08: My Horse Books

What's good, internet?

It is July 8th, 2025, and this is not the final match at the end of a nail-bitingly close tournament.

It's Side Story, a podcast about games and the stories we tell about them, presented by Friends at the Table and supported by all of our patrons.

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It would be great.

Joining me today, a returning guests, Keith Carberry.

Hi.

Andrew Lee Swan.

Hello.

I'm ready to have my moment where I recognize that my greatest weakness is actually my greatest strength.

I love that for you.

And for the first time joining us here on Side Story, Friends of the Table's own Art Martinez Table.

Hi, I'm Art.

um i was thinking in this morning i was getting like nerves because it's my first time on this show i was like when do you last feel that you were like on the pulse of of video games yeah and it's it's like at least it's maybe 10 years it's been a minute i'm sure yeah yeah It's like, I don't want to be like, well, Gamergate ruined games for me, but it kind of did.

Yeah.

Harder to be in the spaces in that same way.

Harder to be on the forms in the same way

There's a second thing too that we struggle with on run button which is that as time goes on there's less and less people doing real video game news and more and more people just fucking around on twitch and YouTube and so as someone who's not like in the industry It's really difficult to get like good reporting on what is going on to then talk about on our show.

Sure.

But I've spent that decade making like very close friendships with people in the industry.

And of course, Austin is, we've been friends for 20 plus years now.

Yeah, uh-huh.

Um, time is bizarre, and you've only gotten more and more

in video games.

I mean, now, now I guess you're not.

It's like, yeah, if you look at the chart, I'm on a downswing.

Though, I guess, actually, no, now I'm probably back on technically an upswing because of this podcast.

But I went, you know, there was a little while there after losing the job that it was like big downswing.

Yeah, you're lower than your peak.

That's right.

My peak, though, is it's a spider's jorg situation.

You know what I I mean?

Who else feels lower than their peak?

Yeah, 2025, lower than our peak.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Which today is an important, is maybe an important thing to think about.

When does someone peak?

When are they at their best?

Today we're talking about all of our favorite sports games, you know, like Pokemon and Uma Musume,

and then some other ones actually have like real-life athletes in them.

I guess, actually, wait a second.

Umamusume does have real-life athletes.

Real horses.

yeah they're real horses real human athletes right is that based on real horse i oh yeah i didn't do enough i didn't do enough research because we were going to do a stream and i was going to go in cold so i'm very cold on umamasume right they're real horses we'll get there we could jump right into that now if that's where we're and we kind of have stumbled into it uh umamasume dre do you want to set up umasume before we talk about pokemon yeah sure it let's see

what the umas yeah

so this is the horse girl umas sounds when you you say umas, I know that it must mean horse or something.

Yeah.

But it sounds like you're talking about like your great aunts or something.

You know what I mean?

Like in German.

Oh, my ummas.

My umasha.

Oh, it is so good.

Okay, so of the four of us, you're the only one who's been playing Uma Musume.

Okay, yes.

Is that right?

Uma.

Is that correct?

Uma Musume, I think it's nice.

I said Musume, sorry.

We have Musume.

That's right.

Musume.

No, Musume is right.

Okay.

As Art knows, because we were in Japanese together in college, I have never gotten emphasis right.

It's taught to you as there is no emphasis in Japanese and spoken Japanese.

Or they sneak it in at the end.

Say that again, Art?

And you're like,

well, I don't want to say like in your second year because

we took Japanese at a university that had a very bad Japanese department.

So when I say it was in our second year, it would have been everyone else's like second semester.

Right, sure.

But they tell you there's no emphasis just to like get you out of the English way of talking.

I see.

And then they're like, there is emphasis.

That's what I thought.

Yeah, of course.

Of course.

Which is funny because it's not that hard, I feel like, to teach, to tell people, like, well, you just put the emphasis on the different one.

Is that that confusing to college students?

I'm so bad at languages that it is that hard for me.

But telling me the opposite didn't help me.

You were taught the wrong way.

Like, intentionally, they told you the wrong thing.

So maybe if they told me the right thing, I would have gotten it better.

But I'm constantly fucking this up.

Even with people's names of people who I like hear all the time.

It is, it is very hard for me.

And I, and I practiced in school for tests and fucked it up.

So, like, I will continue to practice my whole life.

Uh, um, in any case, your umas, tell us about your umas.

What's up with Uma Musume?

Yeah, I'll tell you all about my umas.

Uh, so Uma Musume Pretty Derby is a gotcha game that is about horse girls.

Uh, it is made by Side Games, which are the Grand Blue Fantasy people.

Uh, I think their other biggest stuff is like they did Shadowverse, which I think is like a mobile free-to-play card game.

Yeah, I think that's right.

And Idol Master.

They're also the Idol Master people.

So they are specializing in anime girls.

Yes.

This is the first I'm hearing that it's pretty derby and not very derby.

It seems for the outside, it seems extremely derby.

Oh, I get oh, yeah, it's like a pretty versus.

Edit in a massive laugh there.

Edited in everyone losing it.

It's a head nod joke.

It's not our horse.

Is that a good take?

Is that a good take?

Yeah, that's great.

There we go.

Yeah.

Thank you.

They're like losing it for you.

Okay.

Okay.

So yeah, this game,

you play a trainer.

at an academy, which is about a high school, basically.

And this academy is for Uma Musume, or Umas for short, who are high school anime girls that also kind of have vague horse-like appearances and are named after horsebacks.

They have horse ears, right?

They have horse ears.

Some of them have tails.

Okay.

But also some of them have like hair that makes them look more like a horse in a way that's like hard to explain.

Yeah, okay, I understand.

Yeah.

Character design is

a complex and powerful field.

Yeah, for sure.

I mean, we can look at some specifics later.

Okay.

But yeah, so your job is that you basically train up and coach your your Umamusume so that she can achieve her racing dreams and become the number one racehorse girl.

And also when she have racing dreams.

Because she's an Umamusume, and that's what they do.

Okay.

Yeah.

Well, because they are horses.

They're horses, but they're people.

No, but I guess what I'm saying is they have the spirit of a

racehorse in them in such a way that that produces the dream of running.

Like a racehorse.

I think so.

I think that's the deal.

Also, Keith, they also want a race to win because whoever wins gets to be the main singer at the post-race concert that they do.

So it's also an idol game in a sense.

They're also idols.

In a sense, yeah.

In no gameplay that I've seen so far, do you do anything with the idol stuff?

Like, all it is is that, like, when you get first place in an important race for the first time, you unlock a new song and it plays the music video for you.

Yeah, that makes sense.

It's just a complex set of assumptions that being born a horse girl makes you want to race to win so that then you can sing.

Sure.

I mean, I guess we don't know that there aren't other horse girls in this world who don't go to the academy and go through this

pedagogy, right?

There is a character who's the secretary at the school, and it seems to be implied that maybe she is an uma musume who never raced but always wanted to.

Ooh.

And judging by the name, probably would be like the best ever racer.

Oh, that's true.

Yeah, it was secretariat because of secretariat.

He's the best horse ever.

Can you do the laugh again?

Excuse me.

Was it that one?

Damn.

Yeah, that's.

Yeah, that's fine.

Okay.

Ranking.

Okay.

Any questions about

the premise here?

No.

Well, I have questions about mechanization, but the premise makes perfect.

The premise is simple.

Inside of the, like, and I don't mean that, I'm not being facetious.

We're, it's 2025.

Game world where you train girls to do race is not outlandish.

No.

And they have animal features,

which I think is

part of the thing about this, which is like,

I think that the world has been perfectly prepared for this to hit as big as it has, to the degree that I'm like, yeah, okay.

I don't think that it's...

Well, let's keep talking.

Continue talking about what the game is.

Because this is the thing.

It's like,

thus far, I think everyone is like, I get it.

You have a character.

You do some racing, but like, I don't know that people understand what the racing is, or like, I guess, Dre, my question always is, what do you do in this game?

Yeah, so this is a horse

raising and honestly, breeding simulator first and foremost.

Uh-huh.

Now, what was that?

Why?

Why is that?

What's the name?

Breeding simulator.

Yeah.

So I should be clear.

There is a kind of idea down.

Hey,

can we just do a dub where I say horse raising instead of breeding?

Well, I guess I would say raising twice.

Breeding in there.

Yeah.

Because, okay.

So the way that

you or the gameplay loop is you start the career mode and you pick whichever horse girl you want to be your leader.

Now, wait a second, horse.

You skipped out.

I gotta, I'm not trying to hold your feet to the fire.

That is not the beginning of what you do in this game, presumably, right?

The first thing you do is you like open a gotcha ball and get a horse girl out.

Or did you start with a set of horse girls?

I don't remember.

Maybe you do start with the gotcha ball.

I can't remember if they have you do the first career mode, which is basically like their tutorial, and then the gacha, or if you do the gacha first.

But there is a my point being that like you're not just picking from a character selector.

No, no, no,

no, no, it is a gacha game.

And there's, there's two different character types that you're pulling from the gacha.

Okay.

Good ones and bad ones.

Well, obviously.

Waifus and not waifus.

No, it is the umos themselves, so the racers, and then support cards are the two things that you pull out of the gacha.

So you start by picking your Uma Musume that you won because you're a good person, and you pulled the Umamusume you wanted from the gacha because that's how gacha games work.

Yeah.

When you're picking your Uma, you're looking at a couple of different things.

So they have a favored track style, turf or dirt.

They have a favored race length, and the race lengths are sprint, mile, medium, or long.

And then then they also have a favored racing style which are front runner pace chaser late surgery or encloser all of these have a letter grade from f to s on them and obviously the better the letter grade the better they are at doing that type of strategy or that type of race um so here's where the breeding comes in is you pick two legacy or veteran umamusumes so once you've been playing the game you're basically picking uma musumes that you've already completed the career mode with.

I see.

And which of those, the two horse girls that you pick, they pass down both traits and skills to your career mode horse.

So that's where the kind of like...

Is that trait like a sorry?

These skills are

speed, stamina, etc.

So or skills, are these like special, are these things like when I'm in fourth place, I get a speed boost?

Yes.

So first let's talk about stats.

You have five stats, speed, stamina, stamina, power, guts, wit.

Yeah.

And those are just numbers that go up.

Those are just your stats.

Wit really comes into play for horse racing.

A lot.

Wit is important.

Is that like when do I use my cool skill?

100%, Austin.

Okay.

Oh, this is like racing IQ.

No.

Well, it is.

Well, that is racing.

It's sort of IQ.

Yeah, okay, right?

But it's not general.

It's specific.

Yeah.

It's about a skill, not about like

sort of.

So let me say the skills,

Austin, are basically what you said.

Most of them are things where in this specific circumstance, this thing will happen.

Some of them are pretty broad.

Some of the broadest ones are like, hey, if it's raining, your horse runs better.

The really specific ones are, hey, if you have a horse who is a pace chaser and is in the middle of this specific type of medium race, when you're on the corners, you'll get your energy back or you'll run faster, or you'll, you know, you'll speed, you'll have it, you'll accelerate better.

I see.

You'll have better navigational skills.

There are some skills as well that also will like basically make bad things happen to the other horses.

Damn.

Yeah.

Well, they're there.

It's not, you don't make bad things happen.

There's like RNG that happens during the race.

Okay, we'll get to the race part next.

Okay, so

you pick your horse, you also pick support cards.

The support cards also come in stats, and they basically,

what stat type they are, boost that stat.

So,

are the support cards like fancy hay, or is it other horses?

It's it's the horse girls.

It's the horse girls on support cards.

Um, and normally you cannot use the same horse girl on a support card that you have as your like career mode, it's just the same girl.

So, one girl could be okay.

So, it's not like there's a second class of support cards.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you're like the secretary, like you're never gonna race, but you could help this other girl race.

So, that's it.

So they do have guest cards as well that have like the secretary and stuff, but 90% of them that I have seen are the horse girls.

Okay.

And they also come in rarities from SSR down to R.

Right.

You know, because it's a gotcha game.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because there's no, because

we've moved past the need for comments and uncommons.

No, yeah, yeah, yeah.

No, we're just starting with Rs, and that's it.

Yeah, I mean,

who wants to get a C?

The school wouldn't let anyone under an R into the school.

That's where all the other.

The common horse girl is not allowed to whatever the name of this school is.

Well, or simply by being a horse girl, it makes you rare.

Oh, I see.

You've already been chosen by the horse god.

Dre, there's a horse god.

Well,

yeah, kind of.

Yeah.

This is like the only part that I know.

Yeah.

Okay.

So you've picked your character, you've picked their legacies, you've got your support cards, you start the game.

In career mode, you are basically doing training, which is you pick a stat that you want to level up, and they will do an exercise and then they will level up.

You run races.

There are some races that you have to run.

They're like your objective, like story races.

Different horses have different story modes in the career, which is nice.

Because they all like specialize in different things.

So they're running different races.

By winning races, you get fans and you also get skill points to learn those skills.

You also have to manage their health and their mood.

They can get sad.

They can get insomnia.

They can get sick.

And you have to take them to the school infirmary.

Are you a horse girl?

Yeah.

Aren't we all?

So this is like sports RPG plus Princess Maker.

Yes, 100%.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, this is, this is, because then when you get to a race, you don't do anything.

You just watch the race.

Right.

You don't like have to jump over obstacles, man.

There are no buttons to push or anything.

It's all like background dice rolls happening.

The owner of a horse, you just let the horse go.

If I tap the screen, it goes faster, right?

Like,

you know?

Yes, if you tap the skip button to skip to the end of the race, it will go faster.

If you hold it upside down art, I've heard it helps a lot.

If you're not going to be able to get a hold of the whole plug in a controller

tap down B as she crosses the fence.

I'm writing this down.

Write this all down.

This is going to be important for your career.

I mean, but it's not like there's like F1 management style games, for instance, Dre, where you obviously are not driving the car in that style, but you are saying in those games, like, okay, we're going to, you know, go ahead and use

your pit stops.

Do a pit stop or, yeah, go ahead, burn your extra booster on this lap or whatever.

you're doing kind of strategically but none of that is none of that no uh it is still very exciting i'm not oh yeah i i've seen all i've seen of this are northern lion clips because i'm on the internet uh and yeah he's been playing a lot of this uh and i've seen lots of uh very close races and lots of like oh is she gonna pull it out is she gonna like come from behind to win and it's it's yeah i get it it's exciting to see someone win a race or lose a race especially when like you're towards the end of the game and just six skills all trigger back to back.

And you're like, oh, I'm going to fucking take this whole thing.

This is over for everybody here.

My silent Sakura is about to smoke everybody in this race.

When you say towards the end of a game, you mean towards the end of a career mode?

Is that what you're doing?

Yeah, towards the end of a career mode.

So the overall loop of the game is you basically play career mode to level up your legacy and like what they call your veteran veteran Uma Musumez.

And then any character who's finished the career mode, you can then use to like stock up your PvP team.

And I guess that's like that seems to be the quote-unquote like in-game is the PvP because that's where it's like, you know, you're putting all your best horses and stuff.

So career modes.

Other people.

That's just against computer horse.

It is completely against AI.

So it is basically computer horse girls.

It is basically the career modes are roguelike.

Interesting.

Run-based,

procedural.

And it is RNG-based.

Yeah,

because it's RNG.

You can earn and build up to basically getting like

the other thing that happens with support cards is the more you like use them when you're training, you build up a friendship with them.

And when you max out your friendship, you can get friendship training, which is basically training, but like super strong.

But that's RNG, right?

So I see.

You can't, like, even if you're saying, like, I want to build, I really need to focus on strength right now.

But when I go to the strength training, none of my support cards are hanging out in the strength room.

They're all over here in the wit room.

There's like five of them over here in the wit room.

I don't need to train my wit, but if I train my wit, I'm going to get everybody's friendship up better.

And that will make it more likely that when I do train speed, I might get a rainbow friendship speed training.

I see.

Sorry, I've been paying, I've been knowing everything.

Should I have known what rainbow friendship speed?

no no

it means

it means it means

boost rainbow as long as i didn't like totally miss a section where that i should have just known what that no no no no there is a there is a lot more that goes into like the training and what you should train and when that i just kind of glazed over because it gets not complicated but it's just like finicky Yeah, it seems like it seems like, well, because that is where you're doing your decision making and stuff.

