Pragmata Is Uncle-Core (With Rebekah Valentine)

Hello everybody and welcome to another installment of Aftermath Hours, the weekly podcast of Aftermath.Site, a worker-owned reader-supported website about video games, the internet, and everything that comes after. Aftermath is for the moment reader-supported only, so if you like what you hear, you can subscribe on the site using the big button that lets you do that. Or if you don't have a ton of cash to spare, we'd really appreciate it if you could review the show on Apple, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. I am Nathan Grayson, and today I am joined by Chris Person. Hey, how's everyone doing? Riley McLeod. Hello. And special guest, Rebecca Valentine. Hello, everybody. Yeah, we got a whole crew. Rebecca, you are obviously in a different place than you have been for quite some time. Normally, we would say that you were joining us from IGN, but as of this week, that is no longer the case. You are now at Kotaku. I sure am. A site I believe some of you are familiar with. Mm-hmm. Yeah, only a few. I think most of our viewers and listeners have not really heard of it and are frankly not interested in it. They're not really gamers. They mainly just want to, you know, see about pen reviews and weird likes. Oh, I didn't go there for the video games. I went there solely so that Zach Weissen, a fellow Kansas Cityan and myself, can rank energy drinks. Oh, what's your top? I'm actually curious. No, I don't actually have one. It's a whole long story, but we did a whole thing where he invited me over one night, well before I ever worked at Kotaku, and me and him and a couple other friends drank an absurd amount of energy drinks so that he could rank them for Kotaku. And it was disgusting and I was delirious on my way home. We're gonna do it again. Yeah, I was gonna say, how did that affect your heart? I have not investigated or examined that. Probably not in good ways. No, generally speaking, no, no. I don't think I've ever met Zach. How funny. I was his boss for a long time. Yeah, I don't think I've met him in person. Come to Kansas City. You should. It's delightful. We've got barbecue, jazz, and baseball. I do like barbecue. It's getting warm again, and now I'm just like, what if I just bike across the country? But I start looking at maps and stuff, just kind of curiously. But now I updated my phone, and so now Google Maps will sometimes be like, do you want to send this map that you're looking at on your computer to your phone? And I'm like, no, I've mapped from my house to San Francisco. Why would I want to look at this on my phone? I'm just fucking around. But I appreciate that it takes me seriously. I'm like, maybe I do. And then finally, I bet I could bike to Kansas. I like that you appreciate Google Maps. I don't. I just sometimes do it if usually you can find a real bike map, but sometimes if I'm just curious how far something is, I'll just put it in Google Maps as like a starting point. But you shouldn't actually follow Google Maps to bike anywhere. Also, before Chat brings it up, I want to get out ahead of this. I have a black eye. I wasn't gonna say anything. Yeah. Because I was in a mosh pit earlier this week at a show. And while I do that often, there are occupational hazards, and one of them is that you might take an entire elbow to your eye at a relatively high speed, and yeah, then it leaves a mark. At first it was like a weird big bump too, like right here, and I was like, well, that seems bad. But I didn't like fracture my orbital or anything. It's just, you know, your standard black eye. Yeah, fun show, though. You got to come up with a cooler story than that, though, no matter how fun the show is. How is getting a black eye in a mosh pit not a fun story? I don't know. You got to come up with like a cool fight you had over something really spicy. I think I'm going to stick with my current story, which is the truth. I had one of those. I thought you were a journalist. I thought the truth mattered to you. I had a whole story on the podcast. It was fun. I'm a fraud. Yeah, exactly. All right. Well, speaking of journalism, I think we should talk about that as we often do, because I think that, again, as we were saying earlier, you are in a very interesting situation right now in that you have moved from IGN over to Kotaku. I think obviously IGN, especially for a second there, you know, y'all were outputting some really, like, incredible reporting and news, albeit I think that you had a larger staff at that time that enabled you to do those things. And so I guess from that point when you were kind of doing like, I remember, you know, some of the reporting you did on, like, Bungie and things like that, that was really stand out. How did things kind of change? Very gradually, as things tend to, you know. And I also, I don't want to take away from the people who are still there, because there is still quite a bit of decent reporting coming out of there. Like, Wes and Tom Phillips are really, really good. They're backfilling my position. I expect that that person will do some reporting as well. But it did decrease. I mean, you're absolutely correct. There was a period of time when Tina Amini was our editor-in-chief. She really cared deeply about bringing, you know, original, serious, like, investigative reporting and really building up the reputation as a strong journalistic outlet. And she hired accordingly. I mean, I guess she hired me. And then she hired, like, Cat Bailey. We already had, like, several people who were in there. I believe she also hired Alex Stadman, who was on the entertainment side, but she was doing some really, really incredible stuff. I think Tina was responsible for Alex. And then we got Taylor Lyles in there, who was doing tech reporting. Tina left. Joe Scrubbles, who was in charge of the department at one point, he also left. Cat was put in charge of it. And at that time, we had a real powerhouse of the four of us doing reporting. It was also really cool because it was a news department staffed entirely by queer women. I was really excited about that. And then, you know, we brought in Wes, who was also a really strong hire from Eurogamer. But Wes kind of came in, unfortunately