Triple Click - Take-Two Buys Zynga, E3 Dies, and Ken Levine Struggles

Episode Date: January 13, 2022

The year's only started but it's already full of GAMING NEWS! Join Jason, Maddy, and Kirk for a breakdown of this year's biggest headlines: Take-Two buying Zynga, E3 essentially dying, and the trials and tribulations of BioShock director Ken Levine. Plus: a cool new mystery show and the return of Jason's NFL stories!One More Thing: Kirk: Only Murders in the BuildingMaddy: Homestuck Made This WorldJason: Chargers vs. RaidersLinks:Jason’s report on Ken Levine’s Ghost Story Games: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-03/bioshock-creator-s-next-game-and-its-narrative-legos-in-turmoilThe two-hour Sarah Z Homestuck video that Kirk watched: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohFyOjfcLWQ&t=1518sMusic from Only Murders in the Building, composed by Siddhartha KhoslaSupport 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

Whenever I hear about a video game publisher buying a game studio for billions of dollars, I think, man, that's a pretty good idea. I should sell one of my video games studios. Welcome to TroubleClick where we bring the games to you. We've got a news roundup this week with Mobile Game Studio Zinga getting bought for $12 billion, E3 going online only, and Jason's big new report on Ken Levine's troubled post-Bioshock studio. Let's get into it. I'm Kirk Hamilton. I'm Maddie Myers.

And I'm Jason Shrier. Hello. Hi. Hey. Hello. Hello to both of you. It's us. Podcasting for another week.

For another week. And we do this every week, don't we? Wow, we do. We're able to do that because we're supported by so many wonderful listeners. Just buffeting us every time. They're there, supporting us all. They keep us kind of floating. It's like those where you can practice skydiving and you float above the big fan.

Our maximum fun members are the fan that keeps triple click supported in our squirrels. suit. Is that really a thing? You can like practice skydiving on a fan? Yeah, this is the first time learning of it. It sounds awesome. I don't want to skydive. I thought that was just a video game thing where you use fans. Yeah, you wear like a squirrel suit above a fan and you float in the air. That I would be willing to do. I don't want to skydive. It sounds too scary. But this big fan idea. Love this. I will never skydive ever in my life. Yeah, well, um, not only is it a fun pastime. It's also a good metaphor for a listener-supported podcast, like Triple Click. So, you can become a member and you can support us.

If you go to maximum fun.org slash join and become a member, you'll help us keep making this show and you'll get access to monthly bonus episodes like the one that we just released. We actually released two in rapid succession. Bam, bam. First, our favorite stuff of 2021. Bam. And then, like two weeks later, a whole big long beans cast about the Matrix trilogy

and the Matrix Resurrections. Bam. Just two, one-two punch. Definitely. definitely one of the best beans casts we've done. It was fun. It was fun. Really, really fun. To talk about all four of those movies.

Overstuffed beans. Loved it. Yes, a lot of beans everywhere. So anyways, you can find those in the Maximum Fun bonus feed. If you are a member and if you want to become a member, maximum fun.org slash join. And as it happens, there is another way that you can support Triple Click, a brand new way that's very exciting and is actually being worn by Jason Schreier right now

on this Skype call, and that is the Triple Click T-shirt that you can order online. We finally have merch, which is so exciting. I don't have mine yet, but I'm very envious of Jason's shirt. So yeah, we'll put a link for that down on the show notes, but you can totally order a Triple-Click shirt. It seems like good quality. I'm wearing it right now. It seems like pretty good.

I paid for it. I bought two, actually, one for my wife, and it seems like good quality. So I'm stoked about it. You know you're going to get a cut of that back. Right. I know. It's kind of weird. I bought one too. I think it's a pretty small cut. But hey, you're

in a way you're getting some of your money back. It's like a rebate situation. You got to fill out a form. You're going to have to put that on your taxes. If people want to support the show, support the show, but I'm becoming a member. This is kind of a very, very... This is if you want a fun triple-click show. Buy a T-shirt if you want a T-shirt.

There's also just, you know, the cool word of mouth advertising of wearing a T-shirt that looks so freaking awesome. And then people are like, oh, look at this, like, sort of experimental art of these controllers. Triple-click. What is that? And you're like, oh, it's just the greatest video game podcast of all time. And then they're like, what's a

podcast? And then like, that's the rest of your evening. I really want to see someone out in public wearing a triple-click shirt. And if I see someone, if I see you out in public wearing a triple-click shirt, I will come up to you, I will shake your hand. I might even take an audio recording clip of you and put it on triple-click. That's how excited I am about the idea of seeing someone out there

wearing a triple-click t-shirt. So that's motivation to buy it and to track Jason down. I mean, he's saying this. I'm not saying this. Jason wants to be tracked down in this context. I do. Find me in public.

I do like imagining if anyone has ever decided to listen to a podcast because they saw a cool t-shirt about it. Maybe that has never happened once in the history of time. You know what? That's a good point. I don't know if that's ever happened. I think it's more just a way. It is signal to other people out there in the world that you like triple-click. And then maybe someone goes up to you and is like, oh, my God, triple-click.

And then you have an immediate best friend. There you go. I think it is a good way to meet future friends. Yes. Or your future spouse. Like, what if you meet you? Sure. Sure.

We could be making matches out there. Yes. But in the game of life. That's true. So anyways, T-shirts. Links are in the show notes. Order some shirts. Get a shirt. They're really cool.

All right, one last thing before we get going, and this is related to our predictions from last week. I have already cleared this with Jason and Maddie, and the game that I picked, if I win the bet, was Alan Wake plus the DLC. But there's a chance we might want to play Alan Wake this year. And also, there was another game that I would have made my pick if I had thought of it, and I didn't think of it. Like, I just kind of forgot for a week. And then a couple days after our predictions, I was like, oh, my God, right. I totally was going to pick that game. So anyways, I asked Jason and Maddie, they said it was fine.

So I'm going to change my prediction game. This is a one-time-only thing. I'm changing it right now. It is no longer Alan Wake. It is now Dead Space 2. So if I win the prediction bet, which, who knows, Jason already got half of one of his predictions right in the week since we recorded that. Don't remind me. Two hours after we recorded.