Yeah, if you get a game that's menus, the menus really have to have a lot in them.

Yeah.

And they do.

Absolutely.

Hey, the menus in this game, they're really fucking good.

They are pretty.

They are responsive.

Everything like loads really fast.

And that seems like so basic, but like, no, you're playing shit on yourself.

We're in a pre-destiny world.

Yeah.

Menus don't have to be good anymore.

No, post-destiny world, you mean?

Sorry, post-destiny.

Post-destiny world.

This is the way Keith said it.

Yeah, we're pre-back around.

We're wrapped around destiny world.

There's a future thing also called destiny that you guys don't know about.

No, we're going to reboot destiny and we're going to get AI Paul McCartney to write the songs for us.

Oh, no.

In a way, we're all pre-destiny.

That's just how destiny works.

To be fair, Dre, you did give us notes on another game you want to talk about later, and I summarized that note as to it's badass software.

So I know menus are important and sheen and polish.

Though

I am curious if it's like, I think a lot about it is this tweet from

internet user Doragon,

aka

progressive anime fan,

as Kotaku once called him, which was like, a lot of people say Riverdale looks good.

I think it looks expensive.

And

draws a line between like what production value means versus equally well funded, actually well composed stuff.

And I'm curious if this is menus look good and are are efficient and they work and all that um because side games has a billion dollars from all the other gachas that they run or if you're like actually no this just it's not just polish it's not just sheen it's like the usability like i'm not getting lost in these menus i have all the information i need to make interesting decisions etc

yeah i mean i do think I think if you have never played a gacha before and like you pull this thing up, you will be overwhelmed immediately because it is like a gotcha game and the front page of a gacha game is just a nightmare.

It's almost part of it.

Yeah.

No, it's yeah, it's part of the sickness is that you're like, oh, look at all these exclamation points that I can click on here.

And being confused sort of overwhelms your being disgusted.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, but if I can ask a question, certainly a company that's made a lot of money with other gacha games doesn't need my money now.

I don't think any of them need your money ever.

No, but they have been running Grand Blue Fantasy for over a decade.

So

to your question, Austin,

I think it is both like they want this game to be good and it looks like they have funded it.

And I think it's all, they have been running gacha games for a long time.

And so they've probably gotten a lot of feedback about like what people do or don't like about those menus.

And I'm sure some of it they ignore for dark pattern stuff.

I bet.

Yeah.

Well, and I want to come back to like the big gacha conversation because we'll be able to put it into context of something else in the second half of the show.

And I'm curious how it shakes out there.

So I just want to put a pin in that.

I'm not ignoring that we should talk about how the gacha works, but I want to be able to talk about it in that broader context.

Keith, you were going to say something.

Oh, just I just the word dark pattern brought something up in my brain, which is that I finally saw the Paul Rudd and Tim Robinson movie Friendship, and it was extremely notable to me that his job was developing those dark patterns for half-cause That's what he does in that movie.

Curse.

He says he at one point,

Paul Rudd is like, so your job is to get people addicted to products?

And he's like, we prefer the term habit forming.

Oh, absolutely.

Oh,

it's not good out there.

It's not good out there.

We did skip past the thing that you were trying to set up because we just kind of joked about it and moved past, but presumably during the career mode, you were saying you're also raising or breeding future Umas?

Well, no.

So basically, the career mode is at the end of the career mode, you like your horse retires because she's finished high school and she's graduating.

And then she goes into your like veteran pool.

And then you can use

it.

I have finished high school.

They didn't let me retire afterwards.

Well,

maybe Side Games just imagines a fairer world for us all, Austin.

I mean, we'd have to talk to your principal.

I mean, maybe you weren't good.

But after you retire, you still have to do PvP, which, Austin, I think you also didn't have to.

No, I've done PvP.

You retired from PsychP.

Yeah.

Yeah, we did.

I did a little PvP in my time.

Anyway, so where's the breeding?

Look how many there are already.

That's the legacy stuff.

That's the like the picking the skill sets and stuff.

Because when you, hold on, let me find a, I want to be able to find a screenshot of it because you'll see what I say.

Because when when you pick the legacy horse, it also picks what the two legacy horses for that horse was.

And it looks exactly like when you look at a horse breeding chart, if you're looking at like a race program in real life, like where it's like, oh, yeah, here's the, here's the, here's the mom, and here's the dad, and like, this is like their breeding lineage and stuff like that.

Cause that's a, that's a, that's like one of the things in horse racing.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

It's huge.

When you talk about my horse books, right, that I have behind me.

No.

Your horse books that you have behind me.

My grandfather was was moving out of his house into a smaller house and was getting rid of a bunch of stuff.

And

my whole family came over and sort of like picked over his library.

And one of the things that I found was three books of registered horses from the early 80s.

And I just have, it's got to be something like

it's got to be about 10,000 pages worth of horses.

Can you just open one for us?

Yeah, please.

Hold on.

Okay, I got horses from 1980.

This is the USTA sires and dams, the register from 1980.

They're called dams.

Are they called dames?

Madam Dams.

Yeah, I think they're sires and dams.

Just pick us a page.

Get us one.

Lady Brent.

Oh, so these are the dams, I guess.

Lady Brentwood, Lady Bridget, Lady Buckeye, Lady Bubba.

Let's get off Lady.

Get off a lady.

Lady's fine, but

Donelda Chips.

dinelda council

uh dorothy will do royal uh i don't think i will

eastwood applause eastwood gina eastwood

applause is pretty good edith barman edith bird these are real people sorry edith burr is just that's like someone's that's lucy's next door neighbor these might be

okay let's get let's go to the sires This is the table of dams, table of sires,

high blue,

that's good, hickey high, hickory adonis, hickory daredevil, hickory hill, hickory.

Are these all from like Larry Bird horses?

Persia one over.

Uh, are these bingo?

Uh,

Heather Speedster.

Oh, that's a good one.

I would bet on that.

I would bet on that horse.

Heather Speedster could be an uma, I think.

I'm looking at the ones here: Agnes Tapion, Heather Speedster.

That makes sense to me.

Uh, why, Dre, do some of them not have, Why do some of them have mystery horses?

Bamboo memory and nice nature.

Yeah, I guess maybe they just invented those horses.

Or

they're mystical.

They're out there.

Oh, I see what you're talking about here.

So these legacy horses get...

I guess I don't actually understand what I'm looking at.

I have no idea what's happening here.

Yeah, so this is the, when you pick your horse girl and you pick her legacies, again, you're picking from horses who you have finished the career mode before.

And so what's that showing you is that the one who's like

the main bubble is the horse girl you picked, but then the other two smaller ones are who like her legacies won

when she finished her career mode.

That makes sense.

I see.

And then those two are going to give your main Uma, who's above them and in front of them, in the image above them,

some of their skills.

Yep.

And so after 20 hours of this, you're slowly getting to really

high scoring Umas.

Yeah.

And that's like breeding.

Because I was going to be like, well, it sounds like you're just talking about coaching.

But if no, each new Uma is inheriting from the two previous one, like from two previous ones, and that's like you're breeding.

That's breeding.

And

here,

it's persona fusion.

It's when you map out your persona fusion skill from like, I'm fusing this, this fucking, uh what's the ice guy called jack frost i'm fusing this jack frost because i know later i'm gonna have to fuse the jack frost into the black frost and i'm gonna make sure jack frost has this skill so when i fuse it into black frost black frost will have that skill yeah

or breeding whichever makes us more comfortable

well it's also like egg moves in pokemon Right, well, I mean, there you go.

100%.

And I mean, I think I want to talk about Pokemon.

And one of the things that hit me recently was like, oh my God, Pokemon is a sports game in many different ways.

And I hadn't really considered that before.

Even though I think art, ever since we were in college, we've had the like sports games are RPGs argument.

You know, so it's like 20, you know, 20 years ago or whatever we've been saying that.

But.

You know, actually, let me just stop myself and do the thing that I promise I always try to do with the show, which is explain what a game is.

Pokemon Violet, obviously the most recent Pokemon game, Pokemon Violet and Scarlet, the most recent full new release in the series.

I think it's possible you've never played a Pokemon game before, and you know that it's the ones where you go and you collect little guys, little creatures, little monsters, and then make them fight for you.

It's probably worth

understanding.

It is a game where, yes, you collect dozens or hundreds of Pokemon.

Over the course of a game,

you have

kind of six slots in the single player mode.

You have six slots where you put your Pokemon in.

And then it's a turn-based RPG in the style of something like Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest, where in the single player, you generally have a single Pokemon out at a time, and they each have a set of four moves they can pick between.

That four moves is pulled from a list of,

I guess, probably dozens of moves per Pokemon.

And that bigger list of dozens of moves for Pokemon is pulled from a list of hundreds of moves across all the different games that have been kind of put together.

And so, it's not just that you have a Pokémon who is the Pokemon also have types, they're like elemental types like fire and water, but also weirder ones like Fairy and Steel.

And they can now have two of those types, and that even that gets more complicated in some ways, which we'll talk about, I think.

And so, the game is about having a team that's well-rounded and/or that has

a clear identity that builds towards certain sorts of

towards its strengths that covers all of your weaknesses.

You know, while you're playing through a Pokemon game, even in the single-player mode, you will tend to hit a point in the game in the whole story mode where you're like, oh shit, I realize now I have nothing that can stop a fighting Pokémon.

And now I'm at the fighting gym where there's nothing but fighting Pokemon, and I can like eke out a win, you know, against the first couple that the gym trainer, the fighting gym trainer has to throw against me, but I don't, I can't win the whole thing thing simply on, you know, kind of by pushing through with raw power.

I have to go refigure my team.

I have to go find a new Pokemon and level it up and try to make it strong enough to go do that.

Because each Pokemon only has four moves that it can equip at once, you're making lots of decisions about what to bring with you, not just which Pokemon to bring, but what special moves they have.

And then when you zoom out a little bit, each Pokemon,

and maybe I'll save this a little bit to get a little bit later, but like there's lots of variations even inside of what a Pikachu is.

Not every Pikachu is the same, right?

And then the competitive scene is like even more complex.

And again, we can get into that, but like very shortly, it's two Pokemon at a time.

Teams of six, except in the current format, you only bring in, you have a team of six, but then you pick four of those six to go up against your opponent's team.

And in most formats, you know what their roster of six is, but you don't know

what the which four they're bringing from that roster of six.

So, and you know roster that's a sports name right It's a sports word right there And I don't know what it is.

It's just like this past time You know, I started playing Pokemon Violet when I got the new when I got a switch to which I got when I was sick

and I don't know I there was something about thinking about playing through I played through Pokemon Violet

and it was specifically being like hey

There are all of these players.

There's all of these Pokemon.

You're getting a particular you're they're each full of different different roles You can have someone who is your, I mean, inside of the world competitive Pokemon, they're talking about sweepers, they're talking about like literally in

like

terms that feel like they're pulled from sports.

Um, uh, but then even inside of those roles, you have different individual types, which are like the individual Pokemon.

You know, um, Dondozo is just like a different, it might do the same thing as a different type of water-type Pokemon, but is,

you know, has its own subset of moves and its own special ability.

And then, inside of those, obviously, if you're following Pokemon at all, or if you've ever followed it a little bit and know how the kind of endgame or competitive stuff, or I guess even some of the Nuzlocke stuff,

there's all sorts of systems for further individualization for an individual Pokemon.

So if you have two different Pikachus and two different people played as them, and even just from the jump, they're going to be a little bit different.

Like they're going to have different things, different base stats.

They're going to have different stats that get little bonuses.

Different movesets, different held items.

Different movesets, different held items.

And then different, as you fight with them,

they will gain stats differently based on what you're fighting.

And all that made me like, oh yeah, I guess you're kind of building a team.

And then like the big breakthrough for me was like I started watching YouTube videos about competitive Pokemon because I was so Pokemon brained.

And I started...

realizing, you know, on top of it just being a big competitive esport, which by itself, you can start making sports comparisons.

The thing that I realized about Pokemon that's so different than, you know, League of Legends, different than Valorant, different than Tekken.

These are all games where you have to put in a lot of time to practice to become good, right?

If you're going to go to Evo and you're going to play Street Fighter, you better be in the lab, like 100%.

But in Pokemon, you have to go get your Pokemon.

You have to train them.

Even in Scarlet and Violet, where you can buy something that will change their nature or change their nature, is like one of the things that shifts their kind of bonus stats around.

Yeah, he's one of the the main things that people who are very serious are concerned about.

You can't just find the Pokemon you want.

You have to find it with the right nature.

That's right.

You don't just want a Galad, you want an Adamant Galad or a Joyful Galad because then its speed gets a boost.

You can see I've actually fallen into this pit because that's a real example.

That's a real example.

Adamant is a big one.

Adamant is a big one.

Adamant is a big one.

Is that the one that lets you survive a hit or something?

No, no, this is not even that, Dre.

That would make perfect sense.

Oh, that's right.

These are the natures and stuff.

These are just fucking natures.

Yeah.

Nature is just, you get a little more base stats.

You can max out your attack in exchange.

I think Adamant.

Adamant is attack and decreases special attack.

Special attack.

That would be good for Gallade because Gallade's is a fighter.

He's a physical attacker.

That's right.

Gallade specifically has a thing that gives bonuses to

not just physical attacks, but slashing type, cutting type attacks.

So really focused in on physical and not special attack.

Anyway, the point is like all of those special things things happen and like you have to go do that.

Even in Scarlet and Violet, where you can get items to change the nature or to set your EVs or any of the other like endgame stuff, there's still this like process of doing the uma musume thing of.

Like, I have to go get the damn horses.

In this case, Pikachu is the horse.

What if Pikachu was a horse girl?

That you would, you have to do the training to some degree.

I watched a video from someone who, and I think this is another thing that's actually very much like sports.

Some, some of the high-end competitive Pokemon players

say you decided say you're a high-end Pokemon player and you're like I want to try a new strategy for this next tournament

let's say you were like I need a I need a high-end Charizard I need a special attack focused Charizard

You could go get that special attack focused Charizard or today in 2025 You could pay someone to go do that for you you could pay your like Pokemon scout to go scout you up a Charizard with the statue want and that's not a thing that if you or i wanted to get into it tomorrow we would know who to ask for that we would know what we're looking for all of that stuff feels so like the difference between like a team that's willing to spend money on its talent and a team that won't do that you know the difference between uh you know i i'm a football person so like the bengals are are in the middle of not refusing to pay some people

what they deserve and they have a long history.

I know, and have a long history of not doing that, and also having bad facilities, versus a team that's willing to like spend.

I mean, let's go with the far other opposite.

A team like the Cowboys that not only will overspend on people, but will wait to the last possible second, allowing their rates to go up as high as they possibly can.

So, it's like, even in Pokemon, even the weird split between who has the money to prep a team is available.

And it just like kind of hit me in a weird way because, like

it leads to the cool stuff about sports happening,

which is that like you can have someone who's like, I'm going to bring back a player who was past their prime.

There are so many good stories about like, oh, this Pokemon hasn't been used successfully in six years, but this one player who you might think of as like a coach almost brought him out of retirement.

Like, and something shifted in the meta that it produced an opportunity that no one else had seen.

And all of that stuff is fascinating to me, even though I will never beat that Pokemon player.

Competitive Pokemon is wild, the stuff that's going on there because of how easy the game Pokemon is.

What do you mean by how easy it is?

Like to get a starter Pokemon in your starter town and play through a Pokemon game is like a very easy thing to do.

Like it is not a challenge to like train up a team and beat the Elite Four and then go, I beat Pokemon, roll credits.

But competitive Pokemon

takes Pokemon so far outside of what you would ever see in a normal game.

Like,

it's hard to even consider them the same game.

The contemporary mode for Pokemon is for competitive Pokemon is 2v2 matches and not one

matches.

It's doubles now.

It's doubles.

It's like the biggest

thing.

I think there probably are still singles, but doubles is where all of the world's best players are playing.

And that adds such a degree of complexity.

It allows for a lot of moves that kind of seem useless by themselves to suddenly be very valuable.

It really enhances the amount of strategies that are

on the table.

And it's part of what leads to all sorts of really fun stories around different teams and stuff.

I was watching Wolfie Glick, Wolfie VGC, I think, on YouTube.

I'll put a link in the description.

He did a video about bringing back this strategy called Parish Trap.

