Study language, give the gift of points, and make games that make games.
Play;Write is a podcast about creating and sharing new ways to play. We workshop seedlings of ideas for video games in hopes of coming up with something timeless. It's not just about us, though! Join in the conversation! Pitch your own game ideas to be read and explored on air on our website at www.playwritecast.com, tweet us @playwritecast, or email us at playwritecast@gmail.com.
In this episode of the podcast, Ryan Hamann (@InsrtCoins) and Ryan Quintal (@ryanquintal) study language, give the gift of points, and make games that make games. The community pitch was submitted by Matt Taylor.
Our theme song is "Hello World." by PROTODOME from the album BLUENOISE.
(Edited to remove filler words)
H: Hello everyone, and welcome to Play;Write, a podcast about creating and sharing new ways to play. My name is Ryan Hamann. You can call me H.
Q: And I'm Ryan Quintal. You can call me Q.
H: So I went out, it's my, partner's birthday today. And so we went out for a couple's massage at a local spa, actually the Great Northern Hotel from Twin Peaks.
Q: No kidding.
H: Yeah, they have a spa there, so, you know.
Q: That's amazing. So did you have some DAMN fine coffee?
H: Yeah, nothing, nothing supernatural happened. You know, that was a, I was a little bit of a let down, but I, I'd never had a massage before and so it was very strange because I'm a very like, relaxed person anyways. I don't feel like I carry a lot of stress intention with me throughout my life. And so I felt kind of bad, like partway through, I'm just like, this guy's, you know, he's doing a good job, but he's, he's probably not finding anything that really needs fixing.
Q: Well, first of all, welcome to the the secret world of benefits of relationship birthdays, especially over a period of time where like it's her birthday, you're getting a massage, like well done there. First of all,
H: I'm still paying for it though.
Q: That's fair. That's fair. But it's nice, you know, treat yourself every once in a while, but you didn't have any knots or anything?
H: Not that I could tell. I feel pretty much the same coming out of it as I did going into it.
Q: So, okay. So this might be, this could also be the massage novice, right? I, when I come out of a massage I want, like I always ask for the deepest tissue possible, but you know, if I'm not walking out, like feeling like I'm going to be bruised the next day, I feel like I didn't get my money's worth, which may be says something weird about me. But but yeah, so I have this one spot in my left shoulder blade that literally I had a massage therapist almost like suplexing me, just her elbow was right in my shoulder trying to work it out. And after like 20 minutes or something, you could start to feel it give, but I'm not surprised you, you are all your tone, your speaking tone is always very relaxing.
H: It's pretty representative of my, like my entire being.
Q: Yeah. I mean, wow. This could be your, your own self help book. Like let's all live a little bit more like H.
H: I don't know if that's a, if that's advice I really want to give people.
Q: Yeah, fair enough. Do as we pitch, not as we do.
H: And speaking of which, let's let's go. And I was, I was thinking if we can get like a double, like two lines of rhymes in there, we almost always had other, would've been kind of a nice transition on a, on this show. I'm going to be going first. And as I wrote this down, I feel like this is something we've pitched before, but let's, ah, let's see how it goes. Basically, one of the things that I would really like to see is a game about, about decoding a language that you don't know and having to work with incomplete information. So I was thinking like maybe some sort of a like alien trying to blend into humans or a game about like decoding enemy radio transmissions. Like I just want a, a made up language that you can use context to decode certain words and then as you decode those words, it would kind of fill in every time those words come in with the with the English or whatever language you're playing it within. As you see them again in the future. And it's kind of almost like a linguistic Picross where you, you use the things you've already solved to assist you in you know, kind of contextually putting meaning behind some of the other nonsense words, you know. And then of course on the flip side, if you mess something up early, then that could potentially get you into trouble down the line. So let's let's decode some languages, come up with a way to turn it into a game. Go ahead and start the clock. Now,
Q: One of the things I like about this is I have probably like, I don't know at this point, 15% of the people on the planet attempted and, and given up on Duolingo a couple of times. I think at this point, one of the things I think is interesting about the way they teach something like Spanish in Duolingo by like slowly introducing you and really making it kind of a video game, right? Where they're, they're like, Hey, this means apple, what do you think this thing? And then they kind of pluralize it and you kind of get it from the sentence. And I'm like, well that's apples, you know? And I think that it, this would be kind of cool to like see if you could just teach someone a language that straight up does not exist.