God. If I do win, we are going to play Dead Space 2, which is very, very exciting. And so, hey, root for me to win. So we can all play Dead Space 2. Okay, that's it for stuff before we get into our topics for the episode. Jason, what are we talking about? Today we're talking about the news because against the laws, there has been a ton of news over the past two weeks, like since 2020, since 2022 started, there has been a ton.

Did you say since 2020 started? I mean, I don't blame you for saying that. It's technically true. I had just said two, so saying all the twos at once really. Got it, got it, got it. It is still 2020 though and it has been for 16 years. But go on.

I mean, yes. I should say that the, that's true, I should say that Kirk, the prediction that you just referenced happened two hours after we recorded last Tuesday night, Sony had a big PSVR2 event and they announced a new Horizon game from Gorilla that is exclusive to the PSVR2. So that was at least that was a tiny chunk of news,

a chunk of news that was good for our predictions, for my predictions. Yeah, it was. But let's talk about some big stories. There were a few big stories that I think we should talk about a little bit because, hey, big news happened. Including the most recent thing, which happened on Monday of this week, which is Take 2 Interactive, the publisher behind Rockstar Games and 2K, GTA, Borderlands, Bioshock, etc. Wait, list a few more games. A few more. A few more?

A few more. Okay. Midnight Club, Red Dead Redemption, Bullie. Take 2 bought Zinga for $12 billion. dollars and I feel like a lot of people saw that. Can you list any Zinga games? See if you can come up with any. Farmville. Zinga poker.

Wizard of Oz slots. So here's the thing. That's already more that that's better than I could have done. I'm impressed. Words with friends is a Zinga game. They do. Yes, they have words with friends. So I think that what's funny is that Kirk, I imagine your reaction to this news.

What was your reaction to this news when you see the headline? What's your instant reaction to me? the headline, take two by Zinga for $12 billion. Well, I know that the reaction, I know the reaction you probably want me to say, or the one that will provide for a good conversation, but my actual reaction was this really complicated thing, thinking back to the times when I visited Zinga HQ in San Francisco when I was writing for Kataku and like when Zingo was so hot right now when Farmville 2 came out. So actually it was like kind of all over the place.

But as a just modern gamer, my thought was like, do I care? Why do I care? Why does this matter? Well, no, I was going to say, I feel like the average reaction would be, wait a minute, Zinga is still around? Like, I thought they, like, because Zinka was, like you just alluded to, everybody was talking about Farmville about 10 years ago, like circa 2012 years ago, circa 2010. I forgot it's not 2020, despite what I said. Circa 2010, everybody was talking about Farmville. Everybody thought Facebook and social games were the future to the point where at Kotaku we had in like 2012, we had brief conversations. about starting a social game site that was going to be like a spin-off site.

Well, we had a vertical, like Kotaku Mobile and Kotaku Social. I think those did. Yeah, I think, well, that was like the Twitter account. That was the pioneer. Katakouca Social was like the pioneer for like it was going to be a separate site where like I think Mike Fahey was going to be editor-in-chief. That was one of the plans. But anyway, Facebook gaming, that was the biggest thing.

Farmville, you could not go anywhere without hearing people talk about FarmVell. You cannot open Facebook without seeing notification. that were like, hey, your Farmville friends, like, want you to come visit their farms. It was too many people. It was really fun and satisfying. Too many other people is extremely annoying and kind of spoke to like a dumbness in game design. There were some parodies of it, of the Farmville kind of ecosystem and how it worked. And it also brought a whole lot of microtransactions to popularity, a whole lot of kind of nefarious monetization schemes. But then Facebook gaming just died. It just dropped off a cliff. Facebook changed its algorithms.

You couldn't really spam people's news feeds and notifications anymore. Suddenly Facebook gaming was not as much of a thing anymore. It's still a thing, but like not as much of a thing. So Zinga struggled for a while and then pivoted to mobile, which is where they have been for the past few years. And they've been quietly just spying up studios and operating these games that are regularly on top of the charts. So what's funny is they actually released Farmville 3 two months ago in November of last year. And it was basically a flop. Like you look at the iPhone charts and it's like 500 right now. But Zingha does operate these games, including what I mentioned before, Wizard of Odds slots, which makes like a few million dollars in revenue a month, despite the fact that like I'm guessing that 95%

Maybe 99% of people listening have never heard of Wizard of Oz slots or played it. But that game is making bank. And I think what this ultimately speaks to, and we can talk a little bit about the transaction itself, is that the mobile market is bigger than ever. And I think what we and our kind of hardcore gaming enthusiasts bubble see is that the console market is getting bigger and bigger. But alongside that, the mobile market is exploding. And people who follow the game's business aren't surprised.

that take to wanted to get into a major investment like this, a major mobile game investment. Yeah, I guess my other point in saying words with friends quietly earlier was that I guess we do think of Zinka as being associated with these games that feel like glorified gambling mechanics, or at least to me personally, that's my opinion. I know they're not legally classified as gambling, ass officially covered. So anyway, words with friends, more of a real game,

basically just scrabble on the iPhone. also something that was super trendy for a while. But the fact that Zinga is capable of recognizing those kinds of trends and snapping them up, that doesn't mean I think they're amazing, but it does mean that I feel like they were capable of pivoting away from Farmville into something that I would describe as a more stimulating and fun game. And apparently they're also making a game for Snapchat that's like kind of an Among Us clone. I don't know a lot about it.

It's called Revamp, but I was just reading about that. in the midst of the coverage of the acquisition. So I was kind of like, okay, maybe they're just looking at game mechanics that work really well and putting them on phones. All of that in theory, not exciting to me. Yeah, Words with Friends. It should be noted that Words with Friends actually started as a Facebook game. So that was like, Zingah had that originally back in the social days.

But yes, then moved it to iOS. Yeah, see, I remember it as just a phone game. But I'm also just like, it'd be cool if phone games were better. I had a prediction two years back. that we decided I won with Among Us, where I basically was like, there should be another game like Pokemon Go, but good.

