Built to Play

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Built to Play learns about learning in our 50th episode. We don't know how we did it, except through willful ignorance of the heavenly signs and our friends and family. At this rate, Built to Play will never die, although we offer no guarantees. 

People often forget about game literacy, like this article did in the previous paragraph. Once you know how to read or write, the expectation is that's the norm. How quickly we forget that near 100 per cent literacy is a recent phenomenon, and only then became fundamental part of our societies. When we run into people who are lacking these skills it can be shocking, and the first arrogant impulse is to blame it on their own lack of interest. It's equally surprising when we see someone who's never used an Xbox controller, or is intimidated by the sheer number of keys on a keyboard. Even between cultures, there's been some confusion. Just as the Japanese read right to left, for them bottom-most face button means cancel, while in North America it means accept. While not entirely detrimental, it's worth noting that even experienced players run into the limits of their literacy, if only to justify why some of us had such a hard time playing Japanese RPGs.

As games and technology become a bigger part of how we express ourselves, it's important to remember that not everyone grew up with a Super Nintendo, and the annual blockbusters, which focus on action and destruction, aren't universally appealing to all people. Some people aren't literate in games not because games aren't suited to them or because they aren't interested in them, but because games can be scary. They're active experiences, and so they need some level of introduction. Without that, games are just graphics on a screen and a gamepad filled with 10 plus buttons which could feasibly do anything. 

So this time, we're talking about game literacy with Sagan Yee and her Game Curious program, before discussing ways games can approach more people through performance. Then Jon Remedios tells us about his learning process in designing his own game. Here are our show notes:

On a spectacularly late episode of Built to Play, we talk about the things that keep us up at night, like taxes, lies, and harassment.*

In out post-Halloween episode we decided to touch on real horror. While people are definitely scared of zombified spiders, it's not really the thing we're worried about. There are scarier things out there that we deal with on a day to day basis, some of us more than others. We all fear poverty and one day being stuck on the edge of financial precarity, especially those who have families to support. Then there's Gamergate targets, who have had to either fight off a horde of trolls willing to ruin and threaten their lives, or carefully monitor their statements online. Beyond those two, we all have a personal horror that we have difficulty communicating, whether it's a traumatic incident or a psychological ailment. 

As game design tools have become more accessible to more people, we've seen more games that attempt to communicate personal experience.  Tools that replicate old adventure game engines and visual novels been particularly useful for this, like Twine, which being primarily text based has a fairly low bar to entry. On this episode we talk to four designers and writers who used these tools to communicate real fears to players: 

• David S Gallant on I Get This Call Every Day and the fear in financial precarity. Hear him starting 0:40 into our show.
• Michael Lutz on the Uncle Who Works for Nintendo and why he felt ethically bound to leave his players with hope. Hear him starting 28:30.
• Kaitlin Tremblay and JohnRathiganthan on Lights Out, Please and the communicative power of interactive horror. Their segment starts at 41:40. Note Lights Out, Please has been nominated for five Canadian Video Game Awards! 

Danielle and Arman also give a sample of our local multiplayer primer,to give you a preview of what we've been exploring on the site. It starts 14:10. You can find the full segment on our multiplayer hub. 

This episode was made with the help of the Free Music Archive, with samples from WNYC's On the Media, and CBC Radio's As it Happens and Metro Morning. Our opening theme was "watashi" by Johnny_Ripper. We also used "Summer breeze let it out (johnny_ripper remix)" by smoking fox, "may light (remix by etc)" by SHOMOMOSE, "sister (johnny_ripper remix)" by Sea Oleena, "So This Is How It Ends" by Earsmack, "Oxygen Garden" by Chris Zabriskie, "Toy Cupboard" and "Everything is Broken or Intact" by Bleak House. BUILT TO PLAY IS A PRODUCT OF THE SCOPE AT RYERSON RADIO STATION IN THE HEART OF DOWNTOWN TORONTO. IT WAS PRODUCED AND EDITED BY ARMAN AGHBALI AND WRITTEN BY DANIELLE ROSEN.IF YOU LIKE THE SHOW PLEASE SUBSCRIBE AND RATE US ONLINE. IT HELPS MORE PEOPLE FIND THE SHOW AND GIVES US AN IDEA HOW WE'RE DOING. FEEL FREE TO COMMENT DOWN BELOW.