for him, like, at the tail end of a particular era, because IGN, you know, the media landscape is sure interesting right now. Lots of interesting things happening everywhere. And, you know, a lot of places are having to cut back on things. So kind of one of the first things that happened was there was a buyout at IGN. And for reasons that are their own and are not my business, Cat and Alex both took the buyout. And so our department was significantly smaller. It was just, oh, and Taylor had left us earlier that year as well. So it was just myself and Wes. And we also didn't really have anybody who replaced Tina Amini. So we didn't really have an editor-in-chief who was sort of directing a strong journalistic editorial vision at the time. So we got cut down really significantly. We did pull in Tom Phillips from over at Eurogamer, which was really great. But it was such a small group. We also had layoffs across other departments throughout the year, which meant the three of us were often, like, dipping in and helping out elsewhere. It just, over the course of, like, two, three years, our numbers got whittled down pretty small. And also there was just less, there was less of an emphasis from the top on this is something we want to do. Like, when I got hired, I sat down in a room with Tina and John Davidson and Joe Scrubbles, and they specifically gave me marching orders. They said, you're not here to do numbers. You're here to do prestige reporting. You're here to make IGN a destination for journalism. And so for several years, I was able to do that. The winds changed. My marching orders changed over time, and I was still able to do some reporting. Like, I didn't ever stop, but it was usually smaller scale because I didn't have time. And I feel like that is something that is happening to a lot of places right now. Yeah. Yeah, without a doubt. I mean, it feels like what's happening everywhere. You know, it's wild to me that it seems to not be happening for the first time in what feels like eons at Kotaku specifically. Yeah. Because I think that, you know, during our era, it felt like it was death by a thousand cuts. And then eventually, you know, as that phrase implies, it would just die. And yet somehow it has hung on for so long and is now staffing up again, which just to me, like, because I always in my brain, I was like, yeah, there will be like two websites left standing at the end of all of it. And it's going to be like IGN and one other, who knows which one. But I guess we know now, IGN and Kotaku. And Aftermath, but we're over here. I do like the degree to which, like, the dysfunction of the site was just Jim Spanfeller. Like, just the degree to which it was just like, hey, Clicked it and it took me to Kotaku Australia, which is now the Kotaku Times, a content site. And I was like really sad. I was like, oh, those URLs is awesome. Like I hate my kids, lovingly blogs. And they're like, no, that's not there. And I was like, oh. CNET is very large, I think, compared to Polygon. CNET was acquired by Ziff Davis for a hundred million. It was sold by Paramount to Red Ventures in 2020 for 500 million. And in 2008, CBS acquired it for 1.8 billion. Wow. That's wild to think about. The idea that the written word would be worth a billion dollars, like a any collection of it is like, to me, like, I wish on some level, you know, I wish. I mean, it seems like Vox is just making money off paying Kara Swisher somehow. Seems to be their business model. Yeah, in chat, Miko just said, where do these people come up with these valuations? It feels like money laundering. Like, yeah, and that kind of is the case a lot of the time. I think examining any, like, any high-level money exchange that's like in the high millions or billions, once you examine it too closely, it does just become money laundering. Right, well, because it's all rich people just trading assets. And it's like, okay, whatever we've decided will appreciate in value will, and we trade that off. And then, oh, yeah, it's on to the next thing. So now that doesn't cost as much, but this other thing does. Yeah, I mean, what is being wealthy if not just constant money laundering? Money laundering persisting. But yeah, I do think that this, you know, as you were saying earlier, this puts games journalism in an interesting place because we do have, at least for the moment, it feels like some relatively stable pillars both in a kind of corporate setting and in, you know, the independent setting between us and Jank and Mothership and Rogue. You know, there's a growing gallery of them. And so I guess, like, you know, given how dire things were looking even a year or two ago, how do you feel about, and this is a very small, easy question, the state of games journalism right now? Answer in 15 words or less. Really, 15 words or less? No, no. But I'm not, I'm very long-winded, as my colleagues at Kotaku are discovering about me very quickly. I still don't, I mean, obviously, I got a new job, so I feel pretty good about that. I still don't feel great on, like, a broad scale. And I don't feel great because it is still basically the same pool of, I don't know how many of us would you say there are? 30, 40 of us, generally, people in this scene, roughly, who have what one might consider stable employment, whether that's a full-time, like, W2 job or a job that makes you enough money to live or you're getting enough freelance work to exist. Like, it's such a small pool. And we're all just sitting here, frozen, terrified for our lives, clinging to the jobs that we have because if we lose them, I mean, that's it, man, there aren't any other jobs. That's kind of it. And I don't think I'm going to feel comfortable about it all again until I start seeing jobs again that people can compete for in sort of a meaningful way as opposed to everyone just sort of desperately clawing at. And I don't know what that's going to look like. I'm thrilled that, like, multiple people have been able to spin up their own collectively owned things. Not everybody's in a position to do that. And, I mean, we all know, too, that it becomes a struggle to get new writers into the scene that way as well because they're fighting with all these seniors for