H: I guess in that case would it, how does it how does it remind you of the meaning of words you already know? Does it subtitle them or does it include little pictographs? Like if you already learned a word, does it just keep on presenting it in Spanish?
Q: What are the things they do? Is they kind of, once you establish that, you know a word, they will kind of throw something at you with like new words around it that you haven't learned yet. Right? So they'll tell you like, this is apples. And then the next sentence will be, I have apples. And then they'll ask you to translate something that ends up being, my sister ate an apple, but you never learned to the words my sister and the word ate. But because of the sort of options they give you for words, you're supposed to sort of like tap the words in order because the options that they give you for words, your sort of own natural language structure of like how you would say as phrase in English, you're like, okay, I can make the sentence here. My sister ate an apple. And therefore they're kind of like in that act showing you, Oh, this is the word for sister. And then in the next exercise they're going to be asking you questions about the word sister rather than the word apple. And they're kind of like bridging the language gap like that. Maybe that's not, I don't know. Maybe if that doesn't apply to this thing.
H: No, I think it's interesting. So you could use, yeah. Again, some of these contexts clues, what if there was a way of, yeah, I'd like there to be, not necessarily tests but situations where maybe right and wrong answer isn't, maybe if there's was kind of like a comedy type game as you're kind of fumbling about with the language you're put into situations where you have to like go on a date or something like that and and if you say the wrong thing, then obviously the person would react in interesting ways. I don't know, maybe that's a, maybe that's a bit ambitious for what we're building.
Q: I like the idea of maybe because there's something about this that feels like The Witness to me in it that like if you stack it right and you put the right things in order, then you'll slowly build up this knowledge base of what the previous things mean. So maybe there's a way to do this with like icons or symbols or something.
H: So let's decide upon a premise what do we want? Where do we want to set this? What do we want the character's relationship to be with this place that he or she is trying to ingratiate into.
Q: It makes me think a little bit about no man's sky and the sort of approaching those pillars to learn these individual words. There was a system like that in there. Yeah. So maybe, maybe there's something too, you know, I know there's so many sort of astronaut games happening lately, but maybe there's something to crashing on a planet and like all of your stuff is busted, including your universal translator. And really the journey is to like learn the language of the people so that you can go on your quests and figure out how to actually repair your ship with, with their technology.
H: I feel like it's also worth pointing out there's a game that might be extremely useful in, in studying this. And I wish I'd spent more time with it so far because it it might actually be pretty close to what we're describing. There was a game called Heaven's Vault, which is done by the same team who created 80 Days and you play a like a anthropologist who goes to these ruins of places and, and and is basically trying to learn a language of a people that no longer exist. Beyond that, I, I can't really say that much and I probably should have done my homework before coming here because it is installed on my computer and ready to go. I played the first half hour or so, but yeah, it might be, it might be pretty close to what we're working on.
Q: Fair enough. I'm trying to think of like, because the No Man's Sky system feels too random for me to be like if the, if the game is actually learning the technology, no man's sky is like you learned the word for but and you're like, okay, and that's B U T a U. Okay. Crass you crass Play;Write listener. How dare you
H: Could be useful.
Q: Yeah. Right. It is right. But only like in conjunction of knowing at least the word that's going to come before or after. So I think it would be interesting to try and have something where you can yourself, I don't know if you're drawing it or what, but you yourself can kind of discovered new parts of the language either like by your own expression or your own exploration. Well, you know, I kind of like
H: If you, you know, like in some of these games like in a Tomb Raider we knew learn bits of a language is this kind of like your character of levels up and understands more of the language. Like there's no real puzzle there beyond just finding the collectibles that teach you the language. If you had to make guesses yourself as to what some of the language means, maybe you could save snapshots and color codes. Like maybe you could click on any word and then it will like automatically show you every other time you've seen that word and all the snapshots of the, of the texts that you've seen so far. See all the times that it's come up. And then you can kind of like, you can make a guess, maybe there's maybe there's certain words that are pretty, pretty safe you know, the, the, and, and stuff like that.