_*We used to do these long write ups of each episode, but those have increasingly been taking more time to write. So for now we'll have these abbreviated ones. If anyone actually read the old version, let us know. _

We travel to Gamercamp to walk on walls, battle in tent warfare, and defuse bombs. 

The annual indie game festival Gamercamp came to Toronto back in October, and then after three days promptly left this earth entirely.  This was Gamercamp's sixth year, and its last one, for now anyway. Meaning if you couldn't visit this one, tough luck. We had an interview last week with Jaime Woo, its co-founder, if you're curious what happened.

But we knew that you might have trouble making it out to Toronto's Chinatown, so we went instead to try and compete at several local multiplayer games. All of this happened to fit in with this month's theme, Friends and Enemies, so to make things a little more festive, we began the great competition to defeat each other at mostly cooperative games. 

I'd tell you more, but  we're low on time so we're going to have to cut our show notes short this week. The following is a list of people we talked to on this week's show, their games, and the time when they come on the air:

• Jesse McGibney, art director of Apotheon, 1:00
• Willy Chyr, designer of Relativity, 6:30
• Hamish Lambert, animator on Mouffe, 13:00
• Nick Korneck, designer on Space Bro Justice Rocket, 36:35
• Shawn Pierre, designer of Henka Twist Caper, 44:40
• Brian Fetter, designer of Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, 50:35
  
  The festival floor at Gamercamp
  Mouffe, the interactive tent, where the quilt is the controller for a screen projected onto the tent's ceiling
  Nick Korneck talks to intrepid reporter Daniel Rosen as the game, Space Bro Justice Rocket, highlights what they are thinking behind them.
  Daniel Rosen and Nick Korneck high five wearing the cotton Hi 5000s
  Daniel and Arman's reward after defeating the tutorial bomb in Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes
  In case you didn't know what Toronto's Chinatown looks like. We have streetcars too San Fransisco
  From just outside the Ocho Hotel on the last day of Gamercamp, people celebrate after a round of trivia

Music this week comes from the Free Music Archive: "The Falls" and "Nature Kid" by Podington Bear, "Bacalao Bombao" by minusbaby, and "Run to Canada" by Min-Y-Lan. Our opening theme was "The Libra Lunologists" by Fields of Ohio and our ending theme was "Air Hockey Saloon" by Chris Zabriskie.

BUILT TO PLAY IS A PRODUCT OF THE SCOPE AT RYERSON RADIO STATION IN THE HEART OF DOWNTOWN TORONTO. IT WAS PRODUCED AND EDITED BY ARMAN AGHBALI AND WRITTEN BY DANIELLE ROSEN.IF YOU LIKE THE SHOW PLEASE SUBSCRIBE AND RATE US ONLINE. IT HELPS MORE PEOPLE FIND THE SHOW AND GIVES US AN IDEA HOW WE'RE DOING. FEEL FREE TO COMMENT DOWN BELOW.

It's an episode in which we finally stop talking about virtual reality and move on to weeks of playing with pals. We start with the end  of Gamercamp.

Big game conventions can feel exhausting though. You're fighting tens of thousands of people in a hall. Massive companies push their way towards you to showcase their newest games. And what if you're looking for local products, games made in your hometown, maybe an experiment or two? Every hub for game design has at least one little event for enthusiasts, like a party a few friends put together for their community. In Toronto, we had Gamercamp.

Co-founded by Jaime Woo, Gamercamp was a games festival created mostly for the founder's curiosity. They heard Torontonians were making games and getting attention for it, but couldn't see the games anywhere.  So they made their own event. Their first year, it was just a series of talks in a small theatre on one day, and despite a rocky start they kept at it. Six years later, Gamercamp was the biggest festival of its kind in the city, including an arcade and multiple parties in a single weekend. Compared to even a medium-sized convention like IndieCade, Gamercamp is tiny. Yet, by any measure, it's been a success. Which is why the decision to close up shop came as a surprise to some,and upset a few others.

