The one and only droqen puzzle-platforms on over to discuss his latest game The End of Gameplay, and how it responds to the stubbornly present, all-too-alive gameplay in his game Starseed Pilgrim. This requires a provisional definition of gameplay. Whether the conversation’s other tributaries are required or not is a question for the listener.

You can get The End of Gameplay on Steam and Itch.io.
You can learn more about droqen’s work on his website, and you can check out his Bluesky for the latest on the impending death of gameplay.
———
• Here’s droqen’s rant at Bonus Stage, on the subject of killing gameplay.

• Here’s Richard Terrell’s A Defense of Gameplay, and his two–part appearance on the show.

• And here’s Richard’s curation project about Starseed Pilgrim (his among others), the Starseed Observatory. The project’s Wall of Quotes includes a piece Drew wrote about the game.

• Drew misquoted William Blake, as one does. The actual line, from Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion, is: “I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s. I will not reason and compare: my business is to create.”

• Mutual Aid is available for free online. It’s also probably in your local bookstore, and your local bookstore would even more probably order it for you, in the quite likely event that your local bookstore is cool.

• David Graeber wrote about consensus a lot, but this is probably the single-best entry point.

• We did get to have Arvi Teikari on to talk all about Baba Is You a few years back.

• As droqen says, Brendan Keogh’s The Videogame Industry Does Not Exist is a great way to reframe “the videogame industry” as one part (and probably not even the most important part) of the larger cultural field of videogames.

• Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order is a tricky work track down (because not just any library or bookstore will have it on hand, and also because it exists in multiple volumes, each fairly voluminous).

• droqen’s notebook/forum has some notes on those Agnes Martin and Don Potts interviews (both of which are linked in full from said notes pages).

• The morning this dropped, droqen posted this video, connecting The End of Gameplay with his series of #droqevers, which themselves refer to this unusually useful definition of games:

What is a game? Professor M. Mouse of Texas, America claims that the word game denotes “the historical process by which the term game has been characterised and understood”.

Easy for you to say, Professor!!

Those of us with a more down-home approach to codifying the various aspects of a nebulous and unbearable human condition prefer to go by a simpler definition, thus.

A game is some combination of the following indivisable elements:
– skeleton
– red key
– score thing
– magic door

If you see something that looks like a videogame but isn’t, you should notify the Police.

• droqen also posted some notes on this episode in his “forum-shaped notebook.” Infinite recursion.

———

“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
“romantic,” “gameplay (forever),” and “machine lover,” from The End of Gameplay (new moon OST) by droqen.

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Barney Oram gets into different patterns of sound design, in all sorts of different roles and at all sorts of different scales—plus his love of film in general and Billy Wilder in particular, the durable ethos that “if it sounds good, it is good,” and his extensive experience recording loud sounds that go bang.

You can learn more about Barney’s work on his website.
You can also follow Barney on LinkedIn.
———
• Drew hadn’t played much of Enotria at the time of the interview—but now that he has, he can recommend it enthusiastically to fellow genre sickos. A sunny soulslike indeed, with lots of culturally-specific imagery and some clever twists on progression and buildcrafting.

• Billy Wilder really is an all-timer, both as a writer and as a director, as this recent Every Frame a Painting beautifully explains.

• The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp is on YouTube in its entirety, at least some places.

• The talk that Barney did for Game Audio Boston doesn’t seem to be online, but we’ll add a link if it does show up in the future.

• That said, here’s Barney talking about recording loud sounds that go bang. And here too.

———

“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
“Rev Up Your Arithmetech!” (the menu music) from the Add Astra OST by Emerson Boatwright and Drew Messinger-Michaels.
Some gameplay audio from Enotria: The Last Song, which has music and audio design by Aaram Shahbazians and additional audio by Barney Oram.

As Drew says in the intro, Add Astra is on Steam, Chemistry Set is available directly from COINCIDENCE, and The Tower and the Circle is available through Alexander.

We’re on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, Spotify, PocketCasts, and just about everywhere else. You can also subscribe using good old-fashioned RSS.

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Rasheed Abueideh and Rami Ismail talk about Dreams on a Pillow. We talk about how the game combines layered, poetic audiovisuals and gameplay with history and folklore in order to create an account of the Nakba “that is so true to what happened that it is borderline-illegal to say it.”

