Triple Click - Why Aren't Game Companies More Transparent?

Episode Date: March 18, 2021

Maddy, Jason, and Kirk open up the mailbag to answer listener questions about all sorts of things, from game company secrecy to the pros and cons of digital gaming. Plus: How do you know when a game just isn't working for you?One More Thing:Kirk: Progression and InconvenienceMaddy: WandavisionJason: GnosiaLinks:Maddy’s X-Men podcast The Mutant Ages: https://mutantages.comSupport Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinJoin 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

Triple Click has decided to become an NFT. So what does that mean? You send us a million dollars and we'll destroy the environment. Welcome to Triple Click where we bring the games to you. Today we are opening up the old listener mailbag and answering your questions on all sorts of things. So let's get to it, shall we? I'm Jason Shrier. I'm Kirk Hamilton.

And I'm Maddie Myers. We are back for another episode. Hello, my friends. We sure are. We are. It's true. Back to record a podcast like we always do. Another week.

Lovely to see you both. It is. It's nice to see you as well. The sun is in the air. Vaccines are going around. The sun is in the air. As opposed to, you know, the other places that the sun goes. I guess that is technically true.

The sun is in the air. Yes. It's in the vacuum of space. Just exactly where it's supposed to be. I guess I mean, I'm talking about like the metaphorical sun. Like the, it just feels like sunny. Yeah. Like, doesn't it just feel, I've been feeling really optimistic lately.

I've been feeling like all the vaccine news. It's just good news. I've been feeling very sunny. You know what else I'm optimistic about? What? This shows subscribers and members, Max Fund members. I'm very optimistic about people who help support this show. I mean, I'm optimistic about them as well.

As returning listeners know, we are a listener-supported podcast. We are entirely funded by, you. you the listeners and we are very appreciative to our listeners for that. People who support the show get all sorts of cool stuff. You get access to a big bonus feed where we do monthly bonus episodes. So you get extra triple click in the form of Beans cast and Beans Talks if you become a member. And in fact, we are about to announce our March Beans episode, shall we? Beans. Yes. Shall we take it away?

So Beans Talk or March Beans talk. It's a Beanstalk. This month we are doing a Beans episode. talk. We are talking beans. We are spilling the beans. And we are going to do an episode about each of our video game movie and a TV show, etc., etc. Canons. So we're all going to talk about like the things that define us, the things that like are holy, holy grails in our heads. But that is only available to subscribers along with the rest of our cool stuff. So become a MaxFund member today. Go to maximum fund.org slash join. You will get access to that and lots of other sweet stuff. One other thing before we get to it is as recurring listeners know, we are all playing

Final Fantasy 6. Theoretically. Because of last year's prediction bet in theory, right? The theory, we're all playing it. Some of us might have taken breaks for the past few weeks. But as we've announced in the past, we did a triple play last month. We are doing a beans cast down the road where we talk about the whole game. But we decided we're going to do another triple play. So even non-members will get to hear us talk about it a little bit. bit more. So here's the deal. We will be airing our next, our second triple play of Final Fantasy 6 on April 15th. So you have about a month. And the stopping point will be right after the floating continent, a.k.a. the kind of the act break of the game. People who have played it will know exactly

what I'm talking about. You two don't know quite what I'm talking about. But by act break, do you mean the second act? Like the game has two acts and the game has two acts. The game has two acts. This is the start of the second act. This is the intermission, so to speak. It's not the halfway point because the first half of the game is longer than the second half. But it will be very clear when you will know it when you get there. You will know exactly what I'm talking about. Much like the opera house, which was also a very definitive stopping point.

Yes. This is also a definitive stopping point. So we will talk about that on April 15th. So to those of you who maybe fell behind on your playing, you have until then to talk about that. We will spoil the game only up to that point on. April 15. And then we'll talk about the whole game and a beans cast down the road probably over the summer at some point. All right. All that is out of the way. Now let's get to it. Yes. This week, we are doing burning questions where we reach into the mailbag and pull out

some excellent hot, hot, hot questions from all of our listeners. As always, you can reach us at triple click at maximum fund.org. We read every email. We try to respond to a lot of them. Don't get a chance to respond to every single one, but we appreciate every single person who writes in. And we have picked some cool questions that we want to answer today. Maddie, why don't you take us away with this first question? Sure. So this question's from Maltha, who writes, have any of you battled with repetitive strain injury or similar pain from gaming? And is it something you think about or work to avoid? I have not had this problem, but Kirk told us both today, but he has a response to this question. I'm very curious to hear what it is, Kirk.

I do. Well, so I talked about this, I guess, a couple weeks ago. I was talking about Spider-Man Miles Morales and how that game, like a few, like the Arkham games, games where you have to do a lot of sort of beat-em-up combat with the face buttons and how that had been giving me RSI. Like it made my thumb kind of tired. I've actually been replaying Holo Night. And there are parts of that game, too, where you're really going at it and jumping and attacking and just hitting the face buttons a lot. And that motion with the thumb can be very tiring. So I talked a little bit about that and just how. I'd run into it, some people in the triple-click Discord were then talking about how there are products out there. They're like braces for your thumb. And I've been looking at them, they're pretty cool. And therefore, you know, combating RSI, basically when you're playing video games. I don't want to endorse any particular ones because I don't have one and I haven't used one.

But they do exist. And so this is something I've thought about. And just because I also play a lot of instruments and those can all lead to RSI in various ways. And I'm always very concerned about it. I notice more and more when, you know, piano or guitar are kind of causing some of those things. So I'm always mindful of it because the last thing I would want is for my fingers to get, you know, worse and worse than playing instruments. Which does just happen to everybody as they get older. So I'm thinking about it and at some point I probably will get some sort of thing just for my thumb.

And those do exist. So you can look around and find them. I'm not sure which ones are best, but they're out there. And if you're concerned about it, that's probably something good to look into. Nice. I actually have an endorsement for something, a little bit different, but I was starting to have wrist pain a few years ago, and rather than accept it and just get carpal tunnel and be miserable for the rest of my life, I preemptively got this thing, which you can both see, but listeners can not see. It's a Mueller wrist card, and I've had it for years, and it's awesome, and it costs like 13 bucks on Amazon or something like that. And I wear it every single day and it like has prevented so far any pain. I have seen the advice that generally preventative measures are really good in this kind of thing. It's like you can just ride it out as long as your hands are fine and not think about it.

