Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to Developers Hangouts podcast.
Speaker: My name is James and today I have a special guest.
Speaker: Why don't you introduce yourself and then we'll start hanging out.
Speaker: Yeah, special guest, huh?
Speaker: So I am Brian Robinson.
Speaker: I'm a partial fast.
Speaker: I'm not seeing any waveform on my mic.
Speaker: You're good.
Speaker: You're good.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: So yeah, I'm Brian Robinson.
Speaker: I'm leading the DevRel charge at a company called HighGraph.
Speaker: I've been some form of professional web designer and developer for like, I don't know, 15 years at this point.
Speaker: So I've kind of seen a lot on the web, which is always fun.
Speaker: Even before I was doing professional stuff, I've been doing a lot of work.
Speaker: I was doing lots of weird things on the internet.
Speaker: Like I had a Microsoft front page site that I made for my Star Wars email RPG faction.
Speaker: I actually learned Linux, as it turns out, on a MUD, on a multi-user dungeon, which is a text-based game, where I was like writing...
Speaker: scenes and writing like documentation as like a 15 year old.
Speaker: And I was like, and like 15 years later, I'm like, oh, that was all Linux commands I learned back then.
Speaker: Had no clue what they were.
Speaker: But yeah, I've been through all the different phases of the web and been doing random stuff throughout all of it.
Speaker: Yeah, I think we're in similar positions.
Speaker: We've seen a lot of the web at this point.
Speaker: You know, I'm in my mid-30s.
Speaker: I've been doing this for over... I've been doing it for 15 years and professionally for 13.
Speaker: I've seen the... Everyone should just use, you know, like Java and then just push out like a, you know, like a war file or a Java file that you can download the website from and that will...
Speaker: interactivity will come from Java.
Speaker: Yeah, I've seen everything.
Speaker: The rise and fall of Flash and all that.
Speaker: Yeah, the rise of Flash and you're like, yes, Flash is awesome.
Speaker: And then we kill it off.
Speaker: And then, you know, we think it's a good idea to kill it off.
Speaker: Was it a good idea?
Speaker: We'll see.
Speaker: We could have done something.
Speaker: We could have saved it.
Speaker: But yeah, so we're in this space now of the Jamstack, which is
Speaker: Which I think is how we interacted probably the first time ever was, I think, just like in JAMstack and being in the same circles and doing some content creation around it.
Speaker: And now we're into like what I like to call phase two of JAMstack, which is like how many meta frameworks can we introduce?
Speaker: And then how many of these meta frameworks can we then fight each other until one of them comes out the other end?
Speaker: which is where we are right now.
Speaker: I feel like we're almost in like the in the scenario of like there was punk rock, right?
Speaker: And then there's most punk.
Speaker: I don't even know what post punk is as a music thing.
Speaker: But like, I feel like we're in the era of like the post Jamstack, like we're not actually out of Jamstack, but we're in this era where it's like, hey, next 13, let's do server side react components.
Speaker: And it's like, is that is that still the Jamstack?
Speaker: Like, I don't even know anymore.
Speaker: Yeah, it feels like the what have you done to my child scenario where we all remember how Jamstack started or what it was supposed to be.
Speaker: And now we're in this position of like, yeah, let's do server-rendered components and then let's do some other stuff.
Speaker: And like, hey, we've introduced...
Speaker: you know, island architecture where you no longer ship JavaScript code to your client side.
Speaker: So is that JAMstack?
Speaker: Because JAMstack was supposed to be JavaScript's APIs and markup language.
Speaker: So we're moving along in some interesting ways.
Speaker: Let's put it that way.
Speaker: Well, and I recently had a conversation about kind of where we're at.
Speaker: Like there's, we can argue and we can spend like the entire episode talking about like, what is the JAMstack actually had this big philosophical treatise about it.
Speaker: But like,
Speaker: I come at it from a very specific spot.
Speaker: Like I like HTML.
Speaker: I might be in the minority on that.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: But like, I like the authoring experience of HTML and I like the idea of my sites mostly
Speaker: being HTML and like coming down from a server as HTML being requested and only generate only like getting an HTML file.
Speaker: I like all that.
Speaker: I think that's super cool.
Speaker: So I like the idea of, well, you know, with all this new stuff in the quote unquote Jamstack, maybe the Jamstack is static first and then like everything else.
Speaker: Like by that point you have to ask like,
Speaker: is Next.js, the Jamstack.