Keith, you're a Pokemon person.

Do you know what Parish Trap is?

Do you know what Parish Song is?

Parish, yeah, Parish Song is a.

I'm thinking of Destiny Bond, which is a move that when you use it and then you die, then your enemy dies too.

That's similar.

Which is amazing.

Yeah.

And I know that Parish Song is something like that, but I don't remember what exactly it is.

Parish Song puts the classic RPG in three turns, everyone who has heard this song will die on the screen.

And then there's Shadow Trap, which is a move that says,

it's an ability that says, while this Pokemon is out, the other team can't just pull their Pokemon out, can't switch their Pokemon using the Switch Pokemon action.

So, like, they trap you in there with the Parish Song.

And this is like...

It's a horror movie.

It's a horror movie.

And it has not been a successful strategy, but this one player loves it.

And so, like, found the moment to bring it out and, you know, brought it to a big tournament and, et cetera, et cetera.

And, like, all of that stuff is already really fascinating.

And then you add on top of that all of

the stuff of like, well, how do you even start to begin to prep for that?

And

it's cool.

I don't know.

I'm falling down the Pokemon hole.

And I wouldn't be doing that if Pokemon Violet still ran the way it did in 2022.

Did anyone here try to play that game?

Does anyone here?

Okay, Keith, I know you're a Pokemon person.

Dre, I think you're an on and off Pokemon person.

Art, i don't know you have a pokemon history i'm a mostly on pokemon person okay i haven't played like pokemon

poke poke

what

oh this almost for me now let's put that one okay all right okay uh

uh

because i support my friends i i took the crickets off my soundboard why i had to leave them there so i can play it for myself in moments like this

uh yeah i played violet when it first came out okay you played it on the switch with the

sure did.

Yeah.

I think that game's pretty good.

Art, have you, are you, have you, when's the last time you touched a Pokemon game?

The last time I touched a Pokemon game must have been

what came first, France or Hawaii?

France.

In the world.

France.

I played Hawaii.

Black and white knows X and Y?

X and Y.

X and Y.

I played both France and and Hawaii, not to completion.

Sun and Moon was Hawaii.

Yeah.

And those are still.

Those two loom large in the Pokemon mind share.

The last Pokemon that I saw credits on, assuming that Pokemon games have credits.

They do.

They do.

Was Red.

Wow, that's the first one.

I think that was me also until this.

I think I've always played them until

I have seven or like

six of eight badges or something.

How many badges is it?

Is it eight?

It's eight.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I got that right.

And then I like get distracted and fall off over and over and over.

I mean, I'm going to sound like a bad person here for a second.

Yeah.

But like once they want me to like do the plot, I'm out.

You don't care about team whoever.

Yeah, I just want to win badges

and go on with my life.

I mean, it doesn't help that most of the time the plot sucks.

That is true.

Yeah, I don't think it is helping.

I really was ready for the one that was about sports.

Was that

shield and sword and shield?

Yeah, sword and shield.

I was like, oh, cool.

They're just going to do one that really hits the sports angle.

They didn't do that.

And I fell off of it immediately.

They didn't?

Was there about climate change?

Wait, I thought Sword and Shield was in the past.

No, you're thinking of Arceus or Arceus.

I like saying Arceus, but I hear it's Arceus, and I don't like it.

Yes, I also prefer Arceus, even though I sometimes hear people say Arceus.

And I think that there was at one point a case that both were used officially,

but it has fallen towards Arceus, which I don't prefer.

Arceus cola.

Is this Aceus?

Oh, is Sword and Shield just in England?

That's right.

Yeah.

Sword and Shield.

And England's in the past.

Oh, England's in the past.

That is fair.

That's fair.

England is the past.

Well, it's funny because I feel like we've unfortunately, as now we're in 2025, I keep being like, ah, I think things were a little better just a little bit in the past ago.

Just not really far in the past.

I don't want to go that far back.

I don't want to go far back at all.

But a little bit in the past, I might go.

A little bit in the past.

Like 20 years?

No, sooner.

More recent than that.

Okay.

13 years.

Yeah, I'd say between,

I'd say the 2010s.

You know?

I'd say pre-COVID.

Right before COVID, I felt

kind of okay.

Is the, you know, back in the day,

the thing you do for time travel to get rich was from Back to the Future, you go in time and you get the almanac, and you go back in time and you'd bet who'd won the World Series.

Is that just like I'd go back in time and I'd buy Bitcoin when it first came out?

Yes, that's probably more effective than betting on sports, especially like no one's going to break your legs for being too good at buying Bitcoin.

I mean, they should, but

have I told my cousin's tragic Bitcoin story?

No,

my cousin Ted,

he's the exact kind of person who was on Bitcoin like so, so early, like as early as you could possibly be.

He was going to school and mining Bitcoin on his home computer

when you could do when you could just do Bitcoin mining with your

regular GPU.

Yeah.

And he ended up with,

you know, a couple Bitcoin, like a couple whole ones.

And he spent it when it was worth $63

to buy Brink.

the game Brink.

No!

At its peak, that copy of Brink could have instead been like $125,000.

Oh,

but

you could vault over low cover and Brink, so it's pretty cool.

You could vault over low cover and Brink, yeah.

Was that the multiplayer only game?

Was that Brink?

Yeah, it was.

Was Brink ahead of the curve and we just didn't know?

Brink sucked.

Brink, okay.

Brink sucked, but it also was was way ahead of the curve is that's true everything else is uh kind of sucks dude i warped at game stop when brink came out and that day it came out we had so many people coming in asking for refunds because the game sucks so bad wow yeah but it did but every game because brink sort of like took what mirror's edge did and applied it to a first-person shooter and now that's just like every game Well, and isn't that the game about like, all right, we're going to like, there's going to be like a slow moving tank that's moving through a level and you're like defending the level from the incoming like other team.

That's just Overwatch did it

five years later and crushed it.

Well, to be fair, Team Fortress 2 did it five years low earlier.

Of course, of course, of course.

Yeah.

Brink is kind of a TF2 plus

Bloom and vaulting.

Yeah.

But it was a class-based.

And we can't talk about it.

We all think back fondly on smooth movement across random terrain.

That's right.

I'm always saying this.

We're always saying this.

I'm sorry about your cousin Ted and his unfortunate.

It's okay.

He doesn't like crypto anymore.

Yeah, good.

I wouldn't.

But, you know, in 2010, it made sense to be like, well, what's this?

I'm a weird computer guy.

Let's see.

Oh, I remember this.

Yeah, I was writing

a thing that doesn't exist anymore

and was like, there's a new thing called Bitcoin.

It's weird.

What's going on?

We had to cooperate to never let my dad learn about Bitcoin or he would have gone insane.

That would have been bad.

Yeah, 100%.

um

sorry i looked at brink footage and have to my eyes have come out of my my head now uh anyway i did it i beat a pokemon game despite uh failing to do that forever and i i think it's you know we can probably have a bigger conversation with the state of modern pokemon but i think that violet it was pretty good in terms of you know art unfortunately there is a lot of story um but i think they do an okay job with it i think it drags in the middle because that's video game stories often, unfortunately, especially big budget, you know, stories like this.

But I think that like they really stick the landing.

Did y'all dre and Keith, did y'all beat the most recent set?

Nope.

This was my least favorite Pokemon game, and I barely got through any of it.

But I have played every other Pokemon game that they ever made to completion.

Well, I will say, like, part of this is it is a different game.

Like, they

committed to making a big, some big sweeping changes in ways that I think are

surprising, and it makes me very curious about where the series is going.

You know, it's an open world game that's actually an open world game in the sense of

you can go do whatever gym you want right away.

You'll get your head knocked off because it is not

the content is not leveled to where you are, which I know some people don't like, but I actually much prefer because it feels cool.

What What you could do is, you know, that like libertarian exercise that they tell you about in second grade where a guy trades a paperclip for a pencil and trades a pencil for a book?

You can actually for a movie.

You can easily do that in Scarlet if you want.

You can just like incrementally catch tougher and tougher Pokémon as you work your way towards the last gym.

Are you just describing Pokemon right now?

Yeah.

No, because Pokémon is like, is uh

is like content locked past story points.

You like can't get to the second or third gym usually without the stuff that you need.

So, like, let's say you can maybe physically make it to the third city, but there's a tree that you need to use cut in order to get past the tree, right?

Fight the gym,

and you can't teach anyone cut until after you've beaten the second gym, right?

For instance, right here, yeah, time and like the chance of you just getting knocked out if you end up in a fight you can't win, uh, are there as like mechanisms for slowing you down?

And there are a few things where you do need to have like your main, you have like a motorcycle Pokémon in this game, and you need to be able to like double jump or climb walls to get to certain places.

But generally speaking, you can just kind of walk the path and make it.

The other thing you can do is stand on a cliff that is in you know area one and throw a Pokeball to area three across a little chasm to get into a fight with your slightly over-leveled Pokémon that has a type

like a type advantage against a different one across the way.

I think I did, I think I attacked

a Talonflame, or not Talonflame, what's the lower level Firebird Pokemon, Keith?

The one right below Talonflame.

Or like the middle one, yeah, the middle, whatever that middle one was.

I can't remember.

I can't either, but with like a water Pokemon and Fletchnder, Fletchender.

Fletchender, which I like.

I like those ones a lot.

And I was able to get from one.

When the fight ended, I was over on the other side of the chasm.

I had like a real classic video game.

Like...

Did you mean to do that?

Yeah, I meant to do that.

I wonder if I can, if I can throw the ball from here to over there to, to, I was just trying to capture it, but it turned out I was able to get over there.

And then with it, I was able to win other fights and get other 10, you know, I was jumped from level 20 or like from 12 to 24 or something.

And like, okay, that's what I want to do in a big, weird, open world game.

I want to see Toast Break.

I want to do that stuff.

So the, the, the,

I really enjoyed Pokemon Arceus.

Um, not a lot of people did, did, I think, or it was kind of, it had a weirdly mixed

response.

I think people have come around on it a little bit now that they get that it's not exactly what these games are going to be going forward.

Though, again, I have some questions.

Right.

And there is this like thing.

They've been...

Pokemon has like two weird like trends that they've been doing.

Like they

will all they will come up with these gimmicks.

Every game will have a gimmick, and that gimmick be

either totally abandoned or weirdly unsupported going forward into the next games.

So, like, Austin, earlier, you talked about double battles.

Double battles were introduced in Gen 3 in like 2001 or something, maybe 2002.

And they like just sort of petered out into nothing.

And a huge, I'm not the biggest fan of like doing double battles in a Pokemon game, but a huge majority of Pokemon players enjoy double battles and like want there to be more double battles in the actual game.

I would love.

To the point where, yeah, like that's, that is where people who battle Pokemon,

who battle Pokemon instead of just play Pokemon are like inventing a double battle scene out of thin air for themselves.

And,

you know, now we're at a point where the thing that they're doing is like every year there's a new way to make Pokemon big.

Well, now they're big.

Now they're making them gems or crystals now.

Now they're making them big

instead of big.

Yeah, and that's it's not, I won't say that it's worse, but I can't, I can't say that it's not worse because I think the gems are so stupid.

I think they look bad, but I love them mechanically.

So you're talking about mechanically, I do like it.

Yeah.

Can you explain what

carrotsalization is?

Yeah.

So I guess the context here is, I would say, since Gen 7, there's always been like a new

thing you can do once per battle that is like a big deal.

Z moves and then Dynamax and Gigantamax.

This is the making the most.

Those are the worst too.

I don't like those very much at all.

Terrastalization

in those previous ones, those things, generally speaking, like really broadly,

let you do more damage and take more damage.

And maybe

this, by the way, is one of these two.

What was it?

Mega Evolutions.

Right, Mega Evolutions.

I forgot about Mega Evolutions, yes.

Which I also don't like.

Yeah.

Doesn't Terra styling also change your like your type?

that is what I was gonna say.

Yeah, so terrestrialization is that each Pokemon on top of its basic type.

So if you have Pikachu, Pikachu isn't is an electric Pokemon, but you can terastalize it.

And generally speaking, when you're playing through the game and you're not a pro, you're just gonna get whatever ones are there.

When you pick it up, it'll be like, oh, it has its regular type and a terrastalization type.

And that second thing is like, it could be electric, it could be a different type of it could be water, it could be grass, it could be any of the types.

And what it does is, one, it enhances your damage done.

It enhances your same type attack bonus, your stab.

So in Pokemon, if you have a Pikachu, believe it or not, Pikachu does extra damage with electric type moves.

That's like what the typing, that's one of the things the typing does.

On top of being, having weaknesses and strengths for things like resistances, it also boosts when you use an ability or an attack with the same type that you are.

So if you are a Pikachu and you have an electric type resist or an electric type terrestrialization, then wow, you're doing even more damage with your electric type moves.

But the other thing you would do is instead you could get one that has a different type.

So, for instance, let's say you have, I have a flying Pokemon named, oh boy, what is it called?

What is the, what is the cool electric bird?

Um,

Zapdos.

No, I mean, that is a cool one.

Uh, uh, electric flying.

Oh my god, I'm blanking on the new one.

Kilowattrill.

Kilowattrill is

this cool big bird.

I really like this bird.

And it's electric flying, which means it gets the stab bonus on electric moves and on flying moves.

And it's like an albatross.

It's like an electric albatross.

That's right.

And

it's a storm petrel.

It's a petrel is the type of bird it is, Keith.

It does get bigger than these, but you know, it is a water bird in that way, or like a sea bird.

But I haven't set it up to terastalize to electric.

Normally, birds are weak to electric, but when you terastalize it, you totally change the type to that type, which means it, in fact, resists that incoming electric attack.

Not only does it

even flying, it already would resist, not resist, but it would be neutral.

You're right.

That is actually a good example.

Or a better example would be if I had a Pidgey and had it Terastalize to Electric.

Or if I had a, you know, a Pokemon that would, a Pokemon that would, a fairy Pokemon, and I had it terrestrialized to steal to resist steel moves.

So that's like suddenly, and you can only do that once per battle, and it adds so much interesting complexity around it.

It does look kind of bad.

They do turn into weird little gem creatures, and they have stupid cats.

And they can stupid hats.

If the hats are so big, why are the hats so big?

What are they doing?

If you could not include the hats, I think it would go so much better.

I think it would look pretty.

I agree.

I don't hate the crystal as much as I hate the crystal with the hat.

Yes.

Yes.

But this is the sort of thing, like, they can't stick to what Pokemon is.

Yeah.

Because despite being the most successful thing of all time in human history, they like refuse to like develop

their systems.

They just like make a thing and drop it, make a thing and drop it.

And they're, they're developing these ideas of like, like, through all of these systems, they're trying to narrow, maybe they're trying to narrow, it feels like they're broadening, but like, they're trying to, like, figure out, like, well, we want Pokemon to be big, and we want them to be just not just what they are.

It seems like they keep wanting to put a little bit of Digimon into it and, like, trying to figure out in what way can this be more like Digimon?

Um, I don't, I don't understand,

and it sort of started with Z moves in Sun and Moon, yep, and

or in uh was that Sun and Moon?

I believe it was.

Damn.

Time.

Time is wild.

So, and Z Moves, I think, is the, is, is like my favorite because it's the least, um, it affects things the least.

It changes things the least.

I, conceptually, I like the terrestrialization because of it, the, it introduces, it actually introduces interesting mechanics instead of just like make you strong.

Um, but it looks so terrible, and and they've had such a bad track record with me personally of, of implementing these ideas and then banning them immediately.

Uh,

uh, like you used to have a little clubhouse that you could in an underground lair.

Where's the underground?

I don't know everybody goes underground.

I mean, man, I forgot the underground layer.

Every year, there's one of these things, but but for the last you know, five or six years, it's always been the same kind of thing, which is a new way to make them big.

And what I think back to is like when

I'm forgetting the name of the guy who is like the creator of Pokemon, like the originator of the idea.

Uh, But like he would talk about Pokemon like, yeah, this is me, you know, I remember being a boy, you know, going out alone into the woods and catching bugs.

And like, this is like sort of the heart of Pokemon, the core of Pokemon.

The beetle battling.

Yeah.

And the thing that I find about Scarlet and Violet is that it is this sort of culmination of this idea of like finally.

Finally,

the exploration isn't as abstracted like it used to be.

It's red and blue.