And then once you start getting the problems, it's very hard to work backward. Where if you actually are kind of proactive about it, that can really help you out. Yeah, I cannot agree more with that because like I felt it coming on. And I never quite got there where it was like real pain in my wrist. But, like, I could feel like, oh, this is a little uncomfortable. And then so I started using the risk card and haven't felt a single problem. Nice. This has inspired me to go ahead and order one of those thumbs. Same.

Yes. Is it an endorsement, apparently, because now I feel like I need one. Yep. Yep. There we go. That's good. Yeah. Well, I mean, with wrists, like, for our line of work, like, people who are typing

constantly playing music. Like, it's, I mean, risks are super important. Anyway, let's get to the next question. Kirk, you want to take us away? Sure. This is a fairly long one, but I will, I'll read it. I might do a little bit of parric. phrasing this comes from Luke. Luke writes,

I, like so many others, bought into the hype for Cyberbunk 27, I pre-ordered for PS4. Studio-like CD Project, I figured they'd built enough of a reputation to ensure a good game at the very least, maybe even a great one. Reviews noted bugs, I figured that was to be expected, The Witcher 3 still has some, so I was locked in.

I know the video games as movie comparison is problematic, but as a basic example, even the biggest tent pole movie PR teams will tell you how long the movie is, but few games will even give you a ballpark. Also, there's things like frame rates and bugs, He mentions some other stuff also that you kind of have to test for yourself. Luke writes,

It just feels that gamers are expected to put in all this extra effort like decoding a two-second teaser trailer to find out release dates. There almost needs to be that community because we all have the same product but with wildly different results. TLDR, cultures of crunch and unrealistic hype marketing from gamers as well as studios clearly play into broken launches. But do you all think that transparency would help a situation like this? Are studios justified or ethical in wanting to show their product

and what they feel is the best light, or do we as consumers have the right to some more information before a purchase? So this is a big question, definitely a hot topic. This is a burning question. I don't know, what are the two of you think? Okay, so I have a lot of thoughts on this. I mean, first of all, I don't think that we as consumers have a right to anything. I don't really buy the whole consumer rights thing,

and often that's used in really gross context and it's used as an excuse to do or say really gross things. That said, it is super, like, fucked up. up how opaque the video game industry is. I think about all this time, I talk about this all the time at work because when I started at Bloomberg, we had a lot of conversations and people were just like baffled at the fact that video game sales info wasn't available anywhere. So nobody could actually talk about like the industry in any sort of like how many players are interested in a game or playing it currently, like all of that information. Right. It's just all hidden. And we just have a lot of like

systemic things in the video game industry that people just accept. And this is one of those things, which is like you won't know how long a game is or how buggy it is or what kind of, what the, what the technical situation is until you played it or reviews came out or whatever. I think part of that, unfortunately, is the nature of the beast because movies are finished months before they actually hit theaters. Sometimes there's like post-production happening towards the end and a little bit of tweaking and stuff. But occasionally, Katz gets a post-release patch to fix some CGI problems, but that was...

Cats was the most video game-ass movie ever, though, across the board. But yeah, I was thinking about this with books because I got a new book coming out. Press your set. Comes out May 11, plug, plug, plug. And I was telling people to pre-order it. And a couple of people have been like, oh, you're such a hypocrite, Jason. Like, you've told people not to appear out a game. That's really funny.

That's very good. So I was thinking about how funny it is because my book was finished. Like, I've been going through edits for a year. Like, I filed my rough draft last March, I think, March of 2020. And it's all just been edits since then. And it's been locked, like, almost totally final as of, like, what was it? Like, October, November. Locked 60 frames per second.

Yeah, locked 60 frames and things like six months before it actually comes out. You've already went gold back in December. Can't wait for the digital foundry video about. press reset. Yeah, just doing some final optimization. But yeah, just because games are such a different medium for all sorts of reasons, they don't have that extra slack. And I think that's like a systemic issue. And I think like if there was more of a barrier between when a game is actually finished and when it actually comes out, that might help things. But really fundamentally game companies are just fucking opaque and it's awful. Yeah. I think that part of this that's

interesting to me is when Luke points out the idea of how much extra effort gamers do. And I think this has become extremely normalized to the three of us and probably a lot of our listeners that, yeah, of course, you need to read a whole bunch of reviews and also news articles ahead of time about cyberpunk 27 to find out what's really going to happen with that game and you're following all of the stages of its development and you know how tortured it was and so on and so forth. But most people aren't in that position. Like that's actually describing a minority of the gamer audience that is that informed. Most people are just picking up the game on release day or week after and like, oh, wow, this, this game really sucks or whatever they may think of it. And they have no prior

context for it. And that is such a weird situation. And I don't think that is comparable to books or TV or movies where it's already in the air. Those properties are available in screener form for often months ahead of time. Critics really know what they're describing. Whereas with games, it's not just that the studios are opaque. It's also that these are often very huge products, like the ones Luke's describing are generally these big AAA properties that are very secretive and can afford to be. And so then the only way that you could truly know what to expect would be if you are watching a bunch of digital foundry, reading a bunch of reset era, like listening to podcasts, hearing all those speculation podcast episodes about what could be in the game. And then you

know, but that's absurd. Like, why would that, be the expectation to be a gamer. It's silly. Yeah, I think that there is something about people who play video games who like that kind of thing. Like on some levels, that can be a very positive thing. There's a lot of stuff in the world of video games where gamers come together to solve these incredible problems or, you know, finish an AERG or assemble the full lore of Dark Souls. And then you get these videos that like the whole reason the videos are... Find Secrets in Destiny.

Right. Well, and the whole whole. reason that those Dark Souls lore videos are special is because the game didn't do the work for you. And so when you then see that the people have assembled it and put it all together and then there's some of it as theories, like that can be really cool. And that is like a part of game culture that is generally really cool. And then sometimes that makes its way into game marketing. And sometimes it makes its way into game marketing in ways that are fun, like where, you know, a game will be kind of tease in a way that people have to figure out. And a lot of times it's less fun or it's kind of exploitative or, you know, they're hiding the ball in a way that's really frustrating.

