Triple Click - Story vs. Gameplay

Episode Date: June 23, 2022

Story or gameplay... WHO WINS? This week, the Triple Click gang dives into an age-old debate and discusses the tension between action and narrative in video games. What does a "video game story" actually mean? What's more important, story or gameplay? And does it even really matter?One More Thing: Kirk: Vampire Survivors Maddy: First KillJason: AI: THE SOMNIUM FILES - nirvanA InitiativeLinks:Clint Hocking’s “Ludonarrative Dissonance in BioShock” - https://clicknothing.typepad.com/click_nothing/2007/10/ludonarrative-d.htmlHocking’s 2011 GDC talk “Dynamics: State of the Art” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=St2fE049ULIKirk’s “Gameplay and Story are Exactly like Music and Lyrics” - https://kotaku.com/gameplay-and-story-are-exactly-like-music-and-lyrics-5885432Stephen Payne’s excellent Dicebreaker article about ancient role-playing and strategy games: https://www.dicebreaker.com/categories/roleplaying-game/feature/dnd-influences-roleplaying-games-centuriesSupport Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinBuy a Triple Click t-shirt: https://topatoco.com/collections/maximum-fun/products/maxf-tc-tclogo-shJoin 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

This week we learned that the sequel to Final Fantasy 7 remake will be called Rebirth, which means the third game will be called Rememids! Welcome to Triple Click where we bring the games to you. Today we are talking about the eternal video game question, story versus gameplay. Story, gameplay, who's the winner? I don't know, but I think we all are. I'm Jason Shrier. I'm Kirk Hamilton. And I'm Maddie Myers.

Hello, Kirk and Maddie. Welcome back. See you another episode. Hello Jason and Maddie. It's nice to see you both. Hello, Kirk and Jason. And hello to the listener. They're out there too, you know?

And hello to you out there. They're not on the call right now, but in a way they are. In a way they are. And we each said each other's names, but we're not going to say all of our listeners' names. No, but we do know all their names. Yeah, but we won't reveal them because that would be impolite and kind of creepy. But we do know them. If you're out there, we know your name.

We know your name. We know your favorite shampoo. brand. We know where you live. That's it though, just those three things. Well, that's it. I mean, and we don't even have ads for shampoo. We just are really into shampoo brands. Those are just the important facts that you learn about a person. It's like a really

weird, dumb superpower to just know every listener's favorite shampoo brand. It would be a great superpower, I think. It would be amazing for trivia and like bets you could make a bet and be like, hey, I bet you $20 that I know your favorite shampoo. We got to bet so quickly.

Jason. Speaking of advertisements, which we don't have on the show, did you know that this show, Triple Click, is entirely supported by listeners. Did you guys know that? I didn't know that. This is the first time hearing of it. No one told me. I was like, I thought we were running ads this whole time, mostly shampoo stuff, but apparently

we're not. I've been recording ads every week. I've been hearing shampoo ads in my head for a long time, but it turns out that has nothing to do with this podcast. Yeah. Here at Triple Cook, we are a proud member of Maximum Fun. which is a network that helps us do cool stuff, and we are entirely listed and supported by MaxFund members.

You too can become a MaxFundFundMendMember by going to maximumfund.org slash join, and not only do you get those warm fuzzies that you get from supporting our show, those warm fuzzy feelings. You also get a bonus episode from us every single month. We give you a bonus episode, including last months, which was on Eldon Ring,

where we just talked for an hour, us about our experiences and spoiled Eldon Ring. And this month, which is the culmination of our Sweet Conan 2 play-through, we will talk about the end of Su-Coded 2 and discuss the game overall as a full package. So that'll be up by the end of June. Probably Monday, right? Is that right, Kirk? That'll be up on Monday for bonus feed members.

That seems likely, yes. I think that's, yes, it'll be up on a Monday. I'm just going to come up to it right now. So that's very exciting Very exciting, very exciting And yeah, all you have to do is go to Maximumphanatat org slash join and become a member today All right, Maddie, what are we talking about today? So we've got a hot topic of flamen hot, scalding hot topic today

Which I've titled Story versus Gameplay Love it. It's going to be easy, right? Yeah, just kidding. It won't be. I have a prepared statement Kirk, I want you to add in some folia of a screaming crowd, just absolutely losing their minds under all these prepared statements. You mean this crowd?

This crowd that I brought with me that's just cheering right now for Maddie Myers' prepared statement. Wow, Kirk, I can't believe you fit that many people into your house. Yeah, it took a little doing. You guys ready? You guys ready for this? All right. In the Northwest corner, weighing in at 182 gigabytes,

it's a fighter who will make you laugh, make you sob with wild abandon, and make you fall in love and break your twisted little heart into a thousand pieces. We're talking about story, the all-time champion of almost every art form known to humankind. But who's this in the southeast corner weighing in at 188 gigabytes? The fighter with a routine that's renowned for its hardcore, grueling pace, the fighter with tactics that started out as simple as a dice roll on a stone tablet, and have become as complex and multifaceted as the most large computing systems in the world can devise.

It's gameplay the longest ever title holder of the very idea of what it even means to be a game. As controversial as that record has become in recent years, will gameplay manage to retain that record in today's matchup? Place your bets now, gamers, because there can only be one winner in this battle to the debt. Gameplay versus story. Incredible. So I wrote this because I thought it was funny, mostly because I think this argument is funny

because I have to think that now, due to the fact that it became a somewhat terrifying culture war in video games in the 2010s, I would argue that the story versus gameplay debate led to Gamergate, among other debates, and is still with us today, although I think people are a heck of a lot more chill about it. You're going to have to pause and do some elaborating

on how this led to GamerGate. Sure. I'm happy to. I mean, we'll get into it as we go. But I would say that many, okay, so the games, here's the super simple version, the games that people were mad, that they, mad that games journalists were supposedly colluding over were games like Gone Home and Depression Quest, games about mundane matters, walking simulators, if you will. Games that supposedly weren't games at all and shouldn't be considered games. The idea was that a game that was purely story, which I think it's very debatable as to whether gone home and depression, are purely a story. That's something we can get into today. But that is what that is what an angry gamer gator might allege. Those games are they truly games? Should they be considered games? Would a

