Imaginary Worlds - 10th Anniversary Special Part 2

Episode Date: September 11, 2024

In the second part of our retrospective on how Imaginary Worlds has covered sci-fi and fantasy since September 2014, we look at the world of gaming. I visit the game shop Sip & Play and talk with the owner Jonathan Li. Game designer and cultural consultant James Mendez Hodes returns to discuss the affect Stranger Things and Critical Role have had on the popularity of D&D, and why the last decade has been a golden age of indie tabletop games. Illinois Tech professors Carly Kocurek and Jennifer deWinter discuss the breakout video games in the last 10 years, and why it’s harder for indie video games to have the same success as indie board games. This week’s episode is sponsored by GreenChef, ShipStation and Hims. Go to greenchef.com/imaginaryclass for 50% off your first box and 50 free credits with ClassPass Go to shipstation.com and use the code “Imaginary” to sign up for your free 60-day trial. Start your free online visit today at hims.com/imaginary. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to Imaginary Worlds, a show that's been chronicling how we create them and why we suspend our disbelief since September 2014. I'm Eric Malinsky. When I cover different topics as a journalist, I often feel like an anthropologist who gets parachuted into a new country. I imagine myself talking with the locals and taking notes as I go. I try to write the most accurate report that I can, doing justice to everyone that I heard. And then I move on to the next land. But every so often as I'm talking to the locals,

I realize I like it here. I think I'm just gonna buy a house up the road and live here and become one of you. That's only happened with three topics for me, Doctor Who, LARPing, and Dungeons and Dragons. When I began my podcast, I hadn't played D&D. I know that sounds strange for a guy like me, but as I explained in my 2015 episode,

Rolling the 20-sided dice. I was not happy about being labeled a nerd as a kid. I was afraid of ending up in the bottom rung of the popularity ladder. So I tried desperately to fit in, which failed on many levels. And when I began my podcast, I decided to record myself learning how to play D&D at a game shop. Very nicely done. Describe your kill.

Oh nice. Alright, so it was a... I fell in love with role playing games. I mean I never really got comfortable with all the math in D&D, but what I loved was the way that the game brought me back to my days doing improv in Los Angeles, or my time doing theater in college and high school, or when I was a little kid and would play in the backyard. And when I made that 2015 episode about D&D,

I met a few people at the game shop that I really connected with, and we began a D&D campaign which lasted for years. In the last episode, we looked at how film, TV, comics, and literature have changed in the 10 years that I've been covering them. This time we're looking at the world of gaming from dice to video game consoles to the theater of the mind. When I'm figuring out what to eat during the day, sometimes I fall into the habit of thinking of myself like I'm a video game character.

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to get 50% off your first box and 50 free ClassPass credits. GreenChef, the number one meal kit for eating well. So yeah when you come in it's like our retail section. It's the first thing you see on the left. Several years ago a new game shop called Sip and Play opened in my neighborhood. I wanted to stop by and talk with the owner, Jonathan Lee. You'll see our tables, more games for sale, and then the very back and like the middle of the store. Jonathan opened the store in January of 2020.

When the pandemic hit, they were able to stay in business by renting board games to people who could play at home, and that kept the business going until they were able to open again. Jonathan is a lifelong gamer and I asked him if he had a crystal ball 10 years ago. What would surprise him about the state of tabletop board games today? The sheer number of games and the amount of like niche games and what they make games out of. I just recently played this new game where me and my girlfriend worked together to land

a plane and it's called Sky Team. And I just feel like in 2014, there was no concept like that. A lot of the concepts were, I guess, more generic. But now it's just like run of the mill, like random tasks that are just transformed into a board game. Like there's even like a board game that talks about, or how you play is more so, you work in a fast food restaurant and you're trying to maximize your points and orders and things like that. What do you think are the most important or popular or coolest, you know, niche board games that have come out in the last 10 years

that have really taken off and kind of become like a known thing. Two years ago, the super trendy game was Wingspan. It's a beautiful game. The coverage is like a dove. It's like a beautiful dove. And the whole game is just developing your little board of birds. And there's like a deck of cards with over like 100 cards. Each one's like a hand drawn bird. It's like absolutely beautiful. But had you told me like a bird game would be trendy, I would have never believed you. But this game was flying off our shelves. People were always calling us about it. And we always had to have one in stock just so people can find their bit of wingspan. Yeah. And it just seems like this just creates overall a really healthy kind of ecosystem because, you know, on top of that, you know, you could, you could be an indie publisher.