attention. Yeah, I, that's, as someone who led several newsrooms, at least briefly in different capacities, I feel like that's the, it's so hard. It's not, I said this before on the podcast, that it's not a replacement and that it's not a way to get new people in. And I feel so much sadness and stress about that and how do new people come up and how do they get real jobs. And I think also, like, I think you're right that, like, you know, even for, maybe you are in the same position where I was thinking about this the other night because I was having a crisis. But I think about my, like, career and it's like where I thought it would go five years ago or three years ago or whatever. And I think, like, that's never going to happen. Like things that I wanted. And this is like cool and I'm excited about what we're doing, but I think there are still things I wanted out of my career that I think I still sometimes have to like let go of where it's like, and it feels weird because, like, I think, I don't know how old you are, but like I'm, you know, I'm only 44, which is like old in a way for a workforce, but it's also like I look at sort of the like, the leaders, the generation ahead of me, and I'm like, they're, they're the last ones. Like, you know, Stephen's going to be the last, yes, he's the last, yes, he of Kotaku. But like the last person to have that kind of career arc, you know, where you work your way up or whatever. And sometimes I'm just like, whoa, like, oh well, I've got another, you know, 30 or 40 years left to, I don't know. No, I mean like the getting a new generation in is the thing that, like, worries me the most. It's the reason I would like us to have, I mean, one of many reasons I would like us to have more resources, but it's literally just like trying to make sure you pay the bills before you can get anybody else in there permanently. It's really, really hard calculus to make. And it's one that we struggle with because we have to agree upon what we do with the money, like collectively in that way. And so it becomes this one, like, at what point do you get somebody permanently? You know what I mean? At what point do you add someone new? At what time do you have the time to do, like, what are the on- roads to talent that didn't used to exist, or that used to exist and now don't. And like, how do you, how do you supercharge that in such a way that, like, hopefully what we do allows for that. I think it's also a question though of, like, what kind of job would you be giving someone? Like, I think those of us who own it and started it, there's a certain, I think there's a certain push and pull of, like, what you expect from a job versus the reality of, like, we started this thing and this is how it's going. And like, yeah, I think there are like sacrifices you make. But if I was going to, like, hire someone, you know, the fact that I can't offer them like health insurance, like, it feels bad, right? Whereas I'm like, yeah, I knew what I was getting into. And so I wonder if there's like a certain level you have to meet that is so high compared to, like, a company with money. Like, I've tortured everybody with my efforts to try to figure out. But like, like an employee is expensive. Like, it costs a lot of money. Especially in the U.S. Yeah, like, I never thought about it before. It's like, oh my God. No, it is one of the, one of the like rational explanations for like single payer and or like free at the point of service healthcare is that it just makes it easier to hire people and it makes it easier for you to leave your job. Like, yeah, that is the thing that we are all a prisoner to in the United States, is that like, I might die if I don't, if I don't stay at my job. And I might die if I stay at my job a lot of the times. And, like, that's, it's easier for smaller businesses. Like, if you wanted one policy that would, like, increase small business ownership and, like, increase the, like, staffing levels, it would be just single payer healthcare because it would just turbocharge what you can do with people, you know? Yeah. Small business health insurance is also very expensive. It's extremely expensive. Everything is so expensive. I will sort of round off, I guess, my answer to Nathan's original question with the fact that, well, no, I just, I didn't want to go off on a cynical note because I'm not a cynical person genuinely. I, I still feel tense. I still feel precarious. I think the, the dam is leaking and we are all frantically patching it as we can. But I do think the fact that Kotaku is hiring not just me, like, I'm one job, they're hiring two more. I believe that's true. And then, like, IGN is backfilling me and then you guys exist as well. And I, everything you said about, you know, what a job looks like, like what, what would it look like if you wanted to hire someone is true. But I also think about places like IGN. They started off small and scrappy. Like, they started off as, I mean, I don't know IGN's full story, but like, like a lot of the major corporate websites that exist now began as something really small that probably didn't have great or any health insurance. And so, Stressing how cool his adopted parents are. You don't get that a lot in games. When someone's adopted or has a fucked up childhood, it usually becomes a motivating force in an annoying way. And Hugh's relationship is like, yeah, you know, I was adopted. I really like my parents. They really instilled the values that I find in myself and I would like to do that with you. And, like, that's great. Maybe, maybe we could, I guess, I guess, I guess we don't need good male figures in video games. I don't know. I mean, he's two dimensional. I don't care. But also, it's a game where you're, like, hacking robots and she's seven, you know, like, it's, like, what's the level here is sometimes how I feel about it. And I do think the thing with her feet is really funny because the lore explanation is that she basically, because he asks her that at one point, she's like, why don't you wear shoes? And she's like, oh, because I charge through the floor. She has chi charging. But also, here's the thing. I've hung out with a lot of kids who don't want to fucking wear shoes. I also, in this