Recommendations and Closing Thoughts

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Bonus issued as non withdrawable bonus bets, which expires seven days after receivt. restrictions applies, see full terms at fanDuoolot com slash sportsbook gambling problem call one eight hundred gambler or one eight hundred My reset. So breed a work of genius. But the story itself is still a stupid spato story. Girl gets captured by Dragon, Guy goes after and gets it. And so having the video game structure That simple story, which as you say, is a mythic story. mythic story, becomes bigger in our imaginations without our really having to say, well, then this happened and that happened. Bea if you follow the plot, the actual plot of Epedition thirty three, it's pretty stupid. Okay. Well let's brag at that for a second, but I definitely disagree with that Welcome back. Hello. Hello, It' greatice to see. Nice to you again. We' here. We're underwater this time. I don't know if you can see if you're watching I was a little stuff. We we have this right. now this is our Expedition thirty three C. our special background because we are gonna to be talking about, among other things Exedition thirty three, by popular demand, I have to say this is the topic that everybody has been asking us to discuss Our producer Tom does these cool this is very nice. Yeah. I assume it's AIless he painted it by hand. Well, since we you and I are AI it' just got something That's why we're just that good.s Yeah be perfectly we're machine generated. This is funny because they actually one of the big The controversies about expxpedition thirty three was that they used like two AI textures for s. It a computer game. Why shouldn't use a computer? I know I never thought about it that way. It's not like not like writing. it's not's like a human you're already getting you're gettingly it about video games be al reready to begin with. That's why we're here. Yes, yes Be you as you were wantont to do have as I have known you to do, you really put your foot in it early on in we wasted no time. My foot may be permanentlyight. I mean, how many of these shows have we done? We've done like this is our four four or something. And it only took you like two to make everybody mad at me for some reason. So I this a fair. This is an experience I've known since my since I've been That great. If have people coming out to me your father. I really want you to know. This those like college parties. I'd be trying to have a beer, you know trying to destroy your social lifeves I mean, it's like easy. You gotta s and set the bar higher, It's like shooting fish in a barrel, you know? O the kid that does classics and video games. L I want to make him unpopular. That's really gonna be true It was like a big man now a low. Exactly. Well, we shot for low aspirations here. No, so you said this thing that made everybody mad. and I had a usual experience, which is I had to defend, well, actually I didn't defend you because I don't agree with you sir.ump dumped me by the side of the road. Right. immediately threw under the bus, Which is the other thing that I have been doing s as a child. No, so you said in passing We're talking about Exit eight, which is this video game we were talking about. You said video games don't have stories. And then you said that video games, if they do have stories, they're bad. they're crap. Yes.. That's more of. And O, so we thought this was an interesting thing, actually, not specifically because of the video games of it all, which is You know, we're both interested in video games you like it. but this actually goes way deeper than that. It kind of opens this much larger set of questions, namely What even is a story? what makes a good story? stories are so central to art and that's the kind of thing we want to be talking about here. these kind of big questions about arts and culture through the lens of the stuff that is interesting to people now. So we both loved Expedition thirty three. People have loved it, won all these awards. But before we even get into talking about it, and you know if you're not into video games This is kind of applies, I think, across the board. So we wanted to start with just Explain yourself. What did you mean by this? I actually think first of all, as I've been telling you since you were a little little boy, you can agree with me, you don't have to agree with me immediately, but you'll save time because I'm always right. And I know you were framing misrepresented. But's gone. But I think in this case, I threw off this line And it does and it was too big and too broad, but it is something that I think is really true because when video games started, and you know, I loved video games from Pong. I mean, the first time I saw Pong, I thought, oh my Godd, we've reached the edge of Madura. Great great example of a video game with a great story. I mean, come on. G story. stick meats ball. But I thought the first thing I thought was this is going to be a way of telling stories that could possibly triumph over the problem, as we writers call it of simultaneity of the fact that things in the real world happen all at once, but in writing they happen one after the. They have to happen one afteres. And there was all this talk about, I think it was Raymond Carver, I think, wrote a famous essay about how we're going