Programming Throwdown. Episode 162, Interactive Fiction. Take it away, Patrick. I feel a little bit bad that we're doing

interactive fiction in a non-interactive format. So we should release this episode as an interactive

if you email us, programming throwdown at gmail.com. Very good. This is spoken from someone

who participates in social media. All right. My opening topic is picking game difficulty settings. Jason and I were warming up in the green room, although it's neither green nor room. But we were warming up before the podcast that we were talking about video games. There's some new video games coming out. People are really stoked for him.

I was asking him if he was into it.

He's like, oh, yeah.

I was like, oh, man, I can't get into them. Specifically, there's a new Bethesda game, famously previously makers of Fallout. And I just can't get into Fallout games. I know I want to. People tell me I should. And Jason gave me the revelation of like, you got to set the difficulty setting correctly.

And then I realize I think I have this. tell me I should, and Jason gave me the revelation of like, you got to set the difficulty

setting correctly. And then I realize, I think I have this thing where I just, you know,

you start the game and it gives you your difficulty settings and it's like, you know, story mode,

easy, normal, whatever. And I read the subtext. I'm like, oh, I should go for normal. But I think

I just need to realize I'm not a normal gamer.

And I just need to lower the difficulty settings.

I guess this was ingrained to me when games didn't have difficulty settings.

You know, when you open Super Mario Bros, there's no like, what mode would you like to play on?

You just played on the difficulty setting. Well, yeah,

because of that, it became a benchmark for your talent. It's like, have you seen World Seven? No,

you haven't, you know. Only because of the flute. Yeah, that's right, the flute. But you're right,

that's the temptation is to say, like, it's basically, you know, the game starts by asking you, are you smart or not? You're kind of like, oh, no. Yeah, I'm sorry. No, I mean, this is the worst way of looking at it, right? Oh, I see. It's like, you come into it and say, well, yeah, I'm not, I'm a smart guy. Yeah, I mean, I should clearly play this game on hard.

But no, that's not the right way of thinking about it.

So on this topic, I learned about a new world briefly that I've never played.

And so I've never been an esports gamer other than like the three times I tried logging on to some multiplayer game and heard people significantly

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