I think I have a couple other thoughts on this. One is that I just upgraded the operating system on my Mac and was struck by how complicated it was only because it didn't work. And then I had all this software stuff that I had to figure out and I had to reinstall it and figure out how to do it. And it was making me reflect on, I guess there was never a time where things were just easy. And like a Mac was just, because there was always supposed to be the easier to use computer and you could just upgrade things. But it certainly felt like he used to be easier than it is now. And I think part of that is just that the threshold for technology has just risen. Like people are just more familiar with more complicated things. And as a result,

these products are just more complicated. And it is a lot harder for a company like CD project to give a full picture of a game like cyberpunk, that's kind of a bad example because they hit the ball in a lot of ways that were not cool and really clearly designed to hide the shittier versions of the games from people. So that's like maybe not a great example. But anyone showing a game does have a really complicated object to try to show off to people without letting them play it.

And that's my last thought is just there is like a fundamental difference between video games and movies that's maybe, maybe it's helpful to make the comparison to technology instead, like to like a phone or some sort of new device. Because when Apple releases a new phone, they'll tell you, I mean, they're more transparent. They'll tell you like the estimated battery, you know, usage and like how fast the chip is and whatever. But you don't get to use it until you buy it.

And it isn't until those other sites do the teardowns and do the kind of full tests that you get the full sense of the product. And games are as much product as they are. just like a visual art medium the way that a movie is. So you have to kind of have that element of it to fully understand it. Like you have to take that part of it apart. And I don't know what the method would be for the people who make the games to do all of that breaking down beforehand, even though I totally agree that they're not doing enough right now.

Like the game length thing is a great example. The fact that you'll just be like, how long is the game? I remember being back when I was a games journalist. That was always one of those questions that I just wouldn't bother asking because you just get to the point where you're like, well, how long is the game? And they're like, well, we're not really talking about that now, but it's a healthy length, you know. Well, that's also, it's an impossible question to answer because it could be so many. It's true.

No, yes, absolutely. Like, you could change drastically depending on how you play. And it's the kind of thing that can lead to a really charged reaction. Like, you know, if the community of the game, like the games fans deem your response to be too short, they'll be like, what? The new RPG is only 25 hours long? Like, I'm so upset about that, even though maybe, you know, you know, you know, It's only 25 hours long if you may line the story and really it could be 50 hours long and it's a variable answer.

It's a hard question to answer. But the amount of the lack of transparency right now does seem less than ideal. Yeah. I think one important thing here and one important takeaway from cyberpunk is that even like even if you feel like you trust a company, you shouldn't. Like you should never trust companies. And like even if a company is like appears to be gamer friendly and like they came out with the Witcher 3 and it was awesome. and you loved it and you thought it was really great. Just like as a for instance.

Yeah, theoretically, a gamer-friendly company. Maybe they made something similar. That released a game called The Witcher Tree. No, but like it's still a company that has obligations, especially publicly traded companies. It's obligations are first and foremost to its shareholders. But also like, like if you are pre-ordering game, you can't like, think of it as a future-looking investment almost where like you can't look at past performance as an indicator of success.

Like just because The Witcher 3 was great doesn't mean that like the next game will be great. It might help the odds. You're becoming such a Bloomberg writer. You just, the Bloomberg is really rubbing off on you. Yeah, man. The Bloomberg, yeah, the Bloomberg is running off on me. That's why I'm such a pro-capitalist shareholder loving. That's me.

But no, no, no, no. My point is that like I don't think you can really rely on any company to come out with a game that is like perfect on launch because games are so complex. complicated and like even the developers with the best possible intentions might get it wrong, might not know how bad something might be. And I do think, Kirk, to your point earlier about like CD Project hiding the console versions of the game, I actually kind of give them the benefit of the doubt there. And I actually think that like, based on my own reporting, I think they more believe that everything would actually come together at the last minute. And that's why they kind of kept it from people. Maybe they thought the day one patch would help things or maybe they thought that like really like. By day one, things would be. fixed. But they were still keeping a non-working version of the game from people. I mean, there was an effort to do that, which itself is not cool. No, not at all. But it, right, you're

saying it wasn't with the effort to deceive people into buying a broken game. They were thinking the game would be fine by the time people were going to buy it. I get the distinction. But there were people working on that game, though, who knew it was bad. Like, there were people at CD Project who worked on those ports and knew that what they were making was not

good. No, they all knew. So everybody knew. Everybody knew it was a problem. But the question is, will this problem fix itself the way The Witcher 3 did? Like on the end of The Witcher 3, everything was buggy as hell and super broken, and then it all coalesced. And I think they thought that they had the CD Project Red Magic, like, similar to BIOA, they thought it would all come together. Yeah, or at least the managers thought that. Yeah, exactly.

We've had this conversation a lot about, like, reviewing a game when you don't have the day one patch yet, and how much do you tell your viewers or your listeners or your readers when it might not be relevant to them that experience? And that is a really tough thing as a reviewer. It's a really tough thing as a game developer. It's really tough thing as a PR person. It's just a super tricky situation that I think would be better if there was some guaranteed buffer time or something like that. But for a variety of reasons there aren't.

There isn't anything like that. But that itself, I think, raises a question of like, how can you possibly know if a game will be fixed on launch until you actually get to launch? And there's an argument to be made that like nobody should be posting reviews until later on. but yeah it's all systemic problems is the point and problems related to the nature of video games which yeah i agree with yep okay let's move on um i will read this next question this is from aurora i've spent five hours playing the demo for dragon quest 11 on the switch and i'm now uncertain if this game is for me there's some things i enjoy and some things i quite dislike

i'll probably end up shelving it to finish tales of vespairia good game you three have distinct and identifiable taste. What factors help determine whether a game is for you or not? How long does it usually take? Is there anything that specifically turn you off or an expectation that you think you love? What actually defines giving a game a fair chance?

