203. Video Games & Romance Readers: An Interview with Amanda and Bree Bridges

[music]

Sarah Wendell:  Hello, and welcome to episode number 203 of Smart Podcast, Trashy Books.  I’m Sarah Wendell from Smart Bitches, Trashy Books, and with me today are Amanda, also of Smart Bitches, and Bree Bridges.  After many conversations online about Dragon Age: Inquisition and after seeing a number of romance readers and writers introduced to the game, I decided it was time to sit down with Amanda and Bree and talk about video games.  Both of them are seasoned players of many different game franchises, and we talk about the ones that got them started, the ones they recommend for romance fans, and games that they would suggest for new players.  So if you’ve been curious about video games, or maybe you heard this whole thing about how women aren’t gamers, allow us to correct that concept and maybe introduce you to a fun, though addictive way to spend a lot of time.

This podcast is sponsored by Julie Ann Walker’s Devil and the Deep, published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, available in paperback and eBook.  Bran Pallidino carries a dark secret – one that forced him to push Maddy away.  But when she’s taken hostage during a trip to the Caribbean, Bran and his friends, a group of former Navy SEALs who run Deep Six Salvage, embark on a dangerous mission to save her.  Passion boils between Bran and Maddy, but what good is putting their hearts on the line if they don’t survive the dawn?  Devil and the Deep is on sale now at all retailers.

If you are a new listener or a regular listener, you might have heard me talk about our Patreon campaign.  Allow me to remind you of it really quickly.  We have a Patreon campaign at Patreon.com/SmartBitches.  Listeners who would like to contribute can set up a monthly pledge, starting with as little as a dollar, to help me reach goals like commissioning transcripts for all the episodes that don’t have one.  You can see the rewards and options at Patreon.com/SmartBitches, and to everyone who has backed the show, thank you, thank you, thank you.  You are tremendously awesome human beings.

Our music is provided by Sassy Outwater, and you can find her online on Twitter @SassyOutwater.  I will have information at the end of the podcast as to who this is.

And now, without any further delay, let’s talk about gaming!

[music]

Sarah:  Hey, Bree, how you doing?

Bree:  Okay!  How are you guys?

Amanda:  I am awash in allergies right now because my Floridian body freaks out ‘cause there are seasons in New England –

[Laughter]

Amanda:  – and it’s like, it does not compute.  We’re just going to expel all the fluids at one time –

Sarah:  Ohhh.

Amanda:  – for, like, three weeks.  [Sniffs]

Bree:  Yeah, I’m in the opposite.  I, my New England body still isn’t used to Alabama.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Oh, Alabama’s like a pollen explosion.

Bree:  Oh, my gosh!  It’s, like, I had never seen it before.  I go outside, and my car is covered in yellow, like, literally yellow.

Sarah:  Oh, yeah.  My car is blue, except right now it’s green.

Bree:  Ah!  I had never seen that, so, so I’m a little allergy-ish too.  I’ve spent the last couple days really high on Nyquil.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Whoo!  Everyone should podcast on Nyquil.  It makes for excellent recording.  All right, so let’s talk about video games!

Amanda:  Yeah!

Bree:  Yes, video games!  Yes!

Sarah:  Why should romance readers consider video games?  Because, you know, recently we’ve kind of been told that video games are for boys, and they don’t want our girl cooties on their video games.

Amanda:  Well, that’s a bunch of bullshit.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Amanda:  And –

Bree:  So much!  Girls have always been there.  We have –

Amanda:  Yeah!

Bree:  – always.

Amanda:  I, so, my introduction to video games was sitting on my mom’s lap while she played Doom and Duke Nukem on her computer.

Sarah:  Nice!

Amanda:  Not my dad; this was all my mom.  Like, the first consoles in the house were for my mother, and then as my brother and I grew up we just kind of took them over, but, yeah, the whole “girls don’t play video games; it’s a boy’s thing” is complete and utter, just bullshit.  [Laughs]

Bree:  Yes.  I started with a Game Boy because, of course, I had to take it all with me!  That was some high tech stuff in the ‘80s!

Sarah:  My ten-year-old is dying for me to get him a Game Boy because he wants to play original recipe Pokémon, and you can only play those on a Game Boy, and I’m like, you understand the technology is really shitty, right?  Like, you get this?  He’s like, yes.  I can buy a copy of the game on my DS and I can download it, but I want to play the original, and I’m like, I am not prepared for this sort of high level, you know, adherence to the purity of the experience on your part.  I’m really not – I, I, I don’t understand.  [Laughs]

Bree:  No, see, now I don’t either.  Like, my, you know, Donna, my co-writer’s kids are, like, all in Minecraft, and I’m like, no!  We fought the video game war so you didn’t have to have graphics like that!

[Laughter]

Amanda:  Things don’t have to be blocks anymore!

Sarah:  People’s eyes can be round, not square!  It’s amazing!

Bree:  Which is what BioWare’s on the complete other side of.  They are so beautiful!

Sarah:  Oh, my God!  I finally got to the point – so you and all of your talking about Dragon Age: Inquisition, Bree, got me to download it.  Now, I did not have video games growing up.  Like, I remember the Nintendo 64 was, like, a big thing when I was maybe in middle school?  And a lot of my friends had them, and that was not ever something I had, so we bought a Wii for the kids, and we all played it, but I was like, oh, this is fun!  I like this!  When we got the Xbox, so, when my husband told the kids that we were moving, the first thing my older son asked for was, well, after we move, can we have an Xbox?  My husband was like, yeah, sure!  That’s, that’s what you want?  Not a problem!  I’m like, ask for a Camaro.

[Laughter]

Sarah:  Ask for a Mustang; ask for a pony!  Go big!  I mean, there’s guilt here, take advantage.  But no, now we have an Xbox.  I play the Xbox the most, because Dragon Age is so beautiful.

Amanda:  It’s really pretty.  Like, I was telling Bree this – we were geeking out about Dragon Age and BioWare – is that all of my BioWare games, so Mass Effect, which is their space RPG; Knights of the Old Republic, which is their Star Wars RPG –

Bree:  That was my first BioWare.

Amanda:  Yes, mine too.  And Dragon Age I [Origins] and II, I have all on the Xbox.  It’s all console-based, so I’m used to playing on a console with a controller.  But when Inquisition came out, I really wanted to play it.  I didn’t want to go out to a store and, like, get on the subway and have to go out.  I didn’t want to order it on Prime and wait for two days.  It was like, shit, I’ll just do the direct download to my computer, and – I do play some games on my computer, but it was such a transition, playing all these games on a console and then going to my computer, but the graphics on the computer compared to what’s on the Xbox, it, it was just, it’s amazing.  If you can play on a console, if you can play it on a PC, I mean if you can play it on a PC, I would recommend that better over a console, because the graphics –

Bree:  Yeah, it’s even prettier.

Amanda:  – are so –

Sarah:  On a PC?  Really?

Bree:  Yes.

Amanda:  – so much better on a PC.  It, it’s just –

Sarah:  Why?

Amanda:  – beautiful.  Maybe, like, the hardware?  I don’t know.

Bree:  Yeah, like, I mean, I have a very nice graphic card for absolutely responsible, adult reasons.

[Laughter]

Bree:  It has nothing to do with Dragon Age!

[More laughter]

Bree:  I’m lying.  Just a little.  But, yeah, I mean, you can get these graphics cards, which is, you know, the most expensive thing in my laptop, ‘cause I have a gaming laptop.  For absolutely adult, responsible reasons.

Sarah:  Of course.  Perfectly adult.

