Austin Walker (Possibility Space) On What Makes Good Criticism

Episode Description

Austin Walker is the IP Director at the game studio Possibility Space. He has an extensive background in gaming journalism and criticism. He holds a Masters in Aesthetics and Politics from CalArts and also served as the Editor in Chief for Waypoint and Host of Waypoint Radio.

Since 2014, Austin has hosted the popular tabletop roleplaying podcast Friends at the Table, and co-host the Star Wars podcast A More Civilized Age.

We talked with Austin about his approach to criticism, his move to game development, and the absolute state of games journalism. 

This conversation was recorded before the announcement that Waypoint would be shut down. 

Hosted by Phillip Russell and Ben Thorp

You can follow Austin Walker here.

Visit our website: Originstory.show

Follow us on Twitter @originstory_

Do you have feedback or questions for us? Email us theoriginstorypod@gmail.com

Cover art and website design by Melody Hirsch

Origin Story original score by Ryan Hopper

• Episode Transcript

  Phil 0:18
  
  What's good everybody? Welcome to origin story, the podcast that interviews creators about where they came from, to understand how they got here. My name is Philip Russell and I am with my co host, Ben Thorpe. And Ben, we have a tremendous guest this week, somebody we've been wanting to have, for so long. And we've been big fans of for so long. This week, we're talking to Austin Walker. We cover everything from, you know, the state of games, media, and journalism writ large to you know, Austin's own career, transitioning from games journalism and criticism, to games development. And just like what makes good criticism. This was a really kind of all encompassing conversation. So I think we just want to let it speak for itself. And you know, we can come in after the conversation to kind of dive into some, some key points. But yeah, I think we just wanted to note that we did record this conversation with Austin on April 17, I believe so probably about a week or so before it was announced that waypoint would be shutting down. So we don't get into that on the show. But just know that we are as upset as everybody else's waypoints on incredible work. And I'm sure we'll talk about that. In the post show. Yeah. And
  
  
  
  Ben 1:47
  
  I think it's also super worth noting that we did ask about it. I mean, I think we asked about like the state of games journalism, because that's something that for both of us, I just top of mind, I'm sure people have noticed we asked now every guests like, Hey, how are things going? If you touched games media in any way? How sad Are you on a general basis? So yeah, we definitely got into it with with Austin. There. But I think again, yeah, as Phil saying, worth caveat, saying This happened before the waypoints got hit.
  
  
  
  Phil 2:21
  
  Yeah, so yeah, with that, how about we just hop right into the conversation?
  
  
  
  Austin Walker is the IP director at the game studio possibility space. He has an extensive background in gaming journalism and criticism. And he holds a Master's of aesthetics and politics from Cal Arts. He served as the editor in chief of vices waypoint and the host of waypoint radio. And in addition to all those exciting things, he also hosts the podcast called Friends of the table, which is a tabletop role playing podcast, and CO hosts a Star Wars podcast called a more civilized age. Austin, thanks so much for coming on the show. We're really excited to have Yeah.
  
  
  
  Austin Walker 3:23
  
  When is this going out? What does go out? When does this live? Because Because depending on what it is, there may be another podcast I'm hosting by the time
  
  
  
  Phil 3:33
  
  when's when's the then when is that?
  
  
  
  Speaker 3 3:36
  
  It will I don't think it'll drop until June. So I think this is probably a little too early. But I'm very excited about having a fourth podcast or a third, I guess, third now podcast that I'm in the you know, I'll be in the third chair of that one. It's a different experience because I'm not hosting or producing it. AMCA and we're civilized ages the Star Wars podcast I'm on I produce and, and co host and then friends at the table I like I'm like the showrunner, so to speak if a tabletop role playing game podcast can have a showrunner. And those are much different, you know, responsibility levels than show up and talk about a thing, you know. So, but thanks for having me.
  
  
  
  Phil 4:17
  
  Yeah, awesome. We, we are huge fans of yours. We've been listening to waypoint you know, since its inception, so if anything, it's great to finally have you on the show, especially after just having Natalie on to kind of talk about her journey.
  
  
  
  Speaker 3 4:32
  
  What a year. What a year she's having, I could not be more proud of her. She is someone who has always impressed me ever since she was an intern at waypoint and, you know, seeing the the heights she's already reached. You know, immortality was such a success and, you know, the work that she has done, you know, throughout the rest of the elements of her career have been incredible. So, truly proud to be friends with Natalie Watson.
  
  
  
  Phil 5:00
  
  100 Yeah, and you know, you and her both kind of have an interesting shared trajectory. And that, you know, going from criticism, games journalism into game development. Now. In addition to all the other projects that you you both have, like a number of other things going on, so I'm just curious, like, you know, how are you doing in general? How are you juggling all these things? How's it going,
  
  
  
  Speaker 3 5:24
  
  bro? You know, I'm getting through. It's tough, right? I will say, the, still living in the aftershock of and the ongoing life of being in a global pandemic, going through the era of like, deep quarantine was really, really hard as a creator, as a storyteller, as a writer, as a critic. You know, I, if you go back to some of the earliest shit I was writing, I can curse on here, right? That's okay. If I can go back to some of the earliest stuff I was writing in the broader, you know, critical sphere, one of the things I hit as often as I could was, like, you know, I was writing about video games a lot. But I think I said over and over again, was like, you have to care about more than video games, you're going to be a good video game critic. And the same way that if you're gonna be good film critic, you have to understand something about architecture, about painting about about, you know, culture, and politics and history and all that stuff. And like, have a broad base to pull stuff from and that will lift your work so much, because you won't be stuck referencing copies of copies of copies. Do you know what I mean? It's like one of those things where it's like, if all you care about is video games, then you're going to find yourself making references, especially in video games, where you're like, Oh, I remember that from Halo. And like, none, none. And you remember that from Alien, you know what I mean? And like, Halo took that from somewhere. And to be clear alien is also playing in a certain mold that did that, right? Like having that space to play with. And having those other touchstones helps ground your criticism and your your responses to things and helps you elucidate things for your readership. Living in a global pandemic meant cutting a lot of that down, obviously, you could still like stream movies, but I missed being in the world so badly, you know, I was paying New York rent to like not get to go to the museum, you know, and I mean, like to not get to go to the park to like, not go people watch. And that's, that was really tough. Also, I have trash at working from my desk, especially at the time, I was living in a different apartment. And I was like, in a tiny bedroom with with the bedroom size was fine. But when it's your bedroom, and it's your office space, and you're like two steps between your bed and your desk, it's like I can't do the same sort of work here. Like I can do it. But I literally could only write at that desk, like do real writing work after like, 2am when everybody else was asleep in the world. And then I could like in the English speaking American world, and then I could get work done. You know, you've no idea how many way point error reviews I wrote late at night at like two or 3am Because no one else is awake. Or I would go to a cafe and right in the middle of the day, because I could do that there. But I couldn't do it at my own desk. And so suddenly not having an option to go write somewhere else, or to go be somewhere else to go ruminate somewhere else other than like doing walks around my neighborhood. That was really hard. So I'm still coming out of that a little bit. I think every project I touched during that period shows the like, I think it's probably true for most people who make stuff is like, I don't care if you're making stuff about the global pandemic, you are making something touched by it. And so I'm finally getting back to a flow where I can feel like I'm doing the work and not figuring out how to do the work, if that makes sense. Like figuring out the processes, figuring out, you know, at this point, it's like, all right, like, I can go sit out at an outdoor cafe, I can go mask up and go somewhere else I can. I'm in a new apartment that I got specifically to help handle this problem. And I have to like, get up and walk through my kitchen to my front little area. It's a studio, but it's like a long studio. So I have to like, I can't see my bed from here. And that's huge, you know. So that that situation I think, in general, like figuring out those processes, has put me in a better place than I was like a year ago. You know,
  
  
  
  Ben 9:11
  
  I'm so glad you said all that stuff about criticism because I think one of the one of the questions that I have teed up is like, how you think about criticism and I think like what you're describing there, where you're weaving in all these other different things, whether it's architecture, or whether it's philosophy, or whether it's theory has really stood out to me over the years in terms of like, that's what I get out where it's like, I'll talk listen to you talk about a game and suddenly I feel like I'm learning about something completely else. And you know, I would almost just
  
  
  
