Triple Click - Does Video-Game Marketing Really Work? [Mailbag]

Episode Date: May 21, 2026

Jason, Maddy, and Kirk open up the mailbag for some questions about video-game marketing, female protagonists, what's going on at Studio ZA/UM, and much more. One More Thing: Kirk: Mixtape Maddy: Knotwords Jason: Planet Money LINKS: Kirk’s essay about Mixtape, and the YouTube video version https://www.mothership.blog/irene-kohs-angel-arcade-is-about-the-fighting-game-community-emphasis-on-community/ Garbage Day’s most recent article on modern marketing firms, social astroturfing, Geese, and that whole mess Marketing  The Roottrees Are Dead Help support this show and unlock bonus content! Become a member 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 was 96 degrees in New York this week. And, I mean, I really think it should just not be. Welcome to Triple Creek where we bring the games to you. This week we are answering some listener questions about all sorts of things from marketing in video games to the new glut of female protagonists. I'm Jason Schreier. I'm Kirk Hamilton. And I'm Maddie Myers. Hello.

Hello. Hi there. Do you guys want to hear a horrifying story? I always want to hear a story from Jason at the start of an episode. Especially a horrifying story. So a few nights ago, I'm in bed, about to go to sleep, lights are off, and I kind of turn over. I'm getting comfortable, a turnover. And as my hand hits the bed, I feel like a sharp pain in my hand.

And I'm like, what the fuck? Like, did one of my kids leave a toy? I'm like feeling around for it. Can't find, like, I can't feel anything. and my hand still hurts I'm like, am I imagining this half asleep? So I turn on the light and then I see it. A wasp in my bed that has just stung on the hand.

Talk about having trouble falling asleep the rest of the night. Oh my God. Have you read The Shining, Jason? That literally happens in the Shining. Is that what happens? It doesn't happen in the movie. But that is like one of the scariest and most memorable parts of that book is his dad like knocks down a wasp's nest.

outside of the hotel and then kills it with bug spray and then gives it to his son to Danny and is like, look, cool, you can keep this as a little trophy. And then Danny gets stung and like they put a glass bowl over the wasp nest just in case. And then they come in and it's like black with wasps. Like it's just covered with wasps that have somehow started coming out of it. Well, meanwhile, in my real life. So I'm just saying it could have been worse is the moral of that story. Could have been a fictional story. I hired an exterminator. I called an exterminator to look, like, see if there's a hive here.

Yeah, is there a wasp nest inside? He could not find anything. He said that wasp were probably just getting in through tiny cracks in the house and getting stuck in there and can't escape. Alternate theory, you live in a haunted hotel with an elder rich spirit within it that is trying to kill you and your children. Yeah, but we already know that. Yeah, did the wasp manifest out of nothingness?

That's always a possible. You are a writer. You know, all work and no play makes Jason a dull boy. I don't know. Have you always been writing that? Over and over? So I asked him if there's anything I can do. And he said, no, just keep an eye.

No, I mean, I'm not an exorcist. I'm not rated for this kind of supernatural phenomenon. I'm sorry. Just put up with it. That's all you can do. Hey, if you want to support Triple Click and make it so we can hire, I don't know, giant walls outside of our houses to prevent wasp coming in. We can pay gas for.

of the snow cats so that the groundskeeper can come and save us in the middle of a blizzard. I was going to say, well, I thought you were going to say afford gas for a flamethrower to burn down your house so wasp can't come in anymore. Right. That is the only solution. Can't get wasp if you don't have a house. If you would like to support triple click, we are a listener-supported podcast. You can become a member and sign up and make the show possible by going to maximum fun.org slash join, join triple click today. And not only do you support us by doing so, you also get bonus episodes every single month, including the one we just ran about the Sopranos season two and season three. We ran that earlier this month. It was a mega episode, a lot of fun us talking about

those two seasons, very fun conversation. And we got one coming up soon next week by the end of May about the show players, highly underrated, underappreciated TV show that we're going to talk about a little bit. And since that show in particular is hard to find, we are also going to, we're going to try to make that episode appealing even if you haven't seen it or can't watch it. It's about games and e-sports and competitive League of Legends, and there'll be a lot to dive into, and I'm very excited to talk about it. One more quick thing before we jump into the episode, which is that last week as my one more thing, I kept saying London Calling,

as the name of the book that I was reading. It's actually London Falling. And I just wanted to correct that because it's, I guess the name is a play on London Calling because the guy falls out of a window. But I guess the title doesn't work so well because I just kept saying London Calling.

So I'm not sure it's great. So it's not a sequel. It's not London Calling too. Right. It's the clash wrote this book as a equal to their song. They're less known follow-up. London following, yeah.

Very less known in that it is a book. It's not an album at all. It's a real thinker. It's very ambitious in some ways. So yeah, if you want to check out that book, it's called London Falling, not London Calling. Okay, on with the show. So this week, we are doing some questions.

We are opening up the mailbag and taking some listener questions. Once again, as always, you can reach us with your own questions. at triple click at maximum fun.org. Send in your questions. Please keep them short if you want to maximize your chances of getting read on the show. And by the way, when I say keep them short, that doesn't mean write like a four-paragraph preface and then be like, here's the short question. Please just keep the whole email short is my request for you all out there. All right, let's start off. Many, when you read this first one? Sure. This one's from Andy, who writes, Heya, gang. This week's episode with Nels Anderson was an amazing listen. I'd love to hear about what each slash any of you considers your most notable or most instructive failure. What mistakes or circumstances do you attribute as the root case? What lessons have you applied to your next endeavors? Is this a weird question? No weirder than asking about your finances I'd like to believe. I agree, Andy. It is no weirder than asking about our finances.

I, many years ago, was I created this pretty cool musical theater project with a friend of mine who was an actor and a writer. She was really amazing. And we kind of thought we'd pool our resources and make a San Francisco local stage production with skits and music, kind of a musical review. It was super cool. We had a great working relationship. We had a really good time. and we pretty quickly, like some of, I think they were her friends, there were some writers that she knew who wanted to get involved,

who were like, I don't know, into writing comedy. And we had all these sketches we were going to be doing, so we brought them in. The whole thing was very sort of, it was the protozoa. It was the very early phase of this creative project, and neither of us had ever really done something like this before. So we put it together and staged the first one, and it went really well.

Like a bunch of people came out. We had a cool venue. It was super fun. We didn't really make very much money, and we had no strong plan for, like, how we were handling money. But it was, you know, we just, we knew it was like equally the two of ours. And we had talked to the writers basically being like, yeah, we want to like pay everybody. We want this to be like a whole thing.

But we're just kind of doing it to see what it is right now. And we had no real plan beyond that. So we kind of kept doing it. And then pretty quickly some of the writers got pretty upset. And we're essentially saying, well, We want ownership in this. Like, we want to be a part of this. Like, we want a stake where my friend and I were like, whoa, that wasn't what we were thinking.

You know, we started this together. We want to own this. And we were just thinking we would hire you guys. And it just all blew up and fell apart, basically. The writers got really upset with us. We thought they were being unfair. They thought that we were, I don't know, being unreasonable or not communicating with them. It was kind of crazy, like how quickly it just completely collapsed.