You can help crowdfund Dreams on a Pillow on LaunchGood.
You can download Liyla and the Shadows of War for free from Android, iOS, and Windows.
And you can also follow Rasheed and Rami on Bluesky.
———
• Rami mentions “The Gender of Nakba Memory,” a chapter from Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory.

• Here’s the New Yorker Radio Hour interview with Rashid Khalidi, author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. Khalidi also semi-recently did a much more substantive, equally accessible interview with Adam Conover.

• H.R.9495 didn’t pass, but we should expect to see more bills like it once the second Trump Administration begins in earnest.

• For the moment, Farha does seem to be back on Netflix in the US.

• Here’s Rasheed’s #1ReasonToBe talk at GDC 2017, if you want to hear some more from him about being a Palestinian game developer (and being extremely funny).

• This article is a great starting point on musical traditions in Palestine before the Nakba.

———

“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
“Sefnon bekalbi,” performed by Hag Abdul Fattah El-Kabbani.

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Lilith Walther aetherboosts her way on over to talk about Nightmare Kart, its previously life as Bloodborne KART, its demake predecessor Bloodborne PSX, and the relationship between retro aesthetics, open development practices, and a general attitude of… YOLO?

Nightmare Kart will be out for free on May 31.
You can see more of Lilith’s work, including Bloodborne PSX, on Itch.io.
You can also follow Lilith (or rather, Bunlith?) on Twitter, and see her stream on Twitch.
She’s also got a Patreon, a Ko-Fi, and a Discord.
———
• Here’s the Noclip documentary about Bloodborne PSX. We’d also point highly recommend this Gayming interview, which is the source of that quip about intellectual property law being eldritch—”Capitalism is terrifying. That’s our cosmic horror”—and also the occasion for Lilith saying that the original Bloodborne

kind of talks shit about the people in power, and the protagonist is an outsider, and all your friends are disabled people and sex workers and other outsiders. Then a lot of the enemies are the upper-class people responsible for the plague who trapped all the lower-class people into central Yarnham and closed the gates – who then die horrible deaths anyway from their own creations. It’s a direct response to a lot of the problems with gothic horror as a genre. It’s incredible, and it’s probably why it’s so transgender.

• Melos Han-Tani and Marina Kittaka from Analgesic have been on the show twice, first to talk about Anodyne 2 and then to talk about Sephonie. Both interviews get into the topic of older design tropes worth recovering (and new ones worth jettisoning, or at least bemoaning).

• The Rock Paper Shotgun Electronic Wireless Show recently did an episode on free games.

• Drew was drawing on David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, though he did misquote it. Graeber’s phrase is not “basic communism” but “baseline communism,” which he defines as

the understanding that, unless people consider themselves enemies, if the need is considered great enough, or the cost considered reasonable enough, the principle of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs” will be assumed to apply.

He goes on to say that, “in fact, communism is the foundation of all human sociability” (emphasis his). This is obviously true on the level of giving someone directions if you know the way, or (as Drew says in the episode) handing someone a tool they’ve asked for. Just as obviously, we sometimes operate on other principles, such as hierarchy, exchange, or (as Lilith says in the episode) reciprocity. As Graeber says:

All of us act like communists a good deal of the time. None of us act like a communist consistently. “Communist society”—in the sense of a society organized exclusively on that single principle—could never exist. But all social systems, even economic systems like capitalism, have always been built on top of a bedrock of actually-existing communism.

• Ah, and anyway, here’s Add Astra.

———

“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
“Pthumerian Cup” from the Bloodborne KART April Fool’s joke, the Bloodborne PSX OST and the BBKART Soundtrack, by The Noble Demon.

We’re on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, Spotify, PocketCasts, and just about everywhere else. You can also subscribe using good old-fashioned RSS.

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Dragon’s Dogma II is full of inventive, quirky flourishes, meaningful frictions, and… shameless micro-transactions that capitalize on those exact quirks and frictions. We can, of course, get meaning and joy out of art that comes to us compromised. Which is good news, since most art, if not all art, comes to us compromised. But the details matter.

So let’s dig into the details, and along the way let’s talk about monetization, opera, high art, low art, and how Dragon’s Dogma II is like a D&D campaign where all of the other players are dogs.

This episode contains discussions of death, dying, and mourning.
———

• Dia Lacina has written a bit about Dragon’s Dogma II, and a bit about Dark Arisen.