Bree:  So, yeah.  So, yeah, they’re just, they’re beautiful, the, the new engine, the Dragon Age: Inquisition.  The first two Dragon Age games, I thought those were pretty, and then Skyrim came out, and Skyrim was like, what is going on?  I would just wander around Skyrim –

Amanda:  That’s –

Bree:  – staring at things!  Like, wow!  I’m just going on an adventure!

Amanda:  I wouldn’t even play, like, the quests in Skyrim?  I would just walk around and pick flowers and let my horse, like, kick bandits in the face.  Like, my horse has got this.  I’ve got mushrooms and flowers to get, so you just handle it.

Bree:  So, yeah, and then Inquisition came out, and it’s so beautiful!  And, like, the characters.  I mean, that’s, that’s what – I love Skyrim; it’s maybe a little prettier?

Sarah:  Mm-hmm.

Bree:  But it feels so empty.  You’re just walking around alone, and that’s why I love the BioWare games, ‘cause it feels like you’ve got these imaginary, you know, they’re not imaginary!  They’re like people!

Amanda:  You can have, like, a party –

Bree:  And they get back at you if you say annoying things to them, and they love you if you say nice things to them.

Amanda:  The good thing that I love about the BioWare games is that the choices you make affect your relationships with your party and the actions of the game, and I like that aspect because you kind of create the story as you go.  You decide what kind of player you want to be, and then you get to do it all over again and pick completely different choices and do completely different things, so I like the fact that I’m shelling out, you know, sixty to seventy dollars for a brand-new game, but I can replay it ten different ways with, you know, a bunch of different outcomes and have different, you know, video game boyfriends if I want.

Bree:  Yes, which is where the romance, I mean, all romance people should be playing BioWare games – [laughs] – because they have the best romances!

Sarah:  Oh, my gosh, and there’re pansexual and bisexual characters.  I mean, I just found the page of, you know, my, my character on, on Inquisition is a, is a female dwarf, which is really fun because (a) one of the major characters who does stuff in the background is also a dwarf and will make comments about how it’s so great to talk to another dwarf, and also, she can’t climb up anything.

[Laughter]

Sarah:  So I have to switch to a much larger character to, like, get up a hill, and then she’s fine.  But I found this chart about who I can hook up with, and it was not based on only one thing.  It was like, okay, well, this person will hook up with male and female characters, but not this particular, like –

Amanda:  Class.

Sarah:  – not, not –

Bree:  Yeah, like, Solas will only hook up –

Amanda:  Just mages.

Bree:  – with elves.

Sarah:  He’s such a dick!  Why is Solas such a dick?

Amanda:  It’s ‘cause he –

Bree:  Oh, I can’t tell you.  [Laughs] Spoilers!

Sarah:  There’s no making that guy happy.  Although the, the woman who’s the other mage, who’s black –

Bree:  Vivienne?

Sarah:  Is it Vivienne?

Bree:  Yes.

Sarah:  She told me I needed to bathe!

Amanda:  She’s a stone-cold fox and a stone-cold bitch.  

Sarah:  I like her, but whoo, she’s like, well, maybe if you bathe –

Bree:  Oh!  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – every day for a week, and I was like, ouch!  Bitch, you slightly approve, and you’re tearing apart my hygiene!  That’s not cool.  But, like, you can hook, you can hook up with characters who are bisexual, there are pansexual characters, like, the, the options of sexuality are kind of amazing.

Bree:  And they’ve evolved on that, each game –

Amanda:  Yeah, yeah.

Bree:  – and they, you know, sometimes they mess up, and this is, I love them because they are really responsive to critique.  Like, people criticize them when they screw up and, you know, you know how the Internet can be.  The criticism is, is pretty voracious, but they respond to it, and they try to do better.

Amanda:  In the Mass Effect games, so, the first one, you can play as a, a male or a female, but you get this character who gets added to your party, his name’s Garrus, he’s a, a space cat alien man with an eye patch.

Sarah:  As you do.

Bree:  Yes.

Amanda:  Yeah, and –

Sarah:  Space cat sounds kind of hot.

Amanda:  He is hot, and you couldn’t romance him in the first game, and that’s who I wanted to romance, and every, like, a, it was very vocal that you couldn’t romance Garrus in the games.

Sarah:  Why can’t I hit that?  [Laughs]

Amanda:  I know!

Bree:  Basically.  [Laughs]

Amanda:  Yeah!  So they made it so in the following games, Garrus is now a romance-able option for all of your space cat lovin’ needs, and it’s, it’s great.

Sarah:  That reminds me of the furry shoulders guy in –

Bree:  Cullen!

Sarah:  Thank you.  Furry shoulders guy.

Bree:  Yeah, I told you the Cullen story.  Cullen –

Amanda:  He’s my Inquisition romance.

Bree:  – was in the first two Dragon Age games, and every, he’s got his little fan base, of which I am a member.

Amanda:  Yup.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Amanda, you’re in there too?

Amanda:  Yes!

Bree:  Because he’s a romance hero!

Amanda:  He is!

Bree:  In the first game, he goes through a traumatic experience –

Sarah:  Oh, he’s totally a hero.

Bree:  – that makes him dark and broody and make bad decisions, and then in the second game, he goes through a worse experience that makes him realize that his bad decisions were maybe not so good.  [Laughs] And so then in the third game, he’s ready –

Sarah:  Yep.

Bree:  – for you to love him!

Sarah:  Yep!

Amanda:  He’s ready for love.

Sarah:  And he’s very easy to flirt with, too.

Amanda:  And we’re, we’re ready to give it.

Bree:  Yes.  [Laughs] I was ready to give it in the first game.  There’s a modification that you can download where if you were, play as a mage in the first game, you can have a little mini-romance with him.  There you go.

Sarah:  Ooooh!

Bree:  Yeah, I found that, because of course I did.

Sarah:  Well, of course you did.

Amanda:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  So you actually go out and find the romantic options for some games.

Bree:  Yeah.

Amanda:  Oh, yeah, like, I follow guides and stuff when I play, ‘cause I want to make sure, like, I get the shit right the first time, so I’ll have, like, a wiki open while I’m playing, like, looking stuff up or, like, I got this gift, who does it belong to sort of thing, or, like, who will I get the most relationship points with if I give this thing to whoever?  So I, like –

Bree:  Yeah, the first game you could give people gifts to buy their love, which I had to do because I was – I, I, Alistair was this sweet, earnest guy in the first one, and I couldn’t make him love me because I kept doing bad things!  [Laughs] And he kept being like, I don’t approve of you, lady!  You are not noble enough for me.  And so I would go on these terrible quests and climb through caves trying to find some statue so that I could give it to him, and he’d be like, well, I like statues, so that’s cool.

Amanda:  It’s like, I’m horrible, but here, have this thing!

Sarah:  [Laughs] I’m a terrible person, but I want to give you things.  That –

Bree:  Yes!

Sarah:  – that’ll buy you some points.  I remember when I first played The Sims and you would have two characters talking to each other and you’d have a little plus or a little minus, now you couldn’t, like, you couldn’t influence what they were saying if they were just talking, and it’d be like, here’s a picture of an airplane, here’s a picture of a hotel, here’s a picture of a shoe.  Oh, and then everyone’s really happy that you’re talking about shoes!  It was very strange, but if you interacted with people in a certain way and you did things with them, then the little plus would light up, and then you could get married, and then a shower of daisies would appear in your kitchen and a baby would show up, and then you would, the baby would get take, taken away ‘cause it took me forever to figure out how to take care of a newborn without losing my job.

Amanda:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Life, man.  The Sims know about it.  So I remember thinking, that’s, that’s actually pretty realistic!  Like, I’ll talk to somebody, and it’ll be like, plus-plus-plus, and then I’ll talk to somebody, minus-minus-minus-minus, and then I’ll be talking to somebody, people who I call rattlesnake people?  Like, in the back of your mind you’re thinking, something’s not right?  In the back of my mind I hear [rattlesnake buzz].