This is really interesting question. Yeah. Either of you want to go first? This is a philosophical question. I don't think I have the same answer for every game ever. I think you know it when you know it. If I had to come up with a rule, I would agree with Aurora that five hours is a pretty good amount of time, even though there are many

video games that don't get good until you've played them for 10. And we all know that. Ten hours is a very long time to ask somebody to play a video game. And yet, on this very show, we have repeatedly said things like, well, after the first 10 hours, it really changes, it really gets good, whatever. We've all said that. But I think five hours is probably more accurate to my own experience. You can get a pretty good sense of what the game is or isn't. I know. That's what's true. weird about this question is like it's basically six episodes of television like five hours you're two movies yeah it's it's absurd that i'm i'm saying that i would perhaps spend five hours of my life doing something i do not enjoy doing and yet i have even spent 10 or 20 hours doing something i do

not enjoy doing in the hopes of giving it a chance and then only then given up and been like i guess this game wasn't for me which is pretty tragic i i don't know kirk what about you. It's tricky. I think that's true that there is sort of an ineffable quality to this. Like, it does kind of depend on the thing. I do have, I guess, a few ways of knowing. I know that a game is doing it for me when I find myself thinking about it when I'm not playing it. I think that's a really good tell. Like, if I've just been kind of sucked in, and I don't mean that I'm having breakfast and I'm thinking, boy, that lore drop that I read sure was enticing. Like, I don't mean that.

It's more like, I get the, I just kind of have the patterns and the movements and the progression loops like in my head a little bit. And I'm like, ooh, kind of want to play because I'm pretty close to like finding the new thing that's going to give me some new ability to let me explore this new area. Or like, I just got into that mountain zone and it looks really cool. And like, okay, I'm kind of feeling this. Like I want to know what's going to come next. And I think that when you're asking that question, what's going to come next? I think that that's always at the heart of a game having me is like, I want to. want to know what's next. Like I want to know when it's next in the story. Maybe if it's a story

game. I want to know like what abilities I'm going to get next. I want to know what tough fight I'm going to have to like beat next. Like whatever it is like I'm sort of wondering. I have like this question about what's coming. It's piqued your curiosity. Yeah, exactly. And that curiosity can look like a lot of different things. But I think that that is like at the heart of knowing when a game's got me. And then on the flip side, when I'm like not feeling it, it's the absence of that. If I'm just sort of like, oh, I don't care. Like, I don't care what's coming next.

I don't care about unlocking the new double Buster Sword or whatever. Like, I don't give a shit because the combat isn't fun. I don't care. And then I just don't care. So then I stop playing. Are you saying Final Fantasy 7 did not. I think, I said Buster Sword as a sort of a generalized term. It's just a general pejorative for JRP's.

I love Final Fantasy 7. Yeah. I don't think there are any other games that have a Buster Sword. other games of the cloud. Wasn't there a buster sword in that movie in Edge of Tomorrow? She had a buster sword. Oh, really?

That's true. That's probably a Final Fantasy reaming. I think you get a buster sword and monster hunter maybe. There are totally buster swords and other things. But these are all Final Fantasy references, I would say. Well, yes, yes, yes. Yeah, I kind of echo your thoughts, Kirk,

and I don't have much to add to that. The only thing I will add is that I have found that, like, sometimes I will bounce off a game because I'm not in the right head space for it, and then I will try it again later, or like in a different mood and I'll actually really like it. This has happened to me with a few games in the past where I just like wasn't into him at all and then just jumped right into him. And then I've also found that like sometimes even games that I think I'll hate or won't care

about at all, I can, if I give them a chance and like I'm in the proper mood to play something new, then I can really enjoy them. And the perfect example that I'll give for this, which is one of my favorite stories is that on September something, six maybe, 2014. I was in the Kotaku offices down in the Gawker offices down in Soho and our old colleague Tina Meenie, who was getting like, all the games would be shipped and she would like collect them. She would have packages on her desk and go through them because she was a deputy editor or something like that.

And she was like, hey, Jason, I got a copy of this game. Do you want it? And I was like, oh, I don't know. This is like not for me. She was like, just check it out. We have this extra copy. just take it. I was like, all right, I'm going to take it home. I'm going to play it for half an hour and then I'm never going to touch it again because I know this game isn't for me. That game was called destiny. And a thousand hours later. A thousand hours later. So yeah, so I think that like if you're out there and you're like wondering about a game or you're not sure about it, sometimes I think approaching it from just a different

headspace like or being in a different mood, a better mood or something like that can sometimes help with that. All right. One more question. And then we will end this segment. Mattie, you want to read this last one? Sure. So this one's from James, who writes, sharing and trading physical games with friends is about to feel even more old-fashioned than before

now that optical disc drives are optional. As someone who grew up sharing games, I'm a bit sad to see it go away. All of the social bonding that came with it made gaming more fun for me. Today, people who can't afford to buy every AAA game have more options. They can subscribe to Xbox Game Pass, PS Now,

play inexpensive indie games and so on. But if you want to share a game with a friend who might like it and doesn't have access to it, and your one allotted game sharing partner has already been assigned, hi Xbox, then you'll have to buy the game for them. How do you three feel about this trend? First of all, James, I'm surprised you didn't mention SteamShare, but Jason, I'll kick it to you since you clearly have an answer. Yeah, well, so this is very relevant to me because over this past weekend,

and I just got a bunch of boxes from my parents' place that was like my old stuff and a lot of it was my old video games. So I was like having the nostalgia trip going through these boxes and pulling out like old Nintendo and Super Nintendo games and PS1 games and some of the newer stuff.

I have my giant collection of like 360 and GameCube and Wii games and stuff. Maddie I found Metroid Prime up there. Yeah, yeah. You're having like the opposite of my experience packing everything up to move where I'm also looking at all my old stuff. Yeah. But still it's fun.

And the funny thing is my almost my Super Nintendo games have my name and a label on them because I have this label maker and I and I would borrow them. I would lend them to friends and like borrow other friends games. And I was thinking about how like now all of my modern games are digital on my switch, digital on my computer, digital on my like Xbox, digital on my PS5. And that's kind of sad. And I know there are a lot of people out there who are like really into physical stuff and I'm not one of them. I'm very much like all about convenience. But this kind of experience, of unpacking those boxes was the first time that I got a little melancholy about the idea

that my modern games won't be, I won't be able to stack them all on a shelf the way that I can with all these games. And like, will my kid be doing the same with her games like one day? Or are they all going to be digital? Probably not. Yeah. Yeah. There's something a little sad about that despite me loving everything about the convenience

of the digital age and how just like easy it is to just like immediately download something and have it. and not have to switch discs every time I want to play a new game or anything like that. There is something really sad about not having that physical cartridge or box anymore. Yeah, this is kind of a classic example of something that was nice for a lot of reasons and now is gone and that's sad. But the reasons that it's gone are also the reasons that a lot of amazing things that are just sort of parallel have cropped up and are now possible. So it's true that the community that you can get from loaning games to your friends is just like a thing that doesn't really exist anymore. But there are a lot of community things that do exist related to games now that didn't exist back when it was more the case that you would be loaning Super Nintendo games to your friends.