  Speaker 3 9:41
  
  some people hate by the way because like because they're listening to games criticism because they're tired and want to know like, it's just a fun thing for me to do for the two hours I have of my free time tonight. Like I get that. But yeah, for me, it's like I have to do it that way. I have to draw those connections out. I remember like writing about Far Cry five Be like, I can't write about Far Cry five until I understand what like contemporary theory around cults is, like, why are you Why am I wasting my time writing about that game until I understand not what pop cultural understanding is around what cults are. But like some, like firsthand accounts, like is brainwashing a thing. Like is like what what is what is the cult experience? For real? What are people who have studied this? Where are they at with that stuff, because otherwise, I'm going to be a Rube and like, repeat the company line on it, which is that they've done the research and they know what they're talking about. And they, they didn't in that case, like, there's stuff about Far Cry five, I think was enjoyable. But like, a lot of that stuff was playing in a pop cultural space, which is a fine place to play. But like what that material is out there. And you and also, you know, you were talking about a game that came out, I don't remember the exact year but like, you know, the Nexium shit was not that far off from there, like cults is out there. And plus, they were playing with cults, and they were playing with, like, you know, right wing militias stuff, which, by the way, we've talked about this a lot at the time, but like, that was some stuff, they were saying behind closed doors. And then the second they had to be public with it. They they quieted that part off real quick, they were not talking about, you know, the the sort of like, you know, right wing, sovereign citizen movement stuff, and all publicly, but in the behind closed doors, demos, it was all over the place. And so very interesting maneuvers happening there. And so yeah, for me, if you're going to be a critic, I don't like drawing the line between reviewer and critic, because I think all sorts of writing about an object moves between those spaces. And I don't like drawing the hard line that says like, consumer reviews have nothing critical to say, or they're not cultural or something. Because you'll sometimes find really sharp cultural moments inside of a consumer review. Even if it's not necessarily intentional, someone will slip into a narrative about their life and like how the car that they bought, or the car that they're reviewing fits into their life, or how the laptop that they're reviewing, you know, was very important to them during a moment of grief, or you know, what I mean, like that stuff still slips in every now and then they don't necessarily mean to do it. But like writing is writing. And sometimes it happens. And so I don't like drawing a firm thing. But obviously, there is like, there was like something like a strategic separation between the Consumer Reviewer and the cultural critic. It's a, it's a border that has not, it's porous, right. But for me, as someone who wants to be on that other side, to the degree that it really exists, you have to be drawing, there's other connections out there, because that's two reasons. One is like, that's what's going to move the person reading. And to that's what's fun about it for me, is be like, Well, what, how does this connect to other stuff? This stuff doesn't exist in a vacuum, how does it make me think of a billion other things, you know, like, I don't know, like, I'm not a, I'm not a Roland Barth like, guy like, that's not my space inside of media criticism. But when my man was writing about pro wrestling, like he was spitting, you know what I mean? Like, that was real stuff. He was making connections to culture, he was making connections to politics. And it was better because it was tied to wrestling, it was grounded, it was that sort of thing. And I think that there are times when as a writer, you can get caught up in trying to say, you can get caught up in your criticism being a vehicle for a bigger thing you want to talk about, and then you're like in search of the perfect vehicle. To do that. I think that can be a speed bump at best and like a real derailment at worse. In general, if I always had that if I had that in me if I was like, I really want to talk about the length topic. I couldn't tie that to like a new release, I had to go find that that like set of three or four things to write about, and put them in conversation together, and then go write about them. It was rare that I could be like, whom I really want to talk about, you know, I really want you know, I think about something like when the crew came out, I could have written I could have tried to make a review for the crew, which I reviewed for Paste Magazine, shout out to pace magazine, Charles to Garrett Martin, like truly games criticism, not what it would have been the last decade of games criticism was on Garrett Martin back for giving a lot of people opportunities early on, and then and then people moving on to write for other for other outlets. But I wrote about the crew and the thing I ended up writing about the crew was was I went into it thinking, Ooh, can I read about the American car culture can I write about and the crew for people who don't know, it was an Ubisoft open world racing game. Lots of like, RPG elements, lots of like, the numbers go up, you get a new car, you get new rims, you get new exhaust, you get new engine parts, blah, blah, blah, blah. I went into it being like, I bet I can write something about like I think some of it's still in there like postcard America, the vision of America from this French developer, how do you sell Americans America back to them, et cetera. But the thing that actually mattered in my critique of that game was not about that stuff at all. And it was about like the move in video games towards that, like numbers go up design and that feeling that you're getting better that has nothing to do with your skill actually improving but has to do with like The game, giving you better handling over a long period of time giving you better acceleration, not necessarily teaching you how to race better, but like, because again, it's a racing game, but instead just kind of twisting the numbers until you naturally are you not naturally just perform better. And that, to me is the heart of the critique of that game. And I think it's informed by that bigger picture, but I couldn't force that bigger picture through and have that be the thesis necessarily, without undercutting my criticism sometimes. So like, I do think that there's a limit to how well you can you can come into a piece with like, a big idea and like, see if it fits, you have to let the work guide you. But if it has to guide but I want to be guided somewhere I don't want to sit there and be like, and it feels pretty good to aim down the sights with you know,
  
  
  
  Ben 15:49
  
  where does that where for you did that maybe come from? I think like for Phil and I at least I feel like I was introduced to thinking about games in this way from way point but also you know, through kind of going through grad school that it kind of grad school faiz your brain and you're like, Well, wait, what it's a way that we can think about this in more layered ways. How did you kind of come to thinking about things in this way?
  
  
  
  Speaker 3 16:14
  
  You guys like I can tell like six different origin stories from this right? Not to like name drop the pod but let's go the earliest Yeah, exactly. You're gonna get like, like the hip hop, like, drop, you know what I mean? origin story. You know it and like, boom, boom, you hit it like Funkmaster Flex, Austin,
  
  
  
  Ben 16:30
  
  same thing. Exactly, exactly.
  
  
  
  Speaker 3 16:33
  
  At the earliest is like, you know, my mom is a poet, right? And like, I grew up playing language games with her. And going to poetry reading with her and hating going to poetry readings with her. She makes fun of me now for like, some of the times that in front of the table I veer towards the poetic, right? Because as a little kid, I was like not, I was not a poetry person, right? So because like you're a little kid, and you're being dragged to an event and you're like, I want to be at home playing Super Mario Brothers or Zelda or whatever, right? But, so that was a huge part of it. Right? I was always playing language games with my mom, I was always talking about, you know, what I was seeing. And she was asking me questions about it. What I liked about a thing what you know, oh, I really liked this episode of X Men. What did I really like about this episode of X Men? Talk to me about what you think mutants stand for? etc, blah, blah, blah. And then the same thing with my dad, my parents are divorced, right. And so if I had to say like, what's the thing that was like the defining, like, experience of like, time spent with my dads, I lived with my mom and then my stepdad, then I would visit my dad regularly on and off, depending on what year of my childhood it was, how close he lived to me, blah, blah, blah. But for a big period of time there The thing was going to the movies, or going over to his place and watching a movie, like go into the rental store, getting a movie, bringing it home and watching him for a good period of time there. And I think I've told this story before, but after we watched the movie, he busted out the yellow legal pads. And he was like, all right off, write your review. Write it. And you know, this is like me at 10 trying to impersonate a film reviewer, you know what I mean? Like writing the, you know, the acting was so powerful. I felt thought that when Dan Zell said King Kong and got shit on me, you know what I mean? Like, that style of just like, I didn't really know what I was doing. But I was grasping at something I was being asked to do it and being told effectively, you can do this, anybody can can watch a movie, and then take five minutes to think about it, write down your thoughts. And then we'd share he'd she would also go do this, he'd write his review, and I'd write my review. And then we'd compare notes. Right? And so sometimes I really liked something and he didn't or vice versa. And I'm like, you know, I can see your point, blah, blah, blah, you know, again, I'm, I'm a kid, right? So I always had that as like a an experience that like, again, you can tell that origin story. And that's the moment and that's only like half the moment Right? Because then you have to talk about you know, go you have to talk about like being a nerdy kid in school who like found myself identification through a really terrible sort of egoism about being smart being the Smart kid when I was in you know, elementary school and junior high and then going to high school and like getting the like life lesson of like, Oh, you are you are a big fish in a small pond when you were in seventh grade and eighth grade you are not that in ninth grade you are you don't know how algebra works at all my man you got to slow down right and then still like struggling to identify myself through like being smart and being rd and being you know, good at books and good at reading and like reading it reading comprehension scores, my AP tests like still like very unhealthily focused on that stuff. So that when I went into like, I tell this story sometimes too, which is that like, my first week of high school, someone asked me what what my skin intro was like something that someone knew something I did not know not from my previous school. I was like, Well, I'm an honors this and honors that. And he was like, bro, you have to stop saying that you're an honors English and honors bio. And for me that was like I was putting a cloak on like that was my defensive maneuver was to be like, you no one knows me. But I'm in all honors classes, you know, when I was not in all honors classes for long enough to be clear, like, I got through like a year of that. And it was like, Nah, I'm out. I've no more honor science, please, no more honors math, I cannot hang. As anyone who's listened to my podcast where a science topic shows up knows. So like, I think part of the like, critical, like position, or perspective is almost like a healed version of wanting to be the smartest person in the room at all times. And needing to like realize how many relationships I ruined by being that and trying to be the smartest or cleverest person in a room. And then slowly over the course of like, a decade, and this is grad school stuff, right? It's like, oh, I don't know shit, like, grad school is the ego killer. If you're doing it for real, right, you sign up to be told you're wrong over and over again. You sign up to have your like positions challenged by people who are invested in their positions, and ideally, by mentors and teachers who are invested in helping you sharpen yours, which almost always means asking yourself questions over a longer period of time than you normally get to, which was like, this is the only this is the thing that grad school is good for, for me or like academia, the thing I miss about academia is having a question than having a year to answer it, instead of having a month before publication date. It's, you know what I mean? Like, in academia, you take a big problem. And normally, you know, if you're, if you're trying to write like a paper, maybe you hit a point where you're like, and that's beyond the scope of this paper, but if you're doing like a book project, you're doing your dissertation research, you don't get to say and that's beyond the scope until pretty late in the process. Two years into the process, you have to spend a lot of time being like, I wish this was beyond the scope of the project, but it isn't, I have to go back and do more research, I have to go ask more people questions, I have to go read some secondary materials that I left out, I have to go, you know, go over my data and see if I missed something, all that stuff that in media, for instance, you don't have that long turnaround time, you don't have that I'm gonna go I'm gonna stay in the lab. Like, again, to keep it like fighting games, I, you know, the difference between media and, and academia is, media has a real like pickup and play Call of Duty mode, where you're like, Alright, I'm just gonna hop in and play some matches, you know, I'm gonna have a good time with it, you know, I want I'm gonna be competitive, I want to like go out there and really show off and like, I'm not pro. And then the academia has like a fighting game atmosphere where like, there is no casual academia mode, you have to go to the lab, you have to learn the footsies. You know what I mean? Like, you have to learn your mix up, you have to, there is no, there is no armoring at the SMG. And just like learn the map a little bit, which is what you can do a little bit in media, media is a bigger space. And I don't know that it's a bad thing for me to be that, like it's responsive, it's colloquial, all of those are positive things. But the thing I miss about being an academia a little bit is that big question of like, Damn, how do I, what do I actually think is happening, for instance, is a topic that I never finished. Right. And so it's going to be in my brain forever. In EVE Online, a game for people who don't know a game about spaceships and spreadsheets. It's, it's like a big MMO like something like Final Fantasy 14 or World of Warcraft, except so much of it, I'm trying not to be reductive is driven by two things. One is an intense amount of math and preparation. And the second is an intense amount of social play, that even people who are not role playing are so invested in their character and in their social communities, that they're doing really intensive, impassioned, action, there's very little at the high level of play for EVE Online. There's very little like, you know, I'm just gonna do my dailies, which is what you might hear from someone who does another type of MMO massively multiplayer online game where they're like, Oh, I'm gonna just hop in. And I'll run like two or three little quests, or I'll do a, you know, a run through a dungeon, they might say, that's just like, not how Eve works for like that top tier of player. And there's a lot the cut off and Eve is a lot higher. And so my question has always been like, where is the labor in EVE Online? Is it only in the developers? Or are the people the product in something like EVE Online because that game falls apart? The second the players don't take it seriously. Right? You need a big player base to be committed to playing it in the way it's designed. And they are it's not a public park in that way. Right? Like a public park. You show up and you play and suddenly Your taxes go to keep the park while you're operating. It's like an amusement park where the other players on the rides right? And like their do that is that labor what's where's the line there? Is it not aligned those are over are those overlapping categories play in labor. And there's some really fun things that come up. When you go into the study of this where you're like, early on on EVE Online, one of my favorite stories about it, and it's like, this is Labor Action to me. They, the way you've worked is and it still works like this to some degree, you don't and a lot of like role playing games, you get more powerful as you complete content, you you beat monsters, you solve puzzles, you complete dungeons and quests and stuff like that. And so you level up, that is not how it works in EVE Online, you might get money and stuff from doing those things in the game. Not real money, though, you know, Eve Online has some, you know, kind of real money. But the way your character gets better at things, is it's a sci fi game. It's kind of a Cyberpunk game in some ways, you put chips in your head, and you download the data like the matrix into your character's head. And that's just going all the time, it's always going you have a queue of the your next upset of
  