Amanda:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Oh, okay.  No, I won’t turn my back on you.  I, I remember thinking, this is a much more logical way for me to understand talking to people.

Bree:  Yeah!  Because you get to decide what you’re saying, though sometimes you pick something and you think it’s going to come off one way, and it – [laughs]

Amanda:  No, no, no, no!  No!

Bree:  There was a Mass Effect, when I started playing Mass Effect, ‘cause I played Dragon Age first –

Sarah:  Right.

Bree:  And Mass Effect had this wheel where you could, they give you a summary of what it says –

Amanda:  It’s a touchy wheel, too.  It’s a very –

Bree:  Yeah.

Amanda:  – touchy wheel.  [Laughs]

Bree:   So then the summary might say, okay, and then your character’s like, well, if you want to, asshole!  And I’m like, no, that’s not what I meant by okay!

Amanda:  [Laughs]

Bree:  So, so that was a little bit of an adventure.

Sarah:  I had to stop playing, when I was playing Inquisition because you have the little dialogue circle, and then sometimes in one direction there’d be a star or a, or an eyeball or some, some, like, black raven-looking thing, and I’m like, I don’t even know what that is.  Now I’ve got to Google.  Okay, hit pause.  And then you have to go to the Quest Map and wait there, ‘cause if you just sort of stand still, like, someone’ll come and eat you.  In a bad way.

Bree:  Yes.

Amanda:  I –

Sarah:  You have to, you have to pause by being on the map; otherwise, if you just sort of stand around, somebody’s going to find you and kill you.

Amanda:  When I play on my computer, it’s like I have a, like, a command center kind of thing.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Amanda:  Because my TV doubles as my monitor, so it’s like a big, I don’t know, like, thirty-two inch, forty-inch screen, and then I’m constantly looking stuff up, and I don’t want to ALT-TAB and minimize the game, so I have, like, my laptop on the corner of my computer so I can, like, type stuff in or look stuff up, or when I’m playing Stardew Valley I can never remember what fish I can pick up where and when, and you can only fish up this thing when it’s raining during the spring and at night, and it’s just, I never remember, so I’m constantly having two computers up and running when I’m playing on my actual desktop.

Sarah:  One thing I’ve noticed –

Bree:  I have Stardew Valley wiki on my phone.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  You have Stardew Valley wiki on your phone.

Amanda:  You need the wiki!  Like, you cannot play without it.  You can’t.  It’s impossible.

Bree:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  I feel like I’m doing it wrong.  I don’t play with the wiki.  I just now figured out, like, that the, the way that someone’s greeting me when I walk up to them means they hate me, and I was like, oh, my God!  I had no idea!  Oh, geeze.

Bree:  Oh, and, like, in –

Sarah:  Story of my life.

Bree:  – my older games, man, you can make them hate you so much that they leave your party.

Sarah:  Oh, man.

Bree:  Like, everything has consequences, like, serious business consequences.  And there’s one thing, there’s an epilogue for Dragon Age: Inquisition, and there’s one thing I didn’t do in the main game, and because I didn’t do it in the main game – I’m not going to tell you what it is, ‘cause it’s a spoiler [laughs] – but because I didn’t do it in the main game, when I played the epilogue a character turned on me and tried to kill me.

Sarah:  Oh, my God!

Bree:  Yeah!  Like, somebody who was in my party and was my bro!

Sarah:  You, you didn’t buy, you didn’t find my shoe, motherfucker.

Amanda:  [Laughs]

Bree:  Yeah, basically, I didn’t do this one thing –

Sarah:  I lost my shoe.  You didn’t find it.

Bree:  – so it has huge consequences.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  You die.

Amanda:  I always go into these games like, I’m going to be a badass, and I’m going to be, like, mean –

Sarah:  Nope!

Amanda:  – and just like a, a big, like, business bitch.  Like, I’m just going to go into it like I’m all about business and killing things and whatever, and I started playing the Knights of the Old Republic MMO, so I’m like, I’m going to be a Sith, and I’m going to be awesome, and I’m, like, the cushiest Sith ever.  It’s like, oh, I’m not going to kill you.  I’m going to pack you a lunch and I’m going to free you from your cell, and I’m just like, don’t tell anyone!  Like, I’m – [laughs] – the worst Sith on the face of the planet.  Like, it’s awful, and I think –

Sarah:  For anyone who doesn’t know, what is an MMO?

Amanda:  Massive multiplayer online RPG.  So World of Warcraft is an MMO.  That’s probably the biggest one.  Maybe the only one anyone plays anymore.

Bree:  Yeah.

Amanda:  So there’s lots of people online.

Bree:  It started with, like, the MUDs, the multiuser dungeons, which was, like, text games.

Sarah:  Right.

Bree:  That’s how I got hooked on the online gaming, which was bad, ‘cause it was, like, 1995, and we had four hours of dial-up Internet a month on our account, because that’s what you had in 1995 – [laughs] – and so I started playing, so I played for, like, thirty hours!  And my mom got the phone bill, the Internet bill, and she was like, okay, why do we owe them five hundred dollars?

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Bree:  It’s like, well –

Amanda:  Like, I don’t, I don’t know, mom.  Why do we?

Sarah:  That’s very odd.

Bree:  Yeah.  Online games were dangerous in the ‘90s.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Oh, yeah, if it was a toll call, you were fucked.

Bree:  Yeah.

Bree and Sarah:  So –

Sarah:  – one thing I’ve noticed as I’ve become more fluent – because I, like I said, I’m coming into this very, very late – is that I’ll notice references to games in other things.

Amanda or Bree:  Yeah.

Sarah:  Like, there’s a scene in one of the, one, I think it’s the second season of How to Train Your Dragon, the TV show, where the two twins get very, very sick, and they have fevers, and they become smart, which is one thing – I just kicked my dog.  Sorry, dog!

Bree:  [Laughs]

Amanda:  Aw.

Sarah:  So, one, they become smart, and two, they start acting like the twins from BioShock Infinite, and there are all these physical, like, one of them stands like this and one of them stands like this, and they have these physical gestures where they are mimicking these two video game characters, and I, when I first saw it I’m like, well, that’s odd, but then I ran into something else; I’m like, oh, my God!  Oh, my God!  That was a video game reference, and I just totally got it!  I am so cool!  So cool!  But then you notice it elsewhere.  Like, the video game people were quietly, you know, you’re quietly infiltrating other areas of media.

Bree:  Yes, we are.  [Whispers] We are everywhere.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Bree:  [Normal tone] And there’re a lot of us in romance.  When I started tweeting about Dragon Age – ‘cause I couldn’t help it; I was really excited last November.  The November before – oh, my gosh, it’s been, like, a year and a half since Inquisition came out, but, like, I mean, it was a holiday for me and Donna.  We, like, stopped writing for a couple weeks, and we just played the game until we played it all the way through, which can take, like, a hundred hours.

Amanda:  [Laughs]

Bree:  So that’s what we did for two weeks, you know.

Sarah:  I have to parcel it out.  Like, if, if it’s during the day I have to be on the treadmill, or I will sit there for four hours and be like, well, fuck, where did my day go?  Shit.  I thought I was just running up this hill, but then I found this, and then I did that, and I, and you can get sucked in for, like, hours.

Bree:  Oh, the little quests that trigger other quests that trigger other quests that trigger other quests.