It's really hard to get people to know your book exists. It's really, you know, an indie filmmaker. I mean, you may never get out of film festivals, your film, but it seems like board games, you can have like a Kickstarter, you can have a huge fan base, you can make a out of film festivals, your film, but it seems like board games, you can have like a Kickstarter, you can have a huge fan base, you can make a lot of money doing it and have like this whole like world that's like it's limited but passionate. It's just so different than anything, even video games. It's really hard in terms of an indie video game compared to board games. Yeah, everybody wants to make their own board game.

I'd say every month we have a person just come in, hey, I just made this game, can I add it to your collection? These people have like no game design experience, but they make a game, they publish it, and then they reach out to us, which is kind of nuts. Now in this thriving ecosystem of beloved niche indie board games, there are still huge

franchises like Warhammer, D&D, and Magic the Gathering. I've done episodes about all three, and their relationship with their fanbases can be fraught at times. Wizards of the Coast, which owns D&D and Magic the Gathering, has an open gaming license which allows creators to adapt D&D game mechanics to create something original and make money off of it. Last year, the company tried to amend that deal. The backlash was so fierce, the company backpedaled.

One of the big controversies with Magic the Gathering has been their many partnerships over the last 10 years with other franchises. They produced Magic the Gathering cards with characters from Lord of the Rings, The Walking Dead, Stranger Things, Fortnite, Doctor Who, Transformers, and a lot more. And they aren't just novelty cards. By making these cards, these worlds became part

of the multiverse of Magic the Gathering. To be completely honest, I was on the side of like, this is really crossing a boundary for me in the sense of like, I play Magic the Gathering to kind of like be in that world, it's its own IP. The game just feels weird if you're playing and all of a sudden your opponent plays a card that's like from Fortnite or like from The Walking Dead and it's like not the same world, they made an announcement that they would reprint the cards in a more magic fashion. And it's not like you can only find this one

incredibly powerful card and it has to be a Walking Dead card or it has to be a Fortnite card or a Marvel card. In the future, they'll reprint it as a proper in the Magic world kind of card. What do you think is the power the fans have with the gamers have with like Wizards of the Coast? Is Wizards of the Coast, do you think they're more responsive to the fans than say like Disney is if they get a lot of complaints about Star Wars? Yeah, I'd say so. I follow Magic a lot, especially on Reddit.

And I think the reason why I feel like Wizard of the Coast is definitely pretty responsive is because they'll have representatives, everyone so I'll comment on certain threads where maybe people are complaining. Maybe they're talking about a particular card that's a little bit too strong. Recently they banned a new card that came out.

And they really respond to the fan base when they have questions. The fans and customers really learn like behind the scenes. And that's how I feel like Wizards. It's kind of like more on the grounds versus like Disney is like a giant corporation, I feel like. So it seems like the last 10 years

have been an incredible expansion of tabletop games. Are there any downsides to that at all? I mean, I don't think so. I feel like board games are for the better for that. The more games, the more people have to kind of draw from, the more niches people can kind of find that they'll like. I guess maybe the only thing is like you'll just have a harder time trying every single game in the world as they keep developing more and more.

A lot of role playingplaying games use game mechanics that are based on D&D. But in 2021, I did an episode called Re-Rolling Role-Playing Games, where I looked at a new crop of innovative indie games that are creating totally different systems that would encourage different types of player interactions. In that episode, I talked about a game called

The Quiet Year, which takes place after civilization has collapsed. The characters are a group of survivors, and the gameplay is structured in a way that fosters and challenges your sense of community. One of my listeners, Tug McTighe, was really taken with that episode, and he immediately knew he had to play The quiet ear with his friends. We played it about four times, the three of us, me, Matt and John, and my friend, Matt is,

you know, I've met all these creative people through my advertising years. So Matt's an art director and a killer designer and a killer illustrator. So he just got to drawing all of our, all of our ideas he was drawing. The thing that happens in role playing games is you think it's gonna be this cool, gritty world,

and then it's just goofball. It ends up being goofball, because you're yes-ending everybody. So did you, by playing Quiet Ear, did you then discover other games that kind of lead you down a rabbit hole of similar games? Yeah, so when you just start Googling stuff like a Quiet Ear, you get more.