  
  
  Speaker 3 26:16
  
  like skills you're going to learn, you're gonna learn basically, it's you're like, Alright, I'm gonna get better at turrets, so I'm gonna have the turret ship, just downloading away, even when I'm not playing the game, it's download. Now, when the game first launch, you could only queue up a handful of these at once. And they will take hours and hours and hours to go through your your character. And so sometimes that meant it one would end at 3am 4am. And so players were waking up in the middle of the night setting alarms for themselves. So they could get up and put in that new skill chip. So they could start downloading the next skill quicker than their rivals could who are sleeping in so that the next time they have a fight, you're at target level five, and they're only at target level four, because they stayed asleep. And so eventually, players put together a sort of informal counsel and went to the developer and we're like, Yo, we you cannot make us wake up at 3am to get like a little bit of a percentage point of an improvement. And so they changed the way that skill queuing system works. So you could cue more skills, so that you wouldn't have to get up in the middle of the night to fix that, right. And to me that's like this sort of small sort of Labor Action, where like, Okay, if the players are the product, which I think they are, then they're they're actually what they're actually arguing for. It's not like a quality of life change for a video game player. It's like, Hey, if you want me to continue being the product for you, I need to not have to wake up at 3am. You know, they're not asking for a raise, but they are asking for better hours, in a weird way. And so like, to me, that's the only you only get to that if you spend, I spent six months trying to figure out what the fuck is going on with EVE Online playing labor. And I need another two years to do it right. And now I would even have the three years because that six months that I spent six years ago, seven years ago, doesn't matter anymore, that's gone. You know what I mean? That's who cares about what I knew about EVE Online a decade ago? That's old news. So like, you only get there from that long study. And so that's the thing that I do think if academia has a place inside of criticism, it lets you do that sort of long form sit with it thing that most critics in today's economy cannot justify doing without also having another you know, income stream somewhere, you know, so yeah, sorry for the very long weird tangent on this but
  
  
  
  Phil 28:32
  
  Right, yeah, no, I mean, that makes them there's so much there. I mean, just to to back us up a little bit to some of your stories. I think the first thing I appreciate with that, with that story is this like the relationship that you had with both of your parents and how they kind of are giving you the paradigm of like, why criticism is important one you have to experience our youth to experience life and just take it in and then like with your dad like there's there's a lot of value and you know, discourse and talking about different ideas, different perspectives on the same thing and that doesn't make it you know, I think especially in the games industry well not the industry but the in the game gaming community. There's a lot of kind of toxicity around like criticism and how criticism is like being negative towards a game and like when the reality is like you know, being critical of something usually comes from a deep place of love and like interest, which I think you know that story you're telling that your dad with your dad it's like a perfect example of like a really young age of you know, articulating that to you
  
  
  
  Speaker 3 29:39
  
  there's a there's a there's a parallel story with my dad that I don't actually tell that often which is you know, my dad is someone who I think his career has been in retail and sales right like he's been a salesman for most of his life. He ran some retail stores for a while. Business Owner for a little while. I'm in still technically as a business owner, but his primary income is His by sales. But he's also a musician, right? And he asked me from a very young age and still to this day, he will send me a song I'm like, Alright, asked, What do you think? Like write me your review of this of this like skeleton demo of this like track that I put together in logic. Which, by the way, this is a strange story to say here, but like my dad recently learned how to use logic to make music and he had been making music his whole life. Do you know what I mean? And so the job the second hand, Jaya have from seeing him learn how like loops work, and how like the deep well of instruments that you can pull from to work with has been so fun. But he, uh, he would also ask me to bring that same response to his music and he was never like, I have a new song Austin, you know, like, like, I want to play it for you, period. That's it, I'm gonna play at the end. He was like telling me what you think, what do you think about the bridge, like, and so in some ways, that's a lot harder, right. And in some ways, it also prepared me I think a little bit more for the grad school thing of like, you're gonna get yourself torn into you know, and I don't care how good the pros is, which is like always been a struggle for me where like, I can get the pros good. But if I'm not saying something good, it doesn't matter. You might trick some people because your word choice is pretty good. But if you if you don't have an argument, for me, the most important note I ever got ever on a paper back was I did a I did a piece. piece. It's on a piece. It's an essay for grad school, I was doing my masters. An essay I wrote was about it was like it was a very basic like film studies class, right. And so I got assigned, or somehow I ended up writing about Seven Samurai, I was a great about one scene and Seven Samurai. And the or it wasn't one thing, it was about a bunch of different stuff. The professor was like this one, this professor was like cool with me, like I had done research work with this professor. He knew that I was like, not half assing it, but he gave me like a trash grade on this paper. And he said there's only one section in this entire paper that is good. And it is the bit where you're talking about them deciding. And if you've seen Seven Samurai, but there's a bit where they decide what they're like what they're like, not logo, but their banner is kind of what their symbol is. And it's because I did a sort of visual analysis of the scene and talked about the kanji that was being used and like, what the multifarious meanings of that kanji would be for the Japanese viewer, not just seeing what they said it meant, but also being able to intuit to like three or four other meanings, that it would have also continued or contained. It could be kanji can mean multiple different things. In in Japanese, right? Also in Chinese, but like your one character can mean many different things, and how and the word it doesn't. It's not pronounced the same way. But the character is the same, right? And so I did a kind of read of that. And he was like Austin, this is the only piece of the paper, that's good. And it's because it's the only piece of the paper that you're engaging with the movie as a piece of visual media. The rest of what you're writing here is about the narrative and about the story and with the characters. And that's all fine, but like, it's not a book, you know, it's a movie, how is the visual component of this movie? You know, working and you know, I think that that's, you can do narrative critique of film that is about narrative. First, you can do that, and you can find interesting pockets of information or thought or, you know, ideas in that style. But he was right that anytime I want him to do a character first, you know, analysis of something, it would have been better in an in film. It's better if I also tie in, how was that character shot? How are they dressed? What what angles is the camera looking at them from? And it's one of those things. It's like, I'm not explicitly a formalist as a critic. But to dismiss the formal elements of a medium, you're missing half of what you can talk about, and you're missing parts where you might your point might be undercut by what the medium is saying through its through its actual, like, rules and the way that it works. You know what I mean? Like a very simple version of this that just came up someone, not someone I know, but I saw someone or I heard about someone who thought that a Ston, was the the first time they watched buting the beast, they watched all the beauty and the beast thinking Istana was the hero. Right? And what why did they think that? Why did they think that Ken Starr was going to be the hero? Now, lots of questions, maybe because there's some superficial similarity between histon and like the woodsmen in traditional fairy tales like Red Riding Hood or you know the Sleeping Beauty, you know, hero, but also, you know, they have that song at the beginning about how cool Gestalt is, and it's sarcastic, but if you don't understand that it's sarcastic and A lot of the sarcasm is in the visual language of that scene. It's him being a big like, you know, to, you know, up to bigger personality clearly a big jerk throughout that sequence. You might not get that it's sarcastic. And so you might go to that whole movie be like, damn, this is really a movie about having a Ston, you know, got left left behind unfairly, we certainly live in a world in which I promise you I can spend two minutes on the internet until I find some guest on
  
  
  
  Ben 35:27
  
  Oh, have you ever say that guest on stands are strong?
  