Amanda:  I usually do all of the side quests that I have in my journal before I do the story mission, so that’s why, like, Mass Effect is so long.  Like, if you ever play that game, Sarah, say goodbye to showering.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Amanda:  Say goodbye to eating.  It’s just, there’s so much to do.  And I go through peaks and valleys.  Like, I’ll play a game religiously every single day for two weeks, and then I won’t touch it for a while –

Sarah:  Yeah, that’s what happened to me.

Amanda:  – and then I’ll go back and I’ll play every single day for another two weeks, and then I just won’t touch it again.  Like, just, it’s-

Bree:  Sometimes that’s easier, because then, like, you have to keep all the stuff that’s going on in your head, and then I, like, if I haven’t played in a while, I open it back up, I’m like, okay, what was I doing?  What was going on?  I have to go into the quest journal and try to figure out, you know, I was looking for shards!  [Laughs] So many shards!

Sarah:  More fucking shards.  And I can’t figure out if the things that they unlock in that desert-y land, I can’t figure out if the things that they unlock are even worth all the shards.

Bree:  I didn’t do it the first time.  The first time, like, the first time I play a BioWare game I’m like, vroom!  Plot!  Vroom!  Romance!

Sarah:  Yep.

Bree:  So I will skip, like, tons of the side quests and just barrel forward in the plot and the romance, ‘cause I have to figure out who, you know –

Sarah:  Who you want to, who you want to bang.

Bree:  I, I, I admit –

Sarah:  You’ve got to figure out who you’re banging.

Amanda:  Yeah.

Bree:  Yeah, I do.  Because, as you know –

Amanda:  Priorities.  First of the list –

Bree:  Yes, so –

Amanda:  – who am I banging?

Bree:  Yeah.  I, I went in thinking it was going to be Cullen, but then I had to, you know, Blackwall, man.   He was bearded and grumpy and –

Amanda:  [Laughs]

Bree:  – obviously up to no good – [laughs] – so I couldn’t help it.  I had to –

Sarah:  And don’t forget about Iron Bull.

Bree:  [Whispers] Iron Bull.

Amanda:  Iron Bull was my first choice, and then I was like, shit, I can romance Cullen!  Well, sorry, Iron Bull.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Amanda:  Maybe, maybe next time.

Bree:  Iron Bull is pretty amazing, and you know, it was, it was sort of surprising to see a nuanced, actually kind of consensual, respecting portrayal of BDSM in my random video game.  [Laughs] Not something I expected necessarily.

Sarah:  Plus the fact that he’s voiced by Freddy Prinze, Jr., makes me laugh –

Bree:  I know!

Sarah:  – every time he talks.  I’m like, do you just follow Sarah Michelle Gellar around with that voice just to mess with her head?

Bree:  Have you seen the videos of him, like, doing the voice?  He makes these –

Sarah:  No!

Bree:  – crazy faces.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Bree:  Yeah.  I’m going to, I’m going to send you so many videos.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Well, you know, I take notes while I record, so now I’m writing down video links:  Prinze recording.

Bree:  I have to send you the one, too, like, ‘cause we care about the romances in advance, so, like, I remember a few months before Inquisition came out, somebody posted a video that was, like, basically a breakdown of all the romanceable characters and who could romance them?  With all this, like, sexy date music and, like, hearts exploding.  [Laughs] It was the funniest thing I had ever seen!  It was like a bachelor, like describing Bachelor Number One, Two, and Three sort of video.  It was amazing!

Amanda:  I will also, to, like, decide who I want to romance, I will spoil the endings, and I will look on YouTube, like, what’s the, like, romance scene look like this –

Sarah:  What’s the payoff?

Amanda:  And if I don’t like it, be like, well, that was a letdown.  I’m not going to do that, so.  I will –

Bree:  Oh, and there’s a whole industry of people who’ll do that!  [Laughs] Who, like, do play-through so you can watch, like, all the different things, you know.  All the different romances and how they play out if you didn’t play that one?

Sarah:  I, I’m super bummed that I can flirt with Dorian but not hook up with him because I’m a girl.

Amanda:  I know!

Sarah:  I’m a dwarf.

Amanda:  I love that little –

Bree:  I’m going to have to play a male character.

Amanda:  – thin mustache he’s got going on.  I was also really bummed.

Sarah:  I’m super curious about his uniform.  Like, he’s, like, leather, except for these two straps over one shoulder.  Like, is that armpit particularly problematic for him?  Like, how is that a good battle, battle thing?

Bree:  Because he’s showing off his arm!  It’s an arm worth showing off!  [Laughs]

Sarah:  This is true.  You have a good point.

Bree:  I’m sure it distracts people.

Amanda:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Like, hey, flex.

Bree:  I mean, I don’t know, I was distracted by it, so.

Sarah:  Flex!  He’s, he does have the, the twirly mustache.

Bree:  Yes.

Sarah:  His, his, his supply of mustache wax is not in danger during this entire event.

Amanda:  He’s, he’s a finely groomed man.

Sarah:  Yes, he’s quite well-groomed.

Bree:  Yes.

Sarah:  So what exactly do these games do for you as a romance reader?  Like, you know there’re different plotlines and you can choose how to romance.  What do they do for you as a reader?  Is it hooking into the same part of your brain, or is it a different part of your, part of your entertainment brain?

Amanda:  I would say it’s a little, it’s similar but different.  With reading a romance, the plot is already predetermined.  You’re just kind of along for the ride, and hopefully that ride is a good one.

Sarah:  Yep.

Amanda:  Hopefully it doesn’t suck, and you get to the end of the book and you feel, you know, satisfied, and you give Good Book Noises and everything.  With an RPG like these, where you get to kind of control the action and control your character, you have a more involved aspect in kind of creating the romance or creating the story.  It’s more interactive, which I like, but hopefully you create a good enough story, and at the end you’re happy with what you get, and you didn’t fuck anything up, and no one tries to kill you.

[Laughter]

Bree:  Yeah.  For me, it’s almost the same.  It’s, it’s, it engages some of my reader stuff, but also some of my writer stuff, you know.  You’re, you’re telling a story with the video game. 

Sarah:  Right, but you’re making the story while you –

Bree:  Yeah.  I mean, it’s interactive, and you get to sort of decide, decide if your character is going to be a true believer or a cynic, and what that’s going to mean for the game and for who that they, you know, like and love and –

Sarah:  Right.

Bree:  And the game does, like Dragon Age especially, since it’s got so much stuff going on with the faith, I mean, it makes a big difference how people react to you if you play the game as someone who believes in this, you know, that your character is this prophet sort of person or someone who doesn’t, you know.

Sarah:  And –

Bree:  So we really have control.

Sarah:  And you get to choose whether or not – like, I find myself doing this – I could either answer questions and make choices based on my actual personality, which is pretty chill and, you know, not, I’m not into a lot of conflict, and I’m really interested in hearing other people talk more than me talking?  Or I could make choices as someone that I’m really not, like, I’m going to start a fight with Cassandra ‘cause reasons.

Amanda:  Why not?

Sarah:  Reasons, right?  So I can, I can make choices both as myself or the character who, and play it as a character that’s close to my actual personality, or I can be, like, the total opposite, asshole dickbag –

Bree:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – character of me.

Bree:  And I do that a lot.  Like, I, this is my problem.  Like, you play a squishy Sith?  I always say I’m going to go into these games and play a nice, noble person, but I really like fake money.

[Laughter]

Bree:  I really like it!  And so I keep getting tempted!  I’m like, ooh, I can get some fake money!  I can buy some good stuff!  So I have –

Sarah:  I love the, the quest to get more money is always available.

Bree:  [Laughs] Yes!  Yes, and that’s my problem!  I’m always like, hmm, well, I could be noble and give this thing back to you, or I could go sell it and buy myself something pretty.

Sarah:  Yeah!

