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Episode 7 - Comedy and Alasdair Beckett-King
2.2k Plays7 months ago
This episode contains the terribly charming, hilarious, and otherwise multi-talented Alasdair Beckett-King. We talk about comedy in adventure games and a million other things.
Email us! [email protected]
Games Discussed:
- Ben Jordan: Paranormal Investigator
- Pentiment
- Disco Elysium
- Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective
- Dagger of Amon RA
- A Short Hike
- A Night in the Woods
- The Longest Journey
- Discworld
- The Adventures of the Black Hawk
- The Secret of Monkey Island
- Unforeseen Incidents
- Grim Fandango
- Deponia
- Return to Monkey Island
- Uncharted 4: Thief's End
- Curse of Monkey Island
- Fran Bow
- Little Misfortune
- Trilby's Notes
- Homebody
- Four Last Things
- Procession to Cavalry
- Portal
- Psychonauts
- Lair of the Clockwork God
- Zork
- Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
- Bureaucracy
Don't tweet at Matt about his embarrassing gaffe.
Recommended
Transcript
Podcast Introduction and Humor with Language
00:00:00
Speaker
How do you pronounce the word lieutenant? I would say lieutenant. What? Where's the F come from? Well, that's for fun. That's an extra bonus F that British people are allowed to add into any word whenever we feel like it. That's going to be fun throughout the podcast as we talk about everything. And you just add F into the middle of...
00:00:22
Speaker
I'm not sure I'm going to stand behind the phrase bonus F, but we say it left hand. I love a bonus F though. Bonus F's are my favorite. Seems like we're at the intro music to me. But I have so many things to say about London. You mean Flunden.
00:00:59
Speaker
Hello, everybody, and welcome to Save Your Game. I am your very special boy and host, Matt Aucamp. With me is my rapidly healing wolverine of a co-host, pushing up roses. How you doing, roses?
00:01:15
Speaker
Hey everyone, FishingUpRoses here. I didn't take any painkillers today, so this episode's gonna be interesting as I just squirm around. For those of you who don't know, wait, you do know, because I said it in the last podcast. Hey, you can't just assume they listened to the last podcast.
00:01:32
Speaker
That's true. People might be coming here for a very specific reason, which I will explain in two seconds.
Guest Introduction and Stand-up Comedy Insights
00:01:38
Speaker
I had major surgery six days ago, and I'm already at the computer working and talking about video games as you do. Unfortunately, I'm now recording with two comedians. So this will be tough. I have stitches. I have staples and stitches. This might be a little hard.
00:01:57
Speaker
Okay, so you confirmed one thing in my notes. I do wanna, we do have a guest with us and I do wanna, I wanna check my notes here because this can't be right. This is what I have down here, can't be right. So if our guest could like confirm some of this stuff, I have here, our guest is an actor? Incorrect, no. Hi, I'm the guest. Okay, that's incorrect, okay. I am sometimes described as an actor, but I don't know where they're getting that from.
00:02:26
Speaker
Okay, I have here that you are a writer. I have written some books. Yes, I'm definitely a writer. Yeah, I have here that you're a video game developer.
00:02:38
Speaker
I have made a couple... Who hasn't? I've made a couple of small... They're adventure games, which is, you know, they're super easy to make. Those don't count. Those don't even... You know, everyone does. You can only go left and right. You can't even go forwards or backwards into the room. It's flat. It's not really a game, really. I have here you're a children's book author? Yes, yes. I've written two and a half children's books at the moment. I'm working on the fourth of a series.
00:03:08
Speaker
I have here, Rose has already said this, comedian, stand up comedian. I am a stand up comedian, definitely. I know I say that slightly defensively, but I am. I don't think, some people on the internet don't seem to believe it. I posted a video of stand up to YouTube shorts for the first time. And there's a lot of people who are like, take the left track off. And it's like, that's just a recording of the audience.
Folklore, Adventure Games, and Career Balancing
00:03:30
Speaker
I get that you don't like it and I respect that. That is a recording of an audience.
00:03:36
Speaker
I think COVID millennials maybe, or Gen Z forgot that there were things we could- The Gen Z don't know that there are audience. They think I've hired a venue and stood on stage, said jokes to no one. The annoying thing is I could totally do that because it's easily within my skillset to completely fake it. But I haven't. I have here that you're a podcaster. I do have a podcast. It's called Lawmen. It's about folklore.
00:04:03
Speaker
I have here that you're- What? Wait, whoa, hold stop. Why was I not invited to go on this podcast? I love folklore. We've only had one game-related person on, Francisco Gonzalez, the creator of many good adventure games like Rosewater, the upcoming Rosewater, and Lamplight City.
00:04:25
Speaker
And if, if you remember Homebrew adventure games from the early 2000s, the Ben Jordan series, if you are, if you remember, yeah, do you remember the old magic from those days from 2004? That's like when games barely ran. I used to download games from the internet onto floppy disks at a library and bring them home because I didn't have the internet at home.
00:04:51
Speaker
like people like like fetching grain or something from a silo oh you copied that floppy that's that's that's illegal i think legal games they were not pirated i would never go to video game alistair i do want to say we do make it a habit of bringing our guests on and then ambushing them as to why they don't involve us in their other projects so i noticed that yes
00:05:14
Speaker
Especially me. I am especially volatile. That's what I have here on your resume, which you would know as a CV. I also have here dictator of small nation in Oceania. Is that one correct? Well, you know, we've always been at war. I couldn't possibly comment on that.
00:05:39
Speaker
That is so much. How do you have time to be on this podcast, Alistair Beckett King? Great question. The answer is I do all of those things, but quite poorly and it really frees up time. If you're unsuccessful broadly across a wide range of areas, it doesn't hog your time as much as being successful at one thing. So I have spread butter across a range of eggs and baskets.
00:06:08
Speaker
I very much relate to that. I am doing a ton of stuff all the time and it's just mid.
Humor in Adventure Games
00:06:14
Speaker
You know, I got some mid art going on. I've got some mid murder. She wrote riffing going on and whatever else I do. I can't think right now cause stupid pain, but I do a lot. Matt can confirm. I don't know guys. I can't relate.
00:06:28
Speaker
You're just brilliant at one thing. Is that correct, Matt? Yeah, it's jumping. I'm very, very good at it. The listener can't tell, but Matt jumped at the start of the recording and he hasn't come down yet. He's still up there. He's still up there. I don't know how he's doing it, but he is good. Yeah, this is how I like to record. Well, Alistair, we're very, very happy to have you on the podcast. Thank you so much for being here.
00:06:55
Speaker
Thank you. You could have had influencer. I have been described quite inaccurately as an influencer. Roses, people must call you an influencer sometimes because you've got a YouTube channel and people watch. That makes you an influencer, right?
00:07:09
Speaker
Yeah, I do get called that. You have influenced a lot of people to watch Murder, She Wrote. That's influenced. That's influenced right there. I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but an influencer, their job is to take kind of brand deals and try to influence you with their entertainment to engage in that, right? That's how I view influencer. Yeah, I guess so. Are you telling me that Angela Lansbury is not behind you? Well, she is. The late great Angela Lansbury.
00:07:37
Speaker
Like she is dead. Well, okay. I didn't realize I was going to be interrogated like this. Yes. Sadly and factually Angela Ansboury is dead. Well, that's what an influencer I think does is they wait for somebody to make a mistake on the internet and they leap down their throat consistently. Yeah, that's probably the first time that's happened.
00:07:58
Speaker
we would like to know because you love adventure games, unless you're faking it. I get accused of faking, liking adventure games. And if that's true, I have wasted so much of my time. Yeah, yeah. We're those fake adventure game fans who devote their time to playing, making, and sometimes commenting on adventure games. I co-ran Adventure X for years, a event dedicated to
00:08:23
Speaker
narrative gaming. And I did that purely to destroy adventure games because they're bad and I hate them. It's the profit is why we all do it. Yeah, for that sweet, sweet adventure game money. I did once.
00:08:38
Speaker
lock myself out of a flat. I was at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, which is a festival that all comedians have to go to. It's the law. And you rent a flat. And I was staying with loads of people. And we only had one set of keys because we were, you know, poor wannabe comedians. And so when you left the flat, you had to post the keys back through the letterbox for the next person who hadn't got up yet because it was like 2pm, which means comedians are asleep.
00:09:01
Speaker
And I left the flat and I posted the keys to the letterbox and I realized I was the last person in the flat and there was nobody in the flat and I just posted the keys to no one.
00:09:11
Speaker
For the first time in my life, I was in an adventure game, so I immediately checked my pockets and looked around to see what objects I had. I had my phone and a packet of chewing gum, and I found a mop in the hallway of the block of buildings, because Edinburgh, unlike almost all of the UK, has apartment blocks, which have been around for quite a while, which almost no UK cities have, but Edinburgh does.
00:09:36
Speaker
So I was in an apartment block building, as you Americans might visualize it. So I chewed the entire packet of chewing gum to create a gum, a big ball of gum, and then push that onto the end of the mop. And then using my phone camera as eyes in the room, I put my hand through the letterbox, holding the phone camera, and I used the mop with the gum on the end to essentially fish my keys back out of the flat.
00:10:05
Speaker
And it was the most exhilarating experience of my lifetime. I mean, you had gum gum
Narrative Choices in Modern Games
00:10:11
Speaker
is very important. Yeah, I had very important. Mm hmm. Gums and mops. Yeah. A lot of adventure game. Maybe I was going to say a wrench. I was going to say spanner, but you call them wrenches, a hammer, a saw. But really, I think a mop is a classic Roger Wilco adventure game inventory item.
00:10:31
Speaker
And this is an interesting, a rare adventure game kind of scenario where finding a loose crank of some sort on the ground would not have helped you. I'll just put this in my pockets and take it with me. It looks important. Eventually I'll find some sort of flag pole or pulley system that needs this. Oh, a key. I'll just put this with the seven other keys that I'm carrying that looks slightly different than each other.