It's so abstract.

You're walking around in tall grass and then you bump into a Pokemon right and and and by removing the abstraction it has revealed to me how empty it is like it's so much emptier without all of the abstraction where it's like okay you've got this big world and everything kind of looks like this sort of like slightly less slightly more um

It's like an understated anime look is, I guess what it is.

It's not like super over the top.

And there's a bunch of creatures bumbling around, doing nothing, waiting for you to bump into them and catch them.

Yeah, there is no sort of like, um, well, this is the thing, it's like there never was, and so that doesn't bother me so much.

Like, I was never, I have never in my life felt when playing a Pokemon game that just off screen there is a deep ecological system because they've never modeled that.

It's never, I'd say this in contrast to something like the recent monster hunter games, which are all about trying to trick you into thinking there is a deep ecological system, because sometimes the two monsters fight.

You know what I mean?

And that's effective.

I actually think that you can play those games and be like, oh, wow, look, the Rathalos is here interacting with such and such a thing.

Like, they're not modeling hunger between the, you know, there is not a systemic model happening in that sense, but there are

depictions, representations of an ecological system moving.

And so that has always worked for me in some way, or since they've been doing that, that has worked for me.

Pokemon has always felt like the game where i walk around until i fight a guy who you know was generated for me to fight uh even when that's true but when you when you've when there's all this layer of abstraction over it then you know whether you can either

you can either live in what it's not showing you or you can live in the in the cartoon and you can be like well i'm just doing the 8-bit version of the cartoon right uh and the the less of it they show the easier it is to not care at how little little there is operating underneath in terms of right and in terms of any sort of systemic system.

It's like doing a magic trick, but all of the panels are clear glass.

Where it's like, like before it was totally obfuscated, it wasn't, it didn't feel deep, but you couldn't see what was happening.

And now it's just sort of like, well, there's no more random battles.

You can see that the Pokemon are just standing there, and they are just standing there.

You don't get forced into

trainer battles anymore.

so the thing that Pokemon was about was like navigating these places where trainers were trying to challenge you.

It is now an opt-in system where it's like, it just feels like it's jumped by a Pokemon sometimes when you're trying to like walk a place and someone just fucking runs into you and you're like, I'm trying to get to the auction house.

True.

Stop attacking.

But when you've removed the random battles as part of a game, then suddenly when you do get hit with a battle you weren't expecting, it's so much more annoying.

See, but I like that.

That is the friction I like.

Instead of I'm walking forward and I know that every seven seconds I'm going to get, but I guess really the thing is, I've played enough of the other game.

I'm excited to try a thing that is trying something different.

What I do think that friction hits for me, and I cannot imagine having played this game on the original Switch, is like so much of the presentation is slick in terms of you finish a gym battle and you get this really fun, flashy, you know, pose and photograph with the gym leader or with the head of the Team Star, the team in this game.

All the menus have a certain sort of polish, but like you go watch how that game ran on the original Switch and it ran like shit.

And I do think that that,

to me, was like

20p at a stuttering 20 frames per second.

At best

play at best.

I've played this game.

I have not played it on a Switch or a Switch 2.

Even on a Mystery 3rd console.

I played it on a Mystery 3rd thing.

Yeah.

The game came.

It ran at a solid 30 frames per second, but there was also some crashing and some

weird graphical glitches.

So I want to say that I had a better experience than a Switch one, but I can't be 100% sure.

I definitely had a more solid frame rate than a Switch 1.

I would say that I bet you would not still like it.

I think that your problems with this game are more foundation.

What is your mom paying for that school where you get there and they just go, yeah, go on a Pokemon adventure?

Well, you come back for class, I had that same feeling where I was like, Bro, is that it?

I thought there'd be a whole school arc.

They tell you, you have to go out and have your Pokemon adventure.

You're like, Well, what am I supposed to do?

And they're like, Ask somebody, ask another student.

What are you talking about?

I'm your teacher.

What are you asking me for?

They're there to tell you how to make sandwiches and

how to take photos.

This school looks like it costs $50,000 a year.

Oh, way more.

You don't know what schools cost, Keith.

What's that?

You don't know what schools schools cost, is what I just learned about you.

I mean, look at it.

Look at it.

I mean, this is a this school.

No, no, no.

Art means information.

No, we're like, it should be way more.

Yeah.

Oh, $50,000 a year for an elementary school.

$50,000 a year for a private school anywhere.

I went to private school, and I know how much my private school is.

It's not like that anymore, Keith.

It's more than that.

It got way worse.

I don't have a kid, so I'm only talking about what I've read.

It sucks out there.

As someone who would not seriously consider sending my child to private school, but would like them to go to preschool, I can tell you that

there are preschools you can't get into.

I'm looking up right now, I'm looking up what the current Zeverian Brothers High School tuition is so that we can see.

Zaverian Brothers High School, $28,000 a year.

And does it compare to the Pokemon School?

I bet it doesn't.

It's a

Pokemon, but I doubled it, but I doubled it.

But my point, my point.

But the Pokemon High School isn't a cathedral.

Also, it's not even a high school.

There are 40-year-olds who go to that school.

You fight them all the time.

I don't know what's going on.

I think maybe I didn't play enough to see the 40-year-olds.

It was me and like the very pushy, slightly older girl.

Yeah, no, out in the world, some of the trainers you bump into are like, my man, you pay for insurance for your kids' car.

Why are you in a school uniform?

Yeah.

And

truly, learning those schools.

You're right.

Ash Ketcher just goes out into the world.

Yeah.

In this one, your guy, he tells you that you go to the school and they're like, okay, go out into the world like Ash Ketchum did.

Yeah.

And it's very.

There are classes.

You come back.

There's midterms.

There's finals.

You didn't even get to the midterms, it sounds like.

It could have been online.

Oh, my God.

I would never go to online Pokemon school.

Oh, that sounds awful.

You have to pay a million dollars for

pay it, but what's playing Pokemon is online Pokemon School.

What's the Pokemon that turns into different electronics?

You have to do this.

It's a nightmare.

Yeah, you'd have to get some special Rotom for your online Pokemon.

Rotom used to be special.

Why is he everywhere?

The Rotom is now your phone, and you just have him with you at all times.

And that feels like hell for me.

I would not want to be someone's phone.

And I wouldn't.

It's also like the cell processor.

Y'all remember the Sony cell processor and the promise of what that was?

Of course I do.

In the PS3 era.

In the PS3 era, Sony has a big vision.

Dre, correct me if I'm wrong about this.

I'm going to age a Rotom in my digital locker so bad, bro.

They were going to put the same sort of chips in all of your consumer electronics.

So in your PS3, but also in your refrigerator

and also in your Sony Vio computer.

And that cell processor, they could network and work together.

And of course, another place these are going to get used was missiles and other sorts of government and military uses.

This is part of this special cell architecture, cell chip architecture, was part of why it was so hard to take advantage of the raw power that was in the PS3 and it's part of why the PS3 had no games.

It was part of why the PS3 was like all of its ports came out weird because

also why the PS3 could run Linux because the government needed to have it run Linux so it could hook it up to its military instructions.

It's true.

And so it was hard to program for a PS3 because you had to be like, well, there's no refrigerator functions in this.

Turn all those off.

Is that what you're telling me?

Which is like, if you're building a computer for a refrigerator, you have different priorities than for the machine where you're going to play the Nathan Drake murder simulator, you know?

And like, suddenly, the programmers have to learn all the tricks of the refrigerator chipset.

You know, it's hard to do.

You're used to making one for a computer, you know?

It was a real problem.

Anyway, Rotom is like that, because you can load the rotom into like your washing machine or your microwave which changes its type to like you know ice or or fire respectively and that's a nightmare to me i don't want i don't want my poor rotom i want i don't want a pokemon who is just my phone that feels invasive to me i don't want to talk into it's like if keith your job was to like stand next to me and i talked at you so art could hear me yeah that sounds bad it's also very flintstones It is.

You know what?

It is very Flintstones.

What if the next Pokemon moves towards Flintstones?

It's a living.

Yeah.

Anyway, the last thing I do want to say on this, and we'll take a break and talk about other things.

Pokemon is in a weird place because, you know, we've kind of gestured.

It's been trying to find a new identity.

On top of this game being a weird, different open world game, which, by the way, has a really sick ending.

I think the ending is fantastic.

Like the whole final, like two hours is excellent.

You should look it up, Keith, just to see what's going on there.

I've played played every other pokemon game

to stop now uh put the whole earth in a pokeball

you know and then it zooms out and the dog is wearing that pokeball on its on a on its harness and then it's zooms out again you're in a locker in a gym yep the and then will smith shows up and flashes your memory yeah and he's like you can't yeah uh-huh um and he slaps you the next you all we could have died you could have died the next thing oh my god shut up

we can't be on this earth anymore the next two big pokemon things coming out are another Legends game like Arceus, except this one takes place in Pokemon France, in Pokemon Paris specifically.

And I'm curious if that, it seems like that's taking the Arceus stuff and pushing it more towards the Violet stuff in some ways in terms of like, I don't know, actually.

It just seems like it's a more fully featured combat focused game than Arceus was.

And then secondly, they're putting out Pokemon champions on mobile and Switch.

And that seems like where competitive Pokemon is going.

And I have big questions around that because part of what makes Pokemon such an interesting and difficult thing, and Keith, I think this is part of why every few years they introduce a new core mechanic, which again is a very sports game thing to do.

The truck stick was here and then it was gone.

QB vision cones were here and then they were gone.

And like for a few years, this thing is going to define the game, supposedly, and then it's just gone.

But I'm curious to see the Pokemon Champions has shown both Tirastalizing and Dynamaxing, I want to say, or

mega evolutions or something like that

in the same thing.

And so, like, are we getting...

And again, the thing is that to make a game like this, where you have to support competitive play and you have to make it feel fresh and new, but also a lot of your players are just playing the damn single-player game.

That seems like it pulls you in different directions.

And so is RC or sorry, is Legends going to become the primary,

this is for single-player people who want to play a game where they get their little Pokemon and run around and then champions is going to become the platform for competitive serious Pokemon play and also are they going to do the fucking are they going to gotcha us with the Pokemon champions here's my gut instinct just based on being in the Pokemon soup for a long time Pokemon battle people fucking hate Nintendo and hate Game Freak and if they're putting out their own hey you want to play come come play competitive Pokemon on like our actual thing and they will say no we like our fake emulator thing that lets you do whatever you want they like the sprites they don't like animations yeah but they will official tournaments are all on the damn real game yeah that's true it's like smash brothers but but the but what actually happens in tournaments is so much

uh it's the least amount of pokemon that actually happens for for a lot of these people i think i don't know that i don't know that that nintendo saying we're making a game for competitors will work i'm curious like that's what i'm saying but i think more importantly for me is like what's that mean for what the rest of pokemon gets to be if for the next few years their strategy is okay this is the competitive pokemon game it's weird because they all because the games already aren't catering towards competitive players almost at all No, but the scene is huge.

The scene is now way bigger than it once was.

So I don't know.

I'm very curious.

And also, they've seen such a lot.

I've also not seen a lot of champions at all.

There's like nothing it got announced alongside the gameplay reveal of Legends.

Um, and I also bring it up because Generation 10 has not been mentioned at all yet, basically.

So, I don't know.

We'll see.

I don't know.

Let's take a break and then we can talk about other sports

other than Pokémon and Horse Girl, the two, the two main sports.

Finally, my revenge.

All right.

All right, we are back.

Hey, Art,

how much, what's the percentage of time we played sports games together in college?

Oh,

35 to 40%.

Yeah.

This is your percentage of your time.

I think together or your overall college kind of I think together, but you know, I did cut a lot of classes in undergrad.

There was a lot of playing tabletop games for I was never really cutting classes to play like, you know, Tiger or,

you know, Madden or any of the other sports games we were playing.

I was mostly cutting to play L5R or D ⁇ D or the other tabletop games we were playing at the time.

I'll tell you, I forgot to count Tiger Woods, but I still think the numbers about ready.

You were mostly counting NBA Street and Blitz the League.

Oh, I loved Blitz the League.

Yeah,

or just just like chilling and watching you play the Madden career mode for whatever years those must have been.

Well, yeah,

that was my one football game ever was Blitz the League.

I forgot about Blitz.

Were you playing the one where you could do steroids?

Where you had to do steroids?

I remember mostly like you could grab people's masks and throw them.

Okay.

Helmets?

Helmets, I think you call them.

You do call them.

Yeah,

this one was like the tie-in with the ESPN series.

about doing steroids.

I don't know.

Was it actually part of the tie-in to the ESPN show or was it a different thing?

Oh, it's just a coincidence.

I think it's a coincidence.

I think we were in the middle of there being two things at the same time about how, you know, nightmarish football is slash could be.

God, remember when ESPN would air content that was critical of the NFL?

Oh, oh, wait.

No, that was that show was called Playmakers.

Yeah.

Unrelated.

That's right.

Yeah.

Oh, okay.

Okay.

Unrelated.

Yeah.

Okay.

The coincidence is that they were doing something that was also about telling a story about the NFL or a fake NFL team, you know, a fake football league about things like drug, you know, steroid use, drug use,

injuries, et cetera, at the same time that Blitz the League was hitting and was about that style of thing.

Anyway.

Sports games, I think, were a thing that even at the time in like early, the early 2000s, when we were playing those games, I think we were both hyper-aware of the fact that we had friends who thought, and Keith, we weren't friends yet, but I know that you were kind of like this, that sports aren't good.

Sports are a waste of time.

Sports are caught up in,

you know, cultural systems that had bullied us, for instance,

because of our nerdish ways.

I would like to just kind of maybe start broad, which is like, Art, what is your defense of sports and sports games to people who I don't, I don't think we probably over-index as a superb owl sports ball, you know, listenership.

Um, but I do think that there is still some lingering, and in fact, I think it's on the I think it's on the way back.

I think we kind of pushed that out for a few years, and I think the way the wave is coming back towards us, yeah, not least of all because

all of the deeply compromising parts of professional sports in the world-whether that's FIFA corruption or CTE injuries in football or

the explosion of sports betting throughout the world or specifically throughout America, throughout the US,

has

really emphasized all the negative stuff.

But I'm curious from you, as someone who plays a lot of video games and who is a huge

nerd, is a big comics guy.

What is it about sports that makes you excited?

Why do you like sports?

And what's up with sports games?

Why are you, why is some of the games that you have kept up with over the years been sports games?

Sports are cool.

uh sports are fun to watch okay

uh sports is or sports is sports are great at generating drama

and and providing stories yeah um

each game has a story each season has a story and these are things that are easy to like take

from

you know seemingly disparate

events you know the the player who's struggling the bottom of the of the ninth inning you know the the way that sports tells stories is good and fun

for you know me and you know everyone else who likes sports

and

i mean more than that uh it's really fun to like go to uh i was gonna say

it's for sports that are fun to go to which is to say um for me baseball and basketball and i suppose i understand the appeal of going to a hockey game

Soccer very fun to go to.

I am out.

I'm not as sure because you're outside the whole time, no matter what the weather is, and they are often in the summer.

Isn't that also football?

I don't listen to

that.

Football is in the fall and winter.

And I did not list football.

Sorry, I saw you have left football behind.

Thank you for not listing football.

I have left football behind.

And even when I was a football, I

would not

go to a football game.

yeah you know a football enthusiast okay i thought you meant like oh hey i'm a football

for all of twilight mirage art was a football that's right of course

um but like going to a football game has never seemed entertaining to me at all it's um

i meant i went once and it was miserable it was absolutely miserable yeah there's a lot of downtime in a football game that they cover very well on TV and a lot of information that is way is given to you on TV in a lot like easier ways than in person like in terms of like down and distance and stuff like that

go to going to dodger stadium having a hot dog and watching shohe otani and mookie bets a plus can't beat it this is tough for me because i i already i was already a hater during the pokemon the section that i that i like uh-huh and so i'm trying to temper myself for sports you are a hater No, yeah, just be a hater.

You're allowed to be the person you are, which I think might just be a hater.

I spent a lot of time as a hater.

It felt great.

That's why I kept doing it for a long time.

Look,

there's a lot of valid targets.

This is true.

Yeah.

I'm not going to pretend that sports leagues are good or even that all sports players are good.

These are all things you can't do.