case, this feels very different from, like, Kojima's quiet explanation or whatever. I was going to say, I was going to bring up Quiet. I feel like in this case, somebody drew a kid in, like, a way they thought was cute. And as you mentioned, kids love to go barefoot. So they just drew her and they're like, Oh, put her in a big coat or whatever. Oh, look, she's cute. And then retroactively, they're like, oh, no. Well, we got to explain why we drew her like this. But also, like, I don't know. I've, let me rephrase that. Autistic kids like to wear, not wear shoes a lot. And I've been around a lot of kids who are neurodivergent, who, like, it's a sensory thing. And, like, I don't know, like, you can debate whether or not that's a valid explanation. It works for me. I think it's a fun game. Dude, the game's so good. This game is so fun. It's like, there's a weird little robot guy. It's very, it's very Capcom. There's very clear lore allusions to Mega Man and to, like, Dr. Light. And it does have the sort of in-between, like, like what if Mega Man was gritty? You know, like, why was, why did you make Mega Man? What was the purpose of building Mega Man? You sort of get an X and certain other parts of it. And I don't know, I'm just having a great time. And I think it's, I've never seen... Okay, do you know how in, like, the Avatar sequels, like, say what you will about them, there's a lot to criticize there, but they get teenagers right. Like, the teenagers in the Avatar movies talk like teenagers, which is to say, they say bro a lot. They're like, oh, bro, that's fucked up, bro. You know, like they say that, but they're blue aliens. And this is, feels like that, but with a child. Like, seven-year-olds talk a specific way. They do not give you a lot of extremely overwrought exposition. They ask you what, what Earth is like, or like, what, what, what do you do in your spare time? They ask you a lot of questions and then, uh, get defensive when you talk about their, their hacking as, quote, a mini-game. Like, it's very, it's very talking to your nephew at a barbecue coded. And I, I think there's criticisms you can have that are valid, but I think that, like, a lot of it is just like, man, I don't know, man, just, just... It's nice that there's a game with a, with a normal child in it and an adult who knows how to deal with a normal child and how to talk to them. Yeah, that, that sounds extremely cool. I mean, I played a little bit of it at Summer Game Fest last year and enjoyed it a lot. But yeah, it is like wild to me that somehow people have taken that and turned it into, you know, the, the discourse that we're now seeing. But that, that feels like it's so typical now on, you know, the modern internet. Um, and I don't think it's entirely because, like, games journalists as gatekeepers no longer really exist, but I do think that having multiple kinds of discourse around a game can't hurt when it seems like the predominant discourse is often defined now by, you know, some of the most insane motherfuckers on the internet. I frequently feel two different ways about sort of the things around this topic. Because on one hand, you know, I think about this when I'm looking at sales figures a lot. Like, if you're looking, because I do a lot of biz reporting and, like, if you're looking at, like, sales figures, you know, like how, I don't know, how do we have a copies number on this? How many copies did this thing sell? In excess of a million, I know. It's sold a million. Yeah, okay, so we'll say a million. Great. So a million people bought this game. How many of those million people who bought that game are on the internet in, in like a deep way? Like, they're not just, like, checking their phone and seeing, like, a Google news headline from IGN or Kotaku or wherever and clicking on it, reading it, and then closing it. Like, they're online having discourse about Pragmata, a very small number. And then that number's inflated a little bit because there's a lot of people who are online having discourse about Pragmata who did not buy that game. But, like, ultimately, the actual meaningful, like, impact of that stupid discourse on, like, the overall, like, world impression, I guess, of Pragmata is so small and so minuscule. And so, to some extent, there's this whole thing that I feel like we get caught up in sometimes, where we see something going on over on the really bad website, and it feels overwhelming. It feels like, oh my gosh, what is happening here? When really, it's just a bunch of weirdos in their weirdo corner having weirdo talk, and we can have a whole different conversation about Pragmata over here that doesn't have to have anything to do with them. That said, we all know in here how groups of people on the internet saying crap, uh, can actually have real material impact on the world. And so, like, on one hand, I want to just dismiss it and say, let's just let them gripe in their little room about whatever they think Pragmata is about, and we can do what we want to do over here. But on the other hand, I have this impulse to be like, no, but we have to, like, open our mouths and say, actually, that's a really weird thing to take away from this game, and maybe we should not do that. Like, I just, I feel both ways about it, and I don't know how to confront it. I, I think for me, it's to just, like, I've actually tried to avoid the sort of, one, I don't check Twitter, to be frank, and two, I don't, like... It's been just, like, I'll see a take delivered to me, like, when a dog delivers, like, like a dead animal to you, or like a cat delivers a mouse. You're like, you're like, all right, that kind of bums me out. But, like, everybody I've talked to that's just playing it is very much like, yeah, this, this is tight. You know, like the, I think the, the, the normal person perception of it is like, hey, I missed when they had a game... Was it PO03? I forget what... PNO3. PNO3. Thank you. Like, I cannot stress enough, the way that weapons work in this game is extremely vanquish. Like, there's a lot of like dash, side dashing, and like, it's very, this gun has five uses, and then you drop it on the ground. You know what I mean? And like, you pick up new one up, and like, that's