to now when computers come, we'll be able to hop from place to place and sort of choose your own adventure. And the question that immediately got to mind bght into my mind was is that a good thing? I mean you don't want to be told the story Yes So here's what I mean. First of all, when you say story, you can be referring to two different things. Yeah. usually Technically when you say a story, a story is one sentence long. You know, What's the story of Star Wars? It's the rebels against the Empire. the story. But then there's a plot. and that is how that story plays out because there are only a few stories. There are only certain can if you get broad enough, you can get about seven to ten stories plots, you know, a stranger comes town all of pllots are infinite and they can just It' how the story plays out. You know, somebody wr wrote Hamlet before Shakespeare and it was apparently this this big, you know, melodrama. and then Shakespeare writes it the way he handles the story, it becomes great What I saw as I watched video games develop was that The structure of gameplay and the structure of storytelling were in tension with each other and not in a creative way so that My point is basically that novels Mvies, plays are a story. Video games have a story. You embed a story in a system that is essentially going from place to place killing people or solving a puzzle or whatever the thing is that you're doing, that is the game. Yeah. Obviously there arere games that's not true about, like adventure games where you're actually just playing a detective and unraveling a story. that can have a good mystery. But most games They are are based on what is happening with your fingers. and As proof of this, I would offer up this that I haven't been able to pay attention to a video game story for twenty years. Okay, this is a skill issue, bro. This is you probably, no, no, no, really because because you're always thinking What's the next gun fight? what's the next puzzle? That's where the experience of a game comes to life. And is that's my basic point. so You can have a good story where you say, Ohh, you know, this is really a good story. aliens come down to earth and take over or disguise themselves as people, whatever your story is. But the plot always a problem because you're always moving from one point to from one video game experience to another game experience and it kills the plot. Okay. so here where I can go with you a little bit, right? I think it's EM. Forrester has this great line. A story is the king died and then the quQeen died. And a plot is The king died and then the queen died of grief. So that's kind of the distinction you're getting at, right? Is that this causality is central to what we think of when we think of a story. That's what we're doing in a novel or a play. video games break that up or open up these multiple paths of action that are really extraneous to the thing or they're like not kind of what it's about So It seems to mean Like You can Take that that many things can be elevated to the level of a plot. Let's put it that way, right? Like it's true that a U chorus dancing is not the same thing as a plot doesn't necessarily tell the story of a plot. It's also true that at least as Aristotle tells us, like chorus dancing gradually got refined and developed into this place where it became tragedy. That's the story at least that he tells in his famous the first work of literary criticism ever, the poetics, Aristis. we started out. we were just kind of dancing and singing and telling stories about the gods. And then one guy stepped out and he delivered a monologue, and then two guys were talking. and eventually what you had was a mimesis, an imitation men in action. And that's where So it's like on the one hand, we have this platonic ideal of what a plot is. On the other hand, we have this like raw material that we're kind of developing and crafting into that plot And I think we kind of have done that with a bunch of different things. We started out Maybe we did it with tragedy long ago. We did it with like serial picque like short stories. This is kind of how the novel gets stitched together is like Donkey Hote takes all of these different stories and folds them into one giant plot Even the Odyssey and the Iliad are potentially stitched woven together into this coherent hole out of many disparate elements What I wonder about video games at their best, and this is why I think Expedition thirty three is a good test case is agreed that ninety percent of video games attain this level, right? becausecause they're struggling with these material constraints that you're describing But it's also true that you can use those material elements in service of something that like really does, in fact tell a story that sticks with you, as I think Expedition thirty three has done, right? I mean, this is maybe where we disagree about this game itself, right? I mean, we should maybe talk about Yeah. I mean Expedition thirty three is a really interesting example because I think there's some wiggle room here about between what I'm saying, the truth of what I'm saying and the calculable right Thank you. Exactly. And the fact that there is woven through expxpedition thirty three, there is woven through it a story of interest. First of all, it's a very beautiful game and that's another thing