And Among Us and Genshen Impact were both the mobile games that I said qualified and I stand by that. And I still feel that way about mobile games. I still feel like there's, there's room there for stuff that isn't just populated by, you know, 99% players who are playing it once a day for free and 1% players who are whales

and, you know, financing the entire Zingia Empire with their life savings because they are hopelessly dictated. That is a format for gaming that depresses me and makes me worried. But words with friends seems pretty cool to me. That's fine. Maybe we do that. I don't know. Yeah. I like looking back at this period, the original period, when Zingo was super hot to trot and they were recording hardcore games, enthusiast press and having us come down. They have this huge building. I wonder if they're still in that building. They might have moved out. Bing! Future Kirk here just wanted to bing my way in here to say that Zinga is still in that

same building in San Francisco, though they sold it for $600 million in 2019 and they're just leasing space now. Seems like a pretty good way to do things if you ask me. Okay, back to the show. Bing! They were in this huge building. It was like the former home of one-up and a bunch of different places in San Francisco. And they let you have your dog in the office. And it was very startup-y. Like it had a very San Francisco startup. You know, bring your dog. There's a food court. It's really cool. This is a great place to work. And I always got the sense I've visited, I think, a couple times to interview people for stories that never really went anywhere because our readers never really cared about about Zingo. But I always got the sense that there were a lot of smart people there because they had a lot of money and they were able to hire a lot of smart people to work there.

And it's interesting that they built this huge company that was so reliant on Facebook. And then Facebook, like you said, Jason, sort of changed the way they did things. And I think I would imagine that someone at Zingo was like, oh, shit. Like, we're our whole thing here. We're making all this money, but we're really reliant on Facebook, which just reminds me of what we went through in publishing as well, to a lesser extent since publishing wasn't quite as reliant on Facebook as Zingha. But it was the same thing where like...

People still lost their jobs over that pivot. Oh, no, no. The pivot to and from video. We had people hired just to make Facebook live videos. Yes, I'm just saying that media was not as reliant on Facebook as Zingo was. Like Zingo was sure. very reliant on them to the point where it was like, wait a minute, like this one company, this other company controls our fortunes.

Some sites were upworthy, upworthy was like the Zinga of media. Yeah, yeah. So they seem to have successfully pivoted out of that role, which is impressive. There was sort of a question for... Well, so you want to hear something funny? You want to hear something extremely funny? Well, maybe not funny if you're Zinga. But so a large part of Zinga's monetization strategy is through ads.

That's how they make money off of words. with friends. That's how they make money off of a ton of games, including their quote-unquote hyper-casual games, which is one of the space they've really entered in a big way. And hyper-casual games are essentially like these like little, Maddie, you were talking about one of them a while back like that you were playing on your phone, that soothing thing. What was it like drops or water? Water. Water. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's like nothing. You're just poor colored water from glass to glass and like a puzzle formation and you put all the right colors into the same glass. Yeah. That's hyper-casual.

game. And so that has ads, right? The game you play, that has ads on it. Okay, so that's become a huge part of Zinga's business to the point where they actually bought an advertising company called Chart Boost that, like, does ads on mobile games. But hey, last year, Apple changed their privacy

policies to make it so, like, users have to opt in to advertisement data tracking. And, uh-oh, Zinga got screwed again by relying on too much on a single tech company. In this case, it was Apple. So Zinga was, uh, was, I mean, Taitu paid so much money for Zinga, and we can get into that in a second,

but Zingo was kind of in a position where they felt the need to sell, and their stock had been going down a large chunk of last year, largely due to that advertisement issue. That makes me baffled at how much they sold for, though, that contract that you just shared. This is absurd. So, yes. So what's interesting is that, like, if you look at the landscape, EA bought glue a mobile company and Playdemic another mobile company. Activision Blizzard bought King people who made Candy Crush a few years ago and Candy Crush King has become like a large part of Activision's business. Take 2 was very late to the party here and like there were a lot of

other mobile companies that were sold to other their Take 2's rivals and so Take 2 was kind of like oh man we got to get someone so this is a very much a desperation move for them. They paid $12 billion which is like a super high premium over what the company was actually trading at. And I think that's largely because they felt like they had to. It was just like total desperation. In fact, take two stock dropped after the news. Like their shares fell like 15% on Monday after they announced this big acquisition. That's funny.

So the story isn't that Zinga did so well to be sold. It was the Take 2 screwed up and needed to buy something. Exactly. And you could say, I mean, Zinga, was in a position of strength in some ways. Like I said, I mean, some of their mobile games are still charting really well. So, like, take two buys, this guaranteed revenue from having, like, Wizard of Oz slots, which makes a shitload of money on the App Store, right?

So, but here's the other thing. And this is the part that I think is the pivotal part of this deal. There's no GTA online mobile. GTA Online is the biggest game on the planet. Like, one of the top games, GTA5 has sold 155 million copies. It's considered amazing for a game to sell 15 million copies. And this game is sold 155 million copies. Think about how crazy that is.

155 million copies. So, GTA5 is one of the biggest games on the planet, but there's no GTA mobile version of GTA5 or GTA online, whereas you look at its biggest competitors, which are Fortnite and Roblox, and those two have mobile apps that are the same game on mobile that are regularly on top of the charts. So really, this is Take 2 saying, hey, we can't really do this, build our own version of GTA online internally because we don't have the developers of the expertise to do that.

So we're going to bring in Zinga to do that. And part of their, Strauss-Zellnick, the CEO of Take-2, made the media rounds yesterday. And one of the things he was saying was, hey, we have this library of IP, all the list of games I mentioned before. And one of the things we're going to do is like have Zingo work with that IP. So ultimately, I think what we're going to see out of this is like a free-to-place. mobile version of GTA online, among other things. Plus, like, a free-to-play mobile version of, like, you know, Bioshock, Andrew Ryan's casino, and then, like, a free-to-play mobile version of, like,

Mad Moxie's bar and borderlands, et cetera, et cetera. One can only assume. Yeah, no, definitely. So fun. So, so exciting. Yeah, I mean, from a, from a gaming enthusiast point of view, it's kind of like, oh, my God, like, I imagine a lot of gamers are just like, But I think the past few years have proven that this world can exist as a complementary ecosystem to the console and PC.

There was a time when analysts believed that mobile gaming was going to kill console games. But time has proven that both are just growing. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that was the takeaway from the last time we were talking about Zenga, where everybody was like, oh, God, this sucks. This is going to become video games. It did not become video games. It just became more video games.