very vanquish, and like, even his armor is very vanquish. It's very Dead Spacey. There's like a lot of, um, very good spacing and sort of like, you know, rubbing your stomach and patting your head kind of stuff. And it, it feels really, really like fulfilling. And like, there's, there's a good challenge section. I love a good VR room. There's always a good VR room where you do challenges or like a little area where you just find all the, all the secret things. And yeah, there's a little robot man who's named is Cabin, and who talks like Alan Resnick in that one, in that one, uh, YouTube video. What is it? You, whoever you are forever, whatever. The one where he talks to an AI version of himself. Like, there's, there's, he's just like a little robot man with a sideways LCD screen face. And he goes like, you have wonderful eye orbs, you know, like stuff like that. And I, I find that charming in a Mega Man Legends way. You know what I mean? I find that in a, in a kind of corny, like it's fine to be corny sometimes. You can be corny sometimes. It doesn't have to be dire. You don't have to be like, Ooh. Right Thing, who is your favorite Comedia d'arte character? And then it has all the characters that says 0% and the last it says 100% don't know. Which again, goes back to this whole thing, because, you know, what, two weeks ago we did a podcast where we talked about all the Hasan Piker stuff and the, like, blog about it that I ended up running with was like, why people can't be normal about Hasan Piker. Once again, we're talking about something people can't be normal about, but people is a broad term, and what we really mean is like a specific subset of people who are being weird online. The case of Hasan also, like, part of the Democratic Party, but even then, they're being informed by a specific subset of people online. And yeah, I think it really does help increasingly to remember that a lot of people are just kind of normal. My fear is always that the number of people who are normal is decreasing as we all become more internet-reliant, and eventually we will run out of normal people, especially because, like, you know, Gen Alpha is being raised by this version of the internet. I think the pandemic reduced the number of normal people significantly. I think, may I suggest that maybe the sort of TikTok-ification of things has created a kind of, like, hyper-normal version, some kind of hyper-normalization, if you will, to create a weird, like, like Crimson Desert feels like a TikTok game. It feels like a game you've seen. Have you ever seen, occasionally, I can never find them, but it's always a guy narrating this game. It's always the same cadence. It's always, this game is going to be the best game in history. It has active shooting, and then he'll just, like, list the features, and it will be, like, a Korean game that came out three months ago to basically 6.5s, and the video will be from, like, this month, and it'll just be like, it's just real, like, playground level, just basic, like, here are the features, here, here's what they do. And for a lot of people, that's what they want. They want, like, can I do, can I do active shoot, like, reload? Can I collect resources and craft them into helpful items, you know? Do love crafting and collecting resources. Yeah, because a lot of people want just, like, you know, I mean, it's that second screen entertainment philosophy or concept. You know, something to do with their hands while they're, like, listening to something or watching something or whatever else. They don't want something that's going to absorb all of their attention. And again, I don't think that's necessarily bad, but I think that when most entertainment is catering to that, then we enter a place that, to me, doesn't even necessarily feel dangerous so much as it just feels boring. I do think there is a place for a podcast game, though. Oh, definitely. The game you listen, you play while you listen to a podcast is really vital. And it's called Warframe, and it's the greatest game of all time. It's a check simulator game. Cities Skylines. I think there's a place for them, and I don't understand them. OK, then what do you do when you're listening to podcasts? I generally don't, is the problem. Wow. I know. It's really bad. I mean, it's because I can only focus on one thing at a time, and so it's really hard for me to listen to, like, if I have a podcast on, I will either be listening to that podcast and doing nothing else, in which case I feel very antsy because I feel unproductive. I'm not doing anything with my hands. Sitting on the couch with your hands folded, like, looking at the wall. I know, right? Or I turn on, you know, I turn on the video game or try to, like, do something, but then I get focused on that and I stop listening to the podcast, and so it's very difficult for me. Driving is when I do, because I, for some reason, can listen and drive at the same time. Thank God. That would be bad if I couldn't do that. Old cranky dud says it's called Vampire Crawlers. And then so does, someone is in chat is playing Vampire Crawlers while listening to this. I read about that today on our very website. I feel like I listened to podcasts when I was training for the marathon or when I'm stuck on, like, the treadmill, because I just ran out of music, but I can't really concentrate when I'm running. And so I have, like, vague memories of like, Oh, I really liked the Christianity Today podcast about Mars Hill, but I have a hard time remembering if it was a very good podcast. Keep getting sucked back into Duolingo, and Duolingo has a lot of ads and it has ads for games. And there's, like, one where you, like, unravel yarn, and there's some kind of weird one where you pour things into things. And, like, you can play a part of the ad. It's not the color, the colored tubes. Is that what it is? And so I'll mess around with the ads. And I had this moment where I was like, do I want to, like, get this? Like, this actually seems like really nice. And so I tried to look them up. Yeah, but I can't find the ecosystem is like, here's how to cheat. I was just like, are these real games? Are these scams? No, I solved your problem for you. Oh, good. What is it? There's a