• Podcasters helping podcasters, here’s a good summary of the weird relationship of dogs to Octavia Butler’s work.

• Here’s Alexis Ong’s piece about pawns.

• And here’s Dan Olson’s video about Fortnite.

• You can hear the Met’s Saturday Matinee Broadcasts on lots of still-extant terrestrial radio stations and their websites. My mom and I usually go with KUSC.

———

“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
Messa da Requiem by Guiseppe Verdi, performed by the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, featuring Leah Hawkins, Karen Cargill, Matthew Polenzani, and Dmitry Belosselskiy. Recorded September 27, 2023. Broadcast March 30, 2024.

We’re on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, Spotify, PocketCasts, and just about everywhere else. You can also subscribe using good old-fashioned RSS.

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Helldivers II is a wildly popular co-op shooter. It’s also extremely funny. It’s also very much about fascism, both in the sense that its satirical lens is aimed at fascist tendencies in moribund democracies, and in the sense that its core pleasures are… sort of fascist?

The music makes you feel like a hero as you do your space violence on behalf of Super Earth, and let’s be honest, the capes are rather dashing. Here’s a game that wants to have its cake and eat it too, and we’re inclined to say it pulls it off. So let’s dig into how it’s doing what it’s doing, and the slipperiness of making art about fascism that isn’t useful to fascists.

———

• The clip about Super Earth is from this Helldivers II ad. The in-game propaganda and advertising are fairly consistent in tone, and so far, in terms of world-building as well.

• If you’d like to keep entirely Joel mysterious in your mind, then we can respect that—but if you’d like to know more (to coin a phrase), then Aftermath has you covered (kind of).

• Here’s my piece on moon, and one where I talked more about “Tomorrow Belongs to Me” in contrast to “Springtime for Hitler.”

• Here’s Umberto Eco’s essay on “Ur-Fascism” and Ruben Ferdinand and Elliⓞt’s essay on Attack on Titan (a classic pairing).

• We use bits of Lindsay Ellis’ video on Mel Brooks, F.D Signifier’s video about Hajime Isayama’s New York Times interview, and Mark Brown’s recent video on Spec Ops: The Line.

• We don’t think there’s anywhere to (legally) hear the full Starship Troopers commentary other than the physical releases of the film, unfortunately.

• The Freud quote is from The Ego and the Id, and the Truffaut quote is from this interview.

• The intrusive thought at the end is from this clip.

———

“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
“Guren no Yumiya” by Linked Horizon, from the first season of Attack on Titan.
“My Heart Leaps Up” from Mack and Mabel by Jerry Herman.
The extraction and victory music from Helldivers II.

We’re on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, Spotify, PocketCasts, and just about everywhere else. You can also subscribe using good old-fashioned RSS.

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While the show was taking a break, Drew started putting together some essays on the growing list of recent recent surprise hits—games that, for whatever reason, have been doing vastly better than their developers or publishers had expected. 2024 does, so far, seem to have a sort of serial monogamy to it, with the Sauron’s Eye of game-liker attention focusing intensely on one thing before moving on to the next, abruptly and fickly, with equally frightening fervor.

So at the risk of being eternally behind the viral content curve (as though we’ve ever feared that around here), we’re going to take a little time to think through the breakout successes of this year, starting with Palworld. We’ll also be talking about Last Epoch and Helldivers II (which got so popular that they ceased to function) in future installments.

———

• I mention the episode of Experience Points about Palworld, in the context of positing a possible public domain Pikachu.

• Jack Saint’s video brought the fan design issue to my attention, and also got me thinking about which pal designs work better than which other ones. (Those would be the more original, less chimeric pals).

• Here’s that much-discussed Hbomberguy video about YouTube plagiarism.

• And here’s OpenAI telling the UK’s Parliament that they would have no business model if they had to respect anyone else’s intellectual property rights.

• Astra Taylor pointed out that full automation is still an aspiration and a threat, a pipe dream and a nightmare, rather than a reality, when she coined the terms “fauxtomation.” I learned about this concept from Brian Merchant’s thoroughly excellent Neo-Luddite book about the original Luddites, and about what we can learn from them, Blood in the Machine.

———

“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
“Pal of My Lonesome Hours” by Abe Lyman and Walter Hirsch, performed by Abe Lyman and His California Orchestra.