00:11:00
Speaker
God, I love, yeah, really, the older adventure games where you, yeah, you end up having so many keys and you're like, okay, is this the rusted key? No, is this the golden key? No, is this the silver key? You use silver keys. It's not the rusted key. No, you- It's never the rusted key. And if you do it in a, if you use the wrong key in the Sierra games, you die instantly. You just die? Yeah, tetanus from the rusty key. Yeah. Alistair, what have you been playing lately?
00:11:27
Speaker
Well, I have been replaying, actually. I played Pentament at the moment for the first time. And I was just replaying Disco Elysium. And if I'm honest, if this is a safe space, finishing it for the first time, because the first time I played Disco Elysium, I didn't finish it. I got lost off, even though it's great.
00:11:49
Speaker
And I'm getting a similar feeling from Pentiment, like I bet, in a weird way, I'm enjoying it, and it's clearly brilliant. But I think maybe I would enjoy it more second time round, because the fear of doing something wrong is so intense in both games. Listen, I have a confession. Yeah. I didn't, I didn't play it. He didn't play Disco Elysium. No. I'm sorry.
00:12:17
Speaker
I have a fake gamer girl. It's true. I'm not the first person to notice, but it is actually good. It deserves a lot of the praise that it has received. That suggests that I don't think it deserves all the praise it's received. It deserves 90% of the praise it has received.
00:12:35
Speaker
That's pretty good percentage. That one guy left that Steam review. He was being a little much, but everyone else has got, everyone else, their praise is correct. Those are both games very heavy in reading. And I absolutely sympathize Alistair with what, like, the fear of missing something in Pentamint is so heavy that I probably spent an extra five hours of that game just walking to every room in every time, like, every time the time would advance, I would go,
00:13:05
Speaker
that slow walking animation to every single screen because you don't know what's going to be where. I know. And the game, which I think is again, really, really good. The game doesn't really tell you.
00:13:19
Speaker
First of all, it doesn't tell you that you're not going to have enough time to exhaustively investigate all of the threads in the spoilers first of the crimes you're investigating. Goodness, yeah. It doesn't say, oh, by the way, if you just do this systematically, you're going to run out of time. And it doesn't tell you that, oh, yeah, there are things that you can explore and find that if you just keep moving time forward without pausing, you're going to miss stuff.
00:13:45
Speaker
And I know the game is designed in that way. And in a design move that is ironic in relation to the title of this podcast, there's no save game. No! Specifically, I assume because they know that people would be savescoming the whole time. So the developers are trying to force me to play it properly and just live with my choices. And I am, but I'm not happy about it.
00:14:11
Speaker
Oh no, I love save slots though. I need them. I want them. I want, I want as Matt and I have discussed before, there's no reason to not have infinity times time or save slots. It's really annoying if you're trying to do screen capturing of bits in games. Yes. Not to have save slots.
00:14:30
Speaker
what you're saying, Alistair, it does force you to play the game a specific type of way and like let go of that sort of completionist thing. Yes, absolutely. Which is something we were actually talking about this last episode, this idea of like, rather than having the perfect game, we should
00:14:49
Speaker
learn in these scenarios, and these are two games where this is especially true, letting yourself experience a story as it unfolds for you, rather than being like, okay, let me reload and see what would have happened if I'd gone left. Okay, let me reload and see what happened if I went right. Just live with your choices. The problem, I think, is those games are both so long that if you wanna see what happens if you have lunch with the other guy,
00:15:17
Speaker
You gotta play, you gotta do 20 hours of this. There's a real tension, I think.
00:15:23
Speaker
that exists because what is most interesting to happen in a story is often not what a player would want to do. Because as players, we want to do things right the whole time. And when you watch, if you sit down and watch a film noir, you don't want the protagonist to always make the right sensible choice. You want the protagonist to make loads of really bad choices because that will be interesting for a film noir. And it's annoying in games to get railroaded into making a bad choice or to be given a fake choice that leads to somewhere interesting.
00:15:53
Speaker
I think Pentamet has found a sort of good and disco leasing, they've found a good balance where when bad things happen, you sort of go, yeah, I deserve that. Or yeah, that was inevitable. But it's a really hard balance to strike, I think.
00:16:07
Speaker
You make a really good point. That's that sort of problem you see in fan fiction, right, all the time, is people want to see their favorite characters do a bunch of cool stuff, but there's nothing interesting about a story where somebody just succeeds and succeeds and succeeds. Yes. Well, you've got the first series of the next generation of Star Trek. I think that's what they'll call it, the next generation of Star Trek.
00:16:30
Speaker
That's pretty much what everyone says. Where they're essentially like a sort of a Christian youth group in space. Everyone's pretty much trying their best and is mostly 90% perfect most of the time. And, you know, they get a fair amount of drama out of that, but a little bit of a little bit more complexity is, you know, creates richer stories. It reminds me also of, yeah.
00:16:56
Speaker
I'm also reminded of, uh, I'm just turning my head to look at Sherlock Holmes' consulting detective, which is a tabletop game, but also a dots game. Terrific. Um, and it has a similar tension with, to these games in as much as you want to, as Sherlock, you're not Sherlock Holmes, but you want to, as someone following the footsteps of Sherlock Holmes, eliminate the impossible and be left with, uh, the correct
Classic Adventure Game Mechanics and Evolution
00:17:22
Speaker
answer. But the game.
00:17:25
Speaker
disincentivizes doing that because every wrong move you make, every lead you follow that doesn't go anywhere good, you get penalized for. So it's a terrific game, very well written, but the mechanic is at odds with what part of what I think is the fun of being a detective, which is sort of exhaustively and doggedly tracking down leads and getting all the information together and doing that in a sort of a slow, meticulous way. Alistair, have you played the Dagger of Amun-Ra?
00:17:55
Speaker
Yeah, I think the first Laura Bow game is miraculous by comparison with the Sierra games, because broadly speaking, I think they're not very good. Just going to pause there for the listener to gasp and shout and spit and throw things at the wall. Sorry, they're not good. Gabriel Knight's great Space Quest, quite funny. King's Quest, well, you know, they were several games.
00:18:22
Speaker
Um, no, they definitely, they were say what you will. They are games. They do exist. I feel like I'm being attacked. I feel very attacked right now. I quite liked the perils of Ros Angela, uh, or whatever she's called.
00:18:38
Speaker
Rosella? I don't know. Rosangela's... I don't think Rosangela's the name at all. Rosangela, not the city in California. Okay, well, I was going to ask because in Dagger of Amun-Ra there is a mechanic where all you're doing is eavesdropping. And at this point it is a talky game.
00:18:58
Speaker
And a lot of people found that exhausting. Just like, keep in mind, you are playing a detective character. You might be a reporter, but you're kind of murder. She wrote it up. You are the detective of this game. And eavesdropping is an important thing. And it'll go on forever. You can interrogate every single character. And there's a whole chapter dedicated to it. And I kind of like it. Like, I think that's great for like mystery games. I want to exhaust those.
00:19:27
Speaker
I do as well. I think I was afraid of getting into an unwinnable situation with Amon Raar. For some reason it ticked me off and I stopped playing it pretty early on. Yeah, you definitely can get there with those Sierra games.
00:19:46
Speaker
The consulting detective games do have a fun way of getting to like, again, there's something we talked about last episode, this aha moment that I think all the venture games are striving for, which is that the game ends in a multiple choice with the judge and you have to have, you have to actually have deduced what was going on. Um, but yeah, you're right. There is that score where if you have followed too many leads and
00:20:15
Speaker
seen too many interviews, at the end it'll call you a bad detective or something. What? Wow. Which is how the tabletop game works. I feel like perhaps, if you did a video game version of it now, perhaps something like traveling distance, which is something the game doesn't care about, would be a better mechanic. Because you have to travel all across London and interview people, so perhaps a fun way of doing that that doesn't feel like you're being penalized for investigating would be
00:20:45
Speaker
Like when you're traveling across London in real life, how do I efficiently go between these spots without loads of backtracking? That might be a little more fun way of gamifying it. London's just like a little town though, right? It's like, it's we. It's like, have you seen the start of Lord of the Rings? It's all like circular doors and stuff. Roses, what have you been playing?
00:21:11
Speaker
So upon your recommendation, Matt, I started a short hike.
00:21:17
Speaker
Oh, yes. That's good for recuperating. Yes, it is. Yes, it is. I haven't finished it yet because I think I get into my head with doing all of the things. I've just been trained that way since I grew up on Sierra Games. I have to exhaust every single option. I can't miss a thing. Even though this is a modern game, you don't have to talk to every character. As far as I know, you don't have to.
Modern Game Humor Styles and Influences
00:21:45
Speaker
I like it and I like that I'm playing a little bird and I like I like all of it. I like the graphics I like this the little I guess their adventure game puzzles. They seem smaller to me They seem right simpler. I guess it's more of a it's more of a feeling I think a short hike is you know what I mean? It's a good game. It's got puzzles It's got like a mechanic like we talked about last episode where you're collecting things to give you special abilities So can run faster climb better
00:22:15
Speaker
But I think, I would describe it more as like, it's a game meant to be felt and like vibed with. The side quests, they feel more like little RPG, maybe sort of Zelda kind of level of side stories. You know, puzzle-wise, they seem quite small, but it is more about perhaps the sort of a hub world of Psychonauts kind of thing. That's what it reminds me of.
00:22:41
Speaker
That's a very good analogy. Yeah, and I think, Rose, when you're...
00:22:46
Speaker
You don't have to complete all the side quests, but they're all so pleasant in a short hike that I don't think you're ever wasting your time trying to be a completionist in that game. Like there's nothing where you're just grinding and grind, except for maybe the game with the stick and the ball, but there's very little in that game where you're just like grinding and feeling like, fine, I checked off a list. Everything in that game to me felt fun and adorable and hilarious.
00:23:14
Speaker
I do want to mention one thing about, and we're going to talk about that since we have Alistair on with us, the comedy of the game. There's something very interesting happening in comedic games these days. I kind of refer to it as the Gen Z slash millennial humor, where it's very terse dialogue. Sometimes even in the dialogue, you'll you'll see a character say LOL or OMG. Oh, my God. And it's this very terse, very short, quipped humor.