game. Look up. Yeah. You want those games, right? So here you go. Now let's see you clear them. That is the name of a game. I feel like I just recently started. And it is a minigame collection of games based on those ads. Oh, awesome. I'm gonna look it up. It is. It is literally just that. I did see counterprogramming ads against Kingshot on YouTube. I did see somebody making a, like, hey, you know those Kingshot ads? Well, this is Kingshot, but if it was real ads. And, you know, it wasn't against Kingshot. It was against the ones where you, like, move left and right and it kind of looks like Subway Surfers. They're like, what if that game was real? Well, we made it. We made the real version of the fake AI game in ads. So we're entering, like, deep layers of self-awareness and lore when it comes to these fake-ass games. Yeah, how far is too far? Check this out. This is great. Yeah. I'm so happy I get to tell you about this. But again, it makes me feel like such a sucker where I'm like, come on, man. You're better than this. Like, stop doing this. Octodoulingo, it's full of AI now. I have to stop using it. It just has, like, lots of work. I had, like, first sworn and I was like, screw this. But then I was in another Irish class and they brought it up again. And I think just because it has a lot of vocabulary in it and it's hard to learn new words, but I hate it. Just do Anki with a frequency dictionary. I tried, but it takes so long to set the effing thing up. And I got bored setting it up. And I don't know any words to put in it. I don't know any words. That's the problem. There's pre-existing dictionaries of, like, usually it's, like, word frequency and then it does it sequentially based on word frequency. So it's like... Yeah, there are some for Irish. I've been trying to learn Bangla, but there's, like, no, there's nothing. Like, there's no Duolingo. There's, like, no Rosetta Stone. There's just nothing because it's not a language people, like, globally conduct business in. Everybody over there just learns Hindi. So I ended up having to join, like, a Bangla class in the Bay Area when I lived there. And now I have a weekly conversation class on Zoom where we speak Bangla the whole time. Cool. That is cool. Yeah. Meanwhile, I am over here getting the only language that I know punched out of my head in Mosh Pit. So, you know, we all have similar hobbies. All right, speaking of words, I know a place where we can find a lot of them, and that is the mailbag, where readers ask us questions using words. It's pretty crazy. If you'd like to sign up for the mailbag, or if you'd like to contribute, you can do so by subscribing to Aftermath's $10 member tier. That will gain you access to our Discord, which is where the magic happens, and also conversations. But in a way, those are magic, aren't they? Because, I mean, animals aren't doing them. It's pretty much just us. Yeah, basically. Anyway. Man's kind's greatest invention. Yeah, well, arguably. I mean, then that led to discourse, which might be our undoing. So, you know. Maybe our greatest and worst. All right, from Mectroid. Obviously, most mansions have too many rooms. How many rooms is reasonable for a house before it gets too big for you? Depending on how many people are living in it, obviously. Can we get, like, an average amount of people or something? Man, I'd say probably like, I'm just going to throw this out, between two and four. Okay. So I'd say everybody gets their own bedroom in an ideal situation where we have plenty of money. So let's say four on the max level The bug modern indie games for one that's just good and normal. Well, it's pretty weird, but good is a promise mascot agency. So like it still has narrative. It still has like, you know, stakes, pathos, all of that. But also again, most of the time you're just like hanging out with weird little guys and people are just generally kind of chill. No one's ever like, all right, it's time to endure like, you know, misery porn level tragedy. And it's just like, yeah, let's just have a good time hanging out. Yeah. All right, let's see. Next question. From Jack. Would you be the bird in the backpack or the backpack carrying bear in your relationship? Bear. Like my, like with my partner? Yeah, basically. Which part of Banjo-Kazooie would you be? Would you be Banjo or would you be Kazooie? Which is pointing to people. Which one of you is the banjo? Which one of you is the kazooie? Yeah, yeah. I feel like over the course of our relationship, we've, we swapped like the guys in double dash. Ooh, interesting to me. Just like swinging around sometimes. Yeah. Yeah, I actually, I think that's what the ideal relationship should be, is that no one is in either of those roles all the time, but you swap as need be between bear and bird. Bear and bird. Sometimes, sometimes it's important to be the bear and sometimes it's okay to be the bird. Yeah. Sometimes you need to be carried in a backpack and then you spring out and launch an egg at someone and it hits them as a projectile because in turn, the bear cannot fire a projectile. They're occupied carrying you. That's what partnership looks like. That's beautiful. That's love. Yeah, that is love. Um, all right, from Mish, what's aftermath merch that you desperately want out there, but feel like you can't do because of the optics? Um, I definitely have one because me and Luke have discussed it several times. So you know how every time that we publish an article about Strauss Zelnick, we take the image and make it look a little bit worse. And like, we distort it. We flip it upside down. We kind of just like, you know, he's basically melting slowly over time with our next few. We're going to hit a version of it. That's like, it's just hideous and completely upside down. And we want to make a shirt out of that. But I don't think that, I think that we could easily get sued if we did so. If you're making money off of it directly, I think. Yeah. At that point, it's a little messy. Yeah. I wish, I wish we had merch that fit me that I didn't have to awkwardly special order. I'm too small for our own merch. And so every time I want something, Luke has to try to make it special for me. But then sometimes it's confusing how big it