You have to go to sports and be like, well, you can't think almost everyone involved in this is probably a Republican.

Well, yeah.

You can do a lot of reasons if you want to free to.

Yeah.

But I think, you know, I I think the interesting, the thing about sports, though, is that like I love games and sports are games.

Yeah.

And

one of the things that is confusing to me about which sports are popular and how popular they are is how interesting of games I find them to be compared to the other games in my life versus the general population of America and how interesting they find those games to be versus the games, the other games in their life.

I find football to be a uniquely uninteresting game.

Yeah, I have heard you argue that football has no strategy.

I have heard that.

That's insane.

That's insane.

It's such a shame that baseball isn't more popular.

What a good game.

Hmm.

As a game,

it is easily the most interesting game of all the sports.

I don't.

I don't know.

Because it's like, okay, football, throw the ball, catch the ball, run to the line.

Basketball.

Basketball.

Yeah, that's all that's going on in football.

Pass the ball, shoot the ball.

Throw the ball, catch the ball.

Yeah.

I think, no, I think, see, hold on.

That is all that's going on in football.

Yeah, 100%.

It happened, and I went.

I just went to the bottom.

Well, look, sometimes we say things we don't believe.

I don't really believe that.

Okay, okay.

So you don't have to argue against that.

I would love to know what the context to that was maybe i misspoke or maybe i was just being an asshole you were probably committing to the bit you were probably committing to the bit um but you know and you were being comparative certainly you were saying like in contrast to other sport it's basically just moving the ball down the field

it is that though i'll see no it's just oh

okay so i i can i can sort of piece together maybe an argument that i would make and have made about like baseball and people saying that baseball is slow and and boring, which I don't agree with because I do think that baseball is the most interesting game of the major professional sports.

Where,

like, baseball is asynchronous, there's a lot of like very specific tasks that very specific players are like trying to get done, and that's true in football too.

But it is like there is this, as in soccer, has the same thing where it's like everyone has their task and it's a part of like moving where the ball is up and down the field.

And there's a symmetry to it that I

find mostly uninteresting.

That you're not interested in, sure.

I, yeah.

You know, my instinct on this is that like any of these things, if you have a high level of literacy, you start to be able to watch it in different ways as a spectator, right?

This isn't an argument that makes it a bad sport or a bad thing to watch, but it is one that makes it to me an uninteresting game, like the mechanics of the game.

Yeah, that's fair.

Yeah, totally.

Again, and I, I, for me, it's like all of these things start actually pretty uninteresting.

And then it's when you start, for me, baseball was uninteresting for most of my life.

And then I started to wrap my head around the sort of duel between the pitcher and the batter and the history of what types of pitches are being thrown and all of that.

I still don't love fielding.

right?

I still, I might love a particular play.

I might love to see someone make an incredible catch or an incredible throw.

But for me, the mind games of a stolen base, the mind games of what sort of pitch sequence might appear.

That's where the

stolen base is back.

Come on, guys.

Is that not happening these days?

No, the stolen base is back.

They already brought the stolen base back.

They're bringing it back.

They're bringing it back.

Where'd it go?

I mean, where'd it go?

Yeah, where'd it go?

Did they outweigh it?

Or did it gone for a long time?

It was gone for a long time.

The money ball era of baseball.

Okay, I see.

So baseball has several eras in terms of like statistics.

Sports do this.

Sports have erased.

It's probably worth saying this.

If you don't follow sports, there are metas in sports in the way that there are for something like a fighting game or Dota.

Yeah.

And baseball's metas are defined by what statistical model

people find true.

I love the way you phrase.

Sorry, to be clear, you're saying the ones that are in vogue, not the ones that are true, but the ones that people have adopted to be true for some period of time.

And if you've, if you've seen the, if you've seen the, the, like, the famous clip from Moneyball,

oh, where it's like, where they talk about, oh, he gets on base and they say that over, and like, what's he good?

He gets when I point, like, well, you want me to talk?

Yeah, when I point at you, he gets on base.

Um, for so long, that was the like,

and it's still true, but like, on base percentage became the big thing you need your guys to get on.

In contrast to we have a person whose job is to make, to get us points, we have someone who's good at, you know,

catching the ball, whatever.

There was a development, which was all that actually matters is this smaller thing that we're underappreciating, which is on base percentage, right?

Right.

Um, that like batting average is nice, but on base percentage is more important, right?

Batting average is the percentage of at batting average is the percentage of at bats where you get a hit, right?

On base percentage is your percentage of plate appearances in which you get to reach base safety, right?

And that shift happened and then dominated the sort of discourse of baseball play for a decade or something, right?

And then I don't have part of that, part of that

idea.

What's the word for a set of ideas?

Ideology, philosophy, ideology,

none of those are quite right, but part of that strategic ideology was that

the stolen base is bad because the benefit of moving a runner from first to second is less good than the bad outcome of having someone who got on base become out.

Okay, sure.

Yeah.

And that changed

recently with two

changes.

One was

they made the bases two inches bigger.

Whoa.

So you're technically running less.

Yeah, to prevent collisions is the actual reason, but the bases are slightly closer together and it's slightly easier to evade a tag.

And still

touch the base to get on base.

Right.

They also introduced the the pitch clock, which says the, which is the amount of time the pitcher has to throw the ball, which makes it so they can pay less attention to the runner.

And they also put a cap on disengagements.

You used to be able to throw to first base an unlimited number of times

to keep the runner closer.

And now you can only disengage two times per bat.

So if you throw over twice and you don't get them, if you throw over a third time and they are not out, they get the base automatically.

Oh, they treat it like a bach, basically?

Yes, it is.

I think it is literally scored as a balk.

Which sort of means that you can only throw over once because

you really don't want to waste that second one.

Right, right.

Yes, that is, that is what the, that is what the meta for, yeah, to use the term we're using here has become.

And the first year they implemented these rules, uh, Ron Lakuna Jr.

stole 70 bases.

And last year, famously, uh, Shohei Otani hit 50 home runs and stole 50 bases in the same season.

That was the first time that's ever happened.

I did not hear that stat.

That's great.

It's unbelievable.

Yeah.

We love him.

He seems to be a bad guy.

He seems good at

baseball, that Shohei guy.

Yeah.

He might be good at football too.

He's been again this year.

It's been great.

How easy it is.

Oh, he's pitching again.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

How easy.

He's only pitching a little.

Do you think it would be to get the Dodgers to change their colors to red so that he could be in a red uniform again?

Very, very hard.

Sounds tough.

They've probably never done that, huh?

They call their stadium Blue Heaven on Earth.

I think what's kind of interesting to me is like the stuff we're talking about,

there's kind of like big changes in the kind of meta of a sport.

I think a lot of basketball here, where we've seen huge change in the last 15 years towards the three-point shot,

a change in the way defense works because of regulations, changes on what counts as a foul,

a move towards certain sorts of ball movement and maneuverability, the uptick of things like the Eurostat, like all these little moves that have changed the character of play.

The thing that's interesting to me is like, then you have to go play a video game about it.

And the video game one, I think it, no, no video game I've played that is a sports game tries to project forward those sorts of shifts.

It kind of like puts, if you're playing a franchise mode and you're playing for 30 years, it doesn't do the thing where like, ah, yes, the three-pointer kind of ebbs and flows as a central mechanic in the world of basketball.

It just kind of is what it is.

But, like, it's, in some ways, the thing that happens that's strange to me is like, sometimes

the thing that has become the real life strategy first emerged in the video game world where that sort of play was lower stakes.

Like, building the three-point team was available to you in 2007, playing NBA 2K7,

or the intense focus on passing the ball that has happened in football where the running back until maybe last year had been like very badly diminished

was reflects the sort of move in Madden you know towards towards past first offenses because they're so much more efficient per play or whatever if you're successful at it

and and what I would I'm curious if either if any of you have ever played something where that sort of shift happens inside of of the game i know i know y'all play nba 2k i know you uh two of you play mlb the show

like did any of this stuff with stealing bases show up in the show this year has it ever shifted in that way across a multi-year campaign uh the show

try does keep up with rule changes but it doesn't like anticipate how they shake out like the pitch clock is the pitch clock the pitch clock must be in the pitch clock is in

the the the throws to first is in it has that changed you do you get the experience of like, oh, I can now steal, I can like bait out the

engagement so that I can because so that I can steal?

Does that work?

Every time I'm playing MLB the show, I'm stealing bases.

Okay.

So never not stealing bases.

And

it didn't make me steal bases anymore or less, but I was always doing that because I

hate

Art.

What you were explaining before about like the sort of post-money ball,

like stat-obsessed baseball thing of uh like there's a million different stats that that every sport is into these days but uh but specifically the change away from batting average to on base percentage is like this the the

the thing that bridges

those two eras batting average to on base percentage is like

uh a way an even greater exaggeration than already existed on the home run

uh and like uh on base plus slugging which is the the

when you when you hit for multiple bases it has its own stat that is like above like a

you know like if you like for batting average if you hit it's a one and if you get it and if you strike out it's a zero and then they average all of those out to get your batting average uh if you get a double slugging is a double is two a double is two so you can go like say if you only ever hit doubles

you could have a higher than a one batting average, which is obviously no, you could have a higher than one slugging.

Right, sorry, slugging, yes.

And I just, I have,

I just feel like the home run ruins baseball when it's the only thing anybody cares about.

Sure.

Yeah.

Yes.

And, and so

the thing that I've always done in the show is I tried to play out my favorite kind of baseball, which is

a small ball base stealing baseball.

Yes, Keith is describing the three true outcome

philosophy, which is which is what he is saying he does not like, which is the idea that you're at the plate and the three things that you can do are walk, strike out, or hit a home run.

Yeah.

The only thing you can do that doesn't involve someone besides the pitcher.

Right.

But like there, there are players who's like, there are players who say, like, that's a three true outcome player and it's like all he can do is hit the ball very hard, right?

Strike out or walk.

And I mean, of course, it doesn't, that's not real.

You will always hit the ball and not hit a home run.

But, you know,

I think that this is right.

There's a John Boyce video called Adam Dunn has the weirdest career in MLB history, which is.

Oh, yeah, Adam Dunn's a real.

That's a yeah, it is a that is a video about like how he's the three true outcome player.

It's a great video.

I really like John Boyce, obviously.

Well, I guess maybe not obviously, because I hate sports.

Do you?

Because you were just saying some shit about Slayer that I think was

extremely sports.

Sorry,

in order to communicate my cultural dissatisfaction,

I have to keep saying that I hate sports even when I talk about this.

This is a Cathago DeLinda-esqued style rhetorical position.

Carthage must be destroyed.

I think my answer to your question about the games trying to reflect the future or even their failures to reflect the present is, especially in baseball, is in pitch framing.

Does this mean something to you?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Pitch framing is really interesting.

Tell me about pitch framing.

So in

real baseball,

you know, the pitcher throws the ball to the catcher, and if the other guy doesn't swing, the umpire decides if it's a ball or a strike.

Balls and strikes are opinions of guys.

Right.

Yeah.

Sure, yeah.

They have the technology framing to actually scan it, but that's not what we do, just to be clear.

Yeah, we're not doing it, and no one in baseball seems to seriously want it.

We have a person named an umpire who stands behind the guy who catches the ball and says whether or not the ball that came in was in the area that's called a strike zone.

That is supposed, you know, sort of represents, hey, this is like about the fair area where a batter could hit the ball successfully without it being outside of their natural range of motion.

Crucially, about is true because it is a soft line.

It's not a hard line, which is very frustrating.

And the weirdest thing is it's also a three-dimensional shape.

I think the weirdest thing is not a three-dimensional shape.

It also changes in shape and size based on the batter.

This is why when you see that he goes from the knees, the knees to the center of your chest.

This is why when a

like a team is losing really bad and they put like a position player in as the pitcher and he lobs

ephes pitches and it looks exactly like a ball but it because it's also a strike because it falls through the top of the strike zone and out the bottom of it it's sort of like playing soul calibur 4 and you see your enemy your your foe your your uh opponent that's the word picked yoda and you're like motherfucker you're too short All of these hits would hit if you were Mitsuruki, but you're Yoda, so I'm missing with all these horizontal slashes.

I have to do vertical stuff.

Otherwise, it doesn't hit your small ass.

It's like that, except there's a baseball player involved.

Right.

So pitch framing is the catcher's ability to fool the umpire into thinking a ball as a strike.

Right.

Catching a ball in a way that it looks like catching a ball and moving your hand to the strike zone quick enough that the umpire thinks that's where you caught it.

It's lying.

It's really funny.

And it's really funny.

And this is perhaps the most important thing a baseball catcher does.

They've like statistically analyzed that, like, the best hitting catcher is less valuable than a catcher who can effectively turn balls into strikes.

That's wild.

Yeah.

Is that

the show, the video game?

Not at all.

Not at all.

I see.

So in the game, there's no lying.

There's no deception.

Yeah.

Okay.

That's.

And so.

Players who are like the best catchers in the real life are not that good here because they can't.

They don't represent that in some abstract way

that's like oh i'm sure they have like good fielding stats but it doesn't do it doesn't turn balls into skills that's what i was wondering because like you could imagine a world where their quote-unquote framing does adjust ball position or something on its way in such that

at the last second it cuts in or something but it doesn't do that yeah now this sounds like it's like a problem with the umpires union if i'm being completely honest like

they don't want to present them as fallible people, of course.

Art, this is, this is, I'm glad that you

thought of the pitch framing thing because it's,

it is obviously a huge part of baseball, but it reminded me of that there is kind of an answer to this question of projecting the future into the game, which is that

by default, I think that the

umpires are fallible in NLB the show.

There is this sort of like

you can get a bad call on the edge, but you can turn that off and just make the machine do it perfect.

Yes.

This is something that I think will eventually happen in baseball.

The way that there is that for, for instance, off sides in soccer or something that like the machine can just tell you if you're off sides or not.

Yeah, I'm so curious if we're ever going to get that in baseball for real.

But

yeah.

Well, they tried it in spring training this year and they had like a limited number of challenges, but if your challenge was correct, you kept it.

Right.

And the interesting thing is that hitters were about 50%.

50%

at saying, wait a second, that was a ball, not a strike.

Right.

They were 50% at getting

their challenges right.

Pitchers were lower and catchers were higher.

That makes sense.

That makes sense to me.

Yeah.

Honestly, I would have guessed that pitchers

would do better than hitters.

No, because they're not there.

They have a a better angle.

They're so far away.

Yeah, but they threw the ball, and it's also lower stakes.

Like for a batter,

missing or getting a bad call is huge because you only have three chances until you have to wait nine more guys.

But a pitcher is like, he could be throwing 40, 50, 60 pitches.

Sure.

Yeah.

You know, who cares about one pitch?

So it's.

I think part of it, and we're going to have to wait because at some point there's going to be really good advanced statistics about pitch challenging.

But I think part of it is that pitchers can get more

invested and they can get more emotional about specific investments there is a lot of baseball that's dictated by pitchers being emotional oh yeah that's a big part of it yeah i mean to bring it back to where how we started um

baseball players are racehorses That's so true.

In fact, okay, well,

it brings us to the other game that I know.

Y'all have, what do you go?

Give me your case.

Give me your racehorse case, and I want to pivot.

They're just very temperamental.

they're very much about vibes you it's not good if they break their ankles

um

unlike most people where it's great

well speaking of breaking people's ankles nba 2k uh

really actually what i want to talk about is career mode stuff because when i think about the history of video game sports when i was a kid the definitive mode until about when we were in college in the mid-2000s art was like the franchise mode franchise the season mode but like you know or the the madden games the basketball games okay you have a team you're guiding them from year to year you're gonna generate some fake players after all of these players are retired certain games would give you uh entire kind of uh layers of management simulation on top of like team management like uh brand management on top of player management and play management like what what's our stadium like?

How much money do we charge for hot dogs?

For hot dogs.

Yeah, dude.

Like, that was a huge part of what the franchise mode.

That's still here.

I believe it, but it's not what anybody.

The ultimate team took franchise away from us.

I know that's how we're going to be able to do that.

That is where I'm going, actually.

100% that's where I'm going, which is like the

mode at the time was that.

And then in the mid-2000s, I would say one of the NFL 2K games and then Madden following sort or following after.

And now, of course, all of the basketball games too.

And I don't know about the MLB games, I'm curious.