00:23:44
Speaker
And I see it happening everywhere now since I booted up a short hike. And I kind of wonder about that. I wonder if that's getting exhausted. There's a bit of that in Frog Detective as well. Yes. And also the game with the whole. The game where you put stuff in the whole. I'm not describing this correctly. Donut County. Yes, thank you. It has that same kind of like
00:24:08
Speaker
humor, where I don't know how, do you guys know how to describe, like what I'm describing? I think the internet might call it lol random, which is a bit of a bit of a negative name for it. I enjoy a little bit of random. And indeed, I enjoy laughing out loud as well. But I think lol random might be the way the internet describes that, like you say, Gen Z-ish humor.
00:24:34
Speaker
or maybe younger millennial humor, I don't know. That humor is actually, I think, all overnight in the woods also, but used in a way that you feel like this is how those characters would just talk.
00:24:50
Speaker
I think what's happening is I because I grew up my funny games growing up were Curse of Monkey Island and Callahan's Crosstime Saloon. And that to me even curse with being as silly as it is. It's just a more
00:25:08
Speaker
thawed out type of humor, I guess? Maybe that's exhausting to people. Maybe that's why people like, you know, LML random kind of short, these little short quips versus these insane dialogue trees. Like my favorite game is Gran Fandango because I think it has some of the funniest dialogue trees. And such a great voice cast as well. Absolutely.
00:25:31
Speaker
I mean, you are just starting to list games Tim Schafer wrote or a lot of the dialogue for. He does stand out in terms of properly funny game writers, I think. Psychonauts is also one of the really funny games. I just recently replayed Psychonauts 2. Back to back with Psychonauts 1.
00:25:54
Speaker
or Psychonauts, as they called it in those days, which made it even more enjoyable than it had been first time round. I think perhaps voiced and unvoiced is perhaps part of it, because if you're writing, I don't know, if you're writing Coz of Monkey Island, which I don't know if you worked on. He did not. He did. Yeah, I don't think so.
00:26:12
Speaker
I don't think so either. No, I say it. But if you're writing for voice actors, I feel like at that time in the late 90s, early 2000s, if you're writing something funny, you're sort of like writing a radio script and it feels like a slightly more rounded, more narrative and more character driven kind of humor.
00:26:29
Speaker
Whereas if you're writing something to appear in a box that appears with a noise, it's different, I think. And we're used to playing Japanese games with slightly weird translation in that context. And I feel like the weirdness of that, Undertale and Night in the Woods have sort of taken that and made that part of the aesthetic of the humour, which is that it's a little bit weird.
00:26:55
Speaker
But also, you're not giving a line for a voice actor to try and make funny. It's all happening in the player's heads. That's true. That is true. And I think as we evolve in adventure games, we might be a little tired of exhaustive reading and narrative and dialogue trees.
00:27:16
Speaker
I will go through every single dialogue tree in Grim, because that is my favorite game, but even I acknowledge that this is a lot of talking that's happening right now. ALICE It's a lot. And I don't know if they knew we were clicking on every single one at the time, but they were aware that they were doing that to us.
00:27:34
Speaker
I think Dave Gilbert of White Jedi Games said that he does five to seven lines before the player gets to do something. Interesting. I thought that sounds good. I squirreled that away. And when I've written things, I've tried to think, yeah, if there's more than seven lines of dialogue, you'd better be revealing a key piece of information.
Cultural Influences and Translation Issues in Games
00:27:55
Speaker
if you're not even even sometimes returning to the player for a for a sort of a superficial choice like how to react in a way that's not actually going to redirect the conversation returning to the player to let them have some input on the scene yeah you know i you know obviously i i really like the longest journey and dreamfall and ragnar taunquist's games um but they do have some talking in them
00:28:20
Speaker
But did you like Discworld, the most exhaustive narrative game ever made?
00:28:26
Speaker
I think Discworld 2 is great. Discworld 2 is underrated, terrific, fantastic artwork, really good puzzles. I think the reputation that the games of the late 90s have for having really impossible lol random puzzles is a little unfair because the bad puzzle design is not shared equally across all games or even all games in a series. Discworld 1, impossible puzzles. Discworld 2, really good. Logical puzzles, they're good.
00:28:54
Speaker
I, but I love Discworld one just for the vibe, even though yes, I clicked, I clicked through the majority of that dialogue. It just goes on and on. And there is a little bit of like.
00:29:07
Speaker
I guess British dry humor that I didn't grow up on it, so I'm not completely in it. And I just want these characters to shut up. I'm sorry, it's no offense to your people, Alistair. I just need these characters to shut up. No, if I ever hear Eric Idle say the sentence, that doesn't work, I will not be held responsible for my actions.
00:29:27
Speaker
So I've been playing recently, I started The Adventures of the Black Hawk, right? It's this recent release. It is a very early LucasArts throwback, right? Oh, is it a Zoro kind of story? I think I might have seen screenshots.
00:29:48
Speaker
Yeah, it's a Croquetta Asasina Studios. I'm probably mispronouncing that. It's a Spanish developer and they are so devoted, like the artwork is beautiful. You can just look it up and you're gonna wanna play it because of how beautiful and retro, like how great the retro pixel art looks. Looks like a game from LucasArts in 1991.
00:30:18
Speaker
But their like devotion to making it as much like Monkey Island or Indiana Jones as possible is really frustrating because I think they have, again, great artwork. They have a good premise. But that's one thing. The dialogue goes on and on and on and they just aren't as clever as the LucasArts writers.
00:30:42
Speaker
I will also say they have this incredibly frustrating thing. I'm not very far in the game because this very stupid thing keeps disincentivizing me to even open it. And it is they want to revive the magic of
00:31:01
Speaker
manual-based copyright schemes. Oh, wow. So you have to open the game. And then it tells you to input a word from a page of the manual. Now, the manual is a PDF that sits in the Steam folder on your hard drive. So you have to go back, so you have to Alt-Tab out, go back to Steam, go to Search
00:31:29
Speaker
files or whatever, whatever that button is that takes you to the directory, open the PDF of the manual, scroll to the right page, then Alt-Tab back and enter the thing. And if you enter the wrong word, you have like a minute long cutscene to sit through before the game just closes. What? No! And that's not stopping any piracy at all. That is pure cruelty. Can we get a cracked version? You could easily copy a PDF. They're just doing that for fun.
00:31:59
Speaker
It is not your fun for their fun. When you look at the Steam reviews and all the discussions, that's all anyone's talking about. And the developers are just in the comments being like, no, it's good. I know what I respect that. I think gamers have had it too easy for too long, too entitled. Most of them are bad people. They need to learn to be put in their place by developers. I respect that. They have my support.
00:32:27
Speaker
So as Rose has alluded to, we want to talk about, in this episode, about comedy in adventure games, which we've already kind of started. But first we want to talk to Alistair about his love of adventure games and his career. So why don't we throw up some interstitial music, Rose? Oh, some swanky Paksimino? This is my favorite part of the day. That's my favorite game. Stop. Swanky Paksimino is my favorite Apogee game from the 90s.
00:32:57
Speaker
Okay.
00:33:24
Speaker
Hey everyone! Pushing up roses here. We are back with special boy Matt Aucamp and special guest star, Alistair Beckett King. How was your guys' break? Special guest boy. Hi. Special guest boy, yeah. Now I have competition for special boy and I'm feeling feisty. Furious. Who's the better jumper though? That's good. There's another boy in town. I can't jump. I've never left the ground. Wow. I'm like Geralt of Rivia. First video game character I could think of who can't jump.
00:33:54
Speaker
If I see a fence, that's it for me. That's it. You can't do it. I'm actually getting a little worried that I haven't come down yet.
Nostalgia vs. Modern Game Design
00:34:02
Speaker
It's weird, isn't it? It is weird. Is it like a Mary Poppins deal where we're making you laugh too much and now you're just never going to come down?
00:34:11
Speaker
Yeah, I don't know. Try being not funny. Okay. Okay. So for dinner, I planned on having a nice chicken with some like green beans. No, this is so stupid. He's getting a halaster. It's over. He's never coming down. Aleister. Matt. What was your first adventure game that you ever played?
00:34:36
Speaker
Great question. It was a little known, very niche adventure game called The Secret of Monkey Island. My friends had it on their Amiga and I didn't even play it from the start. They were halfway through. I went round to their house and joined them in playing The Secret of Monkey Island. So yeah, that would have been it. I went right in on the best one and it's been downhill ever since.
00:35:01
Speaker
That's not true. I think the later monkey, I'll get, I think curse is very good and monkey. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. I also started with curse of monkey. Did my voice just change? I don't think so. Completely might be altitude. So they just happened to my earbuds and now suddenly I sound like, uh, I sound like I'm shouting in my own ear, I guess.
00:35:28
Speaker
Are you, is it okay? Are you going to be fine? You sound normal to us. You always sound like this to us, but now you're hearing it. Oh God. Oh man. I'm so sorry. Life is a lie. No, I, I, I also started with secret of monkey Island and how, so you played it with friends. Did you find yourself like getting through it or was it just a weird world that you threw yourself against over and over?
00:35:57
Speaker
No, absolutely. I don't think I completed an adventure game until this century. I don't think I beat a game, as they say, in the 90s. Certainly not until we got the internet and I was able to search for walkthroughs. I don't think I ever successfully... No, I was stuck on the goat in Broken Sword until I think I asked somebody to Alta Vista it for me. So I love adventure games, but I was quite bad at them in those days.
00:36:25
Speaker
So I actually didn't pick up a LucasArts game until at least not a game like on my own that I was going to play because I also played Secret of Monkey Island with friends like they happen to have it. The first LucasArts game I played was Curse of Monkey Island because I found it out of babbages.
00:36:44
Speaker
And I found it because I was buying the quest for glory like collection, so I couldn't still get away from serious stuff. And then later I found Grim Bendango and that was like my that's my jam. That's my whole I love that game so much. Well, Alistair, how did they how how did you end up still interested in the genre all this time later? Like, did you have the very common break and return or did you just stick with it?
00:37:13
Speaker
I feel like I need to defend myself slightly, not against you, but against potential listeners. So I've worked on a few point and click games. I made a pirate themed humorous adventure game, and that's something that nobody should do. It's a terrible idea.