Yeah. It is sad that it seems to be predatory for a lot of people, but hey, it is what it is. Yeah, I wish that part would change, but hey, it's still good. Some more headlines to talk about. This one, we don't have to talk about this for long because we've talked about this subject before, but E3 is canceled this year, which made me extremely sad. Okay, it's not canceled, Jason. It's online only. Do you consider that to be canceled?

Yes. Okay, go on. online only last year okay e3 the past two years the online version of e3 has been a joke it's just like publishers doing their own events and then like this like e3 last year was a complete like shit show um remember we we we talked about it we did some pods last year after it happened it was a disaster like other than the big conferences like xbox had a great conference and nintendo had a good conference and those things that can exist completely separately from e3 so let me ask you when you say e3 is canceled And then you talk about those press conferences.

Are those press conferences going to happen this year? Without a doubt, I'm sure, like, everybody's going to do their own thing. They might do it on their own timelines or they might do it all in June as its tradition, like at the same week as his tradition. But E3, the event is not happening, even if there's some sort of virtual thing called E3 in the same way that Jeff Keeley for the past three years has been stamping summer games fest on everything, despite the fact that companies don't seem to care about summer games fest. He just will tweet the hashtag Summer Games Fest and then a link to some stream and be like,

Summer Games Fest. E3 is going to be a similar thing, whereas maybe they loosely tie together all these events, but like it's not going to be E3 as we know it. And so what's interesting is they came out, the ESA, who's the organizers, the Entertainment Software Association, organizers of E3 came out and said, hey, we're canceling because of Omicron. They wisely, from their point of view, planted a press release with Venture Beat, which is Dean Takashi of Venture Beat, which is where a lot of these companies go

when they have these press releases that they want to throw out there. And then it only took a few minutes for the real story to come out via IGN and also reporter Mike Futter, which is that they both separately reported IGN's Reb Valentine, who's a great reporter,

and Mike Futter, who I believe is an independent reporter, they both were ordered separately that the ESA had been planning to cancel E3 months earlier. So this was in, entirely PR spin, getting them wanting to get ahead of it by putting the Omicron story out there, which really, if you think about it for even two seconds, it makes no sense that they would

cancel an event for June based on Omicron in January. Like it doesn't track at all. Especially because GDC is still on for March. As far as we know, it's still on at the time of this recording. They just announced all their panels this week. Yeah, that's an in-person event. And so once that was happening in person, I was like, okay, I guess E3 is happening. And then a couple weeks later, it was announced to be online only, which is baffling without the additional reported context.

It very strongly suggests, the very strong suggestion here is that E3 is dead. E3 is throwing in the towel. They are giving up because there is no way if you really take yourself seriously as this live event moving forward and you want to present this front that like you're still, you're coming back with vengeance. Then you do not like cancel this early. and the fact that they were planning two months ago to cancel the physical presence suggests that it is just they've given up no more E3 is is my read of the situation here which would make me very sad I feel like you two would care less because you don't go as often as well I liked going to apparently the last in-person E3 ever which was also my first

three it was cool that I got to go to that one E3 I I will say I'm curious whether companies see it as more beneficial to have their press conferences all in that same week rather than spread out throughout the summer, which is kind of how the first year of the pandemic went, where everybody kind of had press conferences at different times. There wasn't any form of E3, not even an online only E3. It was just kind of random scattered press conferences throughout the summer and then the fall. And that from a coverage perspective, very, very difficult, by the way. Like keeping track of when everybody's press conferences were, it was a pain on the reporter's side. And I also wonder if it was similarly kind of a pain on the publisher and studio side to not have like a specific event to plan the year around marketing wise or if it was easier to have their own events, except then you need to market each of your individual events rather than rely on the marketing machine that's associated with E3, which will automatically get people to watch an indie stream, for example, or like any stream affiliated with the, E3 brand, even though we might think it's a little weird or fake because it's like, well, these are all

just streams on the internet. It's not really E3. But the fact that they're all happening at the same time does provide a theoretical benefit that I could see continuing in a summer game fest type of a way where it becomes more of a hashtag than an actual thing. Yeah, it's got energy to it. Just having it all cluster together. That's for sure. I don't know. Maybe when we've considered whatever the pandemic being over looks like. Maybe after that there will be something that rises to take E3's place. Maybe Jeff Keeley will make summer games fest and

in-person event at the LA Convention Center and maybe none of this will actually matter. If anybody's going to do it, it's Jeff Keeley. Yeah, he can pull it off. All right, one more big story to talk about, which is that last week, Bloomberg.com's Jason Trier, ran a piece about Ken Levine,

Bioshock director, Ken Levine's new studio ghost story games and the issues that it is having. The short version of the story is that Ken Levine is a challenging manager to a lot of people. One person on the record called him a hard guy to work with, hard guy to work for. All three of us have heard all sorts of stories firsthand over the years about Ken Levine being difficult. Some certainly say, I don't know, abusive might be too strong a word, but he's certainly verbally berated people. all three of us have heard stories to that effect.

And then there's a lot of stuff that he just, as an author, quote-to-quote, he is inclined to want to change things constantly, which means throwing away a lot of work, which means throwing away a lot of other people's work. And he's been public about that philosophy. And I think the quote from him in the story is that he spends years just dicking around until the deadline approaches and a game comes out. But at Ghost Story, there are no deadlines.

Go read the story. We'll link it in the show notes. I don't want to summarize the, I don't want to include every single detail here, but the short of it is that, um, safe to say he's a pretty bad manager and he has hurt a lot of people with his management style, including some people who spoke on the record for the article and some people who spoke off the record. Um, he's, it's led a lot of people to burn out, quit. Um, eight years of working on a game with no end in sight. Pretty, pretty brutal. Um, so yeah, what do you guys make of the story of altruism and video games of Ken Levine and of ghost story. There's kind of a paradox to this, right, in that anytime someone talks about, to use Ken Levine as an example, oh, Ken Levine,

he made Bioshock, well, then someone will say, well, actually, like, so-and-so and so-and-so, this guy was the art director, this person did music, like this person was actually super crucial for it, blah, blah, blah. There is no one person who makes a video game unless you're talking about, you know, Eric Barone and Stardue Valley. Eric Barone, yeah. Yes, literally the example I was going to say. But, yeah, you know, that is the exception that proves the rule. So people will always say, well, you know, video games are made by teams, and yet it would appear that a video game team can be significantly hampered by an individual.