Amanda:  [Laughs]

Bree:  So it’s –

Sarah:  And then you get to see the consequences of making those choices.

Bree:  And that is not who I am in life, I promise!

Amanda:  Bree’s lying.  She’s got a bunch of fake money piled all around her like Scrooge McDuck.

Bree:  I probably do.

Sarah:  Scrooge McDuck!  [Laughs]

Bree:  I’m swimming, swimming in my fake money.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Well, you know, eBooks aren’t real books, so the money you make off of them isn’t real money.

Amanda:  No, it’s not.

Bree:  That is true; I have heard that.

Sarah:  [Laughs] It was in the news this week.

Bree:  So many times.

Sarah:  It was in the news this week!  It was time to recycle that argument.

Bree:  I mean, you’d think that we’d get bored of it!

Sarah:  No.

Bree:  Are we the only ones who’ve been hearing it, like, constantly since 2008?

Sarah:  No, romance re-, romance also gives us unrealistic expectations.  I don’t know if you knew that one.

Bree:  Oh, I think I did catch that.

Sarah:  Yeah, that happens sometimes?  Yeah.  So if someone is interested in trying a video game, like, okay, I’m curious about this, all of y’all keep going on and on and on about Dragon Age – like, I bought it when it was sale.  Like, I think it was, like, twenty-eight bucks, and I was like, okay, I’m going to buy this, and then I’m going to spend, like, nine years building my character, because my God!  You could customize how the characters appear –

Amanda:  Yep.

Sarah:  – for, like, three whole days!

Bree:  Yes.  You can do anything, and it’s, it gets better and better.  The Dragon Age: Inquisition one, I mean, there are, like, there are videos and cheat sheets out there so you can make, like, famous characters from TV shows.  I saw a Game of Thrones Daenerys one; that went up pretty quick.  I mean, you can just –

Sarah:  Oh, yeah, how to be, how to play as Daenerys?

Bree:  Yeah!  You can make, like, any sort of looking character.

Amanda:  You’ll spend, like, twenty minutes like, is her nose too big?  Should I make it smaller?  Do her eyebrows need to be higher up on her forehead?  Maybe they should be lower.  Like, you can change so many different aspects of just, like, the face, not to mention, like –

Sarah:  Yep.

Amanda:  – body type and hair and – it’s very –

Sarah:  Facial tattoos, oh, yeah.

Amanda:  – it’s very involved.

Bree:  I would give them so much money if I could have some long, beautiful hair, though.  I’m telling you.  That’s my –

Amanda:  There are no long, like, good long haircuts for women.

Bree:  No.

Amanda:  Like, I mean, maybe it’s not practical for battle, I guess, but –

Sarah:  I can see it being a pain in the ass to animate.

Bree:  Yeah.  I definitely, I can see that too, but man!

Sarah:  I do like the braided ones where you have, like, a bunch of braids?  That’s pretty cool.

Bree:  Yeah.

Sarah:  My eight-year-old really wanted to go through the character creator, and I was like, okay!  It’s not really a game meant for you, but okay.  So he decided he was going to create a girl, and you know, when you’re, when you’re eight, that’s a, that’s a lot of, like, this is boy stuff, this is girl’s stuff, and he’s very good about, like, talking to me about how, well, you know, I really like this thing, but my friend says it’s for girls, and I like it!  And I’m like, well, then clearly it’s also for boys, and it doesn’t really matter what your friends thinks.  So, like, you get to have this conversation all the time.  He’s, he decided to go through the character creator, ‘cause he just thought it was the coolest thing, and I mean, seriously, when you, when you’re the type of person who has to see all the choices and then see them again before you choose, I, that could have kept him entertained for, like, all of winter break, plus the days we were closed for the snow storm and spring break.  Like, he could have kept going.  He ended up playing, he, he started the game as a, as a female character.  I think he is a female warrior, and she’s, like, super tall and badass, and I’m like, I love that you’re playing as this massively strong woman!  Like, yay!  [Laughs] Now I can’t let him play all that often, because I have to be there and make sure he doesn’t stumble into inappropriate places?

Amanda:  [Laughs]

Bree:  Yes.  Which there are a few.

Sarah:  There are a few.

Amanda:  Yes.

Sarah:  There’s, and, and the thing is, I think that a lot of people would be like, oh, no, it’s super violent.  It’s actually less violent than a lot of the things I see on TV.

Bree:  Yeah, it’s, Dragon Age especially, a lot of it is –

Amanda:  You can turn off, like, the blood splatter, too.

Bree:  Yeah.

Amanda:  Like, you can, like, lessen the violence a little.

Bree:  Yeah, you can lessen the blood splatter, and a lot of it is like, you know, you’re fighting-

Sarah:  Intestines flying by your face.

Bree:  – or, like, insubstantial, like, mist demons and, like, green blobs and, like, you know – there are people, I mean, you fight a lot of people too, but.

Sarah:  Then you also get to have really fun conversations.  What are you doing?  I am short two pieces of diseased flesh, and I can’t find them!

Bree:  [Laughs]

Amanda:  Well, I will get them for you, especially if you have fake money for me.

Bree:  Yes.  Fake money!  Fake money!

Sarah:  [Laughs] Can I give you a fake eBook instead?

Bree:  Okay, so you asked about entry-level games.

Sarah:  Yes!

Bree:  I think it depends on – I mean, I think that Dragon Age, a lot of people have told me they’re sort of intimidated by it, and I get it, ‘cause it’s not a –

Sarah:  It’s huge.

Bree:  It’s a big game.  It’s, you know, pretty serious business.

Sarah:  But it also takes you through, like, levels.  Like, for a while you get to run around Haven and do a bunch of stuff and figure out how, like, how the search –

Bree:  Yeah.

Sarah:  – function works, and how this works, and how to ride a horse, and so, you know, you get to run around and do one level, and I noticed that after you fight the first big bad and you move to the next level, you’re back running around in a confined universe, figuring shit out in a very small space before you have to go out and do stuff in the bigger space.

Bree:  Yeah, it definitely gives you a chance to learn stuff, and I think that most anybody can, like, I think that you can start playing it.  I mean, some people think it’s easier on the console.  I think it’s easier on PC; I play on PC.  But, you know, if you don’t like that, or if you just don’t want the fighting part at all, there are some games, like Regency Love, I think, is a good one.

Amanda:  Yeah.

Bree:  Is a really good one to start, especially since so many of us, you know, we like our Jane Austen.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Is that the solitaire one?

Amanda:  No, I reviewed it for the site, and it had, like –

Sarah:  Oh, that’s the other one, okay.

Amanda:  Yeah.  And there’s –

Bree:  Yeah, it’s –

Amanda:  – Snape, essentially, and Mister, like, Digsby, who I hated.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Bree:  Yeah, it’s an iPad game, and you just basically, you answer, like, Regency trivia, and you go to, like, balls, or you go out and talk to people and you interact with them, and you get skill points, and you can spend them to make yourself better at dancing or, I think, sewing or, like, all sorts of different things.  Painting.  And then eventually you can, like, pick your people, you know, get into relationships with different people, depending on what you want to do.  And I mean, that’s a very basic, very easy, you know, really, no, you don’t have to have any sort of coordination or fight anybody.  You know, you can just play a romance game basically.

Sarah:  You don’t know how to, you don’t have to hit A, B, X, and Y while moving a –

Amanda:  No.

Sarah:  – trigger?  I was not good at that initially.  I just sucked at that.  Although I did unlock throw a jar of bees.

Amanda:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  And I’m very excited to try this out.

Bree:  Yes!  The bees!  The bees are awesome.  The Inquisition needs bees.

Sarah:  Yes.  And too many britches.