is really important to point out is that you know the theater tells a visual story but it's not a visual form It's a language form. It's what the people are saying on a stage. And things happen and you see them happen and they're exciting, but that's not where the core of the story is the core of the stories is in human interchange.vies But really they are visual. And as Hitchcock, because of Hitchcock, you know, he basically took all the words out of them just like left them, you know, he left them almost silent and it was almost just this reaction of the way things were filmed. And that's all he cared about. And so what made his story so good. I mean, Verttigo has a half hour of no dialogue in it and the dialogue through the rest of it is very precise. and he did that on purpose because he never he started in silence and he never felt sound fit in with this visual art form. Video games are A a visual art form. like the movies, but they're also kind of like, I don't know what else you can compare them to, maybe dance or something where you have to do something, which is what makes them so great. I mean, the thing we love about them is you move into the world through your fingers and I've told I've told this story before, I think on the show of me and faith passing scary. came back because we were so scared of resident evil. Expedition thirty three begins with this beautiful thing here You find out you're in a world where every thirty years or every every year everyvery year people are thirty, they vanish into like into roses, basically. Yeah, so there's a monolith. there's a big rock in the center of the world, basically. It's very mythic, which is another thing we should pererhaps acknowledge here that video games, for me, at least have reactivated these core, I mean, maybe story rather than plot is the right word. like these kind of core mythic elements of heroes on a quest going out to and so sometimes they have this kind of primal feel that I actually really like. But so you've got this big rock in the middle of the universe. It's got a number on it and the number goes down by one every year because there's this like a countdowns Yeah. We think of this as a villain. We're not totally sure there are sort of spoilers, The big antagonist at the start is the painintress who is this monster figure who paints the number on the monolith. and then right if you so it ticks from thirty five to thirty four and if you're over thirty four, you evaporate into a Thanos snap. basically, you disappear. And the basic plot line is every year They send out an expedition of the people who are onene year away from dying, they can go off and sacrifice themselves to try and destroy this, they think evil woman who's doing this to their world. And right there. goodood story. Good story. Yeah. Okay. So I mean, one of the things that Aristotle says is like you should be able, I mean because one of the things we're talking about is what elements of the thing are superfluous to the story and what elements of the thing are there to create the story?. And Aristotle says you should be able to tell the story of a tragedy without any of the other stuff, without the pageantry and the show and the beauty and everything. And people can still be moved and touched by it, right What I think is brings this particular video game to a level that is even I think beyond that that we it makes it useful to think about is it's also about this very thing. It's about immersion, right? It's about the fact that not only are you learearning that story, uncovering it as you go. You're also through the fact this is the best thing about You're getting sunk into and it turns out the plot is about being inside of a painting. It's about our relationship to art and whether or not we actually want to be completely immersed in art or whether we want And we should say that we'll probably have spoilers in this because the game is over a year old and But see, I think that that is really the best thing. What you just said is the thing I really liked about Um about Exposition thirty three, But the thing that kept me playing exposition thirty three. Okay because I don't finish most games because I find them very repetitive and I just you know one fight against a million monsters is the same as a. Which is certainly true. I mean, this is a big Yeah, it's turn based fighting. It's Yes RPG thing. Yeah. So I hate turn based fighting. so stagnant, but they came up with an actual development here, which and this is the other thing about video games. when they started, the actual progress was huge. I mean, I would if I stopped playing for three months and came back a whole new genre of video games had been invented, where' now that's just not happening. But they did this little thing where they took turn based fighting and they on one side, I think it's the offense the thing. You have to basically figure out what kind of strike is going to be the best. But on defense, you have to have thumb react or barry or reflex. Yeah. And that was cool. I thought like, oh, I've never seen that before. That makes the fights interesting. I don't have to just strategize, which is a little geeky for me, you know, I want to sit there and think about all that. But that was very cool And I thought the game was quite beautiful Still in all. I have to say this First of