00:37:29
Speaker
Um, so when I'm, when I'm spouting off about what I think makes a good or a bad game, you can quite reasonably look at what my decisions game wise and go, you seem like someone who doesn't know anything about what is a good idea game wise. And that would be fair. Uh, I also wrote, um, with, uh, Marcus Bama of backwards entertainment, um, unforeseen incidents, which is a, um, a, uh,
00:37:54
Speaker
a mystery point to click game. And because I didn't, because that wasn't my story, I feel like I can enjoy that one and feel more proud of it in a weird way, because it wasn't my game. I just tried to write good jokes for it. I want to say two things. Sorry. I know there's a question that you're
00:38:10
Speaker
working up to answering, but two things. First of all, the two games that you developed, the Nelly Kootalot games are very, very good. And if listeners... Thank you. The other thing I should say is they are quite good. That's the weird thing. Yeah. The problem is that they're better than you would expect, but that's because you would expect them to be quite bad.
00:38:34
Speaker
Why do you think people expect them to be bad? Well, I think there's a sort of divide. There's a small group of adventure game fans who really want things to be like how they used to be. And those people, obviously I hate and despise and look down upon them, but I'm really grateful for them buying my games. Thanks, fellas. Please keep buying them. But they are a smaller group.
00:39:04
Speaker
I think I forgot what I was saying, because I insult adventure game fans. You guys want a terrible decision that way financially? We insult adventure game fans all the time, even with just our presence. But the other thing I want to say, just because I feel like I want it
00:39:25
Speaker
on the record in case he listens to it, Unforeseen Incidents is the only point and click adventure game that my son played before I did. He is, it is difficult to get him into adventure games because, you know, he is young and full of life, but... He's like staring at the same picture as a man stands in the same position, looking at a variety of objects. He did it. They're in his house, as if he's never seen them before.
00:39:55
Speaker
Just describing himself what he sees in his own house. Just describing his own possessions.
00:40:01
Speaker
What's not to like about that? That's a normal game experience. He weirdly, he just picked it out of all the games that I had on Steam. And I think I just, this was sometime, I think early last year, maybe two years ago. So he would have been 16 or 17. And I think it just came downstairs and he was just playing unforeseen incidents. I was like, oh, I haven't gotten around to that one yet. And it was very proud father moment. Oh dear. Oh, that's lovely. That's sweet. Yeah.
00:40:31
Speaker
I think there's a there's another small lesson in that because I've read play, you know, because I that that feels like it's a game that I worked on, but it feels like it belongs to Marcus, I can read reviews of it without feeling as sensitive. And, and one thing I noticed is that if you were
00:40:47
Speaker
If you like the protagonist, and if you find him funny, which I hope you do, because I wrote a lot of the funny things he says, or the supposedly funny things he says, then you probably like the game. Even if you don't like everything about the game, you might be, I didn't like this puzzle, or I wasn't happy about the ending. But overall, people who like the protagonist and find him funny and warm and charming enjoy the game. And people who don't like the protagonist, which is a much smaller group, I'm pleased to say,
00:41:14
Speaker
don't like the game. And I think that sort of identification with the protagonist in an adventure game, especially a funny protagonist who's maybe a bit sarcastic, we worked really hard on that game to just not make him a... I don't know if I can swear on your podcast. You can. Absolutely you can. To not make him a dickhead, if that's acceptable to say.
00:41:36
Speaker
I think that's really interesting about comedic adventure games because I feel I'm trying to think of Curse of Monkey Island and Grim. And the first thing I think about when I think about those games are like, oh, those are so funny. I play those games to feel good and to laugh.
00:41:52
Speaker
at the characters and enjoy the time and the journey spent. And I think I very much think less about what the puzzles are like or what I'm doing or puzzles that even stood out to me. I would even argue that Grim had some clunkers of puzzles. Yes it did. I feel like I could live without any kind of beaver related activity in the woods. I feel like I don't need that.
00:42:15
Speaker
Did they die though? Did we kill them? What are the beavers? Who are the beavers? Why are the beavers in this game? I am against the beavers. Guys, I have legitimately blocked out the beaver section of Grim Fandango from my memory. I think the designers did that and then they somehow just still made it.
00:42:35
Speaker
Just like blacked out or something during that. And they're like, there's a whole beaver section for... Oh yeah, like in the classic film noir movie where there's a weird beaver section. And they're on fire, guys. They're on fire. On fire. Like in Build My Gallows High, where Robert McChee spends ages aiming something at a beaver.
00:42:56
Speaker
It's interesting because I don't think of, so Unforeseen Incidents is a very funny game and maybe we should describe it for the- It's not a comedy game, I would say. Yeah, it's not a comedy game, but it is funny. No, it's a funny game. Yeah. I hope it's a funny game.
00:43:11
Speaker
That was one of the first things I said. The game already existed before I started working on it. They were developing it. Marcus and the team are German. They were writing it in German and English. So we wrote it together in German and English. So it was neither written in German nor written in English.
Ethical Considerations in Comedy and Games
00:43:30
Speaker
It was written in both languages, sort of simultaneously, and with a lot of back and forth between. He speaks very good English, I speak no German, so he did a lot more of work on that than I did.
00:43:44
Speaker
But it was pitched to me as like it's a comedy mystery game. And because of my little alarm bell started to ring, because I think if you say, you know, if you say, do you want to play a comedy adventure game? I think the correct answer is no, generally speaking. You want to know if it's going to be your sense of humor. Whereas horror, I feel like is maybe less
00:44:09
Speaker
less a matter of taste, you know? But comedy, it really better be funny. I can enjoy a horror game that isn't scary, but I struggle to enjoy a comedy game that I don't find funny.
00:44:18
Speaker
Because then it just becomes obnoxious then because their characters are, it's kind of like how you guys both described Simon the Sorcerer. And I clocked out. I didn't like that game immediately. It does have some good gags, weirdly, but I think he's unlikable, Simon. Yeah. This is an interesting thing about the difference between not liking the jokes and not liking the protagonist, because I feel like this is something that
00:44:40
Speaker
This is an interesting debate that comes up with the Deponia games a lot, which is when you say you don't like the Deponia games because the humor is offensive and racist and sexist. People say, oh, well, you're not supposed to like Rufus. He's supposed to be an unlikable character. And it's like, well,
00:44:57
Speaker
Yeah, I got that. I got that part. Don't believe you. What's the wrong Swanson gift? I don't believe you. It's like, I don't. Yeah. I don't like Rufus as a protagonist, but also the game is making jokes that I find sexist and racist and distasteful and offensive. Well, I haven't played them, but that won't stop me having an opinion about them, which is very good.
00:45:26
Speaker
I don't want to prejudge. There's clearly some terrific artwork in them. And then there may be some good puzzle design, but if there is, I haven't heard about it. And there definitely are some jokes that I think are unfunny and really bad in a moral way, as well as being unfunny.
00:45:48
Speaker
But I also think we're being a bit dishonest. It's a similar thing with stand-up comedy, where you sort of go, you know, you're not supposed to admire comedians. They're supposed to be bad guys doing terrible things to subordinate women who work on the show. I don't know if that is what they're meant to be, but it is what they are.
00:46:05
Speaker
And I think the claim that when you're enjoying a stand-up comedian, you're not actually like them. You're just appraising the jokes as they arrive, like a jeweler, and going, yes, funny, I will laugh now. I don't think you are. I think you admire the comedian. If we're being honest, when a comedian is out there saying the unsayables, saying something terribly offensive, we enjoy that. I'm not saying that's always a bad thing. It's a good thing. Comedy is transgressive in lots of ways, and that can be liberating.
00:46:33
Speaker
But we should be honest about the fact that we are, you admire a comedian when you were a fan of that comedian and you admire the character they embody on stage. And when you play an adventure game and you go around being a dick to people, the game is inviting you to enjoy that. And if you don't enjoy that, then it's not fun. I think like playing Return to Monkey Island, right? They really address that in a heavy way. You know,
00:47:00
Speaker
There's another, a weird parallel that I see to Return to Monkey Island that I'm gonna bring up is Uncharted 4. I know that's an action-adventure game. I brought it up weirdly on a lot of episodes, but- Are you obsessed with this game, Matt? I'm such an Uncharted fan. You know, both games deal with this idea of the protagonist is not quite who he thinks he is, and
00:47:25
Speaker
this complex sort of storytelling where it's like, this person is not a good person. You have to make them do bad things and it hurts people. And I think that's a really hard needle to thread. If your game is about that and you're making interesting points about it, that's one thing. But yeah, if you're just supposed to be laughing at all the hijinks this person is up to,
00:47:53
Speaker
The butt of the joke is the people who you're hurting, and if those are specifically a certain demographic, and what you're hurting about them is treating their demographic like it's lesser than you, then that's not making the same point.
00:48:13
Speaker
I agree for the record. I'm just saying that in case that becomes a clip. I agree that racism was bad at this point. I think perhaps an instructive comparison would be a quite different
00:48:31
Speaker
couple of games, Kill Monday's games, Fran Bow and Little Misfortune, which are great. I loved Fran Bow. I loved that game. I was so stoked when that came out. I played it multiple times. Love that game.
00:48:46
Speaker
I was really very, very impressed and blown away by both of those games, which are both, I think, blackly comical games. They're very funny. But they're also, I don't know if you'd call them horror games, but they have really heavy content warning requiring themes of
00:49:06
Speaker
abuse and self-harm and drugs, institutionalization and mental health and, you know, child abuse and really heavy stuff. I would categorize it as horror, not because of the heavy themes, but because of the way it is conceptualized, the way that it is visualized. It is very horrifying. Yes. And you get that feeling of like, there are some people who don't
00:49:31
Speaker
categorize Kubrick shining as horror, and I very much disagree with that. I think horror is a vibe and a visual as much as it is just simply being frightened at something. You don't have to be frightened at it. I'm expanding categories as much as possible without them losing meaning. I can't be done with getting into arguments about whether something is technically an adventure game. There's a lot of those people out there, though. It's not an adventure game. No, it is.