H: And then some you can some that are kind of like those gimmes like the corner pieces in a puzzle. The, you know, if somebody is pointing in an airplane, you can, it could be pretty safe to assume that the word they're saying in his airplane or something like that. And then you can kind of from there fill out like a game of Minesweeper, like the, the words around it, and then the ones that are around those. And you can kind of cross reference between the different photographs of of writings that you've seen in the past.
Q: Yeah, and I think maybe like a linguist, one of the things you could do here is like say you your computer or whatever holds a transcript of everything anyone's ever said of you. What you can do is highlight words and almost do a find and replace where you're like, anytime this word shows up, like show me this word instead. And maybe that's a limited list. So you control it a little bit more or you let the person free form type. Now you get into a situation where you actually like can see everything that was said to you in context. You're like, Oh, if that person was talking about, if they were talking about an engine in this scenario, like I suddenly know what to do to like get them their thing. And so you can kind of go back and follow up with people and you're like, this is, this is that word, you know, and, and make connections. And actually I think that would be really interesting. Something that I don't feel like I've ever felt in a game. It's always like language is always treated like an unlockable in a game.
H: That takes us to about time. Let's go in and call that one there and let's give it a name. We can call it Linguisonauts.
Q: Linguisonauts! Okay, I'm down. Yeah.
H: All right. Linguisonauts that's a coming to your PC and Mac soon.
Q: What's the knots game that everybody loves? The ones with donuts? Not Psychonauts, but isn't there scribble, Scribblenauts. I love it. So now we have psycho not scribble nuts and linguist and nuts.
H: Three more, and we'll have the whole set. Q, what are you pitching today?
Q: If I did my math correctly, this is coming out the day after Christmas, Yes?
H: Oh wait. So last week actually was our Christmas episode. Was it last week that we joked around about that?
Q: Yeah, it was! So yeah, this is happening to you potentially on December 26 year. You've just opened up all your gas. You're sorting through all your new stuff. Yeah, it's boxing day. I want to give you an idea of something that maybe you can use if you're getting together with friends or family over the next couple of days. But if you already missed it, it's for next Christmas. So sorry,
Q: I want to do some sort of twist here and I'm going to need your help big time on it. But like something like a secret Santa for video games and not just you buy a video game for someone but like every you, you get together a group of friends, hopefully you all have a similarly proficient video games skills. Maybe you choose a game that you feel like everyone could play like Tetris or Pac-Man, something people really enjoy and everyone draws a name. You write down all the friends names but in a hat draw a name and the friend's name that you get you the high score that you get in the video game is going to be donated to your secret Santa to add to their points. So you are getting a mystery donors amount of points and you are donating your points to somebody else's run in some particular video game. And then of course you all go around taking at this game, let's, you know, whatever. It could be a roguelike spill. Lucky there's lots of games we could do this with. And at the end of your run, your achievements, whatever milestones the group sets get donated to your partner, your secret partner, and you are their secret Santa points donator. But I'm sure there's more we can do with it. It's just kind of a ptoto-idea. So let's, let's try that. Okay.
H: Starting the clock there. So this is like a, it's kind of like a meta game thing that plays between games that already exist. Is that correct?
Q: Yeah. So this is like you and I are going to play Tetris and well obviously there would be a third person. You, I and Leon are all gonna play Tetris. And I draw your name, you draw Leon's name, Leon draws my name and we all play and whatever my highest score was, gets added to yours and yours gets added to Leon's and so on and so forth. So if we do get each other, we will have the same score, which is kind of interesting.
H: Is the intention to do poorly when you're giving your points, do Evers winning so that they don't pull farther ahead and the middle East?
Q: No, that's, so I think that wouldn't, first of all H shame on you. That would not be in Christmas spirit with it. No, I think it is an honest game where everybody is trying to do a good job and then the amount of points that you're getting as bonus from somebody else, it does depend on that person's performance. So you, you are kind of a bad secrets and if you don't get a good score, but everyone's trying to get the best score possible because your score is the base, right? So even the very best person at video games, if they've got kind of, you know, a weaker partner at those scores are put together. So there's, there's some balancing there.
H: You could see you can assist people in and, and playing games of, of various kinds. Is the, the ends that you working towards them doing well or are you being rewarded for helping the right people at the right times?