all, there's a function in the game where there are little resting places like you know save spots where you all come back and you've been around a fire. and during those you can go and talk to the other characters and get their backstory. Yes. I did that maybe twice and then I thought, this is the most boring part of my entire life. I've been in countable hours I've been in the waiting room of doctors' offices that are more interesting than this. So in that sense, is that's where exactly the thing I'm talking about comes in I did not care. And you know, if I reduced the story to its necessary elements Uh it would it would be maybe four beats, you know, there'd be maybe four beats in it. And the part that you brought up, which I think is the important part because's what's missing from most games is the plane of the game and the point of the game. the theme of the game actually came together And that's a good thing. You're pointing out, I mean, so the mechanic that you've just described, which is kind of a technical nerdy thing that you have to like video games to care about, that they've incorporated real time dodging into turn based fighting It's true that I don't think that Ell, that's the thing that makes the gameplay innovative. It's not the thing it doesn't contribute to the thing that makes the storytelling innovative. And so there is a disconnect there that there isn't always with games. Sometimes, like in Resident Eil or in scary games, the fact that you're physically connected to the story is part of what tells the story. So you have that thrill of fear, which is itself a representation of the fear that you're ha. And So Exedition thir three just doesn't have that does have this thing that you're talking about, which is huge now and not limited to video games at all. and that is world building, right? the question of the universe. Yeah, which is something that also cuts against This if you like traditional view of storytelling that we started out with, right? you and I both, I, I think as a and you as a craftsman have this idea, which is very Aristotelian that a story should be this self contained thing that goes from you know one event to another and the first one opens it up and then causes the next thing and the next thing causes the next thing and And when it all comes together, it's kind of a satisfying conclusion. att least since JR or Tolkien has not been, I think the thing that most people connect to in stories, which is really interesting because I am with you. I don't actually need my stories or my plots to expand out into this huge cinematic universe. Isn't it kind of an interesting phenomenon that like everyone seems to want that, that people want to click through these like endless discussions at the fiire side, which I agree like didn't particularly want to go unearthing those. you know. Well see again, it's the problem of having a story instead of being a story. I have this theory that that video games can be a vehicle for stories, but you have to figure out what kind of story they're a vehicle of. So you know, you mentioned Hitchcock and Hitchcock is kind of the linnchpin between moovies as filmed plays and movies as a thing unto themselves is where he just said this is a visual medium. It's all about how I shoot this. All he ever talked about you know he never talked about the themes of the movie. just look like looked like and how I did this and how I created this impression that made you scream in terror. Now he was a much deeper artist than that, but pretended he wasn't because he was talking about cinema as cinema I think that the I think the greatest video game ever made is Super Mario Bothers. And there are about two or three of the versions of it that I think were fantastic Yeah. And recently I was playing it with your nephew and he's playing an all completeist's every possible He loves this thing. And I was thinking, this is amazing. Yeah. And the reason it's amazing is the story is a story The princess has been kidnapped by the dragon The Italian plumber for some reason has to go off and save the princess. and therefore a world he travels through a world that is so visually innovative. I mean, ye you don't even know it anymore because so much has happened since. But the first time I saw plumber this Italian plumber fighting mushrooms with teeth. I was like as a guy who never took drugs all through the sixties, I thought I miss something a whole c. Yeah What is fascinating about it is because the gameplay is so fun and innovative and involving and really drags you completely in physically into the story. The story sort of exists as an aura around you. They completely agree with this. Yeah. And I mean, doesn't this To stick with the Hitchcock example for a second It Fascinating to think that yeah, this guy is doing movies as movies, Qa movies, right you would say. And like the other previous generation of filmmakers might have been trying more to importort an old form of storytelling into this new medium So he's not as concerned with script or the progress of the ideas or what have you, and yet All of those things do exist in Hitchcock movies, wouldouldn't you say? I mean, it is possible to speak about themes of Psycho and the of it, right? It's significance and why it struck such a chord So Is it possible that The person who makes the craftsman of the