And the whole project fell apart as a result, which really, sucked because I think it could have been really cool. So the lesson that I took from that was be very clear with people you're collaborating with early on about what their role is going to be, what how ownership of something is going to work, even if it's like a really kind of embryonic project and you're not sure what it's going to be, be sure that you're communicating to everybody, like who owns what, even if you think that it's clear, because we certainly thought it was clear, but it was not, apparently, and that led to the whole thing falling apart, which was a bit. bummer. And that's why Chip-click has an operating agreement. Yes. If you're starting a business, definitely have an operating agreement. That's a related lesson. That's good advice. I have a pretty similar story, actually. I didn't know we had this in common, Kirk. Back when I was writing for the Boston Phoenix, which I talk about all the time on the show, I usually talk about how I covered video games there. But I also covered a lot of theater there because I used to be really into. theater productions. And I did a bunch of theater in college and when I was younger than that.

And for a time period, I was like, this might be my thing that I'm really into is theater. And while I was at the Phoenix, I also started a small business with two really good friends from college who we had all done theater together and we started this theater company. And we did not have an operating agreement and we did not have an LLC. We didn't do any of that stuff. So in some ways. It's like, was it even a real company? There were no documents that needed to be broken up when this company did spoilers break up. And this was kind of a different situation from yours, Kirk, in the sense that it wasn't a power struggle where everybody wanted ownership. It was a situation where I took ownership of a lot of tasks, kind of without asking the other people. That doesn't seem like you.

I can't imagine that happening. And then I got. very resentful that I was doing a lot and that other people weren't. And that became an issue over time. And eventually I very melodramatically, I would say, I do regret this, quit the project and was like, all of you have let me down. You weren't doing all the things I expected you to do. Now, did I communicate any of those things with the two of you? Or did any of the three of us really sit down and actually nail down what this project would be and who would have responsibilities or ownership over each piece of it. No. So I also learned a lesson about, again, just having really clear expectations if you start a project. But I think another piece of that that I'm

not sure if this happened to you, Kirk, was just the concept of starting a business with people who are really close friends of yours can sometimes be really fraught as well, because sometimes you haven't worked with them before, but you might really love them or care about them and just want to believe that you're all sympathico as co-workers. But sometimes you're not. And that doesn't mean they're like a bad person or even bad at a job.

It just means that you're not actually a fit to work together. And that can be tricky, I would say. And that is something that sometimes even if you sign an operating agreement, you don't know until you try it. Yeah, for this, for my situation, my friend and I were actually great together and had been working together a lot on the project. It was more other people that we brought in who we didn't communicate with well. But yeah, I mean, that's certainly true. And operating agreement is great even if like the three of us, we work really well together and, you know, just work things out and talk through all of our ideas and like resolve things pretty easily.

But it's nice knowing that we have like a kind of a mechanism for that if we ever need to be like, okay, well, the official rules of our, you know, of our business are. the voting works this way or something. Like, it's just nice knowing that exists just in case you need it. How does it work? Is it just majority? Well, I don't think we never had to address the agreement. How little this has ever come up because we could just talk through conflicts? But it is on a legal document that all three of us signed. You know what I mean? Like, it's nice knowing that that is, that exists. Sixty-six percent of the LLC has to agree for for a decision to go through. Interesting. Okay. Man. You should read over our operating agreement, Jason. Jason, we could be voting you out.

Also, it was expensive to get it written. Yeah, it hasn't been relevant in the six years of been doing this. Nope. It's a good thing. I feel like a lot of people we know out there should listen in both of your stories. I do think it's a pretty common story for creative people, truly, to start a project and be really excited about it and even have it go really well. In our case, I think it did go really well for the first six to eight months.

We put on a couple of productions that I'm still really proud of. But the division of labor part, you really have to nail that down ahead of time. You cannot build that as you go. It's also a thing with freelance pay. This happens with musicians all the time where you get offered a gig and you take it and you still don't know the night of the gig, whether you're getting paid or how much or who's paying you. That happens constantly because people just don't lay it out ahead of time. And you kind of assume, all right, they'll probably just divvy up the door after the gig and I'll get

100 bucks or something. But I try to be like really clear with people, even with friends. Like, I am paying you this much for this. Or I have no budget for this. This is me asking you as a friend, you know, and just laying it out and trying to be very clear. But if it's a jazz show, it's all about how much you don't pay. Yeah, I'll try that next time. I'm not paying the man. Look, guys, it's about the money I don't give you. I'll tell a story real quick. I've told this before, so it might sound familiar to YouTube, but I'll retell it. about my most instructive failure, which is when I was in high school, I was obsessed with the newspaper, and it's all I wanted to do. And my senior year, I, like, wound up becoming the

editor-in-chief of the newspaper, and I was so jazzed. And I do it for a couple of weeks when one day I get called into the principal's office, and he has, like, printed out on pieces of paper, um, blog posts from a live journal that I had where I talked about, like, smoking weed and hanging out with friends and stuff. And, uh, he busted me, not because of, I talked about like drugs, but because as my avatar, my icon on the live journal, I used a picture of a teacher who looked funny. And his punishment for this, because he was like a vindictive, just kind of awful principle that it's funny. We talked about this in my high school reunion last year, like even with other teachers about how awful this guy was. But anyway, since he was kind of

his punishment was to kick me off the newspaper. He was like, I'm going to take away the one thing you love most. And since then, my career has just been driven by spite for this one, for this you joke, but I'm, I feel like maybe part of it is. I also feel like that's fine. Like, I don't know. A lot of my career is driven by spice too. Kirk, I gave the same high school reunion. I just mentioned, I gave a speech at that reunion. And I talked about how I told, I told two stories. I told that story. And then I told a much more positive story about experiences in the high school journalism world. And I was like, so my career has been driven by love and spite, like equal parts, love and spite. Love for passion for journalism and also spite for this one principle.

I feel like that is a good lesson, though, is that sometimes an adult can't be reasoned with. I feel like as a kid, I learned that in a few different ways. And also that like sometimes authority figures aren't always, don't always have your best interest at heart. And you have to be careful. They can be unfair and capricious and they can punish you in ways that. Fairness. That was my big takeaway. My big takeaway was that like, wow.

Like I thought that like rule like if you follow the rules, if you do good work like you will like just kind of like I was lucky enough to live like a comfortable like life like I never had to worry about not being fed or whatever like I lived in a house like et cetera. And I always was just kind of taught like you work hard. You can you can make your way. You can succeed in life. And this was my first experience of like oh wow. Okay. Sometimes you just do something and the consequences are completely unrelated. And I'm not saying I should have like done that blog post with teachers, pictures, but like the consequences were so. Because the consequences were so disproportient. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. It's a good lesson, though. It is one that can be overlearned as well. I know some kids get betrayed by an authority figure like that when they're young and come to believe that you just can never trust that, you know, there will be reasonable outcomes from something that you do.

Like, it was actually a very irresponsible and harmful thing that your principal did, even though. So, you know, it in part fueled your career. Like, that is a really bad lesson to teach to a kid. Yeah. One hopes that those kids end up having, like, a really great teacher as well, or teachers who show them that that can also be a really empowering and meaningful relationship and that mentorship can be great just as much as it can also be unfair and capricious and absurd because this is a person who has power over you.

Yeah, Jason, was there? Did you have any other teachers who were like, I know, man, this is total bullshit. that shouldn't happen. No, they wouldn't say that to a kid. But there was one other guy who was the journalism advisor who I liked much more and I felt was much fairer and a better mentor to people in general. And twist ending, he's now the principal of my high school. Hey, it all worked out.

It all worked out. I bet that your story that you told has continued, like I bet he will never make that mistake because of that, because of your story. I sure hope not. I sure hope not. Because, you know, even when a kid is like misbehaving, It's like that was the one thing that kept me like like despite like like not that I was a total blunder. Yeah.