Q: So you could do something where like the highest score, like get some special prize that everybody goes in on or something. But the idea would be let's go very simple. Let's say we're playing dead cells. I get to you know, the fourth location and you get to the third location. Well, I'm your secret Santa and the, you get my four points as well. So your total is seven and that, you know, might put you at the top of the leader charts to get this, to get this Christmas prize.
H: So this, this kind of puts me in the mind of death stranding, which I know is a point that you like to, he's just all about kind of like helping people, assisting people. But that one is a little bit more random in a way and kind of like dark souls where it, it you're playing on the same server as a certain number of people and you can leave behind a little bridges. And ladders and stuff like that to assist other people in there. Ostensibly single player journeys. So are you are you picturing this being something that is still kind of anonymous or are you intending it to be among friends all helping people that they know out?
Q: I think it would be fun to do it amongst friends, but maybe there's a way to virtualize it. And what do you think?
H: Yeah, potentially. I mean it really comes down to what is the experience that you want people to have. You want it to kind of grow friends group closer together or do you want it to be, do you want it to just do it? Is there like a experiential thing about just helping anybody that that could go that could be useful?
Q: I like the idea of maybe this is a good way to bring this, this happens a lot in games like at backyard games like Cornhole and Horseshoes and, and Pool even where, or even in Bowling where like sometimes people will pair up specifically because one of them is far more expert and the other one's far more novice. So like the expert is like, ah, I'm just having fun here. Like just trying to play a game. And then the, the novice is they don't really care about it. They wouldn't be doing it anyway. So maybe this is more of a social game to make your, your aunt or uncle or, or mom or dad or one of your cousins, you know, even a sibling feel good about playing video games. Oh, it's all right. You know, you, okay, you died on the first level. I'm going to have to get to a level six to be at the top. And, and maybe it's more of a conscious pairing between friends.
H: It kind of like, I wouldn't, people go climbing together and they're tied together by that rope and as one of them falls, the other can potentially catch them, but only if they themselves have a good enough footing. Now we are pitching [inaudible]
Q: A co op climb sequel in VR, which is also very good.
H: Oh, Oh yes. Gosh, that would be interesting. I mean, this is something different entirely. The back pocket. All right. So what kind of system would this metagame be tied to in this be an achievements type of thing or how would you gain the resources that you need to help somebody else?
Q: That's interesting. I mean so skill based matchmaking is always kind of asked for and competitive video games and a lot of competitive video games have it. What if a competitive video game say like a competitive fighting game specifically had a mode called like Sherpa or it was, you know, it's called like, I dunno if it's called w something, whatever. I don't a good term for like pairing an expert in enough is together master and apprentice mode, right? Where one person is specifically low in the skill sort of ladder and another person is specifically high. But it's all about putting these people together and normally like when you have disparity in a competitive game where people are randomly paired up, it's really upsetting, right? Cause you're like, I'm really good. This person's really not a what a bummer. But a mode where someone is specifically signing up to do that in someone saying, okay, I know I'm very high in this skill ladder, maybe it, you know, it doesn't affect your ranking or whatever. To play this mode and to actually be paired specifically with a lower skilled player to kind of teach them to get better or so that you both just have a little silly fun, you know,
H: This is kind of like journey then how you can appear in somebody's game and the nos who have gotten all of the collectibles within the game, have a white robe. And whenever you see one of those it's like there's two things. It's like one, Oh, I didn't know this person. Yeah, yeah. Ah, this person is like, you know, they're kind of like a Sage, you know, they are they've, they obviously know all the secrets, but then on the other side it's like, you know, what are they doing playing the game? Like there's nothing more that they can gain. The only thing that they are here doing is helping somebody else, which is really a kind of affirming as well. And makes me feel good.
Q: Yeah, that's really cool. And then the idea of like, knowing like, hopefully the mode won't just be one team's expert beating up on the other team's novice and then vice versa until it's just both experts left facing off against each other. But maybe in the case of a fighting game, that's still great because it ends with the two novices kind of, you know, on the side of the ring, essentially watching two very high level people compete on their behalf. So you're both rooting for someone like truly rooting for someone. And also they are there getting the competition that they would want any way, but with the added benefit of like teaching someone else and, and really just, you know, having a little fun.
