you think it'll be people in their 20s to like go to concerts a lot?

Do you think it'll be like millennials and Gen Xers who like listen to Blink 182 in the 90s? Like, what's it going to be? Turns out it was all of the above. It was like a humongous mix of people. I mean, so let me kind of set the scene for you guys. So this is a city field. I generally, I've gone to many, many shows in my life, but they are. almost entirely in small venues where like you stand in a pit and you rock around or mosh in

some cases, uh, as opposed to big stadium shows, which I generally don't like. And this kind of, I mean, going to see a concert at a baseball stadium is not ideal. Um, it's not like, like you're kind of you're sitting in a small section and I mean, you can stand the whole time if you want, but it's still kind of like, it's very big. There are 40,000 people there. Um, that said, I was, still very curious to see what it would be like. And so, yeah, the demographics of the crowd were, I saw everything from, like, middle-aged people, people in their 30s and 40s like me to, like, 10-year-olds, in some cases. I saw, like, one dad with his daughter, and my wife was like, oh, that's going to be you in a few years. I saw. And then also, boomers, like, people in

their 60s people in their 70s. Like it was like a total wild mix. A lot of the people there seemed like pretty casual fans like they would only get on their feet for like the big hits when when playing those. The like all the small things and like I miss you and stuff like that. But there were a it was like a pretty wildly diverse and kind of demographically interesting crowd. As far as the show, it was pretty good. there were a couple openers. One of them was good. This band Pierce the Vale is pretty good. And then Blink came on and did a bunch of silly things, as they always do, made a bunch of sophomoric jokes and played a bunch of songs. And Tom DeLange, who is now back with the band after many years in an absence. He is kind of infamous for sounding terrible, live. And he did, of course, because he does. And yeah, they're entertaining in the middle of one song, Mark Hoppice. their bassist and one of the two singers in the middle of playing Dammit, which is one of their singles way back in the day, he sung Sabrina Carpenter's Espresso, which is very entertaining.

Hell yeah. Like as a mashup? That's fun. Yeah, like in the middle of it. And the bridge, he like sings some other, a couple of verses of it. He just has it so stuck in his head that it just came out. He just came out. He couldn't help himself. I get it. I get it. Travis Barker, the drummer always does this thing where like he flies in the air on a platform and like plays the drums in the air. No nice Tommy Lee style. Yeah.

Tom was wearing a shirt that said like UFOs are real. Very entertaining. Mark came out and he was like, oh, so this is where the Mets lose. It was very, very entertaining show. I really enjoyed it. It's fun being around live music and a way that I just, it like really brought me back. Again, the stadium thing is really just not my jam. They do have like a floor and like people can do the standing room section, but it's so much

more expensive. Oh, yeah. Than just like regular kind of seats. We had decent seats, but still pretty far away from the band. But yeah, it was good kind of, it was nice feeling nostalgic, tapping into 20 years ago, 25 years ago. When I used to listen to this music, it was a lot of fun. Fun show. That's awesome.

That's by one more thing. Yeah, man, concerts are fun. Yeah, stadium shows. The sound can also kind of be a bummer. Yeah, this is like, it's a big open baseball. a bunch of people who like the band though and that's like it sounds like an experience you had which is fun. Yeah well so when I was in high school I would go to shows

all the time mostly like pop punk shows in the city in these like gnarlier venues yeah I mean when you're going to like CBGVs or like Hammerstein ballroom or like Irving Plaza it's like you're maybe 200 people packed in a room as opposed to 40,000 people in a massive stadium but yeah that's blink 182 it was also this is some fun serendipity because blinker82 and Green Day were my first ever concert, like 30 years ago.

No, not 30, 20, 25 years. And this is your last ever concert. You're never going to go back. And this is my last ever concert. Never going to go back. You close the loop. Nice. Well, I'll bring us home.

My one more thing is a 1996 film called Twister that I watched with my nieces over the weekend. That would imagine a lot of people are rewatching right now because. I was going to check it out too. Because of the sequel. Yes, because of the sequel. twisters with the dollar sign is coming out or is out now.

Is it really with a dollar sign? No, that's just an alien's joke. That's an alien's joke. So I think it's out now. I hope it's still in theaters when my nieces come up and visit. They're visiting in a couple weeks and we might go see it with them. It was a lot of fun to watch this movie. I really enjoyed it.

