Breaking News And God Of War Setup

SPEAKER_02 0:02

Alright, so Doritos, apparently people on the internet are upset. What? No way.

unknown 0:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 0:12

That never happens.

SPEAKER_02 0:15

Yeah, I went to IGN just a little bit ago thinking, what's in the breaking news, what's relevant in gaming? Because I've been playing video games this week, but not really things that connect to the present as much. And so the first thing I see is the next God of War game, which, by the way, God of War is one of those franchises where you play as a Spartan warrior who dies, makes a deal with, or he's about to die, makes a deal with Ares, the God of War in Greek mythology, and is empowered with these supernatural abilities to succeed at conquest on the battlefield. And he has a tragic thing with his family happens, and he goes on a quest for revenge on Ares. He feels tricked by the Greek gods, and it's a video game opportunity to fight one-on-one battles with every god you can think of from Greek mythology. And then they did Norse mythology starting in the late 2010s. And so that's the setup. It's a hack and slash style game with combos, and you level up and you find new gear and new weapons and new god-like abilities. And I find it to be a very fun franchise. Have you played God of War before, Doritos?

SPEAKER_00 1:44

I have not, but it's not for a lack of wanting to play God of War series. It's just it's not been in my Steam library.

SPEAKER_02 1:54

They do have both of the Norse games in Steam, right? I don't know if they've gone back to do so PS2 or PS3. Yeah, I think I have actually God of War, I think it was 2019 or 2017. And so this is one of those franchises, too, where the franchise was done for a long time. God of War 1, 2, and 3, and then some games in the middle that are side games. And then when they come back with the new game, the new setting, and the new playstyle, they didn't name it God of War 4, they just named it God of War again. So there's two first God of War games that are very different games that are just named God of War.

SPEAKER_00 2:46

Interesting. How does okay? So back to the article that you said you mentioned at the start of the show. What was

The Loffy Reveal And Online Rage

SPEAKER_00 2:55

that all about?

SPEAKER_02 2:57

So the actress who plays Loffy, which is going to be the main character, of course, it's a female protagonist for the next God of War game. So that automatically gets a lot of people upset for whatever reason when you switch a franchise from having a male protagonist to having a female protagonist. We saw this a little bit with the Star Wars sequel trilogy and The Force Awakens. We've seen it with so many things, actually. And so the internet is upset in a way that you don't continue playing God of War as Kratos. And I think also the way God of War Ragnarok concluded, it seemed very much like either the next game you're gonna play as Kratos or you're going to play as his son Atreus. And so for the next game to be you play as Loffy, I think is very surprising to people. And they're using the power of anonymity to spread hate and negativity about a game that's not even out yet on the internet. And IGN decided to write a story about it today. So yay, internet for doing what you do.

SPEAKER_00 4:20

Exactly.

Representation And The Hero’s Journey

SPEAKER_00 4:21

So what that brings up some good questions. Why do some people feel like it matters so to keep the protagonist the same? Story to story. If you're following the hero's journey, does it really matter if the protagonist is the same?

SPEAKER_02 4:38

In older myths, and Joseph Campbell wrote about this in Hero with a Thousand Faces, and he has a book about the imagery of the goddess, and he has books that try to explain the importance of the gender and the inherent powers in being male and the inherent powers of being female. And that's something that you can definitely study and learn to appreciate. In modern times, these are fictional characters, they're digital representations on a screen. And one of the things that I talked about in my book, yes, I wrote a book, it won an award, it's called The Gamer's Journey. We do this every episode. In fact, on stream on Sunday, the chat did it to me, which was funny. Anyway, I talk about a couple different franchises where they're the same game. It's just one is a male protagonist coat of paint, and another franchise is a female protagonist coat of paint. It's just different assemblage of pixels. And one of the things I talked about in that way is we say Metroidvania as a type of game, right? What are the two games in that hybrid word, right?