We brought Jaime into the studio to talk about those early years and why he's decided to end Gamercamp. Tune in a minute into our show for more from Jaime.

After diving through another round of death threats, we round off with a final bout of scepticism about the future of virtual reality. 

We've done a lot of talking about the wonders of VR, but we've been sceptical throughout. In every interview we've explored the limitations and the unforeseen complications. Virtual reality could very well be the future of video games and much more, but for now it's unproven beyond a certain subset of players.

So what are the reasons to be sceptical? VR, not matter how you cut it is going to be expensive, and if not expensive, then it's going to be limiting. Moving in a 3D world is challenging just from a control standpoint. You need high end hardware to run two screens inside the VR headset, especially as games become more graphics intensive. One way to smoothen these out is adding more peripherals and sensors, like a camera or markers on the wall, but that adds to the price. It also needs a large space for all of this equipment and for you to be doing anything except sitting or standing.

There's another thing that VR needs: presence. Presence is when you are so engrossed in a virtual environment you forget you're in your living room. That's what all the major virtual reality headset manufacturers are competing for, but have yet to master. And without it, Tadhg Kelly believes we're still a while away from VR being a mainstream phenomenon. He's a game design consultant and earlier this year he wrote a column about "the death of VR", and so we thought it would be a good idea to talk to him as we wrap up. 

**Listen to Tadhg Kelly discuss the idea of a "perfect" VR, why it's hard to achieve, and why 2015 will be the Year of Virtual Reality anyway starting about 38:50. **

Thanks to the Free Music Archive for music this week: "OLPC" by Marco Raaphorst, "may light remix by etc" by SHOMMOSE, "So this is how it ends" by Earsmack, "Love Theme" by Dave Merson Hess, "As Colorful as Ever" by Broke for Free, and "summer breeze let it out (johnny_ripper remix)" by smoking fox. Our theme tune was "japanese prog" by Rushus.On Freesound we used "convention crowd noise" by awesoman.Built to Play is a product of the Scope at Ryerson radio station in the heart of downtown Toronto. It was produced and edited by Arman Aghbali and written by Danielle Rosen.

If you like the show please subscribe and rate us online. It helps more people find the show and gives us an idea how we're doing. Feel free to comment down below.

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Built to Play dives back into virtual reality through Samsung's Gear VR and by visiting Toronto's VR hub.

Almost a month ago, Samsung announced the Gear VR, a small virtual reality headset. The idea is Oculus already uses Samsung phone screens for its display. In fact their current display is the exact same as the Galaxy Note 4. So why not just use the phone as the virtual reality headset? Plug it into the Gear VR, and BOOM, virtual reality on the go. 

Turns out there's a bunch of reasons why not. Unless the attachment comes with an AC adapter or an extra battery, that phone is going to die within the hour. Not to mention, phone CPUs may be more powerful than ever, but they still pale in comparison to a PC. And that's without getting into the lack of positional tracking.

But don't listen to us. We're a bunch of downers. Listen to E McNeill, better known as E to his friends, the designer of Darknet. He's been working on his virtual reality hacking game since the 2013 VR Jam competition, and will be launching it on Gear VR. He explains the advantages of the platform and dos and don'ts for working on early virtual reality games.

Then we visit Toronto's VR Meetup to talk to games designers, programmers and startup heads about the potential of virtual reality. 

Danielle and Arman visited the centre of all virtual reality conversation in Toronto, the almost monthly gathering of enthusiasts in the city's downtown. Usually they meet at a local bar, but this time they visited Verold, a startup making tools for interactive 3D projects on the web. We caught up with our guest from two shows ago, Stephan Tanguay, who manages it.

