Immersive Sims are Wrestling w/ Josh Boerman

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Only right on doors. Bugs, flash me.
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Hey, check this out. Ooh. Thinking about everything. Everything being wrestling. There's literally been a meme recently in the magic community about how we're just getting Emrakul off the top rope and she's gonna body this twink that we need and destroyed if at time of recording magic. The Gathering story is nuts right now. And Jace needs. Jace is dead as hell. Like, it finally happened.
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Oh.
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Oh, no, no, it's good.
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I. Again, as you know, I know so very little. So I'm not sure. I'm gonna take a guess here, but the twink is dead.
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Yeah, the twink is bad.
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Yay. Cool. Yeah. That's already like wrestling twink style lot.
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The Twink is Dead was also basically a recap of my past year. I just wanted to throw that out there. It's not great, but, like, whatever. We're doing our best. We're adapting. We're surviving.
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Yeah.
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It's not twink death. It's twink evolution.
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That's right.
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Twink Rebirth.
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Twink Rebirth. So what is this card? The Exigent Doom Bugs. What are we doing here?
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Yeah. Emrakul, the Exigent Doom. It's. This is the fourth Emrakle. I'm so excited. I love her. She is my evil noodle Mommy. I have. This card was just spoiled today. I have no idea what it does, what it could do.
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You just literally.
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I'm just here for the art.
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You literally is just dropping on this and you want me to just take this random thing you're giving me that you has no very little context. And, you know, like, this leaves me wide open options with where to go with this bit. And like, that's kind of messed up.
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He's kind of hot.
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He's also kind of hot, but, you know, like, oh, Chimera horror. Okay, I. I'm gonna need to save that for later, but. Yeah, no, you're giving me all these options. There's so many ways I could go with this. It's. I'm feeling very immersed in this. I. Yeah, I'm just gonna hit the button I got. And welcome back to Everything Is Wrestling, where I have to find some weird, silly way to do the intro because I refuse to actually come up with an intro. I've been podcasting for, like, going on four years now, and I've. I refuse to change.
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So you can always just start talking. That's. That's been my approach pretty well.
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Yeah. I was gonna say, like, that's a way to do it. I Like a little intro. I like, have a little fun. What can I say? I was a failed theater kid.
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A little.
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Yeah, a little yappy. We yap here. So today we are yapping as I the Garrett. Oh, my God, Almost dead. Dead name. Dead named myself. Right, right. I love when I Internet. Dead name myself is always so fun. It's like Ella Taylor. What would the she, her pronouns and the transgender. And with me, as always, is Bugs Matrix. Say hi, Bugs.
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Hi, Bugs.
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I'll never get over it. It's so stupid. And we are here again. I realized that I was going to. You had made the joke a while back, Bugs, and we were going with it of how this show doesn't have a format so much as we're trans Joe Rogan. We get trans people on here and we let them info dump. And then I was listening to House of Declines podcast.
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Yeah, like you're talking about one single podcast person who just holds long form conversations that are interesting to listen to. I think she actually might be the Joe Rogan.
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And I was like. And I was like, no, no, no, no, that's Trogan. That is in fact Trogan. So like, no, absolutely. Yeah. I was like, wait, no, no, Bugs. It was a fun bit. We're killing it. We bow down to. To the Drogons. But yes, we heard here to talk about things that are relatively related to wrestling in the sense that I've only seen a lot of wrestling and you know, we're like that. Not not only.
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I joke, only seen wrestling. Getting on a.
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Exactly. Today we have a guest who is a. A professional podcast guest is on a journey and I am once again helping this journey. You have one more opportunity to be on helped on this journey from me at least once. We could talk about that off Mike. Josh Borman. Hello.
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I appreciate your support in my ongoing quest. It's true. I'm embarking and have been embarking on something known as the podcast Challenge. I'm trying to go on 52 podcasts in 52 weeks. One of those podcasts, as you had previously mentioned, was House of Decline. And I'm not entirely sure, but I think this is appearance 44 that we're doing right now, depending on when it releases.
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Ooh, well, depending on when it releases, it'll be September 30th. So.
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Okay, yeah, this is either going to be 44 or 45.
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That's unfucking real. Oh, my God. But we're here to have you yap at us and info dump at us about immersive sims because why not?
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And the last one, Immersive Sims are wrestling. That's basically. And we got to talk about it.
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They truly are. And I don't know yet how, but we'll figure it out. No, I do. I have an idea. But in the meantime, Josh, tell the people about yourselves real quick. You can do it again at the end, but just in case, let people know where to find you. Send you money, if that's your thing. Check out your things. Where do they do that?
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Well, my name is Josh Borman. I co host two podcasts. One of them is called the Worst of All Possible Worlds, where we do case studies in the pop culture of a dying empire. Just basically up, down, and all around various forms of media. We talk about the narratives contained within those pieces of media and how they either can help you out or fuck you up, depending. And really a very wide range of media on there, everything from TV to movies to video games to evangelical Christian radio, drama for children. We cover it all, and we're very proud to do so. So, yeah, that's the worst of all possible worlds. You can find us wherever we get your podcasts. My other show is called Ill Conceived. We talk about natalism, the product which is the ideology and project that sees declining birth rates as the most important issue facing our times right now. Not our position, but we're very interested in the people for whom it is. And we've been fighting some wild lately.