SPEAKER_00 6:02

We got Metroid, so that's kind of a side-scrolling, increasing skill-based game, and then you have Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 6:09

And Castlevania has a lot of protagonists throughout its whole game series, but more often than not, the early games, you're a male protagonist, and in Metroid, you are, to the surprise of everyone playing on the NES, a female protagonist. A female protagonist. Yeah. Yeah. And one of the first season episodes of the gaming persona, I had one of my research colleagues, Dr. Stephanie Diaz, on the show. I think we talked about this, or maybe it was a one-on-one conversation offline when we were doing our research work, but she talked to me at some point in our friendship about how meaningful it was for the reveal that Samus is female. Just playing that in the 90s, being a girl video game player, and wanting to feel like something was made for you. Right? Representation, not just across gender lines, it does matter because it makes the story more relatable to a population that may feel underrepresented. Name a white male protagonist, we're gonna be here forever, Doritos. There's Mario, few, there's Nathan Drake, there's Leon S. Kennedy and Chris Redfield, there's Dante from Devil May Cry, Cloud, who you could argue that anyway. Never mind. I'll do some editing there. You have all these characters that just are representing the same kind of thing, especially on early consoles where there's not voice acting, and so you don't even get ethnic variation and dialect differences, right? It's just there's a sameness to it. Anyway, Kratos being put into a background role, and all the games, he fights everybody, right? It's okay for him to be tired for one game and rest and let someone else go swinging the sharp object.

SPEAKER_01 8:33

I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 8:34

Yeah. Anyway, back to the point. I never finished the point. So you have two games that are in the same genre and play very similarly, and the main difference is the protagonist and the type of world they're in. And it's not just Castlevania and Metroid. You can see this very clearly in Uncharted and Tomb Raider, you can see it in Devil May Cry and Bayonetta. You can see it in I'm sure there's horror games where this happens. I'm sure there's just everything. It's all over the place. So I think that this argument of fans not having the control to make those creative decisions. And a game studio like Santa Monica Studio, which has a track record of banger after banger, their games are exceptional. And they decided this is what we really want to do.

Fans, Studios, And Creative Control

SPEAKER_02 9:40

And they found an actress who can do voice acting too. And if you don't know where you've seen Deborah Ann Wall, she's in a lot of stuff. I remember her from True Blood on HBO. I saw her in the Escape Room movies, and I'm sure she does stuff with DD games online because she's really developed her geek credibility in recent years and really is a good ambassador for what it means to be a nerd, you know, and still have a job. I don't understand why you would want to go after her with that kind of vitriol.

SPEAKER_00 10:25

Because it's not what people wanted. Again, you've had what five, six games in the franchise now with a male protagonist. So everybody now has probably has the expectation that you're going to be able to play as Kratos and continue the Carnage as that character.

SPEAKER_02 10:53

Yeah, I'm gonna blow your mind here for a second. There's God of War 1, 2, and 3. Then there's also the two games that were on the Vita or the PSP, so they were handhelds, but they did have moments that were relevant to the main games. And then they made a prequel game after God of War 3 called God of War Ascension, and then they went on hiatus for a long time and came back with the two Norse mythology games. So that brings us to eight God of War games as Kratos.

SPEAKER_00 11:32

Okay, so math are hard for me.

SPEAKER_02 11:35

Yeah, it's just a lot.

Writing Game Psychology While Streaming

SPEAKER_02 11:40

But Kratos is a very important video game character, and I'm going to share uh a Dr. Gamology update on the show tonight. If you've been watching on Twitch recently, you'll notice that I started playing Tomb Raider Definitive Edition, and I've never streamed that game, and it's not a new game. So I put a lot of thought into what game I'm actually going to play, even though sometimes it seems like we're just defaulting to Final Fantasy XIV. But I submitted a whole bunch of chapters to my publisher to write in different books for their 2026 batch of proposals. And I did submit for Psychology of Heroes four options because I didn't know what other authors had submitted, and I wanted to make sure I was in that book. And this book is the counterpart to Psychology of Villains, which I'm in, and so that's why I really wanted to be in both Villains, where I wrote about Darth Vader, and that book should be coming out soon, I hope. And I wanted to be in Heroes also. So I submitted a chapter idea for a Kratos chapter from God of War, and a Sora chapter from Kingdom Hearts, a Cloud Strife chapter from Final Fantasy VII again last week, declared that my favorite game of all time, and Lara Croft for the Tomb Raider Survivor trilogy that started on the PS3 and ended on the PS4. And I've never played the second game in that trilogy, by the way, and I've never finished the third one. So I'm taking this as a chance to visit a trilogy that I've always wanted to make time for, and I'm really enjoying it. And anyway, long story short, my chapters on Lara Croft and Cloud both got accepted. So I'll be writing two chapters in the same book, which is exciting, and I'll be writing an additional two other chapters for different books on top of that. So I currently have four chapters in about 60, maybe 75 days to write drafts, accepted drafts of all those chapters.