There's one I found called Campy Creatures, which is like, it's just a little quick card building game, but the art is amazing. You're a mad scientist trying to capture teenagers and turn them into creatures of the Black Lagoon and mummies and all this stuff. I also played one after The Quiet Year, I bought it. It's a role play.

Maybe you've seen it. It's a role playing game that's at everyday calendar. No. So there's a story and then you pick your character, there's like eight characters to choose from, you pick your character and then you play as that character and every day you do a couple things. And there's dice rolling and keeping track and all this. Hold on one second, I'll tell you what it is.

Sure. Wow. Yeah, it looks like a combination of a D&D players guide and a calendar. Yeah, it's called Quest Calendar, and it's a tear off everyday calendar that is a role playing game. And you get the story the first week of the year and you read through it. Then you have a couple of characters you get to choose you choose from.

And and then just every day you do just a couple of things. One day you fight a monster. The next day you do just a couple of things. One day you fight a monster, the next day you have to go hire a boat, I hope you have enough gold, that sort of thing. And then just as the year progresses, you get the whole story. Oh my God, that's such a great commitment, you know? And people have these like, you know,

I wanna do one fun thing every day or something like that. Like that is so cool. Right, yeah, five minutes. Oh wow. Five minutes in the morning and you're done. Wow. In my 2021 episode, Re-Rolling Role-Playing Games, I also talked with James Mendez-Hodes. He just goes by the name Mendez. Mendez is a game designer and a cultural consultant on games like D&D and Magic the Gathering.

He looks at characters and worlds that they're developing and tells them what might be considered offensive or insensitive. He says one of the biggest changes in the last several years has been the use of the word race in games. For a long time when you create a character in D&D. You choose your race, but it's not a real world race. You can be an orc, a centaur, a gnome, a goblin, or halfling. Using the word race never sat well with Mendez. When I asked him what his biggest surprise would be if I gave him a crystal ball in 2014, he said it would have been the fact that these huge companies would be open to having that conversation and making changes.

The idea that that term would no longer be in parlance for the next edition of Dungeons and Dragons would have shocked me and warmed my heart. Now in D&D they use the word species instead of race. The other thing that would have warmed his heart in 2014 is seeing this healthy ecosystem of tons of indie games alongside the big franchises. Some of the most interesting design space, the presence of that weird stuff alongside the biggest fish, you know, like the remoras on the side of the great white shark or whatever, it creates a symbiosis. And I think the ability of like the niche space to talk to the big mainstream space and for us to like stay in community with each other,

like keeps everything fresh and keeps everything interesting. So have those big fish gotten even bigger? Like Stranger Things came out in 2016. And I mean, if D&D wasn't already mainstream enough, like, I think it got so much more mainstream and so much more popular after that. Is that just my imagination? Judges of Dragons and Magic the Gathering and other tabletop games have definitely gotten much bigger

steadily over the past 10 years, and starting in, I think, 2020 or so. So Hasbro, giant company, has this toy division, which was its main moneymaker for the longest time. And then on the side of that, they had also acquired Wizards of the Coast and they were doing some tabletop stuff on the side. And starting over the past few years,

this has been the first time that the tabletop games like D&D and Magic and them are making more money for Hasbro than the toy division. As I've talked about in my episodes on indie board games and indie role-playing games, modern technology allows entrepreneurs to create their own worlds, build fanbases, and make a living. But board games require a lot of shipping, to the point where you could just go into the shipping business and lose track of your creativity. ShipStation can take care of all your shipping needs. With their easy-to-use dashboard, you can automate shipping tasks, smoothly print labels, and manage orders. You can import orders effortlessly from anywhere you sell online, whether it's Amazon, Etsy, eBay, Shopify, or Squarespace. And you can save thousands on shipping costs, with discounts of up to 89% off UPS, DHL Express, and USPS rates. Over 130,000 companies have grown their e-commerce business with ShipStation, and 98% of companies