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Y' all have been on one. Yeah, like, wow, I feel like that. I feel like that show. I feel like that Ill Conceived wasn't. Isn't even that new, but like. Or like. Or like, isn't even that old, I should say.
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Yeah, we've been running for a little over a year now.
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Yeah, I was gonna say. But then I think about, like, well, it's a little over a year. And I think back, my God, y' all have done so much.
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And like, just. That field is nuts right now.
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Oh, it's so. And there's still more. And like, wow.
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The worst thing about it is that when your podcast is about covering horrible freaks who are still alive, they find you. They find you. They know who I am. And you. You start noticing them in more places. Like, you'll. You'll see, like, a news article and be like, oh, this news article mentioned this person. Wait, I remember that person. Because they were also in that other thing. It basically rewires your brain. Because the thing about these people is that they're very good at operating in plain sight. They're not necessarily Secretive about their project or intentions, but they frame it differently to the general public than they do when they're talking amongst themselves. Yeah, we, of course, on our show have heard both contexts and they're not as clever as they think they are,
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but they really aren't.
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No, but they're very well connected, which
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is, you know, all it takes, really. Yeah, we are. Again, for, for more on that Josie Reisman on Here for Politics is Wrestling. It's a couple episodes back. Sometimes it's who you know in that instance. But like, oh my God, I recent episodes are you like, you're talking about getting to like, do the actual interaction in real times. It's just a wild thing. It, that's a while. I can't imagine it. Like, it'd be like if, if will ospreay the AEW championship came on my show, like, well, you got a problem with me, brother? Because I believe women and I read a different book. You're like, just read another book, bro. Yeah. And, and maybe women are people. Just maybe. Yeah. I don't know. We do, we do get up to some, don't we? All right. We're not people. We're magical, Divine Fae creatures. Okay.
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Damn it.
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Yeah. Nyah nyah, nyah, nyah, nya nyah, nyah, nyah.
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I've been saying this.
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What if we managed that for 45 fucking minutes? This is a whole.
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Say NYAH for 45 minutes, but like
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a whole conversation of nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah.
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That can be the least listenable podcast of all time. It's worth thinking about. I, I, I, I.
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It is a criminally bad idea.
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It's incredibly bad. Which is why I want to do it again. Why, why, why don't more people save
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that one for when we do cast 2019.
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Yeah. The unwatchable movie. I tried. I don't. I think I just needed more drugs than I, than I had.
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So which movie is this?
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Cats 2019.
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Oh, God.
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Oh, no. I got 20 minutes into it and I just couldn't do it. I couldn't do it. Movie bugs. You're weird saying it out.
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That's actually, that's a fucked up and bad opinion I'm gonna say.
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No, no, I, I, I agree, I agree.
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But like, I have a core memory of watching Cats the motion picture alongside a couple other films while I was sheltering in place during the early acute period of the pandemic in the great state of Michigan, actually. And fantastic. There was a red box that was not too far away from where we were and so that was a great no contact way to get DVDs because we didn't have like reliable service early on there to even have like reliable Internet. And so it was. We got. I'll tell you the three movies I watched. I watched Uncut Gems Cats and then. Oh God, what was that horrible, horrible movie about Fox News about the ladies, about how ladies can be.
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Bombshell.
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Bombshell. Have you seen that movie?
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Yeah.
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No.
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It's insane.
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It's insane.
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So bad. It's like bad in a different way from how I thought it would be.
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I was going to say like an evil object.
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Yes, yes. Because there is a world in which you could absolutely build a narrative about how like, you know, the, the, the. The nature of patriarchy is that it affects all of us, regardless of politics, etc, but it ends up becoming this thing of like Roger Ailes, the guy was the bad thing, nothing else. Don't worry about these systems. Don't worry about this network. Don't worry about these political operators.
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There's no structural critique. There's exactly.
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It's just Roger the man.
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Don't think about the systems and societies that created that man. Right. Well, yeah, none of that. Yeah, that's so. I hate that. I hate when you have a good thing you don't that up. I hate when something gets like really close to get like to me that's like we're gonna talk about a bunch of stuff that's not immersive. Sims first, I guess. But that's. Remember that movie they slash them. Oh no.
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Yeah.
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Oh, Josh. Oh, Josh. I. I could. This could be a whole podcast me going off about this movie.
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So John Logan wrote this thing.
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What?
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Holy.
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This movie. This movie. I just. It's what it was like one of those things where like we're gonna do. We're gonna put out like this woke horror thing and then you watch it and by the end it's like, hey, you know, maybe the. You ever think about how that oppressor who's trying to conversion camp you feels? You know, you ever think about that? And it was like, why are you like the. The end? And it's the kind of thing where it isn't. It wasn't in the story, it was in how it was delivered at the end. Not to spoil anything, but like the. The who the killer was wasn't a problem. That was fine and good. But the delivery of how they are trying to make you feel. Feel about who the killer revealed was, was like. No, no, no, no. There's. This isn't like a. They were right. They should have kept killing you. Like, but, you know, it started. It was one of those things where it's like the bad guy was right here the whole time. And you're trying to make me feel like bad about the fact that this bad guy was in fact correct. You know, that's my remembrance of it. And on top of that, it was just very like Tumblr bat derogatory the movie, you know, you know, like it was like that sort of. Or who was it you, I think who toiled. I forget who. I can't remember what podcaster I listened to too much who talked about like not Tumblr ification but like buzzfeedification where like it's not the Tumblr language, it's the fact that buzzfeed found Tumblr language. And then.