So maybe the autore theory that I believe in is the autore of fucking up your team. You are the otter of the fuck-ups. That appears to be a consistent thing with Levine, as much as he does have his name on some really great games. It just seems so consistent at this point. I mean, going back more than 10 years, the stories of constantly cut stuff, of revisions, of destroying people's work, of bad communication. And, like, I don't know, like, you could probably do that stuff in a way that didn't

leave people feeling so burned, but apparently that's not the way that happens. And it's worth noting that in response to my article, I didn't want to, like, single people out and retweet them or anything, but people on Twitter who worked with Kevin Aterational are, like, tweeting all these gifs and, like, sub-tweets and being like, yep, that's on Levine. So this is not something that people are like exactly keeping secret. It's something that he's been allowed to do because Take 2, the publisher, believes that he is going to make them money if he's given all this time as much time as he needs. It's kind of an interesting situation, right, in that the way they described the burn rate of their studio as being a rounding error. And we can

just kind of keep doing this forever because Take 2 makes so much money. And, you know, it's just not a big deal to keep this. 30 people only at that studio. studio going. Right. So that's just kind of an interesting place to be because I could see for a certain type of person and I, you know, clearly it does not work for a lot of people, but I could see for a certain kind of person. It could work great because it's like, well, we just get to play around with ideas and I don't know, whatever. They never really expect anything of it. And you know, I've got my family. I'm taking care of. I'm getting paid. This is fine. And not, not crunching. It sounds like they don't crunch. I'm like infinite. Yeah. It's kind of a weird one,

honestly, in some ways. But, but I will say that that's only if you, if you're on. Ken Levine's good side. And I think that, like, there are people who have certainly had super negative experiences with him and felt like he bullied them out of a company or bullied them out of the industry in some cases. Right. Also, it seems like Ken Levine might be the only person who works in the way that Kirk just described, where he seems completely at peace with the idea of never actually completing something and constantly revising it. I have talked to a lot of people at a rational as well, and that was how they would describe working with him would just be that he would have people create something extremely elaborate

and then once he finally saw it, he couldn't envision how a game would work until he saw it completely built out. And then once he saw it built out, he'd be like, oh, I don't like that. Let's cut all of that, which is just, especially for video games, it frustrates people. I won't say you can't work that way because Creeley-Biochok Infinite did come out. So like a thing happened eventually.

Well, Rob Ferguson showed up. Penn Levine does not seem, I don't know the man personally, but he doesn't seem to have the like natural sense of guilt that most people would have upon giving those kinds of directives. Like I know I, as a manager, I feel really bad when I tell a writer they have to do a total rewrite or that the story won't work at all despite all the work they've done on it. That feels horrible, but it happens. And sometimes you have to throw something out completely.

I don't enjoy it. And I usually that's a day of work and not once of it. can. Sometimes it's, sometimes it's a long time. It's nothing like a video game, but it's the closest approximation I have. And if I were Ken Levine, I wouldn't be able to live with it. I'd be like, what am I doing? I got to make an outline. Like, I'm, I got to complete something. Like, I just don't have that personality. And it sounds, I would, I would find that to be purgatorial. I would be completely miserable in that workplace, personally. Yeah, no, when you put it that way, I mean, it is true that, like, actually finishing work and having work that you

can show to people and be proud of is I would say for most people is a significant part of what makes you happy in your work. And if you just are going to work forever and never release it, it would feel maybe purgatorial or just unsatisfying in a sort of way, even if you were getting paid and not crunching. Yeah. And even if there were no reports about Ken Levine being moody or temperamental, like even leaving aside those reports, which I'm not saying they're not important, or the reports about how intense crunch was at a rational, which I mean, I think just based on the people that I had talked to at the time about the company, part of why that crunch was so severe was because Ken kept changing things in the way that I described,

which then meant that people would have to crunch in order to meet the changes, to like rebuild whatever thing had been cut, which if you have infinite time, yeah, you don't need to crunch, but also you have infinite time to throw out something you spent months on, which I guess you have no attachment. It's a very meditative way to go about thinking about your art. It's just nothing matters. Anything could be trash tomorrow. That's a way to be. So a couple of things. One is that Maddie, the way that that method that you're describing, which is Ken Levine's method, 100%, it can ultimately ship a game if you're making something that is like a linear cinematic game and all you have to do, like what you have to do is put

together this long story and maybe you'll throw out like two entire games worth of stuff along the way. But like ultimately you're just you're putting together a linear. your story. So there is going to be a beginning, middle, and end. What they're doing now is like a systemic procedurally generated narrative game, which is made in a completely different way. If you think of like Wildermouth, like Wildermouth doesn't have a beginning, middle, and end, it has all these bits and pieces and systems in place. And so what the, when that approach is applied to a systemic game where like things are looking super messy and ugly and bad up until the very, very end, because you don't really know how it's going to pin out. And sometimes it's

always going to be messy because it's procedural. You have Kelvin looking at it and saying, oh, this isn't working and this is bad. This is too messy when it's like maybe not take, like, it's never going to be polished to the extent that he wants it. And like he might not be comfortable with seeing stuff on screen that's like out of his control as a storyteller. And that's when you get into what we have at Co-Story Games, which is eight years of development and nothing to show for it. That I think is a really interesting aspect of the autour theory and the idea of Neil Druckman comes to mind as a director who's extremely controlling

about his games and I would say can accurately be described as the O'Tour of a game like The Last of Us Part 2, obviously I know other people worked on it but he really does, from everything I've heard, exhibit a lot of control, exert a lot of influence. And the idea of someone like that

starting to work on a game where the game itself is going to take control away from them and tell the story, it seems like maybe a bad fit. It feels like a horror movie premise or something. thing where it's like you're trying to make a game and the game itself doesn't do what you want it to do. It's resting control away from you and becoming the otter of itself. That's a great idea. Ken Levine, don't take that. It's kind of that Netflix Bander Snatch actually. It's kind of the story

