Everybody's Talking At Once

Jordan Thomas hides out with us to talk about The Blackout Club. It's a game that is at once an "infinite meaning machine" and an authored narrative, a game about "extremely rewarding movement" but not "physical combat with a clear victor," an early access experience that shares much of the appeal of ARGs, but not an ARG as such—and being a horror co-op game about teenagers, it's scary and it's funny; it's cosmic-horror-vast and it's small-town-intimate.

Talking about it means talking about providing catharsis without "killing the mystery" as a developer, and being "comfortable with negative space" as a player. It also means talking about Question Games' previous effort, The Magic Circle, and about Jordan's previous work on the Bioshock series. That, and: A man, riding a horse, riding a lizard.

• Here's that other interview with Jordan (not on this here podcast) that I mention.

• The Discord for The Blackout Club is indeed the place to be.

• Those NiER:Automata articles I was thinking of are this one and this one.

• Eldritch was and is so, so good.

• Only incidentally of any promotional value is our new catchphrase. Truth in advertising.

Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

Jay Tholen remembers the internet of the '90s, when things were a few shades dorkier, and whole lot less smoothed-over and centrally managed—and especially the internet of the late 90s, when an end-of-days urgency and paranoia hung over all of that. Hypnospace Outlaw is in some ways his attempt to capture that time, but it's also about the travails of the present-day internet, and about our relationship to technology more generally.

In this episode, Jay talks through his sci-fi alt history online detective game, and the fictional people that populate its equally fictional (and equally plausible) somnambulant network.

• Here's the Video Games Hot Dog podcast, and you'll find Zach Johnson's episode of The Zachtronics Podcast at the bottom of this here page.

And then there are the other "operating systemsey" games that Jay and I briefly discussed:

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Brian Fairbanks' game Lost and Hound brings together a whole lot of his passions—from meaningful soundscapes, to accessibility, to dogs. In this episode, we start by talking about Host and Hound and end up talking about mainstream games that are (often, accidentally) accessible, audiogames that are build from the ground up for blind players (and are pretty compelling to sighted players, too), and the importance of empathy and compassion in everything, always. And yes, Brian and I do both have scalding-hot takes on Sekiro.

Speaking of: There's one pretty specific mechanical SPOILER for (the New Game Plus part of) Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice from 37:47 to 39:40.

• It looks like the part about Babel in Film Crit Hulk's Iñárritu essay may have been disappeared for some reason—and if there's some good reason for its disappearance, please do @ me—but said section lives on in this Reddit post.

• Here's A Hero's Call.

• And here's Swamp and Aprone's other accessible games and tools.

• AudioGames.net is imminently worth taking out in general.

• Here's Matt Thorson's tweet about what a Celeste-style Assist Mode might look like in Sekiro.

• Pokémon Crystal Access takes an accidentally pretty accessible game and makes it that much more accessible, which rules.

• EA's commitment to accessibility is indeed laudable, and Karen Stevens' Twitter feed is indeed an excellent way to keep up with said initiative.

• And here's a link to the Twitch channel that streamed Lost and Hound. It does seem to sometimes feature a Shiba Inu instead of, or as well as, a Pembroke Welsh Corgi. The Everybody's Talking At Once Podcast regrets the error.

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In lieu of a guest this week, we humbly present a conversation that Drew and Lucio recorded just before GDC, all about what it means to play a game wrong?from misunderstanding mechanics, to knowingly ignoring objectives and incentives, to adding one's own layer of rules for tournament play or speedruning.

Playing wrong can be a joyful, exciting, healthy-as-hell thing. It can reveal thematic and mechanical corners of a game that might otherwise remain hidden. It can even, maybe, allow us to transcend the boring or abusive aspects of long-running games-as-services and refocus on what we found joyful in Destiny or Anthem, say, in the first place.

And no, we don't totally tease out the fact that Bloodborne and Sekiro are forcing you to play right and are better for it. Next time, next time.