  
  
  Speaker 3 35:32
  
  They're strong, they're gonna be in the comments. You know, don't don't clip your stonham hive is like a stamp. There we go. There we go. So yeah, so like you having using the whole part of whatever the object is in front of you, is gonna give you better criticism every single time. Because you will, and it might undercut you in a way that's important for you to address. There's so many times that I've been like, I want to write, you know, oh, there's a game I want to write about, or a movie I want to write about. And here's the idea I have for it. And then I think about the way something was shot, or the way a piece of music was was deployed, or the way it felt to move through the world or something like that in a video game. Suddenly, my initial thought doesn't hold up in the same way. You know what I mean? A great example. This was like Monster Hunter world, a game that I really liked is a game that like on its face, I There are so many things narratively that put me off about that game that are about, you know, I'm not a hunting person. You know what I mean? This is a game about preparing to go out and do a hunt against the dragon, you know, and there's a bunch of different animals, a bunch of different kind of mythical creatures. And I think that a lot of the narrative stuff around it in that specific game is like, extremely White Man's Burden ish, Manifest Destiny storyteller, it gets wild, how much it's like, we've come to the new world, but it's filled with animals that need to be eradicated. Like that is like bar for bar that is that game. But I can make that criticism, right. But I have to make that criticism while also holding the criticism that is like, it feels really good. And something something distinct is happening. When in the middle of combat, I have to go hide behind a rock to sharpen my sword. And that is like, can I put those two ideas in conversation? How do I put in conversation, the materiality of of what's happening in the moment to moment clay, of of Monster Hunter world that feels so distinct from every other action game, but isn't a Monster Hunter game or like, maybe a Dark Souls game or adjacent with the sort of narrative idea that is that is kind of tossed over it like a tarp, about this kind of like Manifest Destiny, colonial expedition stuff? How do those two things interact? What is the fantasy at play? In doing all this preparatory work? Like? How do those two things inform each other? And where does my joy at one sit with my disdain for the other? How do those two things interact? And that's, that's hard work as a writer, because it's so much easier to just pick one or the other. It's so much easier to be like, Yo, I chop that that dragon's tail off and it was sick. Five out of five thumbs up? Or Would ya wouldn't do it again, or narratively. This game makes me feel like a like a column like young colonists like what am I doing here? ejected Jack, the jack, don't buy this game. And the reality of trying to like weave those two feelings together and make them bounce off of each other is both the difficulty and the reason I did this for so long. It's fun to do that, which I think is the other thing people don't get about criticism. Is that like people think, and there are people out there who maybe do it for a different reason. But for me, I'm not doing it because I'm a hater. I'm doing it in fact, because it's it's joyful for me to put these ideas in conversation with one another. Yeah,
  
  
  
  Ben 38:56
  
  I feel like Phil and I are always talking about variations on that. And I think the flip of that is when we're like oh this narrative just like beautiful hitting all the right notes. So good. But God damn is is not fun to play.
  
  
  
  Speaker 3 39:09
  
  Yeah. Which is a bummer, right? Like that feeling of like that feeling of like, I wish I could give myself over to this thing all the way and what what I really want is a cutscene constantly. Like and that's a it's a bummer because it's like that's the thing I'm here for and I will take the opposite every time and again maybe this does reveal I'm a formalist just like, I I don't know that. I love where Death Stranding goes narratively, the Hideo Kojima came about delivering packages and opposed to pie do not love but any I don't. There are things I like about it their world building things I like about it but there are not narrative there are not plot things I like about it so much. You know, the world is while I'm here for the world. I'm even here for some of the bad swings at terrorists have If I don't love where any of it goes, however, take any 10 minute chunk of that game where I'm Climbing a cliff and setting up a ladder or a zipline or a road, the feeling of like putting a road together with someone is the thesis of that game so much more than the stuff with the characters that are, you know, having bad boss fights and family reunions. So it feels incredible. It feels incredible. I'm excited for the sequel of that game. There's nothing makes me not happier. But it's it's a good moment when someone has spent decades making one type of thing. And then they get to like, go make a different type of thing and, and really, really go for it. To me that's like a sort of artistic freedom. That is I wish more artists had like most artists don't even get to get to the like stable franchise to most artists, regardless of medium are stuck at like, how do I make rent? How do I make rent? Okay, I got to commission, okay, I'm on this contract. Okay, I'm on this TV show, whatever for a little bit of time. Okay, how do I make rent? But for those who do make it to that tier of like, Oh, I'm in a pretty stable place, getting from there to like, and now off doing a different thing is like, that's the that's the dream in some ways, you know?
  
  
  
  Phil 41:21
  
  Yeah. I'm curious, like, you know, over the last couple seasons of the show, we've had game developers come on and talk, like one aspect that they that comes up a lot is like, developers wishing that critics or, you know, games, right, journalists had a better understanding of how games are made, because that would influence how they talk about them. And you know, we can get into the weeds of like, Well, part of that is like, there is no transparency to how games are developed, except for Double Fine's recent documentary, which, you know, we don't need to get into it, but
  
  
  
  Speaker 3 41:59
  
  they're not. Right. They're not the average place. And then, like, you know, you get to things like like no clip from Daniel Dwyer. But that's all and I love Danny, Danny, and I go back, you know, but But I must say, we go back like crew cuts, which is a deep Rhymefest reference, and no one cares about that. But I'm going to drop it anyway. And real ones now. But what Danny does is, and I don't, I'm not accusing Danny or anything. I'm not saying Danny gives anybody Final Cut. But like, Danny is going into a place they know, Danny is coming to the place. In fact, we had Danny on reset, which was the show that I was consulting producer on for Vice, which was like a video games culture industry, kind of like 30 minute, you know, Act One, act two, or like behind the scenes, investigation, conversation, you're talking head things. And then the third act was like a was like a roundtable with like some industry people. And it was hosted by Dexter Thomas, who I think might still be advice. I'm not 100%. Sure. But Danny came on that. And one of the things that we talked about was like, you know, Danny did a video on Final Fantasy 14. And when he showed up early in the morning with his crew, people already there in the middle of their workday. And when he left late at night with his crew, people were still there. The videos he made were not about crunch culture at Square Enix, you know what I mean? And that's not an accusation, that's something he talked about, you know. And so I think that like when you know, the camera crew is coming, you're gonna, you're gonna have a different level of transparency. And you're gonna put stuff in the front in the foreground, because you want to make sure it looks good and blah, blah, blah. So like, I do think that there is a degree of like, that lack of transparency is why critics sometimes don't know what it is to make a game. But also, so I'm on like, almost on your tube of making games at a fairly sizable studio. Now. I think we're at like 60 people, something like that. That number is going up very quickly. Every month. We're hiring, we're hiring, we're hiring. And I like stand by everything I said about the stuff that I critiqued at the time. And in fact, I work with some of the people whose games I critiqued as hard as I could write multiple people that I work with now, we're on watchdogs Legion, again, I think had really high ambitions and like, came in under them. And those people enjoyed my writing on the game because I engaged with the work as best as I could, you know, I I don't need to know. You know, you can imagine a game that has a okay, you can imagine, let's say Breath of the Wild. This is a fake. This is fake. This is what I'd say is fake. Imagine I knew that. And first of all, imagine I'm someone who pretend if you can, that I'm someone who doesn't like weapon durability and Breath of the Wild that I'm one of the people who's like that game is so close to perfect but I hate that weapons break and breath of the While there are millions of those people imagine I knew that the idea of weapon durability was back and forth for months and months or years and years inside of whichever Nintendo sub team built that that game. They tried it both ways. They tested it both ways. They had a third system that was like sort of like weapon door ability, but you could repair the weapon. Imagine I knew all of that stuff. None of that clarifies my position of do I enjoy it or not, none of that clarifies what the work is. I imagine all that there was nothing in a video game that didn't come from hours of meetings, or a last minute fix that someone put in at the best of their ability when they realize something was broken. Right like that. It is it is amazing that anyone ships, any video game, right? That doesn't mean that my response to it is going to change based on I know, that makes me like, I know that that makes me sound callous in some ways, right. But I don't know, like I want to respond to the work, I want to respond to what's in front of me to what my hands can touch my eyes can see to what I've played and how it hits me. And if I want to talk about I love to hear about the process of making things because that can inform my criticism, I love to watch a GDC talk about how some gameplay feature was designed. And what they were going for. Often what they say is we're going for x what we came out with why? And that turned out why was pretty good. You know? And that's this is part of why I wish there was more transparency. It's not because I think people would be like softer on game developers in criticism or something. I think it's because people would have a better understanding of, of what it is they're critiquing to begin with. The thing of like, I don't know, I think I think the the first response you have to a thing is often not a thing, you yourself understand why you're having it, you know what I mean? Like, the thing of like, I don't like the taste of this thing in my mouth. And then and then you're not sure but is it because it's burnt? Is it because it has an ingredient you don't like the taste of? Is it because you were just brushing your teeth? Is it because you know what I mean? Like, and I think that that can be hard to unpack that. And the job of a good critic is to unpack why did the thing taste bad in my mouth? What was going on there in that moment? And and while I think it can be good to know that the chef's tools were dirty, and it doesn't change that the food tasted bad. Do you know what I mean? Like, if any, if anything, sometimes you're like, I think like the Destiny one thing all the time that came out of some reporting around that game that was like, Oh, if they wanted to move a rock in any one of their big open world areas, they had to move the rock at the last, the last thing they did at the end of the day, and then set the entire level to be rendered or whatever overnight. They couldn't they couldn't get in there and move things around, which meant they couldn't test things. They couldn't test things the way that you're supposed to be able to test them. Because it took so long to update the like go from one build to the next build. And so things just got like really stagnant and they weren't tested. Right. And like that's an interesting story. That's an important piece of reporting about the way that game was developed. But fundamentally, it's like, the thing that I come back to is Kirk Hamilton's incredible review of that game for Kotaku at the time, which is so it's like this embodied review of playing that game at launch, staring into a cave and shooting so that loot drops out because the game that they built is one where that wasn't the best way to plan and like I don't care, I care as a curiosity and as a as someone who's in game development now I care about it, but I don't care about it in the critical sense how it got there. I care about engaging with the work and talking about what it does. And again, that's that's me as an audience member and as a writer, I don't know that that's everybody I know that it's not everybody in fact I also think people have this tendency to like lash out at a piece of writing that isn't like it doesn't meet their needs as if that piece of writing is a claim that that's what all pieces of writing should be we got that a ton at waypoint was like why do you think every review needs to be x y z as I we don't believe that we believe our reviews need to be xy and z and so we're writing those ones but like you got to understand we don't get IGN traffic Why are you mad at us you know what I mean? Most people are looking at reviews that look nothing like our reviews. Why are you so heated up about these also being in the pit you know, and I don't know people have strong feelings about what is and isn't a review
  