Amanda:  If you, I would say if you like those kind of visual novel RPGs, like Regency Love, so I’m really, I’m really salty about this, but Japan has, like, a brand of game called otome games, which are visual novels.  So you play as a woman, and you kind of go through, like, conversations or, or whatever, and you can kind of pick who you want to romance.  Like, a lot of the scenarios are kind of like slice of life.  Like, you’re an orphan, but you found out you’re actually the daughter of rich parents, and now you live in this big estate, and do you want to romance the fancy butler, or do you want to romance, like, the chef of your mansion or your bodyguard or something like that?  But a lot of them are in Japanese, so if you don’t know Japanese you’re kind of up shit creek without a paddle, ‘cause you can’t understand what’s going on.  But one site that I follow is, like, English otome games dot Tumblr dot com, and so they have a list of all these games that are being translated into English or, or stuff like that, so I think that’s a good resource if you kind of like those romance games without the fighting.  We’ve mentioned Stardew Valley, which is not –

Bree:  Yeah!

Amanda:  – quite a romance game, but there is romancing in it.  It will suck you in like no one’s business.  I think I have, like, over sixty hours played, and I got it, like, maybe a month ago.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Bree:  Oh, there was this, this, this one week where you told me on Twitter, and a few other people had, like, been mentioning it, and then Amanda was like, are you going to play it?

Amanda:  You had to!

Bree:  And I was like, okay, and Courtney Milan had been telling me too.  She had downloaded it, like, the week before, and she was obsessed with it, and so, like, I went and I got it, and I was like, I don’t know, this game seems so silly.  What the hell?  I, I don’t understand what I’m even doing, and then I was like, wait a minute, it’s been forty hours!

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Bree:  Why, why am I so obsessed with growing pumpkins?

Sarah:  Where did time go?

Amanda:  It’s like a, It’s an –

Sarah:  Where did my time go?

Amanda:  – open-ended farming game, so there’s no end to it.  It just keeps going and going and going.  Yeah, and you have these seasons, and you kind of have, like, quests, like you have to rebuild the community center by turning in certain items, and you can have farm animals and crops, and you have to, like, battle through the, like, dungeon, the mines, to, like, get certain things.

Bree:  Yeah, that’s the only fighting.  You have to, like, hit bats –

Amanda:  Yeah.

Bree:  – with a sword if you want to –

Amanda:  It’s super, you just, like –

Bree:  – go mining.

Amanda:  – click your button over and over.  There’s no, like, XY, anything like that.

Sarah:  There’s no technique to kicking ass?

Amanda:  Nope!

Bree:  And so there are all these people who live in this town, like, I think the, the hook is that you’re tired of your, your boring, dead-end job –

Amanda:  The city life.

Bree:  – and so you go away to the Stardew Valley to inherit your grandfather’s farm, and you get to meet all the people in town, and you have to clean up the farm, and you can plant stuff and grow it and, you know.  I became obsessed with making, like, artisanal jam and mayonnaise?

Amanda:  Yes!

Bree:  [Laughs]

Amanda:  Yes, and goat’s cheese?

Bree:  I’m not kidding!  It sounds so silly when I say it.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Amanda:  You can make, like, truffles.

Bree:  It was like, yes, I’m making mayonnaise!

Amanda:  It’s great.

Bree:  It’s so hard to describe, and everybody else loves fishing, and I can’t fish, because apparently I don’t have the fictional fishing gene.

Amanda:  [Laughs]

Bree:  So I don’t know, yeah, that one is a fun one.

Amanda:  In the town I think there are, what, like, five bachelors and five, like, bachelorettes that you can romance –

Bree:  Yeah.

Amanda:  – and you can do same-sex romance, I believe, in that one.

Bree:  Yeah, you can.

Amanda:  And you have to, like, you know, talk to them and give them certain gifts that they like and, and stuff like that.

Sarah:  So if you wanted to enter that game, do you, is it, it’s PC only?

Bree:  I think –

Amanda:  It’s designed for the PC, but there’s, like, a, a program you can use to play on the Mac, right, Bree?

Bree:  Yeah, I think so.  I’m a PC user, so, but Courtney was playing it, and she’s Mac, so.

Sarah:  So there has to be a way to put in on a Mac.

Bree:  Yeah, there has to be.

Amanda:  I think the, I think the thing was called Wine, W-I-N-E, is what it was –

Bree:  Yeah, yeah.  Yeah, that’s a Windows, like, virtual –

Sarah:  It’s a clone?

Bree:  – thing, yeah.  So, so that’s a good one.  I’m trying to think other romance-y –

Amanda:  I liked, so, I loved the Fable series, which you can play on the Xbox.  Fable I, you can’t play as a woman, but the, Fable II and Fable III, you can.  The romancing is a little different.  You don’t have, like, NPCs that, that join your party and that you go on quests with, but you can romance townspeople and buy a house and get married and, and stuff like that, and I would say it’s like Dragon Age, but more cartoon-y.  It’s not as violent.  The animation style is a little more cartoonish, rather than realistic?

Sarah:  Right.

Amanda:  Unfortunately, I think the gaming studio, Lionhead, is going through some issues, and they won’t be making any more Fables, which is a bummer.  But I would say that’s a little easier and I think a, a teeny bit more approachable than Dragon Age, but it’s not as involved with romancing and customization in terms of storyline that the BioWare games are.

Bree:  I was just looking to make sure.  It looks like Steam still has Knights of the Old Republic, since Stars Wars is, you know, having its little renaissance right now.

Sarah:  Right.

Bree:  Knights of the Old Republic was my first BioWare game, and so, you know, the graphics are, it’s older.  It’s, you know, got to be –

Amanda:  Yeah.

Bree:  – fifteen years, ten years now.

Amanda:  Well, the romance guy is like a –

Bree:  Yeah.

Amanda:  – kind of a Han Solo-esque character, if I remember correctly.

Bree:  Yeah.  Maybe a little nicer.  He’s –

Amanda:  Yeah.

Bree:  – a little more of the –

Amanda:  A little more charming.

Bree:  A little more nice.

Amanda:  A little less abrasive.

Bree:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  So do you have a romance that you’ve done in a video game?  That, like, you still look back on, like, among, like, the same way you look back on a favorite book?

Bree:  I loved the Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic one.  Carth, Carth Onasi.  [Laughs] He’s the Han Solo dude.

Amanda:  I would say Garrus, because I wanted that romance so badly in the first game, and I was so happy to finally get it.  And you can kind of carry that romance over into the third game?

Sarah:  Oh, cool.

Amanda:  The, you know, because he is a recurring character.

Bree:  Oh, yeah, the Mass Effect games are different than the Dragon Age.  The Dragon Age, each one has a new protagonist.  The Mass Effect, you play one character, and everything you did in the first game impacts the second, and then the third.

Sarah:  Oh, that’s cool!  And scary!

Bree:  Yeah.

Amanda:  It is scary, yeah.

Bree:  Yeah.

Sarah:  That’s very scary.  ‘Cause one of the things that paralyzes me when I’m playing is it’s like, okay, if I choose, something’s going to happen, but I could also do this choice.  I could, I could go either way.

Amanda:  Save frequently, Sarah.

Bree:  Yes.

Amanda:  So, so if you make a shitty choice, be like, well, I didn’t really mean to do that.  I’m just going to restore my previous save.

Sarah:  Go back.  You know, I should do that, ‘cause I –

Bree:  Oh, you might like Dragon Age II, because no matter what choice you make in everything in that game, it all goes badly.

Amanda:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  I’m not going there.

Bree:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  I just, I mean –

Bree:  Dragon Age II is very controversial.  Some people love it; some people hate it.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Bree:  I – [wavering  noise] – I don’t know.