of Bander Snatch. Neil Dreckman came up to me at the Game Awards. He saw me at the Marriott. He came up to me to say hi. We had had a spat on Twitter a couple of years ago. So I was like, oh, hey, like, it's good to see him. We had that online. fight, whatever. And he told me he read my most recent book, PrestiSet. And he got like pulled away by someone else. Sam Lake pulled him away before I had a chance to like talk to him a little bit more. But I was thinking to myself, oh, man, like, I wonder what you thought of that, the irrational chapter. Oh, is that all he said? He was just like, oh, I read your book. And then Sam Lake was like, wait, I need to talk to you about Alan Wake's novel. You need to follow up with Neil and find out what

he thought. Yeah, I need to follow up with him. Yeah, I need to, I'm very curious as to what he made of that because yes, there are a little bit of a cliffhanger. I think you should add him on Twitter and just be like, hey, Hey, man. What did you think of the book? Yeah. No, I don't actually think you shouldn't do that. Please don't do that. Well, I barely even remembered what our Twitter spat was about. I hope I run into Neil Druckman for any number of reasons, but mainly because I'd like to ask him what he thinks about your book. I'll definitely make that question number one if I ever get to meet him. Yeah, I'm very curious. I think he said he enjoyed reading it. Probably. It's a good book.

It's pretty good, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, the thing about, like, not only do you not get to see your work come to fruition, you also don't get to show it in portfolios because, like, it's all NDA'd. Also, it's probably going to be scrapped by the time if you leave, like at this point. So, okay, a little bit more context here is that when Irrational, Levine and to shut down Irrational to start this new company, Levine took 11 people with him from Irrational. So there were a group of 12 that started this new company. Of those 12, seven have now quit.

They came out, their idea was we're going to change culture. We're going to change rationales culture. We're going to start from scratch. We're going to build something new. They wanted to ship a game by the fall of 2017. Needless to say, old patterns die hard, and it's very difficult for people to change. And a lot of those old patterns just kept creeping up. And the game that existed in 2017 probably bears.

zero resemblance to the game that exists now, if something exists now. And who knows what's actually going to ship if it ever ships. It's just a kind of sad and draining story. And I think even though there's no like slam dunk, like, oh my God, this guy was, was, uh, beat his staff with a hammer or like, I don't know, abused people physically. Like, none of that is in the story. I do think that it's, it's like something that can be really just grueling. for people, especially if they came into it, thinking that this is going to be different, that they're going to ship a game in two years. Like, there's, it's really, it's the purgatorial aspect, Maddie, that you mentioned is like, even worse when you're constantly promised that it's going to come out,

that things are going to be different, that things are going to change. And then that just never happens. It's like, nobody came into this thinking, we are going to spend eight years on a game. Yeah, I also think having read press reset and having enjoyed it, I wonder, if some of these management issues that we see at these major studios are just so endemic to games as an industry? Like, how do we just get, how do we get everybody into management training? Because what we're describing here is like, I know I don't do well without a deadline. I need a deadline. I need something to hold me accountable so that I can complete something. I've been known to get stuff done of my own Steam, but that's very unusual. And a manager, a good

manager, a project lead, whatever, a tour, if you want to use a fancy schmancy word to describe what essentially this job is, which is just the director of this project, they help everybody get their job done. That's what you're supposed to do. Yeah, they're making decisions constantly. Hearing that either you end up in this purgatory situation, like Ken Levine has his staff apparently in by these reports, or you end up in something closer to like the Activision Blizzard Crunch stories we've read about.

or the naughty dog crunch stories we've read about where like there's a deadline and you have to meet the deadline but instead the culture is toxic in a completely different way like what how do you think why is why there's the two things right where's the middle ground come on and then the other the other contrast here so the contrast I keep thinking about is anthem which I also wrote a long story about a few years ago at Kotako and the issue was it with anthem was that they didn't have a creative director making decisions they didn't have an answer coming in and

like, okay, we're doing this, this, and this. That can be as big an issue, if not an even worse issue than having a director who's constantly changing things and being too heavy-handed. So it's really like what you need is like this platonic, idyllic notion of the creative director who is like making everybody a best version of themselves. And I feel like that person is just very rare. Knowing what to cut and what to compromise on and so on. I mentioned Rod Ferguson earlier.

People talk about him as the guy who came in to kind of close. Because he's a producer, and it does seem to me that O-Tour theory doesn't function in games, obviously, because so many people work on a game. And one of the biggest and most important partnerships, which it could be two people or it could be more than two people, but is between the creative people and the producers, the people who do the scheduling and say,

well, we're going to hit these milestones, we're going to get this done. And if you're good at that, that is how the whole thing theoretically works anyway. ways. Like you need those two roles and it can't just be one person doing all of that. I mean, maybe in some rare cases, but that's pretty tough to do both at the same time. Yeah, but you don't just need that. You also need that person to have enough power to be like, okay, we're doing this. So Echo Story, they had someone like that and, hey, he and Canada falling out and he left and now they have a new EP. But when there's nobody above them saying, we have to ship this game by

this date, then there isn't, there's no, the EP won't have any power to actually do anything. And that conflict between producers and creatives, I mean, that is a conflict as old as any art production in history. Like, that will always exist, and it's just a tension that exists in this kind of work. And that's okay. Like, there are just ways to do it better and ways to do it worse. And clearly, this seems to be not as good of an example. Yeah, it's so funny. Like, usually we look at stories and it's like, oh, man, those publishers force this game to come out, like, on this day, even though it was rushed.

But, like, here we can see the opposite problem, which is one of the reasons I thought it was such an interesting story. Anyways, I think it is time for us to take a break and then be back with one more thing. You're in a theater. The lights go down. You're about to get swept up by the characters and all their little details and interpersonal dramas. You look at them and think, that person is so obviously in love with their best friend. Wait, am I in love with my best friend? That character's mom is so overbearing. Why doesn't she just stand up to her?

Oh, God, do I need to stand up to my own mother? If you've ever recognized yourself in a movie, then join me, Jordan Cruciola, for the podcast. feeling scene. We've talked to author Susan Orlean on realizing her own marriage was falling apart after watching adaptation, an adaptation of her own work, and comedian Hari Kondobolu on why Harold and Kumar was a depressingly important movie for Southeast Asians. So join me every Thursday for the feeling scene podcast here on Maximum Fun. I'm Lisa Hannah-Walt. And I'm Emily Heller. Nine years ago, we started a podcast to try and learn something new every episode. Things have gone a little off the rail since then.