thing is not the person who necessarily sees or understands the narrative of it. In other words Video games also To make a good video game, it's possible that, you know, what you mostly have to do is focus on the visuals and the mechanics and the gameplay it's got to be fun Also, it seems like when people encounter this stuff, They They either fill in or they immerse themselves in or create. like there is some kind of storytelling that's going on. Isn't there mysterious this is You know, I was going say Adjunct to Super Mario is an indie game called Braid, which is one of my favorite games ever. Also love Braid. Yes,es. So it's the same plot. A princess has been kidnapped And it has this little Prince of Persian thing in it where somewhere along the line, our little hero who's going after the prrincess, chasing after the princess He finds out that he has to make time go backwards in order to solve the puzzles. It's very ingenious and you really do get into it because now you're not just doing it with your thumbs because you have to leap from place to place, but you have to solve the puzzle with your mind. How am I going to move this cloud here so I can land on all this stuff But as he goes back in time The entire narrative of the story changes so that you realize he's the dragon. Yeah. He in fact post modern video. So not it's not just a postmodern video. It's a commentary on Super Mario. Yes. And here's the reason it matters, right? Okay Bys, especially Dream about rescuing girls Because boys also know they have this aggressive gesture toward girls, this feeling toward girls. they want to take them, they want to conquer them. And But if you conquer through love, it's different than conquering through power. And so they're fighting with themselves. Yeah. One of the most stupid things that feminists have done to us is take the hero man, male out of stories because that's how young men learn to be one kind of men with women instead of another kind of. Well, they imagine that there's some third secret third thing secretd thing on it So Braid is a work of genius. But the story itself is still that stupid story. Girl gets capp by captured by Dragon, Guy goes after and gets it. And so Having the video game structure That simple story, which as you say, is a mythic story. mythic story, becomes bigger in our imaginations without really having to say, well, then this happened and that happened. because if you follow the plot, the actual plot of Eedition thirty three, it's pretty stupid. Okay. Well let's brag at that for a second, because I definitely disagree with that. What you're saying about them mythic elemental aura of these stories is a key to their power. No doubt. in much the same way as Greek tragedy has its origins in the choral song of the Dithoram. V games bear with me in this comp. But Aristotle was know if he were here today I'm going to channel him. I'm going actually some my Aristotle and say video games have their origins, especially role playing games, which is what Exibition thirty three is, have their origins in the table topop. in Dungeons and Dragons. Yes, ye. Which is precisely where that hereroic male impulse went as feminism began to chase it It's in the seventies and eighties And I think that's second wave feminism, which really is what you're talking about. this like woman needs a man, like a fish needs a bicycle kind of critique As boys lose their access to that narrative in the mainstream culture, they start to get it from nerd culture. They start to put it onto these tabletop games and they do enter into it in this way that you can't do in a movie because a movie is just beamed at you and it tells whatever every tells And this is where these things come from. This is like part of their historical trajectory. And again They've been refined since into something I think more elevated and at their height more artistic and that's kind of what you're looking at when you're looking at something like Expedition thirty three, or indeed, even Braid, which I agree has a slightly more subversive story. but you could take also ECo, probably my favorite video game. Yeah great video. absolutely great. Yeah. And I would pair it with actually Megaman X, which is an older series both of which Dico and MegmanX are have this quality that they operate through suggestion. They kind of open a universe for you to insert your own experience into Do think that that's not in itself disqualifying themough from becoming I don't want to spe in absolutes because I'm not an absolist about anything. But there's a there was a TV show that I came over from somewhere in Scandinavia called The Killing And it starred that absolutely beautiful woman, Marll Innos. I don't know how to pronounce her name Maraie, Innos. She was in World War Z. and she's just lovely. And it had that Joel Kinnaman who became briefly a kind of minor star and a really good acting. It was an old fashioned who Dun it mystery cop, female cop. you know, goes out, interview suspects, finds whod done it. But because it was in the TV you know media because it was told through television story. It was really long It was maybe like ten episodes twelve episodes. And she had in order to sustain that She had to keep catching the wrong guy. And so became incompetent by virtue of structure. Exactly The second season now this woman is we