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Yeah, this, this feels like the intersection. I'm just sort of like skimming the synopsis. Yeah, yeah, it's the exact intersection of Tumblr and buzzfeed, which is just a God awful vibe.
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Yeah, no, it's just rancid. It's just ran.
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Yeah. And Kevin's B. Kevin Bacon is there. It had one good line in the whole thing, but yeah. Holy, what a movie. That, that's not grabs though. I mean, I suppose that could be grabs immerse. It's also not immersive Sims, so look at me producing. You should tell us about why you love immersive Sims and or DOS Ex. And feel free to info dump as much as you like because we are just a couple dumb gays.
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Yeah, well, let's, let's, let's frame a couple things up here. Let's talk about the immersive simulation, the genre, sort of what its whole deal is. So yes, the immersive sim is a genre of video game that finds its genesis in RPGs mostly. And the idea is that in this type of game, player decisions are the thing that sort of drive the game forward. And in each world, each level, you are sort of presented with a sandbox, basically a toy box. Like, there's all of these different choices within the world that you can make and you can advance your way through this world by playing it the way that you kind of want to play it. So generally speaking, immersive sims are going to have a mixture of different mechanics. Oftentimes there's a strong emphasis on social interactions. So like, you know, dialogue trees and stuff like that. More often than not, there's gunplay in case you want to go in there with Guns blazing, or I guess, like sword play. If it's a fantasy imsim. Like, for instance, the very early Ultima Underworld is largely considered to be the first imsim, kind of. There's also this emphasis on emergent storytelling through gameplay, where sort of what you do in the story that you tell, through the sort of gameplay that you've done tells you your own story in your head about what it is that your character wants and how they achieve their objectives. Oftentimes, missions have branching trees where it's like, oh, you can do this thing or you can do that thing. And then the story will branch based on those decisions. Because, again, it's this idea that choices matter, and you also have to be able to pick up bodies and hide them in the corner. And you need to be able to find audio logs of people saying, I'm the last one on this ship. I should have known. I should have known that we were never gonna make it. But I thought. I thought I could be the one who's gonna make it. I'm not gonna make it. Those are sort of the characteristics of an imsim.
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I will say those last two things specifically. Totally grabs. Yeah. Very wrestling. Yeah. Very well. Well, to say, well, again, no format to this, but one of the things I thought of when looking into immersive Sims and. And that I found. What? First of all, I found a bunch of games I love. I. I never played Dos X, but.
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Deus Ex.
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Deus Ex.
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Deus Ex. You know.
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Thank you.
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I just wanted to help you.
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Laugh me around. It's so hard.
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Sex.
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Day of Sex. That's right.
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Day of sex. Home of sexual. Yes. All right. We got there. Day of Home of sexual Sex. Anyways,
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when they said mankind divided,
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you
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know, only to come back together again.
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That's right.
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So when I. When I had never played that, but I'm looking into it, what I have played hundreds of hours of is Fallout 76.
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Okay.
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And holy hell, when I'm, like, looking at what an immersive sim is, I was like, that's. That's 76. And that's very much how I played 76.
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Okay? So this is an interesting question. Is like, is Fallout an msim? And especially with New Vegas, people ask this question a lot, too. Go ahead, Bugs.
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No, I was going to say, I think one could make the argument specifically, specifically for New Vegas, but then for the other, like, I wouldn't say that Fallout 4 is an IMSIM.
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I see. I would make the argument specifically for 76.
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I haven't played 76, so I don't know. I would argue that what makes an immersive sim is a big. It's mostly. And this is going to sound weird, but it's sort of like I know it when I see it. Because it's a feel thing.
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Yeah, yeah. It's a vibe more than like a defined genre. No, because, like, go ahead. Not all, like, all immersive sims have RPG elements, but not every RPG is an immersive sim. Like.
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Yes. Yeah. Like, you know, not. You know, all cops are bastards, but not every bastard is cop, you know.
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Have either of you played Vampire, the Masquerade, Bloodlines?
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I've been meaning to.
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I have not, but I've. I've hung out in many a party with many people who really, really did.
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Were these people transgender by chance?
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Several of them. No way. Including me, though I was in a closet in Eggy at the time.
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Because the thing about a game like Bloodlines is it is a bit different from most immersive sims because, you know, you don't have gunplay, you don't have sci fi trappings, which are often a big part of the immersive sim. But you can tell that it's an imsim when you play it because it's that thing of like, oh, I could go up and talk to a guy, or I could go in the back way and hack his computer, or I could just like, blast the shit out of him with my vampire magic or whatever.
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All valid options. Good for you in any one of those.
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Yeah, having. Having those branching options, I think is. Yeah, definitely, like a defining. And that's.
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That's also why I think that, like, Fallout isn't quite that. Because there are different tactical approaches that you can take.
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Yeah.
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But it's not that the game doesn't allow necessarily for different mechanical angles of approach. It's that, yeah, you can talk or fight, I guess.
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Yeah. But like. And you can spec into different types of, like, fighting style that.
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See, that's where I. Yeah, the specking into different stuff is where is where.
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To me, that comes like, you know, because you can get. There are some things that kind of feel like they should have a mechanical, like, impact. But, like, at the end of the day, it's like, no, if you have a high enough repair skill, you're functionally just talking to a thing. Like, you're not. It's not like the gameplay itself doesn't really change. Right.