This session was all about the Oculus Connect, a developer's conference held in downtown Los Angeles. Alternating between keynotes from experts and parties at a Malibu beach house,  Connect was a celebration of Oculus' success and its transition from Kickstarter project to Facebook buyout. John Carmack, co-creator of Doom and chief technology officer at Oculus, gave a speech on the power of the Gear VR, speaking for an hour and a half before being booted off the stage. 

So we chatted with Blair Renaud, the designer of the cyberpunk adventure game, Technolust about his trip to LA. We also went over his history in the game industry, from his time as a technical director at Rockstar working on the original Grand Theft Auto and how he got back into game design. 

Plus, we talk withBernie Roehl, a programmer and lab instructor at the University of Waterloowho's worked on VR since at least the 90s. He goes through the early challenges of the tech and how far it's progressed. And the CEO of Verold, Ross McKegeny, sat down with us to talk about the ways virtual reality could be used for marketing and education.

**To hear from all of these guys, about the Oculus Connect, the Crescent Bay prototype and more, tune it at the 33:00 for the second half of the show. **

The music from this week's episode came from the Free Music Archive. Our opening theme was "Air Hockey Saloon" by Chris Zabriskie. We also used "Spring Solstice" and "Belfast" by Podington Bear, "Hallon" by Christian Bjoerklund, "Family" by Johnny_ripper, "Detective" by Krowne and our end theme was "State Shirt" by Computer. Thanks to Leadndros-ntounis at Freesound for "Crowd in a bar."This episode was written and produced by Danielle Rosen and Arman Aghbali. It was edited by Arman Aghbali.If you like Built to Play, be sure to recommend it. Reviews help the show like peanut butter helps jam. Feel free to comment and let us know your thoughts below.

It's all news and reviews as we talk FFXV road trips, laughing about Windows 10, Smash Bros, and Persona 4 Ultimax

On Built to Play, we put on a headset, strap on a pair of headphones, and talk about virtual reality in all its forms.

Some people just can't stop thinking about virtual reality. Last week Oculus chief technology officer John Carmack (and the creator of DOOM) got on stage at the VR conference, Oculus Connect, and improvised a speech about the technology for more than an hour. But that's not us.

We called up a local VR game developer, Stephan Tanguay, to explain the ins and outs of modern virtual reality. You can hear about the power of virtual reality and its current limitations starting 1:00.

Topic 2! Victorian arcade machines would often play music to disguise that they were for gambling. The second video game ever made had sound effects. Music didn't come until later. Early game consoles didn't have the space on the cartridge to have sophisticated soundtracks and relied on the internal sound cards. PC games had a great range of sound years before consoles, but by the time of the Nintendo Entertainment System, consoles were catching up.

The Sega Genesis/Mega Drive and Super Nintendo were still limited to an electronic sound, but these were catchy tunes. People remember the Super Mario theme to this day. Talk toKaren Collins, and she'll remind you that music has gone a long way since the late '80s. We have orchestral scores, sound effects that rival films', and a form of composition unique to video games. 

Karen is the Canada Research Chair for Game Sound at the University of Waterloo. She has a letter from Prime Minister Stephen Harper to prove it. She's also working on a documentary about game sound, called BEEP, tracing its history from the 1890s to modern day. It can be a difficult task. Early composers weren't credited, and old games don't produce the same sounds in an emulator as they did on a console.

To hear more about the documentary and the history of game sound, tune in 32:40

After talking to Karen Collins, there's one question that stuck the heads of our producers. Game music can be just as interactive as the medium for which it's created. When you switch from a combat scene to a conversation the music changes with it. It doesn't make sense to have a bombastic score during a quiet character moment. So, what does that mean for game soundtracks?

Like a movie score, a game's score is meant to compile the most important background themes in the production. That's not possible in a game, at least if you think of themes as a singular piece of music. In games, music composition can look more like a flowchart, diving in and out of scenes when necessary, and looping back when a scene lasts longer than the track itself.

To learn more about the world of music composition we talked to composer Winifred Phillips. She's an award winning composer who got her start on God of War, but has since worked on Assassin's Creed III: Liberation, Little Big Planet 2, and a few licensed games.