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in 2015. Critical Role is a podcast and a webcast. It's a D&D campaign where many of the players are voice actors in Hollywood, so they're really good at inhabiting these characters. The show is so popular and helped to inspire a whole industry of what are called actual play podcasts. The dungeon master or DM for critical role, Matt Mercer, has become one of many celebrity DMs. An older goblin, probably later in his years, a bit rotund, this kind of puff of gray, white hair that kind of sits at the back of the head in the front of it,

it's just bald entirely, liver spots in the face. How are you? You're coming to do business, aren't I? I have been surprised by the popularity of Critical Role because I can never get into it. I mean, it's not that the D&D campaign isn't fun. It's really fun. But I find it frustrating that I can't join in.

I feel like I'm a ghost at a party. I must be in the minority because there are so many actual play shows out there and they have very dedicated fans. I asked Mendez if he thinks they've been good for the hobby overall. I think actual play is giving people the ability to engage with tabletop role-playing games, even if they don't want to make up a character and act out at the table, I think that's fundamentally good.

It does change the way that a lot of new gamers interface with the hobby though. One thing that I've noticed from a lot of players who got into gaming through something like Critical Role, Dimension 20, something like that. They watch celebrity DMs, professional DMs, voice actors playing these games on camera, and they see the quality of acting, voice acting, improvisation in the media that they're consuming. And they sometimes set a kind of a unrealistically high bar for themselves for what they have to

do or should do to enjoy the game at their own table. By the way, I've heard that referred to as the Matt Mercer effect. Yeah, yeah, exactly. The Matt Mercer effect. It's very easy for us to get intimidated or to fall victim to imposter syndrome when we're exposed to that. And sometimes, you know, we end up creating barriers for ourselves. But I would rather that someone came into the community with that barrier that they

got to work through than that they didn't come into the community at all. In my last episode, we talked about how movie and TV franchises like Star Wars and Marvel had become so vast in their lore and world-building, casual fans could feel alienated. It's a tricky balance for the companies because a lot of the hardcore fans really want more of the mythology. Mendes says D&D, Warhammer, and Magic the Gathering are in a similar position, except you're adding game mechanics on top of learning about a lore that's already pretty complicated.

I worry a lot about barriers to entry. Like new players don't have that time and engagement necessarily in the same conversation that you've been having. If you talk to someone who's just there on their first day, the same way that you talk to your friend who's been playing at that D&D game with you since 1987, it can shut them out. A lot of new Magic players have this story of they were in their first game and they ran up against some pro who just shut them down the whole game. The more you load on them on their first day, the more likely you are to shove them out the door. Whenever I tell a a new person like, yeah, there's a lot of dice and cards and books

and like five editions of people arguing about editions. But fundamentally we are doing the same thing that we did as children on the playground. I mentioned earlier that there are two topics which I've covered that have turned me from a journalist into a fan or participant. And one of them was LARPing, or live action roleplay. The early LARPs were kind of like D&D campaigns that you could play with costumes and props outside the confines of a table.

But a version of LARPing from the Nordic countries came to North America, where you could have LARPs that are so immersive they feel closer to method acting than role playing games. But most LARPers aren't actors. They're not professionally trained to deal with whatever emotions might come up. Mendes says one of the big innovations in LARPing in the last decade has been the use of what are called safety tools. One of them is the X card, which was created by a game designer named John Stravopoulos. So we're sitting down to play a role playing game and we sit down at the table and I take an index card and I draw an X on it and I put it in the middle of the table.

So if at any point during the game something makes you uncomfortable out of character, if that happens, you can just tap or lift the card and then we all know to stop what we're doing, step back and pay attention to you and then it's up to you how much you do or don't want to

explain what it is that you need us to change, but whatever it is that you need to change to make the game comfortable and fun and safe for you again, we'll make sure it happens. There have been parallel developments in safety mechanisms in LARPs using symbols like in LARP, they sometimes have the green, yellow, red scale for indicating to each other, like, yeah, you should keep going with this, or maybe slow it down, or maybe stop. Another one that you see in LARP all the time is the okay check-in. So let's say that we're role-playing and it's like a really

intense, like it's a gangster game. Your character is like threatening or torturing my character and I'm like, I'm feeling all these emotions and I'm like crying and everything and you want to make sure that like you're not actually like scaring or torturing me in real life. You just make this like okay symbol to check in with me. And even as I'm role playing. Right, you just did an okay symbol with your hand.