Sarah:  The, the, the alteration I want is for the dragons to be tamable and rideable.  That’s all I, I want.  I don’t want to have to kill all the dragons.  I would like to make friends with the dragons and be like, let’s be friends and hang out, and no one will fuck with us, ‘cause we have dragons.

Amanda:  Well, write a letter to BioWare, and they might make it happen!

Sarah:  Oh, right, yeah.

Amanda:  So complain on Twitter.

Bree:  Dragon Age IV – [laughs] – coming, I hope.

Sarah:  I, I don’t know.  I mean, it feels like the, the, the people I see mentioning Inquisition of oh, my God, I just started playing it, and it’s amazing, keeps growing.  Like, how, why release a fourth?  You’ve got the third that’s doing so well.

Amanda:  I feel like that’s a good thing about the Dragon Age series is you can kind of pick up with any game.

Sarah:  Yeah, you don’t have to start with one.

Amanda:  Yeah, like, of course, like, the actions in your previous games can affect the future, like, events.  Like, I remember when I installed Inquisition, they have you go into that thing and figure out –

Bree:  You go in the Dragon Age Keep?

Amanda:  Yeah, and you have to, like, put in what decisions you made in the previous ones?  And ‘cause I play on the console, like, I couldn’t carry over the stuff, so I had to, like, put in what I did.

Bree:  Yeah.

Amanda:  So that’s really cool is that you can kind of pick up anywhere because it’s its own separate character with its own separate party and characters, whereas Mass Effect you have to –

Bree:  But there were definitely, there were some things like, like, in the first Dragon Age game, you could make one guy king or not –

Amanda:  Yes.

Bree:  – and so in the third game, he might be the king, or he might be, you know, a Grey Warden.  You know, there are some characters – I don’t think you’ve gotten there yet, but when you have to go into the Fade, and you might end up killing your previous characters from other games –

Amanda:  I hate the Fade so much.  I hate it.

Bree:  Hate the Fade.

Amanda:  I hate any quest having to do with the Fade.  It’s like, mm, can I skip that one, please?

Sarah:  And you have to go?  Ugh.

Amanda:  Mm-hmm.

Sarah:  I didn’t like the part –

Amanda:  Most of the time Fade quests are, like, storyline quests and –

Sarah:  Ah, great.

Bree:  This is why you need to play on the PC.  There’s a mod for Dragon Age One [Origins] called Skip the Fade.

[Laughter]

Bree:  Where you literally just get to skip the Fade.

Sarah:  Fuck that!

Amanda:  I, okay, I can’t remember if this was in Dragon Age One or II, but the quest where, like, there’s that stupid little boy and the mom, like, is worried because he’s been possessed by a demon and taken into the Fade?

Bree:  That’s fun.

Amanda:  That fucking quest line, I, I have, like, night terrors about that quest line.  I hate it so much, ‘cause you can’t, like, make a good choice, and someone’s always really pissed off at you, no matter what you do, and it’s like, you know what?  Fuck it!  I can’t win!  I’m just going to leave you with your weird, creepy, possessed child.  I’m, I’m out of here.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Bree:  I had to restart my game because, or go back to a save point, because I made some weird choice with that kid, and Alistair was like, I hate you forever.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Oh, my God!

Amanda:  That quest was so, like, no matter what decision you made –

Sarah:  Someone was going to leave.

Amanda:  – someone, someone was so angry!

Bree:  Yeah.  And they do that.  They do that sometimes where you’re just a no-win, and that was the thing with Dragon Age II, like, the whole game was just no-win scenarios, and, like, whatever no-win scenario you picked in, like, the first act would come back and, like, screw you in the second act.

Sarah:  Yep.

Bree:  And so –

Sarah:  I completely understand.

Bree:  – I [Origins] and III [Inquisition] both have a, have a little more of you can end as a victorious hero sort of thing going on.  II was basically –

Amanda:  It’s a big garbage fire, I think.

Bree:  Yeah.

Sarah:  [Laughs] So if, if someone’s listening to this and going, okay, I’m going to try these games, how much time should you, should you warn people?  Like, okay –

Amanda:  [Laughs]

Sarah:  – get ready.  Hours will disappear now.

Amanda:  Well, it depends on your schedule.  Like, if you have a job that you actually have to, like, leave the house and go to, I feel like you’re okay.

Sarah:  You’re, you’re safe?

Amanda:  You’re all right.

[Laughter]

Amanda:  You have some time that you have to separate yourself from the game, but because I work full time on SmartBitches, like, I set my own schedule, so sometimes –

Sarah:  Yep.

Amanda:  – I’ll be doing suddenly like, you know, it’s noon, and I’ve been working really well for, like, two hours.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Amanda:  Maybe I should, you know, just take a little Stardew Valley break.  I’ve got to check on my crops.

Sarah:  Yep.

Amanda:  You know, I’ve got to see how my cows are doing.  And then I get on at noon; before I know it it’s, like, 5 p.m., and I’m like, I haven’t showered today yet.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Bree:  No, that’s not familiar at all.

Amanda:  [Laughs]

Bree:  No, definitely not.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  You don’t know anything about that.

Bree:  I will tell you, ‘cause it keeps track of your save points, I charged – now I will say this with a caveat that I get lost a lot.  I think I tweeted you, Sarah, that map of me where I had run, like, in, like, so many loops, so I get lost a lot, and that makes it take longer –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Bree:  – but I charged through Inquisition and, like, skipped so many of the side quests and was just leveling up enough so that I could handle the plot, and that was, like, seventy-nine hours.

Sarah:  Wow.

Amanda:  I, I think it depends on what kind of personality you have?  I am a former World of Warcraft player, and that game consumed so much of my life.  Like, I would have friends show up at my house, like, Amanda, do you want to go to the movies?  Like, uh, I’m doing a dungeon right now?  Can’t you see that I’m busy?  So I shudder to think, ‘cause in Warcraft you can do, like, time played, and it will tell you how many days you’ve sunk into this game.  So I, I feel like it depends on what kind of person you are?  If you get absorbed into things really quickly, you might want to block out time to visit the land of the living every so often.

Sarah:  So how hard was it for you to get out of doing World of Warcraft?  If you were super into it, was there a point where you were like, okay, cold turkey, got to stop?

Amanda:  [Sighs] Okay.  So I started playing vanilla WoW, which is before any expansions came out.  I played a Night Elf Druid, and I started because my high school boyfriend was getting into it, and his friends were getting into it, so I played because they needed a healer, and I’m like, yeah, sure, I’ll do that.  So we kind of, like, one guy was, like, the tank character, like, the warrior.  My boyfriend was the rogue.  Our friend was the warlock, and – so we played for a while, and the first expansion was The Burning Crusade –

Sarah:  Right.

Amanda:  – and that was amazing.  But the thing about Warcraft is there’s no end.

Sarah:  Right.

Amanda:  They keep coming out with more stuff, more, like, big bads that you have to kill, more end bosses, and then another expansion comes out, and you have to do it all over again.  And I feel like I’m one of those people where I’m not going to do something unless I can be really good at it.

Sarah:  Right.

Amanda:  In order to do that, you have to treat it like a job.  And so I treated the game like a job, and I would raid and do, like, high-end dungeons for five hours –

Sarah:  Ah!

Amanda:  – Monday through Thursday.  And then you have to, like, farm for materials for your potions, so that’s, like, an even more, like, few hours a week you have to tack onto it.  At one point I was the best-geared Alliance Resto Druid on my server, but it also meant that a lot of my social life and my friends deteriorated –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Amanda:  – because this was like a full-time job.  I stopped because, like, another expansion came out, and then another one, and for some reason they kept changing things in the game that kind of turned it into something that I didn’t recognize anymore, if that makes any sense.  Like, the things that I loved about regular WoW and the first expansion seemed to go away, the more they came out with more stuff and more stuff and more stuff.