00:49:58
Speaker
And I think Little Misfortune is, even though it's very linear and doesn't really have any puzzles. But I've just re-watched the entirety of Twin Peaks, including the missing pieces deleted scenes from Fire Walk With Me. And I think there's a comparison between the two of them, because I saw someone who didn't really like
00:50:25
Speaker
little misfortune, because they found the humour, you know, the silly, sometimes puerile humour, counterposed with, is that the word? Juxtapose? Juxtapose, butting up against, in one way or another, really heavy stuff, and that made them feel uncomfortable.
00:50:44
Speaker
Which is a legitimate opinion, but what I would say is, can he? Yeah. The game did that on purpose. That sense of discomfort you were experiencing is the intended effect that the game is having on you. Sometimes you're laughing and sometimes you're horrified and sometimes you're in an uncomfortable hinterland.
00:51:00
Speaker
drifting between the two and you're not sure how seriously you're supposed to take things. And I think Twin Peaks has a similar thing because it's got very absurd humor at times. It's very, very silly in places. And it's also got extreme violence and really dark stuff. And what I also think they have in common is the themes of sort of really grim, malevolent evil
00:51:24
Speaker
you know, and a dark world where people do terrible things to each other and are really grimy. But both the Kill Monday games and Twin Peaks, they also believe in, quite open-heartedly, they believe in goodness and kindness and the power of, you know, the transcendent and liberating power of love.
00:51:48
Speaker
in a really naive and honest way. And it's what makes them so lovable, I think. Is it just me, or did we go from talking about racism and sexism in video games to heavy themes? Matt, this is your fault. We may dip into the heavy theme section of the podcast. Hard news. Yeah, we went from trying to interview Alistair to talking about how video games are full of
00:52:16
Speaker
heavy psychological torture. Your stand-up comedy has no, it doesn't venture into these sorts of themes at all, but is ethics and morality something you think about when you're crafting jokes? Like you have to put, you have to make sure your ethics, your morality is coming through. In a way, a joke is a little bit like a machine or a puzzle or a trap.
00:52:42
Speaker
They have a mechanical shape to them. They're not easy to make, at least not for me. But one-liners, wordplay, puns, jokes, really funny collisions between ideas. There's a slightly mechanical element to it sometimes where you know that if you put two things together, you're going to get a reaction.
00:53:07
Speaker
And so that means that probably everyone has thought of a joke that would be inappropriate in one situation or another. And sometimes it being inappropriate is what makes it funny. We edit those out of the podcast. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Just like, oh, I don't know. That one's dodgy. If you can't think of jokes, you're capable of writing a joke. You're capable of writing an offensive joke. Sometimes an offensive joke that you don't, you know, something that doesn't reflect your values will come into your mind.
00:53:33
Speaker
And if you don't say it, then that's self-censorship and you should go to prison for being against free speech. It's not my opinion. Twist.
00:53:49
Speaker
And that's fine. I think maybe we get a little bit too concerned about what people think inside their heads. I think we should be more concerned with people's actions, although speech is a type of action. So it's really, really hard to think of funny things. And that's the primary concern, I think, of most comedians. I think we're being a little bit cheeky as stand-up comedians when we get to
00:54:15
Speaker
too involved in the free speech culture war side of things, because on the one hand, we want to say, hey, it's just jokes. I'm just having a laugh. It's all jokes. I don't mean anything. You know, you know, don't take offense. It was just a joke. And then on the other hand, we want to say this is free speech. I'm pushing the boundaries. The entirety of liberal Western democracy sits on my shoulders. I'm like a hero. I'm basically Socrates.
00:54:39
Speaker
It's got to be one or the other. It can't be, I am the only person speaking truth to power, the last bugler on the tower. And also, it's just a joke. I don't really mean any of it. You can't take offense. Alistair, the jesters are like, they're like the ones who used to be able to speak truth to the king.
00:55:01
Speaker
Only the fool told Lear that he was mad. But if we remember, he does die. The character did die about halfway through. So maybe there's a lesson in that. Just keep a lid on it. Yeah. So I want to revisit a question that I don't think we ever got to the end of, because we got so wildly off track.
Community Influence on Game Design
00:55:28
Speaker
How did you keep two adventure games throughout your life? How did you go from playing Monkey Island on an Amiga as a kid with your friends to still involved in the medium today? I loved it. I was one of the people who got very upset when 3D graphics came in and ruined my life. For a while, between the year 2000 and 2008, you couldn't make a good-looking 3D adventure game. No.
00:55:56
Speaker
adventure games were too subtle, too character-driven, too dialogue-driven. And every attempt to make an adventure game was some variety of a disaster. Not everyone, but many of them were horrible. And I felt like games had moved away from what I wanted. I didn't realize that I could have been playing Morrowind, which I
00:56:19
Speaker
played many years later and realized that, oh, all the things I like about adventure games are in this game. And does all of the storytelling and world building brilliantly. And it's funny as well in places. But I didn't know that because I was siloed in adventure games for so long. So I played a lot of
00:56:35
Speaker
a lot of bad, bad games. And I started making bad games and I made games on Adventure Game Studio and ran into people like Francisco and Dave on the Adventure Game Studio forum in the early part of the 21st century, which it was so long ago now. How long ago was it?
00:56:59
Speaker
Oh, we were so young. It was so long ago that it had a text parser.
00:57:09
Speaker
Some of them did have a text passer, actually. I actually did. Yeah. Trilby's Notes. Trilby's Notes is what I was thinking of, yeah. I love Trilby's Notes. Good one. One of the good games in that series, Trilby's Notes. So you were one of the big blue cup forum people. Yeah, I was one of the true believers. I never lost faith. I knew Adventure Games would come back, and they will one day. I was being in the pill to still think that the spaceship is coming. It's going to happen.
00:57:40
Speaker
We were just wrong about it the last few times. I feel like I was not, I really had a break from it for a very long time. And I think it's mostly due to just, I wanted to play the older adventure games. That was where my interests were growing up. And it got to a point where on our computers, we just didn't have that accessibility. We could not play these games. You couldn't play them. You couldn't play them, yeah.
00:58:07
Speaker
So I really think that things like Gog and even Steam now are such a good proponent for people playing. And scum VM, which is a big part of that. Yeah, fantastic. And Adventure Game Studio. Just to give context to the listeners, there are some people who listen to this podcast who aren't deeply ensconced in the Adventure Game world. Get out. Take your headphones out. Throw your phone away. This isn't for you.
00:58:34
Speaker
AGS was this, it was basically video game engine that was very, I don't wanna say easy, but it was. It is easy. It was simple enough that, yeah. You're not wrong. It is, if you want to make an adventure game.
00:58:50
Speaker
today the easiest way to do it is to download adventure game studio and start making a game because i've tried in other things it's easier in adventure game studio it's only designed for making classic 2d point to click adventure games and it makes it much easier than any other way of doing it right you don't need to know coding at all like coding helps but you don't need to know coding at all you can just input your assets you can write your dialogue and there are very they're like
00:59:17
Speaker
visual design elements that help you do it without you having to do any of the coding. And this is in the early 2000s, where most of the adventure game community was, while adventure games were languishing, as Alistair said, in very, very bad 3D and very contrived puzzle design. The smell of despond. I have a theory. Can I share my... Yeah, absolutely.
00:59:43
Speaker
Whenever I talk to people about adventure games, I share this theory. I don't know if it's true, but there's a big, very visible switch from my point of view around the turn of the century where adventure games got substantially worse. Whereas looking back on it, what I think happened is America
01:00:00
Speaker
and Britain stopped making them, and Europe continued making them. Now, I'm not having a go at Europe, but what it means is from my point of view, I went from playing games that were written with English as their first language to playing games that were translated into English from Spanish, French, and German.
01:00:17
Speaker
and occasionally Italian. And the quality of those translations was not good. And I, as a cis-head, white, western, anglophone, arrogant, colonial mindset guy, was not prepared to accept dodgy translations, because I'd never had to.
01:00:37
Speaker
And so, you know, playing the Tunguska games, where the games don't distinguish between the concept of being closed and being locked, which are so important in the English language and in adventure games, but in German are the same word. It's just infuriating to have her refuse to go into a door because it's closed. It's like, I can see that it's closed!
01:01:00
Speaker
All of the Frogware Sherlock Home games have that. Oh, it's closed. Yeah! Open it! Open it! Look, they're based in the Ukraine. I avoid criticising them because you're having a hard time. I hate those games so much, but good luck to the guys. Look, they look beautiful. Those games have a beautiful... They've done some great work.
01:01:24
Speaker
Yeah. If you've ever been to London, the way the trains work in one of the Sherlock Holmes crimes and punishments is the most hilarious thing. If you've ever spent any time in England, the way it thinks the train stations in Britain connect and the accents that go with leads is very funny. It's very wrong.
01:01:47
Speaker
I think one of the reasons that games have reputations for wacky puzzles in the 90s is that we forget the good puzzles and we remember the bad puzzles. We remember the Gabriel Knight 3 moustache
01:02:02
Speaker
disguise puzzle, which makes no sense. And we remember the monkey wrench puzzle in Secret Monkey Island. And that one I think is particularly pernicious because they're called monkey wrenches in America. We speak English. We don't even call them monkey wrenches here. We call them Spanish. And in the rest of Europe, obviously the pun doesn't translate.
01:02:25
Speaker
And I think I, I don't know. I'm not suggesting that I can make a comment about the psyche of Spain, France, Germany, and other European countries that have developed adventure games, but I think a lot of people grew up playing that game and thought, oh, okay. So the way adventure games work is you do a completely random thing and it moves the game forwards. You use the monkey with this thing and it opens. Okay.
01:02:50
Speaker
I will grow up and in 10 years time and around 2002 start making adventure games here in Europe and the puzzles will all be like that because that's what adventure games are like because I've been playing badly translated American games in my native language. So if I'm not condemning Europe out of hand, I suspect that's why some of the worst aspects of 90s puzzle design are preserved in those early 20th century Euro games.
01:03:17
Speaker
the people that loved them enough to then grow up and make them were people who liked things that made absolutely no sense. That's such a good fear.