should not let allow women to become detectives. This is ridiculous. And that was just the structure, the structure was pulling against genre of the mystery story, which really unfolds top episodes, I think you get a really tight who done it? just who done it specifically? You get a tight mystery and it's over and you guess the guy and that's the end of the story So in the same way, I think the The video game, first of all, is so huge. Vide games are so long. they go on for hours. These days. I mean, that's part of the reason that we don't play them anymore is becausecause they're all made for kids like a million hours. And And going back to this other thing is the emotional moments really are fighting that That's what you're trying to do. I mean, I've screamed to the TV during Expedition thirty three when the monster kept killing Right, Not when some dramatic event occurs. I mean, I could name a few moments, I think that for at least most people, maybe not you are not like that. So I'm thinking, for example, spoiler on ancient game but Final Fantasy seIven, one of the most beloved video games of all time in the JRPG genre when Erith dies sweet girl character. I think a lot of people have that burned in their memories in the way that you might have like the shower scene from Cy in your memory. However, I want to return to this point that you're making about the tension between form and content, which again, I just think is an ancient tension. I don't think they can actually say anything about video games in this regard that wouldn't also be true in other media in other formats because you're always dealing with some folk tradition or poetic kind of art you know song tradition that you're kind of refining out into something more crafted and specific you're making me think also of, say The Sherlock Holmes stories or the PG Woodhouse, Jeves and Worcester stories. to Terrific works, bres of heart. Right Yeah All both short story series. And both, I think, justifiably regarded as classics of pop art, right. I couldn't tell you the plot of a single. No, you can Woodhouse. I mean, you can read them over and Sherlock Holes are a couple of classics. Yeah, I know, but like maybe I just don't have the brain. because really what you're doing, it's the sitcom before there was a sitcom. It's when you really want to bring it into with these characters. Absolutely. And the plot beces sort of subservient to that or is a vehicle for that experience. And it seems like something about The video game era has evoked that again, has like really, I don't know, made people want that more and more. And I will completely agree with you that it does cause or tension between the form and the content I just think those difficulties are kind of always there to some extent. Well, there are always difficulties Yeah, But this difficulty is an essential one is that gameplay form is not a narrative form necessarily. And I think that that's a big tension. But I would like to put forward an experimental theory about we're talking about. And I'm not going say that this is the absolute but just something that has occurred me as we're talking you know I believe that right now we're in this period of very poor stories. I hope I think it's passing, but I think we went through this period of television in the two thousands where there was great TV. All the best stuff was on TV. And it was all about bad men. And it was all about the sopranos and all this stuff. And I've said many times, it's because they outlawed masculinity so only outlaws could be masculine Now we have a problem which is they're trying to find what good men look like again, but they can't do it without pointing out that good men need good women. And to tell feminists that they should be good women as opposed to powerful women or good women as opposed to boss women is so offensive to them that essentially everybody's frozen in place and can't do it except me in the camera. I'm just insulting everybody.. But available on Amazon now But still So, so some fundamental thing. about men and women has been overturned in a way that doesn't work, in my opinion.. And so you've taken stories It seems to me the stories used to be much more complex at the movies. Casablanca is much more complex than Star Wars. And you? Yeah. I mean I'm really going to get DM. Yeah. No, much more. I mean Star Wars, entertaining, big, be fun. But Casablanca's a very complicated movie. And I think A civilization, great stories come out of great civilizations because they build on the basics. And what I think has happened to us is we've lost the basics and now have to go back to a mythic form of storytellingcover to recover basic things. Okay, I like this And you were making me think about The novel as the canonical sort of plot driven form.. One thing that I've often thought about the novel is it really does exist in a social context and the social context is Basically Europe in the nineteenth century. Y so no question. When that world where the expectations, a highly sophisticated and refined set of expectations is in place so that we all know when Madame Haversham lifts her petticoat just so, we realize that she's grievously insulted to the Earl of Quanto It's so true. And that whole world is where all these actions take on this enormous meaning, these tiny interchanges. and everything