SPEAKER_00 14:03

Sounds like you're going to be entertained to say the least. Well, you have time for games while you do all that.

SPEAKER_02 14:11

I have to play some of the games that I'm writing on because it really does help me to take the initial idea and really get the details into it. And then other things that I don't have time to get to those moments, I'll have to use YouTube or VODs from other streamers that have done the game, or just research it on wikis related to those franchises and do my best to take the vision for the psychology analysis and find those moments that happen in the game and verify them some way. It's a lot of work, but it's fun. Oh no,

Pokemon Cards And Skipping School Lunch

SPEAKER_02 15:12

that would be 2013. Yeah, 1996 is Tomb Raider 1 on the PlayStation 1. I was 10, okay? And I never got to play this game because I didn't have a PlayStation 1. And I'm sure that the narrative in Bible Belt churches about what Tomb Raider represents would have convinced my parents, don't let your son play this game. And so if you would have if I had a time machine and was able to go back to 10-year-old me and be like, you can't play this game now, but someday you're gonna write a chapter about her in the psychology of heroes. And by the way, you're gonna do a lot of really cool things with psychology. Because when I was 10, I don't think I realized that either. And then I'd be like, that's crazy that I get to the things that people can read about Pokemon, and I would have been like, what's a Pokemon in 1996? Yeah, but they weren't as popular then. Didn't they come over to the US in around 98?

SPEAKER_00 16:26

Around 96, the end of 97 into 98, because I was working at the then Warner Brothers Studio store when Pokemon were just becoming part of American culture, and the Warner Brothers company had the licenseure. So we had to explain to many a parent what a Pokemon was. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:52

Wow, you're a cool person, Doritos.

SPEAKER_01 16:55

That's really neat.

SPEAKER_02 16:58

Um, I have a story that I'm not exactly proud of, but it explains my drive on what I will do to achieve a goal. There was a hotel across the street from my house when I lived in the house that I was in the most as a child once we moved to Florida. And my dad would give me cash for lunch every week, and it was calculated $2 per day of school, because it would be like a piece of pizza and a Yu-Ho at my middle school. And this hotel sold Pokemon cards, but they were the Japanese cards where you were guaranteed one holofoil card in every pack, unlike the American cards, which I could read, but you would get crap and no guarantee of anything good. And so, me, my seventh or eighth grade mind was like, I don't like gambling, which is really important for what I became. I was like, I would rather buy a card that I can't read that is guaranteed to have something that I think is great, than to buy a pack where there's only a chance and my money's gone, and I didn't get a thing that I'm happy that I have. Right. So I would skip lunch at middle school. And keep in mind, middle school in Florida at that time in my city was 7:30 to 2. Okay, so when it's like you need to eat lunch, it's like I was still eating lunch, I was just eating it at 3 o'clock when I got home. I was skipping lunch at the school, doing the last two periods of the day on no food or no extra food from what I ate in the morning, and I was going to the hotel on the way home from school on foot, buying the pack of Pokemon cards, and then going home. And I did this 12 weeks. And some of my favorite cards I ever got came from this scheme of I had a Japanese Zapdos and a Mewtwo and a Lapis. I think I got a a Moltres out of it too. So take that English Pokemon cards of the 90s.

Save Systems, Memory Cards, And Money

SPEAKER_02 19:30

Did you ever do anything that was like gaming the system just to show your dedication to sacrificing your own basic needs for something not? Not like that.

SPEAKER_00 19:43

It was more save scumming on them on original NES games. How do you save scum in NES game?

SPEAKER_02 19:51

Very carefully. Depends on what game it is. Oh. The only thing I remember about saves in NES games is they would do the thing where you have a 22 character string of letters that you can get when you're done, and then you at the menu it's new game or continue or options, and then you go to continue. You put that string in it, it's basically it's not actually a save, it's just plopping you into the exact location and s and inventory that you had when you quit.