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See, and this is. This is where not to cut you off, but this is where I would make the argument specifically for 76. Because 76, I. I started playing that. I want to say God, now I can't remember a little less than a year into its release. So pretty early on. And when you in, like, me and my. My exes got me into it, and we put a lot of time into there, and, like, I put a lot of hours into it. After a while, like, you beat the main storyline, but then like, it's like, okay, well what do you do? And it's like, well, at that point, it becomes an apocalypse simulator. Because, like, you. You have to keep yourself fed and watered. You have camps, you know, like, you can go find other things. The world is so huge. Like, 76 initial map is like three or four maps of a normal Fallout.
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This is actually one reason I would argue that 76 is not an msim, because what you're describing is an open world and immersive Sims. One of the things about just the philosophy behind MSIMs is that they actually don't have an open world. It's a world that thinks oftentimes feels open. And I think Prey is a really good example of that. The game prey from 2018, or whatever the hell that was, because it feels like you can go all over the station or whatever.
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Yeah.
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But you don't have the ability to, like, do things or pursue quests outside of the parameters of how the designers wanted you to experience the thing. Whereas I think a game like Fallout, hearing what I'm saying is hearing about the description of Fallout 76, or talking about other Bethesda games for that matter. Like, if we're talking about, like, you know, Skyrim or whatever, more of the experience is about having this large world that you can explore at your leisure in the way that you want to and at the pace that you want to, and playing the parts of the game that you want to. And that last thing is definitely not a part of what Immersive Sims are.
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Okay. See, no, and that. That's where the difference. And that's where I said in how you play it too. And also it changed because the other thing is it changed because, like, that is an aspect of it, but you didn't have to do it. But the thing you're talking about where, like the set thing, that is absolutely an aspect and they added to it and that. And they continue the storyline after a while. There's NPCs. And what was really cool about that is, like, when you first started 76, you were the only human person, like, period there, you know, Unless you run into another player. But that was very, very rare. So there is, you know, like no one else. And then after a couple of years, they storyline wise had like, oh, well, a bunch of people are returning to Appalachia and that's where the NPCs came from.
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I also see that one of the, again, having not played Fallout 76, kind of reading about it, that a big piece of it, a big mechanical piece of it is that you can build and defend bases.
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Yeah.
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There's sort of like a crafting system that allows you to put stuff in place permanently that is nothing you will ever find in an immersive sim.
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Okay. All right. So that's just my, my misunderstanding of immersive sim.
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You might have the ability to place like turrets, for instance, or like light fortifications and defenses, but it's not something where you are going to be adding to the world in a such a permanent way as that. Because the environments aren't persistent in the way that they are in an open world game.
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Okay.
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This is another thing is like if you get a game like System Shock 2 for instance, enemies respawn in a game like Sam. Just again, thinking about my other like IM Sims, off the top of my head, there are other in sims where enemies do not respawn. But either way, the thing that you're not going to have happen is this like persistent world that changes again outside of the parameters of the sandbox that the designer wants you to play in.
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Okay.
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So it's just a different design philosophy. It doesn't make it better or worse.
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It's just.
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Well, no, no, well, you know what, when, when you make that clarification. Holy. Immersive Sims is wrestling. Yeah, that locks it into place. Because the way I was looking at this is from an audience perspective, wrestling becomes almost an immersive sim because you can, it is very, it is very immersive in the sense that you are, you are literally throwing yourself into the storyline that overlaps reality. We've talked about that before. And the weird way wrestling time works where you know, you have this fictional ongoing storyline that exists in, in second to second real time with reality. And, and that's crazy in its own right. But then you add the aspect that a lot when you talk to wrestlers about the craft of what they do, a lot of them, the best ones, in my humble opinion, will say that a lot of what they do is listen to the fans when they're out there. They're listening to the reactions to what they're doing. And that dictates where the match goes.
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And I would say too much like an immersive sim. The broad parameters of the engagement are of course set. And in many cases the storylines are set. They have. They have a place that they need to get to by the end of the thing, but they have all of these tools in their kit at their disposal to get to that objective.
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Exactly. Exactly it, Josh. That's what made it click. No, I play. So I was like, oh, that's the thing. Like all. Everything in between can be improv. And again, in my humble opinion, the best versions of wrestling are some version of that. There are especially in the Fed. Nowadays, the wwe, we call it the Fed still because it was the World Wrestling Federation. So it's the Fed or just the fascists in that. In that company. It's all very, very choreographed. Like the whole match from beginning to end in Aw and in the Indies, a lot, almost out of necessity really. It's all improv. They do what we call calling it in the ring. You get out there and you know who's gonna. You know, the finish, you know, the. Your characters and, and. And then you go out there and you improv based in those parameters. Very rarely, though, there are instances where, again, you know, you're taking the word of a bunch of literal carnies who lie for a living that this is how this went. But there have been instances where that listening to the crowd does change the ending that you will like. Several like you calls are made on the fly from the back where the guy who sets the parameters says, no, I'm going to change the parameters now. So the one that I think of, one of the biggest ones, and I hate to bring it up because again, it's in the fast company and involves two pieces of. But Terence Hulk Hogan and Dwayne the Rock Johnson had had a very famous WrestleMania matchup. And it was supposed to be the thing where like, Hulk was doing Hollywood. Hulk Hogan, like nwo, his. His heel guy and the Rock is the Rock. So they're like, okay, well, the Rock is. Is going to be the face here, obviously, and Terry Z is the old evil dude. And it'll be a passing of the torch of the. The new icon of wrestling beating the old icon of wrestling. Then they go out there and the crowd just pops so hard to see Terry Belea and to see Hulk Hogan in a Fed ring again in at a WrestleMania that it just. It completely changes the energy. And the crowd dictated. No, no, no, no, Hulk, you. You are winning this sort of thing or, or it might have been the other way around, now that I think about it again, because it was like 20 years ago. I can't remember and I haven't watched it forever, but like. But yeah, it was like the kind of thing where they were supposed to be one way. They switched it. I think it was Hogget 1. But yeah, and it's like that happens again. I'm supposed to be the wrestling expert here, but like, I stopped paying attention to the Fed so long ago.