It's like you want to encourage someone to like really get into what they're actually into because it prevents them from not that I was a troubled kid but like in a situation where someone was like really troubled. Yeah. You could have become one. Like this could have been the beginning of your downfall. Yeah. Right. Like then suddenly my life went off the rails.

Well and like how many kids who you know have a really tough background and don't have a lot. Exactly. positive things in their life tell the story of like it was the newspaper at school it was banned it was sports it was something that was like that was my passion and it got me through it and it got me out a hundred percent yeah um anyway uh let's keep going okay so this next question kirk you want to read this next one uh yes this comes from abamanyu who writes hey triple click i was looking at a recent postmortem of two x ko a two v two fighting game that i tried out because of the turris Art Style, despite no longer playing titles in this genre.

One of the points made about its failure was that Riot simply didn't market it well, to the point that the reviewer hadn't heard of the game at launch. Do you agree with that sentiment? And what's your perception of the role of marketing and publishing in making games a success nowadays, regardless of how well they're made and reviewed by critics? Thanks for making the show. I always look forward to Thursdays when I get to tune in to the latest episode. Big love from a fellow journalist in Bangalore,

India. Cool. Cool. All right. Well, yeah, what do we think of this? This is like kind of relevant to last week's episode. Yeah, yeah, really fitting because like I think we were we were kind of probing Nels a little bit about marketing last week. And there is definitely a lingering question of like even if that, even if Generation Exile was splashed on billboards in Times Square and on buses on the street, would it still, would it have been a hit? Like would that have changed the course of it? And yeah, I don't know. More and more I've actually felt just talking to people like marketing is less relevant than ever, or at least that marketing has to be approached in a very different way. It was really interesting, actually, and I wanted to follow up on this. I don't think

I got a chance, but like, Nell's talking about kind of following the beats of the traditional playbook. Actually, I did talk about this, how that's kind of like an old-fashioned way of doing things, where it's like you got your PC gamer show reveal, and then you have your coverage there, and then you come back in the show in the next year, et cetera, et cetera. I think, a more successful approach these days is a lot more community driven and just kind of trying to find your people and your audience and like drive word of mouth, allow people find a thousand people or 100 people or whatever and get them into your closed beta and get feedback from them and get word of mouth going among those people and then try to get them telling their friends.

And it just feels like it's a different world because the market is so crazy and there's so many games out there. Yeah, there's definitely a question of whether traditional advertising works anymore or, I mean, to the extent that it ever did, because advertising is always a little bit hard to measure. And I guess I'll throw out there at least. The two of you are aware of the controversy around geese and some other bands like the sort of industry plants, marketing firm stuff. Maddie is not in Jason, you look like you're not. No, can you just sum it up? Yeah. Okay, yeah, I'll summarize it for listeners anyways. I'll do my best.

So Geese is a band. They've been around for a while. They're good. People like them. They've been a kind of a niche rock band for years. And then they really kind of blew up a little while back. And basically, there's way too much for me to get into, and it's not like there aren't that many clear answers.

So it's not something I want to go too deep into. But it raised all these questions about modern marketing firms that claim that they can like organically build online engagement or viral fame, you know, by like, exceeding accounts and having accounts, you know, show clips from, you know, from a band or something. And then that, if you do that enough, it fools the algorithm into thinking that this is bigger than it is, which then actually causes it to become big. So you can basically game the algorithm in order to engineer viral success for your client. And just to be clear, like, it's not really demonstrated the extent to which geese actually benefited from this.

Like, they're actually a band that has a following that people know about and they're good. everything, but they were kind of an inflection point in talking about this kind of stuff. It's come up in a lot of other stories recently in the news as well. It kind of ties in with the whole clipping economy thing, the stuff that ties it with like clavicular and these other kind of right wing or like Manosphere influencers. It's kind of the question of is modern marketing, is modern social media marketing just elaborate advanced astroturfing? And is there really a difference between the two things?

this whole world that seems very undefined and a little mysterious, but does seem like it's very relevant to current marketing. And I don't know how it works. I think a lot of people don't know how it works. And that's what makes it hard to talk about. And maybe a reason that we shouldn't even get too deep into it, we could maybe link to a couple of things. A Garbage Day has done some great coverage of this, like summarizing what's going on.

But it is something that's just like in the back of my mind whenever I think about marketing and trying to sell attention in. 2026. I mean, that feels like that's what happened in Crimson Desert. That was everywhere on TikTok and Instagram before launch. But again, who knows how much of that was organic. And even saying it, right, it feels like conspiratorial. Well, we don't have any answers to that. To get this back to something that, like, maybe we do, we can kind of tangibly talk about what's effective or isn't. When I am marketing books and trying to sell those, there's kind of a strategy that I found quite successful or kind of like a, I don't know, maybe this is a,

truism, but I think, I mean, I actually, I think it's real. Trueism can be true. So yeah, it's a truism. We're like, you're like, you're not called falsism. Yeah, exactly. You hear about something once and you might be like, oh, yeah, okay, that sounds kind of true. Cool, I'll check it out one day. You start hearing about it two, three, four, five times in various ways and you're like, you know, actually, I kind of want that right now. And especially if it's good, like, there has to be a quality level for this to be effective and it has to be positive word a mouth for the most part. But one of the reasons that like for Play Nice a couple of years ago, I went on every single gaming podcast I possibly could is just to make people feel like, oh,

like everybody's talking about this book. This book is everywhere. Jason has all these stories. People really like it and it got really positive reviews, which is also very helpful. But not to say that I was trying to connive or anything, but I wanted people to hear enough about the book that if they were interested and wanted to read it, that like it felt like, oh, okay, like Jason's out there talking about it. Like, I keep hearing it on all these different podcasts. Maybe I should go buy this as opposed to like, if I just talked about it on triple click or something, maybe a bunch of our listeners would be like, oh, that sounds pretty cool.

And then never think about it again. So you want to kind of like get something in someone's head as much as possible, which again, I mean, it sounds kind of manipulative when you say it out loud, but it's very effective. And I don't see it as manipulation because like I wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't something I was super proud of and wanted people to read and would probably give away for free if I could. Yeah, I also think people, like Nell's kind of got into this, people who are making games underestimate the amount of time that all of that promotion might actually take them because he was describing, oh, I'll just do it myself and then kind of realizing, wait, this is a job on its own, I don't have

the capacity to do this. I mean, that may not have been riot games as excuse for not marketing this game. I don't know what their reasoning was for that, but for a smaller team where we have more of a sense of familiarity with how they might operate, because obviously we try to market triple click, Jason tries to market his book, etc. We know it's almost like an entire job to market something. Or like when I was launching mothership blog and I did, like I called it the podcast circuit. I was like, how many times can I tell people about this? Not because like you say, Jason, I was trying to be manipulative, but because I actually was like, I just want the right people. to find it. And I know if they find it, or if they find play nice or press reset or whatever, I know that they will like it. They just have to find it. And so in that sense, I'm like,

it's almost like a system of reminders rather than advertising. I'm just like reminding people, like, oh, this thing that I know you'll like is here. So I'm just reminding you to go check it out or buy it or, you know, we talk about our bonus episodes every week for a reason. too. It's like we're literally just reminding you people like, hey, if you wanted this just letting you know it's still there. Yeah, one other quick thought

is like something that I see sometimes that just makes me so mad is like when a game will come out and I know that it's something I would have really liked if like the people behind it had thought to reach out to me two weeks earlier. And just to give you an example

of this, there was just so this game I really enjoyed. I talked on her show like five years ago called Call of the Sea just got a sequel that came out and I didn't find out that it was out until like the day it came out and if you're a PR person working on this game and you don't look to see who had Call of the Sea on their game of the year list and like reach out to those people you are not doing your job effectively like you got to reach out to every press person every streamer who like was into that first game and be like hey there's a sequel coming out here's a coat and the fact that nobody did that to me is just is bonkers yeah I would

Yeah, that's a really good tip. All three of our tastes are established enough at this point. I mean, it's not like triple click is changing the world or the triple click bump is that big of a deal. But at the same time, I would have to think that most PR professionals who've been doing this for a while would at least know, like, I should at least email Kirk about this jazz RPG or Maddie about this Metroid-inspired game or, you know, Jason about this old school JRP. Like all the people who email you, Jason, about Blueprints likes or Oberdeen likes. There are a lot of people who do know to do. Yeah, well, so I mean, in April of 2025, I'll link this in the show notes. This guy named Chris Zucowski, who does a bunch of game marketing blogging and stuff.