hardcore gamer care about them? Should we only care about quote unquote gameplay? That is to say mechanics, systems, numbers, spreadsheets. And part of why I think this dichotomy is so hard to talk about, at least for me, is because there are so many different kinds of games that blend story and gameplay. And there were, you know, even in 2012 in the early run-up to GamerGate, but there are definitely a lot of games like that now in 2022 that we can look at to the point where sometimes the dichotomy just seems ridiculous to consider. Like in Outer Wilds, for example, how could you possibly separate the story from the gameplay? I would argue they're pretty much the same. They're very much in sync. What you do in the game is the story of the game. Your experience

of exploring that world and making those discoveries is also the story of that game. But I wanted to talk about just this dichotomy in general and what you two think about it. So, Kirk, where were you when you read Clint Hawking's essay on Pluto Narrative Dissinence? I'll have to think about that. I remember people mentioning it because that was in 2007, Clint Hawking wrote this essay called Luda Narrative Dissinance in Bioshock on October 7th, the day before my birthday. It was really a birthday gift to me, to 27-year-old Kirk Hamilton. I didn't read it when it was first published. I think I saw smart people talking about it and then finally read it, and I had at that point played Bioshock. And really, I don't have a strong memory of reading the article because, to me,

the article has become a sort of a simplified version of what it really was. And it's just like, well, sometimes the thing you're doing in the game doesn't match up with the story of the game. And that's what people say that Clint Hawking's article was doing. And then I just reread it before we recorded this episode. And it's actually, it's a cool post. We'll link it in the show notes. And it wasn't really doing what I have sometimes remembered it to be doing. People will talk about, well, Luda Narrative Dissinances like in Uncharted, where Nathan Drake is this really likable guy who then kills all these people, and we're supposed to just think of him as this every man, but he's this murdering machine in the gameplay.

Sure. And that's kind of, that's just, I mean, I suppose you could make that argument about Uncharted, but that's not really what Hawking is doing. And really, what's so interesting is the first sentence of that post is about a year ago, I praised Ian Bogost's critique of bully and lamented the unfortunate lack of game criticism as distinct from game reviews. And then he goes through, and what he's really trying to do is, demonstrate a type of criticism that he feels as a game designer, a professional game designer,

he was at Ubisoft at the time, that he felt that he was not seeing enough of in the world. And he kind of treats the active gameplay, like the interactive nature of games, as the thing that makes them unique. I've seen, he's given some GDC talks, or I saw one at least that he gave. It was very interesting where he talked about editing in film and how editing is kind of the thing that once you understand editing, you can really understand movies. and then kind of understanding that that fundamental thing about the creation of film. And he's like in games, if you can really talk about the interactivity,

you can really get to the heart of the video gameness of it and this kind of core thing about video games as an art form. Bing! Kirk here, as I edit this episode, I just want to chime in to give some specifics. This was a 2011 GDC talk that Clint Hawking gave called Dynamics, State of the Art. And it was a very cool thing about dynamics specifically. So I don't even know how much he talked about the world. word gameplay, but dynamics, the idea of change in reactivity in games.

You can watch it on YouTube and we'll link it in the show notes. You should totally check it out. It's really cool. He's a smart guy. And I think a lot of you would dig it if you haven't seen it. All right, back to the show. Bing! And that's kind of what he was demonstrating in this Bioschak article, which we can talk about

more in detail in a minute. So reading that, I just thought it was interesting that it's come to be framed as this, you know, story versus gameplay. It's like a thing that people think of as a competition. and frame that way it needs to be one, it needs to be other. And the insecurity you're talking about that a lot of sort of reactionary gamers were talking about was this sort of, it was rooted in this insecurity about like, oh, the games are changing, they're going to become something I don't want.

These other forces are taking over this thing I love, which is also viewed in this kind of zero-sum way, though what Hawking was originally doing was just being like, I want to better understand games and talk about them in a more critical way. And so to do that, let's look at the stated story, and then let's look at the story that you play in Bioshock and kind of compare them, which is a useful thing to do, and I think really interesting. Yeah, that article is also largely about the state of games journalism, which I think is another big reason why it took off and remains such a cultural mainstay because we all love navel gazing on some level. And a lot of critics just enjoy, I think, or perhaps in my case, enjoy as a strong word. but are captivated by his assertion at the beginning that there's this really big difference between reviews and criticism, which I think is less true now and usually now a review for any media property, not just games, has a specific angle to it. And it's not just a list of features, for example.

Like, does the game work? But I will say that was extremely true in 2007. Oh, yeah. That was the beginning of a whole new type of criticism of video games. Right. So that was also a dichotomy that was happening at the same time. And to me, they are inextricably linked. And unfortunately, they're also linked to Camer Gate, which is tragic. But just the idea that reviews were getting too much criticism in them, especially of story and social issues and what a game could represent and what it could be about or say or change, even, inspire change in people playing it. And that argument. is itself, I mean, I associate it with being reactionary, but I also really understand it because when I was young, I mean, I don't know if the two of you had an opinion on this when you were younger, but when I was younger, I mostly played competitive games. I didn't grow up playing story games.

Kingdom Hearts was the notable exception and I mostly made fun of it. I was playing a lot more street fighter at Marvel versus Capcom at that time than JRPGs, as everyone knows very well. And I was pretty conservative. and like internalized misogynist and definitely was like, yeah, gameplay's what matters. Even though I don't think at the time I really even understood what I was talking about,

it took years of me thinking about it more and reading more to unpack that. So Jason, as a lifelong JRP fan, I'm guessing that you didn't experience any of that angst growing up. Well, it's so interesting. I mean, rereading Hawking's blog post, which is a fascinating relic of 2007,