You can tell me, but like, there was this introduction at the time of this, like, well, wait a second, what if instead of playing as the team, you played as one player and you're playing your character's journey, and it was like an RPG, and you slowly got better.

And, you know, the first of these, these are single-player experiences, largely.

You know, you're playing your wide receiver, your quarterback, you're playing, you know, your outfielder or your, you know, center or your power forward or whatever.

And, and, you know, eventually they would have like Dre, we were just streaming the NBA 2K game fairly recently that has the spikely story mode.

Madden had long shot, which was a story mode.

But behind all of those over the last 15 years or so, the thing that has been slowly becoming the definitive mode,

modes, I'd say the two modes that are definitive, franchise mode gets replaced by

ultimate team via FIFA, right?

Or what is now EAFC or whatever it's called,

which is instead of having a fictional or having taking control of a real team or building a fictional team and playing them against the computer, you have a multiplayer mode where you've built your team using gotcha cards of real life players that have gotcha style stats and ratings.

I mean, sports game characters already have those sorts of stats and ratings, but the gacha ones really opens up some possibilities.

And then the my career mode, especially with NBA 2K, where you have one player and you're grinding to increase their stats and etc.

I have not played any of these, any of the my career stuff.

I've touched a little ultimate team, but not in probably a decade.

What is up with My Career mode?

And I would really like to, you know, the thing I said earlier about

Musume is like, I know it's a gotcha game.

I'm very skeptical of it for that reason.

I'm kind of,

Janine's not here, and I don't want to misrepresent her position, but her position on it was very much like, we have been doing this style of cute anime girl waifu shit now for long enough that it's like some of the sheen is wearing off or like repeating the same tropes, etc., in such a way that like it's just not hitting the same anymore.

But I am curious about a thing that I think we've now been saying probably for a few years too is like, hey, why don't we ever talk about these my career modes when we're complaining about gacha games?

Not to say we shouldn't complain about gacha games, but like the call is coming from inside the house.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I think like sports games in general have just been like the Vanguard in the worst sort of way for like microtransactions and monetization in games.

Say more.

I mean, just like you said, imagine the listener who is not engaged with this stuff at all.

What is my career mode or my player mode?

Sure.

So, okay, in 2K, the my player mode, I think, was first introduced in, gosh, like 2011, 2012, I think.

I didn't double check it.

That seems right.

I'll double-check it.

You keep talking.

Yeah.

And it is what you said, Austin.

It is, you know, you start out as a kind of like, depending on the game and the various story modes, you basically start out at the beginning of an NBA career.

Maybe you start in college, maybe you start in high school.

But it is, you are starting from the beginning and you're building your dude up and you ideally are like leveling your stats as you play games and things like that.

And that's really all the original like My Player mode in 2K that I remember was.

It was very much like you play the game, you level your character.

you know you're doing the career mode blah blah blah it has been expanded to where now in 2k my player is almost more multiplayer than single player um because they have they're like multiplayer they they call them like part games and rec modes, I think.

But basically, where you're playing like you know, two on two, three on three, five on five, but everybody is a player, right?

So, like, I'm controlling my player, Austin's controlling his player, Keith's controlling his player, Art's controlling his player, and all four of us are playing against another team that has four people all playing as individual players.

It is very cool.

Um, right, right, what you just pitched sounds awesome, it sounds sick, yeah, right?

Why aren't we doing this?

And the answer is,

so the answer is that

the biggest answer is that

they have turned MyPlayer into a place to just get money out of people.

So to level your character stats in MyPlayer now, you use the same currency, which is called VC, virtual currency.

They have the currency.

You use VC to level your stats, to buy clothes,

to buy animations.

No,

I guess in some way, it's better that they only have the one currency because that's one of the the fun ways that gotchas gets you is by having like five different fucking currencies.

You have to trade in all of your dribble dollars for crossover cash or whatever, yeah, yeah.

Um, and over time, they have made it so leveling up takes longer and longer and longer because you can also just go buy VC.

So, for instance, in 2K25,

um, the consensus seems to be it takes about 200,000

VC to rank your player up to 99.

That's $50.

Okay.

Well, that's, I mean, when he said 200,000, I thought it was going to be worse.

No.

Well, I mean, you know, again, this is the gotcha math, right?

It is.

I'm paying $50 for 4,000 win-wham wobbles.

Right.

Of course, it's all nonsense.

The MLB of the show equivalent is much,

the ratio to dollars to

stubs is much tighter.

Sorry, they're called stubs.

What is it called?

Why is it called a stub?

I don't stubs.

Like a ticket stub?

Yeah, I have to imagine it comes from ticket stub.

It's a ticket stub thing.

Okay.

Yeah.

So that's

in my in my player mode, you have one character?

Are you trying to have like a center?

This is God.

This is where it gets even crazier is you usually have one, but you can have more than one, but you have to re-level them from the start.

Like none of your stuff carries over from like if you start a different character.

So people who like play 2K, that's all they play.

Because there are people who do this with sports games, which I think is also partially why this shit has gotten so bad and nobody talks about it, is that sports games are pretty insular.

They're like incredibly popular, but very insular.

It's the stereotype of the guy who just buys Madden and Call of Duty every year, right?

But both of those games sell gangbusters because of that guy.

Anyway,

yeah, you'd have to do it all over again or pay $50 again.

So in other words, if I wanted someone who was like focused on three-point shooting and then someone else who was focused on like intense under-the-rim defense, that's two different characters I have to get and level up.

Yep.

And how long would it take to level them up like without spending money?

So when I looked around and read it, the consensus seemed to be the fastest way was to play through seven seasons of your career mode.

Do you want to know how many games are in an NBA season, Keith?

You play every one?

I guess so.

Can you not?

Yeah, I don't think so.

You don't get VC for simming.

I'm like 90% sure.

And also, like, the better you do, the more money you get.

Or the worse you do, the less you get.

Right.

The harder difficulty you play on, the more money you get.

But if you fucking suck and like you're a level 65 overall, it doesn't matter if you're playing even on easy, you're going to miss half the time.

Right.

So

I think that some

is where I'm coming from.

Football has like 20-something games in a season.

Is that right?

That's not 17.

17.

Baseball is like a number of 80 plus thousand.

180,000.

That's right.

180,000 is the number of baseball.

They play several games a day.

They play several games a day.

Sometimes multiple games an hour.

I would say maybe football has like 60?

You mean basketball?

You mean basketball?

It used to be about 60.

It's 83?

I always forget if it's 83 or 82.

82.

It was 80,000.

82.

There was also a game that doesn't exist that exists now, or a set of games that don't exist.

Oh, that's

the play-in games, yeah.

There's games that exist.

The mid-season tournament and the play-in tournament counts.

The mid-season tournament is just real games.

That one counts.

Yeah, that's true.

They count towards your postseason.

But the play-ins, yeah, Keith.

So it used to be.

Yeah, let me make sure I get this right.

How many teams used to get?

Baseball has the game.

Okay, so they're playing in baseball?

They made the wild card round decision.

Okay, so

do those games count statistically?

Because they don't in NBA.

I think they would count as your postseason statistics.

They don't in the NBA.

They're not playing games towards your postseason.

They do not count.

Yeah.

So

let's say that you were two three-pointers away from breaking the all-time three-pointer record and you didn't get it in your final game.

Then you got it in your play-in game.

That would not count towards breaking that record.

You just didn't do it.

And I believe.

You had to play again next year.

You'd have to play again next year and try it again.

And let me tell you,

it's so hard to do anything historic in that way.

It's just funny to me.

And like, the games that you could have, like, an all-time game, it doesn't go anywhere on your stat sheet.

It's just ephemeral.

And so, what are these games for?

Why do they play?

Wouldn't it be funny if they came out and just parted around?

No, these are, do you make the playoffs or not?

You're on the edge.

And so, instead of letting

the four lowest button most, yeah, it's like wildcard.

It's like wildcard games, except they're not full series the way that they would be if they were in a real wildcard round.

So, yeah.

Well, the MLB wildcard round is now a best of three where the top-seeded team hosts all three games and they're played on consecutive days.

They've tried to.

Jesus Christ.

They expanded the playoffs and they're like compromised so it didn't last as long.

It's like it's just going to be three days.

Can I say this?

Baseball players work too hard.

Yeah.

If I was

dictator of professional American athletes play too many games.

If I was dictator of baseball, I would cut 100 games out of the season.

That would be my first act.

That would be

how many many baseball games are?

180.

Oh, that's a lot.

It's 162.

It's a lot.

That's a lot of games.

That's a lot.

I would go down to 100.

Let's start with 100.

Let's see how 100 goes for a couple years.

This is my first move as baseball.

I would start by going back to 154, which is what it was the last time they expanded.

Can you get 150?

Yeah.

Can I hear 150?

I want singles.

Oh, I got it.

I got it.

I got it.

I got it.

I got it.

151.

Each one has a Pokemon, an original Pokemon associated associated with it.

Oh, in the World Series, they can get a Mew.

They can get a Mew.

Exactly.

Highly underrated.

So, of course, the post-game doesn't add to the 151, but, you know, yeah.

Still.

Anyway,

too many games.

It's too many games.

This is the problem.

People talk about the pitch clock.

Games are too long.

People are getting bored.

It's like they're getting bored because there's 9,000 games to keep track of every season.

Honestly, the main reason I can't get into baseball is the season is just too long and it just, it's so hard to keep up with.

Baseball people, I think, have a hard time knowing what is wrong with their sport because everybody shits on baseball, but baseball people love it.

So it's hard to go, it's hard to be objective about like, what is it that's driving people away?

I think it's the amount of games.

I mean, I think this is part of why people like football.

There are 17, there are 17 games a year.

There's 18 weeks.

Every team gets a week off.

And that's it.

You show up for your team once a week and it matters.

And it's very digestible because on television, yes, you're right that it is slow, that there's like a lot of downtime, but it's very digestible because what happened in this one play, right?

The play's over.

New play, you know, new chapter every time.

This is what I find so romantic about the baseball

stadia, the baseball park.

You know, you go to the, you go to the park, you get a hot dog, you can kind of watch, like, everybody sort of feels, you can feel when something exciting is happening.

So you know to stop talking about how

the quirky lawyer from Veronica Mars plays a bunch of characters in Kotor 2 with your friend.

And you can focus.

Shout out to Goto.

Shout out to Goto.

You know, you can feel that it's time to look at the

play and see what's happening.

And then you can kind of go back, you know, putter around, get a hug.

I love that.

It's a great feeling.

Going to...

The difference to me between going to a football game and going to a baseball game live was like,

it's like my favorite thing versus my least favorite thing.

Yeah, I am not a, I like football despite myself.

And it helps that my team has had my team has had some incredible runs over the last five years, you know,

really over the last 10 years now, I guess.

Really, since the 2000s, the Eagles got good.

Yeah.

Yeah, the Eagles have had a good, have had a good quarter century.

The last 25 years.

I mean, not every year, but like generally.

Yeah, well, compared to teams that have suffered, you know, we've done all right.

I'm pretty happy with it.

But yeah, I wouldn't, I'm not a go to the the stadium for that stuff person at all for the reasons you've just said.

Anyway, tragically, go ahead.

The town that I live in, Pawtucket, used to have the Red Sox AAA team, the Paw Sox,

which is great because in NLB of the show, they can say the name of my town when my team, they always talk about Pawtucket when my team is up.

Wait, do you have like a custom team?

Did you build a customer?

So wait, what is that mode like?

Is that mode a traditional franchise mode?

No, Diamond Dynasty is ultimate team.

It's ultimate team.

It's ultimate team where it's easy to not spend money, which is nice.

But it is

a very no-money spent friendly ultimate team.

Yeah.

The thing that makes 2K very strong still is the My GM like mode is very good.

And

it has all the stuff you were talking about, Austin.

Hot dog prices.

It has hot dog prices.

It has proposed rule changes in the offseason.

I've seen people be like, yeah, year 10 of my NBA career we turned the shot clock off all the owners voted to ban the shot clock why are we streaming this right now yeah you can also like pick a time did scoring go way down no i don't know but you could like pick a time so you'd be like i want to play my franchise mode in 1976 as like the seattle supersonics with that roster with that draft class and there's no shot clock

Well, I mean, yeah, I think there was a shot clock.

No, no, but I'm saying you, can you, can you push that through?

Oh, probably, yeah.

But how does that, how does that voting work?

I believe it is just like

AI in the background.

No.

Well, I guess it's probably an option.

I'm sure you can turn off the vote.

No, I want the version where the computer is.

It's going to be a campaign for you.

That's what I'm saying.

The owners, the owners, the simulated owners just vote on it.

But are they making decisions based on who their rosters are?

Because

if I had an

idea,

I want to learn all about that.

I want to go back in time and make it so the three-pointer never existed.

Okay.

Well,

I'll see.

You guys want to stream me education

or are we doing?

I have to just say, I have to voice the thing I want in my life because, like, I have watched, for instance, I watched Rob and Shia over at Remap now, going back to the Waypoint days, play through

Motorsport Manager, Motorsport, is it an F1 manager?

There have been a couple of these, I think.

And it's so good to see people play a sort of sports management game in this style for all the reasons that

Umamusome is so compelling, which is the like, will my favorite win the race?

But you can broaden that out to like,

will we win the season?

Will we win the cup?

Will we win the thing?

And I think there's something I've watched also shout outs to a former secret base contributor, Kofi, K-O-F-I-E, who I believe is now on Patreon, patreon.com slash Ko-fi.

I've watched him stream a bunch of sports franchise mode stuff over the years.

And it's like such a joy.

If I could snap my fingers and make us all have it a free time, I would watch y'all play through an NBA GM mode or be the show franchise mode forever.

It would be my perfect background.

Unfortunately, there is no franchise mode.

There is a play as a one-hit.

There is a franchise mode.

What is a franchise mode?

Where is it?

Yes.

On the main menu?

I haven't seen it.

I don't.

It's not framed.

I'm not going to boot this up right now.

I use the scene

monitor for the moment.

Maybe I just thought it was something else and I never clicked on it.

There are two franchise modes in MLB the show.

One is what you would think of as a franchise mode, and one is a mode called March to October.

That one I've seen.

Which works on two levels,

both definitions of the word March.

Oh.

And March to October is like moment-based.

You don't play every game like this one

that I've seen games for you.

But you do like a more full off-season,

like free agents, trades, everything.

And then it has a more traditional you can play all the games, franchise mode.

You do not do rule changes or anything like that.

But you just play every game in the season, and that's it, though.

You don't actually, there's nothing, there's not like a layer, a management layer.

There's not like a ticket prices, hot dog prices layer, but there is a there is a scouting layer.

That's nice.

Scouting, drafting.

You know, that's just fine.

I did know that that was in there.

I just wasn't thinking that that's what that, that's what we were talking about.

I see.

Yeah, anyway, I would love to watch that because I think some of that stuff is some of the most interesting,

you know, which comes back to like, why are sports fun?

And the answer is like, they are,

you were saying, like, they are systems that create drama, right?

They're games designed to create interesting drama.

Um, uh, and, and, part of the thing that I think works for that, it comes back to what I was saying about Pokemon, which is like, there's a, there's a time investment part of this that's about when you put

time into a thing like this, it creates a sort of investment.

I, I have, I really do like watching fighting games.

Uh, I really like watching, uh, there are esports that I have had a good time watching, even though I don't understand them intuitively, you know, uh, because I haven't played them enough.

But there is something different about going to watch.

I mean, it happens in esports with players, right?

It happens in esports with like, I want to watch Sonic Fox's huge rise over the last decade.

But in an individual match of Mortal Kombat,

there's a back and forth, you know, as someone goes to a tournament, but then that tournament closes off.

The thing I really love about a sports game is that like the, even in single player mode, you get that really great long run.

You see like, okay, this, look at how our team struggled for years and then we found it and blah, blah, blah.

And that's like, I wish there was more of that.

That's why I like Dwarf Fortress.

You know what I mean?

They're the same to me.

The history of a Dwarf

Fortress falling apart is the same thing as watching a simulated NBA team falling apart because

their best player got hurt halfway through the season.

To me,

that's good.

And it's really good in a video game format.

And this is what they're taking from us with all of the gotcha mechanics that are all over these things now and the virtual currency stuff is like, hey, in the video game format, I don't have to worry about.