He's like a game marketing expert dude. He did a post about the root trees are dead and cites me in it because I, like, talked about the game and got them a bunch of attention. And I explained that the developer of this game just emailed me a few weeks in advance. was like, hey, I know you loved Golden Idol. I think you would like this. And I was like, okay, you sold me. I'll check it out. And obviously, like, if the game wasn't great, I wouldn't have been into it, but the game was great. So it was like that one two punch of like, here's a great headline to the right person. And then I really liked it. And I was able to use my platform to reach a whole bunch of people about this game, which the developers have like contributed,

like attributed as like a big part of how it was a success. So yeah, I mean, I, I, I, I do think that that sort of thing is essential and a lot of people unfortunately neglect it. Just to get to Abiyamanyu's original question, I don't know if great marketing would have helped or hurt or would have helped 2KO. Really, it was the name that killed them. Yeah, and I mean, it's not my genre. Yeah, who knows about. Maddie, was this a game on your radar? Oh, yeah.

But partly because it's like, I mean, it was made by Patrick Miller, who's, like, really known in fighting game circles. And, like, when he started working for Riot, I followed that and was like, oh, wow, Riot's making a fighting game with this guy. He was like a journalist, right? Okay, I remember him from back in the day. And also, yeah, his partner, Irene Co. Oh, okay. Yeah, I remember both of them.

Funny, I didn't know they were involved with this game. Yeah, she is now making, we covered it on Mothership. She's making a fighting game comic book now. Because she's like a great, she's a great artist. Yeah. And part of the comic and the spirit of it is about the fighting game events that they created together after the failure of this game. Because like Bryant, I think, I mean, I'm sure Patrick could talk about this in more detail because I'm doing all of this second hand. But I think I get the sense he did feel let down by them and like how they approached the project.

And in that case, it's like, well, if you're going to do. a different genre. I mean, we're kind of talking about something different here, where we're, like, talking about Riot Games, which is a studio that's really famous for League of Legends, and they've occasionally tried to branch out and do other games and it hasn't always worked. And this is one of the examples of that. And like, did they know how to market a fighting game? Could they get it out of the network of people like me who are like, okay, great, like, I know who this person is that's developing it. I'm familiar with this genre and I'm interested in it. But did it ever break containment out to other people? I don't think it does. did. And that, I think, is something for any company of any size to consider is like, if you are moving genres and you don't know how to market in this new genre, then you really should be considering what you're going to do differently. You can't just assume like, oh, this is going to sell itself because it's good. I mean, it's funny to say even Riot Games could make a mistake like that, but it does seem like that's what happened here because I did hear this game was good. Do you have a sense of what they did or didn't do marketing wise?

I don't, but I do know that I knew when it was coming out, but I feel like I saw no one talking about it, you know, but I'm like, well, I follow a bunch of fighting game people, but I don't blame you too for not knowing. Because again, I think it didn't escape containment at all. I mean, that's in a game that Kirkner, I would have paid attention to, even if it was. But you might have if you knew that it was specifically designed to catered to newcomers. No. No. I still would happen. Sorry. I don't know.

This is the other issue with fighting games and like certainish genres. is that marketing them outside of their niche is maybe always hard. So then you're like, okay, well, how can I make sure that everyone in that niche really knows about it? And did they even do that? That I'm not sure about. Because, like, I'm a journalist, so I'm going to follow game developers. I am not the norm. What about the regular players out there?

Have our listeners ever heard of this game? I have a bad feeling the answer is going to be no. So why is that? Especially the ones who actually like fighting games. Why did they not hear about it? They should have. That is an example of them missing the mark, I would say. All right.

Let's try to get to another question or two and chatting a while about these two. This next one is from Griffin. Griffin writes, hello. Maddie Jason Kirk, long-time fan. I have a somewhat urgent request to make of the three of you. After a decisive showdown between my dominant gaming thumb and a kitchen mandolin, I am sad to admit that I have approximately eight weeks of limited gaming on the horizon. I wonder if you three have any game recommendations for continuing to play games with certain bodily limitations.

For example, I was able to play the ace of turning games by using the accommodation of my left hand and a stylus in my right hand despite my injury. Any recommendations would be appreciated. I mean, anything on an iPad, you could just play Balotro for this entire time, just on your iPad with one finger. Oh, my God, yes. Rock that. That's it. That's the only answer. No problem.

Eight weeks. You won't even know how the time passes. Just volatria. show for a week. Yeah. I feel like all the Ace Attorney probably qualify for this, right? Ace's Attorney, actually. They're pretty much one-button games.

Ace's Attorney, that's right. There's a lot of games you can play on Switch with just the touchscreen using your left. Yeah, plenty of the ends, right? Like visual novels. There are just so many games where you kind of just tap for most of the game. So, yeah, any visual novel, really. Yeah, I mean, you could go, you could

fill eight weeks by just playing every Ace Attorney on the Switch or Steam Deck or something using the touchscreen, And then move right into all three Dangenrampa games. And you got, man, that's a lot of hours. That's like a thousand hours of video games. Yeah, zero escape too. Yeah. That's so much.

Yeah. So there you go. There's your answer. Yeah. All right. Let's get to this next one. Maddie. Sure.

This is from Luke who writes, Good afternoon. I discovered Triple Click a few months ago after hearing Jason as a guest on another gaming podcast. Another reason that Jason should go on another podcast. Maybe we all should. So I've been listening to the backlog of your 2025 episodes, and I noticed a pattern I'd like to hear your thoughts about. Multiple prominent games in 2025. Hades 2, Ghost of Yote, and Silk Song were the second installment in a successful franchise and featured a female protagonist.

In the case of Hades and Ghost of Sushima, the protagonist of the original installment was male. And while I haven't played Hollow Night, my understanding is that the protagonist is possibly genderless, or at the very least, not explicitly female. That's right. Similarly, the upcoming Witcher 4 falls into this category, with Geralt in the original trilogy and Siri in this later installment. Do you think this is a conscious strategy by game developers? Is the logic here that it's too risky to launch a franchise with a female protagonist, but once your player base has bought in, they'll accept a female protagonist in the second installment?

Is there an idea that players who liked the first game will buy the second one regardless, but by adding a female protagonist to the second game, they might draw new female players, or femme presenting gamers of any gender who didn't play the first? Or is this just a low effort cosmetic way to distinguish the sequel protagonist from the original protagonist? Or do you think this trend is just a coincidence? Definitely not a coincidence. I have another theory.