Right. And then I can either say like, yeah, it's good. Keep going. Thumbs up. Maybe like keep it here. Don't go any harder or like- Wavy outstretched hand, yeah? Yeah, or like, no, I'm not feeling good.

Thumbs down. And based on what I signal to you, you know, like, yeah, I can keep running with this scary, scary scene, or I can adjust it based on what you need. And all of that happens without us having to break character any more than making a hand gesture. Games also have started building these elements into the design of the game itself. Let's move from the theater of the mind to the high-tech world of video games. I played a lot of video games as a kid.

As an adult, I did not play as consistently, and I mainly stuck with games that were adapted from something that I already liked. Alfred, have you got my location? Batman, Buffy, Star Wars, or The Simpsons. Girl power! When I began my podcast, I wanted to go deeper into this field. And look at these games that were not based on something else. Games that were their own original worlds.

I did a whole episode about the low budget indie game Undertale. I looked at choose your own adventure video games like Life is Strange where you have difficult decisions to make in character and your choices affect the ending that you get. Whenever you reverse or alter time, maybe you cause a chain reaction, even in the environment. I discussed open world games like Red Dead Redemption 2, where you get to live vicariously in the Old West. You did good holding your tongue in there. Do you trust one word that comes out of that bastard's mouth?

And during the pandemic, I talked about how cozy casual games like Animal Crossing were becoming really popular. Karlie Kocirak is a game designer and professor at Illinois Tech. She says the video game industry was already doing well before the pandemic. The pandemic's interesting because for a lot of industries, obviously, that kind of slowed things down. But for gaming, it actually accelerated, right?

So more people were playing video games, and that includes like mobile games and web-based games and all kinds of things, because, you know, people were looking for ways to connect and fun things to do, and games were one way to get to that. Eventually, the boom ended. The video game industry is now trying to figure out what is going to be the new normal. But the past decade started with something that was shocking for a lot of people. It was a fight over what should be considered normal in video game content and who gets to call themselves a gamer. Gamergate began in 2014.

It was an onslaught of trolls reacting against an increase of women making games and getting critical acclaim. They were enraged at the criticism that video games had sexist tropes or lacked diversity. They took extreme measures of harassment and vitriol to defend a world that they saw as being under attack. With almost every episode that I've done about a sci-fi fantasy fandom, I could easily

do a whole section talking about the trolls in that particular subculture, what they say they're angry about and what they seem to really be angry about. I just choose not to. But in talking about how video games have changed in the last decade, I have to acknowledge Gamergate. It was a huge deal and it changed the culture at large. Gamergate was bonkers.

Jennifer DeWinter is a dean at Illinois Tech. And if you were a woman working in games, like you were functionally a victim of this thing, woman gender nonconforming person, you were a victim of this. And we still see women talking about the ways in which they're driven out of the industry, or that they have to like join women only studios.

We still see the harassment of women in online spaces. It has not disappeared. So you have to keep on talking about it. Another dark aspect of the video game industry is crunch time. Employees at game companies sometimes have to work ridiculous hours to the detriment of their mental and physical health, not to mention their marriages and relationships. Carly says one of the big changes that she's seen in the last 10 years has been a more public acknowledgement of crunch time

and gamers really caring about this issue. I think we're having a real reckoning in talking about labor and labor rights. Like we're seeing unionization in industries that historically have not been unionized. So yeah, I think crunch is hopefully falling out of favor. Definitely I've been seeing ads for game companies that are just like, we don't do that. We don't think that's okay to do.

We don't expect that of you. We set humane expectations. And I think 10 years ago, that was glamorized where it's like, oh, it's so cool and it's so exciting. And you're like up all night because like things have to happen. But like, I often think like the games industry ended up with this, like worst of both worlds where it's project based the way a lot of film and television is, but with like almost none of the.