And I think that that is really cool. I have been, so I've mentioned that I've been just replaying Hollow Night for fun and a really good friend of mine who also likes video games. And we used to live really near each other in San Francisco. now we don't see it that much anymore. He's been playing through it as well. And he's playing for the first time. So we've just been texting about Hollow Night. And then just like sharing, you know, screenshots.

And it's like so easy in so many ways because of the very technology, not just digital download technology, but like the same kinds of technological innovations that have made it so that we don't need or you can't loan games to your friends anymore, have made it possible to share this experience with a friend in another city. And like that. And then, of course, having discords and, you know, the ways that twins are designed for us to share.

Yeah, like there are all these other community things that have, that now exist, that didn't exist then. So it's kind of like a good way to think of it, I guess, is if you're feeling sad about the thing, which it is sad that this cool thing is now gone. There are a lot of other cool things that are now possible. And while the one didn't directly lead to the other, they are happening due to the same technologies. Yeah, yeah.

I really feel that because I have been streaming and watching other people stream on Discord a lot in the pandemic, which is something that I didn't. really do that much before and there was no real reason for it, but it's just that more of my friends are happening to do it now because they're stuck at home. And it's introduced me to a way of sharing games that reminds me a lot of like having somebody over or going to somebody's house or like, you know, being on the college dorm room floor where like one person's playing Halo and we're all watching it and like making snarky comments over it or whatever, plassing the controller around. Like those those kinds of experiences, I just don't have that much as an adult, but I feel like

I'm getting a warped version of them. Like one of the times I was playing Dark Souls recently, a bunch of my friends have gotten really into Overwatch. I don't care for that game at all. But all of them were in a Discord call together, playing Overwatch together. And I just joined it while I was playing Dark Souls. And we all just hung out and talked and like talked about the games each of us were playing. And it was almost like having the IRL experience of like some people are all playing a game

together. Another person is on their laptop playing a different game. everyone's having the shared experience. Like I could share my screen with Dark Souls and show it to them for certain moments. They could share theirs and I could like watch them get a team kill or whatever. And those experiences are only possible in the current reality we're in now because these are all people who live all over the country. They don't live on my block. And it's kind of magical and amazing that I can have that social experience now that would never been possible before.

That kind of streaming is something that until you talked about it, I'd never even considered. because I think of streaming as like, oh, I have a Twitch channel. And then I'm always like, man, I don't want to do that. And then you're streaming for whoever and you have to publicize it. But like just streaming through Discord to a couple of your friends is very different because it's so fun. Yeah. It's like it is like you're just playing for your actual friends. It isn't the kind of the whole thing that Twitch streaming has with all these complicated social and pariscial dynamics and whatever.

Like you're just with your friends playing video games. That sounds awesome. I don't know why I'm not doing that yet. You should. I mean, I look, much like you, I also had. never done that until fairly recently. And it's so fun. And it really is mimicking a social experience that James is essentially describing in this email that I can relate to. And it even ties into the idea of borrowing a game where like I'll watch somebody play a game that I don't

own and just hang out in the Discord and watch them for a while and then be like, well, maybe I'll buy that game. Or I'll be like, oh, I would hate this. And like, it's a good thing I watched my friend play it because now I don't, I don't need to buy it anymore. You guys should play Final Fantasy by one of you streaming it and all of us watching it. Oh, that would actually be fun if we did that. That would be fun. That would be fun. You know, and there is this technology that I know they were what doing it on PlayStation. I think Steam maybe allows for this in some games, like the, where you can actually take over for somebody,

which they haven't fully mastered yet. Stadia was promising that this would be part of the thing. But I could see as the technology improves also being able to hand the controller around across state lines and in other countries. And that's also a very promising, exciting thing. It is. It is. The future is bright in that one way. Look at that.

Optimism. We are all feeling optimistic today. Yeah. Imagine that. The future is bright. It's a weird feeling. Games are digital. Vaccines are physical.

Vaccines are coming into our arms soon. All right. Why don't we take a little break? And then we will be back with one more thing. Hey, folks. It's me. James Arthur M. Host of Minority Corner.

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And we are back. Kirk Maddie, it is time for one more thing. Kirk, you want to go first? Sure. So I wrote down in one more thing, progression and inconvenience, and that's a little bit vague. Are these not the names of games? I thought this was the new Dosayevsky novel. Right. No, it's like it's the new Descaya game. Yeah. So I've been thinking about progression in video games because I've been replaying Hollow Night and also playing Assassin's Creed Valhalla. and I've been trying to put my finger on what it is about the progression in Holo Night that I find so, so good. It's one of the things about the game that's kind of subtle. Like when you think about, oh, like, a few guys made Hollow Night that's so impressive because it has these really clearly visible things.

Great combat, lots of enemies, a really huge world, a great story, like good writing and music. It's like all this stuff where you're like, wow, I can't believe so few people made that. But it's the under the hood stuff that's impressive, things like the way the game is balanced, and the way that the experience meets itself out over like 60 to 80 hours if you're playing for the first time and being a completist. And like at every moment you're appropriately challenged, you're always working towards something that you want to find, some new ability that you want to get. And there are all of these kind of spread out axes for progression that aren't always super

convenient to you as a player. They kind of require extra legwork and they take a little bit of time. And as a result, you don't progress. super smoothly. There's some friction inserted in the progression of the game, and I think that's the key to what makes it work. And I'll give some specifics to explain what I'm talking about. In Assassin's Creed Valhalla, it's pretty seamless. There's not a lot of friction for the progression, and that's very standard for Ubisoft games. So what that means is, in that game, you fight some guys, you finish a quest, you get XP, your character automatically levels up, you see a notification in the corner of the screen.