H: Yeah. This this reminds me at X-Box. One of the reasons I just kind of fun community things that we did was specifically with the Latin American community. I wasn't directly involved in this other than a few approvals because game pass was involved. But they did a like a competition where two two gamers were paired with their their mothers who the mothers were the ones who had to play for three different games. I think it was like guac, a melee and rocket league and you know, something else. And so the, the gamers that knew what was going on just had to like kind of sit on the side and like tell them what to do and assist them as they competed against one another, which is kind of a fun dynamic to have as well. As long as people don't get frustrated. Yeah. Anyways, we're out of time. Let's put a cap on that one and come up with a name.
Q: I'm sure. Something like Master and Apprentice is already taken. The, the original thought was like coming in with doing this in the name of like the holiday spirit and like w what do you, is this like partner mode is what is this? Oh, is this Mistletoe Mode?
H: Yeah, I guess it's festive.
Q: It is festive. It's like trying to get into like the holiday cheer or the,
H: What are we filled with jolliness because as we all know, when you're under the mistletoe, you have to instruct other people to do things that they might not want to do and they're obligated to comply.
Q: I'll have, you know so for listeners in episode 129 and 130, I've been trying this experiment where I've including transcripts of the episode and I'm just thinking, you know, there's so much context lost when you just see, like when you read that in text H, you're really going to be like, Ooh, that does not look as good as it sounded in the moment.
H: Well let's let's go ahead and call it and Mistletoe Mode and yeah, and call that our...
Q: People are giving kisses on the cheek. Holiday kisses on the cheek for platonic friends. Okay. I need a, I need a listener pitch. That's what I need.
H: All right, let's get into our community. This was emailed to us by Matt Taylor who says H and Q. I'm back again. Fourth maybe fifth time to give you some new suggestions. I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but I want to put the two of you to work. I want to put the two of you out of work rather. I want the everyday common man person be able to create games just like you to do every week. So my suggestion this week is for you to, to create the ultimate game creator game. We have RPG maker, Fighting Game maker, and even things like Dreams for PlayStation four. But I want the two of you to brainstorm with the next game maker platform. We'll be, we'll be VR based or be super easy. Super complex. Good luck. All right then this is more of creating a framework. So what a, what could we do to add to this, this game maker space? Let's go and start the clock.
Q: So, probably about two ish years ago now, maybe three years ago I was working in a place that we were lucky enough to be a small group and take a tour of one of Autodesk's San Francisco sort of research labs. One of the things they have this research lab was a drone that was built by a computer. And what they did is they, they basically said that the future of design, which this is always like makes any person who is a designer's ears perk up, but they said the future of design is a lot more like what we see in Star Trek, right, which is humans are going to give a computer a set of requirements. They are going to say and in this case for the drone, they were like, it has to have two engines and has to have four copters of this size and it has to be able to land and hover in a stationary way. Then the computer took all that and it decided to use the same pattern that mold grows in to grow the skeleton of the vehicle and the whole thing. And I'll, I will try to include a photo in this episode posts, but the whole thing looked like this weird, strange alien thing, a structure that probably the human mind would not go to as a first resort, but it looked like, I don't know, a tree or something, but it was indeed a drone and it used to like 80% less material than like if it had been built with the traditional drone body. So that, that's all to say I just went on very long. That's all to say that I think like for me that means the next generation game creation thing more than like dreams, which is very like, okay, create the character, create the world or whatever is a little bit more like even what Matt's doing here, right. Which is saying I want to have a 20 player game and like, okay, then the engine is going to go and like, all right, what do I have to, I'm going to just do everything possible to make sure that this can do 20 people.
H: Yes. So one of the things that I've been thinking about lately, there's a, there's been a game going around, it's just free made on one of Google's tools called AI dungeon too. Have you seen this at all Q now? So this is something that somebody created and it is a text adventure game, but it is, I guess at least in the way that they describe it being spontaneously written by an artificial intelligence. So you could, you could literally type anything into it and it would find a way to work that into the story that's being created. And so, you know, you can you can ride your horse into town and then you can you can type in, kiss the horse and then there will be like a short little scene and it will at all you know, write out about how you kind of, you know, tenderly brush the horses hair to one side and give it a soft kiss on the mouth.