SPEAKER_00 20:29

Yeah, but when you if you got Legend of Zelda 2, it actually would have save points, so you could do that. So is there like a battery inside the cartridge that would as long as it's got power, it would remember where you got well no because when I came along when I what was it? We were back up here in Tennessee and got the you know, loaded up the game and it still had all the original save files.

SPEAKER_02 21:06

Oh, interesting. That's been a full of years. Yeah, when you get into the two generations later, memory cards are external things that you plug into the console. But I never understood why we switch all the systems like that.

SPEAKER_00 21:28

More money. Oh no.

SPEAKER_02 21:30

Okay. Yeah. You should always assume every decision that every company ever makes is just that. Anyway.

When To Quit A Game

SPEAKER_02 21:43

So long story short, the internet needs to chill and learn their mindfulness, start journaling and meditating would be really great. And enjoy God of War Laffe. And I have to write a ton of chapters. Oh, I also. I also have been playing a little bit of Stellar Blade, but not very much. But I've been playing Persona 3 Reload in the morning, like before starting work, just playing it on the couch. And I finally made it to the point where I enjoy it and I'm looking forward to the next chance I get to advance a little bit in the story. And I was thinking, I have a question for you, Doritos. You know how there is a rule of thumb about how much should you read a book before you give up on it? It's like how much of a chance do you give this book to see if you like it? And it's basically sometimes I've heard it as an equation. You should whatever decade of your life in you're in is 10 pages, and then you start at 50. So then it's if you're in your 30s, you do 50 plus 30. So it's like you should read 80 pages before you give up on the book. You don't have enough time in your life to try to enjoy a book that hasn't grabbed you in the first 50 pages. I don't know. I'm there. Yeah. So like right now, I'd be like, I might have gotten that rule completely wrong. It's one of those Instagram things that's popped up on my feed a few times and I wasn't taking notes. Totally reliable, got it. But how long should you play a video game before you consider abandoning it?

SPEAKER_00 23:45

Oh, that's a fun question. For me, I've and this is in a previous episode of I think working class nerds with A-Trax and Marcus. For me, it's probably close to 18-20 hours because I I want to give the game a chance. I usually can tell right away if it's something that's going to grab me and really pull me in, and I can get into the story, into the characters, but of something that's kind of meh, where okay, I I can see the intent, or like a genre that's not mine are simulation or city building games, stuff like that. I enjoy them, but I'm not gonna spend a whole lot of time in those when I can play an action adventure RPG or an MMO with which I like.

SPEAKER_02 24:43

Yeah. The reason I wanted to ask that is if you've been following my Twitch channel and my journey through different games, I have tried to play Persona 3 Reload about three different times, and it is a full remake of Persona 3 Portable, which I have owned on the PlayStation Vita and on the PS4 and 5, and on Steam, and I have started it so many different times. I even played it for a little bit on my backbone using Xbox Game Pass, the PlayStation or sorry, Persona 3 Portable on Game Pass. So I have started a version of Persona 3 six times in my life. The sixth time I pushed deep enough into it where I know I'm gonna finish it now. I I really do. I'm having fun with it. I know the characters by name without thinking about it, which for whatever reason I did not have that problem in Persona 5 or 4. And the names are very Japanese and not their names are not Greg and Sandy. It's hard, it was harder for me to remember the names in Persona 3 for some reason, and I don't know why. But now I've got it down, and there is a gameplay reason why that's important too. There's a lot of times when you're doing the full walkthrough guide to plan out your days, where it'll say for the afternoon of June 14th, go talk to Chihiro. And you remember Chihiro is one of the girls that has a social link, but I don't remember which one that is because it's just easier to remember names that are in your own cultural vernacular. And I found Persona 3 to be incredibly confusing in this way. And I just got it in Persona 4. I don't know why. That was my first persona Persona 4 Golden. If you're listening to me say Persona, it's clearly an important franchise to me. It's a word in the title of our podcast.

