Ep. 271 - FunJail, with Jason Schreier

esper

Ep. 271 - FunJail, with Jason Schreier

Bloomberg Game Journalist and Author Jason Schreier joins the panel to cover Wizards of the Coast, the greatest story in video games, and whether or not buying games is ethical. Hosted by Alex Jaffe, with Frank Cifaldi, Tim Rogers, Brandon Sheffield, and Jason Schreier. Edited by Esper Quinn, original music by Kurt Feldman.

Questions this week:

Cliff Bleszinski asks: What food do you associate with your best gaming memory? (07:16)
Why is everybody so mad about Dungeons & Dragons? (15:22)
What is the greatest story in video games? (20:59)
How do you break news no one else has yet as a game journalist? (28:26)
You have an investor meeting in 6 minutes to pitch them a new social media network for Gamers. What’s your presentation? (34:51)
Spencer Gifts asks: which game console libraries boxes have the best graphic design? (40:49)
Under what circumstances is it unethical to buy a video game? (49:26)

LIGHTNING ROUND: MobyCritic (55:30)

Recommendations and Outro (58:50)

A SMALL SELECTION OF THINGS REFERENCED:

Recommendations:
Jason: Triple Click
Brandon: Try eating dandelion leaves, find the fan translation of Project Eye Dol, Mad Stalker
Frank: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

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◉◉maru

@Jaffe has an eyepatch now.

My absolute least favorite word in game development is “gameplay”, an unhelpful and vague term that usually hides a lack of personal investment in correctly figuring out and properly communicating the specific design issue you wish to address.

esper What food do you associate with your best gaming memory? (07:16)

Not my best memory per say but my strongest games+food association is probably Chinese food with Super Mario Bros. 3.

Any “usual” big European city variation of Chinese food, mostly Southern, some sort of Fujian / Guangzhou / Vietnamese mix. But especially cantonese rice.

My best friend in middle school got Super Mario Bros. 3 and soon after he brought it to my home, on a Friday evening, so that we could play it together until Saturday evening. We made the tactical mistake of starting playing as soon as we arrived from school, and my mother surprised us by taking us out to a great Chinese restaurant for dinner, pretty far away from home.

There is no save on the NES version of Super Mario Bros. 3, so we decided to leave the game on, and left either Mario or Luigi (I am pretty sure it was Mario) on standby somewhere on the 2nd World map. The whole night out lasted something like two and a half hours. This was back when there were tons of stories and second hand accounts and rumors of standby games messing up TVs, or blowing up consoles, and we both spent the entire dinner stressing out whether we had just ruined our weekend by taking a chance on our ongoing gaming session instead of restarting the game from scratch after dinner.

Nothing went wrong in the end but the stress scarred me for life and I often randomly think about that evening when I eat cantonese rice.

esper Why is everybody so mad about Dungeons & Dragons? (15:22)

I think the panel misunderstood the crux of the issue. With the current license, any other Tabletop game developer can reuse the current ruleset of D&D (or even previous rulesets) for their own game.

This has been a win/win situation because it helped D&D regain its status as the standard for the hobby, and made sure everyone was familiar with D&D even if they came to TTRPGs through another mean.

With the new (leaked) license, other game devs using the ruleset in a new RPG or unlicensed expansion would need to share a report of their earnings with Wizards of the Coast, and pay a 25% royalty to Wizards of the Coast passed a certain revenue threshold.

This new license also allows Wizards of the Coast to block the sale of contents they think is contrary to the spirit of their brand, such as (I am giving their examples) racist, homophobic or misogynistic contents, or anything related to NFTs.

If you are more cynical, this would also theoretically allow Wizards of the Coast to stop the selling of any tabletop game or video game using the (formerly open) ruleset, such as the Pathfinder series which gained popularity by re-using the rules D&D 3rd edition when the real D&D moved on to the controversial 4th edition.

Answering the initial question, the closest analogy to this story in the video game world is probably how Bethesda tried to get a tighter grip on mods a few years ago.

esper

Stadia exclusive saved by sneaking it into the Steam version of its sequel

I think you meant

Steam: A former Stadia fan hid while he played a new game

rejj whenever a new IC episode turns up I always hit “play next” instead of “add to queue”. It’s the only show that queue-jumps.