H: You know that guy, like you know, I don't know how much of this is based on prefab, prefab stuff that has been written, fed into the AI. I don't know if it's pulling from a number of sources to generate the linguistic functions or whatever, but it is essentially, I mean the promise of it is that it's essentially an endless game with endless possibilities. And so I've always, I've always wondered if a game, and I know that this would be rather a CPU intensive and so maybe it's not something that we can do on current hardware, but if a game could be structured in such a way like a grand theft auto type game where every person that lives within that city has once and desires and the story essentially of their own all being kind of generated by the computer just based on a few symbol inputs that somebody could write into it.
H: And you know, you could say that they you can fail at a simple personality matrix, kind of like you're creating Sims. You can choose things like their occupation, their socioeconomic status, their what part of the city they live in, and then just kind of let the computer extrapolate and fill in the rest and give each person a story, you know, then potentially like you could live in so much more of a rich world that people actually going off and doing things for a reason instead of just, you know, walking around in circles and driving around on kind of predictable paths. Yeah. And then potentially if your character dies, you could just be, you know, hot swapped into another human being that is going about their own story in their own way.
Q: Yeah, I think that's interesting. So you kind of have a world filled with people. I think also the, the thing here that is like the central problem that we don't really face it because we're, we're kind of designing these games that we do every week based on no, just, you know, ideas or what we think is interesting for the, the topic at hand and we come in with ideas. But what's true is that like every gamer loves a different specific cocktail of stuff. And yeah, there's overlap in those areas, but there's not really a constant, and like even there's not a constant in my own taste day in and day out, right? There's like, sometimes I want a first person shooter I want, like in our arcade-y action game, other times I'm like, I think I want to play something slower or more plotting or something solitary like Astroneer. So imagine maybe not a game creator, but a game generator that like the experiences you sit down on your couch, turn on your Xbox, your PlayStation, whatever. And it's like, what do you want to play today? Right? And it just asks you, this is like, music services do this, right? A series of questions, they're like, what kind of games do you like and you choose for a list, I like Control and I like Alan Wake and they're like, okay, I'm gonna make something for you on the fly, right? There's one version of this, which is what you could do today, which is associate games with each other and say, okay, I found this other game. It's just like these games, right? We get that in Netflix. This thing is like, okay, I'm going to make something supernatural with guns and here I go. And then AI is doing that.
H: It would be really interesting to feed in games that were just like entirely different from one another. It's like, you know, I like, I like Pokeémon Picross and I like you know, Doom 64 and it's like, where do we go with this?
Q: Right, right. And, and in a way, yeah, speaking of putting us out of business, right, in a way that is kind of what we do here a lot. We're like, let's try really, I love this about this game. And I wouldn't it be interesting if you could do that over here in this context. So smashing games together a game smasher essentially. And this would be really fun to do. And in a way, it's kind of what we're seeing a little bit with Nintendo. And w you know, link is now in Mario maker, right? And that's gonna open up a whole new set of plays and possibilities. And I'm sure link is going to break a bunch of levels that exist, but it's great that Nintendo's being relatively unafraid and attempting something like that. So I'm wondering if like that's the future of games is just like, you know, some publisher has a cohesive catalog, I'm sure. Like you could smash together most of Ubisoft's games and get something that still feels like a good Ubisoft game.
H: I mean, I would love to smash up a Tony Hawk or catamari with any number of games. You know, I'd like to play Katamari and half-life to universe.
Q: Right. I think the thing is is when we do the, and it's, it's, it's also true of this show. This is a good meta episode. Thank you Matt. It's also true of this show is that when you smash up two things, you're not necessarily gonna get something that's good. Yeah,
H: That's true. Yeah. And so maybe maybe we'd have to program into this artificial intelligence that's generating these games. Kind of like the director and left for dead, like a sense of, of pacing and fun. I could almost be testing it behind the scenes to make sure that it's reaching adequate. I mean ideally it would be really neat if we could see a hookup players as some sort of biofeedback and it can read, you know, on the fly the chemical responses that people are having to things that are happening on screen. And it can adjust the game. It may be even entirely switching genres to better suit how they want a person to feel.