01:03:29
Speaker
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by a monkey wrench. Honestly, there's truth to that because as I've kind of talked about in other episodes, I grew up on nonsensical things and now I don't know what to do with a game like Myst. I'm just fucking lost. What are these logical puzzles and how do I approach them? I grew up on nonsense and that's all I know. I need that.
01:03:59
Speaker
My model for how the Sierra games work, specifically the, I'm sorry, I've forgotten the pioneering developer who created King's Quest. Sierra. I've forgotten her name. Sierra. Sorry, the woman, Roberta Williams. Oh, Roberta, Roberta Williams, yes. Yes, Roberta Williams. I think, I can't find it, but I think she has described the games as being like a puzzle box. And I think she said that, and I didn't, I'm not just putting words in her mouth.
01:04:26
Speaker
And I think that's the way those games work, where the player is invited to treat the entire game as a sort of Gestalt entity. And the question you're asking is, what does the developer want me to do with this toy? I've been given a world to play with. And so if I find something in one room, I'm going to explore the whole map, trying to find out where it's supposed to go, because everything in the game has a purpose, and that purpose was set out by the developer. And the developer is wily, and he's going to try and trick me.
01:04:56
Speaker
And I'm in an intellectual game with the developer. Whereas the much more narrative games that LucasArts were making are, I think, more sophisticated in many ways, because they're asking questions like the obstacle that the player
01:05:15
Speaker
has to get through, come out of character to some extent. You know, this character is blocking a door. Why are they blocking a door? What do they want? What character related reason could there be for them to create these obstacles? And how can that be resolved by doing something that's related to some kind of narrative or something? They're much more in that direction. And I think that is the type of game design
01:05:41
Speaker
that has now jumped to the mainstream and every open world RPG has, you know, plot beats that work like that. And the Sierra style, which, you know, has its charms, has not, has quite rightly died. Ray is gone and dead.
01:06:01
Speaker
I think a thing we forget a lot is that so much of retro adventure games was by necessity. Right. I don't think that everybody making adventure games specifically was like, I am an adventure game maker. I am just games in those days. Right. They just wanted to make games and.
01:06:21
Speaker
they wanted to make games that were reflective of the things they wanted to see. And those started being delivered in new ways as the technology grew. And so if Roberta and Ken Williams started making video games in 2000 rather than in 1980 something, right, they might not have been making point and click games at all. Yeah.
01:06:48
Speaker
Of course, I think that does make games like Colonel's bequest and Trinity
01:06:57
Speaker
The Infocomp Text Adventure, really remarkable because they prefigure a lot of indie games. The first Laura Bowe game is basically a roguelike game. You could do that game now and significantly improve on how long it takes to get to the ending because you then have to start again immediately because it's impossible to do it in one go.
01:07:20
Speaker
I just played Homebody, which is a short, kind of funny, kind of creepy survival horror in a sort of time loop, which is the, I guess, the descendant of
01:07:39
Speaker
the Colonel's Bequest in a weird way. Right. I love the Colonel's Bequest. I think it is innovative. I love the mechanic. And like we've talked about Colonel's Bequest on previous episodes because it's one of my favorites. You've had Julia Minamata on previously. Yeah, for Crimson Diamond. Yeah. And we gushed about, you know, we gushed about it a little bit. And it's one of those games where you can beat it even if you beat it poorly. Like even if you've done nothing at all, you still get an ending and that's
01:08:09
Speaker
I kind of dug it. It really, really stands out. It has aged remarkably well. Yeah. Really love that game. I did want to ask you guys about what do you think are some of your favorite, like the funniest games you've played? Because I do want to talk about like what makes
01:08:30
Speaker
certain video games funny like where where does the comedy that is so almost unique to the adventure game genre like
01:08:40
Speaker
Well, I know my answer immediately. And it's Grim Fandango. And the thing with Grim is it's not always a funny game. It is a noir. It has its own themes, and it's a murder mystery. But I would say that those are the funniest dialogue trees I've ever done. There is a scene where Manny is talking to Carla, the security guard,
01:09:08
Speaker
But they're not really talking she's talking and you get to go in your dialogue tree and just kind of respond with these just a very mundane very blind Bland responses. I just think it's so funny. It is just so funny and In second place is curse of Monkey Island. I think I brush straight, but it's very very funny It's that wholesome humor. I really go for
01:09:35
Speaker
very silly, very wholesome humor, almost kind of Wayne's worldy and Wayne's world, they have their more adult jokes. But when you get down to it, it's kind of wholesome. It's kind of goofy and silly. And that's kind of what I go for. So that to me, I don't know if those either of those are considered comedy games, I would consider curse a comedy game, because I think it's a comedy parody. I think that is a comedy game. I think grim is just funny. I think it just has funny dialogue trees.
01:10:02
Speaker
I think one of the things you said there is is a crucial thing, which is that it is hard to write a joke for every line of dialogue, and it's hard to write a joke for every item you might encounter in an adventure game. And those games don't try to do that. They're not always trying to be funny. Sometimes they're trying to create atmosphere or build character or tell you story or, you know, give the player information they might need. But when there's an opportunity for a joke, they take it. And I think that's that's more enjoyable, I think, than games which are
01:10:32
Speaker
trying ever so hard. And maybe, maybe I've been the person responsible for this on some games, you know, but games where there's a, you know, there are 19 puns per inventory interaction. Right. It can be exhausting for the game constantly to be looking out at you and breaking the fourth wall to say that was a gag. Right.
01:10:51
Speaker
And you have to have serious moments for there to be a funny moment. Otherwise, it is exhausting. It's just like I can't laugh at this 15th plot and I just can't do it. Don't make me laugh at this. Please.
01:11:10
Speaker
Lower the gun. No, I think I find that with the data like games, right? I find that it they are games where they really, really want me to be laughing. And they're just sort of hammering jokes into every single line. And maybe it's a translation thing. But these they're jokes that largely don't land for me. However, I'll say that something like the Joe Richardson games. Yes, I was going to say
01:11:40
Speaker
Joe's games in terms of good examples of properly funny games. Right. He crams jokes into every, every inch and every, every inch of the screen, every line of dialogue, every moment. And somehow, oddly, they are all funny. Like this guy,
01:12:02
Speaker
That's probably not true. There's probably a couple of clunkers in there. But it's just, I was going to say he cannot write a bad joke, but it's close to true. Close enough to true that he should be complimented by this rather than insulted. I'm going to shut up. Yeah, it must be so easy for Joe, considering he can't write a bad joke. He's one of the laziest developers I can think of. Write a bad joke. Only writing good jokes. Write a bad joke, Joe.
01:12:27
Speaker
I suppose it does come down to taste, doesn't it? Because the reason I, you know, I don't find his jokes tiresome is that I think they're funny. And the reason I find them tiresome in other games is that I don't. And I'm sure some people would not find my jokes funny and have exactly the same opinion. I think those are great examples. The last few things and, um, uh, Oh, four last things and, uh, procession to Calvary. They're also religious. I couldn't remember the names.
01:12:55
Speaker
Portal, I think, is a very funny game. Really, really Portal and Portal 2 are very, very funny. Absolutely. I've already mentioned earlier, if it hasn't been edited out, Psychonauts 1 and 2, both very, very funny games, I think, while also... They're Tim Schafer games, man. He has a way of doing dialogue that just cracks me up. And that's not even to say... I mean, we're using the terms like jokes and saying, yeah, we're putting jokes.
01:13:20
Speaker
I would say obviously these games are not just joke after joke, they're just funny. You know, they're just even Curse of Monkey Island. The dialogue, even though it's not jokes, it's just funny. Guybrush sounds funny, you know? The funny is part of the first Psychonauts for me playing it for the first time.
01:13:39
Speaker
Uh, there's a couple of bits that you can't quote them. They're not jokes out of context, but you know, the, um, being interrogated in the milkman level, um, after you have punched the, the cookie scout girl, the guys who, who've been interrogating you all the way through, add into their interrogation. Why did you punch that girl? Which is out of context, not very funny, but when you're playing it for the first time, the fact that the game has responded to the bad thing that you've done that you shouldn't have done that you had no reason to do. The game has made a note of that.
01:14:08
Speaker
And it's now adding that to the reasons you're suspicious is very funny. And and when you're in lungfish opolis, when you're a giant Godzilla like creature smashing up the city, the the box from people in the city, you occasionally hear them shouting, Oh, no, he's going for the orphanage, whichever way you're going. I say he's going for the orphanage, which is funny. And as you smash it, they say, I think that was the puppy orphanage.
01:14:34
Speaker
And the fact that you can't avoid doing these bad things, but the game is telling you off for them is, is very funny. Yeah. I think, I think games like Matt was saying, like the, how do you pronounce it? Daedalic Daedalic is how I pronounce it, but I may say Daedalic Daedalic. Oh man, I'm out. That's ridiculous. Oh no.
01:14:53
Speaker
I think it's like, I think it's like data lists. This is why they went out of business. But like, when they, when they try to cram jokes, I think, I think you're getting, I think writers get lost in their head.
01:15:11
Speaker
with trying to execute a joke versus having a humorous piece of dialogue that is simply just funny. I think Curse does that a lot. There's a section in Curse where I'm trying to join a pirate's barbershop quartet
01:15:29
Speaker
And he tries to do this by singing a bunch of songs. And at the end, I always laugh at it. The end, the pirate's like, I think I'm having a stroke because it was, your singing was so bad. And that's not funny on its own, but the way it's delivered and the silliness of it and like, what am I even doing? Why am I wasting my time? There is a song joke in Curse of Monkey Island that's like just utterly destroyed me as a child. And it's, um,
01:15:58
Speaker
Everything Guybrush says, like he's trying to get his crew to get to work on the ship and they just keep singing.
Indie Games and Comedic Design
01:16:06
Speaker
And everything he says, they turn it into a verse in their song and by creating a rhyme with it. And the way that you stop them is you mention the word orange and they can't think of a rhyme for orange. I think the line is, we're sure to avoid scurvy if we all eat an orange.
01:16:26
Speaker
And then they go door hinge and they just kind of kick around and they're like, I guess it's over. Let's get to work. That was so hilarious to me. My partner and I will still say.