Mine is Matthew Belloni’s The Town, at the moment.

shlootermcgavin

esper What is the greatest story in video games? (20:59)

was playing tomb raider (2013) recently, and the button prompt to save lara from rolling off a cliff did not trigger, resulting in this moment

pizzascrub

esper Under what circumstances is it unethical to buy a video game? (49:26)

okay , we cannot ethically buy video games.
so then the question becomes

How do we liberate video games?

GigaSlime

esper Cliff Bleszinski asks: What food do you associate with your best gaming memory?

For some reason the only particular association I have between food and games is when my mom made no-bake cookies for the first time while I was in the middle of the Agni & Rudra fight in Devil May Cry 3. I have eaten that particular food while playing that particular game exactly once, but they are inexorably linked forever. I cannot experience one without thinking of the other

rejj

I subscribe to too many podcasts (every few months I go through my list and cull a few I’m not listening to) and I just want to say: whenever a new IC episode turns up I always hit “play next” instead of “add to queue”. It’s the only show that queue-jumps.
💜

Jaffe

Review from my mom: “Love this guest.” I think she can detect his Jewishness

Gaagaagiins

@exodus is this the one that was on your laptop’s internal microphone inexplicably? Sounds pretty good to me, I can hardly hear the difference. Perhaps kudos to @esper for cleaning it up real nice?

exodus

Gaagaagiins we have a recording on discord and a backup - my backup switched to the internal mic but the discord one was my real mic. The discord recording was broken in many ways so we thought it was going to be a lot of my internal mic, but esper cobbled it together with the best parts basically.

Punzai I also mentioned it was a Japanese term not a UK one but maybe that got lost in my mic situation

Punzai

I’m from the UK and I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone here called side scrolling beat-em ups “belt-scrollers” 🤷🏻‍♂️ I always thought that was a Japanese term? But if that was the case, surely Tim would know?

Jaffe

Punzai I’m from the UK and I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone here called side scrolling beat-em ups “belt-scrollers” 🤷🏻‍♂️

Oh, not in the UK, no, it’s a Southern Ireland expression

◉◉maru

Punzai Check here. I trust that guy!

aerisdead

Punzai literally logged on just to complain that Tim’s anti-UK rhetoric has gotten so lazy it’s just plain wrong

Punzai

Jaffe I suddenly had a cold-sweat realisation that I’d wandered, unprepared, into a Rogers bear-trap!

marurun

The Dungeons and Dragons kerfuffle is multi-faceted, but there is one sticking point which Wizards of the Coast seems unwilling to back-track on, which is OGL (Open Gaming License) 1.0a. Back when it was released it allowed people to use a whole bunch of stripped back D&D content (mostly, but not entirely, mechanical stuff which is questionable in terms of whether copyright would cover it) in the form of an SRD (System Reference Document) upon which to build derived works. For years and years after WotC insisted it was irrevocable and publishers could rely upon its terms. And now that there are a bunch of software and electronic entertainment execs in power at Hasbro, they’re suddenly deciding they need to revoke the 1.0a license to replace with this new one, which conveniently, even in stripped back form, would render a lot of previous OGL-allowed content to no longer be made. One of D&D’s largest competitors, Pathfinder, was originally based directly on the D&D 3.5 SRD, making it VERY compatible with D&D 3.5 at a time when WotC was trying to release a relatively unpopular D&D 4 (which is arguably a very good game on its own but SUPER different from past D&Ds) which had a new, much more restrictive license called the GSL. Notably, they didn’t try to revoke the OGL at that time, and boom, a competitor was born around retaining disaffected players who didn’t want to move to D&D 4 but wanted more that just D&D 3.5.

Essentially, WotC employees at the time, and their web site, claimed OGL 1.0a would remain in effect indefinitely and was not revocable, and now that new Hasbro execs feel D&D is under-monetized they want to revoke 1.0a and replace it with something else which favors their business wants more handily. It really screws over lots of companies who started and grew not just their own business but the audience for D&D as well (bottom-up rising tide kinda situation) by saying, “You can keep the old stuff made under OGL 1.0a, but you can’t make any new stuff under 1.0a despite us telling you it wouldn’t every go away.” So-called partners have basically been told they can’t trust Hasbro/WotC to keep a promise. Also, there’s evidence that the early leak of of the OGL that WotC has had to walk back dramatically was not, despite WotC’s claim, an early draft, but a final version that was being floated to partners to sign officially. So WotC is both backpedaling and being dishonest about the narrative that lead them to have to backpedal. That sort of stuff tends to sour the people you work with and sell to.