I think a lot of what he's trying to say is less about story versus gameplay prioritizing and more about how this game specifically is trying to make a point that it doesn't actually, it isn't actually capable of making specifically with the big Atlas reveal and the game kind of pointing and laughing at you and being like, ha ha, you were following my directions, even though I was the bad guy all along, but not actually giving you a choice to not follow the directions and how that works in contrast with the the ludic story of being able to decide whether to save or harvest the little sisters. So that to me is kind of an interesting. It's a more subtle distinction than like the story and the gameplay being directly at odds with one another

and more that the story in the game or the gameplay in the game isn't actually capable of not being at odds with itself and with its story. So to answer your question, Maddie, and to kind of get at the more simpler conflict here, which I think is an interesting one, and certainly worth talking about story versus gameplay. I actually grew up being like only caring about stories because I grew up playing role-playing games. And like I would never, you could not, it wasn't until like I was in my late teens that I started playing most other stuff. Starcraft, for example. Well, no, StarCraft. With a few exceptions on PC, where I would play gameplay first games. But like, especially on consoles, I would really,

really just only play RPGs. It wasn't until like I was like 18 or 19 that I was like, I should check out Metal Gear Solid. I should check out Grand Theft Auto, like see what the deal when these big franchises are. So yeah, I was very much like I want this game to emotionally resonate with me and make me cry the way that Final Fantasy 4 did. I was very much like after after those storytelling experiences. So yeah, very much the opposite of you growing up, Maddie. Yeah, that's fascinating to me because I'm glad I got over it, but in your case, I'm like, it would have been okay if you just kept doing that. Because at this point, I'm like, the games that do something interesting with Story are, this is a generalization, I guess, but I'm not sure else to put it. I feel like it's

very hard to do something really compelling with Story in a game because I guess at my heart, I'm still a gameplay first gamer. And I'm like, well, if you're going to put story in there, how are you going to fit it in between the dice rolls or the Tetris blocks falling or like Ken punching Ryu like how are you going to get that in there you're going to what are you going to do cut scenes like that's not anything I'm not even playing the game during that part well so okay so then you have to kind of figure out what is the story is a story of the game throwing you these characters and this plot and these conflicts and telling you this is what our story is or is a story what you are actually doing in the game and the experiences you're having because we've all had those

moments where like we all sit around the dinner table and talk about the cool thing we did in Skyrim or that amazing new dungeon we found in Eldon Ring or whatever. And oftentimes when we talk on this podcast, we're telling stories about our trials and tribulations in games. And there are a lot of narrative designers out there who would argue that that is really what story should be in games is the players' experiences and their campfire tales and that the kind of overarching story you're trying to tell doesn't really matter. That is just like lore or back. story and you don't have to think about that. It isn't quite as important as the kind of stories you're coming away from the game with. And that's certainly a fair argument we've made.

And then again, there are also visual novels, which I guess you could call a video game, although it begs the question, which you were alluding to at the beginning of this, which is like, what is a game even? Are these all really considered? Like, why do we consider all of this to be games when they're such drastically different pieces of media? But you play a visual novel and you're just getting a story fed to you. So that's a totally different type of experience. Yeah, I mean, it raises the question, what is story, which you raised, and then it also raises the question, what is gameplay, which you also raise. And what is is is is? Both of those things can be seen on a spectrum, right? I mean, I wrote a thing, one of my favorite things that I wrote for

Kataku was gameplay and story are exactly like music and lyrics, which was one of those just like thoughts that I had and then I realized that the whole argument just made itself and that it worked perfectly because they can both exist independent of one another and then they begin to work in different ways when you combine them and in their truest form they exist beautifully together and support one another and create something new they create a song in the case of music or they create a great narrative video game in the case of gaming and yeah I mean it's it's different obviously but I thought that was kind of a helpful comparison at the time I think we've moved past needing that kind of a comparison to even understand the two, because it's so complex.

So first off, looking at what is story, let's start there. So, Maddie, you talk about fighting games or competitive games. I know you also played CounterStrike. Both of those games do have some narrative elements, right? So in Street Fighter, you said Ken punching Ryu. I know. It wasn't player one punching player two. It's these two characters, right?

As I was saying that, I was like, I am betraying myself by even using the Ken and Ryu example because that is, of course, there's the notorious friendship slash rivalry between Ken and Ryu that is itself symbolic of the countries that they come from. Ken being half American and having his own worries about never being as good as Ryu. I mean, that's a part of everything about them and how they relate. There's a reason why the Street Fighter 5 tutorial is about the two of them and actually features some story. They have some conversations in the tutorial about training together.

I mean, that's about as much story as you get. Of course, there are campaigns, but the campaigns are really cordoned off from what you see as the game, which is just the lines set at beginnings of battles. And that's just flavor text, essentially. But I would still consider it story. Right. So there's this narrative element to that that some writers and also some character designers and artists work together to create. I was just talking with a friend of the show, Matthew Burns, who works at Zachronics. And we were talking about some character designs that their artists had made for a game they recently made.

made as strategy game, like a war strategy game. So your characters are kind of soldiers. And Matthew, who writes the stories for these games, would just say to the artist or write to the artist, well, this guy is arrogant, and this woman is kind of doubtful of herself, and this guy. And so then you look at these portraits, and they're just little portraits in a kind of advanced war style game, but each one really conveys a personality. And it's kind of an artist working with a writer to create characters who then play out

a story that you're playing. Like, there are elements of story in that. And you can get really granular with like, okay, well, is that the same as a visual novel? Or is it the same as, you know, Return of the Obridin, which creates these characters that you give names to in a story that you're kind of creating in your head? There are so many different ways that that can play out. But it's all kind of the rich, you know, tapestry of video game story. And that's just on the story side. Yeah.

I don't know how to define gameplay. Please don't make me do that. I think part of why I thought it was so fun to think about this topic right now. is because we're all playing Sweet Kodin 2. And that was one of the examples I included that's similar to Street Fighter to me because in my head, I'm like, is Ryu and pals,

Ryu and Friends, that's the subheading of Sweet Kodin 2, Ryu and Friends, is he fighting all those random battles? Does he run away from each one of them? How does he feel about having to go back to a place and fight a bunch more, a certain kind of random battle?

Does he buy off the enemies? Does he buy off the enemies? Yes. Like, is he paying several thousand potch to skeletons in order to get them to go away. By the way, it's hilarious that you can pay off skeletons that go away. I don't think that's how fighting the undead works.

They love their potch. They love it. But to me, I just, at this point, as a critic, I do just see that as part of the story. I don't separate those two things anymore. And I haven't for a while in terms of how I write about games. When I'm summarizing the story, I try to also include that and just be like, you know, Reeves trekking across so many places and he's visiting and revisiting places. as he's seen before and he's dealing with all these battles.

Like, to me, that's part of his life experiences, even though you could mentally separate that out. Like, in my case, I could be like, I actually kind of enjoy a lot of the cutscenes in Sweet Codent II. Don't care for those battles, but they're part of the story to me. So I don't feel like it's entirely honest for me to say, I just like the story of Sweet Codin 2, but not the gameplay,

although I think someone would understand what I was getting at if I were to say something like that. I don't think it's entirely right. I mean, saying that today, I think, means something different than saying that back then. Sure. Did. Because back then it was such a more common, it was kind of like gameplay was so limited in what people could do, what designers could do or what they thought to do at the time. And that's why they're invisible random encounters.