  
  
  Speaker 3 49:49
  
  I'm getting a little bit of the academia thing of like the long term project again, right which is like it takes a long time to make a game. And so like you know, I'm I have a terrible title which is IP director It's a good title in some ways, it's a bad title because like intellectual property is a hell phrase that represents a lot of like, terrible things with the world. It means chief world builder and like lead writer, which is nice. But also because it's IP director, it means I do get to like, elbow my way into certain conversations and say stuff like now that wouldn't be good for the IP, if we did XYZ. And like that, there's a little bit of benefit from that. But fundamentally, it means that I'm working on a longer time scale. Again, I'm not working on the one week turnaround, or the two week or one month turnaround that media comes with. Generally, you know, for the spaces we're in, right, obviously, there's long term reporting, of course, they really don't want to be dismissive of that. But in video games, the amount of people who are doing long term reporting is very, very slim. And they often have to contend with also doing daily daily reporting or daily criticism on top of that. And so like part of that what I part of what I get, is that where I'm like, I've been working on this game now for almost two years. And some of the questions I had about our game two years ago, are still questions I'm solving today in terms of what my part of the job is, right. And that's exciting. That means I do get to spend that long term. But in terms of my general position, again, like I know more quickly why something might be the way it is, when I see something bug out in the game. When I see like, placeholder voice acting, get played, instead of like, the real voice acting or something like Oh, damn, yeah, someone XYZ, you know what I mean, like that, that, like I get some of that stuff now. But But generally speaking, I think my positions have been pretty consistent. Which is that like, and maybe that comes from me, having already known a lot of devs. And having spoken to them about the realities of development, right that like, I already knew Game Dev was a mess. I already knew that none of this stuff was clean. You didn't get like a design doc that then you implement over the course of a few years. And it never changes. I you know what I mean? Like, all of that stuff is still it's what it was what I thought it would be, it is what it is, you know, so thankfully, I haven't had too many big, big changes. I think the biggest thing is I don't do much criticism anymore. Especially for video games, like, you know, my criticism at this point is Star Wars stuff with a more civilized age. And that's just like a different it's a different beast, you know, what I mean? I'm not doing that like truly like the difference between like watching and or last year and taking good notes and doing some reading like that part of it's also the same, but it's not the same as picking up a controller and playing something for 50 hours. And being there in this other way. Not, like immersed necessarily, but like the process of picking up a controller and playing a video game feels different to me phenomenologically than sitting down watching a two hour or hour long TV show and writing some notes about it and doing some research. And so like that is just gone from my life at this point. Though, when I play video games, I do still I do still sometimes take notes. I maybe went back and played like 15 hours of Anthem two weeks ago, or two months ago, a month ago. And I absolutely opened up the notes I took from when I first played that game and thought I'd be reviewing it and added new notes there because it you know, you never know, you never know when you might come back to something. It's still built that way. Yeah, I believe the thing that happened with anthem and now I get to tell this little story really quick, is I think that the reason I went back to it is I was watching my friend Dre play something some mech game on the front of the table Twitch account, shut up slash friends at the table. And I was like damn, and I was playing Destiny after the Destiny two DLC had dropped in was kind of disappointed in. And that was like the very beginning of that drop. So like before, the quality of life changes were really clear. And it was just like kind of the mid story stuff that felt really, really tacked on. I was like, Damn, you know, I just really wish someone made mech Destiny like that would be my like as grody as it sounds, that'll be my forever game. And someone in the chat was like, Well, what about anthem? I was like, well, obviously anthem isn't it was an anthem. First of all, obviously, those are exosuits and not mechs. Obviously, they're different. Come on, very clear. But to the I was like, You're right, let me try it again. Let me jump back in and see how it goes. Like it failed as a game in terms of a live service game. But like maybe under new you know, it's a new day. They never like did the big refix of that game. They killed the like, Anthem next thing that they were going to do or they're going to try to fix that and give it a second shot. But maybe what's there now is still compelling. So I started the new character I went in with no expectations. I spent like 10 hours be like you know what? Feels good to fly around feels good to do these abilities. Feels kind of cool to get some loot feels cool to like fly under this waterfall, and then somewhere along the line. When I looked up, I wanted to see like, where's the community for this game at now? I found a YouTube video of someone who was like, trying to be the guy like he was the anthem guy on YouTube. In fact, I want to say what is it his day was a guy literally something like something like that it was your anthem on close enough, literally your anthem. Very nice guy. And he if you go to his page, if you go to his like, if you go to your anthem Game On, on YouTube, dozens of Anthem videos from two to three years ago, just dozens of them, you know, Cataclysm has finally been released Cataclysm start soon Bioware response more Cataclysm leaks, new strongholds lease is anthem and legal, legal trouble the truth about anthem like just dozens and dozens and you've got to be the guy. And then the game didn't need a guy cuz that game basically got got canceled after it was released. Right. And I just got really sad about it because it's like, here's a person who the last video on his account was anthems development ended news and detail and 200 views. And like the one before that was anthem second anniversary news. Like he was like, ready for the for the rejuvenation of it. And he sounds so defeated. He sounds so defeated in the Emperor has been canceled. Yeah, it's like, you know, some other stuff is gonna come out soon. Maybe I'll pick up my channel to that. He didn't know this is a battle board tragedy.
  
  
  
  Phil 56:31
  
  Greek tragedy, truly. So then
  
  
  
  Speaker 3 56:33
  
  I'm like, damn, what's going on with this guy? And I was trying to track him down trying to track him down. I couldn't figure out like, did he change his date? Does he have another YouTube channel? What's going on? And then I clicked on live, and it turns out a month ago. So at the time, like two weeks prior, he did a four year anniversary stream with two of his best friends that he met through anthem. And his wife who he met at an anthem meetup years prior. And now and in the time since then, because of the anthem meetups he ended up getting like a job and he ended up getting like an opportunity to be like, like one step above influencer one step below, consultant or like, what's the thing that what's the the job title? I'm thinking like Community Manager. None of that below that, like outside like, it's like, like a critic like a company hires a critic to come in and do a consultancy. On a game before it comes out. There's a word for this anyway, you know what I'm talking about, right? Well, yeah, like and Guy crawl went and did this for like a decade. I think Jeff Green doesn't now. Shout out to them two incredible people who mentored me for a little while, which was great. Anyway, he got that role. And then from that, he got like, some roles working on some indie games. And now he's doing community management stuff I want to say at Ubisoft or something. And since like anthem ended up like, and then he did this stream, this like four hour stream replaying his favorite stuff of Anthem with his wife, and his two other good friends. And I was like, You know what, I'm back.
  
  
  
  Ben 57:59
  
  I'm back. Hello, everyone. We're back up.
  
  
  
  Speaker 3 58:01
  
  We're back. That's right. I think we're back that I played Five more hours on marathon when I was like, I gotta stop. doesn't know about I hit the grind, the middle of that game, where you stop getting new abilities, and you just start reading, like, every fight is the same. It doesn't have the progressions, system needs, etc. And like, all right, I'm going to close those notes. But who knows, when that game is about to get cancelled, I'll go back, I'll start a certain character, I add some more notes. Maybe I'll send out a newsletter. Uh, you know, you never know the thread is always there. So I don't think it ever leaves you. That's the thing. Once you start thinking about things like this, you're always looking for angles, or I am anyway, once I decided I'm going to write critically about media. I'm never not in that mode. I know that that sounds exhausting. And there are times when it can be tiring. But it's mostly because it's fun that I do it. You know what I mean? I'm mostly engaged in a positive lean forward way. Not in a like, it's not like I'm looking for things to tear apart. It's like, I want to know what how I want to know what this thing is doing and why I'm responding to it, you know? And that hasn't left me in the world of Game Dev either, right? Or, like, I'm constantly thinking about, how does this How would this hit me as a player? How is this world building? Like, what's this evoke? Hey, I'm making a decision about a character's name and what am I trying to evoke with this? What is the idea that I'm trying to like, bring to bear what is the emotional experience? I'm trying to give somebody when I use a certain collection of sounds, you know what I mean? I do that all the time with friends at the table anyway, so it's not like it's it's not like it's like a new thing necessarily. But it's like that's the day job now that's different. So So yeah, that's that's how that transition is.
  