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But have. Have either of you played any of the big Immersive Sims? I'm just kind of curious here, because the big ones just. Just to rattle off a list.
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Yeah, I was gonna say please. I thought I had. Please help.
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We got Deus Ex Human Revolution, Deus Ex Mankind Divided, and of course, Deus Ex Invisible War, which is sort of the black sheep of the franchise. You got Thief, Thief to the Metal Age Thief, Deadly Shadows, Thiforf, which is the, like, newer Thief game, which ended up just being called Thief after all. You got System Shock and System Shock 2. In particular, BioShock, which is mostly an MSIM, but also kind of not.
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And yeah, I was going to say Bioshock's like a weird kind of outlier there, right?
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Because, you know, the director on Bioshock was Ken Levine from Irrational Games, who was the lead on System Shock 2. And then after he put out System Shock 2, he really said, every game I'm going to make for the rest of my life is just going to be System Shock 2 again. And he's been trying to ship Judas for like a fucking decade, and that game is never coming out.
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I have played some System Shock 2 and obviously BioShock.
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How far did you get in Shock two?
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Oh, this is like three or four years ago. I don't. I don't recall.
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I have not played any of those, unfortunately.
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Here's another thing, to the point of why Immersive Sims are wrestling. Yeah, I think that when you talk about your antagonists in MSIMs, that brings some real wrestling energy and I can give numerous examples.
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Oh, please, go for it.
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So showdown, Showdown From System Shock 2 is. Is the ultimate.
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Like, you are not the first. I've, again, I've never played it, but I heard the name. You are not the first person to say Shodan is grabs. To me, she is.
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Her whole thing is that she is a ship's AI computer who has been corrupted and as a result of sort of becoming rampant, she now is trying to kill everybody and kill most people and then keep a few People around as her own slaves so that she can basically ascend to a higher plane of existence and create her own digital heaven.
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Okay, so that's literally Jon Moxley's like last two years of storyline in a W. My cat's namesake. Yeah, basically. That's the Death Riders. You just described the Death Riders storyline.
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Okay, how about. So that's, that's Showdown. She's one of the antagonists. Another one of the antagonists from Shock 2 is Xerxes, who is the onboard computer of the Rickenbacker, which is the ship that you are on. The ship that Showdown boarded, basically. And his whole thing is that he's been working together and he has sort of fused with the. This weird alien bioenetic race called the Many. And the Many are basically the Borg from Star Trek.
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Yes, good.
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Say that sounds fine, except that they're like squishy rather than metallic, you know, but their whole thing is, oh, we are going to absorb you all into our, into our wonderful mind. And they sound like this and they talk to you in your head using this voice. Is that right?
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That's. Oh, yeah, that's wrestling.
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Oh, hive mind is absolutely wrestling. That makes me think we're going just modern graps. That would be the Don Callis family. Or let's see, there's. We've talked about what the, the, the hot goth mommy spitting in mouths bugs that you love so much gathering.
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Excuse me, you have my attention now.
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You have my attention, folks.
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Hold on, let me, Let me get
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a. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Bang us with that. But we've mentioned them before. The Sisters of Sin, Julia Bloomington, Minneapolis's own Julia Hart, uh, was a cheerleader character, uh, and like, you know, yay, bubbly. Great. Woo. You know, and then there was the House of Black, uh, which is Brody King and Buddy Matthews and Malachi Black Rest and piece. He's not dead. He just. He's dead to all of us. Many, many such cases in wrestling. But his whole. They were like this super goth dudes. And like he would. His whole thing is he would spit black miss in people's face to win match, win matches. And then every once in a while they would be like, you know, okay. And now like, they never did it much. I don't think they did it much outside of. Yeah, there she is. Elish Nor in the Grand Cenobite. There we go.
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Nice.
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Yeah.
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So she's sort of like Lady Pyramid head, basically.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Very, very well said. So he would do the.
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He.
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He would. They Changed it to a thing where, like, he would spit the black mist in your face and maybe that would corrupt you. So he corrupted Julia Hart, the. The cheerleader, by spitting this black mist in her face. And she became, like, under his spell. He ended up leaving the company because he sucks. And she ended up, like, taking over the stable and it. And like, she is so awesome. And then she started doing it to women in the roster. So, like, you have Sky Blue from Chicago again, one of my favorites. Love Sky. She got spit in the face and like, you know, hot goth girl, mommy spit in her mouth, the black mist. And then she turned evil and now they're the sisters of Sin in a tag team. So, like, at any point, this hot goth woman could spit black mist in your face and decide that you're evil now. Like, that's. That's just not. That's just.