• Here again is Travis Day, of Diablo III's 2.0-era lootsmith, talking about Anthem loot.

• Chuck Wendig has written a whole lot of stuff, screenplays included, but his Star Wars work has been on the novels side of things, not the movies side.

• In addition to the much-rightly-lauded charity "nightmare stream," Hbomberguy did a great piece on speedrunning generally and Donkey Kong 64 specifically. (And yes, yes, the category is called 101%, not 100%).

• The Baten Kaitos speedrun is in fact over 100 hours, and for that matter, well over 300 hours.

• The chance of getting across the bridge in Mario 3 without getting grabbed is 12.5% (so not quite as dire as I'd remembered).

• You unlocked the Item Switch in the original Super Smash Bros. by playing 100 Versus Mode matches—which, interestingly enough, makes it something that was explicitly set aside for experienced, maybe even serious players.

• Summoning Salt is the place to be if you want to get deep into the intricacies, controversies, and quirks of various speedruns.

• I regret not owning it when I almost coined the neologism "wackward."

• "Or is it genius?" is always the question with Spec Ops: The Line, as Darius Kazemi has pointed out.

• Kintsugi. That is indeed the word for the blessed unpatchednes of Melee and Starcraft.

• Discussing The Stanley Parable and Undertale in the same breath reminded me, after the fact, of another important text that we failed to mention, namely Dan Olson's excellent video on "intended play."

• Nathalie Lawhead's game RUNONCE is bracing.

• Thanks again to The Local for letting us mess around (while, to be fair, drinking a goodly amount of coffee).

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Evan Hill drops in to talk a little about Solar Ash Kingdom and Torment: Tides of Numenera, and a whole lot about his current work at Naughty Dog—though don't expect any new details on The Last of Us Part II itself. Evan keeps that close, and fair enough. What he does talk about is just what a level designer designs, thereby frustrating our casual notions of auteur theory on the one hand, and of design-by-committee on the other. Level designers show us the inadequacies of both those frameworks, as far as understanding how games actually get made.

Aside from that, this episode covers the ugly magic of loot tables, Evan's abiding love of Liz and the Blue Bird, and the oft-underappreciated usefulness of mediocre criticism.

• Here's Travis Day, of Diablo III Loot 2.0 fame, talking about how to fix the loot in Anthem and thereby in darkness bind us, as grindsmiths are wont to do.

• And here's how I, like a lot of folks, learned about bumping the lamp.

• Also, here's Hbomberguy on Bloodborne and Big Joel on Sinistar.

• And I will never shut up about Ways of Seeing, so there.

"All The People Say (Season 3)" by Holly Hyperion.

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C. Andrew Rohrmann (also known as scntfc, previously known as Scientific American, and alternately known by some pseudonyms that we're not at liberty to disclose) stops by to talk about reactive soundtracks, "the mutability of music," his notion of "anonymous ubiquity," and his work on games like Oxenfree, Afterparty, Old Man's Journey, ELOH, GALAK-Z, Virtual Virtual Reality, Crackdown 2, and Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP—not to mention his work on things-that-are-not-games, from his extensive DJing and his solo electronic albums, to his music for commercials, to his contributions to the ambiance of the Xbox Dashboard.

• And here's Andrew's GDC talk about using the the grid in game music, and doing so on "an indie budget" to boot.

• Here's (Part One of) Sigur Rós' 24-hour stream-thing, Route One.

• "Toccata and Fugue in Dm, BWV 565," baby.

• I talk about that GDC talk about Bloodborne kind of a lot, but hey, it's good.

• Here's the other interview with Andrew that I quoted from.

• Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective is indeed an Arcane Kids joint.

"All The People Say (Season 3)" by Holly Hyperion.

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Robin Baumgarten's work doesn't fit neatly into any single category or tradition. He makes games that are also toys, and also art installations, and also unusually beguiling lamps, and also—most straightforward to experience, most difficult to describe—simply objects that make the world a little stranger a little more beautiful whenever and wherever you encounter them.