I mean, the concept of invisible random encounters only started because there wasn't enough memory to put enemies on the screen and it just became this tradition. Like same with turn-based combat. That was a thing because, like, well, I mean, I guess there were a few reasons why that was a thing. But there's a reason that Final Fantasy very quickly moved to, like, active combat and then action combat. And very different. Like, it's a relic of its time in some ways. And that's one of the reasons you don't like it. But to get it, your question, this is an infamous trope, an infamous JRP trope is like, hey, there's a meteor hanging over the world and it's going to explode in 24 hours.

But let's go kill some goblins and breed some jrpid some tropeg. Chokovos and do whatever. Let's go recruit the rest of our 108 friends really quick before we do this battle that's supposed to unfold any second now. Yeah, and we're about to be attacked, but we can go chill for a while. In Tickland II, it's particularly hilarious because a bunch of your party members will all just be hanging out in the war room while you go do stuff. So you're literally just like making your council wait around, they're standing around. There are no seats in that room. They're all just standing there waiting for you to come back and you're just like, no, I'm just going to go trade some crystal balls and make a bunch of money on the stock market. Yeah, you gotta get Gordon

somehow. Yeah, I think that like there's a certain level of suspension of disbelief you have to have when it comes to really any game because there's there's some things that are just silly. There are a lot of things in games that we just kind of accept as as necessities that are just like allowing us to play the game, whether it's menus and interfaces and just kind of other things that kind of break the fourth wall or break your immersion, so to speak, or it's random encounters just getting in the way of everything that you want to do when you want to see. And I think game designers, I mean, again, we're talking about such a young medium where, to the point where in 1998, the video game industry was less than 20 years old.

That's when Sigurton 2 came out. Like, the video game industry could not drink alcohol legally in the United States when you're going to take him out. Now it's double that age Morrison. Now it's more than 40 years old. So we've reached a different place. And in 20 years from now, who knows what kind of crazy advancements we're going to be

seeing. So it feels like when you talk about video games as a medium, we're so, so early, we're so young that it almost feels unfair to be like, this game from 1998, let's compare that to what we're playing now. But you have to. I get where you're coming It's only unfair if you're thinking of it in terms of combat.

I think it's really interesting and helpful if you're just thinking of it in terms of understanding the art form. Because that's true. And it's even, I mean, it's helpful to look at this essay from 2007 and think about it in terms of today's games. Because, you know, it was so much more common back then that you would either have a game where one of you mentioned cutscenes earlier, where it was just you watched a movie and then you did some mission where you just shot stuff and then you watched another movie. And then sometimes you play a game like, I mean, I remember golden eyes. by 007, you know, in the, I guess, what, 96 in the late 90s? Bing! 1997, Bing!

That game, a lot of the missions that you played through felt like James Bond levels you'd be sneaking into an installation through the ducts and using your cool watch to open up, you know, locked ventilation shafts. And that was really cool because it felt like you were actually playing the story and then you'd see a cutscene. So there was still this kind of dance between those two things. But now, I mean, look at a game. like Outer Wilds. Like look at a game where those contrivances have really gone away, and the game

isn't requiring you to do that much suspension of disbelief to just play this unified narrative, interactive story. Granted, that game is kind of unusual, but probably less and less unusual as time goes on, and that just goes to show the way that the art form has matured, which is really cool. I mean, I think we can define gameplay better now than we could in 2007, the other half of this. And part of that is because of games like Gone Home, games with less of the sort of... Combat? Is it capital G gameplay? The sort of the gameplay that people were talking about when they were talking about that, less of the, you know, Twitch-based reaction-based interaction.

But they're still interactive stories. I think that interactive fiction taught us so much over the course of the 2010s. And granted, it was not like easy. It led to a lot of kind of awful conflict at a lot of times. but looking back now, at least for me, just speaking as my own perspective on games, I can see the same kind of spectrum that I see with story on the gameplay side, where there are all these different kinds of interaction that you can have with the game, and they can interact with the story in so many different ways

that each game can be a very distinct thing because there are so many different ways that you can do both of those things and combine them. I think, Kirk, to that point, I mean, interactive fiction had always been a thing. That started in the 70s with Zork and all the info, games and bureaucracy and bazillion others and then it turned into that kind of naturally evolved into a point and click adventures and other stuff you could

play with graphics on your PC Zork Zero was a personal favorite of mine I think what you're getting at is kind of taking that model and adding the same graphical standards that other like the high production values of other games because that's kind of

what got home to. Kind of but not exactly because the things that the games that you're describing the Zorks of the world, that kind of interactive fiction, where you basically just go through the story and put in the inputs to get to the next chapter in the story, which is also true of a lot of 90s point-and-click adventure games. Those games are story first. I mean, the story is kind of the motivation for while you're playing. But I'm talking about a game like 80 Days, which came out, I know in the mid-2010s, that type of interactive fiction, which I know was not invented in 2010,

and I'm not suggesting that. But a game like 80 days, that was the first time I at least had ever played something like that, where it is a, it felt like a novel that was being written according to the decisions I was making. And I was watching this story, this different story that was different every time I went around the world be told to me and sort of understanding the gameplay elements of that in a new way. And, you know, that also had its own whole long lineage and I wasn't as familiar with the games earlier. I mean, that's just Oregon Trail with a new coat of paint. Would you really say that, though? No, to some extent, yeah. I mean, it's Oregon Trail with like, with a map where you can see every new, like, branch and infield. And obviously, it's a lot more elaborate and a lot more

complicated. I guess then, yes, to say, to just take that as true, then that kind of reinforces what I'm saying, which is, that is the gameplay of interactive fiction, is you can take something like Oregon Trail, which is really rudimentary, a lot of just different sort of parameters that you move through. And you can put beautiful writing and story and narrative on top of that, and suddenly you have a very different experience. Like the coat of paint that feels a little reductive When you're like a new coat of paint But that coat of paint is a huge deal when you play 80 days Well yeah, that's what I was saying too

With Gone Home, Gone Home is a good example of that Because Gone Home was really the first time That feels like an example of a game That took those ideas that you're talking about, Kirk And made it so it felt like you were playing a Bioshock Like you're playing that game, it looks beautiful You can interact with 3D objects And that I think like kind of made the barrier