I loved this movie back when it came out. And it's kind of fun to go back to this particular era of Hollywood when it was 1996, so computer graphics were on the way up, but they weren't everything. And almost all of this movie is in camera. Like, there are so many scenes that are just, they drive a friggin truck through a house in that movie. And it's awesome. Like, when it happens, you are watching a truck go through a house. And there's a lot of that in the movie, a lot of really gorgeous helicopter shots of trucks off road going through cornfields. And it just has a really killer visual look to it. The special effects hold up, for the most part, there's some kind of gooey CG.

The CG stuff is the weakest. I think everybody remembers the cow that goes flying by. It's pretty fake-looking in that scene, but it's also a funny scene, so, you know, whatever. It's a really charming movie. It's such a hangout movie. It's so about this group of misfits. Alan Ruck and Philip Seymour Hoffman are two of the members of their crew. To anyone who doesn't remember this movie about like a crew of tornado chasers.

and what's the name, Bill Paxton, who it's just so funny hearing his voice after seeing true lies so many times. It's impossible to take him seriously as a leading man. But I do love Bill Paxton, and he and Helen Hunter is estranged about to be divorced, and Bill Paxton comes back to the fold to try to get her to sign his divorce papers,

but really kind of because he can't let go of chasing twisters. And then there's a kind of epidemic of tornadoes. I think they're in Oklahoma, and they wind up running around chasing the twisters and trying to get Dorothy, this device they've invented launched up into the twisters in order to study them. I feel like this was like the era when he was in everything, Bill Paxton. Like he was in Apollo 13 and like Titanic.

Like he was in all these movies like one after another. Paxton is such a working guy. Yeah. I really I think of him as aliens and then true lies. He was one of Cameron's go to Goobers. And he just gives so many lines, game over man. Yeah, of course. His voice, I got a tiny dick.

It's pathetic or whatever it is. He says in true lies. It's just very hard to then see him be like, I'm the leading man and not be like, no, you're not. You're the used car salesman who tried to seduce Jamie Lee Curtis. Anyways, he is great and Helen Hunt is great. And I don't know, there are a lot of just fun scenes with them all hanging out, eating steaks at her Aunt Meg's house.

And like, I don't know, it's got a really tangible sort of social chilled out vibe. Also, because there's no real bad guys like Carrie Elwis from the Princess Bride. He's kind of the bad guy. There's a great line where they're like, he's in it for the money, not the. science, which is just very 90s too. Like, this is all we really had to worry about is like they're twisters. And if we could only have warning, then this wouldn't happen. And that's kind of the whole movie.

But man, the set pieces of it, there's a great scene, of course, where they're watching the Shining at a drive-in movie. And then the twister appears behind the screen and like rips through the screen as Jack is axing through the door. It's directed by Jan DeBant, who I believe was the DP on Speed. So he kind of came up as a cinematographer. and then became a director. Anyways, super fun movie.

I think a lot of people are probably going to watch it before watching the sequel. I hope the sequel is good. I hear it's pretty dumb, but also pretty fun. And to anyone who wants to hear a really interesting conversation about it, I actually listened to this podcast episode a little while ago without planning to watch the movie. I've just been listening to this podcast. So this kind of doubles as a podcast recommendation.

You are good, which is... Classic Kirk move. Yep. Just like we said before. Well, not really. I mean, this is about Twister, though. Every time he says not really. Yeah.

So you are good as a podcast hosted by Sarah Marshall and Alex Steed. Sarah Marshall of You're Wrong About. And Alex Deed is her co-host. It's a really cool movie podcast. It's actually a really different kind of movie podcast from the other one that I listen to a lot, which was Blank Check with Griffin and David. I'm sure a lot of people know that one. These are both fairly popular.

But that podcast is much more like industry, much more backstory, much more sort of craft and technical stuff. You are good as much more just. about like feelings and what it's like to watch the movie and how what it says about us. And it's a really great podcast. I've been loving it. And their Twister episode is really, really good. So I'll put a link for that in the show notes for anyone who watches Twister and wants

to hear a good podcast episode about it. But yeah, Twister, man. Good movie. They made some good movies in the 90s. Even the dumb movies. Yeah, they really did. I'm excited to rewatch it too. Yeah, it's good.

All right. Well, that's that for this episode. I thought this was a really fun conversation about cheating. and look forward to cheating and then having it become innovation in new and creative ways in the future. Don't cheat, kids. All right, thanks everyone for listening, and I will see the two of you next week. See you next time. 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 artists-owned shows. Supported directly by you.