Speaker: Like it was, like, because you get static props and all that.
Speaker: Like you can generate static files.
Speaker: But like, I've been playing with Next.13's app directory, like the beta they have for that.
Speaker: Everything's a server-side component.
Speaker: Like it's, to my understanding, there is no, unless you go and still have things in your pages directory, there is no static at that point.
Speaker: It's rendered on the server at request time.
Speaker: That sounds like not the Jamstack.
Speaker: Still cool.
Speaker: I've enjoyed playing with it, but not static anymore.
Speaker: That is dynamically rendered.
Speaker: Yeah, there's some interesting takes there.
Speaker: I think once you start playing around a bit more with the app router, you get things like...
Speaker: Is it getStaticParams or something?
Speaker: There's a new helper that used to be getStaticProps that's now not getStaticProps, which allows you to generate pages based upon at build time, still like you do today with getStaticProps.
Speaker: Yeah, I spent a couple hours playing with it this weekend for the first time, like truly outside of like, hey, I have to use it for Clark occasionally to like show how it works with app router and all that kind of stuff.
Speaker: And I ended up converting this podcast into Next13.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: in, I think it was like an hour.
Speaker: And that's like a mix of like, there's a lot of like client components that are required to like be able to press play and play an audio file because you can't do that on the server.
Speaker: So like there was some hiccups there and then, but yeah, I think I enjoyed it.
Speaker: Like I haven't fully done like the conversion yet because there's still some state I need to manage and that part's not as fun.
Speaker: But overall, like, yeah, it's an interesting route into Jamstack.
Speaker: movements, I guess is the right word.
Speaker: Because if we think about the philosophy, I don't really like using Jamstack anymore because I just don't think it exists anymore.
Speaker: I think we're done now with the word Jamstack.
Speaker: Post-Jamstack.
Speaker: Yeah, we're in post-Jamstack now.
Speaker: So now we're just like, cool, we're using these meta frameworks or frameworks to give us websites again.
Speaker: But yeah, I think the evolution in the last two years has been really interesting for everyone, I think.
Speaker: If you've been here long enough and you saw the inception of what was happening when Gatsby was suddenly this revolutionary thing that was happening and then, you know...
Speaker: you get spread too thin and you end up losing market share and seeing everything else that's happened.
Speaker: I mean, I'm excited.
Speaker: What is your go-to framework these days?
Speaker: Is it still Eleventy or are you branching out to other things for websites?
Speaker: Like, what are you loving?
Speaker: What are you loving right now?
Speaker: What am I loving?
Speaker: I will...
Speaker: I will never not love Eleventy.
Speaker: Eleventy is a joy of mine.
Speaker: I truly enjoy it.
Speaker: I have branched out to a degree.
Speaker: I've been playing a lot with Astro since their 1.0 release.
Speaker: I played with it like a year and a half ago, like early, early on.
Speaker: And I was looking at and trying to figure out data management and a whole bunch of other stuff, and it wasn't there yet.
Speaker: They didn't have a lot of the...
Speaker: features that are like table stakes like 11d has all these data features and we've got api routes and next.js and all these other things but like since the 1.0 release i've been talking about islands architecture it was like on uh my year in review 2021 maybe or it might have been like 2020 and i was like islands architecture like this is what we've been promised since react
Speaker: and have not gotten since React.
Speaker: And like the island's architecture thing was a big deal for me.
Speaker: So Astro, I feel like has the best grip on that.
Speaker: Like they figured out all the a lot of the pieces that really matter around doing it properly.
Speaker: Now, I haven't haven't gotten too deep into the app directory and next.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And I know that that's a big part, right?
Speaker: Server components versus client components and all that.
Speaker: So I'm I'm liking the next is going that direction.
Speaker: But I neck or Astro gives me
Speaker: a lot of what I like about Eleventy and a lot of what I like about Next and other meta frameworks like that kind of in one go.
Speaker: So like I'm writing a book on Eleventy and I love Eleventy and I will probably reach for Eleventy for most of what I build personally because I just enjoy the editor experience on that.
Speaker: But like Astro, like as movements are concerned in the post Jamstack era, like
Speaker: I enjoy working in Astro more than anything other than maybe Leventy.
Speaker: Like it is, I think the next thing that I'm gonna be in love with for a few years.
Speaker: Yeah, I pretty much have to agree with most of the sentiment.