Of like older stuff or even 80 days which is all 2D and not everybody's cup of tea, something like Gone Home, anyone could really get into. And I think that's one of the reasons it was so successful is because it really just overcame a lot of those barriers for entry. And not a coincidence that Gone Home was made by devs who worked on Bioshock specifically Minerva's Den and had certainly read Clint Hawking's essay

and this whole thing. You can see this progression happening kind of in plain sight. It's very cool. Yeah. Well, so I think what Gone Home does that is so brilliant, and we talked about this on our Beanscasts, which go everyone who's a moment, members should go check out or come join max fun and you can listen to do it but i think what that game

did so specially um or was so special at doing was just creating well a story that only a video game can tell because it's all told through exploration and through interaction and that i think is is really what narrative designers are still just kind of like in the early days of figuring out how to do is to take a story and make it so it can only be really experienced in a video game as opposed to taking like a film story and just splicing the cutscenes with like splitting it up into cutscenes and then having gameplay in between it, which was very much the model of AAA gaming for a long time. But now we're seeing a lot more of this like sort of environmental storytelling and exploration and interactive storytelling in even the biggest games, which I think is pretty cool.

Yeah. And it also notably didn't include combat, which that's a whole other piece of this argument that we are kind of skating around, which is the idea that interactivity also includes violence. because in so many games, that's been true, in part because it's just easy to create a game that's violent. And also because a lot of games, especially if we're talking about ancient ideas of games, like chess, are competitive games and are based on war and our simulations of strategic choices you can make in wartime. And that is fascinating to me just as a problem to be like, okay, how do you take the game of chess and put story and motivation on top of it? And if that's a rabbit hole, anyone else is interested in.

We can include this article that I linked here about ancient role-playing games and strategy games. And there's a part in there where there's so many examples. I mean, there's the furthest one back, I think, is 70 AD that they talk about, like the idea of gladiator fights as being a role-playing game of sorts, which is sort of terrifying because people actually died, but there were rules and roles that sometimes people were playing. But one of the other examples I really liked was about medieval nights role plays. and doing basically LARPs as part of reenactments, essentially, that they were doing. And what we don't know and what I'd love to know is whether people argued about that.

And we're like, I want this reenactment to be pure numbers and pure strategy and truly test which of us is the best at fighting on our horseback. Or other people being like, but I'm a really good actor. And I'm here for the role playing aspect of it all. And I mean, we don't know that that happened, but it doesn't. doesn't seem entirely impossible to me. And I also have no sense, although I did try to find out, as to whether that argument was as gendered in that time period as it is now, where now we associate like cooperative playing pretend with as being a feminine pursuit.

I think gender roles are fake. Everyone knows. I think that. But whatever, society says that's a feminine pursuit, whereas competition is a masculine pursuit, supposedly. And that is part of what leads to these discussions. being so fraught among like who is and isn't a gamer and games being advertised as being for men and about hardcore strategy, especially in the 90s and then us dealing with the

fallout from that, like in the times after that. Like I think Jason, as a longtime JRP fan, I think, I mean, I don't know if you sort of witnessed that change at the time, but I do remember that happening of games being something that kind of felt like it was for everyone and then something changed at a certain point and it became like, no, games are masculine and they're about war. And then we're only now unpacking that again and being like, no, games are a lot of different things. And it's okay if games are a lot of different things. And they can be about story and they can be about combat and they can be war simulations but also have story in them like Fire Emblem Three Houses. And that's been like the youth that you described, Jason, of the past several decades of

games is games being like maybe we can just have all of that stuff maybe we can have all the above you know yeah i don't know my my young my growing experience is going to be drastically different from yours because you grew up as a woman playing games i grew up as a little boy playing games and i didn't know any women or girls who were into games um until later on when i started playing online games and then occasionally i would meet a woman occasionally i would meet a man pretending to be a woman but that's another story. But it wasn't really until later on when I met people who were like, oh yeah,

I love the Sims, which I think kind of follows along those gender stereotypes, but they exist for a reason. Or women who got into, really into, like online games like World Warcraft and were just like really into the socialization aspects of it. But actually,

my personal anecdotes and personal experiences did kind of fall along those gender lines somewhat to that. I mean... Was there ever a... a time in your life where other guys would be like, why are you playing those girl games if you were playing like Final Fantasy or something? Or did that just never happen? No. No, not that I can't remember. What if I started doing that to you now? Would that? That would be fun. I think you should try that. I think you should make this a bullying podcast where you just are constantly bullied. I'm so sorry.

Yeah, the past year I was listening to you trash on SweetCodent too is basically that. It basically has been kind of bullying. No, I love Sweet Codin 2 now. Find out whether or not I'm willing. I'm listening to lying by becoming a maximum fun now. So I have a thing. I have a thing I've been noticing. I've been playing Divinity Original Sin 2 and having many thoughts about it, as I've mentioned. I'm glad you're still playing it. Yeah, I haven't had time lately because of

a certain other JRP that I have to finish to record Arvines guest, but I am still playing it off and on. And so that game, I mean, that game contains multitudes. I've talked about it many times on the show. it's a sort of role-playing game where you really do get to play a role. You can play pre-written characters. You can come up with your own character.

You can decide your take on them. And there's a lot of flexibility with the story. And there's a lot of flexibility in the game world. You can kill almost everybody. You can kill so many characters. So it's one of those old-school, isometric, you know, fallout style RPGs where kind of the whole world will just let you do stuff. And maybe you won't be able to finish all the quests.

But you can make it through the game doing a lot of different. things. So your actions, the game is very reactive to your actions and that includes your actions in the story and in the dialogue and in, you know, what you choose to say and how you choose to play your character. And I've read a lot more guides this time playing through the game. And there's a thing in this game where you really need XP in this game. It's a pretty tough. You don't level up very often. Each level is a big deal. And if you really know what you're doing and you min-max the hell out of it. You can reach kind of a higher level, like maybe one level higher than you're supposed to be at each given point in the game. But to do that, you have to maximize the amount of XP you're

getting. And what that usually means is you have to just kill every NPC that you see. So the opening area is called Fort Joyce, this kind of prison island. It's the tutorial area. There's a bunch of stuff to do there. And before you leave, all of these guys will be like, okay, and now just go kill everyone. And that means everyone, all the guards, all the friendly people, it doesn't matter because you're never going to see them again. When you leave this island, you'll go to the mainland. No one's coming back. Doesn't matter. Right. So it gets into this very interesting conflict where in these, there's lots of threads, you know, people explaining how to do this. And then at some point, someone will say, also though, you could just roleplay your character and not do that and it'll be fine.