I'm going to offer a not cynical, a kind of a generous, a generous theory. Yeah, I have another theory as well, but I'm curious to hear if yours is the same as mine. My generous theory is that oftentimes these games, many games, are helmed by dudes and dudes kind of instinctively want to do something about a dude as art because it's reflecting them. But then after doing it once and maybe finding some success, they're like, you know, I mean, I did this already. I want to do something completely different for the next one. And then so they want to try doing a story, telling a story about a woman, animating a woman, character, doing things that just feel different because I think artists by nature just want to

try new things and give new challenges to themselves. So maybe even, I'm not even thinking about the commercial aspect of it, just kind of the artistic aspect of it. Again, this is the generous theory. Maybe people just kind of like, if you're male, you're inclined to make something about a male character, and then afterwards you want to try something different. I would throw out a similar theory to that, I suppose. First, one game that comes to mind actually is Mina the Hollower, right? Because is the Shovel Knight canonically male? I actually realized that maybe the Shovel Knight's gender is He is because there was actually a Kickstarter stretch goal that they took a very long time to implement where they were like, we're going to make a female character, which I know because I waited a really

long time for that. So anyways, that just came to mind. But my modified version of that theory, or at least something I've noticed with a few of these games, is that I think that's true, Jason. And also, a lot of times these games launch with a male protagonist. And then it just turns out that in that first game, there is a secondary. character who is a woman who then winds up being the most interesting character in the game. Like I'm thinking of The Last of Us where Ellie, who was playable in the first Last of us, there were periods where you played as her. But she was the heart of the game. And over the course of the game,

I mean, her character was so important. And then playing as her was so cool that then they made an expansion where you played as Ellie. And then in the sequel, it's like just fully, you know, your Ellie. Like, I think that trajectory is also a thing. I think that's also true in of Hollow Night, where, you know, Hornet is by far the most striking character in Hollow Night. You see Hornet move once and you're like, I want to play as her. And so I think they knew that and they had made that, you know, the goal for the first game, what, for their Kickstarter, right? So they were kind of aware from the beginning,

well, she's really cool and people are going to want to play as her. So it's like, I think that sometimes it's just a logical outgrowth of making one of your most interesting and coolest-looking characters, a female character. And then you get to make a sequel. So it's like, well, yeah, let's make her the star. Bing. Kirk here as I'm editing the episode, and I wanted to just add a little bit to that, which isn't something I usually do, but I had this thought while I was listening back and editing, that the phenomenon that I'm talking about is also kind of an outgrowth of video game protagonist problems, where a lot of times the protagonist is the least interesting character in the game, either like they're silent or they just are kind of a blank slate because all the stuff is happening around them and they want the player to be able to project themselves onto them. They kind of need to just exist in the world to provide. a viewpoint for the player. And then as a result, the supporting characters are like all way more

interesting. And so then eventually, it's just natural that you would want to tell a story about those characters, because by the design of video games, the supporting cast tends to just be more interesting than the protagonist, at least the way that a lot of video games are made, or the kinds of games that we're talking about are made. So it's kind of an additional thought that I had that just seemed worth interjecting here, because I thought it was interesting. Okay, anyways, back to the show. Bing. Yeah, I think that's definitely a thing. I also think totally non-cynically that times did change and that game developers who maybe would have wanted to make a game with a female character previously just didn't.

Either they didn't have the resources or confidence or whatever the situation was backing by their publisher to do it and felt like the safer option was to have a male character have seen many games succeed with a female protagonist and are like, I actually wanted to do this the first time. around and now I can. And like, I guess that's sort of cynical, but I don't necessarily think it is. I think it's normal for times to change. And in this case, it's a good thing. So I'm excited about it. And I think it's a nice trend that this is the case. And that now, I mean, when I was first covering games, it was like almost never that there were playable female characters in games. It would be so notable that that would be a huge talking point about the entire marketing of the game. Like, the amount of time people spent talking about that Tomb Raider reboot trailer, like just the trailer, and how was Laura presented in it, and was it fair to her, and on and on and on. That was like,

just all of games journalism was that for like weeks of our lives. Like that's because it was like, okay, we really need to consider this very strongly. Whereas now it's like, it's just not, it's very different. The conversations are really different and way more nuanced and cool and interesting. And that's such a relief to me that we can talk about games in a different way. that is more specific to who these characters are and what they represent in the story. Yeah, I mean, in what, in 2017, I guess, Sony can launch a major successful franchise in Horizon Zero Dawn with a female protagonist that, like, has just gone on to star that female protagonist. And that's, you know, it's Aloid's series. That's a good point.

And I know some people are very weird about Aloid, but at the same time, the games are successful, they're really good. And it was just a matter-of-fact thing, even by 2017 of like, yep, we're launching a major AAA open world series with, female protagonist and that's people are going to like it because it's going to be a great game and she's a great character. By the way, one subversion of all this is Housemark releasing Returnal with a female protagonist in 2021 and then going to a male protagonist for the spiritual successor. And control is doing it too. Control too has Jesse's brother in it.

So it's actually trendy now to have a male protagonist. We've come full circle. I was so underrepresented. Well, that, I mean, I know you're kidding there, but it is an indication of how far we've come that now just a series will launch like Control. Control is actually a great example of a, you know, AAA, maybe double A game with a female lead. And then they're like, yeah, we're making another one. We're just going to have it be a different character. It does, it does bolster my point that I think sometimes people just spent in five years making one thing and they're like, we want to do something different. We need something new for this next one. Whether it's a female protagonist or very true. And that after much as I love Jesse, I can understand how they'd be like, we want to make a character who plays totally different. He's going to be really melee forward and look different and have a different personality. Okay, let's do a couple more. Kirk, why don't you read this next one? Okay, this one comes from Kate who writes, Hey, Triple Click, I wanted to write in with some great news, all caps,

after listening to your previous mailbag episode in which you chatted about getting worse at gaming as you get older, I'm happy to report that I am in my mid-40s and I am most definitely getting better at gaming by the day. I've always struggled with games requiring a lot of hand-eye coordination, particularly platformers. I was the kid who fell into the first hole in the ground in Super Mario every single time. I have avoided almost all platformers preferring RPGs and turn-based strategy. However, a while back, I tried out Animal Well after hearing about it on your podcast. That game really rocked, and I found that the environmental puzzles in general vibe were so cool that I was willing to really practice some of the movement techniques in the game to push through it.

Jumping up and up on all those bubbles, it seemed impossible to me at first, but I figured it out. I was very proud of myself when I rolled credits on that game. Now I find myself playing Hollow Night, something that I never would have expected. I've explored most of the map, I think, and I'm finding it incredibly difficult, but well-worth-the-effort of repeating difficult platforming sections and bosses until I master them. It took me over 100 tries to beat Hornet, but it felt so freaking amazing when I did it. There is no way I could have progressed in either of those games in my 20s or 30s. What changed? I really doubt that my physical reaction times have improved, but I do think I'm just in a

better place to appreciate and enjoy the process of learning these games. I'm more patient and I give fewer fucks. The excellent design of both titles is certainly helpful too. Have any of you experienced something like this before? All this to say, keep gaming you geysers. There is lots to enjoy and you may surprise yourselves. Love it. Love it too. I love this story. I don't have a great example of this, except to say that obviously I didn't try Dark Souls until relatively late in life. And I think some of that was me assuming it would be too hard for me. And I think there's like a piece of that in Kate's message where maybe she wouldn't have actually found these games too hard in her 20s. I know she thinks that, but I don't know if that's really true or if that her personality and

philosophy and patience changed over the years. And that was the thing. that made the difference. And I feel like that's been true of me. And I have so much more patience now with certain kinds of games than I did when I was younger. Yeah, I can definitely relate to this. I think coming from a higher point as you get older, you do start to notice just the physical limitations of age do just cause some of your reaction times to lower. So that's kind of the downside of having already been pretty good at games in your 20s and 30s. You're just depressing everybody. As you feel the sadness. But to flip that around, the patience thing, the personality changes that Kate is talking about are absolutely real. It sounds

like Kate is on an incredibly cool journey because it's just this upward trajectory, which is a nice thing to feel as you get older. It's something that I've actually felt with music in some ways, particularly with guitar, where like I'm just so patient. I feel very expansive on the instrument and very relaxed, and I'm not as obsessed with playing super fast or getting my chops killer, but instead I just like to learn. And as a result, I like progress so much and have made so much more progress over the last five years on that instrument than I did in 15 years from when I started playing. So like the mindset thing is huge. It makes a really big difference. And I also just love Kate's story and her enthusiasm because that rocks and I'm glad she's having that experience with games.