We’re on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, Spotify, PocketCasts, and just about everywhere else. You can also subscribe using good old-fashioned RSS.

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Lucio and Drew talk about some of the games they’ve enjoyed gaming at this year, from KarmaZoo, Pizza Tower, Wobbly Life, and The Murder of Sonic the Hedgehog, to Remnant II, Spider-Man 2, Street Fighter 6, Jedi: Survivor, Wo Long, and Tears of the Kingdom.

Speaking of, spoilers for Remnant II from 40:53 to 44:21.
———

• We’ve talked before about playing games, including but not limited to Destiny 2, wrong.

• Guilty Gear -STRIVE- does not, at time, of publishing, have a simplified input option for supers.

• Here once again the Bartle taxonomy of player types.

• The curling documentary in question is “Stone Cold,” which is the fourth episode of the Netflix series Losers.

———

“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
“If It Wasn’t For You” by Buddy Rose, Gene Rose, Harold C. Berg, and Herb Wiedoeft, performed by the Crystal Orchestra.

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Glen Henry and Chase Bethea drop achor awhile and talk about Sunken Stones, why pirates mean freedom, and why the Golden Age of Piracy was a lot more Caribbean than Pirates of the Caribbean would have you believe. Also, inevitably, One Piece.

You can play the Sunken Stones demo on Itch.io, and wishlist the full game on Steam.
You can find Chase’s work on his own website, as well as on Spotify and Bandcamp.
And you can find Glen’s work on the Spritewrench website.
———
• Here’s Glen’s previous appearance on the show.

• And here’s our conversation with Tanya X. Short, wherein we talked a bit about Five Strategies for Collaborating with a Machine and On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots.

• For more about why Drew will take every opportunity to defend and ere’s Blood in the Machine and a great recent interview about it.

• And here’s Chase talking a bit about his process, including the more technical side thereof.

• LucasArts made some intensely impressive music tech for the Monkey Island series specifically, including iMuse.

• In Pirate Enlightenment, David Graeber gives us this useful assessment of the centrality of freedom for the actual, historical pirates of the Golden Age:

Perhaps the best that could be said of them is that their brutality was in no way unusual by the standards of the their time, but their democratic practices were almost completely unprecedented.

———

“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
“Luck Don’t Live Out Here” and “Pugnacity in Port Royal” from the Sunken Stones Soundtrack by Chase Bethea.

We’re on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, Spotify, PocketCasts, and just about everywhere else. You can also subscribe using good old-fashioned RSS.

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Ezra Szanton painstakingly platforms his way over to talk about To The Flame, the first in his new studio’s forthcoming kinda-trilogy of horror games. He also talks about how to effective horror, what makes a game interesting to watch as well as play, and some of the potentially-actually-pretty-intereting applications for so-called AI.

You can find Ezra’s games on his Itch.io page.
You can also follow Ezra on Cohost, Mastadon, Twitter, and Bluesky.
———
• Ezra’s Guide to Magic and Otherwise Significant Objects has Ezra’s name on it in part because of Bennet Foddy and Zach Gage’s 2019 GDC talk, “Put Your Name on Your Game, a Talk by Bennett Foddy and Zach Gage.”

• Here’s my piece on the hypothetical No Berlin Roguelike, as well as my Babycastles talk about masocore platformers, and about how Celeste fits into that tradition and also my article about the history of asking machines to lie to us.

• Be Honest is indeed featured in Tiny Mass Games, which you can hear more about in our talk with Matt Brelsford. We should note that Ezra also worked with recent guest Ryan Canuel, who himself is currently working with other recent guest Ichiro Lambe.

• Here’s the SCP Wiki (which is intensely creepy, as discussed), as well as a great video essay on why VHS is such a great format for horror.

• And here’s Ezra’s appearance on Party of One.

• Ezra’s studio co-founder is Fergus Ferguson, with whom he also collaborated on Radio Tower.

• Here’s Edward Ongweso Jr. arguing for the outright abolition of venture capital.

• And worst of all, here are Snolf and Snolf 0.

———

“All The People Say (Season 5)” by Carpe Demon.
“Prom” by The Spookfish.

We’re on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Amazon Music, Spotify, PocketCasts, and just about everywhere else. You can also subscribe using good old-fashioned RSS.

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