OH GOD THERE IS SO MUCH MUSIC IN THIS EPISODE. The following music came from the free music archive. Our opening theme was "Sun Bum" by Monster Rally. We also used Alex Gross' "4AM Party" and "Space Stage" by L'homme Manete. Our ending theme was "Moving Boulder" by L'homme Manete. Plus, "Luke, a True Gentleman Prefers a Touch of Light Jazz," by Proto Dome on OCRemix.We used "Aveline's Escape" and "Society Suite" in 4 Movements" from the

Assassin's Creed III: Liberation

soundtrack, composed by Winifred Phillips. We also used "an evergreen is forever green - until it dies, of course," from the soundtrack by Ryan Roth and Halina Heron, and "Companeros" from the soundtrack, composed by Peter McConnell.We used samples of sound from Asteroids, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Sonic the Hedgehog, Sokobond, Starseed Pilgrim, and some space virtual reality game no one recognizes. 

This episode was written by Danielle Rosen, edited by Arman Aghbali and produced by both. If you liked this episode, feel free to comment and please recommend it.

This time on Built to Play, Danielle visited Xbox Canada and Arman discusses Canadian games and the great outdoors.

The Built to Play staff doesn't make it outside often. Sure we can see the outside from the windows in our studio, but we rarely experience it. Just kidding. Our studio doesn't have windows. Anyway, Danielle actually left the studio to talk to play some upcoming Xbox One games, while Arman talked to game designers about why they liked the outside. For Arman, it's baby steps.

Tune in about 50 seconds into the show to hear us chat about these games and _Assassin's Creed: Unity. _Plus we hear from Nitai Bessette, the level design director, of AC: Unity and Matt Grandstaff, the global community lead at Bethesda Softworks. Daniel also met two designers from Lionhead on the Fable Legends team, the game's director David Eckelberry and the villain's designer, Lewis Brundish.

As we've repeated multiple times on the show, Canada is the third largest centre for game development in the world, right behind the United States and Japan. Which is why it feels odd when we can call so few of those games "Canadian." Games like Deus Ex: Human Revolution, Mass Effect, and Assassin's Creed are all games made in Canada, but you wouldn't know that from looking at it or playing it or talking to the developers. To be fair to the first two, Mass Effect and Deus Ex both have had levels set in Canada (Vancouver and Montreal respectively), but Assassin's Creed, even when Ubisoft Montreal leads development, never feels like it belongs here. 

The majority of development studios in Canada are owned by larger publishers, like EA, Square Enix, or Microsoft, none of which care very much about where these games are physically made so long as Americans buy them. So the majority of Canada's big budget games don't feel very Canadian. 

Alexandre Fiset felt this weirdness while he was at Beenox, a studio based in Quebec City that's owned by Activision. Beenox makes games starring Spider-Man, sometimes based on the ongoing film series. Fiset wasn't satisfied working on a Marvel hero living in a fantasy New York, so he left the company to start Parabole Games. Parabole recently completed a kickstarter for the game Kona, an episodic series about a supernatural mystery in northern Quebec.

Fiset wasn't alone in thinking about his game as a cultural product either. Raphael van Lierop, founder of Hinterland Studios and designer of the Long Dark, has been thinking about game design as a way to make something local. The Long Darktakes place near the mountains of British Columbia, far north of where van Lierop lives on Vancouver Island. It's a survival game based in the rough Canadian wilderness.

Fiset and van Lierop discuss Canada, the garrison mentality, and why cultural diversity is important for all games, not just Canadian ones. You can hear from them starting 38:45

The Long Dark's survival mode is now available on Steam Early Access. Kona's first episode will be released in April 2015. You can play the demo here.

Once again thanks to the Free Music Archive for access to great bands like Podington Bear. In our Xbox One preview section, we used the following tracks from that band: "Nature Kid", "Moondots and Polkabeams", "Lake Victoria" and "Belfast". We also used "Hedge Schools" by Peter DiPhillips. For the rest of the show we used the following songs from the Free Music Archive: "Wanna see my Spaceship" by Beatoven,"Run to Canada" by Min-Y-Lian, "Detective" by Krowne, "Photosphere" by Charles Atlas, and "Blind Eyes" by Everlone. We used sound effects from Destiny. 