Speaker: And I think a lot of the people that have been around for a long time that remember island architecture is not like a new novel thing.
Speaker: It's been around forever.
Speaker: And it's gone through iterations of naming conventions and all sorts.
Speaker: And we've kind of landed back in island architecture.
Speaker: And at this point, yeah, I think like Fred and everybody over at Astro has really...
Speaker: One, they really lent into it in the first place.
Speaker: They're like, hey, by the way, our main focus right now is literally to build websites that you can have island architecture with and ship zero JavaScript or a few kilobytes if you need it, whatever.
Speaker: You can use any of these websites
Speaker: frameworks, we're not even going to tell you what to use.
Speaker: You can use Astro, you can use Svelte, you can use React.
Speaker: Whatever you want to use, that's up to you.
Speaker: And now with 1.0 introducing the ability to do some cool stuff with dynamic routing and things like that in a lot easier way, I think they're going to end up
Speaker: in my opinion, at least taking that market share away of like, hey, we know what our limitations are.
Speaker: We know where we're at.
Speaker: And they've always been open about that.
Speaker: It's like, hey, if you're looking for a website or an app that does this,
Speaker: We're not the right people.
Speaker: Go to Next.js.
Speaker: They're the people that have got this all figured out.
Speaker: And I'm excited to see what's happening with Tana and Solid.js and this Astro sort of thing that's happening behind the scenes right now as we're recording this episode.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: which will go out probably after they announce everything that's going to happen.
Speaker: But yeah, I'm excited for what's happening.
Speaker: Like I'm excited for Solid JS and their sort of, I don't know how much you've played with it, but their movement into this, like, hey, this is what React could have been.
Speaker: if we had, you know, had the time to really get reactivity to a position of like where we're at.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I think that's like there was a conversation that just happened a few weeks back, but it was kind of around the idea of
Speaker: in these phases of the web, we eat the previous phase in a lot of ways.
Speaker: And like, I don't think you get solid JS without getting react.
Speaker: What, like a decade ago, you, we don't, we don't reach this point because there were mistakes happened, like mistakes totally happened.
Speaker: And a lot of what happened around the early phases of, of react, sometimes like looking back on it, you're like,
Speaker: That wasn't a great idea, but as it's matured, it's corrected those.
Speaker: And then the frameworks that get built on top of it correct the issues.
Speaker: And then the competitors that come out are correcting what they see as the problems in the area.
Speaker: And all of it is of benefit to the future.
Speaker: All of it's of benefit to the way that we do things.
Speaker: And yeah, the whole idea is like, this is perhaps what React should have been from the beginning.
Speaker: Who knew that?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I was going to say, who knew that when we were writing it?
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Like who knew that that was a thing?
Speaker: And we were going to end up in that position of like, hey, this is this would have been really cool if we had hindsight and it was 2020 and we had all the time in the world.
Speaker: Like, you know, it's one of those those things that like I love that people like make those comments is like, yeah, this is what react should have been like.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, react didn't exist and someone just thought of it.
Speaker: So some guy was like, you know, what's better than all the stuff we're building at Facebook, this thing.
Speaker: And nobody believes in me, but we'll get there.
Speaker: But yeah, I'm glad to see this is happening.
Speaker: And this this like we've seen a lot in the last year, I'd say we've seen such a boom, maybe in the last 18 months, such a boom in new frameworks or new just new revolutionary ways of doing something that we've either just dealt with like, man, it's fine.
Speaker: Or we've been like, somebody needs to fix this and nobody wants to fix it.
Speaker: And then someone suddenly does.
Speaker: I'm glad to see it's happening.
Speaker: And the web moved slow 15 years ago.
Speaker: The web was slow as hell.
Speaker: Revolutionary anything in the web 15 years ago was just unheard of.
Speaker: Well, and you look 15 years ago and you think, man, jQuery.
Speaker: jQuery was a revolution.
Speaker: And again, talk about us eating the past.
Speaker: jQuery was a revolution all the way up until the web platform ate the best features of jQuery.
Speaker: You don't get document query selector all without dollar sign, whatever it was, dollar sign parentheses selector, right?
Speaker: Yeah, you don't get there.
Speaker: And perhaps we would have actually gotten something better
Speaker: We could have gotten dollar sign, but you've got to move slow because otherwise you break all the legacy stuff.