  
  
  Phil 59:47
  
  I take that. I mean, I recently transitioned into game development at the beginning of the year, as well and like similar to Ben like went to grad school for creative writing and like my background is in creative nonfiction right? writing that specifically so like when you say all this stuff about like, you know reading a piece of criticism or some some kind of personal anecdote or personal essayistic element enters the enters the chat like that's the shit I'm, I'm all about you know? Yeah, I think I think kind of being on the game development side of things has been interesting in that when when I first started, I feel like I was getting the feeling like, oh, it's going to fundamentally change how I talk about games. But then I was thinking we recently recorded a Resident Evil episode just talking about like the remake and Ben's playing Resident Evil two remake. And I was writing a, like a column piece about resonable four remake, and I was just thinking like, it hasn't, like, knowing a little bit more about game development actually hasn't changed much of how I talk about games, but maybe it's changed like the things that I find interesting, like, in the same way that like that a good you know, piece of criticism or a good theory theoretical framework kind of changes how you engage if you're given the time to interact with
  
  
  
  Speaker 3 1:01:07
  
  I mean, like, a great example for this for me is this new trail or tears of the kingdom Breath of the Wild sequel trailer, or like gameplay video that came out a few weeks ago that revealed like all new gameplay mechanics, were like I would have already been hyped on those probably. But being on the dev side and thinking about thinking about what that means for the core gameplay loop. Maybe that does hit me harder now in terms of what a big undertaking that is. Are we are we talking about spiral I don't know how spoiler free All right, to tears are the kingdoms new thing, one of the new things that seemed was on top of like some new mobility options for link our includes like putting things in the world together with a sort of like sticky glue objects into one another, but then also like just items in the world. So like, they showed they show a player building a boat, they showed in the most recent trailer, Link piloting a really janky mech, comprised to four big stone tablets, like sort of thrown like the slates of stone, like put together in a rectangle or cube type thing with a lever on top. Tons of that, like player expressivity stuff. And I the response, you know, the response to the gameplay video had been like, well, this is still just DLC or some of the response, a lot of the response was like, Yo, but there was a subset of people who are like the same map, same game. That's the same game basis basics,
  
  
  
  Phil 1:02:40
  
  anatomy. Yeah,
  
  
  
  Speaker 3 1:02:42
  
  it's like, right. And to be clear, I think even before I was in Dev, I would have been like you're out of your heads, this is a huge change in the way the game is going to feel. But being in Dev, I guess I would say, I do understand maybe a little bit more, or it's more front of mind, it's not something I didn't understand before, but it's way more front of mind, the idea that like, that's something that's going to come up every 50 seconds to five minutes, which means that's the game like the game is different now in a different in a bigger way. And the developers are thinking about that when they're building all the level design, when they're doing the level design, when they're doing all the stage layout when they're doing everything. Somewhere in that thought is, oh, they could put these two tree branches together to do something wild. That's a huge difference in the way you're thinking about the game. I think maybe the other thing that is different. But again, I knew this before, you know, the classic thing that you hear when you interview devs is the best stuff I made was at the end of development, because I understood my own toolset. Right? I understood how to make the game. You know, a common thing you might hear about game development. I don't know who this comes from originally, is that like every, if you compare film, to video to video game development, the big difference is in video games, you have to build the camera every time. Right? You have and and you do to some degree, but also sometimes you get to make a sequel. And obviously they're building their own camera like not literally the camera but the the objective design of the core thing of like, again, in tears with the kingdom, it looks like putting two things together is like one of these core verbs. That's unique. That's clearly a new thing that they built. But the fact that they don't literally have to rebuild the camera controls, they don't have to rebuild every inch of territory, or how territory how ground exists how characters move. Fundamentally they have a groundwork. Part of why I'm so excited about that game is like they're getting to make it after having already made one of these. They are going to be good at that stuff. And it doesn't mean the game is going to be perfect. I maybe I'm disappointed by it. It's happened you know what I mean? I've come into stuff super hyped and come out and like, Damn rough but for them to make Breath of the Wild and then go right into making this means there's a lot of stuff that they would have learned and they're gonna have Have those lessons. So that's something that's a lot more front of mind for me, in this kind of hype cycle moment, versus just judging what's on the in the trailer. Again, when I get to the game, I'm gonna care about what's in the game. But when I see a sort of like snapshot of a game, I do feel like my judgement of it is a little more informed by some of my dev experiences. If that makes sense. Yeah. So yeah, I think that adds up to me. How was your How was your game dev experience been generally?
  
  
  
  Phil 1:05:29
  
  Good? Yeah, I think it's, you know, so I went to school for creative writing. But then after I graduated, during the pandemic, in mind that my MFA, I ended up having getting a job in marketing, and like a tech startup that was just like, soul sucking. So just at a base level, it's like, so much better to be around creative people. But I think more so than that, unlike you, since you would talk to a lot of developers over your career, you kind of had a better sense of our games, where I kind of came in. I'm basically an editor currently, and doing like some narrative design and some, some narrative work. But the games coming out fairly soon. So kind of on the tail end, and
  
  
  
  Speaker 3 1:06:12
  
  are y'all announced? Or do you? Can you anything yet? Because this is the other thing? That's
  
  
  
  Phil 1:06:15
  
  yeah. It's Thursday. ciders is coming out this year? Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, I'm excited. So, you know, one of the things I would have been bringing up as, like, when I came in as an editor, I thought, like, I would just get a script, you know, like, a huge, like, huge document with everything, and I just go through it, and then you know, that'd be it. And then obviously, like, that's not the case. Like we use Anke so there's like, zillions of files. And you know, you're at the edit each one individually, and each time you edit one, you have to implement it into the game. And it's it's very collaborative, as you know. And
  
  
  
  Speaker 3 1:06:54
  
  yeah, it's and it's like, where's the source of truth? Yeah. Is it in the document? Is it in the game is at the end of it on a page on like, some, you know, you know, other sort of like, wiki style, you know, database that you run? Is it as it was on JIRA? Like, where is the truth? Yeah. And what are you responsible for? Doing upkeep for and what do you do when someone when there's a difference of opinion about where the source of truth is? Or about? Like, all that stuff is like, it's collaborative, and it's collaborative? It's technological collaboration? Especially? I
  
  
  
  Phil 1:07:26
  
  don't know. Yeah, it's, it's fully remote team, you know, so like, everything, you know, you're working off a server and like, things are changing rapidly. All the time. So yeah, I mean, it's been really, it's been really fun. And I think like, as a black person, being able to work with other, you know, people of color that have kind of interesting worldviews, like, that's been really exciting. And yeah, I kind of just want to work on like, the start of a project, you know, like, I think like, you coming in at possibility space and kind of being able to work from the beginning on whatever y'all are working on. I bet that's been like really interesting. And like, maybe to segue you this off of me. You know, one of the questions we had was like friends at the table, and how that fits into, you know, your, your ethos, other things you're creating, and hearing that as the IP director, you know, you're doing things like world building, I'm curious, like, do those kinds of analog pretty closely those skills you were doing with friends at the table? Are you finding it's a different experience
  
  
  