grows out of that. And once that shared social context starts to dissolve, I think you lose. It's another reason why there are many great American novels, but there's no the great American novel because there's no real America, that's sense.s right. There's no one kind of social contact. You're describing an even larger breakdown, which is sort of the disintegration of our basic premises about what it is to be a human being and how we relate to one another as men and women. And without those, you can't tell any narrative at all. Well Well, I think it speaks into The thing that offends me about video game stories right, plots is that the essential video game is the essential male practice of killing dragons. Y. That's why Super Mario is so great. I mean, that's why that story just like thing just kills you because you're just there. That's what they're about. And when it tries to go beyond that, You know, it comments on itself, I think expedition thirty three. Can we tell the ending of the We should talk about the ending actually because everything I've been saying Yeah. I mean, one of my best cases for the excellence of video game storytelling is that everything we've been addressing is invoked by the end. And I can say something that actually feeds into serves your point more than grind.. At the end of Eition thirty three, a man and a woman fight the family brother and sister, I believe, is his family. Y. You have to decide whether you're going to continue to live in these paintings, which is a world created a woman in grief. Yes, it turns out, this is the spoiler. It turns out that the pintress is not the ultimate villain. R. She's the creator of the entire world who's trying to preserve it, but it's withering away because her husband is trying to destroy it to get her out of her grief. She made this painting as an act grief to commemorate her dead son who lives in the painting. and with now her living And they are together in this painting now and have to decide whether they're going to destroy it and move on and to grief and move on. And yes, move through grief. And that's the girl's ending. She chooses that. if you choose The guy's ending is to destroy the painting. D I say that? Sorry. Okay. no, the guy's ending is to destroy the painting and the girl's is to live in it forever Right then avoid the grif. And you'd have to choose as the player. And fascinatingly. Almost everybody chooses the guy, everybody I've spoken to, because that's the right thing to do. The right thing to do is tove, live in the real world, get through your grief, pass through the suffering, be ennobled by suffering in some Christian sense, and move on I alone chose the girl because it was her story So I said this I knew exactly what was going to happen. And I thought this is story And the fact that it could be her story speaks to something rich in Epedition thirty three that I think is legit. You know, and it has to do with what you were talking about in the beginning that, you know that it's not just a story, it's a story about the story that is And I think that that's a beautiful thing and I really like it. And what I'm saying is all that other talk, I just left it out. Well, right, that part is a bit, but that raises this question of immersion, right? Obviously the right moral choice to move on from the work of art It's ofen the right artistic choice to let yourself be absorbed into it. these works of art that we really love most deeply. We love because we want to be inside of them somehow, a story we really love Even a novel, I mean, my sister, your daughter, Faith Moore, whom you may know,, has this wonderful podcast Storytime for Grownups and she read this book, Jane Ayre, which she's read like a million times, right? And when you connect her story that deeply You do wish that you could just go there and live there forever.. And many of the most bittersweet narr are stories about how the story has to end. I mean, this is the end of Lord of the Rings has this wonderful quality. They have to sail off into sunset. And some of the characters have to go away basically and evaporate and some of them are left behind to kind of carry on their normal lives. And that is the feeling you have when you close a book that you've really loved You're like, how am I supposed to make breakfast now? How am I supposed to return? And the answer, of course, is that you're supposed to understand that your life is a story. And I think I'm very hard about this because I never like sequels more than the original. No we have a problem with this now. Yeah. And I think like you know, I watch The Terminator, which I think is an almost perfect little action movie. Every line is quotable, every moment is memorable And people say, yeah, but Terminator two and I say, no, no, no. This story is what this guy created that this guy comes back in time to kill the mother of That's a profound story. Everything else is just special effects. as far as I'm concerned. So I'll watch them if they're entertaining. But you know and by the way, a sequel is different than a trilogy. A trilogy is one story told three parts But like, you know, these sequels, you know, when I was a little boy, I was like the kid in Salem's lot. I love monsters, Universal monsters.. So mom bought me a CD collection of all the Universal monsters. So I thought I'm just gonna