Speaker: So I don't mind the slow moving of the past of the web either because watching the standards and specifications of- This episode of Developers Hangouts podcast is sponsored by User Interviews.
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Speaker: All of like the thoughts that have to go into that,
Speaker: I, at one point in my life, I thought I want to be like a member going to the W3C meetings and like figuring, no, absolutely not.
Speaker: I do not want that anymore.
Speaker: I want to take what they give me and maybe open up an issue.
Speaker: Like at some point in the CSS grid specification, a syntactic sugar that I helped like document and like create issues around will be in the specification.
Speaker: I thought it was going to be in the specification like five years ago, like super early on.
Speaker: But yeah, that's as far as I want.
Speaker: I'm good.
Speaker: Like, that's my claim to fame in that world.
Speaker: I don't want to go to those meetings.
Speaker: I don't want to think about if we have this specific syntax, it will break this random framework that kind of had it back in the day.
Speaker: No, thank you.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Speaker: So let's talk about things that you do outside of work, I guess.
Speaker: Work and just general content creation.
Speaker: I'm not quite sure what you're doing in content creation anymore, except from writing a book, which is just a whole thing that takes forever.
Speaker: What do you get up to when you're not doing all of those things and working that nine to five?
Speaker: Well, as it turns out, I also have a seven year old.
Speaker: So a lot of time goes into that because he's amazing and I want to spend time with him.
Speaker: But also I'm pretty much exhausted.
Speaker: Like there's a lot of energy there.
Speaker: But I do think I bake a decent bit.
Speaker: I like I like baking bread.
Speaker: I like doing pizza, that sort of thing.
Speaker: I'm.
Speaker: kind of a consummate geek like i read fantasy and sci-fi i read i watch a lot of movies i play video games i play board games i play tabletop rpg games um
Speaker: Yeah, there's all that in the tiny, tiny, tiny bit of mental energy that I have left at 8.30 in the evening.
Speaker: So what are you playing video game-wise recently or what's keeping your attention, I suppose, if you do have that mental energy?
Speaker: Anything specific?
Speaker: Are you playing something new or are you still just rocking something from...
Speaker: way back.
Speaker: So the great thing is in my area, the public library has free video game checkout.
Speaker: It's amazing.
Speaker: It's not like
Speaker: When I heard they did, I went and I expected like, oh, there'll be like Wii games.
Speaker: There might be like a PS2 or PS3 game, like super old stuff.
Speaker: New games are coming like all the time.
Speaker: It's great.
Speaker: Like it's still slow.
Speaker: And like, but like yesterday I ended up taking my son to the library and I checked out Gotham Knights, which is like DC Batman game.
Speaker: It's not, I'm telling you right now, I'm an hour in.
Speaker: It's not going to hold my attention.
Speaker: Like I'm already kind of done with it.
Speaker: Mm hmm.
Speaker: But what is really holding my attention right now is the Switch just came out with their Game Boy Advance stuff.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And I am six hours, seven hours into Legend of Zelda The Minish Cap, which was I'm a huge Zelda fan.
Speaker: I'm really big into Zelda.
Speaker: I never played it.
Speaker: I didn't have a GBA when it came out.
Speaker: And by the time I had disposable income,
Speaker: Like that would have been actually like, yeah, you can look around, you can get like Minish Cap for like a hundred bucks.
Speaker: Like it's right.
Speaker: It's rare enough at this point that it's super expensive.
Speaker: So like the ability to play it on my switch, I've sunk, you know, in the past two weeks or however long it's been since it came out, like maybe seven, 10 hours.
Speaker: Just like, cause you can play it in little bits and pieces.
Speaker: And I'm enjoying that in the same way that I've enjoyed most other entries into, into Zelda, even though it's like, you know, 15, 20 years old at this point.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But yeah, it must be close to 20 years at this point, I suppose.
Speaker: Oh, that makes you feel old.
Speaker: Super old.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That makes you feel old.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I'm playing.
Speaker: So I got a Steam Deck.
Speaker: which was worth every investment I've ever had because like, I, I didn't have to just want to sit down at my desk and play my PC.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's cause we spend all day here.
Speaker: We can't agree.
Speaker: You're either editing, creating content, writing blog posts, documentation, whatever you're doing.
Speaker: By the time you get done, you're like, cool, I want to leave this space and go somewhere else.
Speaker: Um, so having that steam deck has been, been amazing.