This episode was written by Danielle Rosen and edited by Arman Aghbali. If you liked this episode leave us a comment, review or subscribe. Thanks for listening!

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One of the first pieces I ever wrote for Built to Play was the style guide. On the podcast, and in the articles, we should limit our  use of the word gamer. We agreed to that rule because it's not a word that makes a lot of sense.  Not everyone who plays video games is a gamer, just like not everyone who watches movies is a film buff. Now it's unusable, even in the strictest sense. 

Since 'real gamers' began attacking Zoe Quinn for supposed ethical infractions or Anita Sarkeesian for inserting politics into innocent games, the term has become toxic. They've released pounds of personal information online, scared women out from their homes and riddled their social media with death threats. Let's not dance around it. These attacks have been misogynistic, largely targeted towards women who don't fixate on shooters and Nintendo nostalgia.

Some people use Quinn's activities to say all games journalism is corrupt. HASHTAGGAMERGATE! But that fundamentally misunderstands what games writing is. Most articles on sites like Gamespot and Polygon commentate and criticise. Think game reviews or big convention coverage. On the few occasions where they engage in journalism, often it's redistributing content. Here's a trailer a publisher gave us. I found this neat thing on the Internet. That's not a fault of the websites, that's just the job.

The games industry is insular and secretive, so there are few opportunities to do professional reporting. That's true with a lot of enthusiast press, like in comics, music or movies, but especially so in games. The old adage is that anyone can be a journalist. Just point a camera out your window. You have to call someone to be a reporter. When there's no one to call, however, there's not much you can do.

Sites like Polygon, USGamer and Kill Screen still go out of their way to make great articles about game development and the video game community, although few people read them. That's true of all media by the way. The Washington Post's biggest story in 2013 wasn't the Edward Snowden scandal. It was a collection of pictures of a busted Sochi bathroom.

All of this is to say that people who accuse games journalism of being corrupt are missing the point. I hesitate to call anything written on this site journalism. It's definitely not reporting. We're still honest when it comes to our opinions, as I expect most in the industry are. Enthusiast  writing serves a different purpose than conventional reporting. They disseminate product information and evaluate media.  That lack of diversity is why scaring away strong writers who go beyond that, like Jenn Frank and Mattie Brice, helps no one. They were among the few people who went beyond criticism to question the games they played and the people who made them. 'Real gamers' encourage bias in the industry by making the pool of commentators smaller and the voices less varied.

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

I also challenge gamers on whether they are the equivalent of music, television or film enthusiasts. Outside of video games, enthusiasts seem to recognize that their medium of choice is a broad spectrum of content, made for many audiences. Some genres might be dismissed off-hand, like the romantic comedy or pop music, but even then good versions of these make it through to critical appeal. A lot of music fans acknowledged that 'Call Me Maybe' by Carly Rae Jepsen was fun and an enjoyable piece of music ephemera. Or that while 500 Days of Summer has its problems, the film tries to take the romantic comedy in a new direction. Being a fan of a medium entails a willingness to dive into its depths and explore all possible permutations of it. It doesn't mean tripping head first into the shallow end to wallow in its most obvious features.

If you enjoy  big budget games, go ahead. No one can take that away from you. There are plenty of games made by big publishers that are genuinely great, but no game is perfect. Wolfenstein: The New Order has to be one of my favourite games of the year. It also has some groan-worthy dialogue and has terrible enemy artificial intelligence. Every game merits criticism, from indies to those old Nintendo titles.

People who have such a narrow definition of games need grow up. More people have launched an Angry Bird than have made Mario jump. More adult women play games than teenage boys. Those blockbuster franchises won't vanish any time soon, but as video games become more popular, players have be more accommodating to more kinds of people and more kind of games. There is no sense in attacking people who are trying to make games like Depression Quest, because that's only going to become more prevalent, not less.