The union protections and none of the kind of guilds and things you develop to make up for the fact that everyone's working on contract and then like all the volatility of the software market where like you have full-time jobs, but like people are like expecting these bubble and burst cycles all the time. And like, that's so awful for workers. I don't know how people can really be innovative

in an environment where like they're constantly, like there's a sword over their heads. like they're constantly, like there's a sword over their heads. Ten years can be a milestone for a lot of reasons. But when you get to a certain age and you look in the mirror, you might think that's not the person I remember seeing 10 years ago. And if you're losing your hair, the passage of time can be even more striking. HIMSS makes treating hair loss simple with doctor-trusted treatment options and clinically proven ingredients that can regrow hair in as little as 3 to 6 months.

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Prescription products require an online consultation with a healthcare provider who will determine if a prescription is appropriate. Restrictions apply. See website for full details, and important safety information. Ten years ago, a lot of people thought we were on the cusp of a new age of indie video games. In fact, when I was a reporter at WNYC in 2012, I did a story about how modern technology was gonna allow people to make and distribute

their own personal quirky games. But Jennifer says, mergers and corporate consolidation in the entertainment industry and the publishing industry also happened in the video game industry. And not only were there mergers, but indie companies who had success were sometimes bought up by the big companies who had success were sometimes bought

up by the big companies. Or if a company had a surprise hit, they had to staff up and expand very quickly. Now as we heard earlier, that's not what happened with indie board games. But unlike board games, you can't create a prototype of a video game with cardboard and ship the final package to people in the mail. There's a lot of technological investment required to make video games, and you usually have to partner with a third party to distribute it, like the website and app Steam. The biggest change in the last 10 years is in fact the closing of those possibilities,

that all of a sudden, Joe Blow off the street is not making the next breakout multimillion dollar game anymore. Now you've got independent studios, but independent studios can be up to 50 people now. You've got the hyper-professionalizing of video games around these different distribution patterns again. the control of it, the monetization of it, like really streamlined back down in. It's funny though, because I mean, I made a list of all the indie games that I either have played or have heard really great.

That is Cuphead, Undertale, Stardew Valley, Stray, Hades, Disco Elysium, Citizen's Sleeper, What Remains of Edith Finch, Night in the Woods, Kentucky Roots Zero, Goose Game, Oxenfree. Like these are all indie games. Sure. So what do we mean by when we say indie games? So Stardew Valley, I think, is like, I'll take that one and I'll put it aside for a

moment because that feels like that early moment in indie games. One guy has a crazy idea and everyone's like, how did that take off? But a lot of these other ones were developed by studios that had track records, that had funding behind them, that were developed in professional or semi-professional situations, that had professional marketing prior to going up and hitting the market versus like these weird breakout games that people just accidentally discovered. And this is what we found like the mid aughts. Yeah, no, the indie game market is still there. But what we now call the indie game market

is a hyper-professionalized market. So their core competency has to still pay the bills. And many of these nano studios are just picking up other types of jobs between. So Steam was supposed to be democratizing with maybe some gatekeeping or is gatekeeping the issue? I mean, gatekeeping is always the issue whenever anything becomes big, right? So STEAM is part of that early indie explosion, right?

It's all of a sudden this open platform that allows people to have access to distribution that's digital. So they don't have to worry about brick digital. So like they don't have to worry about brick and mortar stores. They don't have to worry about the cost of that. They don't have to worry about the investment of that. But it was so explosive that they needed then a way to start curating the material on it.

Because anytime that anyone can put anything onto a medium then you're gonna get like weird fringe things. You're gonna get like offensive things. And I mean offensive, like horrific things hop on there. Hundreds of games would dump onto Steam a day. How do you even begin to go through that catalog to decide what to play? So then Steam tries on a whole bunch of different ways

to gatekeep that. They try to create codes of what is allowed and not allowed. And then the green light system has a, and I'm going to put it into air quotes, that people can't see a democratizing moment of like allowing people to vote for what goes on to Steam. But then you start paying attention to who's participating in this process, it starts creating a normative Steam-based player, which is the gamer. People who identify as gamers tend toward highly competitive PC games or Xbox games.