Sarah:  Right.

Amanda:  And it just became, like, a game that I didn’t really recognize anymore.

Sarah:  Right.

Amanda:  And I tried playing it again, like, my roommate plays casually, but I reinstated my account, and I played for a little bit, and I’m like, I don’t want to really do this.  Like I, I have, I have other stuff to do, and this just doesn’t seem fun anymore, and –

Sarah:  And my goat cheese needs my attention, and my mayonnaise.

Amanda:  Yeah, I thought –

Sarah:  This sounds like, by the way, this –

Amanda: Right.

Sarah:  – this, this Dew Valley, it sounds like it’s like Facebook Farmville on steroids.

Amanda:  It’s so good though.

Bree:  It is, and only, like, it’s better somehow.  [Laughs] It’s way better.

Amanda:  I’ve never played Farmville, but I can probably tell you –

Bree:  I think some of the same impulses, ‘cause I, like, you know, I played that for, like, a week.  I wasn’t really that into it?  But, like, everybody kept sending me invites.  I was like, fine, whatever, what.  But, you know, it’s, it’s way, way, it’s a whole interactive little world there, but yes, you get to plant things, and they grow.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Awesome.

Bree:  And then you get to harvest them and sell them for money, which I like.

Amanda:  Fake money!

Bree:  I was like, yes, I made a million fake gold!

Amanda:  That game is all about fake money, essentially.

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Bree:  I have so much fake money.  I haven’t actually talked to most of the people in town.  Everyone’s like, who are you romancing?  I’m like, I don’t know!  I’m going to become a billionaire first!

Amanda:  So the romance has taken a back seat.  Like, as soon as I conquer all, like, the dungeon stuff and, like, get all this iridium ore, then I’ll worry about getting a, like a lover –

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Amanda:  – but I’m busy at the moment.  And it’s such a rush because, like, you harvest all your crops, and you make all your cheese and your mayo, and you put it into a little box by your house, and what that box is is, like, everything you put into that gets sold overnight, and it’s such a rush when the day ends and you see how much money you made from all the stuff and how it, like, totals out.  It’s, it’s really fun.  [Laughs]

Bree:  It sounds crazy, but I tweeted the first time I made a hundred thousand dollars in a day.  I was like, yeah!

Sarah:  [Laughs]

Bree:  My life is totally on track!

Amanda:  I’m like, shit!

Bree:  I don’t know if I showered today, but I have a hundred thousand gold!

Amanda:  I know!  It’s so, it is a rush.  I’m like, oh, my God, I made four thousand dollars off those blueberries?  Like –

Sarah:  [Laughs] Somewhere there’s a blueberry farmer in real life who’s like, yeah, okay.

Bree:  Dream on!  It is lovely!

Sarah:  Just put all your food in a magic box.

Amanda:  [Laughs]

Bree:  I want that, I want a magic box that I put my books in, and I get five hundred gold.  [Laughs]

Sarah:  Isn’t that what Amazon is?

Bree:  None of that’s – oh, yeah, in our dreams.

[Laughter]

Sarah:  You just, isn’t that what you’re told as self-published authors, though, that Amazon is the magic box?  Like, you put your books out, and then boom?

Bree:  I want to tell you, honestly, in 2012 it had a little bit of a magic box quality, but in 2016, no.  [Laughs] It’s like throwing it into a pit.

[Laughter]

Sarah:  Now you need to write an erotica series about a magic box.

Bree:  [Laughs]

Amanda:  Which is a vagina, obviously.

Sarah:  Right!  I mean I don’t know if that was clear.

Amanda:  Yes.

Bree:  The magic box!

Amanda:  If you made that connection.

Sarah:  [Laughs] And, you know, it makes money when you put things in it?

Amanda:  Blueberries, cheeses.

Sarah:  Yeah, you know.

Amanda:  The sky’s the limit.

Sarah:  Just no mayonnaise, please.

Amanda:  No mayonnaise.

Bree:  No.

Sarah:  [Laughs] Somebody listening to this is going to start yelling right there.  Like, NOOO!  You went there!  No!

Amanda:   And now I’m, like, thinking of all the things that you can sell in Stardew Valley and then, like, comparing it to this analogy.  Like, you can dig up artifacts.

Bree:  Yes!

Amanda:  One of the artifacts is, like, a rusty spoon.  Like – [laughs] – now I’m just –

Sarah:  Ideas!

Amanda:  This is your fault, Sarah.

Sarah:  Sorry, it’s all my fault.

Amanda:  You, you did this; this is your fault.

Sarah:  Well, thank you for doing this podcast.  This is ridiculous fun.

Amanda:  [Laughs]

Bree:  Yay!  Everybody should be gaming!  That’s my take.

Amanda:  Or willing to try it, yes.

[music]

Sarah:  And that is all for this episode.  Thank you to Bree and Amanda for hanging out with me and making my gaming life better, because thanks to all of their discussion, I also downloaded Dragon Age: Inquisition, and it is ridiculously addictive, and I enjoy it so much.  And if you’re curious about the games that we talked about, I will have links to all or most of them in the podcast entry, based on what’s available online, and you can always email me at [email protected] if you’ve got questions and you want to find one of these links.

This podcast is sponsored by Julie Ann Walker’s Devil and the Deep, published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, available in paperback and eBook.  Bran Pallidino carries a dark secret – one that forced him to push Maddy away.  But when she’s taken hostage during a trip to the Caribbean, Bran and his friends, a group of former Navy SEALs who run Deep Six Salvage, embark on a dangerous mission to save her.  Passion boils between Bran and Maddy, but what good is putting their hearts on the line if they don’t survive the dawn?  Devil and the Deep is on sale now at all retailers.

It is now time for my dog to dig a hole in the carpet.  I swear to you he does not do this unless I am recording.  [dig, dig, dig] Yep.  I’m going to have to have him as a guest, aren’t I?  Yeah.  I mean, he doesn’t say much, but I’m sure he has many opinions.

I have received a number of new pledges to the podcast Patreon campaign, and I wanted to say thank you.  Thank you for that.  If you’re curious about it, you can have a look at Patreon.com/SmartBitches.  Starting with $1 a month pledges, you can help me reach different goals like upgrading equipment and commissioning transcripts, plus you’d be helping me continue to produce the show every week.  I am so excited to see how many people enjoy the show and contact me and leave comments and send emails, so if you’ve looked at or pledged or shared the link, thank you.  I really appreciate that.

Our music is provided by Sassy Outwater.  You can find her on Twitter @SassyOutwater.  This is the Peatbog Faeries.  This is their album Blackhouse.  This track is called “Jakes on a Plane.”  You can find it on Amazon or iTunes or wherever you buy your fine music.

If you’ve got ideas or suggestions for the podcast, you can email me at [email protected] or you can leave a message at 1-201-371-3272.  That is a U.S. number, so if you can’t call internationally, you can also just record a message of yourself on your phone or your computer and email it to me, but if you have an idea or suggestion, you want to ask a question and you’d like to do it in your own voice, that’s fabulous!  You can also email your questions with, you know, words.  That also works too.  Either way, I love hearing from you, and I am so excited to see how many people enjoy the podcast each week, so thank you for that and for leaving reviews and for generally letting me know how much you enjoy it.

Orville, one of my two cats, is about to start rubbing his face on the sound box, so that might make a really interesting sound effect for everyone, yay!  Cat on the podcast!  It’s been a long time, Orville; welcome!

But on behalf of Amanda and Bree and everyone here and myself of course, we wish you the very best of reading.  Have a great weekend.

[sinuous music]