Yeah, it's awesome. All right. Let's do one more question from the mail bag. This is from Carl. Carl says, love the podcast, long time listener. Could you explain what exactly happened with Zaum? I loved disco Elysium and played it thanks to your review a while ago. However, I'm confused what the deal is with their new game. And is this made by the same team or not? It's all very unclear. So their new game, Zero Parades is out this week. So I thought this was fitting to kind of talk about this. Have either you played it? I haven't. I haven't. I haven't. No. Okay. No, I will be playing it, though. There's a lot of good games happening right now, but that's super at the top of my list. It's a real cluster. Well, maybe we'll talk about it once one of us or multiple of us have actually had a chance to play it.

But what exactly happened with Zal? This one is intractable. A question for the ages. I mean, I guess the short version is that a bunch of the studios kind of core creative team left and have since founded like five different spiritual successors all making different disco-elisium-style games. And there are lawsuits and legal battles between the core creative team and the studio,

the core creative team has thrown all sorts of allegations of fraud and stealing theft at the people who own Zahm. And at the same time, there have also been allegations for people who worked at Zalm of toxic leadership and kind of creating really negative environments from the core creative team that has left. I think that sums it up. It's obviously much more complicated than that. But I will say, just kind of looking towards the current game, I can share a few things that I do know. I actually interviewed the current president of Studio Zalm, not the CEO, the guy who was, like, accused of anything, but this guy, Ed Tomasuski, who came from private division and joined Zalm in 2022.

And he's a really interesting guy. I suspect him about a bunch of stuff that'll be in a story on Bloomberg on Friday, I believe. And a few things he told me. One is that there actually are a few things. few people, I don't, I'm trying to get the exact number, but there are some people who worked on Disco Elysium who are working on this new game and just stuck around at Cidio Zahm. So it's not totally new people, even though a lot of the core creative team and the people who created the IP essentially, created the story. Robert Kerwitz, who is the main writer.

He is no longer there. I think one of the reasons they chose to do a new IP is for that reason. And it's more of, it's a very different kind of game. I mean, it's the same genre and style, but this is a spy game rather than a game about an inept cop and his partner. A few other things he told me that I thought were really interesting, just a couple of fun little anecdotes. One is that Studio Zalm has unionized, and he was telling me that, like, after reviewing their request and having a bunch of conversations with them,

he and management decided to voluntarily recognize the union, which is something that it's essentially what management does when they're like, you know what, we're cool with people, we don't want to drag this out and turn it into a fight. So instead we want to work together to create a better environment for everybody. I thought that was an interesting bit of context here. He told me that they work 35-hour work weeks. And for this game, they had one month of crunch where they added 10 hours to that.

So their version of quote-unquote crunch was 45-hour work week. And it was all like paid over time. Beautiful. Wow. He told me, and this is the anecdote that you guys are going to crack up at, he told me that during development they went on what he called a good old-fashioned clanker hunt, where he got a posse, this is Ed's words, of three other people, and they went out and put together questionnaire and surveyed every single person on the dev team

and made them sign this attestation saying, I did not use generative AI in this game under punishment of losing my job. Wow. Oh my gosh. calling that a clanker hunt kind of iconic honestly a good old fashioned clanker hunt is what ed says um i was like

does that mean like they couldn't use google like he was like of course there's like nuance here like but the the the core idea is like nothing no content no generative AI content is in this game um i was like wow you were saying things that gamers will love to hear well and i would imagine now given how many developers now have had to eat crow after it turns out there's like Gen AI art in the background of some scene that like probably half the people on the team didn't even know was there like I can imagine now going around and be like guys please don't do this to me

Just promise me. Don't let me be the main character. I don't want to deal with that It's so funny because it feels like like that almost feels like Just a gut response to this idea that they're going to be launching this game under the shadow of this controversy Surrounding Disco Elysium and all It's just like we want to do anything possible that is the opposite of controversy that will make people realize that we're trying to do what's right here,

despite what's all this legal drama and the people quitting and all of that stuff that happened in the past. And yeah, I mean, it seems like, obviously this is a new team of people who worked really hard making this game. Obviously, a messy and tractable situation. So I'm not going to be like, I'm not going to tell people how to feel one way or another

about what happened to those creatives. natives, but this feels like it's kind of something new that is that is out there in zero parades. That's a pretty good summary. I'll be very interested to see what it's like. A spy game in that style sounds pretty cool, and it was a lot of fun playing esoteric abs. So I'm apparently infinitely hungry for this type of game, so I'll play another one. It's funny you say that because I was a little bit kind of fatigued on them after playing a esoteric app.

I was like, I don't know if I have it in me for another one of these types of games. Yeah, let alone the like six other disco likes coming from all the other studios. There will probably come a point, and maybe this game will be that point where I feel that way. I kind of would have said that starting at Soteric Ebb, though, is like one disco Elysium was plenty. The game was pretty singular. I don't know if I can do this again. And even at the beginning of that game, especially when they're coming at you with all the proper nouns and it's so complicated. Part of my brain, I think we talked about this in that triple play.

I was feeling a little like, I don't know if I can do another one of these. And then, of course, five hours in, I couldn't stop and was so into it. So I guess it all depends. Yeah. Yeah. It's good. It does a disservice when they all open the same way with the voices in your head just talking to you and you can't see anything and everything's black. It's gotten decent reviews, including a five out of five from Eurobe.

Oh, nice. Reviews are out. I hadn't seen that yet. Yeah, reviews are out. Yeah, the game is out. I believe on the day this episode comes out, May 21st. Yeah. All right.

Thank you to everyone who mail. in. Once again, you can reach us at triple click at maximum fund.org. Let's take a break and then come back with one more thing. I'm Graham Clark, co-host of Maximum Funds, stop podcast yourself, and I'm here with MaxFund member of the month, Matthew. Hello, Matthew, how are you? Hi, Graham. Thank you for supporting a thing that you love, that's something that you listen to. I do it as well, and I love being able to do that for the podcast that I listen to. Plus, you're the Kings of Boco. Absolutely. We are.

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One of these days you're going to learn how to say one more thing. One of these years. Kirk, what's here one more thing? My one more thing is a video game called Mixed tape that I played like a week

and a half ago and was going to be my one more thing last week. And then I realized that I wasn't sure what I thought of it. I started trying to write out my notes for my one more thing because I was like,

I have kind of complicated feelings about this game. And then I just kind of kept writing and I was like, okay, I think I need to write about this game. And then I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote about the game. And then I like made a video writing into a video essay about the game. And I've like now done so much work thinking and writing and talking about mixtape over the last week that I feel like I have to make it my one more thing. But I guess it's partly just to say, if you would like to read extended thoughts from me or listen to extended thoughts from me in a video essay on YouTube, you can do so. And we'll put links for that down in the show notes.

but I'll also make this game my one more thing, just as a one more thing, only tangentially related to the writing that I've done about it. So mixtape is a game from an Australian developer based on Melbourne called, I should say Melbourne, Melbourne. I get crap about how I pronounce Melbourne. I think some Australians get weird about it. An Australian indie studio, they say Melbourne, but I'm not going to do that because I don't have an Australian accent. Kirk, you can't piss off the Australian. No, I know. There's very core constituency for much of my creative output.