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That. That's just my idea of a good
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weekend that's quite literally grabs. Yeah.
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All right, so other. Other MSM antagonists going. Going to Deus Ex. You've got Bob Page. Bob Page's whole deal is that he is. He's basically Elon Musk. Honestly. He is this extremely wealthy industrialist who has decided that he is going to merge his own consciousness with that of a super intelligent AI and so he's just floating in this vat of goo in Area 51 with the intention of eventually embedding his. Embedding this. This AI Icarus Helios. This. This merged AI into his own brain. And that. That. And then he thinks he's going to be able to like, rule the world. As this Uber mentioned. He. He is creating the titular Deus Ex machina.
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Okay, see, and as far as that, in wrestling, a lot of people, you know, folks at home, longtime listeners of Lowers of Wrestling, are go, oh, Vince McMahon. Anytime there's a mega maniacal asshole.
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It's.
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It's totally Vince McMahon. No, no, no, no, no, because what you're describing is Paul Levesque. What you're describing is Triple H, the heir to Vince McMahon, who is currently the creative director at the Fed, who has ushered in the complete downfall of everything created, along with Dana White, because of course. And they're over there literally, like they were like, telling people that they're using AI to write storylines. And, and like that you can tell because the product is hot, wet garbage. And like, it's. It's terrifyingly bad. And Paul's like, no, no, you understand about this thing we do. The AI is gonna merge with my brain and I'll make dad happy. And like, yeah, it's terrible. So like that's why he thinks he's going to perfect wrestling by taking the formula that his monster father in law created and literally feeding it into the goddamn machine. And he's going to make profit forever off of this.
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I got one more for you.
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It's not working. Please hit me.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. Constantine from Thief. So Constantine is in the first Thief game you play as Garrett the master thief. And Garrett's whole thing is like, oh, I'm going to go to this, I'm going to go to this mansion and I'm going to steal some shit. And then from stealing shit from this mansion, he catches the eye of this eccentric wealthy man named Constantine at one point. You actually end up then doing a mission in Constantine's house where it turns out that the house contains various nightmares and a whole lot of non euclidean geometry. And then much later on you learn that Constantine is the actual devil. He's. He's a trickster God. And so he's been trying to use you in his ongoing war against this cult called the Hammer Rights to sort of shore up his own strength as, as Constantine the, the Woodsy Lord.
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Yes. That's awesome. But yeah, that might not be wrestling,
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but it is cool.
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Well, no, well no, no, no, it's wrestling. As soon as you said Satan himself. Yeah, no, that one's Vince McMahon. That's an easy go to this. Could go forever. Again, like I, I keep coming, I do keep coming. Back to. Oh, and I should mention I looked it up. Hulk Hogan did not win that match. It was a spiritual victory. He won the heart of the people. But he still lost the match because Vince said no, no, no, don't. Vince knew better because it was, I think it was a championship match. Even if it wasn't, Vince knows better. If you give a Terry a victory, he's gonna want a title run. And, and like it's good. And he was so like, you don't give Hulk an inch at that point because he will take everything. God rest in piss. I'm so happy he's gone. So I wanted to make sure to mention that. But no, wait, like the other way I can think of like the outcome, like when this goes bad, I imagine this is like, are there instances of immersive sims where like it, the concept just failed horribly when executed. Like they thought it was going to be great and then it just failed.
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Well, Redfall, which I actually didn't play because I heard it was bad, but that was the Game that killed Arcane, Austin, that was. That was their follow up to Prey, if I recall or no. Was it was there for. No, I think it was their fall up to follow up to Death Loop. Deathloop is a pretty cool game.
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I never got to play it before I had to sell my PS5 and I hate that because I really wanted to.
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Redfall was trying to be a multiplayer tactical immersive sim.
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Okay.
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Set in the world of vampires. And it just. I. The sense I get was it was trying to do too many things. It didn't spend enough time in the oven. And they also just never figured out how to make the core gameplay loop fun. And that's always a problem. Like, because Arcane is very good at creating these worlds, which are cool. But if the game. I mean, to quote Reggie, of course the. The game is fun. If it's not fun, why bother? We've all heard this quote. We know this quote. We've heard Reggie say it. And I think Arcane ran up against that difficulty. And I think they also. That was a game that had its development pretty severely fucked up by the advent of the pandemic. And they just never figured out how to reground the project is the sense that I get. And that was the lead on. That was Harvey Smith who worked on the original dsx and you also might know as the lead on Dishonored.
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Okay, okay, that.
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So he knows immersive Sims and Dishonored is proof of that.
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And he eventually found a hit there. Okay, see that, that makes me think of something right away. Roman Reigns, this is a Fed heavy episode, folks. But Roman Reigns is this guy who is a cousin of the Rock. The Rock's whole family, the Anawahi family is like the most powerful dynasty in professional wrestling, basically. And people like think, well, not really. No, no, literally. And it goes back a while and through sheer numbers, there's so many of them. So like Roman got brought in very early on and Vin. Vince McMahon loves a golden boy, basically. Vince McMahon has been trying to replicate the money he made with Hulk Hogan since he made it. And. And though. So he created this formula where you have the face of the company, that torch gets passed. It's a big thing. We. And it's all important. We create and it's. You know, they create this thing and it's his story, it's his play. You know, the Fed is a sandbox, but it's Vince's sandbox.