So if gamers are people who like the most bland of the bland, and feel justified in ruining people's lives on behalf of a fool's errand, I don't want to be associated with them. Call me a game player. Call me an enthusiast. But please, I'm not a gamer. Gamers are about as self-absorbed as men's rights advocates, who can only conceive of the world in childish black and white dichotomies.

I'm embarrassed to have needed to write this rant. Games are supposed to be enjoyable. Ideally, when coming away from a great game, we should feel enriched. A well-crafted game can engender joy, sadness, hope and occasionally fun.  All this does is make me feel disappointed in all of us. Games, and the people who play them, are capable of so much more.

**This episode was written by Daniel Rosen and produced by Arman Aghbali. **

Built to Play explores new Nintendo games, the tricky world of Dota 2 and why we keep seeing the words "You Died" when we close our eyes.

Danielle and Arman visited Nintendo of Canada to play upcoming titles like Mario Maker, Bayonetta 2 and Yoshi's Wooly World. But when it comes to Super Smash Bros. the two land on a bit of a competitive streak. Take a listen to hear more about the relative nudity of Pokemon, Toad's Batman voice, and genius robot design. If you want more in-depth coverage of these Nintendo games check out Daniel's write up from a few weeks back. 

You can hear us squabble over whether Bayonetta 2 is better than Smash Bros and if Goku is the greatest fighter of all time starting 1:06.

Danielle finishes his masterpiece in Mario Maker, the Mario platformer level designer coming to the Wii U.

Mobile online battle arena games like League of Legends are easily the most popular games on the planet, so we decided take a look into the fast-growing esport.

Also known as MOBAs, games like League of Legends and Dota 2 are becoming a force in esports. The fourth annual Dota 2 championships back in July crowd-funded a $10.6 million prize pool, a bigger prize than the Super Bowl. Twenty million people watched the tournament, with as many as two million watching at the same time. League of Legends is still the most popular game in the genre, filling the Staples Centre in Los Angeles during its last tournament, but Dota 2 outranks it for the sheer amount of money on the table.

Shane Perron of eSport Gaming Events hosted a viewing party  of the Dota 2 championships in one of the city's oldest theatres, the Regent.

Shane says that hosting events like this can be sustainable, though it will take time. Hear him describe the viewing party they hosted at the Regent, why he's spent more than a 100 hours in Dota 2 and the challenges facing eSports Gaming Events starting 36:00.

Meanwhile, a game's sounds can hang around long after we finish playing, according to a new study from Nottingham Trent University.

Many players have made the mistake of playing games for too long. Say by accident you stayed up all night to beat a boss in Dark Souls, and wound up seeing the words "You Died" and hearing that evaporation sound over and over again. That's never happened to Danielle or Arman, considering they're absolute masters of that game, but for hypothetical sakes, let's all imagine. You turn off the game, head to bed, and right as you close your eyes, you hear the sound of your soul leaving your body. 

This strange phenomenon of lingering game sounds has been studied by the International Gaming Unit at Nottingham Trent University. Everything from the bloop of a portal opening to the ding when you collect a coins can hang around after gameplay, usually after a considerably long playtime.

Sometimes it's music. Sometimes it's bullets. It's hard to say what triggers these sounds but they can seem like they're coming from outside of the body, reasonably freaking some people out. It's all part of a group of effects known as game transfer phenomena or GTP. Angelica Ortiz de Gortari is a psychologist and doctoral researcher studying GTP, who explains the sheer variety of lingering noises, images and behaviours. 

You can hear her describe her own experience with GTP, starting 47:00.

We used a ton of music this week from the Free Music Archive.

In our Nintendo segment, we used "Blanks," "Moondots and Polkabeams," and "Hundy Mil Tight" by Podington Bear. "Night Owl" by Broke for Free is our opening theme. "Hallon" by Christian Bjoerklund, "eeeoooww" by junior85, "Nana Veloz" by Crisopa, and "Sun Bum" by Monster Rally.

Special thanks to Mark Asfar for filling in for the news on short notice. This episode was written and edited by Arman Aghbali.