I mean, it's not true.

I bet there's DraftKings ads in these fucking games now, aren't there?

Not that I've seen, but I don't know.

No, no.

But I mean, I think only because they haven't gotten there.

Well, probably, honestly, the real answer is probably because they're rated E for everyone.

They're rated E for everyone.

That's actually probably true.

That's probably actually true.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, but they can't try to take all your money in their gotcha game and then be like, well, gambling is.

They have to be making more money in the ad deal than they get from people, you know, buying packs.

And that's all they need to do is figure out how to pay that much, and then they'll be there.

You know,

I mean, I like the idea of betting on the game I'm playing.

No, stop.

You want

okay, people?

Universe art, they'll hear you and they'll make it happen.

And you won't be allowed to join the Hall of Fame.

Is that one of the rule changes you have to do?

I know

I can affect the outcome.

That's right.

Yeah.

I got $100 on me striking out.

No wonder.

No wonder you.

I'm pretty sure they're talking to some people about a similar thing right now.

They sure are.

Dre, one of these rules is no foul outs.

Sorry, I've looked up the rules.

No foul outside.

Eliminate the shot clocks.

Oh, have you found like a list?

I'm watching someone go through the whole list right now on a YouTube channel.

And like, you know, some of them.

I think no foul outs, no clock.

You could have a game that ends one nothing.

Yeah.

That's the

reason they introduced fouling out in the shot clock.

It's because games were ending one and nothing.

Right.

Sorry, what is fouling out?

So

if a player has six fouls, they're not allowed back up.

Okay, I didn't know about this.

Come on, knock it out.

You're out of here.

We're not going to let you keep playing with us.

You keep hurting people.

This is getting ejected.

I love this shot clock one.

Right, exactly.

Shot clock resets to full duration when possession remains with the same team.

I hadn't thought about the idea of like, instead of coming to a shot, you know, like right now, the shot clock doesn't go all the way back up.

It goes to what,

13 seconds?

Like halfway,

something like that instead of the full shot clock.

Going to, oh no, you get it all back.

I want a version of it that's like, it doesn't change between teams.

If you steal the ball, the shot clock keeps running.

It only stops when it hits a rim somewhere, you know?

Sure.

The thing is, like,

there's a realism problem here, though, because no league would vote for something that brought scoring down.

People go to see the ball go in the basket.

Well, this is why this is the beauty of video games.

All right, we can pretend to be in a different world where outside of the arena, the world has changed such.

The psychology of the viewer has changed such that they're not interested in points going up anymore.

They care about like defense.

They want to see hard defensive plays.

As a counterpoint, I did just make a case for less home runs, which I know puts me in the minority of people who are interested in baseball, but and I don't know anything about basketball almost at all.

But I have heard people talking about like all of these rule changes that have driven the score up has coincided with like an equal drop in viewership of the games.

Well, I mean, that's not true.

The 1998 home run race is the most popular baseball ever in my life in basketball.

So that is very complicated, Keith.

The short answer is that the reason viewership is down is that the NBA has one of the worst viewer contracts.

It is just

a little bit of a watch.

Yes.

Yeah, it's all because of contracts and shit like that.

Can you slow down and explain this again to the listener who might not have a fucking clue what we're talking about?

Yeah, totally.

So this is actually a thing that's more common in sports, but there's like these region, you have regional, all the teams have like regional broadcasting deals, right?

Because they're like, well, if you live in Salt Lake City, you need to be able to watch the Utah Jazz because like that's the team, right?

But what ends up happening is that the teams negotiate these individual contracts.

So one, the league as a whole, when they offer their thing like league pass, which is, hey, you can watch every out-of-market game.

There's a million asterisks because no, you can't because of the contracts.

But it's so bad now that it's getting to where, like, if you don't pay for the specific cable provider with the specific sport package, you don't get to watch your teams.

So, like, watching the NBA is hard and it sucks.

Kind of like trying to play 2K.

Damn.

Yes, I want to give the worst example of this from baseball, which is if you live in Iowa and you have the MLB TV package, which means you're paying some amount of money a year to supposedly watch all quote-unquote out-of-market baseball games if you live in iowa you're blacked out of six different teams yeah i mean living in in louisville if i buy nba league pass i don't get pacers games memphis grizzlies games uh what's the other one

oh the cavaliers all of those cities are like at least three hours away from me that's wild and what yeah whereas if you're in if you're in iowa you can't see either chicago team the milwaukee brewers the st.

Louis Cardinals

or the Kansas City Royals

when you buy the product that is, you get to watch the most possible of the game.

All the games.

But they're not technically in the market.

Right.

Because you could technically buy a cable package that'll let you watch it.

Although I can watch Padres games from where I live.

So it's weird.

So the thing is, like having

covering local sports, and by local sports, I mean like the professional sports that are local to these companies, these broadcasters, like it's some of the only economic power that they still have to contract out.

So it's just the thing is that

they're just trying to get as much money as possible from as many places as possible with the only thing of value that they still have.

Yes.

Okay.

Well, it's more complicated, but yes.

And it's going to be a big issue.

Baseball is going to have a lockout next year

and regional sports revenue is going to be a big part of it because you have things like

the Dodgers make so much money from selling their games to local TV.

And then there are some markets where it's like the regional sports network went bankrupt.

And so that team is getting no money for their games at all.

Can you explain what a lockout is to people?

Yeah.

So

you often, there are two ways that during a labor dispute, you can stop work from happening.

One is a strike where the union says, we don't like what's going on.

We're not going to work.

And a lockout is when the owners say,

we we don't like what's happening you can't come to work and when the baseball collective bargaining agreement expires next year the players are going to be like you know we'll keep coming well we can just we can just let it ride the current we like we like the current situation we'll keep working and the owners will say no there will be no baseball and so you will not get paid until we have an agreement uh can you tell us what the sticking point is for owners because i was listening to something about this in the last couple months but I don't really remember

something about this A for the lower

for like non-stars right is that part of this is this is this is terribly complicated the the biggest thing the owners are going to want in this negotiation is going to be a salary cap right which is to say an amount of money over which teams cannot spend on players um baseball has never had a salary cap uh their union is going to fight tooth and nail against one.

I don't know that they're going to succeed this time.

It would, of course, be accompanied by a salary floor, which Major League Baseball also doesn't have and every other league does have, which is, of course, a minimum amount you must spend on players.

What the Major League Baseball has now is if you take revenue sharing money, you have to...

put a certain amount of that money back into your team, which has gotten in situations where like the union has sued the Miami team because they're saying that that means means you have to spend money on players and not on like the weight room,

which Miami has said counts as a baseball expense.

It's just a really cool

guys, you got to understand.

Like in every sport, any sports team that says they can't spend more money on their onfield product is lying to you.

With a few exceptions,

they're either lying to you or they're monstrously incompetent.

So I don't want to like exclude the monstrously incompetent here, but

owning a sports team is very profitable.

They're definitely making a lot of money and they could be spending more money on players.

They're just choosing not to and pretending it's because, oh, our team's in Cleveland.

We're not making any money.

It's not true.

But that is going to be what they say during this labor dispute.

And using the fact that the public finds that these players are paid so much to be like abhorrent.

And so they should not be asking for more when, in fact, the people on the teams are, you know, orders of magnitude crazy.

I can't even imagine what a hard, it would be a hard salary cap that they want

because they already have a task, right?

They have a luxury system.

Obviously, they don't have, yeah, they have a they have they have several luxury task X-esque sim uh

systems right now.

I think they want a hard salary cap.

Um,

what I haven't heard discussed enough is

if they're gonna have a hard salary cap, I think the current team control system needs to stop.

When you're a baseball player, you get drafted often when you're very young, and then you go to the minor leagues where they teach you because any sort of college or other baseball you're playing is not like Major League Baseball, and it takes several years often for you to get to the point where you can play Major League Baseball.

And then once you get to Major League Baseball, you have to play for the team that drafted you for six years.

before you're a free agent, no matter how long it took you to get there.

Oh, yeah.

And you get three years where you're essentially being paid nothing.

That's

where, I mean, nothing for

still a six-figure sum of money.

Right, yeah, sure.

What you are generating is

more than that for your company, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Uh, Paul Skeens, who uh was the National League Cy Young Award a winner as a rookie last year and also rookie of the year, um, his the baseball card that contained the debut patch that he wore on his first game sold for more money than he will make playing baseball this year.

Wow.

And you have three years of that, and then you have three years where you're paid under arbitration, which is the team comes with an amount of money they say you're worth, and you come with the amount of money you say you're worth.

And an arbitrator hired by the league decides who's right.

They often pick a number somewhere in the middle.

So after three years of that, then you get to be a free agent.

So like you're often like 30.

Yeah.

You've already peaked potentially.

And then yeah, you get one contract and then you retire.

And I think if they're going to do a hard salary cap that the union should really press on

years of play of team control.

But

I am not a lawyer for the Major League Baseball Players Association.

Sure.

They should bring you on, though.

You could be like a, you know, advisor.

Consultant.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

Exactly.

But

that's the way I think baseball is most fucked up.

I will say again, I'm not, I'm not, this is going to sound like I'm defending the NFL, but what I'm trying to do is talk through why people like the NFL on top of all of the nationalism that's caught up in it, on top of the violence that's caught up in it.

I think another thing that actually contributes to both of those things or is part of a similar part of the kind of rhetoric of what is the NFL is it has a hard, it has a hard salary cap.

It has a soft salary floor.

And so you can tell the story that is, listen, man, all of these teams have the same amount of money to play with.

They all,

it's a fair and even thing, and you all, you leave it all out there on, in, in the, in the stadium, on the, on the grass, like everybody or on the very poorly maintained

not grass, the various sorts of fake grass that get used now that hurt people's ankles.

Uh, and like, I think that that's part of the mythologizing around it is, and again, to some degree, it is true, you know, the Philadelphia Eagles and the Dallas Cowboys have the same salary cap.

And there's not the NBA situation where there's different aprons and there's different, you know, or the MLB.

The NBA is illustrated.

The NBA situation is unbelievable.

I feel, I do not, Dre, we have talked about me not liking the Celtics.

Arn?

I cannot imagine what you feel about the Celtics.

I don't care for them.

They are in a terrible situation because

they're fucked, man.

I don't know how they're going to.

Why is this?

What's going?

What?

The very short version.

The very short version is they kind of went all in.

Baseball has this notion colloquially of the window, right?

Where you're like, oh, we're in our window where we could succeed and win a championship.

We could win the World Series.

That's also true in most sports.

We're like, oh, we are good enough right now.

Enough of our investments are peaking in talent.

The structure of the game is such that it is aligned with where our strengths are.

Our key opponents in our division or in our conference are weak right now.

Whatever.

The wind is blowing.

Well, who live these lives don't bad news bears every year where every year everybody is like, we have what it fucking takes.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Because they know their numbers.

They get put in games where they get numbers put on their faces.

It says like, sorry, man, most of your team's 64s.

That's right.

And the Celtics have had that window open for a little bit, and they've paid for the privilege.

And Jason Tatum, who is their biggest star at this point, was badly hurt at the end of this season.

Tor is Achilles.

Yeah, Torres Achilles, which means he will not be available for most of this coming year, if not all of it.

And

a bunch of other sort of

bills are coming due, effectively.

And so they're going to have to make some choices about who stays on the team.

And because Tatum is hurt, they're going to be having, they will have spent money on someone they cannot use.

You know, I would say, for instance, it's still a better position than like the Cleveland Browns, who spent a bunch of money on a terrible person,

legally a terrible person.

And that guy got hurt so bad that he can't play.

And

they wasted every opportunity to get rid of him when they should have.

And now they are stuck.

And I feel there's like a little moral play happening with Cleveland.

I think everyone should learn a lesson about what to do with abusers, which is like, you fucking get rid of them.

You stop building around them the way that the Browns did.

Tatum is not that, but Tatum is a lot of money caught up in a guy who will not be able to play with a team that's about to go not broke, but it's just so expensive.

So I'm very curious to see what they end up doing.

Anyway, we're now just in sports mode.

We're now just talking sports.

And we've been going for quite some time.

Yeah.

To just get us back, I want to specifically talk about storytelling in sports games and specifically shout out the

storylines mode in MLP the show.

What is it?

Okay, so this started, this is the third year, so it started two years ago.

And do you know who Bob Kendrick is?

Yes, and I see what you've done here.

He's like the head of the Negro League Baseball Museum,

which I now sense you did not want to say exactly.

Fair enough.

Yeah,

I don't know how else to do it.

And he tells stories from his museum

in the game, and then you play moments as the players that he's telling stories about.

It's really good,

it's really good, and one of the things is they like mini docs.

They do like someone's like mini docs, basically.

Sure, yeah,

like six a year, I think it's been.

And it's, of course, been players you've heard of, like, you know, Satchel Page and Jackie Robinson, and then players you may have, may not have heard of.

They've been doing this now for a few years.

John Donaldson's.

This is the third year.

They've been doing specifically Negro League ship.

That's awesome.

That's cool.

And it usually starts off the year, too.

Like when a new, the show comes out, it's like the first thing.

Is that maybe that's just the two years?

Yeah, they've always, or I think, I think they've always launched with three and then added three later, but it's possible that the first year was just all six at once.

That's really cool.

I'm not sure.

Is it the sort of thing of like,

and this is where we tell the story of the player, and then this is the key moment, and we go into that game at that moment.

Yeah, a lot of those.

So, just like when you're playing Brett Hart or Blackman Hart, whatever WWE game did the Bret Hart one of these.

Pretty much exactly like that.

It's like, yeah, go out and get two hits.

Go out and hit a home run.

The most fun one for me is he tells a story about how Satchel Page was once so confident he had all of the fielders leave.

And then you have to get through an inning where there's no, there's no one in the field for you.

What?

Oh, that is the other.

You have to strike out every hitter.

The tone of these is like

comic book superhero.

I see.

This is like, you know, every guy, this is the fastest guy.

And he goes, I can't remember who it is they've ever, they talked about, but, but there was a story.

I think it actually might have been also Satchel Page commenting on another guy that was like, he's so fast, he can

shut off the lights and get in bed before the lights are off, was a a line I remembered from that.

Yeah, that's a story about Cool Papa Bell.

Is that where Ali got that line from?

That's a famous Muhammad Ali.

I think I've always heard it.

Weirdly, in the commentary, during the moments, they like explain this story in a way that makes it a little less fun.

It's like Cool Papa Bell bet Satchel Page that he could do this trick,

turn the light switch and be in bed before the room got dark.

But he knew that the light switch was faulty.

That's very very funny.

But I mean, it's still not like...

He wasn't.

It's like a long time.

All the rest of the missions you play with this guy is about him being very fast still.

Not about him being a little trickster.

Not about him being some sort of baiter.

And there is like this really fun kind of larger-than-life thing to these moments.

And

it's nice because it's built on a pre-existing mechanic that the show had, unless I'm wrong that somehow this doesn't predate it, but like where it's like, hey, this player this month hit you know three home runs in one game get three home runs as this guy and then you just go you go into that game and then this like builds off of that mechanic at like sort of um

filling it with this sort of mini doc content hosted by bob kendrick it's really good Yeah, and the weird thing is it's the, like I said, it's the third year they've done this.

In the second year, alongside doing this very celebrated, they like won awards for this the first year.

Alongside this very celebrated historically important thing, they also did it with Derek Jeter.

They just had Derek Jeter narrating his own life, and you do the same thing, like unlock different versions of Derek Jeter.

And it's like, I want to know if someone did this as like a prank to Derek Jeter.

It was like funny.

Like, there's you over here, and on the other hand, we have 19-year-old Hank Aaron.

And we're telling stories about how he held the bat the wrong way.

That's very funny.

But also, like, Derek Jeter on a fake subway being like, yeah, I remember my third World Series.

And it's like, Derek Jeter, shut the fuck up.

You say this is a Mets fan, though, huh?

Yeah, but I think we can all agree Derek Jeter, shut the fuck up.

I've done some research here.

It seems like long before even Satchel Page described Cool Papa Bell this way.

The earliest written location here, as found by quoteinvestigator.com, our favorite.

Thank you, Quote Investigator.

Says that

in 1917 in the Marines magazine, a monthly for the U.S.

Marine Corps personnel, a correspondent from Fort Mifflin, Pennsylvania, using the pseudonym Hablarius, employed the following jape.