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Right.
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Sort of thing. So he decided Roman's the next big thing and he's like, you know, this is gonna be the guy.
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We're.
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We're gonna build this guy up as being the next guy. He's gonna win the Royal Rumble. The. The multiplayer, if you will. He's gonna.
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He's gonna.
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He's gonna win the 30 person over the top rope Rumble to. To be like next in line to be the champion and like be coronated. This is what's going to happen. This is the story. There's one problem with this amazing story. He sucks and the fans know it.
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He's so. He's.
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He was not good. He was very not good. He's gotten much better. But like to be worse, hard to be worse. And this was a long time ago too. But like the fans hated this guy. Really hated him. They wanted Bryan Danielson, the, the plucky underdog, vegetarian little guy who is like the opposite of everything Vince McMahon thinks makes a good pro wrestler. But. But he is literally one of the greatest to ever do it. The American dragon. Love you, Bryan Danielson. So like he. The people know what they fucking want. Vince knows what he wants. They clash. So at the end of the Royal Rumble, like the Royal Rumble happens. Danielson comes out because I'm not. You say you don't know much about wrestling. The Royal Rumble is the thing where like, if you're unaware it's a. 30 people could possibly fight at once. Very rarely gets there though because it starts with two people and then every like minute and a half or three minutes depending on the year a new person comes out. And if you get thrown over the top rope, you're eliminated. The last person standing with.
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It's a battle royale.
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It's a battle royal. Yeah, but it's unlike other Battle Royals in that it's staggered. That's a thing that the Fed invented. Basically. That's what makes. That's what makes it the Royal Rumble. And not just a battle.
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Oh, Royal Rumble. I get it.
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Royal Rumble. That's a. Because tmtm. Tm. He can make money off the concept. Yeah, Exact. Yeah. Vince. So like this at one point, Danielson is the next entrance. Next entrance about. I feel like it was like halfway through and the crowd goes nuts. Here's their winner. And again it's that thing where like the, the. It's set in stone. What's going to happen here? Vince is going to get what he wants, but the crowd don't want to play the game that way. And like what happens when the.
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It.
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The. It's so broken because like the crowd, the, the. The People playing this immersive sim do not want that ending. They do not want it no matter how hard you give it to them. So eventually Bryan Danielson gets eliminated before the end of the the match. And at this point the crowd knows what's going to happen and they revolt. So the match is going on and they are booing, they are, are yelling at how much Roman sucks. They have stopped playing the game. They have thrown the controller, basically like they're done. They, they have set it the down and like, oh, it was bad. The Rock tried to fix it by coming out and going, no, my cousin won. Don't you love me?
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Me?
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And everyone's like, you, you go back to Hollywood, give us Daniels. Like everyone was done.
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The question of buy in is an interesting thing to me. Like from when we're talking about like gameplay, a work of theater, whatever.
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Yeah.
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Because there is this handshake that you have with your audience. They come with their expectations for what the product is that they are going to receive. And you can give them just about anything as well as you are as long as you are willing to honor the terms of the implicit contract that you have made with them. However, when you show your audience disrespect by throwing something at them that is not just like different from what they expected, but also very clearly disrespectful of their time. That's when people get upset and then with, with video games, yeah, that is when you will lose an audience entirely like it. It is not an exaggeration to say that Redfall, I mean part of this is also just Microsoft being Microsoft because they have been very austerity forward since acquiring the ZeniMax portfolio. But it is still not an exaggeration to say that Redfall is the game that killed Arcane Austin because it was supposed to be a big revenue generator for that studio. It was the only game that they had been working on and for various reasons it did not deliver on its promises. And ultimately the blame for most of this does roll back up to corporate for not giving the games the resource, not giving the studio the resources that it needed, and also not sort of shepherding this project in the way that the project required. But obviously in video games, big publishers not being very good at how they communicate expectations, their studios. That's nothing new. That's a tale as old as time and it's gotten a lot, lot worse over the course of really the past five years.
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Yeah, well, the what makes me that, what that makes me think of too is like you talk about the disrespect to your audience. There is nothing Vince McMahon loved more than disrespecting his audience. Because what. Here's the. What I would give to you. What if there was only one game studio? What if you had a single game studio and a bunch of extremely underfunded indies?
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There's three.
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Yeah, I mean, yeah, I guess we're not too far.
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No, that's where. That's where we're at right now. Because there. There's the Fed, there's AEW and there's, I guess TNA or like New Japan really is the big one. CMLL to a certain extent, that's the Lucha Libre, the big org in Mexico that's not owned by the Fed. And AEW and New Japan work together too. So it's really more like two ones are collaborated enough, but for a good 20, 25 years there it was one. Because that's what Vince did is he gobbled up everything else, bought all of his competition, and he became a monopoly on professional wrestling for 25 years. Like, just like. Well, 20, but like, holy, holy. And that sucked. If everything hurt because it was that thing of like, okay, well, then you just don't play video games, you know, if you don't like what I'm doing, then you have no other option. There's a bunch of indies you could go check out, but they're not. They're never going to be A AAA because they don't have my money. You know what I mean? And they're never going to give you that experience. Like a AAA is because they just. They. It's not the same thing. In a lot of people's opinion, it's better.