Why Persona Feels Like Psychology Class

SPEAKER_02 27:11

It is a JRPG, stands for Japanese role-playing game, and it's a two-sided role-playing game. The daytime side is you're a high school student, you go to class, you form relationships, and you have to make conversation choices to build those relationships. But those relationships give you abilities in the nighttime realm where you're trying to save the universe from the subconscious demonic or evil forces that battle through the collective unconscious of society. So it's a very young archetypal analytical psychology tradition in a Japanese setting. And the amount of psychology and mythology and religious symbolism in these games is my favorite thing you could possibly turn into a video game. You have personas power you, you have Thor as a persona, you have Satan as a persona, you have a demon sitting on a toilet as a persona. It's just whatever your psyche might throw into an image that would have meaning, it's in the game. Have you ever played a persona game? Not. No. That's okay. I when okay. I think you and Marcus have played enough for me for now. Yeah, that's true. My friend Gene, who was on the show for 50 or so episodes, maybe 60. Right around the time where I had finished grad school, there was a period of time where he was living with me and my wife for three or four days at a time, and then spending a couple days at his parents' house, and then just hang out with us and not leaving. He would talk to me all the time about Persona. And this is when we would play co-op for Resident Evil 5. And so I developed my love of Resident Evil from talking with Gene, Devil May Cry, and also Persona. And I remember listening to him talk about this game, it just sounded bonkers. I was like, what even is this game? And then I played my first one when it was on the Vita and it was handheld, and it was being talked about on so many game podcasts, like this is the reason to get a Vita. And it really was. And then all the conversations that I had seven years earlier with Gene made sense. So I know that you or people listening that are counselors and not necessarily gamers will just hear me say persona and have no clue what I'm talking about. And I'm just sharing this story because, yeah, for seven years I had no idea what one of my best friends was talking about when they were talking about this game. It's so different than what you think video games are, but it's amazing. The stories are powerful, the music, it just works. One of the songs actually has such a powerful message that I use the lyrics in my book as a way to explain the importance of purpose pursuing truth. And it was a concept that shows up actually in Hero with a Thousand Faces. And when I was reading Campbell's take on it from 1949, I was just like, that's the song in Persona 4. It's perfect. I have it ready to plug into my version of a chapter on this stage of the hero's journey. It's like the person who did the music for that game was doing the heavy lifting for me. All I had to do was remember the song, which I probably hear that song three or four times a week anyway. So I there's one more thing that I wanted to talk about. I remember, Doritos. You're never gonna guess what this last topic is before we go home for the night, but probably not then. Lay it on me. On

“Gaming Is Self-Care” Goes Viral

SPEAKER_02 31:26

social media, I am famous this week. Oh, why are we famous this this week? Just this week? Statistically speaking, something happened this week that has never happened before in any of the other days of me doing social media. I posted something very simple on Threads, which is my favorite idea sharing social app. And what I said four days ago was gaming is self-care and I will not be taking questions. And then it's just a simple thing to start the day. It's meant to make gamers see it and go, Yeah, that's me. Maybe get a like, maybe get 35 likes. By lunchtime, my phone was acting really weird, it was buzzing a lot. So I looked at that post and I had a hundred likes on it, which for me is great. And then the middle of the afternoon, Xbox commented on it, like blue check mark official Xbox account. They said no questions here. So I just got the googly eyes and I saw it and I commented back at them. I was like, hey, thanks for joining my little proclamation today, gamer health for the win. And after that exchange, the post just kept growing for three days, hundreds of likes at a time, and it settled at 1.7k for likes, 91 comments, and 203 reposts. Nice. And those numbers are not what happened when I participate in social media, and I think the bump from Xbox was a huge part of it, but I think also it was moving in a very interesting way before that even happened. And I post three to four times a day on that app and one hit like that. I think it might be my best social post performance of all time. That's awesome. I've been thinking a lot about how Xbox put me over to use the wrestling lingo of like you get the popular wrestler to lose to the up and coming, and that makes the audience see what the new one can do and get excited for them. I've been such a PlayStation fanboy supporter, PlayStation Everything. For Xbox to be the one to do that for me. Maybe Marcus is right. They do make the best game controller of all time, and they certainly have good taste in gaming psychology. Marcus was right. So,

Time Check And Closing Thoughts

SPEAKER_02 34:30

with that being said, I think it's really important to keep your eye on the time, remember your schedule, enjoy your games, and continue the journey.