to choose a monster and just watch all of them. I got to the like fourth Frankenstein movie This is. Th first two movies are great Yeah because we watched all of those together. I incredible Th those first mov Th first movies are great. And we do there's something obviously and your theory maybe helps explain this, I guess, a little that We're having some kind of psychological problem where we're trying to relive the old myths in a way that we can believe in again.. We keep therefore going back to these old stories, which I completely agree with you about this. I'm going to say it and people are now going to get really mad at me No more Star Wars. Yeah. No Wars. It's over.'s The story has been over A the third movie. Yeah. And it's like, what is it Grogu we didn't even go to Grogu and Mandalorian to talk about it in this on the show because it's just like who cares? And But the answer has something to do with this you know, thing that where you get a million different side quests in Expedition thirty three is that you know you go to stories to try to take something out of them. and what we want to take out of stories like this is The recovery of the heroic, right We want to be able to live that in our normal lives again. I've never believed in art for art's sake. I believe that life is everything. L you know arrt serves life Yeah. And but that's a very unpopular opinion among critics and artists since the romantic era when art became sort of like this, you know they call it the mirror of the lamp. You know, Shakespeare said that art holds the mirror up to nature. But the lamp is like something within me is so bright is going to light your way into the way. And no, I think, you know, hold the mirror up to nature because it increases the amount of your experience, increases the amount of your wisdom, gives you a way of looking at the world you didn't have before. And then you go back to life and you put these things to use Yeah. But if you're just going to immerse yourself in the story, which is what kind of bringing the think full circle is what Expedition thirty three is about and why it is Well to concede a point to you, it is one of the things that games actually offer is immersion. R. So it's about the kind of we want that, but it's also not good for us It doesn't work as its own thing. L has to be contained within life And not to be too like dramatic about this conversation about video games, but perhaps one reason why we can't return to life and live life as a story is because we don't believe anymore that the story has a storyteller.. So it's like the mirror and the lamp theory that you're talking about is really from the classical world into modernity, you start out, stories have a narrative structure because they're an imitation of the world, which has a narrative structure and has order and form And that starts to break down and stories are the only place you can go where there are heroes and dragons and princesses because there aren't any in real life. As opposed to what by the way, somebody wrote in and said we mentioned CS Lewis in every episode and he's going turn it into a drinking game. So here we here we go. We we almost got there for that one, but yeah know, CS Lewis says you don't have to be afraid of telling people telling children that there are dragons in the world. stories teach them that dragons can be killed. And I think that that's yes, we have lost them. Yeah Okay, in the brief time remaining, let's talk about stuff we like. stuff we like. Yeah, yeah. let's talk about stories that we really enjoy or I mean, even a video game that you I just have to recommend Braid because nobody I meet has played it and's so it's so good in terms of gameplay. and also it's profound. And it has and it has it's openly profound. It has this kind of what's oracular narrator to it who keeps telling you the things mean things And I just think it's beautiful and it's kind of the indie puzzle game, which is I think are still right now the best games going. Cool. Okay. I like that. and I will I guess since you you've mentioned Braid already, I'm going to take ICo. So yeah, I mentioned this. This is like if you want the real I mean, something about also Japanese culture, which we didn't really get in, but like this kind of this like shhinto universe where everything is somehow alive and it's just a very simple, yeah boy wakes up in the middle of nowhere and' got a girl he's got to save and it's beautifully designed. Yeah It's like completely immersive. And that's the one where the ending really gets you in the heart. Yes, absolutely. And is not you don't have to choose. It just gives you it to you kind of absolutely. Yeah We should wrap up it. Yeah, we're out of time. And so tellell people to like and subscribe. We should like and subscribe to all of the things. Tell your friends. Tell your friends about it. share the show. As we've always say, this is an adventure, an experiment in criticism. And We got two more after this that were're contracted for? Yes, that's right. And if you like them, we will do more. So tell people that you like them U And yeah, share spread the word, let us know other topics you'd like us to discuss. This was one that we talked about because everyone asked us to talk about it. And so we will listen to you hear your call. call out to us. See you next time