is. And like I get it wrong. And like, so I thought that would be my trans small trans guy size merch would be great. This is a problem with our providers, not us. We are capable of, obviously. I've wanted to make a, have you ever had a sauna hat? No. So when you go into a sauna, sometimes, like particularly if it's a Russian sauna, you'll get like, they'll give you, you can buy a wool hat for like 20 bucks usually or 25. I forget how much, depends on how nice it is. And it's usually just like a felt hat of wool that has usually some kind of embroidered thing like sauna boss or like a weird cat or like, it'll say in Russian, like I love to have money all the time, you know, and then like a dollar sign. And it serves a purpose, which is that wool is an insulator. So it allows you to go into a sauna for longer, much longer periods of time because your head isn't overheating. And when your head isn't overheating, it allows your body to absorb more heat and thus get more, more sauna time and thus torture yourself better. And I've wanted an aftermath one of those, but I had, I would have to source it and then I would have to mail them out individually and that would be hard. Yeah, that'd be a nightmare. But also another one that I've wanted to do that I think we can, but we'd have to like get in touch with some folks is that the art that I did for my New York article where it's like basically a Final Fantasy logo, but it says New York, because the actual New York image we sourced from Shutterstock and we only obtained editorial rights for it. So merch would be a whole other thing. I think we'd need to like reach out to the person who made that little, you know, graphic of New York that looks very Final Fantasy and then also get in touch with the people who made like, we need to make sure that we can use the font and things, component parts. So it would take some work, but I love that design and I think that would be sick. Well, that was interesting when we made the woke too, because I, the guy in charge of all of the boring bullshit, then subsequently learned a lot about like the different, the different legalities between parody and satire and how protected you are in terms of copyright infringement. And I was like, huh, never thought about it before. So I guess, but you could probably draw one. Is woke copyrighted? No, we were not sure about the PlayStation 2-esque font. Oh yeah, that'll do it. And also because like we had basically, originally we took it from like a generator, you know, one of the online ones. That was just a mock-up though. So then Luke made his own to ensure that we were not, you know, legally exposed in that fashion. Yeah. It was a, it was a whole little saga. I was excited because it was, it was his sudden thought, oh no, are we going to get in trouble? And I didn't have to be the asshole who was like, well, you know, guys. So like, I, I was excited that it was, that he thought. Hannah Riley is like a person teaching Paris to talk only he's giving us all anxiety. Oh, God. All right. From Mystic Eddie T. If you taught a university class on games journalism, which pieces of investigative reporting in game spaces that have lived in your head rent free over multiple years, would you most like to use as case studies of what aspiring games journalists should strive toward? People make games, Roblox. Yeah, that's, that's a really good one. Just really everything people make games is done. Yeah. They're really good. Yeah. I mean, I think just like, I mean, both because it's good reporting, but also because it, I think it was a very seminal moment for just games media in general. I think Cecilia's Riot Games report has to be in there. Yeah. Yeah. Because I mean, that also like had a major impact on Riot Games. Yeah. It both, it both had a big impact on Riot Games and then it also kicked off, I think, like an era of a lot of people doing similar kinds of work that, I mean, the work existed before, but not quite on the same level. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I think that Jason's stuff on like Rockstar crunch. Yeah. Because again, that had like an outsized impact on, you know, the company or at least had an impact on what they tried to do. It seems like they still have crunch issues, but you know, they at least have attempted to clean up their act. And then also like, I remember that informing a lot of the discourse around the game too. I think that was a moment when people sort of woke up to the fact that it's hard to discuss a game like in that case, Red Dead Redemption 2, um, without engaging with crunch as an issue and like asking the question of, you know, is this ultimately worth what people are being put through to create it? Um, and then of course the follow-up question, can we create it in a different way so that we are not potentially irreparably harming people? Um, and I think those are important questions. Yeah. Most of mine just involve working like, like, uh, labor. Like most of the good stories are just labor based for me and there's too many to count, but like, including, including some of yours, Reb. It seems like what a lot of games journalism investigations. I mean, that's because what it fundamentally is, right? It's about people. Yeah. That's, yeah. I was thinking the other day about your investigation into the, the Darwin project studio, whose name escapes me. Just thinking about the Darwin project, again, that I really liked. And so I was like, ah, that sucks that, that, um, but I think that's one of those things where I imagine, I don't know if it was hard, like who heard of that game, who heard of that studio, like, like sort of how you balance like. And I'll like, I guess I'll throw this in as sort of a going back to our conversation earlier about lamenting where games journalism is right now. Like that, that was a very small studio. That was a studio that like now, like if I tried to do that, I mean, I, I don't want to say anything about Kotaku, but like if I had tried to do that, you know, a couple of months ago at IGN, like we would have said no, because that the studio and the game is just too small. But at the time I was at GI Biz, I had a whole lot of freedom, um, in the kinds of things that I wrote