And I keep finding myself in that interesting middle place where I do some of that and really max, you know, do all the quests I can. I'll kill all the bad guys, but I do like playing Losa as Losa, the character I'm playing, she wouldn't kill these friendly people who helped her out, so she doesn't. And that's fine, the game is still playable. And it's an interesting point of tension between the two things that I think

makes the game much more interesting. And that's true of a lot of games, even going back through the 2010s, these games that contain narrative elements that have interactive components to them and, you know, typical combat, whatever that looks like turn-based combat, like Divinity or Action Combat, like a game like Mass Effect.

And a lot of the those games are most interesting when you kind of have these two things working together, and you can adjust how much of one you want in the other, which makes it in retrospect. So it was just such a growing pains kind of argument, this argument that everybody had over story modes in bioware games at the time. That was so controversial. When now, games are so reactive and people see them, I think, so differently, that that wouldn't be the flashpoint that it was.

I mean, for a variety of reasons. But that's one of them. Yeah. You're referring to the statements that Jennifer Hepler made, right, in 2012? Yes. Yeah. I, okay. So I will, this is another one of those pre-Gamergate things that I go back and I read it.

And I'm like, really? People are this mad about this? And it's like, yeah, no, people were, like, worried they were going to die because of responses to this type of thing. So Jennifer Heppler worked a bioware. I am positive. I don't have this on the record from her, but I'm positive she hates that this is the legacy that many people, quote, her having said this because it was clearly just something that she said and I think

is an extremely reasonable statement that somehow got blown out of proportion. So I'll just say that preliminarily. But we can link to the news stories about this at the time. But more or less, she said that she thought that Dragon Age and Mass Effect and Bioware games should have

a skip button for fight scenes. Which, by the way, I happily use since we code in two and did in Final Fantasy 6. And that seems completely fine with JRP fans. Nobody argues with me about that. Everybody understands that I would be playing that for the story. But for some reason, in 2012, when Jennifer Heppler said she wanted to just skip over the combat and just do the story, which by the way, still includes choices. You still have to create your character. You still have to, you know, decide what Hawk is going to say to their

compatriots. For some reason, this was considered anathema to a certain subsection of gamers and was one of the sort of data points on the scatter plot that led to the culture war at that time. Yeah. Well, okay, so there's some context here that is worth noting, which is that, um, A, mobile games and Facebook games were really on their peak and they were everywhere and you couldn't, you like, couldn't throw a video game without hitting one. You can shoot a Nerf gun without running into FarmVill or something else and ended with Bill.

I don't know. I don't know what those metaphors were, but just take it. And the other piece of context here is that people thought that console games were on their way out. People thought PC games were already dead. And RPG fans specifically had seen a lot of, quote, dumbing down of role-playing games. You Dragon Age and Mass Effect were seen as kind of like the quintessential examples of this because it took a lot of the complexity that was in older games like Baldur's Gate and Icewindale and really simplified a lot of stuff.

The theory from a lot of the hardcore gaming crowd was this was because of console gamers and the console gamers do not understand what the PC gamer master race. That's what people actually use, master race. And so this was kind of, one of the reasons that this became a flashpoint was not just because of the gender dynamic,

which was a certain part of it, but also because a lot of quote unquote, hardcore gamers, gamers with a capital of G, were worried that some of their favorite games actually were going obsolete and were not happening anymore as a result of what they saw as the boogeyman people like Jennifer Hepler. And that would change over time. Games were going to be all casual. There were never going to be any more hardworking. Exactly. And I think now, if that happened today, it would not be nearly as controversial because

there's so many more of those deep, complicated role-playing games. And now you cannot shoot a nirf gun without finding one of those on Steam. You're shooting, we're shooting nerf guns and you're hitting something. No, that's very true. Because combat is the most important way to interface with the world. Exactly. Exactly. Even when you're picking your games. Even when you're making metaphors.

Yeah. Although it's worth noting, I should say, because I kind of contextualized the Hepler stuff, it is worth noting that this also was very much this despicable act in this like proto, proto-Gamergate culture was stuff. She got death threats. And she was seen, like, people... It was awful. Like we're making fun of the way she looked, the way she presented herself.

There was a lot of really nasty stuff out there. And that very much was like this like capital G gamer being like the women are taking our games, which led directly to GERG. And so even even understanding that context of like the lack of deep RPGs and the Facebook games and mobile games and all that stuff, like you have to that, that context is important. But that doesn't justify anything that happened as a result of that. Right. It's like the consumer rights argument is similar to like the state's rights argument with the Civil War, where it's like, well, I guess that can be like a footnote in a textbook, but it's not really what the war was about. Like, it's important to like contextualize every piece of it and be like a lot of it was also very sexist people who were really mad that women were.

Even remotely attached to directing video games or like being in charge of what decisions were being made. But that's also part of why now when I look back on the. those comments that are like, gameplay first, no story, I can laugh at them. Because we've all grown. And I mean, looking at it now really underlines the way that the kinds of video games we play have changed. Like, even if you weren't an insecure or reactionary, things felt very different then. And now we're in this an era of plenty, even though we're currently in kind of a dry spell,

generally speaking, an era of tons of choices, tons of great ways to play video games, all kinds of styles, so many creative ideas. looking at that idea now of, well, what if you just skip combat and, like, focus on this part of the game? It just seems totally natural, which I think overall is wonderful. Like, it really does mean there's been a lot of progress, not just culturally, and that someone could say something like that and not be attacked in this terrible way online, but also in terms of just the progression of the art form. We're in a post-disco-elisium world. We're in a post-disco-elisium world. Although people do still get a post-disco-elisium world.

Although people do still get upset about things that make me feel a little sad. Like when people, and I still see people talk about this with Eldon Ring where people are like, but I didn't like Eldon Ring. And what if it's so popular that every single video game becomes just like Eldon Ring? And I understand where that comes from. But I think because I've seen arguments like that so many times in the past, I'm so much more able to relax now and be like, there are probably going to be a lot of games that really take a lot of inspiration from Eldon Ring.