Speaker: Um, because I get to like sit and have a pretty powerful PC, uh,
Speaker: at a reasonable, you know, like a reasonable size, pretty decent screen, everything you could possibly want.
Speaker: And then I was playing, I just finished Cult of the Lamb, which has to be one of the nicest like chill games, I guess is the right word for something in that genre.
Speaker: Like roguelike is like my favorite game.
Speaker: genre like Binding of Isaac is probably is still my most played game ever and I think I have like 1800 hours now and I play at least once a week if not more and
Speaker: So having something else that's in that kind of space, but with resource management and buildings and all that kind of stuff that comes along with it was super cool.
Speaker: And I saw recently that they're going to be doing DLC that's free, that's going to do some changes and some upgrades, some new weapons and some new bosses.
Speaker: So I'm pumped because I just finished it, finally got to the end, finished everything.
Speaker: And now I'm like, OK, give me more.
Speaker: I want more of this.
Speaker: But yeah, I've been playing that.
Speaker: And like the resurgence, or not the resurgence, like the growth of indie games.
Speaker: Like it's amazing.
Speaker: Like I, let's say 80% of the time would rather play an indie game or something that feels like, honestly, like at this point, Minish Cap and stuff like that feels a little bit like indie because it's so old.
Speaker: But like, I mean, let's talk about roguelites.
Speaker: Like Hades is amazing.
Speaker: Anything Supergiant does.
Speaker: I have never not liked a Supergiant game.
Speaker: My brother just texted me this weekend and super excited.
Speaker: He finally beat Skull.
Speaker: I don't know if you know Skull.
Speaker: S-K-U-L.
Speaker: Which I never got very far in.
Speaker: But he was like, I finally beat it.
Speaker: And he sent a screenshot.
Speaker: And it's like 146 deaths or something like that.
Speaker: Like some huge number of deaths.
Speaker: And like just these types of games...
Speaker: you can just sit down like i don't know there's not like huge investment but then you end up investing huge like i could sit and play for 15 minutes and then i look and it's like like i said like the top game played in my library 1800 hours or you know whatever it's like oh i spent that much time i
Speaker: I spent forever in Stardew Valley.
Speaker: When I got my Switch, I got Stardew Valley and I had a whole bunch of other games on the Switch, but like I said, not being tied to a computer and not being tied to even the couch.
Speaker: I just lay in bed and all of a sudden two hours are gone and I've been playing Stardew Valley for that amount of time.
Speaker: It's amazing what you can do as an indie developer nowadays.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: It's definitely, I think...
Speaker: The Xbox, was it 360?
Speaker: I don't know when it was, but when Binding of Isaac, the original one came out or Super Meat Boy, I guess it's the real example.
Speaker: When Super Meat Boy came out, which was like Ed McMillan's really first big game in the industry.
Speaker: Like when that came out, that revolutionized what you could do as an indie developer.
Speaker: Because he had no money.
Speaker: He did all this work on the side.
Speaker: And then having Microsoft be like, hey, we want to purchase this as an Xbox arcade game.
Speaker: Would you be interested?
Speaker: And the rest is history.
Speaker: And then Bynak Visek was there, which was built in Flash, which people...
Speaker: like wait you could do that like yeah welcome to the uh industry of building cool stuff with cool things um and like yeah everything he's ever made i've played at least to completion maybe not to like 100 percenting but to completion and then binding advisor being the the real revolution of like i played the flash version then i played the rebuff which was like the upgrade version
Speaker: And then every expansion ever since I have every achievement and I still play it every week.
Speaker: Like it's just one of those games where it's like it feels comfortable and the time sink.
Speaker: You're right.
Speaker: It's that barrier to entry.
Speaker: Is so small compared to like a AAA game, because if you look at like Death Stranding, for example, AAA game, 100 million dollars,
Speaker: It looks amazing, but you still have to sink like 50 minutes into the game before you even do anything.
Speaker: Oh, like Gotham Knights.
Speaker: I said I played for about an hour last night.
Speaker: I really played for about 25 minutes.
Speaker: I watched a lovely CGI rendered movie to start with.
Speaker: A lot of interesting things happening.
Speaker: I played for like 25 minutes of that hour.
Speaker: And it's like, I...
Speaker: Where's the time for that?
Speaker: I can't invest unless you hook me with the gameplay right up front.
Speaker: Right, yeah, and that's exactly it.
Speaker: I don't have that time, one, anymore.