It's like, you have two skill points. If you want to assign, get new abilities, maybe you're about to unlock one of those things in the skill tree, you just pause the game, go right into the skill menu, boom, unlock the things. If you want to upgrade your weapons, you just go right into your menu. You do have to go to a guy to, like, fully upgrade your weapons, like you have to go visit him, so there's a little friction there. You have to visit the blacksmith. But a lot of it can just be done in the menus, or it just happens like passively while you're playing. You're just steadily getting better. And your character improves. So that's the kind of seamless way of doing it, which I'm finding not that satisfying, especially in Valhalla, which I've played for a million

an hour, and at this point I'm like, I don't know, none of this matters. I have two axes that I like, just who gives a shit? And I just am not playing for the progression at all. I'm just exploring and playing for the story. Hollow Knight, as a comparison, in that game, you're constantly earning Geo, which is the currency that you spend. It's kind of like Souls. You can spend geo to upgrade your weapon, but to do that, you have to go all the way down to this blacksmith. Sometimes you'll get to the blacksmith, and the blacksmith will only upgrade if you give him pale ore, which is the thing you have to go collect, but once you get it, then he tells you how much it costs. Maybe you don't have enough geo.

There's also a collector who will buy these items that you pick up when you're out in the world, and you can get more geo from him. So you'll kind of be carrying around three or four of those thinking, well, if I need it, I can go spend it. So then you have to go all the way over to him. You get the thing from him. You go back. Also while you're exploring, there are these grubs that you rescue, these little worms. And when you rescue a worm, there's a guy called the Grubfather who's in a different part of the map,

where when you go visit him, he'll give you geo, which is the currency. So there are all these different ways that you're kind of, you're earning geo by killing enemies. You're also collecting collectibles that you can sell for geo to one guy. You're also rescuing grubs, which is going to get you geo if you go to another guy. But all those things require you to be like in the world and going and doing things. And you don't have to do them all at once, but they're not happening passively. And I think that that kind of progression is really good. Like I think that it pulls you in and kind of makes you engage with it.

And it's less convenient. Like there's actually friction in there. but I think that it actually makes for a much more satisfying experience and it allows them to kind of meet things out more consciously so that the game doesn't just become this kind of empty, passive, frictionless thing of just numbers going up where it stops really mattering after a certain point. So that's the thought that I had that I'm making my one more thing. Do either of you have any thoughts now that my TED talk has concluded?

Yeah, I'm surprised you didn't bring up that like in Hollow Night to switch your charms that you're using, you have to be sitting on a bench, so you can't just do it anywhere. There are a bunch of other things like that that I just, I wanted to use. One, or two specific examples just tied to geo. But yes, holiday is filled throughout with this kind of thing. Well, so it's interesting because some people call these, like, quality of life things. And in some games, it feels like, especially games. I think what you're talking about fundamentally is games that are just trying to do very different things.

Like, Assassin's Creed is very good at exploration and, like, mystery and story and dialogue. And it only has progression because. every AAA game has to have that. Like it has to be on the feature checklist. Holo Night is one of the reasons HoloNate is so great is because it's not trying to do everything at once. It's just trying to do very specific things and it is masterful at

everything it tries to do. And I think with Ubisoft, like the progression, like that game didn't need a skill tree. It's just like, oh, it's a Ubisoft Open World game, AAA, we're charging $60 for it. It has to have a skill tree. And I think that's the case for a lot of like the big Sony games or like a lot of AAA games these days. Yeah.

The passive thing is also true in JRP's I've been noticing this at just a lot of times in the games where you just level up and your numbers just kind of go up. And it's not, I'm not necessarily saying one is better than the other

or that everything should be like this. This is like very much the Metroid Souls, like this world of like, the upgrades are things you find in the world. They're not skills that you unlock in a menu. You find a new jump packer in Hollow Night, you know, you find the mantis claw

and that lets you stick to the wall. Like, it's just a different type of progression. But I'm finding it very satisfying and I think it's been helpful to articulate what it is about it that I think I find so appealing. And it is that friction. I think for me it is better. I think I actually would say I actively prefer games that do what you're describing.

Yeah, I mean, same. Where, I mean, the Metroid and the Souls like game. I don't know if it's, you know, objectively better if you can measure to that. But I agree with you completely that even just the action of physically going to another location, it has the same hit for me as checking something off of a list in real life. I feel as though I've performed a real chore. Like I've gone all the way to a merchant and purchased an item and it mattered and I like had to get souls or whatever in order to get the item or I have to go all the way back to Andre. I have to get uncursed after you fell in the frog.

Yeah, I have to get uncursed or I have to go all the way to repair my weapons again, get the repair box, whatever it may be. I have to physically walk there. I mean, there's some shortcuts in dark souls of course. And you know, you learn your way around hollow night as well and you figure out the fastest way to do. things, but you're still physically having to go and do each action. And that, it is, it is inconvenient, as you say. But that's also what makes it so much more rewarding because you had to walk all the way there to talk to the person and do the thing. And it feels like it actually mattered, as opposed to just pausing the menu and being like, well, now my axe is stronger. Now that I've paused and clicked a little tiki box that made a number get bigger somewhere that I can see. And now we'll close that menu and continue swinging my axe, which is stronger in some type of way. Yeah. So another thing I thought I'm sort of having now as we're talking about it is that there are, it does kind of depend on the kind of game that they're trying to make because

there are games where inconvenience is just annoying. Like to use destiny as an example, it used to be you had to go down to the, to like pick up bounties. You had to like go to individual people. And I think they've streamlined that. There are like a lot of things you used to have to go to the tower to do. Yeah, that's what I was talking about. Like quality of life is the way that. Exactly. And I think that tends to fall more into quality of life where it would be funny if someone was like, well, now in Hollow Night, you can do everything from the menus. You don't have to go see Grub Father. You just cash in your grubs and you get your rewards as a quality of life improvement.

Well, that's to the point that I was making before. It's like it depends what the game is trying to do. A lot of this stuff just feels taxed on because it is. And oftentimes when something feels like you're just going through the motions doing something, it's because it probably shouldn't be in the game in the first way. Yeah. It's just kind of a bloated addition. That's a good point. Yeah. I think that's maybe why I'm finding the one more appealing. So it's a big conversation, but that's something I've been chewing on.