So Beethoven and Dinosaur is based out of Melbourne. Their last game was called The Artful Escape, which is also like a music game that I actually did not play, even though it's kind of up my alley. And I don't know why I didn't play it. I just didn't, it kind of missed me. It kind of passed me by. So this game came out, and I started getting emails from people who'd played it,

saying, dude, you have to play this game. It's totally up your alley. It's like exactly your kind of thing. And I fired it up and played it. And I actually really liked it, even though I've gone and written all these long, complicated thoughts about it. Overall, I think it's just, it's really cool and fun and gentle and sweet and a nice video game. It's a kind of an interactive music video is sort of how I describe it. The premise of the game is at some indeterminate point in the 1990s reads to me as mostly 94, like pre-internet 9.

but it's a purposefully timeless. Some of the slang doesn't quite fit, and there's references that don't put you in a certain year, and they never say what year it is. Three teens who live in similarly, a kind of purposefully undefined California town called Blue Moon Lagoon that just looks like a California suburb with mountains and the ocean,

but it's not a real city. It doesn't map on to anywhere in the world. These three teens are at the end of their high school careers, And one of them, Stacy, the sort of ringleader and music lover, is about to leave the next day. She's going to New York to go enter the music industry and become, kind of to pick music for movies, to be like a playlist master, professional mixtape maker. And so it's her and her two friends, a guy named Slater, who's kind of this stoner, who's actually pretty talented and cool, and Cass, who was previously kind of an overachieving softball jock,

good girl who then decided to become a burnout and hang out with them and rebel against her dad, who's a cop. He's like the local cop, basically, for their town. And so she wants to smoke pot with them and listen to music and, like, break the law and, you know, get into trouble. So the three of them are enjoying their final day together, getting ready for a big party that night. And Stacey has made a mixtape for them all. That's the kind of mixtape for the final day together. And because Stacey is so big on mixtapes, and she, like, places all this import on picking the perfect song for the perfect moment. Everything in the game then is accompanied by some song, like it starts out with Devo, and then there's some silver chair, there's like a smashing pumpkin

sequence, and then there's some kind of more obscure stuff. Like there's John Paul Young, this Australian rock singer, who I wasn't even familiar with. And one of the best sequences in the game is this John Paul Young song, Yesterday's Hero, that's like an amazing song and I'd never even heard it. So it's a collection of sequences. You know, there's mini games and there's cutscenes and there's like gone home sequences where you walk around someone's room and look at stuff. And it's all kind of a mix of memory and current events, but it's kind of magical, like impossible things will happen. They'll fly into space. It's kind of hallucinogenic at times. It's like a trip down memory lane, a whole bunch of short sequences, each one accompanied by a new piece of music.

So it's kind of an interesting mix of music that is in no way reflective of like an actual teen girl in the 90s, like it's not even close. It is very much the music liked by these guys who made this game who were probably around my age and grew up in Australia. Like there's a lot of Australian bands. It's a lot of just like classic rock. There's no no Britney Spears, no backstreet no, there's no miseducation of Lauren Hill, which I was like, well, the fact that that's done in here alone. But no, it's very specific and then kind of odd. There's been a lot of criticism of this game, people playing it being like, I was a teen girl in the 90s and I'm Sorry, but like, what?

They're listening to Rainbow, like, Dio's band and talking about how cool it is. Like, this is not something my friends and I did. But, like, to me, that was actually a kind of a cool thing or funny thing about the game. I didn't really mind. Like, I don't know. Like, it felt very specific to the people who made it. The writer-director is a guy who goes by Johnny Galvatron. I'm still not totally sure about his name situation.

He was the lead singer of an Australian band called the Galvatrons in the 2000s. I believe that's his stage name. The Galvatrons are named for like a Transformers character. So I think it's not his real name, but maybe he like adopted his stage name. Anyway, his name is Johnny Galvatron. There's kind of all these layers of artifice around this game. This is what I wrote about. And how for a long time I was kind of just okay with that.

I was like, well, this game is kind of weird. It's not set in a real place. It doesn't feel that believable. The music doesn't totally make sense. But also it's like kind of weirdly Australian. Like I actually like having Australians tell me about their favorite. bands. It's like something that I spend a lot of time doing, so it's kind of a fun part of the game. And I guess the one thing I'll say that I should mention here in my one more thing is that what wound

up being kind of the central realization in my writing about this game was that I figured out that some of the songs on Stacey's playlist actually aren't real songs. And I thought that was actually kind of weird. It was a creative decision that I don't love. There are just bands that I'm not sure what they are. I think it's likely or at least possible that their library music made by this Sony label called Extreme Music that is credited in the credits, but it's not clear where they came from. There's like a band called Wooden Sword, and there's a musician called Curtis Dunn. And Stacey introduces them in game. She's like, this is Curtis Dunn, doing deep space scan, a song that we loved. And in the context of the game, like when I was playing it, and I know everyone I've talked to who's

played it, they were just like, oh yeah, I assumed that was just some obscure synth artist from 70s that I'd never heard of because like Stacey's so cool and she knows all these cool bands. But he's not real. Curtis Dunn does not exist. He's not an artist. And I think that's weird. Like I think it's kind of counter to the ethos of the game. And so, you know, I wrote about this and some people shared the theory, the likelihood that, you know, they had a list of licensed songs.

They wanted to get, but license songs were very expensive and they couldn't get them all. So they just had to use library music for some of them just as a cost thing. And that seems possible. Galvatron has said, at least in a vice interview, that they got every single song they asked for. Even so, just like given the nature of the game, I think it's strange that they didn't explain where the music came from at any point or even in the credits. Like, you know, say who wrote it beyond just crediting extreme music at the end of the credits, you know, given that they're attributing the songs to artists that don't actually exist in the game. And that kind of set me thinking about like art and artifice and music and performance and like the levels of the kind of truth and what the truth really is in this kind of artistic work. And so that's what a lot of my thinking has been about the past few weeks.

Yet another thing that I actually find valuable about this game, that it provoked in me all of these thoughts and feelings. And it really, I couldn't let go of it until I'd written about it. I had so many other things I needed to be doing. And I was like, I guess I just have to write this essay. Which I'm sure is a feeling you can both relate to when you just, you've got an idea in your head and you just have to keep working on it until you get it out. Well, your Australian fans would be disappointed if you're not. I know, I know. So it's a cool game.

And I really do, you know, for anyone just looking for a game recommendation, it's like three hours long. I think it's on Game Pass. Like, it's the kind of thing that if you just kind of want to cruise and listen to some cool music, like, it's really lovely. I found it really funny at times moving. I really thought, like, at its best, it's really cool. And I recommend checking it out. Cool. All right, Maddie, what's here one more thing?

Mine is far less existential and is going to take less time for me to describe. So I've been playing this Zach Gage game called Not Words and it's really, really good. So a while back, I was talking about playing word games on my phone. And I'm playing this game on my phone, by the way. It's a phone game. And I have a lot of really bad word games on my phone that, I don't know, what happened this past week. I was playing one and I just got really mad that I was watching an ad and I was like, this game is fun, but it's not fun enough for me to be dealing with this

shit anymore. I can't. Like there's got to be something else I could be doing here. I really like anagrams specifically. I think it's just a fun concept and like the faster I can do anagram, like the better my brain feels, it just really gets me buzzing and I think it's really entertaining and compelling as a game mechanic. So I was like, What are some cool anagram games out there that will not serve me, terrible ads for games that may or may not even be real and will be trying to get me to pay microtransactions just so that I can solve another freaking anagram or whatever? And NotWords is so far my answer to this question.