What we're then seeing is the silencing of voices that might be opening up space on Steam for certain types of games and groundswell of, and I'm not saying that these are bad games, right? But a groundswell of a type of game that you go to Steam to play. Karlie is more optimistic about the state of indie video games. Obviously, there's still gatekeeping with things like Steam, but it's easier to get your game on Steam than it is to get your game in Walmart. Like I can say that for sure, right? And so I think that's like let the industry make room for kind of some

experimentation and play in a way that would have been really hard to imagine if we hadn't had this move towards digital. And it's also really cool that you have, you know, people that are making games really independently, like on their own or on on shoes during budgets or in remote areas where they're actually quite geographically removed from most of the industry, and they can still circulate their stuff, find their community, like really connect with an audience. In fact, she was really impressed with a casual game called Cuphead, which turned out to be a breakout hit.

It's designed to look like a cartoon from the 1920s or 30s. Even though it's like not my favorite kind of game to play, I think it's really important just for like, instead of just going more and more photorealistic, what if you did something else, right? Like, what if you kind of go back into older media forms and play with that? I think that's really, really cool. In 2021, I did an episode about Disco Elysium, which is one of my favorite indie games of the last 10 years. It's a detective story set in a fictional European country with doses of film noir and magic realism. The detective that you play is out of his mind.

An inaudient amount of time passes. It is utterly void of struggle. No ex-wives are contained within it. I love this game because it was so strange. But it's not the kind of thing you can easily turn into a game franchise or adapt into a TV show. I do think though, like Disco Elysium, I do think the thing there that's like maybe replicable and it actually kind of goes back to why I think Cuphead is interesting is like play with art styles, right? Like there's such a tendency in games to be like the thing we should aspire to is like

photorealistic animation. But then they all look the same. Jennifer agrees. She has been delighted by this explosion of art styles in video games. Graffiti-like art or more Westernized anime type art, or some of them are like going back into medieval art and just kind of being weird and medieval and brush painting. And these technologies are allowing these game creators

to do 2D interestingly, 3D interestingly, and stay in an art style that is more expressive of an experience, an idea rather than always chasing like what is that next level of photo realism. There have been other positive developments too. I've enjoyed seeing how many games from big budget to indie games have been adding lots of romance options. In fact, the game Baldur's Gate 3, which came out last year was so beloved

because they had options for you to romance a wide variety and diversity of in-game characters. For a decade that started with the toxic masculinity of Gamergate, that feels to me like a nice break in the opposite direction. I'm really excited to see like the number of options that people can play in terms of like,

not even customizable characters, like pre-made characters that get to be different genders or gender non-conforming or different romanceable characters. And I think we're moving in the right direction. I think the industry has been more thoughtful about who all is playing and why they're playing. And definitely romance as a genre cannot be neglected in any medium, right? We're also seeing, I think, romance as a more normal part of large-scale games in general because they're kind

of trying to show more about the kinds of things that, the kinds of stories you can tell, the kinds of worlds you can build. And of course romance would be part of that. And despite her disappointment that the last 10 years didn't turn out to be a golden age for indie video games, Jennifer is actually quite hopeful about the next 10 years. What I'm going to find interesting about the next 10 years is that we've always talked about games that originate from like the US, Canada or Japan. And I think other countries are about to become major players in this global market. I think then we're going to start seeing like really weird and interesting things coming out of India, Pakistan, China, the African nations. They're all developing like their game industries in a way

that they have historically been disenfranchised from doing. And I'm really excited about that. I love to think that these innovative games which don't exist yet, made by people I haven't interviewed yet, are right now a spark of imagination in the back of somebody's mind on the other side of the world. I can't wait to see how it all plays out.

That is it for this week and for the first 10 years of Imaginary Worlds. Special thanks to James Mendez-Hodes, Karla Kuciric, Jennifer DeWinter, Jonathan Lee, all the listeners that I interviewed, and the many, many more people who wrote in. I really appreciated seeing all of your messages about the show and what it's meant to you. If you liked this two-part series, you should check out my 200th episode where I talked with more listeners and caught up with previous guests.

My assistant producer is Stephanie Billman. If you like the show, please give us a shoutout on social media. Leave a review wherever you get your podcasts or tell a friend you think might like the show. The best way to support Imaginary Worlds is to donate on Patreon. At different levels, you get either free Imaginary Worlds stickers, a mug, a t-shirt, and a link to a Dropbox account which has the full-length interviews of every guest in every episode. And there are new designs now in the Imaginary World's merchandise store on Tee Public. You can also get access to an ad-free version of the show through Patreon and you can buy an ad-free

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