about. And also we had enough resources that we I would just be spending four hours of my afternoon sitting there with a PDF in front of me, scrolling slowly through, reading through this whole thing for whatever reason. Meanwhile, on my other screen, I've got Slack, and I've got my three other colleagues who are frantically trying to cover like whatever giant news had just broken and like the Xbox showcase that was happening and whatever else all at once. And they're, like, you know, panicking because they don't have enough person power. And I keep looking over there thinking, okay, like, I should be helping them. And then I DM my boss, I'm like, do you need help? She's like, no, we gave you this time. Go take it. And you feel like so guilty because it's like, but they're struggling. But if I don't sit over here and do this, then I'm just gonna keep getting pulled off of it every single day, every time there's a crisis. And this is never going to get done. And, like, it sucks for them. It sucks for me. It sucks for everybody. We should all hire, like, 10,000 reporters and just let them cook. Yeah. If any incredibly wealthy benefactors are listening right now and would love to just give Aftermath like a million dollars, you know where to find us. You know, even we have that problem and we definitely are, you know, we definitely value your reporting. And I think, you know, I definitely now, like, even for us, it's like, you know, there's only so many of us and there's so much to do and, like, stuff. Yeah. Sure is. On that note, I think that's probably our show for the day. Reb, where can people find you? I'm on – I'm on Blue Sky, duckvalentine.bsky.social. I mostly post about my garden and food, but I'm posting my articles a little more now. And I'm on— I'm writing Kotaku now, which is ridiculous. And I think I have an author page there, but I haven't memorized the URL yet. How do you spell that? Is— How do you— I think it might start with, like, a C? No. I'm on Kotaku somewhere. I publish articles daily now. It's very cool. Yeah. It's very cool. I—I feel very— this—this sounds trite, but I do genuinely feel really humbled by it because, like, you know, I've watched from the sidelines for the last, what, decade, basically, as, you know, all the people who have gone through there before me have fought, like, and been in the fire and just been through it and desperately clung to that site to keep it strong. And, you know, we've seen the ups and downs. And the fact that I just get to stroll in and benefit from all that, I—it feels very weird. Yeah. But also me strolling in and benefiting from that, like, I don't want to just take—I don't want to take that for granted. Like, I want to be the first person of many, many, many to do that. So. Yeah. I love that people—Ethan stuck it out. I feel like he's in charge. He just climbs and I love that. Like, I feel like it's my son and he's, like, he's done it. It's so exciting. He's your son and now he's become a father, very literally. But also. He's also gotten such a calm demeanor now. I don't know. I feel like—I mean, he always— he always kind of had that, but, like, now he's now he's got a little, like, now he's salt and pepper. And he's just kind of like. Although, who he really reminds me of, you know, I ran into him a bunch at GDC this year. and also, like, went with him, or we were part of the same dinner that we got invited to by, like, some folks who work on—I don't know what they work anymore. It's our dear friend, Chase, formerly of Twitch. Um, but Ethan was, like, to Chase and to the other person who was, like, a head of an indie development company or, like, an indie publisher, Ethan was asking all these questions that felt very Steven-like in nature and with a very, like, you know, kind of wry Steven-like grin about him. And I was like, all right, so I guess when you, like, ascend to that position at Kotaku, you just become this guy. It's like the Santa Claus. There's— it's the Steven Claus. It's the Steven Claus. He was probably listening to this, by the way. He put— he put his new reporter on a bunch of podcasts, so he's probably listening. We love you. I just, I think as a, yeah, as an editor, I've said it before on this podcast, but watching him grow as a reporter and now as a leader is, like, to me, as someone who has his boss and editor, like, I just love it, man. Like, that's what it's all about, man. Like, I'm so, like, I love that. I'm so thrilled about that. And I hope that he continues to grow. I'm really stoked to learn from him. Yeah. Shoot. It's—you know, you end up in a pretty solitary place sometimes when you're, like, the main reporter at an outlet. And you like, I've been watching Ethan for years, like, just be really fricking incredible. And so now I get to, like, see how he works. And we probably work in very different ways. And there's probably a whole lot of things he does way smarter than I do. Yeah. Yeah, it's a classic thing of being in games reporting and kind of teaching yourself a lot on the job and then other people telling you, oh, you don't have to do it that way, actually. And there are, like, all these resources and all of these much faster ways of doing things most of the time. But it's so important that people get to learn that stuff. And like, I'm passionate about this. Like, that—it does, I think, feel like, you know, there are, like, five reporters in games journalism and that's it. And, like, how do you people get those skills? And I think the idea that, you know, you can learn them or you guys weren't born—I assume weren't born reporters, like, you learn it. And I think that there's less and less opportunities for people to, to have those mentoring opportunities and stuff like that. But it's so important if, you know, there's going to be any future for this field at all. Yeah. That's a more positive note, right? Speaking of the future, this show's over, but we will be back next week, which counts as the future, albeit not too distantly. We record every Thursday at 4 PM ET live on Twitch. And we will do it again. Also, if you liked what you heard, you can subscribe on our website at aftermath.site for money. Anyway, thank you for tuning in and we'll be back soon. Bye. Bye.