There might be some you hate, but there also might be some you really love because they'll take inspiration from parts of Eldon Ring that you never even got to experience because you didn't like most of the game and you didn't play it. And they'll just take something else from it that's really cool or weird. And it'll just be more creative ideas that people have. And maybe everybody's really excited about Thing X this week or this year or this decade. But that's okay. I don't know. maybe that's corny, but having seen it all, having been a veteran of so many culture wars, I now feel like we're in a pretty good spot when it comes to a lot of these arguments, and that makes me feel better about the arguments that we have today.

Yeah, I agree. It's the silver lining of getting older, as you can finally relax about some things. That's true. We've all grown, and we would never need to argue about this again. Well, with that, I'd say let's take a break and then come back with one. more thing. Hello, I'm a stuffit dowager countess. Travis? I'm judging everybody's manners. Oh, no. Schmaners isn't judgy. It's about teaching you to be your best self and be a little more confident when you enter social situations that you don't understand and maybe also teach you a little bit about

about history to know or give you interesting things to talk about at parties. Yeah, like the secret life of Emily Post. Or like why wrist watches are the way that they are. We can talk about table manners from the Victorian era. Sure, or what it's like to attend a Regency Ball. Yeah. You can find all that and more if you listen to Schmaners on maximum fun, or wherever your podcasts come from, I guess. Smanner, schmanner. Get it?

A man was walking along a beach which represented his life. At his feet were two sets of footprints, his and gods. But looking back down the beach, the man could see that in the hardest parts of his life, there was only one set of footprints. So the man said to God, why is there only one set of footprints when times were hard?

Where were you? And God replied, My precious child, I was in my car listening to the Beef and Dairy Network podcast. The Beef and Dairy Network podcast is a multi-award-winning comedy podcast and you can find it at maximum fun.org

or wherever you get your podcasts. We are back with one more thing. I'm going to go first because I'm the only one who didn't play a video game this week. Other than sweet coden, too. I watched a Netflix show called First Kill. Have you too heard of this show? I have a feeling this would not be advertised.

Well, okay, maybe you're going to surprise me. Kirk is about to say something. I have seen the promotional art for this thing every single time I turn on. Okay, great. It's pretty hot promotional art. I'm not going to lie. It's pretty hot promotional art, and I'll tell you why. This is a TV show about a young vampire girl who falls in love with a young slayer, Buffy style, comes from a long line of slayers, a long family of slayers. And of course, this vampire girl comes from a long line of vampires as well.

So they're both the princesses of their respective families, basically, but they fall in love. And it is a doomed romance. and it is one of the stupidest shows I've seen in a long time. It's really stupid. There's many parts of it that have made me laugh out loud with how stupid they are, but Dina and I have been loving it. We refer to it explicitly as the stupid vampire show in our household, and we just finished it last night.

And I really recommend it if you want something that's just not going to get into anything serious whatsoever. Like, for example, almost all of the vampire slayers, Not all of them, but almost all of them are played by black actors. And almost all the vampires are played by white actors. And this show takes place in Savannah, Georgia. Now, you might think to yourself, now it's very interesting. Like, the vampires represent this sort of white aristocracy of Georgia.

And the slayers are like the up-and-coming, like, post-slavery proletariat workers who are fighting back again. No, the show is absolutely not going to go there. Don't even think about it. That is not a part of the show at all. There's absolutely like, talk about taking your politics out of media. casting director. It kind of is like Netflix style. It's like what people make fun of Netflix for doing, where it's like

pure colorblind casting, this queer romance at the center of it all. Nobody's going to bring up race. Why are you even thinking about it? We're just giving all these fun, corny role opportunities, very soapy role opportunities to a diverse range of actors who are all killing it in this

basically soap opera of a show. The theme song makes reference to Edward and Bella. It really has everything we could ever want in show, I think it's really stupid. I will say there were a couple parts where I felt like the show jumped the shark and then just kept going and it's only on season one, which is not a great sign. But one example of that is that in episode five, I don't consider this a spoiler because it's like scene setting as opposed to a plot thing. But in episode five, there's a part where the two main characters

end up at their high school on the set of their school play for Romeo and Juliet and they start acting out Romeo and Juliet together and then romantically fall asleep in Juliet's bed, just as Romeo and Juliet might have done. And I was like, I don't think I needed it to be that explicit. Like, I did already get two households, both alike, et cetera. I got that from the whole vampire versus Slayer think. Like, that was super, super clear to me. I didn't need the two characters to literally stand on a balcony and on like the floor of a stage. Like, it's ridiculous. Anyway, it's called First Kill. It's on Netflix. It's super, super stupid, and I enjoyed the heck out of it so much. So, Kirk, why don't you go next? Because I've given you such a good transition here. You have. My one more thing is also vampires. The vampires are not falling in love with one another. No. It is, you're pretty much killing vampires. So this is a game that I'm sure a lot of our listeners already know about because it's been out in early access for a little while and has really caught on by I only finally played it just this past week. It is a game called Vampire.

Survivors that's on PC and Mac. It's in early access that's made by a developer named Luca Galante. And man, it's really fun. Have either of you played this yet? No, but I'm very familiar. I have read and edited many a story. It's so fun. It's wild because it's wild in the context of our conversation, or at least appropriate in the context of our conversation, because the gameplay is so simple and the narrative layer is so straightforward. And yet, it works so beautifully. And I'm simple is, it proves that simple is best sometimes. So you play as, it's kind of a rogue like, a top-down, smash TV almost, like, just like you're in a room, top-down, pretty simple visuals. And you play as some sort of a vampire slayer, or at least I haven't unlocked a ton or played a whole ton of this game.

You play as Calliopee from First Kill. It's a Netflix tie-end. You're exactly. It's a tie-in game with their new games department. No, it's not. It's not a kidding. No, you're some version of a vampire slayer. And the thing of this game is you move around in a 2D space and you're always just attacking.