Good hot topic for the future. As I've been replaying Holo Night, which is still a wonderful game. Yeah. Good hot topic for the future. I'm going to go next and then I'll throw it to you, Maddie, because we all want to jump in on your one more thing. But I'll do mine pretty quickly. I've been playing a game called Gnosha, Nosha. And it's really weird and interesting. It's on the switch. I'm playing this game because I read a great review, edited by Bandy Myers, published on Polygon.com, written. by Eric Van Allen, our former compete colleague, who is great. And he wrote this really compelling review, and I was really hooked by it. And so basics of a game are it's like, it's single player, but it's like among us or mafia or any of those games. You're in on the spaceship with a bunch of people, and one or more of you are NOSHA, aliens that can kill people and the rest of you are crew. And you are constantly trying to figure out who is a NOSHA. And then it's like a series of loops also.

So it's like it's like among us mixed with like a time loop movie. Because every time you go through a loop, you start over from the beginning. Except you're the only, you and like one other person are the only people who know that you're in a loop. Everyone else just thinks that it's like it's the same thing. And then it'll say like loop one, loop two, loop three. And then the conditions you can pick so you can pick like, I want to play this role or I want two no shot on my ship or six nocha or like 15 crewmates. and each of the crewmates has its own his or her or its own personality

or their own personality because I believe there's a non-binary one on there. There are, yeah. And there's like an ongoing story and mystery and the way that you unlock it is by repeating these loops with like under certain conditions and it'll tell you like you have to do it under this condition to find this. And it's really, really interesting

and like kind of tricky because sometimes you'll be trying to like get through a loop and like learn something. but you'll get voted off because you said something stupid and like they all think and it's really really interesting it's a fascinating game it very much reminds me it's like a visual novel really it reminds me a lot of like zero escape or like ding and rompa because it has that vibe and like has that feeling um but it's also very gameplay oriented because you spend a lot of time thinking about like okay how am i going to get everybody to vote for this person or like logically if this person is claiming he's the engineer but this person also said they were the engineer like

one of them has to be NOSHA, must be them. It's really, really cool. I really like it so far. It's definitely repetitive because you're going through these loops and like doing a lot of the same stuff over and over again. And I haven't gotten far enough to like be really into the main mystery or like seeing how that resolves or like what's gripping there. But like the main mystery is basically to try to figure out who the Nosha are and why they keep taking over and stuff like that. So it's really compelling to me and I'm really into it called Nosha. It's on the switch.

It sounds like a cool game. Yeah, it does sound super cool. G-N-O-S-I-A. Maddie, take us away. Okay, so I want to talk about Wanda Vision, which is the television show on Disney Plus. Wanda Vision. aired its final episode a week ago, so hopefully our listeners have finished it by now, but we don't have to spoil it too much.

I also wanted to say, I've talked about this show a lot already, because I have a different podcast outside of this one that is called The Mutant Ages, where I talk about X-Men stuff, and Scarlet Witch, she's sometimes a mutant in the comics. They've reconed this back and forth a few times. She's certainly been in some X-Men adaptations and properties. And Wanda and Pietro, they used to be mutants. They're not currently, but I think they will be again at some point now that Disney owns the X-Men again.

And part of why I watch Wanda Vision for my show was because I was like, maybe they'll put Magneto on this show. And they didn't do that. But they could have. Maybe they'll put like the Quicksilver from the Fox movies in this. show? Yeah. Maybe they will. Maybe they'll get Evan Peters back. So I, if people, if people want to hear me talk about Wanda Vision for two hours with two other people who know a lot about the comic books and watch all of agents of Shield and know all of this lore about Wanda Maximov, we have an episode at the Mutant Ages that folks can listen to. But I'd really like to hear from the two

of you and what you thought about the show. Wait, you didn't give your overall thoughts. Just give us your overall thoughts. Gotta go check out the Mutant Ages. Okay, fine, fine. I'll give a really brief one. So I, I thought it was really interesting. I do come at it from a different perspective than the two of you because I've read so many comic books. And so for me, I did not find the show surprising or twisty in the way that I think the average viewer might have. I wasn't surprised, for example, that Wanda was creating a pocket reality. I know she has the ability to do that. So even from the pilot episode, I was like, Wanda is coping with her grief about vision and creating this pocket reality.

And that's just a compelling thing for me to watch because I already need. know she can do that. We should have like too many spoilers, by the way. Yeah, but I mean, that is the premise of the show, is that Wanda can bend reality to her will. And it's about her traumas and how she deals with that. And then, of course, there are other actors in her life who try to take advantage of her, of course, as one does with a superpowered being. And that is, I would say, the larger plot of the show is the other people around Wanda and how they react to her. But I did think it was really cool, even as somebody who is super familiar.

with those comics to see how they pulled from a ton of different comic book sources and recombined them into a story that was new and not in any comic book previously. They basically wrote their own version of Wanda Envision's romance for this show that's inspired by, but not literally based on any one previous storyline, which is quite difficult to do. And I think the MCU at its best does that very well. And at its worst, it's confusing. And people are like, I don't understand why some of these characters were here, but I guess they were in the comics. And like, I think, I felt that Wanda Vision hewed more closely to the former than the latter, but you two don't have all that prior context.

So it's part of why I'm curious about what you thought about it. So, Kirk, why don't, why don't you go first? What did you think of the show? Yeah. First of all, I just want to tell a funny, very short story, and that's the couple friends of ours watched the show. And they were like, I don't know, we didn't really like it. We didn't really get it. And then we learned later that they hadn't watched most of the Marvel movies that they hadn't seen.

game or Infinity War and I was like yeah that would be kind of tough yeah if you're like I don't understand why everyone is you know like what the snap was or like that vision died and Thanos killed him yeah um so I just thought that was kind of funny and sad so then I was like you should at least just go watch the Avengers once yeah and civil war it's like five movies but you'll have a good time and then you'll know what was going on yeah um I liked it a lot in general I was a little let down by the finale which I think is a kind of a common sentiment just the marveliness of it all it just sort of became a big action scene I loved um You know, I'll be chill on spoilers.