  Speaker 3 1:08:27
  
  there, there are similarities and their differences. High level ethos is the same, which is collaboration forward. For instance, table is an actual play podcast, a tabletop role playing a podcast where we play tabletop games together. And I think one of the things that we strive for is collaboration in every aspect, we talk about the I don't show up with a story and go, Okay, we're gonna run through my story. I show up with some world building, I show up with lots of questions, and I help those questions, fill in the gaps, and produce interesting moments and like drive us towards drama. And so a lot of that ethos is still there in the sense that like, my goal is not to, like produce a book about the world for the game we're making and being right here it is implemented, it's to work with narrative designers is to work with gameplay designers, and talk about how those things can inform each other and make sure that we're all making a product that we're all super excited about. That sounds so corny to say out loud, but, but that is the thing, right? Like that is the ethos is still that and the ethos is critical world building, you know, which is shorthand for like world building that cares about what it means. You know, it is materialists world building in the sense that like, it is not I like to build worlds worlds that are interested in things like class dynamics, and think about history as an action We'll thing that, like matters. And it's not just like a list of events, it's like those events have to like, have effects have knock on effects and have to come from somewhere. And like, I like to have that as like what moves me as a as a world builder or like that's one way I think about world building, right? So that stuff is all still there. There's stuff that isn't right, which is that like credit the table is a show where what we do is we get excited about a tabletop game, and then I bounce off that tabletop game to help build a world around it. Here's an example. We're currently in a season called palisade which is a season about giant magical Max it's the sequel to a season called partisan which was about giant nonmagical Max I mean, all mechs are a little bit Are you know metaphorically magical in my heart and are and are also kind of figuratively magical because they're not real. There's a good reason why militaries Don't you think humanoid Max, they're not there. It's a fake idea. Don't do it. Also, if you do it, or you see someone doing it, don't send to me all excited. I don't want to see Max be real, they're terrified. Like that's not a thing I'm hyped about. But in beam saber, which is a forged in the dark game, designed by Austin Ramsay, the way mechs have a mechanical the way that they play is you have a mech, you have a vehicle that has a number of like special quirks about it, like it might have like, like loud afterburners, or it might have you know, a like intense targeting system or something your as a player, you make those. And when you want to get damaged inside of your mech, instead of you taking damage or you taking stress, the machines cork gets damaged instead. So your you lose your your loud afterburners, and in fact, they make a damage so bad, they become unreliable, loud afterburners instead. So the mechs in that game are all about being a shell for the person. There you're inside of it, you're in it like a like a suit of armor, it protects you, it takes the damage from a for you. It has its own set of characteristics that you take on when you're inside of it. And the game we're playing for this season armor wrister which is by a game by Briar, his priors last name, I'm gonna I'm gonna get this real quick as I have it right here. Why am I sovereign, of course, Briar sovereign who I just had lunch with not that long ago, shouts at Briar, that is not true in our roster. When your mech takes damage, when your mech gets put in danger, you get put into danger, too. So this is a fundamentally different truth about the world for me, right. And one of these games, the Mecca is a metaphor for the thing, you cover yourself in the thing that does things you wish you could do. And the other it's a metaphor for you yourself, right. And so I'm going to build different worlds around those rulesets. One of those is going to be a world or a setting, that's about people hiding themselves behind things, it's going to be about factions providing cover for actions, it's going to be a world that's like a little more cold and removed, a little more mechanical. And then in armor, stir, which you know, armor also has all this other cool stuff going on around like different magical approaches. So for instance, like if your mech has arcane magic, it's strong, it's divine magic, but it's weak against mundane attempts to attack you stuff like that, all of that stuff, informs how I build the world. These are both in the same like broad setting, but I almost think of them as like different TV shows that like treat the camera, the way the camera like moves and focuses on things is like different, right? Like, like Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones are both fantasy shows with their fantasy fiction, but they're both very different. And how, like, the focus are literally in the film adaptation. And the TV show the camera frames things differently, you know what I mean? So I think about that a lot. So like, the world that we're building in palisade is a lot less about people being able to hide behind things, you can't really hide behind anything, you're out there, you're in danger, you're being put, you know, at the end of a blade you're being you're you're going to end up not being able to hide behind these big robots, and when they get hurt, that's symbolic of you getting hurt. In some ways. It's symbolic, but you're getting entangled in something. So I have to build a world that supports that in video game development. Some of that ain't there yet. That's just game you know what I mean? Like, video games don't have all of their again, this is why I'm excited about tiers of the kingdom. They're kind of getting there. Early already had that when they started making tiers of the kingdom to some degree, so they could build around it instead of find it along the way. And so in another great example, this is like the Dark Souls versus Elden ring thing, right and Dark Souls. The world building very much was built along the way. And so part of the reason why you end up getting references to places that like don't actually ever show up in the series is because Miyazaki and Whoa, like wrote those, you know, at mile marker eight of 10 to be like, and then that's where the witches of Isaac lift are from a place called Isaac if they didn't know what Isaac was, was it day one, and Elden ring they started with all this world building are able to integrate it deeply from the jump. So you would go to those places right away. And so that's like a distinct difference from and also, when you're writing the on ring lore, you kind of get what like, up souls like, it's like, I don't know that George RR Martin, like, sat down and played a lot of Dark Souls. But he certainly was given lots of documentation and videos about what the gameplay would feel like that it was this kind of, you know, style of disciplined play where the player has learned and how to move slowly and make, you know, very precise decisions about when they're attacking. And they're committed to their attacks, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all that writing can be informed by the feel of what that game is. And so for me now working on a game from the jump, you don't have all that stuff yet. You know what I mean? You have a design for a lot of it. But some of it's just not there yet. Some of that gets, you're figuring it out, you're testing, you're seeing what works, you're seeing what doesn't, you're seeing what's fun, you're seeing what's not fun, you're seeing what's in line. And sometimes you also get the other thing, which is, which I'm grateful for is you get gameplay designers who were like, well, I want to make something that's in tune with your world building. Whereas when I'm playing a tabletop game, I don't have that back and forth with the tabletop game designer, I got a book in my hands. And I'm like, it says here that arcane magic is strong against divine magic, but we're against mundane approaches, right? And like, how do I build off of that. And so in some ways, that's actually been tough for me. I love bouncing off of mechanics. And so if those aren't done, it can be harder for me to do what I like to do, which is interpretive sometimes, and like, Oh, this is like a little engine I can pull on this is a little seed that I can that I can start to play with. Do you know what I mean? And not I think, in some ways, I think like, that's kind of how you ended up with the world building that sticks to you. Again, I don't live a lot of the plot and Death Stranding, who I think about the world building in it, I get how you get there from I want to make a game where I climb a bunch of rocks and build some roads and zip lines. How do we get a world that supports what that is? The world running in a game? It absolutely supports it. It's super weird and cool. The plot which like I don't know, what the the writing order is on that, like, doesn't feel like it emerges from the gameplay necessarily. It feels very much stapled on. And so I think that's, that's the biggest difference between friends of the table. And what I'm doing now is like, we're, I'm making world building decisions without some of the engine or at the engine, but like the engine, lowercase E engine, not gameplay engine, but like, you know, metaphorical engine of gameplay design being totally firmed up, you know. And that's about all that's about as close as I can talk about a project that's unannounced. You know, I'm sure that that's, that's understandable. Yeah.
  
  
  
  Ben 1:17:54
  
  It kind of sounds like in some ways, like, there's maybe a little bit more collaboration with friends at the table where you're like working with people. And I'm wondering, with your, your work presently, is it like, a little bit more, what's the word I'm looking for, like, there's that you're you're trying to find a set, like concrete worlds that you can kind of bounce off of.
  
  
  
  Speaker 3 1:18:18
  
  It's, it's interesting, it's like, I think the collaboration is still there. It's, it's, you know, first and foremost, I have a team of writers, right. I have two great writers who's who I am, like, thrilled to work with on an everyday basis, Tara and Olivia, who are brilliant, and who bring things to the table that I don't have, which is the most important part of, you know, the collaborative processes that like, I can be very self serious. And it's really good to have people who are either self serious in a different way than or are, don't take something as seriously as I do, or where they take something seriously that I think I can be very jokey about, because that blend ends up pushing us all towards something much, much stronger. So I do direct collaboration in that in that method. I say it's less, it's like, we're building a world to bounce off of, it's more that we are it's more about the building of the world and then building stuff around the world. Like, you know, I'd my team is not narrative designers, there's a different team, that's narrative designers who we work with very closely, but there's something very different about being like us being like, here are the bare bones of a place in the world or a story idea or whatever. And then they go and make those stuff. You know what I mean? Like that's a different experience. That's it's different from friends of the table where I'm doing both of those things, you know, with my friends, but also like there's a point at which is like, I'm going in the lab, I'm gonna put together an adventure for people to put together a situation or something like that. This is all stuff that like I cannot wait to talk about it. greater detail is talking around it is just impossible. You know what I mean? Once we announce, and once it's once it's clear what the what what I've been working on, I think a lot of things will snap into place around, like, why I left waypoint to come do this and why the team is the team that is and all that stuff is just gonna be very clear. But I think that there is a degree of like to talk about, it really means talking about it, really. And until I can watch again, this is the transparency thing I wish I could, I wish I could be like, Alright, here's the thing we're doing. But part of that lack of transparency comes from the sense that you need every single competitive advantage you can just to like to succeed, which is not me projecting about like, our, you know, our competitive edge in the market as a particular product. But you know, you think about, you know, you said, I always bugged me out, when I see people talking about, like, how much money the games industry makes, you know, I don't know what the current numbers are, but like the games industry makes such and such billions of dollars in revenue this year, you know, it's bigger than film, you often hear that, right. That's like, such a bad figure. And if you do any reporting, you know that that's like playing with numbers in a goofy way, especially when games are 60 or $70. In many cases, right? You know, you might, you know, a game might drop, when tears of the kingdom comes out, it's gonna make a boatload of money, it still might not have been seen or played by as many people as that money suggests, you know what I mean. And more importantly, everybody is one flop away from losing their job. It is a, this is an industry where the numbers are big, but they're big both on cost and revenue game, especially for triple A games. But even even bigger, indie games are so expensive to make, now that you need those high revenue figures, or companies believe they need those high revenue figures, in order to continue employing people and keeping, keeping stuff going. And often, that's what their goals are, are outlandish. I think about the Tomb Raider reboot games, and the number of Square Enix expected to get from those, and how iDose was just kind of like at the end of a knife on that subject. Like they weren't going to get those numbers, they weren't going to get them. No matter how good that game those games were like, it was just you have to hit a different scale of way, then what was anybody was hitting at that point. But like, the games are genuinely very expensive to make. And so it's one thing to like, Oh, look at all the money that's coming in, in revenue, and it's a different thing to be like, okay, but like, where did the EA originals? Go? You know what I mean? Why, why are they making the Mirror's Edge anymore? Why are you know what I mean? The answer is because like they weren't making money, you know, all this stuff is so much more of a tightrope than anybody in the industry likes to think like to say it is because you say it is you lose investment. You can't put you can't come out and say, and this is like a tough this is like one of the hardest things in the world is the thing of like not so one of the hardest things in the world. I'm like, I've worked hard jobs. You know what I mean? As a person who is one of the things in creative fields, that is difficult when we d hyperbolized. A difficult thing for me, and anyone in the creative field is walking the tightrope between putting your chest out and pretend and saying, giving the best version of your success story. And being like, we have x millions of listeners or whatever, all. And it's like an all time figure, which means nothing. Do you know what I mean? If you're long if you're a long running podcast, if you're a long running publication, and we've asked millions of readers over the last decade, it's like, alright, that doesn't mean nothing, but it kind of means nothing. What do you get per day, how many people are on your site right now, that's what people actually care about. And so there's this hard, you know, tightrope between putting your chest out and giving the best possible most generous version of your story that makes you seem very successful. And then getting being clear to your audience that you are not necessarily as big and as stable as you you may be sometimes portray because you need their support in order to keep the lights on. That's like a really difficult tightrope to walk sometimes, you know, I saw somebody compare friends at the table to Welcome to Night Vale recently, and they called them both behemoths of the podcasting scene. And it's like, bro, we ain't the same. Like Night Vale does numbers numbers, do you know what I mean? Like Night Vale is like 100 times bigger than us or something. You know what I mean? And like, I get it, friends. That table is 100 times bigger than the average podcast that someone makes with their friends like Oh, 100% But like the difference between those, it's a different tax bracket. You know what I mean? Like, and that's and that's, it's a tough, weird thing to be like, Okay, this is the waypoint thing to write like waypoint at its height. And waypoints still doing good. Now, I cannot be any more proud of the way that they like, picked up the ball and ran with it, they've been doing great with the subscription model stuff. I'm so so so, so happy that we got a subscription model sift through before I left that was like, a huge, like, weight off my chest because of something we'd worked on for years and tried to do and then finally it lined up, and we kind of like pushed it through and one day will tell that whole story, you know, in even greater detail than it's already out there. But you know, there was there, there was a point always, and a lot of that has to do with for instance, Danica, being just incredible on socials. waypoint could be the conversation on any given day. And, you know, we were a profitable company, I tell the story a lot that like, we were more profitable at any given time than say, noisy vices music site. But noisy is not profitable was 10s. of million, it was noisy was like, this is a fake number. I'm making it up. But it's not that far off from what I remember, was making. Again, this isn't don't sue me, let's say 28 million a year, but was costing 30 million a year, or as we were making 3 million a year, but only cost 2 million a year. And if you're vice if you're any media company, you're going to invest more are noisy because it feels like if noisy hits, they're going to have a $40 million a year, and that's going to be 10 million profit. Whereas if we have that sort of growth, what do we have a $4 million dollar a year? Who cares? They don't care. Right? It's that's the way that that shook out at the time under that leadership, which by the way is like two regimes of leadership ago so like no one even those numbers are so far in the past not real. This is you know, forever ago now please don't sue me. But like that was the situation was like okay, well, how do we present waypoint as being the sizable new kid on the block who's here to take names and like, be part of the conversation dominate? But also, like, we're not, we're not at polygons level, let alone the IGN Kotaku level, you know what I mean, but readership doesn't really understand the difference between those things. And this comes back to the criticism thing, right, which is like, what, of course, they know what they care about is like, is the article good? Is the review good? Is the podcast good? And in some ways, it's is it hypocritical for me to be like, I wish the audience understood more about the industry side of this, so that they would cut us some slack? Because it's like, that's the same thing. I'm saying I won't do for game development. Right. So, you know, maybe, maybe, do as I say, I do, I don't know.
  