Speaker: And two, I don't have that attention span to be like, you're going to show me a 30-minute movie about the backstory to this game?
Speaker: That doesn't work for me anymore.
Speaker: But with Hades, for example, you get the lore as you play the game, you get a very short introduction of like,
Speaker: the story in air quotes, and then you were playing the game.
Speaker: And then you either get hooked to the game.
Speaker: You're like, oh my God, this is amazing.
Speaker: Or you don't get hooked to the game and you're like, cool, I can put it down.
Speaker: And that's it.
Speaker: And the same with Stardew Valley.
Speaker: There's literally no story to that game in the beginning.
Speaker: You literally get like, hey, you've inherited a farm.
Speaker: The end.
Speaker: Go and be a farmer.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Go break rocks.
Speaker: Clear some vegetation.
Speaker: You're good to go.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: After that, you'll figure it out.
Speaker: And I think, yeah, like the indie game market is just rocketing.
Speaker: Things like, I don't know if you ever played Outer Wilds.
Speaker: Mm-mm.
Speaker: It's it's it is an indie game.
Speaker: It came highly recommended to me.
Speaker: I played it when I went to San Francisco last on the plane on my Steam Deck, which was amazing.
Speaker: But it's like this indie game.
Speaker: It's very like weird and mysterious.
Speaker: And I was like hooked immediately.
Speaker: Great like music and story and atmosphere and everything that came along with it.
Speaker: And I was like, oh, God, I got to finish this.
Speaker: So my flight to and from, you know, to and back done.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: That was amazing.
Speaker: And I just don't have the time for AAA games anymore.
Speaker: I'm like, I got a Callista protocol, which was like the dead space, like homage to dead space, even though dead space was coming out at the same time.
Speaker: And I think I've put like two hours into it.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: And I'm like, okay, cool.
Speaker: Like, yeah, it's great to see like these, you know, celebrities being, uh,
Speaker: being the stars and, you know, doing mocap with these cool celebrities.
Speaker: But like the story is too, there's too much story here.
Speaker: Just give me the action parts.
Speaker: I wish there was like a skip all cut scenes, skip all story as an option in the menu for people that are busy.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Go ahead.
Speaker: I was going to say like, like the weird thing is like when I think back on the video games that I adored as like,
Speaker: preteen, teenager.
Speaker: They were incredibly story-driven.
Speaker: The medium was where I wanted to spend my time with stories.
Speaker: My first...
Speaker: So my first obsessions in video games, my first like teenage one was like Final Fantasy nine, like super into that.
Speaker: Early on, there's a game on the Genesis called Shining Force and Shining Force.
Speaker: And these were like super rudimentary like fantasy stories, but like they were long term things that unfolded over huge amounts of time.
Speaker: And like that was it.
Speaker: Like when I thought about maybe I want to be a video game designer, because what what what teenager.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Like they grew up, especially like in the era that like we grew up in being in like mid to late thirties.
Speaker: Like that's, that was the dream.
Speaker: Um, but like I actually worked again, I was, I was like playing this mud and like being a writer on it.
Speaker: And a couple of the admins for it were like thinking about building a game.
Speaker: And I was like, I would like to write like this epic story for like a final fantasy esque, you know, thing.
Speaker: And nowadays I'm like, I need like super solid gameplay mechanics.
Speaker: Like,
Speaker: I'll take some story, like I said, like in this kind of iterative fashion with with Hades and stuff like that.
Speaker: But like, I want to enjoy the feeling of the controller in my hand and doing something.
Speaker: And like there's even like I really, really enjoy Celeste.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: I would probably never beat Celeste because I am not that good at video games.
Speaker: I don't know if I've ever had as much fun dying in a small amount of time as I have with Celeste.
Speaker: The learning loop of it is amazing.
Speaker: It's like with three game mechanics to start with.
Speaker: It's nothing.
Speaker: You start, but the game mechanics fit so well together that
Speaker: I don't know, the hooking with game mechanics is far superior, at least to my age-addled mind, than story nowadays.
Speaker: And plus, I think there's been such a... There's so much more...
Speaker: stories out there that meet up with the expectations of a gamer from the 90s i guess like yeah like you look in like mcu and marvel and dc and there's a dnd movie coming out there's all these things that meet with the types of media that i enjoy that i don't have to seek the refuge in the story of the video games anymore and so i feel like there's a little bit of both happening they're like hey yeah i want like
Speaker: If I want to play a game, I want to play a game.