01:16:44
Speaker
Can I call you Bob? I guess he's calling him Bob. I guess it's a pun, but to us, it was just a surreal opening gambit. Can I call you just guessing the school's name? I guess it's because he's bobbing up and down on water at that moment. Yeah, I think that is a two pronged. I think it is a pun about him bobbing up and down in the water and also a reference to the skeleton named Bob from the first game.
01:17:11
Speaker
I've thought about I've played curse one gallon so many obsessively of ridiculous times I'm sad thought about all these now. There's a thing in video that video games have the Ability to do like it's it's sort of like in in TV shows right you can do delineate between a sitcom right where It's just like a it's just a
01:17:39
Speaker
people acting out a scenario, but the scenario might be funny, right? And that's what most, I think, adventure games are, basically. You're finding comedy in an everyday or not so everyday situation being pulled out by the characters being silly or whatever. But then the other thing you can do is you can create games based on a premise that are just comedy, just like in TV. There are certain shows that the premise is comedy and
01:18:09
Speaker
Video games, I think, don't take advantage of this idea enough, right? That the act of playing the game in and of itself can be funny. And this isn't an adventure game, but I say it only to make the point, is that trumpet hero game of, I think, last year, where, I think, what was it? Wasn't you make noise into a microphone and it comes out as trumpet sounds and you're trying to match
01:18:37
Speaker
No, I think it's just clicking, right? It's just clicking your mouse. Oh, you're just clicking, and it's never, ever going to sound right. Well, it sounds horrible. But then a more complex example of this, I think, of if you guys have played the Ben and Dan games. I was going to say, Lara the Clockwork God. Exactly, yeah. I'm always recommending that to people. That's a really good modern adventure game.
01:19:02
Speaker
Lair of the Clockwork God is so funny because the premise of it is that Ben still likes to be an adventure game protagonist, and he wants to keep solving puzzles and pointing and clicking, while Dan has decided that is no way to profit in the modern video game world, and they should be an indie darling platformer. So now,
01:19:30
Speaker
Dan refuses to pick up, like refuses to touch inventory items or have conversations. And Ben refuses to, there's one point where he comes across the tiniest possible step that one could find. And he refuses to step over it because that's too much like jumping and that's too much like platforming. And so Dan has to go through this incredible series of platform challenges just to pick Ben up
01:19:58
Speaker
and carry him around this incredibly long way to lift him over this tiny little step. It's just the, again, the act of playing that game is funny.
01:20:10
Speaker
Yeah. I enjoyed, I think I was slightly ripping Dan off. I did a video a few months ago spoofing indie games, spoofing the serious navel-gazy side of narrative games, which I like, but I also spoofed. I think he does a very good job of spoofing the same type of game in the mandatory sad bit that occurs. I don't want to spoil it for him who hasn't played it, but the bit where it gets sad and meaningful is very funny.
01:20:39
Speaker
Nice. Also, I also want to say the premise of that game is that all the apocalypse is happening at the exact same time.
01:20:48
Speaker
So it's like, Godzilla's attacking while there's a major virus, while there's zombies, while the sun is crashing into the air. It's just like every apocalypse is happening at the exact same time. It's like everyone's worst nightmare. It's incredible. It is one of my favorite. I think one of my top three funniest games of all time. It's very, very funny.
01:21:10
Speaker
What do you guys think about purely text adventure? Cause those were meant to be funny. If you think about things like Zork and Hitchhiker's guide and bureaucracy, a lot of those, even Colossal Cave, maybe they, they had to be snarky and funny in a way because we're not relying on visuals or obviously not relying on voice acting. So we have to have a bit of snark that goes with them. Do you guys find those funny today? Or ever, I guess.
01:21:38
Speaker
Douglas Adams was a very funny writer. And so I think bureaucracy and hitchhikers, particularly bureaucracy stand out as being sort of a really original and funny and not feeling like other games before or since. And Starship Titanic, which is still sort of text driven, it has a sort of spooky talk parser that allows you to sort of talk to the characters and it doesn't really work.
01:22:04
Speaker
But the game is terrific and full of really, you know, full of really funny lines. Yeah, I haven't spent much time. I played a bunch when I was a kid when, you know, options for adventure games were kind of light on the ground, but I have not gone back and played many of these.
01:22:24
Speaker
I played a few of the hybrid ones. I'm going to call them hybrid, but the games like Eric the Unready, which are super goofy. I think they are comedy based and they're this hybrid of some visual and some parser. That game has a funny premise too. Do you want to explain that real quick? I don't know that game at all.
01:22:42
Speaker
You know, oh God, well, you gotta go play it. I don't even remember the premise. Like, you're playing this, it's like, it's like medieval times. You're playing this knight, maybe? And you have to save a damsel? I think you're like a Conan, you're like a Conan sort of character, but you're not very good, thus the name Eric the Unready. You are not ready to become
01:23:11
Speaker
the hero that you suddenly have to be. This is also a game that I've not played, I just know the premise. I didn't play it, and I would put it up there as a pretty decent, non-Sierra, non-LucasArts game. That's pretty funny. It does have unwinnables, but some of the puzzles are pretty fair. But again, it's very goofy, just very, very goofy humor, which I guess I kind of am drawn to anyway.
01:23:39
Speaker
Does it, as a comedian, Alistair, does the video game striving for comedy and often not quite hitting it, does that ever bother you or is it just? Well, I feel like I'm not in a position to judge because if you
01:23:56
Speaker
Comedy is very, is very hit in this and very down to taste. But also if you, when you're writing jokes, you know, if you're a comedian, you write a whole load of new jokes and then you go and try them out. And some of them maybe get laughs if you're lucky and a lot of them don't.
01:24:11
Speaker
And so you've got to be a bit sympathetic, I think, to a joke that doesn't land because that's how you get to the jokes that do land. And I do think with especially with indie games and with lots of games, I sort of have a feeling that with some games, there's never there's not much of an intermediary between the person who wrote that joke and you. It feels like maybe that joke hasn't passed through that many hands.
01:24:37
Speaker
Which is lovely sometimes, especially if there isn't voice acting, which is lovely because sometimes it feels like this is a joke just for me. How could anybody else get that reference? That's so niche. I love that. And sometimes it's like, well, fair enough. That one didn't really work. But to be fair, you didn't get anyone to even proofread this game. I go by the MST3K kind of riffing style type of comedy, at least for my videos, where it's like someone's going to get this reference. And if not, here's 50 gazillion other references that someone will get.
01:25:07
Speaker
I do think that I'm not wanting to contradict you, but I think one of the tricky things, one of the reasons I think humoring adventure games in particular becomes tiresome is that an easy way to get a gag is to break the scene, which is fine if you're watching, you know, if you're Mystery Science Theatre, you're allowed to make fourth-wall breaking jokes. And of course, you're allowed to write fourth-wall breaking jokes, but
01:25:32
Speaker
after the fifth reference where someone says, I'd better pick up this spanner because I'm in an adventure game. After a certain point, those jokes become tiresome and it becomes a device that we get tired of as the player, I think. Yeah, you rely too much on it. It's
01:25:50
Speaker
I was just thinking. Bear with me. This is going to make sense. One of my favorite shows of all times is The Monkees. I love them. I love The Monkees music. Totally obsessed. Totally knew you were going to say this. This absolutely makes sense in the premise of this conversation. I was like, oh yeah, she's going to talk about The Monkees. Well, it was kind of in a big hobby at the time. I believe you. I believe you. There's a bit where they're stuck in a situation and they can't get out of it.
01:26:19
Speaker
And one of the monkeys goes to have a word with the writers of the show and walks off the set. Just says, we're stuck. We can't get out of this situation. Is that what you were thinking of? It is. Yeah. They were known for breaking the fourth wall, but I think they did it better. I don't think they overused it terribly. And I think maybe they were a shorter band. So it was kind of a gag. Like they were a real band and the songs are good, but also we know they're not a real band. So we're in on the joke already.
01:26:50
Speaker
Yeah, and I can't even think of like many, I mean, I guess if I tried, I could pull up some, but I can't think of many things before The Monkees that was doing a lot of improv, because a lot of those things were improv, and also breaking the fourth wall in that way. There were other shows, like I don't know if you know what the show is, Alistair, but we had a show called Doby Gillis, or the many romances of Doby Gillis, and he would break the fourth wall
01:27:16
Speaker
by talking to the camera and like the introduction, but then everything else is serious or something like, um, what's it called? Saved by the bell where Zach will be like timeout and he'll break the fourth wall. But yeah, like, I will say the timeout thing. This is a, this is an interesting, I find it interesting. We all remember Zach Morris saying timeout and looking at the camera all the time. I think he only did it in one episode one time. Wow.
01:27:45
Speaker
No, that can't be. Nope, that can't be. I don't believe it. I don't believe it. I don't believe it. I think in the UK, there's probably the Goon show and Monty Python are probably the obvious examples of comedy shows that sort of deconstructed the medium they were working in in some way. And Python were particularly known for that.
01:28:08
Speaker
And I think it doesn't work as well. Frequency doesn't work as well in adventure games, because at least in a show like The Monkees, you're getting some narrative, you're getting actual jokes. If it's over and over again in an interactive video game, I feel like I've lost control. Like I feel like I'm just being barraged by pun after pun. And I just not a fan. Are there any games in particular
01:28:35
Speaker
And don't be afraid to name them. Hold on one second. I'm sorry to interrupt you, but I have to step back and say I did the Googling. I did the Googling. I did the Googling on myself. And yeah, he times out a whole lot. I don't know where I heard this. I do not know where I heard this weird factoid, but it was probably just some Redditor who wanted to be like, who wanted to be me in this conversation five minutes ago, like actually.
01:29:05
Speaker
This is the worst kind of misinformation. Yeah, how dare you? It's misinformation that sticks in somebody's head as a nice well, actually, and then comes out in the exact same way. Oh, my God, I'm sweating. And you just well, actually, do your female co-host. Not great, Matt. Oh, boy. It's pretty bad. I am not a good look, Matt. I am dripping sweat over here. Hold on. Time out, everybody. Time out.