So you don't choose when to attack. Your character just attacks on a rhythm. And at first it's just bats that are coming at you. And you have to figure out kind of quickly, okay, I got to kind of move the bats and kind of kite them around the room and make these paths through the bats to kind of keep moving. And then you start to figure out, okay, well, my attacks go at this rhythm. so I have to move in right before the attack, so the attack hits in time for me to move through the path that I've cleared, then you gradually begin to get power-ups, and soon you're, you know, throwing axes and fire and magic spells in different directions off of yourself as you're

attacking, and then your attack gets bigger, and it starts going in both directions, and you get more powerful, and as that happens, the enemies get more powerful, and they begin circling you, and you have to really start to think, you know, oh, God, here comes this thing, I've got to keep going, and because it's a rogue-like, you know, you're just playing until you die, you will, inevitably die, no matter how long you last. Eventually this game will kill you, and then you start over again. And it's an extremely simple formula, and it's so much fun. I started playing this game, and about two minutes in was just laughing, just because it was great. It's a rare game that has that kind of an immediate effect, where you just can tell. This developer has figured

this out. They know exactly what they're doing. This is so much fun. And it really is fun. So I don't have a ton of deep thoughts on it and I haven't played a whole bunch. But wow, for just a game to pick up, spend 20 minutes having a great time playing, it's really good. It's also, I gather, extremely cheap and just gives you a ton of bang for your buck and just great game. So that's vampire survivors, PC and that. This is different than V Rising, which is that other vampire game that's popular now. Correct. And I have that installed and I've started it. Vampires are back. It's like so obvious vampires are back. Apparently V Rising is also very good, but I haven't had a chance to play. Well, Necklord.

You guys have to kill Necklord. Yeah, Necklord. Yes, I am about to fight Necklorn. I will be the true vampire survivor after that. So true. So true. Jason, what are you playing? Okay, I'm playing a video game called

A.I. The Somnium Files Dash Nirvana Initiative, which might be the worst title for a video game that I've ever played. Definitely up there. I would say it's the worst title since A.I. Omnium files. Yeah.

That's true. I love how Nirvana is not capitalized, but the A at the end of Nirvana is. Right. So it's like, well, so it's like A-I. Initiative and so the AI at the end of that. To me, it looks like it's actually a backwards word. Yeah, me too. It looks like it says anavron.

Anavron. Could be. So this is a game. So this is a sequel, as Kirk correctly pointed out, this is a sequel to. That's a very magnanimous of Jason. This is a sequel to 2019's AI The Somnium Files. So both of these games are like adventure games.

And they are written and directed by a guy named Kotaru Uchikoshi, who you guys might know from the Zero Escape series, which has an awesome name. Zero Escape. That game started with nine hours, nine persons, nine doors, great name. Virtue's last reward, great name. Zero time dilemma, great name. And then they've kind of, this AI, the Slamanyan files, total nonsense names. And I bet they're going to cost themselves like hundreds of thousands of potential sales because of this terrible name.

Anyway, I haven't played a lot of it, but it's really good so far. It's another murder mystery in the style of the first game. So far it seems like there are a couple of things I didn't like about the first game, which is that a lot of the actual gameplay. I mean, talk about story versus gameplay. The story was very good. And then the gameplay itself was like where you have to kind of go into these dream worlds and just like randomly interact with objects and you have no idea what's going to do what

and you decide to kind of do a lot of trial and error to figure out the best way to go. That seems to be back in a way that is very unsatisfying. But I'm pretty early in it, so I reserve the right to change my mind in case things get better. And it surprises me in fresh ways. But the story is really interesting. So the concept of the story is essentially it takes place in kind of the present and the past, and they're six years apart. And so six years ago, from the time of the game,

one of the characters, one of the two detective characters, found the right half of a man, just like the severed right half of a man in a gymnasium. Like it just appeared in a gymnasium. And for six years, this was a big mystery. It was called like the half-body killing or whatever, and nobody knew what happened. Six years later, in the present time,

another detective who you play as finds the other half of the man. But it seems like they have both, like they were, it was, they were sliced apart at the same time. So there was some like time skipping shenanigans going on. And in both eras, both the paths in the present, the autopsy says that the man died like just a few hours ago. So that's the mystery. This sounds like someone was half into the time machine. Yeah, exactly. So that's the kind of fundamental mystery that the game starts with.

And based on the first game, I know it's going to have lots of twists and turns. time travel shenanigans and what uh ucikoshi always does with these games is he creates these um kind of uh flow charts where you make choices and you have to go you have to you kind of like follow a branching timeline and you have to like move back and forth among the different timelines with information very much the gamification of narrative exactly but it's it's really awesome and he he's brilliant at mapping out these stories um highly recommend if anyone out there hasn't played the zero escape games highly highly recommend all of them um i think you get them all in a package on steam these days, although not switch yet, sadly.

But AI of Asomnium Files, Nirvana Initiative, I'm into it so far. I'm definitely going to talk about it more down the road once I've had a chance to play more of it. But yeah, it's cool. And hopefully less of the kind of horny nonsense that was in the first game, because the first game had a lot of horny nonsense. At one point, you had to, like, throw a porno mag, which would heighten your main character's senses, like by seeing a porno mag, he would suddenly turn into like, like, pop

by eating spinach. your main character seeing in front of it. So hopefully there's less of that perverse stuff in here and it's just a solid mystery. But so far I'm into it. So wait, is this game a sequel?

Like, is it its own game? Yeah, so actually, it's really clever. Why is it called that? It is a sequel. I don't know why it's called that. Maybe it'll be explained by the end of things. But it is a sequel.

At the beginning of the game, they ask you, have you played the first game? And they give you like a trivia question about the first game to like test if you've actually played it. And what the game says... You would have had to have played it

to, up this game because of the titles, but go on. That's true. What the game says is that if you haven't played the first game, it'll omit all of the spoiler potential, like potential spoiler lines and like revise the script to not include anything that could be a spoiler. And the game assures you as you're playing. It's like, you can play this. This story has nothing to do with the first game. You can play this without having to understand the first game and we'll just remove all the potential spoilers. That's very unusual. So far it's all the same characters, though. It's like every single character

who I've been in the first game is back for this one. But it seems like it's standalone, so you can just step in. But anyway, like I said, I've only played a couple hours. So I will definitely be talking about this more once I've really dug deeply into it. They sent, I got an early code, but they sent it out pretty late. So need to spend more time with it. All right. Sounds good.

Well, we've done it again. Done another episode. We did it. Yet another debate. Put it to rest in a coffin. It's definitely not an undead vampire that will come back to. Bite us again. Definitely not, Nicklard.

I'll see you both next week. See ya. Yeah, 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 maximum fun.org slash join.

Find us on Twitter at triple clickpod, send email to 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.org. Comedy and culture. Artist owned. Audience, audience supported.