Jaffe

exodus Sure Brandon, just like all the times you acknowledge my great jokes

exodus

Jaffe I am usually the one who actually acknowledges them! I may not laugh, but I know it exits

Fuck Trevor

The best story in video games is when my friend was playing Batman: Arkham Asylum on their Xbox 360, and their 360 managed to get the red ring of death at the exact moment the game does its fake glitching/crashing section. They thought the game is what killed their Xbox hahahahahha

Syzygy

Fuck Trevor
I saw the Digimon Movie in theater on its debut (no comment) and right when the villain– the anthropomorphic representation of a computer virus as a digital monster– first appeared, the projector broke and we all sat in silence in the dark thinking how avant garde such an extended black screen was for the Digimon Movie.

tokucowboy

It’s not technical (or sensical), but I get unduly annoyed when gamers say “art style,” which they say a lot. I get much more annoyed when they make it one word, like “artstyle.” We have a term for this already, it is called art direction. What you’re talking about is art direction.

Also, I’m a shmup sayer, it’s fun to say (“bmup” is not fun to say, that’s why people don’t say it). I also say STG. But STG also annoys me because it’s not an acronym for “shooting game,” it’s like we just allowed the “T” in there as an exception because “SG” doesn’t sound good.

_i _know _acronyms _can _have _word _parts _i _dont _like _it

Toph

My mother eats and praises dandelion leaves everytime I see her. I’ll have to let her know someone else enjoys them. She’ll like that.

exodus

Toph Let her know you can eat squash leaves and stems too, in case she wasn’t aware of that.

Toph

exodus

I actually told her about your dandelion recommendation and she told me to tell you to try making tea from the roots as well! She loves keeping a garden and having fresh vegetables around so I knew she’d appreciate you saying that.

dylanfills

exodus Eating squash leaves was a prior recommendation of yours I think.

I think the question of when is it ethical to buy a video game is an interesting one. I did have a really intriguing conversation with one of my (read: the only) bar customers on Christmas Eve; I had felt we agreed on a lot and both liked video games, but I soured a little bit when she expressed that she was going to buy the Harry Potter game.

I did find it funny that Tim had described exactly the scenario that played out in my head about High On Life, a game that I almost entirely want to play because of the music by TOBACCO, one of my favorite artists. If I’m not mistaken, this recording took place right before the story of Adult Swim and wretch Squanch Games dropping Justin Roiland. The timestamps on the articles I just googled say they’re from Tuesday and Wednesday. It does seem like a bizarre premonition, but not impossible. (I also found it encouraging and kinda funny that there is a slider for gun quip frequency in the game. TOBACCO had posted about this game, and I’ve been torn by my desire for some tasty synth tones and my desire to avoid hearing Morty talk at me through a whole video game.)

I agree with Jason and Brandon’s sentiment against using No Ethical Consumption as an excuse to not spend your money or give your business uncritically. I haven’t spent money on anything from amazon for a couple of years, but I do still watch twitch streams. I try to support the local coffee shops in my town, but I know that the owners are young enough that these are some real Daddy’s Money^tm businesses. I work for a family owned business, but it’s really a Trump supporter family that bought their son a restaurant after he got out of culinary school; they doesn’t preclude them from running a business well and creating a positive workplace, which I think they have. I like getting deals on games, but there are some games that I’ve waited until they aren’t on sale. Dadish 2 and 3 come to mind; they’re really simple, breezy one button platformers about a radish made by a small, possibly one person, team. I know what I’m getting from them, and I like them enough to re-up for a whole ten dollars.

When it comes to game foods, I had a real good time last year munching on leftover guacamole from my job while playing Elden Ring. Salted tortilla chips are a pretty decent game snack, and my job makes a bunch of fresh guacamole daily that sometimes doesn’t get sold.