But I really loved all the stuff with Vision and Wanda. And I thought that this show did its main job, which was to make me care about that relationship, which the Avengers movies never had time to do. They just kind of, they were like, these two people are good looking and they seem nice. And like they have two scenes together where he's like her captor, but then they flirt. And now they're just okay. And like you kind of just went with it because they just couldn't. It's so weird. It makes no sense.

They couldn't show everything. I knew enough about the comics that I knew they had a relationship. So, you know, I just sort of rolled with it. But getting to see it and getting to see them, especially that second to last episode with the flashbacks and stuff was wonderful. And like I really, I'm just a sucker for like, you know, pop culture being used as a way for people to escape bad circumstances and like the meaning that we find in old TV and like how like all of that stuff that this show is really at its most emotionally potent when it's really

dealing with that. And then they kind of rush through stuff and then like any Marvel movie, the whole end is a big fight. And you're kind of like, oh, okay. It's a big final fantasy battle with like a bunch of sparkly stuff. Yeah. Which like, okay, you know, it's a little bit of a bummer. I saw someone point out, this may have been Alan Steppenwall saying that most Marvel movies have this problem, that the issue is that this was a season of TV. So instead of it being the last 20 minutes of the movie, where then we walk out of the movie and we're like, well, the overall experience was great, even if the last 20 minutes was kind of a whatever fight, This was the whole final episode because percentage-wise, like it's sort of the same amount of the story.

So then you had to wait a whole week and then you're like, oh, the finale was kind of just like a big sort of a letdown. But it was still cool and I'm like excited to see where she turns up next. And I liked it overall. I think it was a cool experiment and that Marvel really lends itself to TV. Like it worked for me to watch a TV show based on these characters from the movies. Yeah. Yeah, I loved it. I've talked before about how much more I like TV than movies in general.

and one of the reasons I like the MCU is because it feels like one big TV show where it's like the current characters everywhere. But even then, I prefer the kind of smaller scale of a Wanda Vision where it's like nine episodes. You get to know these two characters for a long time. It made me want to go and rewatch some old MC movies, which I did. And like suddenly I'm seeing Wanda in Vision and new lights when I watch them, which I'm really enjoyed. Like what rewatching Civil War was really cool because you're like, oh, Wanda and Vision. Oh, cool. I know what happens.

Even Age of Ultron. It's definitely like those sort of less. liked Avengers movie. That's better than people give it credit for it. But yeah, it made me super stoked for future TV shows using these characters because it like made me and I'm super psyched for Falcon and the Winter Soldier and then Loki

and like just to see all these people. Although yeah, I'm with you on the ending because it feels very ridiculous that Wanda did not face the repercussions she maybe should have. It's interesting because I feel like she did. We got into that a lot on show, but like I feel like

I'll have to listen to your show. Well, I will spoil some of the comics at least by saying that I've always felt in the comics, like Wanda is not necessarily presented as a heroic character. Like, she's often making huge mistakes and bending reality in a terrifying way that is not condoned by the people around her. I mean, she's basically a godlike figure in terms of her power level. It's, like, absurd that she can bend reality. And people in the comics are always manipulating her to their own ends.

And then it has disastrous consequences, of course, because why would you want to, to bend reality. It's usually not good to do that. So that, and that's a wonderful comic book storyline that they do over and over again with her. And this felt like a show that was very much about that and very comic booky. So it was interesting to me to see people reacting to the show on Twitter and elsewhere and being like, whoa, like this superpowered character, like it's kind of immoral that they have these absurd powers. And I'm like, well, yeah, I mean, that is what it's about. That's the situation. Well, but this is a little different. This felt a little different than like your standard like, like Civil War is all about how immoral the superheroes are.

But this, this felt different because she was like really personally invading people on an... But they show that and they make you really feel horrible about everything that's happening. Yeah, they make you feel horrible until the very end where like Monica Rambo and like it... Oh, that line was stupid. I agree with you there. I mostly for Monica Rambo's sake, I hope she gets a really cool Captain Marvel storyline because I do feel like she got a lot of set up in Wanda Vision that was not paid off. I don't even know if that's a spoiler to say. Like I just don't feel like where they left your story. It's all set up. It's as satisfying as it could have been.

But you're right. It's all set up for other stuff. It's all set up for, yeah, future movies. That's part of this whole weird thing. It's like one ongoing show of like television instead of just a self-contained season or anything like that. But yeah, overall, I really enjoyed it. And it made me care about like the relationship between a robot and a witch in a way that I never thought I would. I still don't.

Actually, I still don't understand. It helps that it's a really hot robot. Oh, yeah. I just, but I don't. see why she's a lover of a robot. They're both beautiful. You know, Jason, it's so funny that you think that because having read so many comics about them, I feel like I completely understand it because they're the original odd

couple. Like he's the robot and he thinks like a computer. He wants to be human. In the comics, that Pinocchio storyline is so much more a part of his characters. Like he's constantly hanging out with other humans and wanting to be like them. And so naturally he gravitates towards Wanda, who's the most emotional, the most intense person on the entire Avengers team. and all of her powers are based in emotion.

Like that's how she gains her power is from feeling. And so she is like the most human, human of all, which is also what makes her inhumane at times and extreme. And so that opposites attract energy is what guides their relationship is that like she wants to be more like vision who is always cold and in control,

whereas he wants to be like her who's like the most emotional capable of feeling person that he's ever met. And they're just endlessly fascinated by each other, but also have this incredibly toxic relationship that can never work out and never does in the comics. They're always fighting and it's very torture. Yeah, so none of that, none of what you just said is evident at all in the show. I know, but it's what I bring to the table and then I enjoy the show more than other people do.

Got it. Too bad for them, I guess. One more quick thought, and then we have to go, Wanda has somehow seen every sitcom except for that 70s show and for some reason the mom of that 70s show is just hanging out with her and she doesn't recognize her. What is this world where all the other sitcoms are? what the issue is with the show. You're right. Major plot. That's the big problem.

Sinicins. Ding. It's over for Wanda Mission. All right. We've got to say goodbye. Kirk, Manny. See you both next week. Yep.

See you next week. Bye. Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreyer, Maddie Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom DJ.

Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple-click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network, and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at Maximumfund.org slash join. Find us on Twitter at triple-clickpod. Send email the triple-click

at maximum fun.org and find a link to our Discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Maximumfund.org. Comedy and culture. Artists owned. Audience. Audience supported.