In this episode, Robin wobbles on over to talk about Line Wobbler, Wobble Garden, Quantum Garden, and all the weird questions that they raise about what the hell games and art and arcades and galleries even are at this point in history.

———

• And here's Zach at the NYU Game Center last year, talking about how math sucks (among other things).

• Here's Robin talking about the build process for Line Wobbler, fellow spring nerds.

• Here's the emulator-friendly version of Line Wobbler Advance.

• Wolfenstein 1D is a good'n.

• As is Get Lamp.

• And as is Two Bit Circus.

• Also, here's that piece on the perils of social media vanity, and the scored-earth modes of consumption attendant thereto. I should mention that this story as continued developing, and taken a fairly dark turn between the recording and the release of my interview with Robin.

"All The People Say (Season 3)" by Holly Hyperion.

Logo by Aaron Perry-Zucker, using Icons by by Llisole, Dávid Gladiš, Atif Arshad, Daniel Nochta, Mike Rowe, Jakub Čaja, Raji Purcell and IconsGhost from the Noun Project.

Philip Buchanan went indie so that he could finish 39 Days to Mars, a consummately silly co-op-as-comedy physics-and-gadgets puzzle-'em-up rendered in florid trichromatic line drawings and bone-dry Britishisms. The result is as delightful as any cuppa could hope to be be.

In this episode, Philip stops by to talk about the joys of being a solo developer, the importance of collaborating even so, and the occasional social perils of frank, unwinking Kiwi humor.

Corrections: "All Wrong" performed by the Isham Jones Orchestra.

Segue: "The Temperature of the Air on the Bow of the Kaleetan" by Chris Zabriskie, from Undercover Vampire Policeman (and the 39 Days to Mars soundtrack).

Technical Difficulties: "Apple Blossoms" by Vernon Geyer.

Outro: "That Kid in Fourth Grade Who Really Liked the Denver Broncos" by Chris Zabriskie, from Undercover Vampire Policeman (and the 39 Days to Mars soundtrack).

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Rami Ismail wants everyone to be able to make games. "Literally anybody anywhere" should be able to work in this medium that has the potential to transcend not only cultural and national boundaries, but language. The work of including everyone is, of course, not trivial—but Rami is attempting to do the work, and the collaborative, yearlong game-a-day project Meditations serves as one particularly ambitious example of how.

We talk about Rami's current work, as well as his time making Super Crate Box, Ridiculous Fishing, Nuclear Throne, and LUFTRAUSERS. Plus I get to tell him my weird-ass Ridiculous Fishing story, and we get to discuss the value of traveling. (I travel a fair bit, but Rami makes me—and just about anybody, really—look like a wanderlust dilettante).

• Here's Rami on the difference between diversity and inclusion, and the issues with the English language that the former fails to address.

• Here are links to TEMPRES and VESPER.5.

• And here's a link to Lose/Lose—which, FAIR WARNING, will seriously actually delete files on your computer at mostly-random, for real.

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Gabby DaRienzo stops by to talk about her work as one half of the core Laundry Bear Games team, from A Mortician's Tale (and Tracktoons) to their still-in-its-early-days next project—as well as her excellent, now-concluded podcast Play Dead, and her extensive and varied freelance work on Celeste, Parkitect, Graceful Explosion Machine, and the upcoming Super Crush K.O. (among other fine videogamic works).

I do of course also take the chance to talk to Gabby about death in games (and in general), on account of her well and truly knowing her shit in that arena—and I pick her brain about the upscaled visuals in Katamari Damacy REROLL, for that very same reason.

• I'm more or less here for the Toronto Indie Scene Extended Universe.

• The show is in fact called The Great British Bake Off. And no, we've never spoken about it before on this 'cast, I don't think.

• Latrice Motherfuckin' Royale. D:

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