Q: I think that's cool if you, I mean we're living in an age, right, where we do have Smart Watches and a smart watch at at minimum these days. Can me, my heart rate, it can probably tell me the temperature of my skin. Maybe you can even tell clamminess or something like that. I feel like hand claminess this would be a great indicator of how engaged I am in a video game.
H: Yeah. it can map out stress levels as well. Using the like I think the salts in your skin or something like that, you know? There's all these different measures they can take. But anyways, we're out of time. Let's let's call someone down and come up with a name. I think we said Games Smasher at some point, which which has a bit of a honoring toward as well.
Q: Yeah, I kinda love it. Game Smasher the ultimate game AI, right?
H: Yeah, I like that. That would be a nice little tag on the front of the box. Like use it to get on old like nineties big box PC releases.
Q: I like Game Smasher you also use the word director and maybe that's something too, but gave special works well.
H: You could also be the Play;Writer.
Q: Ooh, okay. That's it. We've done it. Goodbye everybody. This is, this has been Play;Write. It was 130 yeah, 131 episodes...
H: You did it, you broke it.
Q: We just reached a game breaking bug and we cannot continue.
H: All right. All right. I like that. Thank you very much Matt Taylor for emailing us directly at play. Ride cast@gmail.com if you would like to submit a pitch, you can also do so by going to PlayWriteCast.com/pitch or you can tweet us @playwritecast.
Q: Thank you to prodome for the use of our theme song. Hello world off the album blue noise and special thank you to all the other wonderful shows on the Camden or its network. I say thank you, but you, you guys, if you haven't checked them out yet, I, I don't know what you're even doing. Go listen to the end of the year, stuff. Go listen to it. You know, there's so many hours is literally our recording session. I don't know how you're going to edit it H. I really don't.
H: It's coming together.
Q: Slowly?
H: Yup. Yup. We're getting there.
Q: But surely.
H: All right. Yeah, we do have some really fun stuff on the Cane and Rinse network towards the end of the year. So anyways as we're leaving the show today, I'm going to take us out with a miniature pitch and what I would like to see is a mashup of Pokeémon Picross and Doom 64.
Q: Ah, brought to us by theGame Smasher! Hey, you know what? Yeah, usually we just say goodbye at this point, but we're not going to get a chance to say anything to anybody until the end of the year. So I hope everybody had a great holiday season. Have a nice safe, happy new year. And I guess you know, we'll see you again in 2020.
H: Right. Join us again for another, another fun year of Play;Write. I think we're still going strong. I think our our idea Wells aren't running short just yet. My my notepad is currently empty or my one note where I keep all the, the game ideas but also need to have a quick little sit and think and then we'll be back up and fueled up and ready to go for the new year.
Q: So did you see the tweet that I put out? A, I got it from Spotify a long time ago. That's fair. At minimum you should be at me. Spotify sent us an email that has our podcast stats in it, but of course it didn't get all the episodes because we weren't on Spotify all year. You know, I think it was like March or something. That Spotify happend. So, but as far as Spotify is concerned, we put out 44 episodes this year, which is not true. We know we did 52, but those 44 episodes were 1,800 minutes of content.
H: Wow.
Q: So, you know, just quick napkin math, that's 30 hours. Right. So, you know, we are, we've got like as many minutes is like a season of friends going on. It's, it's pretty crazy.
H: Wow. That, yeah, that's a, that's pretty wild. We do about a 40 minutes every week. So yeah, that adds up pretty quickly. I mean, thank you. Thank you to everybody who has listened to us collectively for 30 hours over the last year. Like that's a, that's pretty incredible.
Q: So I'm, I'm putting into spotlight right now, 40 times one 30 we'll say that's roughly the episodes, and roughly the time is 5,240 divided by 60. So there is over 87 hours of Play;Write to listen to at this point, which is kind of crazy. But here we are again and thank you, sir, for another great year of podcasting together.
H: Well, Merry Christmas. Happy Hanukkah. Happy Boxing Day. Happy Kwanzaa.Happy new year.
Q: Happy all of it.
H: Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, I hope it's all very happy and Merry where appropriate.
Q: I hope everybody got time to actually play video.
H: Yeah, take some time for yourself. All right. All right, well we'll catch you in 2020 everyone.
Q: Bye!