Speaker: Let me play a game.
Speaker: If I want a story, there's so much good stuff out there now that is enjoyable.
Speaker: I can do that too.
Speaker: And they're two different mental processes and like they're very separate.
Speaker: And like I used to think video games are like the epic storytelling medium.
Speaker: I also have a degree, like part of my minor in college was film studies.
Speaker: Like film is also super epic about it.
Speaker: Books.
Speaker: I love novels.
Speaker: Like they're super epic about it.
Speaker: I can live those stories for huge amounts of time.
Speaker: Um, but give me solid gameplay.
Speaker: Yeah, me too.
Speaker: Yeah, I'm the same way now.
Speaker: Like, I feel like, you know, I grew up with like Metal Gear Solid and like Kojima telling these stories through the medium of like PlayStation and like breaking the limits of every machine he's ever touched.
Speaker: And like now I'm at the point where I'm like, Kojima, could you just make movies?
Speaker: Yeah, because you make a movie inside my video game and I spend more time watching your movie than I do playing anything.
Speaker: Death Stranding with withheld because there is story there, but there's a lot of like walking and moving and doing things.
Speaker: But but like Metal Gear Solid is a prime example of that, like the latest one that which was five before he left to build his own studio.
Speaker: I could just couldn't get into it because.
Speaker: I was like, man, you're telling this really cool story, Kojima.
Speaker: But also, can you let me do something with this?
Speaker: Like, I've been holding this controller for like 45 minutes.
Speaker: And so far, all I've done is walk three feet.
Speaker: And you've told me this whole story.
Speaker: Yeah, and I'm in the same way.
Speaker: It's like, yeah, now we're living this life of like MCU.
Speaker: Star Wars is back, although...
Speaker: whatever.
Speaker: For good or ill.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: The good, the bad, like, you know, Apple's invested in movie making TV shows.
Speaker: We're getting shows that are actually made from video games that are actually reasonable.
Speaker: Like the last of us.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Like the last of us, for example, but then we also get the bad, like resident evil on Netflix, which was terrible.
Speaker: Like, you know,
Speaker: we get this like medium of like, wow, remember when we were kids and like, you could imagine like, man, I wish they'd make a movie about silent hill and it'd be awesome.
Speaker: And then like 10 years go by and you're like, man, it would be really cool if they made a movie on this.
Speaker: And then we kind of get those movies.
Speaker: Um, and yeah, I'm the same way.
Speaker: Like the mediums now these days, it's like, Hey, just give me, just give me tight controls.
Speaker: Give me tight gameplay.
Speaker: And if there's Laura well along the way, I'm good to go.
Speaker: If I can spend 15 minutes or 15 hours and like in the same kind of game.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: That's, that's for the best, right?
Speaker: Like I, like, yeah, I want to pick it up for 15 minutes when I've got 15 minutes and when I've got two hours to invest, I can spend that same amount of time in that same game.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: Exactly.
Speaker: So we are coming to the end of the show.
Speaker: It's been 30 minutes.
Speaker: It feels like we just got started.
Speaker: It just flies on by.
Speaker: So Brian, why don't you just plug everything where people can find you, where they can talk to you, whatever it might be.
Speaker: go ahead it's all yours sure so uh for good or ill uh i'm still around on twitter so you can find me at b rob b r o b on twitter uh that's the easiest way to kind of reach out uh i'm in various communities like discord communities high graph the company i work for has a slack community i'm in there um but yeah twitter is is all things brian um and so you can get updates on things like i'm writing a book and should be out and you know
Speaker: a matter of like a month or two probably.
Speaker: Like I, all my editorial changes are in.
Speaker: Now it's just technical review changes I have to get through.
Speaker: So it should be circling around and coming out soon too.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: Awesome.
Speaker: All right.
Speaker: Thank you so much, Brian, for coming on.
Speaker: Thanks for coming on so quickly too.
Speaker: It felt like we just organized it so quickly.
Speaker: Really appreciate it.
Speaker: Loved having you on chatting about video games.
Speaker: It's probably my favorite thing to talk about.
Speaker: Heck yeah.
Speaker: And yeah.
Speaker: And if you ever want to come back on, there's always repeating guests.
Speaker: So feel free to come back.
Speaker: Well, it's been super fun.
Speaker: So I'll hit you up for that in the future as well.
Speaker: Absolutely.
