How Do You Feel a Billion? [Podcast]

So we recorded this right after the US midterm elections and a couple days before the AI discourse in games really kicked off. Super prescient!

I open with Julien Eveillé's Threshold, my Playlist pick from last week. Julien left Arkane in 2023 and built it on the side: you wake up in a mountain work camp with almost no oxygen, a terse coworker named Mo, and a train you keep at speed by blowing a whistle. Nobody tells you what's on the train. Danny Snelson joins me to talk through clips from my conversation with Julien.

We get into enumeracy and why big numbers stop meaning anything, Paul Slovic's psychic numbing, and the country select screen in Threshold that quietly works as a difficulty slider tied to meat consumption. Then the second-order critique: Dan Davies's accountability sinks from The Unaccountability Machine, bosses who never threaten you, and why the game lands harder than a "meat is murder" message would. Along the way, Charles Burnett's Killer of Sheep, the fish cannery in What Remains of Edith Finch, Universal Paperclips and Frank Lantz's The Beauty of Games.

A lightning pick: Karyn Kusama is attached to direct the Mouthwashing film for Screen Gems, with Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi writing. Danny and I talk about what an adaptation should keep when the game already has a good story.

Then news from the site: Lea van Hall and Éléa Brando's rebuilt Casio My Magic Diary, the 1,500-copy physical edition of Caves of Qud and Jason Grinblat's idea of handwritten lore as a trellis for procedural systems, Read-Only Memory's PlayStation book, Yuri Suzuki's tuned-bell chess set and the Stack Order demo.

We close on three works that talk back: Aurora Mititelu's Abel & I, Sarah Rothberg's Between Meetings and Gary Zhexi Zhang's Autodrama, plus Florence Smith Nicholls's Bleed Map, a free zine you play alongside any game.

Links

• The Whistle and the Sink: What to Play, October 30
• Karyn Kusama to Direct Mouthwashing Film for Sony
• My Magic Diary Turns a Casio Toy Into a Secrets Console
• Caves of Qud Gets a 1,500-Copy Physical Edition
• Play Caves of Qud the Way You'd Read The Grapes of Wrath (2015)
• Read-Only Memory's PlayStation Book Ships in November
• Every Piece in This Chess Set Is a Tuned Brass Bell
• Panflip Studio Teases New Stack Order Demo
• A Bedside iPhone Is the Only Controller in Abel & I
• BETWEEN MEETINGS Puts Two Offline Chatbots in Endless Debate
• Autodrama Stages a Chamber Play for Self-Directing Actors
• Bleed Map Is a Keepsake Game Played Beside Another Game