Corporal Smith is still in training, and believe me, he is some speed merchant.

Here is one record he holds: it is 20 feet from the switchboard to his pile of alfalfa, and he can switch off the lights and be back in bed before the room gets dark.

Oh my god.

This is the this is favor.

This is actually Philip K.

Dick's famous The Man Who James.

The Man Who James.

That's right.

I have to say, by 1975, when Ali is saying, why I'm so fast I could hit you before God gets the news.

I'm so fast I hit the light switch in my room and jump into bed before my room gets dark.

He's just better.

Ali could just deliver any line and it's the best thing there is.

So,

but it was said about Cool Papa Bell.

It just seems like it was an established vaudeville line somewhere in the 20s and 30s and then worked its way into fast-talking tricksters, you know?

Very few things that seem old aren't somehow vaudeville.

It turns out that.

Well, I don't like that this starts with the Marines.

I don't like that it worked from the Marines into vaudeville, but, you know, what can you do?

Well, this is, according to quote investigators.

You're right.

Maybe quote investigator is wrong.

Exactly.

So.

Any final thoughts on our sports on our sports episode?

Any final...

Oh, I guess that's my thing, Dre, is like, I wanted to ask you this about, like, given your time with my career on NBA 2K and all of that stuff, like, how does, how does Umamusume shake out in terms of the gotcha side of things?

Again, where it's hard, we're like, I don't even necessarily want to hold the water of being like, well, it's a good one, you know, like, I think fundamentally these things are designed to prey on, uh, what was, what did the lie, what was it, a habit, habit-forming design or whatever, um, is like explicitly built around that stuff.

Uh, but I also, but I'm, i am still curious about how it handles that side of things um do you feel as you're playing like what is what is that struck part of the structure with that game with the horse so i will

say the the thing about the horse scroll game is that they do specify so the currency you use to pull on banners is called carrots get it because horses use carrots um i see and also gold uses carrots sure and is that type of it's actually spelled like gold actually it's spelled right with two a's um

but they do delineate between free carrots and carrots that you get by paying money and there are like certain banners right now that are like the ssr guaranteed that you can only pull on if you pay money oh wow you cannot grind for the good banner no well it's it's no like no but it's it's it's like the thing that's That is unfortunately common in a lot of gacha games where it's like, hey, we just started out.

So if you give us a special $10, we'll let you pick your favorite horse racer person.

Yeah, you can call them Umas.

We're all ready.

No, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You're right.

You're at Uma Umuma.

You're Uma Uma Uma.

Yeah.

I always fall for that.

The like, yeah, like just launched.

The like the introductory thing,

if I'm having fun with the game at all, I all, I will, I am very susceptible to like, you know, I'll give you four bucks.

For five bucks, you could have

more than much more than like, yeah, yeah, This is not like a good thing about me, but it's true.

Well, this is the thing, right?

It's like, even if you are going into it with a lot of care and criticality and stuff, like that's the bet they're making.

They're betting Arnold will probably give us at least the intro banner thing and maybe more.

What's so tragic?

I think I downloaded that game while we were talking.

I already paid $300 into it.

Yeah,

someone's coming over to buy my stroller.

The thing that's so evil, I think, about these games,

which mirrors the way that

any sort of

financial structure, like anyone that has access to money in order to get you to buy their thing, like

when games started doing loot boxes, microtransactions, battle pat, all of these things, everybody hated it.

Games, a a couple games failed because of

looking back, relatively tame efforts to

introduce microtransactions into their games.

And they just had the cash to wait everyone out to like now.

It is just part of the culture.

People do not even bat an eye at a battle pass.

Like, you can just

outspend the complaints and eventually sort of lock yourself into the culture.

It's, and it's, I mean, it's despicable.

It's all of culture does this.

Is it a video games thing?

Any complaint that anyone ever has against someone with $10 billion,

eventually they just lose out to being spent for so long that no one really complains anymore.

Yeah.

I mean, that's it's what's happening with AI right now, right?

Like anyone who knows anything about it knows that it sucks shit and doesn't do half the stuff that it promises it does but the people who are promoting it have just so much fucking money that they can just pay to advertise everywhere on everything all the time and until you just blunt people into either submitting to well i guess ai's here there's nothing we could do about it and just putting it in you don't have to buy ai it's already in what you have it's forced into

some cases you know we for instance use notion as our uh as the way that we organize all of our like recording schedules and stuff like that and it's fucking all over notion now and it's like, this is, I don't want this.

I don't want it to be near me.

I don't want it to be.

I don't want to click on it by mistake.

Every single like electronic record software for medical stuff, at least on the therapy side of things, all of them are talking about how to use AI.

It's a nightmare.

It's an

like, I don't need that.

It's a calendar.

We use it as a calendar.

For a while, I was using Todoist,

which I haven't.

been using because I've been using a PDF calendar for the last year.

but as far as i know they haven't introduced any ai stuff but they just have like built in sort of like a we just take your natural language and turn it into a calendar thing and that is like what people thought about a what ai was you know before the gen ai stuff of the last eight years

that is like an older version of it that is like essentially it is like predictive text on your phone from before from before all of that stuff and like, that is so much enough for me where I just write every Sunday and it goes, like, okay, every Sunday,

that is way enough.

I don't understand why I need like a machine to pretend like it knows what a Sunday is or like, like, make you, make, make advice for how you could better spend your Sunday.

Right.

Yeah.

Jesus.

Yeah.

Or replace you

at your Sunday recording, you know, sending AI Keith, your AI Keith agent to record Perpetua for Friends of the Table instead of you, you know?

I, you know, we are not a new show, but I guess it should be said that the absolute bloodletting at Microsoft this week, 9,000 people

let go, fired.

I say bloodletting, but I should maybe

retain that phrase for their ongoing support of genocide by Israel, which is a literal bloodletting.

Bloodletting versus blood spilling.

That's, yeah, you know what?

Yeah, you're right.

100%.

Do you think they did that so you couldn't use the term now?

Yeah, that's right.

So now, yeah, now when they fire people, I have to be a little less hyperbolic

because they actually are doing the bad, the worst version of it also.

Yeah, it's a nightmare.

And my sympathy goes out to anybody who listens who is directly affected by this or indirectly.

I know lots of people who wound up at studios that have had layoffs in the last month or two, who had just gotten through studio layoffs, you know, months before, including former co-workers of mine.

My heart goes out to those folks.

It is a hard time in the industry right now, and it is so

driven by this sort of the thing that you were just describing of billionaires deciding we are going to push this thing for so long and so hard that everyone just sort of shrugs and admits that it's, you know, quote unquote admits that it's here for good now and we're just stuck with it.

It is,

you know, I think that it was one thing when microtransactions started.

My hope

that we all kind of just went, okay, well, this is just where it is now.

And I think there were gray areas there, right?

I think that from the production side, it became very easy to be like, well, you know, we can release a free-to-play thing that has, you know, a just as a battle pass.

It doesn't have any sort of loot box stuff.

All it has is a way to tip us, you know, and maybe get access to some cosmetics, but it lets us make the game.

Like, I have been in,

you know, production meetings around budgets, and I understand that there's like we have to pay for this game at some point.

We don't know how to do it the other way.

Or our publisher is making this decision and we're stuck with it.

So I understand this.

My hope is that this stuff is so direct and so nakedly evil.

Some of the quotes coming out from folks who are in executive positions at Microsoft or other CEOs throughout the industry and other executives throughout the industry about thinking about what AI is supposedly going to bring us to, it's so naked in its ambition and in its greed and in its stupidity that I think that there may be pushback against it.

My hope is that it's a catalytic force for change.

I know that that change will come along with lots of additional layoffs, lots of additional, a lot of people bouncing out of the industry because they're near enough to retirement age.

They're going to stop or they can't get their heart broken again.

They're not going to spend five years working on a thing that's going to get canceled at the last second again.

They're going to go work on medical software.

They're going to go teach instead.

They're going to go focus on their families for a while.

I think the cost of what these last few years of layoffs have been is going to increasingly become clear as we move forward in games.

And I think that the reasons for it are going to become increasingly maddening as companies like Microsoft decide to invest in illusions instead of in real things, like the talented people that they've had working for them for years.

years.

So I just wanted to say something quickly on this because it fucking sucks.

And our hearts go out to everyone who's affected by it.

And our hearts really go out to everyone who's affected by

the ongoing genocide that is supported by the company.

We have kind of gone out of our way to not cover Microsoft stuff during the BDS boycott.

My hope is that that boycott is felt strong enough that Microsoft divests from Israel and from its support of

the terrible war machine.

War

is too weak a word, actually, I think, at this point.

It's It's a war machine, but what they're doing isn't war.

It isn't war, it's massacre, it's genocide.

And so, you know, just wanted to say that here.

Clip that on the end of our big sports episode.

Yay!

Go team!

I mean,

the degree to which sports culture is enmeshed in war culture is...

Oh, yeah.

Especially Ameribal.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Well, and this is.

Or I should say specifically American sports.

Right.

In our experience, especially, right?

We have a front row seat at the ways in in which American nationalism intersects with sports

and American sports culture.

And I think part of the thing that's so frustrating is it doesn't have to be this way.

You can imagine a better world where sports are extricated from this and are put in a different context where they get to be good.

And that is, I think, part of why it's so frustrating.

I think they're good now in the ways they're good.

They're just compromised.

You could imagine less compromised, maybe not even perfect, but less compromised versions of almost all of them.

And this is why I think it's important to be a hater.

Yeah.

No, yeah.

Yeah.

You just got to hate the race.

I think it's the sports leagues are bad.

Yeah.

Sports is good.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But there's, there's also, there's, there's no,

I feel, I don't feel a meaningful difference.

Sometimes, like, I think about the people who I know in my life who are like way into sports, and it's like they've, they have drunk the juice, the wicked juice from the franchises, from, you know, ESPN, from

the way that, like,

you know, the MLB and the NFL sort of like engender patriotism.

These people don't get to say what the sport means to you.

No, they don't.

But

yeah, I'm the ones who hear it.

It does leave a real nasty taste in your mouth.

They're the ones who hear like, I hate sports and then like can't think their way around it.

Like yeah, you can't.

Totally.

I am someone who is like, I fully understand why anyone who lives in this country or this world says, I am going to cut myself off from sports culture.

It is a source of

literal or figurative pain to me and my loved ones in ways that I don't want to engage with it.

I'm totally fine with that.

I think that that makes perfect sense.

What I also will say is we could build a world where that was not true because at the heart of these things are incredible storytelling machines that feature people pushing themselves to do incredible things in a world that fundamentally understands that play is something valuable and not simply valuable at the bottom line, but valuable in and of itself.

And it is a great and terrible corruption of that to have turned it into what it is, which is a vector primarily for greed and abuse and harm.

So

yeah.

I like it when they don't say, hey, if you like the idea of sports, but you also hate all that icky stuff, you should go watch women's sports.

Yeah, there is a lot of it isn't there because they've decided it isn't profitable yet.

Yeah, unfortunately, it is now in the WNBA in a big way.

But hey, if you want to go watch the National Women's Soccer League,

you should do that.

I'll always tell anybody who listens to go watch the National Women's Soccer League.

It's a great product.

Who's your team?

What are we?

It's so hot where the stadium is.

My team is the home team, Racing Louisville Football Club.

Oh, this is why I brought up Pawtucket earlier.

They moved the Paw Socks to Worcester and call them the Woosax now.

And they tore down the

Poo Socks is fun to say, though.

Yeah, but Paw Sox is better.

It was a big polar bear mascot, and now it's the Smiley Face because the Smiley Face was invented in Worcester.

But the Woosax is a worse name.

What the fuck did you just say?

The Smiley Face was invented in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Sure.

It wasn't.

It was.

Yeah.

It's like the cheeseburger was invented in Louisville.

This was invented in Louisville.

That's not true.

It's not true.

A restaurant claims it is, but I know it's not true.

I see.

I feel like the thing you just said about the Pawsocks being moved to the Woosak, to Worcester, and now they're the Woosaks, is like a great first sentence of a Stephen King story, or if Bruce Springsteen was from Massachusetts instead of New Jersey.

Stephen King, noted lover of baseball.

There's a local alt paper by the, I think it's the Brown student newspaper that did a really good piece piece about McCoy Stadium that people can look up if they want because McCoy's very interesting.

Link it to me for interesting history.

I'll put it in the shot.

Oh, yeah, sure.

But

it's now called the Stadium at

Riverside,

and it hosts the farm team for the New England Revolution soccer team.

And Isaac was there yesterday.

They have good hot dogs.

Great.

You know, they moved the Paw Socks to Worcester last night and they

threw away the polar polar bear, too.

They say they invented the smiley face there,

but I just

did, apparently.

They did.

Every team moves.

Maybe that's a fact.

And maybe every team that moves someday comes back.

This is good.

This is good.

Sorry, I have to give up on this.

We have to to end the show before we end the show.

Thank you, everyone, for joining us.

As always, you can and should support the show by going to friendsatetable.cash.

Any amount that you give us helps.

But, you know, for $10, you do get access to our exclusive Outward Let's Play.

Jack and Janine and I have been playing that now for eight episodes.

That's a lot of video to watch.

We'll have a ninth one going up next week.

We've already recorded that one.

It's very good.

You can also watch all the games we do stream at twitch.tv slash friends of the table.

You can watch the archives at youtube.com/slash friends of the table.

Keith, what's the last archive that went up?

What's uh, what's or what's something going up recently that people should watch?

Uh, the most recent thing that went up was uh

hmm, some mystery out of it.

Our night rain or night rain went up recently.

Night rain, yeah, night rain, uh, Allie doing Fields of Mystery.

Where I've now, I've had, I have so much fun

while I'm editing those, imagining that Allie doesn't know that she's recording.

That's my new, that's my new thing that, like, this is just Allie's like pure,

you know, stream of consciousness.

There's no mics on.

You know, you see a chicken, you squeal.

You talk to the boy, you squeal.

Something cute happens.

You're like, oh, my God.

But like.

no awareness at the microphone obviously this is right this is i'm inventing this in my head but it is that is like how those streams feel to me they're very intimate and funny just hanging with allie yeah yeah

but uh that elden ring stream went up um that was really fun and then you two keith and dre y'all just streamed the demo for backseat drivers right oh that was fun yes that was fun that was very fun so people can go watch that i feel ready to speedrun that level after that

Incredible.

Where else can people, what else can people, Medical Plus, Hunter Hunter?

We're basically there.

We're basically there.

Yeah.

next week is the finale and then after that is a q a and then we're starting our uh m night shy malon mini season which will be featuring art martinez temple yes yeah and that we we're recording that in like two days right after watching this movie yes yeah time to get to it

fuck

our child care keeps canceling uh-oh well good luck geez i hope it i hope it uh works out it seems seems like important uh but more more more uh caring for children of caring for children yeah um more of the dreamcast stuff is going up next i think amazing that's like the next thing that's going up is jack's dreamcast dream i gotta get mine in i haven't announced what it is yet we'll have to have to tune in to watch i think people can make educated guesses but we'll see um coming up more vlr and crusader kings too on the twitch exciting very exciting uh so look forward to all of that thank you as always again for listening you can follow us we are on blue sky at Friends

Dash.

Friends Dash table is at the Blue Sky.

Yep.

It's so, it's so complicated.

I'm going to shut up before I you should not be allowed to make a website if you can't handle underscores in your username.

That's what I think.

That's it.

That's exactly it.

I can't believe I'm not Austin underscore Walker over there.

It drives me crazy.

Who are you?

I'm Austin Walker.

Austin Walker, no space.

No space.

No nothing.

Dot B sky dash.

No dash.

No dash, no space.

Please leave us reviews.

Also, I have not pulled one up yet, but next time I will read a funny review on the iTunes podcast app, the Apple podcast app, not the iTunes.

That doesn't exist anymore.

No one's going to iTunes specifically for podcasts.

So please check that out.

I'll give you a little preview.

I think next time we're going to talk about V Rising.

Janine's been playing a lot of V Rising, so I'm going to hear about that.

Oh, that's fine.

And we'll figure something else out.

Maybe some Death Stranding 2.

I haven't dug in yet, but I know Jack has been playing and I need to get to it.

So look forward to that.

Until then, to be continuing.