Tune in to hear about. Low-stakes neighborhood drama. Gardening. The sordid, nasty underbelly of the horse girl lifestyle. Hot sauce. Addiction to TV and sweaty takes on celebrity culture. And the weirdest, grossest stuff you can find on Wikipedia.org. We'll read all of it no matter how gross.

There's something for everyone on our podcast, Baby Geniuses. Hosted by us, two horny adult idiots. Hang out with us as we try and fail to retain any knowledge at all. Every other week on Maximum Fun. And we are back for one more thing. Maddie, kick us off. Sure. So I want to recommend a podcast,

and it is called Homestuck Made This World. This is a podcast that is hosted by Cameron Konsulman and Michael Lutz, who keen-eared listeners might remember host Just King Things, which is a podcast we all talk about all the time, where they read every Stephen King book in publication order. Kirk guested on an episode of that show about the stand miniseries. So, you know, that podcast is great too. Whatever.

Who cares? Just King thinks is out. Homestuck is in. This is my new favorite podcast. This podcast is incredible. Really? It is so good. I have never read Homestuck.

I have no intention of reading Homestuck. I don't think I need to. However, I feel like I'm learning so much about how influential Homestuck was. and has been. I didn't know that it was essentially a point-and-click adventure game and not so much a web comic at all. So if you're interested in video game design, you should listen to this show. If you're interested in pop culture and media criticism and how something awful and its style of humor has influenced basically every single thing on the internet you should listen to this show. And also just Cameron and Michael are excellent media critics and I enjoy them and their sense of

humor. The premise is Michael used to be a homestuck super fan in his youth when this this this comic first started coming out in like 2009, so just like peak edge lord something awful days. And Michael's very, very lighthearted about his past. And Cameron has never read Homestock, never wanted to read Homestuck, still probably doesn't want to read Homestuck and is being pulled along through it in a very charming way. And I just really enjoy it. So yeah, it's called Homestuck Made This World. And if you like pop culture criticism and analysis, even if you don't even know what

Homestuck is and you've never heard of it, I think you'll find this. show really, really fascinating. Nice. Yeah, that would have been my question. I watched a YouTube video. I think I mentioned this on a bonus episode. There was just this two-hour deconstruction of Homestock. If I can find it, I'll link them in the show nuts. And it was cool. It was really interesting. And like you said, it made me realize, oh, okay, so Homestock is kind of, even in the world

of video games, just an important thing to understand a little better than I did. And it's nice to know that I don't have to actually go and read it, play it, and experience the whole damn thing, just listen to this podcast. because I do want to listen. It sounds great. That is useful to know. It's way funnier to hear Cameron being forced to endure all of it. That's a lot more fun, at least for me.

Yeah, I can imagine. Kirk, your one more thing was going to be my one more thing, but you beat me to it. I did. I have also watched it. We all have. Nice. Oh, you've all watched it. My one more thing is a show that I watched over the holiday break called Only Murders in the Building.

And that I really loved and just wanted to recommend anyone who kind of saw it passed them by and didn't watch it. This is a half-hour murder mystery comedy starring Martin Short, Steve Martin, and Selena Gomez as the three leads. And I loved it. First off, I love the music. When it started, the music started up. This show features the bassoon heavily in the, and there's a bassoon playing character and also in the score. And the minute the score started, like the title music, I was just like, dude, this is great. And then it's a bassoon playing character. And It's just fantastic throughout. So the music really sold it for me. It has that kind of... You have to say the premise, because the premise is fantastic.

Yeah, so, well, the music, that's the most important thing. Bing. Just really quick here, I do want to credit the composer. It's a composer named Sidarta Colsa. Absolutely beautiful music. Really elevated the show for me. Okay, onto the premise. Bing! So it's a murder mystery. It's about a murder podcast, a true crime podcast. It's sort of sending up true crime while also presenting a pretty fun murder mystery. It's extremely New York. It has a very David O. Russell kind of energy to it, the director of I heard Huckabee's many other films. And the music has a kind of John Bryan energy too. So the whole thing just gives me that feeling. I like how you just wind up talking about the music. It's a very musical show in a lot of

ways. And I think that it rolls along on this really wonderful rhythm that is very musical, even outside of all of the music that is featured on the show. And I just loved it. I thought it was delightful. And the last thing I'll say that I loved, and I'm curious what the two of you thought as well, I really liked the intergenerational cast. I thought that the way that Selena Gomez played off of Martin Short and Steve Martin, two amazingly talented comedians who are both in their 70s, and she's like 24 or whatever, and they just, I've never quite seen an ensemble like that before with that specific energy where it is frequently referenced their age difference, and they're trying, and they're just being friends, and it's not like their

grandpas and you know Martin Schwartz's character has a son but they both don't have kids and are kind of just in this apartment building living a sort of different lifestyle than your average TV septuagenarian and just I really loved the chemistry between the three of them and also just love the show of Roth that was super fun

yeah I really liked it too yeah so the premise I mean what what hooked me was the premise which is that these three people are huge fans of this this serial podcast it's like a hosted by Tina Fey facsimile of cereal and then someone dies in their building and so they all decide to start a podcast of their own about them

solving the murder. So it's about like these super fans of true crime podcasts doing their own true crime podcasts, which I found very funny. Also the podcast gear on the show is super right on, like all the gear. As someone who has spent a long time like researching and getting the correct podcast gear, every microphone, every field recorder, it's all the correct stuff. Well, so a lot of the humor of the of the show comes from them recording a podcast, they're doing this solving. And like Martin Short's character is always like, so we're recording you, like stealthily saying it.

So people will know that they're being recorded. And he's also like a theater director, his character is. And so he'll be directing everybody as to like how to perform the podcast adequately. I think part of why the music is so noticeable is actually because since it's a show about a podcast, the idea of an audio serialized adventure is a key piece of it. It's not to say there's not like visual splendor to enjoy, but it does feel like a very audio-centric show in a way that I thought was really interesting and fun. And yeah, I agree.

I really like Steve Martin and Martin Short. I don't think I've ever seen them together in something. I'll probably think of something as soon as we stop this show, but I love them together, and Selena Gomez was like a funny triad for them. It was just bizarre. I would never have expected that casting. It was fun. Three Amigos is the classic, the classic movie.