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And. And another parallel to video game studios, they have the exclusives. That's the other thing. They've got the exclusives. Which means that particularly when you're talking about the pairing of developer or, sorry, studio with console, Nintendo, Sony, Xbox, they all have their exclusives. And labor is, of course, the thing that ends up getting the short end of the stick if you are not able to demonstrate that you are the one who can deliver the most value because you're a big fucking name or whatever. Yeah. So, yeah, if you're.
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Which is why wrestlers are constantly struggling and dying because they live in poverty while throwing their bodies around for. For us. Yeah. Yeah.
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There's an assumption that everybody's like Dwayne Johnson and that's just not the case.
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It's like, absolutely not the case.
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Absolutely not the case. Like, and what's cool about aew is they have been trying to work backwards. They've been basically trying to undo what Vince did in a lot of ways. And it took another billionaire. It took a billionaire's son who is a sicko nerd for wrestling. Yeah. Like Tony Khan had his dad take him to ECW shows and now we have a dub. So like he's trying to undo that where that you want to get rid of the exclusivity because it's not good for labor. It's not good for the product and storytelling in the medium long run. The fans eventually hate it. The people who like the Fed still has huge numbers. Like, I'm not. I'm not saying this for like tribalism's sake. Seek help. Like if. If you. If you are still watching the Fed, why there. There. There's no reason other than it's a security blanket and you need to read a new book. It's the same thing. It's a security blanket. There you are hurting yourself. There is better graps out there that you can't even begin to imagine. But they like their slop. And, and like because for 25 years that a lot of these people who are watching that now, that's all they've ever known is the slop. They didn't know what. What wrestling used to be. So like AW is trying to fix that. And part of that is the Fed will not let its. Its contracted workers work anywhere else. The Fed acts like nowhere else exists. Like that is like the mandate. We are the only wrestling company Aw. All of their workers can work indies. They can take indie booking still. They can work other companies. They can do whatever the fuck they want. They have creative control. Just don't get hurt, you know, that's it. So you get situations where the. The current world champion at the time, Jon Moxley of the second biggest wrestling company in the world is shocking. Showing up to the biggest indie and fighting Effie and smoking a cigarette and burning him with it and making out with him. The game Effie makes out with his. His opponents because he's gay to try to bamboozle them. It's always a good time. And then sometimes he tries to do it to another gay wrestler and then it just gets kind of hot for a while. Shout out first Wrestling. Love y' all folks. Go see indie wrestling shows. But yeah, no like that. That's exactly it. For the longest time it was. And it's not good for anyone, especially the workers. So it's wild to think that, you know, we. We joked about when we started the show like, oh, everything is wrestling now. The more and more we do it. Yeah. Like we bring people on. It's like we found out that these things are wrestling in ways we hadn't even thought of yet. More often than not. That's a perfect example. And that's a good one to end on, I think.
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Yeah.
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There's your hour right there.
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Yeah, there's. There's the hard out.
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There's.
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There.
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Thank you, Josh. You're some sort of professional. That's amazing. You. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for helping us explain immersive Sims to people. Because I was confused.
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Now you know now. Now you genuinely understand in a way that you didn't before. So I feel like I've done my work here.
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You absolutely have. And you know, as always, a better understanding of the world through a better understanding of wrestling, video games, magic, the gathering, whatever we can get our hands on. Josh, where can people get their hands on you? You should tell people again at the end here.
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Please don't. I don't like hugs, but if you do like analysis of media, which you probably do, if you're listening to this, check out the worst of all possible worlds. If you like hearing about weird freaks, go listen to Ill Conceived. Those are my podcasts. You can follow me on bluesguyosh, worstpossible.world. and that's it.
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Hell yeah. Bugs. Where can people follow you and or send you money?
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They can find me on bluesky or most of the places where you can look up a bugs matrix.
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Hell yeah. All the bugs places. Before I talk about all my other things, I'm going to plug Socks so
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that I don't forget just the concept of socks.
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I. Well, kind of. Yes to no Socks. Socks is the. The artist who wrote our theme song and ultra song. The sex theme to everything is wrestling socks ed. Edm or socks. Edm.bandcamp.com go there. Listen to Socks Socks. Just put out a new ep. The very. The very first track on Sox's new episode. I'm gonna bring it up because I was unaware and it's amazing and I need to share the title. Damn it, Be faster Internet. Socks has been like basically the soundtrack to my summer. The. The first track track on Socks's new EP is called Too Hot to be cis. So that should give you an understanding.
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That's the vibe.
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Yeah, yeah. Is hyper pop, is gay, is so good. It sucks. Listen to Socks. Listen to me rant about more formatted weekly recaps of wrestling at Wednesday night Fake fights with my Wrestle Queers. It has been a wonderful time. We've had a lot of guests lately. Bugs, I have to talk to you about that. So we've had guest hosts lately because Erica has been moving. Thank you all for people who listen to that show, in this show who have helped Erica move. We appreciate that. You can also find me on blue sky garretaylor.com that's also is going to send you to like my website with links to all my things. But yeah, that's all. I think we did it. We did all the things. Crappy wrestling.
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Crappy Wednesday.
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Crappy Wednesday. Yeah. Happy, happy. Wrestling is the other one. Grappy Wednesday is this one. I gotta come up with a sign off. I think I might just go with let's all get laid. Sam.