  
  
  Speaker 3 1:27:50
  
  But it's tough. It's it's that particular thing I think, is one of the things that I stick with a lot is like, I do wish there was a little more transparency in the games industry and more a little more honesty about how precarious things where sometimes not because I think that like that should mean that you should go support every game in the world or whatever. But because I think I get I get put off really bad when when people are fronting about how important their Shin is, or about how big it is. They feel like they need to prove something and by like, the worst thing in the world for me, in the games industry is like when the games industry tries to beat its chest about Yeah. Being a big industry about being art. If if it doesn't also want to, like, live that career. You know what I mean? It's tough.
  
  
  
  Ben 1:28:32
  
  I guess, first of all, how's your time looking? I don't want to be, I could go a little bit. Okay. I think maybe we'll like ask like one or two more questions. This just you? You you teed this up? You perked my little ears, that I think the thing that I'm thinking about is, you know, in some ways, I think that the game industry does that because it's this reflexive, like, Well, yeah, please don't cut the Washington Post's like game reporting. It's important. Like it's a huge industry, like please, you know, please, and I think like, some of it is, is just this reflexive, like, let us exists. And maybe you can talk about you know, Phil and I kind of had this conversation with Natalie about like, where is the the games journalism industry? Because from the outside, it's not looking great. It's not feeling great.
  
  
  
  Speaker 3 1:29:20
  
  It's not feeling great. I don't know. i i It isn't a weird place right now. I mean, I think to some degree, this is like, if you asked me where it was going five years ago, I'd be like, Oh, we're gonna see way more layoffs. We're gonna see a continued shift towards independent YouTubers taking up time and and becoming the de facto places that people go to for games coverage. We're going to see more mainstream outlets cut back or eliminate their their, you know, on staff, games media focus, or they'll get rolled into the A bigger, something bigger, like the tech, you know, part of the site or the arts part of the site, or the publication, we'll probably see even a big reduction in some of the biggest, you know, publications that are that are game centric. That's like all that happened. We all knew all of this was coming. I don't think anybody in 2018 was like, games, media is going to keep growing. But then it happened. And it's different to think it's gonna happen than it is to live in it and to feel like, Ha, like, we really it really feels empty in here sometimes, which is, of course not true. There are tons of people doing games media stuff. There are more sites today than there probably ever have been in terms of small sites that are, you know, doing what we would have called blogging 15 years ago, 10 years ago. But I don't, but it feels like there used to be more behemoths in the room. The positives, here's what positives I'll say. I think IGN is in like a surprisingly good place in terms of like, who's over there in terms of reporting and criticism, they have some really great folks over there these days. And that's not to diminish polygon, or Kotaku or anything else. But like, for a long time, inside of the critical sphere, people made fun of IGN as like not being serious or not hiring people who were serious about games, it was like, there was a real, you know, pejorative in a pejorative sense. That's a fanboy website, that's like a site for people who like, just want to see this, you know what I mean? I think over the last five years or so they have, over the time brought in some people and, and turn out pretty good stuff pretty regularly. And that's the biggest gaming website, either is or is in that top, you know, it's up. It's one, it's one or two every time every time, right. The way Gamespot, however, has been like, slowly chipped away at as it's been sold over and over again, is like a heartbreaker, because I spent some time doing freelance stuff for Gamespot Gamespot had some really great people over the last 20 years on and off, as we all know. And seeing like that, that site fall apart, in some ways, and again, there's still good people there. But like, the, the budget ain't what it used to be. And the front page ain't what it used to be, has been very weird. And those are just big. Those are two big sites right to talk about. But then like in that middle area, when you see the layoffs that hit places, when you see things like us game, or closing and Euro game or getting layoffs and you see Rock Paper shotguns, which still has great people, but their models shifting a little bit as ownership seems like it pushes things in new directions, when you see people who want to do good reporting work, spinning off to do stuff, like people make games instead of being full time employed by a media company, that it's awesome that like, that's happening, because people make games and put out some great, great stuff. I'm like so afraid for when someone tries to sue the hell out of them, because they are not going to have the money that a big media company has to protect them, you know, which is of course, like this is part of the trade that this is one of those things I think audiences maybe don't have insight into sometimes readership doesn't Is that like the reason why you don't see a lot of the reason why you there might be stories that don't get run as early as you want them to. Or the reason why you see that people will you know, in my experience that is like stories can get killed by legal because they don't think that it's a safe story to run. They think they're gonna get sued into oblivion in the post Peter Thiel, Gawker, right? That happened to us at a point. My biggest professional failing was like failing to get the story through the door that we had ready to go. It was super important to us. That legal just ended up pulling Patrick off, um, for bullshit reasons I will never be this is like, one of this is one of two things that like almost made me want. The other the other thing was Rockstar, putting pressure on us to do to stop covering labor stuff around Red Dead Redemption to through like backchannels advice because there were connections between like executives advice and executives, at Rockstar from years before I was out of the office when this happened, I would have quit if I had been in office I would have quit but I was in Vancouver on a trip with some friends. And so I wasn't there to like hear it happen live. So that's my second biggest slide, like in my craw. But that thing of like game media, game media reporting on things like labor conditions, things like session sexual misconduct cases, is always running up against the fear from legal teams that they are going to If you're gonna get sued into oblivion, and so while I'm really happy when I see people like Chris brats, start people make games and do a great job of reporting on stuff like the the Roblox stuff, I'm always terrified of like, okay, well, when is the big company going to stomp on the independent reporter who has done great work, but who is putting themselves? You know, I think that what we've seen is they're being very careful about about how they put out content to try to keep themselves safe, but you truly never know. And you can be bullied in a courtroom. And so like, I'm terrified of that happening and scaring off people from doing that sort of work. You know, it's, I think the one that hits me the hardest, it's just the state of games criticism is not where it was. Maybe that's untrue. The same criticism is a different thing. Now, there's a lot more of it on YouTube. And I am not a big YouTube credit person with some exceptions. I really like umbrella terms. I really like the stuff that they are signal does, I really like Jake Geller stuff. There are people who I like, and even some of the people I just said, you know, I've watched a lot of Harry's videos, each bomber guy, right. But even like those and shout outs to Perry, because I'm gonna say something that's like, critical of it is like, and this is about this is about the taste in my mouth more more than Harry's work process. My man, you make three or four hour videos. And sometimes it would be better if it was a 10 page article or a five page, you know, piece, or, which is to say a 15 minute or 30 minute video. And that's the editor, like find your argument, make your argument, identify it. And that's just the how video just doesn't live in my life the same way that words? Do you know what I mean? The same way that texts does, I would rather do the long read that takes me an hour to read. Or that takes me 45 minutes to read, then I like I'm not in a place where I can put on a three or four hour video about JSX. You know what I mean? I've watched that video because I found the time to do it eventually. But like that, to me is a stronger piece, if it's super edited down has a thesis argues for that thesis with textual evidence and like is straightforward. And so my point being that a decade ago, there was a ton of that work, which I really love. And again, this is my personal bias in some ways. And it was being shared on social media platforms, which were still emerging at that time, you could still feel excited about them, like Twitter. And it felt like there was a real discursive space. People argued with each other about their, their critical takes in ways that were elucidating and enlightening about what they were trying to say people people, you know, I would write a blog and someone would respond to my blog, and I would respond to their blog, and we would get somewhere with that. And what I don't see in the YouTube space so much is that as often I don't see Jacob Geller releasing a video and then Campster being like, no, actually, here's my counter to that, or here's how I'm gonna build off a point that you said, and that's just not how YouTube is built necessarily, you know what I mean? YouTube just doesn't isn't set up in that same way. That's not the culture of it. Whereas like, the culture of the blogosphere era was so much about bouncing ideas, and picking up from one person's new thing and like and putting your spin on it, and then like pushing it back out into the world. And that bred a generation of critics that are really good, I think, which is a generation right before me through the generation right after me, because we were all kind of like in that mixer all the time. And that partly also comes from a privileged position of like being on Twitter early enough to like build an audience that cared about our work, and that would share our work, but not yet being so overwhelmingly big that it was hard to find an audience in that space. But like, you know, even before I was at Giant Bomb, I had a readership of a small readership of people who liked when I wrote stuff. And and, you know,