It has a bunch of free puzzles, and I got through all the free ones and really liked them and then paid for it because there is an option to subscribe to it or just pay a higher price, which I opted to do because I liked it that much. And I was like, I'd rather just pay for the whole thing. I never have to pay for it again. So I'm going to describe this quickly, although really, if you're somebody who likes anagram-type games, then I probably don't have to sell you any more than that, but I'll briefly try to explain it. So each level kind of looks like a crossword puzzle that is totally blank, but there's no clues for the crosswords. And that's not how the game works at all. Instead, it's almost like Sudoku where you have to find a series of words that will fit together within the permutation of the crossword, which you could have that just be the game.

But there's a further limitation on how it works, which is that the crossword map is divided up into these random little chunks that are not contiguous. So, like, part of a word and part of another word will tell you, you can only use the letters S, S, S, and T in these three squares. But those three squares won't all be part of one word. And that full word will also be broken up into several other chunks, and those chunks will be part of other words. I realize this is kind of hard to describe. This is very Zach Gage. It is. That's a compliment.

And the first time I played it, I was like, this is so hard. I can never beat this. And then like something unlocked in me as I was playing that first puzzle where I was like, oh, like the trick is I fill out all of the two letter words first because there are only so many two letter words that exist. This is my tip for anybody who wants to try out not words. Like, okay, I fill out A and T like at. That's a word.

And then that alone gets you kind of kicked off. You're like, well, that connects me to this other remaining larger word. And I only have maybe one or two letters left that could go here. And I'll just try putting one in and see what happens. And then as you go along, it ends up being kind of like this really brain expanding anagram because you're like looking at the letters that you have on your sort of virtual scrabble board, if you will. And you're like, I can only use these letters and certain permutations.

It's so fun. I've played a ton of this game this week and really, really enjoyed it. If you like word games, you will enjoy it. How much, how much was it for the lifetime? I think it's 12 bucks. It's not a lot. And so I'm saying it's called not words. I should specify it is a homonym.

It is spelled K-N-O-T-W-R-D-S. But if you look for not-words without the K, you'd probably still find it. Either way. And it's on, it's on Google Play and it's on iOS. So if you have a phone, you can play it. Yeah, I'm going to check that out. I'm going to tell Emily about this. Okay, my one more thing is Planet Money, which is an NPR podcast,

but it's also a brand new book that just came out that is really, really cool. So the Planet Money book is kind of a collection of stories, some of which have been reported in the podcast, some of which are new for the book, and all of which have been adapted into text form for the book. Many of which just kind of, or all of which just kind of are designed to inform people as to how money works and how the economy works through these, kind of interesting narratives. And it's really cool. I'll give you guys an example, which is the opening

story, which I found absolutely fascinating, which is about these food banks. And it's about how this food bank in Alaska had this issue, which is that they were, someone donated to them five gallons of pickles. And they were like, look, we appreciate getting donations, but like nobody wants this five gallon pickles. Like, we can't do anything with these. And so this kind of food back feeding America, they looked around and they realized that they had an issue and they brought in some economists to try to help them fix it. And their issue is that like essentially they were running it kind of, I don't know, in almost like Soviet Russia, like a kind of communist style or socialist style commune where like you have the centralized location and they just decide based on whatever information they have, how to distribute the food to different places based on what they think is fair.

And they kind of, they do it in a way that they hope will be equitable for everybody. but it was very difficult for them to have enough information about all these different food banks to be able to actually distribute what they wanted. And so they brought in these economists and these economists put together a market system and they went through different iterations of it, but eventually landed on this idea that every single food bank would get fake money and be able to bid on different food items. And it would have to be like a blind bid so they wouldn't be outbidding each other. And what they did was they gave more money to the poorer food banks, the food banks that were in like a corner of more remote cities and less money to the ones that had a lot of donations than were like in richer cities, better off cities in the first place. And they found that with this system, they learned so much about how to be more efficient because the prices that these like different items would land on taught them so much about how to collect and what to collect and what to encourage people to donate and what to buy with. their money that it wound up leading to a way more efficient system, which I thought was really fascinating. It was like peanut butter turns out is way more valuable than they had any idea.

And they like learn so much from like the prices of peanut butter getting driven up by this fake money, eBay system. It was really fascinating. And then the book's authors kind of extrapolate on this by being like prices are not just kind of like a thing that you look at and you're like, okay, this is not just a piece of information for you, but also almost like a, newspaper. Like you can learn so much from the price of something in that it signifies not just how much something cost it for you at the store, but also the way that the crops for peanuts worked that year in whatever country that peanuts are grown or like the amount of oil that it took to ship those peanuts across the sea and like how prices just kind of changing can just teach you

all these things, all this stuff about the world and how much you can learn from them. really fascinating book. And then even more fascinating is that Planet Money, the podcast, did a, I believe, four-episode series about how the book was made. And so if you're interested in the nitty-gritty of book publishing, you listen to this series by this guy, Alexei Horowitz-Gazi, this reporter of theirs, who goes behind the scenes. And the first episode is about how a book is pitched and bid on by publishers. And the second one is about like how they decide where to print a book and they just dive deep into like the creation of this book. That's very planet money of them. That's very cool.

Very cool compliment to it. Turns out they reveal in this podcast series this book got an advance of more than one million dollars, which is a lot of money for a book. Got an incredibly popular podcast. I bet it helps. Yeah. I mean, it's sold. I believe it's already sold more than 100,000 copies. So it's justified that advance.

some. But yeah, but I've been, I'm about halfway through the book and I really enjoying it. It jumps around. It's like a whole bunch of different kind of stories from all over the world. And many of them are very fascinating looks at money and the way the economy works and the way the planet works. And a story about gig work and how that has impacted people and how like these companies, how it used to be this boon for gig workers to be able to like set their own hours and then how it just got squeezed. as like a competition got squeezed out and the kind of effects that monopolies can have on the market. It's a very just kind of like factual look at markets and the way they work.

It's a very just kind of, it's not, it's not, there's no agenda in the book, which I really appreciate. It's very much like we are looking at this from a perspective of like what is fair and what is accurate and that is it. That is their entire kind of they want to inform people. about the way that the world works. There's a great chapter about remote work and the kind of the people that it's good and who it's bad for and the kind of the hybrid model, just being a great balance for a lot of people.

And yeah, fascinating book. I recommend it. And I really recommend the podcast. Even if you don't want the book, you should go listen to the podcast series about how it was made. If you're curious at all about how the process of book creation, the reporter who did that at the end of it

was like, I will never look at a book in the store the same way again. after learning about all this. They talk about how a bestseller, how like a book becomes a bestseller. They talk about the printing process, the auction process. You guys would find it really fascinating. I think everybody would. Nice.

Yeah, that sounds great. So yeah, plenty of money. Really cool book. And of course, the podcast is very popular. All right, that is that for this week's episode. Thank you again to everybody who sent in questions. And next week we'll be talking about a very good video game. I cannot wait to get into.

too. So look forward to that. And Kirk Maddie, I'll see you both next time. Yep. See you both 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 maximum fun.org

slash join. Email us at triple click at maximum fund.org and find links to our merch store and our Discord server 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.