01:29:35
Speaker
Did you know that Captain Picard never actually says engage? Is that true? I don't know if you're joking. No, he says it loads. I thought it would be obvious. Okay, I'm sweating now. This is really bad. Well, what the heck was I talking about before Matt... I'm so sorry. I'm so sorry. You were going to bring something up, but we don't know what it was, because you hadn't got to the keyword where we would know what you were going to say.
01:30:03
Speaker
I was going to ask you guys, are there games you can think of, and don't be afraid to name names, we always punch up here, that are too pun heavy that you felt like, this is rough. I really can't handle this. If we're going to go there.
01:30:18
Speaker
I don't think Ron Gilbert's going to listen this far into the podcast. I really hate Thimbleweed Park. I would never normally say that. I've got too many followers on Twitter to say opinions that are negative about indie games. I was delighted by Return to Monkey Island and part of that delight was that I was anticipating not liking it because of how much I didn't like Thimbleweed Park. I didn't find any single part of it funny. I played about two thirds of the game.
01:30:48
Speaker
And I don't think it's funny at all. I don't find Ransom the Clown funny. I don't find any of the characters charming. I think the artwork is not my favorite kind, but I think it's much better than it looked when it was a Kickstarter. So clearly loads of work has gone into it. I find the idea of having multiple characters bizarre when the lines of dialogue they say are the same line of dialogue. So you've got multiple characters voiced by actors, sometimes not that well, I think.
01:31:18
Speaker
And yet the line of dialogue they say when they look at an object is exactly the same for every single character, which is truly the whole point of having multiple characters in a game is that they react differently to the same thing. It's just full of bizarre and incomprehensible comedic and puzzle design decisions for me. And I wanted to love it because I love Twin Peaks. I love detective games.
01:31:40
Speaker
I love Ron Gilbert's games and I don't love it. I just love murder, mystery, anything. Just anything that has that vibe, that detective vibe, I'm there. I'm there for it. That said, the one meta joke that really worked for me in Thimbleweed Park was collecting specks of dust. Yeah, that was cool. An achievement was very funny. The actual Pixel Hunt. Render up to Caesar, et cetera, et cetera. Yes, that was good.
01:32:09
Speaker
I will say the comedy that I, if I want to call out a comedy game that I absolutely can't stand, it is the telltale versions of the Sam and Max games. Ooh, I was going to say that I thought they were good. Oh no!
01:32:26
Speaker
Oh, we got to fight it out. Fight it out. Okay. Granted, I only played season one. So season one. If you haven't actually read all of Jordan Peterson's books, you can't criticize him. And similarly, if you haven't, they
01:32:43
Speaker
they really hit their stride okay they get a lot better the third season which is the devil's playhouse is quite standalone and it's it's really the best in terms of writing and and puzzle design and it's it's much more coherent across the season than the first series is and it looks an awful lot better
01:33:03
Speaker
You know, the graphics, the style of it feel much more, much more like, I have to say, I think the original Sam and Max game is very funny, but it is not the most satisfying puzzle-wise. You sort of go, oh, it was something to do with big feet. Oh, it's the end of the game. All right. Yeah. The first season of, so I really enjoy the original Sam and Max. I can see your point here, but, uh,
01:33:30
Speaker
It's one of those games I can play in an afternoon and just sit down and go from beginning to end. But season one was just so, it was, I'd use the word formulaic. Every single episode of season one of Sam and Max was the exact same adventure just with different, you know, different sprites.
01:33:56
Speaker
different 3D models pasted over the ones from the previous episode. Sometimes not different. Sometimes the same ones. Right. But I'm glad to hear it gets better. Maybe it really, really does. Because around that time, people were like, you simply can't make adventure games with 3D graphics. And I really think they did. They, you know, obviously they did eventually.
01:34:20
Speaker
work out how to do it. And while we're talking about Telltale, Strong Bad's cool game for attractive people. SPCG4AP. Really funny. Very, very good. I mean, you probably need to be a Homestar Runner fan. The moment may have passed, but I love them.
01:34:37
Speaker
I love that we are of the generation and of the age that we grew up with Homestar Runner and we were able to go to the weekly emails and see them as they came out. I'm a huge fan. I typically do not like
01:34:54
Speaker
to the telltale games. I haven't played the Sam and Max telltale game. I haven't played any games. I clearly, I am a fake gamer girl. I don't know why I'm here. Yeah, fake gamer girl. Gay brigade. No! Let's not go there.
01:35:11
Speaker
But I typically don't like the Telltale games, and I did like Strong Bad, and I think that's just because it was a franchise that I held so near and dear to my heart. I also loved the original Sam and Max, but I played it with no nostalgia for it. I played it as an adult, and it was just grueling to me. It was so difficult, the backtracking alone. It's quite cruel. I do think Puzzle Agent, the Telltale game, I think that holds up
01:35:38
Speaker
Well, I haven't played it recently, so I don't know. Because it's the Professor Layton style, there's no question of the puzzles being integrated into the story, but the funny, weird, very Twin Peaks-y plot line and the grickle artwork is really charming to me. What do you think it is about
01:36:00
Speaker
adventure games and Twin Peaks. Why do you think the two seem so inseparable? I think it's because Twin Peaks is a show you have to try to like. Once you've managed, you love it. You love it. I think I love Twin Peaks as well. And I know a lot of devs like Twin Peaks and I think it's because Twin Peaks
01:36:18
Speaker
is something that it's so abstract. It's something that you feel as opposed to a storyline that makes sense. And maybe that resonates with a lot of creators and a lot of, you know, developers that creative, imaginative mindset.
01:36:33
Speaker
Yeah, if you're like me, you go into Twin Peaks wanting to understand everything and to work it out and to try and piece together all the clues. And there are people out there on Reddit still today trying to do that. The show is telling you as it goes on, the show is telling you that you don't need to do that.
01:36:55
Speaker
David Lynch has blatantly said, we're not gonna, you don't need to, you don't need to do that. Don't try and work it out. Just watch the goddamn, watch the movie.
01:37:06
Speaker
At the start of Firewalk with me, there's a lady that does a weird dance with a blue rose. And then the FBI character explains what all of that means and explains what each element of it meant. And they're all things you could never possibly guess. And it feels like it's probably the only joke in that film. But the joke is kind of on you for trying to work it out. Like you can't because you can't work it out. It's not about trying to work it out. It's about coming into contact with something incomprehensible.
01:37:37
Speaker
That's interesting. Like comic book continuity, right? Like I just read the, uh, what was it? It's called, um, it's a, it's a book where a man has read every single Marvel comic and he tries to string them together. It's called all of the marbles by Douglas walk. And he's trying to string them together as one cohesive story. And he ends the book by just pretty much warning you, like, don't do this.
01:37:59
Speaker
It is not. This is not what it's about. This is not what it's for here. And he tells you like all these examples of times that it's like these are the writers specifically telling you that these are just stories and they do not connect fully. And there's like you are not enjoying them correctly if you try. Wow.
01:38:20
Speaker
It's actually a very, very good book. But okay, we have gone on for a very long time. It was very, very nice to have you here, Alistair. Thank you for having me. So much fun. You are welcome back any time you want to talk for over two hours. Oh, no way. Because the time has stopped. I didn't realize how long it had been. You're going to have to edit this down.
01:38:44
Speaker
No, we will definitely edit it. Hey, edit out the part where I said something absolutely batshit crazy about Saved by the Bell. Absolutely not. All of the Zack Morris stuff stays in there. But, Alistair, before we go out, is there anything you would like to plug to our listeners?
01:39:03
Speaker
Well, I'm sure your listeners are all based in the United States of A, and that is useless to me because I'm on tour in the UK, the old-fashioned place. And if you live there, if you live near a city in the United Kingdom, you might be able to come and see me on my tour nevermore doing stand-up comedy jokes. But if you don't, then feasibly you can't. So that's the option, really.
01:39:33
Speaker
live here or don't is what I'm saying. Are there any crucial dates you want to plug or be able to just find your own? From the end of March throughout April and into May, I'll be in lots of lots of towns and cities in England and a very small number in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Matt, Matt, road trip? Road trip. Yeah, let's take a road trip. Road trip. I'll go to Philadelphia across England. I think you need to appreciate how windy our roads are before you commit to this.
01:40:01
Speaker
I rented a car in Scotland thinking, ah, just drive it. I'll just drive around. No, very difficult scenario that I did not foresee. I got a lot of people putting very helpful two fingers in the air at me. I think they wanted to wish me a peaceful day.
01:40:21
Speaker
That's a Scottish greeting. Yes. We want to say we are part of the Adventure Game Hotspot network. They are at adventuregamehotspot.com. Go check them out. They have all sorts of cool adventure game goodies there. Rose, is there anything else you want to say before we get out? He'd ask me what I wanted to plug. You know, I do stuff too. I do stuff too.
01:40:50
Speaker
I've, you, this is your podcast. You can plug at any point, help me asking you. I'm plugging this whole time. You know what? Sometimes it's just nice to be asked. Oh yeah, please. Rosas, what do you want to plug to me, your friend Matt, and I'll go check it out.
01:41:09
Speaker
Yeah, I'm not doing anything right now, actually. This sentiment would have been nice, is all I'm saying. Other than that, I mean, hey, Alistair, I have to postpone my trip, or I did postpone my trip to England, so if I'm there while you're touring, I will gladly see your stand-up. Yeah, you better. Yeah, let me know. As long as it's not offensive.
01:41:35
Speaker
No, it'll be safe, boring jokes for woke PC nerds. So I guess we could end our podcast on our, uh, on our saying. We have a saying match. Do you, would you like to do the saying or would you like me to do the saying? Well, let's split it. Okay. Okay. So our saying is podcasts is art and art is suffer.
01:42:13
Speaker
Yeah, we're not known for our quality of coffee, I think, in this country. I noticed that. No offense, but I was like, I would really love a coffee right now. But I did use the kettle for hot chocolate, and I was very impressed at how quick the water boiled. I'm like, oh my God, it's ready. Thank you. I've never been so patronized in my life. I don't know why I'm accepting the compliment on behalf of kettles.