That's the two of them and Chevy. With Chevy. Right, of course. Surprise TV Chase isn't in this. No, I'm not. Surprised about that. You know, he tried out for the Selena Gomez role, but they just didn't think it was a fit. It didn't work out.

Okay, guys, my one more thing is an NFL story. This one is a doozy, so get ready. This is a wild ride. I'll try to keep it as piffy as short as possible, but it was a wild ride. So Sunday of this week was the final week of the NFL season. And it was a weird run because this year they extended the NFL season. It was 17 games instead of 16. They've extended the playoff runs, so more teams can get into the playoffs, which sets us up for some weird scenarios.

So a few days before Sunday, people started to point out that there was kind of a weird sequence of events that could happen where if the Jaguars, Jacksonville Jaguars beat the Colts earlier in the day on Sunday, then we could wind up in this scenario where the Chargers and Raiders played at night in a game where both of them with a tie would make the playoffs. So if one of them won, the other one wouldn't make the playoffs, and they would. So if the Chargers win, they make the playoffs, Raiders win. They make the playoffs. If they both tie, they both make the playoffs. And that would be like a very weird scenario, which I will get to in a second. But it was so unlikely because the Jaguars are the worst team in the league and the Colts are playing for their playoff lives. Like they have to win to make the playoffs.

So it wasn't going to happen. Cut to Sunday. Sunday afternoon. The Jaguars destroy the cults. It is hilarious. the Jaguars, again, worst team in the league, the Colts fighting for their lives, like have all this momentum.

People thought they might be a playoff sleeper. The Jaguars beat the Colts. Colts don't make the playoffs. And we wind up in this situation. We're going into Sunday night, inexplicably against all odds, the charges and the Raiders will both make the playoffs if they tie. But here's the thing.

Like neither team, like, so what should happen, really, is both teams should get on the field and just take a knee the entire time and give up the game because if the score ends zero-zero, they will both make the playoffs. It's literally the prisoner's dilemma come to life where they have to both give up. If that happened, it would be, the takes would be so spicy and incredible. But you know what?

I mean, normally in the NFL season, like, if you are in a position to win the game, that's what you do. Like, there's a whole thing where at the end of a game, if you just want to run the clock out because you're ahead, you kneel, you just kneel. So you give up time. So, like, why wouldn't they do this? But both teams came into it being like, no, we're going to. compete even though they shouldn't have done that.

I guess to be fair, because of playoff seating, like the Raiders would have had to pace the chiefs if they lost or if they tied. So like it made sense from a competitive point of view that they went into that. So what would happen if everybody did that for every game of the whole season and they all just tied every single game? Wouldn't everybody kind of wins? I think that means everyone wins. Yeah, every single team wins the Super Bowl.

I don't think, I'm not sure how the math would work for playoff seating in that case. It would be very strange. It would break everything. There's only one way to find out. NFL players, if you're listening, you know what to do. I feel like the only way to win is not to play. I mean, we've solved it, you know? It sounds like a John Boy is like Madden experiment.

So we can experiment in Madden and see what happens there. But anyway, so here's what happened. So we get to the game. It's a good game, high scoring game. I stupidly bet on the under because I thought there was a chance they might both give up, but they did not. It was a good game, high scoring game. Get to the fourth quarter.

It is 29. 14 Raiders with about eight minutes left. So people are like, okay, Raiders are going to win, charges are going to lose, it happens. Chargers, drive, score, four minutes left. Score on a crazy, I should admit, by the way, at this point that I fell asleep at half time, so I missed all of this. But recapping, I caught up on what happened later. This is what you really want in the middle of a story, though.

Chargers score. Chase the story told her to have fallen asleep in the middle of events. Take it down to one score. Then have an absolutely batch of a drive to end the fourth quarter where they, they wind up converting on like three fourth and tens and score on a buzzer reader with zero time remaining score a touchdown and then kick a field goal to send the game to overtime.

So this is so improbable that at one point ESPN's win probability tracker had the Raiders at 99.9% chances to win the game. So we get to overtime. Raiders drive down the field, score a field goal. And the way that overtime works is if one team kicks a field goal, the other team has one shot, one drive, to get a field goal themselves. And then you keep playing.

If they don't get a field, the game is over. Chargers, drive down the field, drive down the field, drive down the field. Four minutes to go. Kick a field goal. Now it's 32, 32. Now we are at the point where a tie is actually in play, and both teams should sit and kneel and take the clock down because they both make the playoffs. But no, the Raiders keep driving.

Gets to the point where it's like 30-something seconds remaining and the Raiders are just running the ball. So they're clearly like running the clock out a little bit. and the Chargers could still make the playoffs with a tie. Chargers inexplicably call a time out, like stopping the clock, giving the Raiders time to think about it. Raiders run a play. They get a first down, kick a field goal.

Boom. They are winning the game. Chargers go home because neither team could just sit back and kneel the clock, run the clock out, kneel and get a tie. The Chargers are going home. I wonder if there's like a conversation during that timeout between the coaches just being like, this is crazy, right? Like, let's just call it.

On top of this, on top of all that, because the charges got knocked out, you know who gets its spot in the playoffs? The Pittsburgh Steelers, which is a team led by Ben Rathesberger, who is probably the most hated quarterback in the league, accused of sexual assault among many other horrible things. He's generally considered a horrible person. This is his last season. So everyone was like, oh, yeah, we never have to watch him again. He's done after today.

But no, he gets to play another week as a result of the Chargers and Raiders, not. doing the smart thing and just saying, hey, we're just going to have a tie. Wow. It's like a parable. Looks like they're not allies. They are not allies. They are bitter rivals. So, yeah, wild times in the NFL. Anyway, that is it for this week's episode. It is.

Let's agree that the three of us are going to call it here and end this episode. And this episode is a tie. Because we'll all make the playoffs. Can we do that for the predictions, too? Just kidding. Just kidding. We did last year. It could happen. It could happen. All right, well, I will see the two of you next week.

See you next week. Bye. Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddie Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes.

Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network, and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at maximum fun.org slash join. Find us on Twitter at triple clickpods and email the triple click at maximum fun.org and find a link to our Discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening.

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