For better or worse, reality TV is everywhere, a continent-sized chunk of the modern media landscape. But even though shows like Survivor, Too Hot To Handle, Love Is Blind, The Circle, and so many more are glorified games, there are only a handful of games that explore the format (outside occasional licensed efforts like the well-liked but now-discontinued Love Island mobile game or the small interactive fiction game Netflix released to promote Love Is Blind’s sixth season). What gives? On the latest Aftermath Hours, we answer that question.
This week, we’re joined by special guest LB Hunktears, formerly of Fanbyte and Blaseball fame, who is now working on a reality show queer romance horror comedy game called Fledgling Manor. We discuss the reality TV shows that inspired it, as well as the strange lack of games about reality TV, given just how game-y those shows’ structures tend to be. We also rank every season of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, a show that has aged like a fine wine if the bottle contained a tiny man named Joss Whedon who you kept learning new terrible things about, and who you had to nudge aside every time you wanted to take a sip.
Then we talk about Twitch’s recent string of gaffes involving Israel, including its “inadvertent” failure to re-enable sign ups in Israel and Palestine for a whole year, as well as its very advertent decision to ban several Arab streamers for a month following spurious claims of antisemitism. Lastly, we discuss the best fall flavors and conclude that apple beats the shit out of pumpkin spice. Sorry, but it’s not even close.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we don’t have to find ever-lasting (read: entirely contrived, but contractually enforced) love on a reality show to promote Aftermath.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:
Nathan: Reality shows often have a lot of gamified elements, and yet I feel like – short of Crush House, for example, which just came out recently – we haven’t seen that many games based on reality TV. What do you think the sticking point is there? Why isn’t this more of a thing?
LB: That’s a good question. I was really excited to see Crush House. I’m excited to start playing games again when this game is done, because I think [Crush House’s] mechanic is really interesting and cool. I think the transmedia thing – transmedia as in making a game about a different kind of media – presents a challenge to people in general. It’s one of the many, many reasons I thought Immortality was so interesting. I also don’t see a lot of games about, like, making movies; there’s an element of imagination that needs to happen. In general with games, though, there’s an element of imagination that needs to happen around just not running around and jumping – which is my least favorite kind of game, which is why I said that.
But reality shows, there’s an element of people thinking they’re too smart for them – that [reality shows] are stupid – but also a lack of understanding of those gamified elements and a lack of appreciation for how complicated and insane some of those gaming elements are. I’m currently doing some contract consulting work for KO_OP, the game studio, and they do a show-and-tell thing. Somebody did a whole presentation mostly about the game elements of certain Korean reality shows and variety shows and how interesting they are in terms of game design.
I’ve watched a lot of those kinds of shows, and even as someone who’s been in games for over ten years, it never occurred to me to make those connections. Hopefully people are starting to have those conversations now. Someone did!
Gita: I know that [Dropout CEO] Sam Reich has talked about watching Survivor and other reality shows for Dropout. I started watching Game Changer, and that is a game show about games, and so they do sometimes tap into the gamified elements from reality TV shows because they’re also improv comedians in a studio. It does not feel cross-media, but it does become cross-media when you add that sort of metatextual element to it.
I feel like games are a particularly good device to call attention to the artifice of reality television because in a game you are sort of a god. In any kind of a game, you have to make choices about how much agency you give to the player. There’s two ways to do a reality television show and have it be fun: One is that you’re a contestant, and you have to survive, which is the Fledgling Manor approach. The other is where you’re the producer, and you have to make something compelling – which is kind of the game I’m waiting for. And that is the thing that’s interesting about Immortality; it gives you a timeline and the ability to edit a huge amount of video into something.
Crush House sort of gets there in that it introduces you to the concept of reality TV as though every element is a game. So you do get to understand more cleanly that these are just minigames. They’re making [the contestants] do real-life minigames. When Tyra Banks shows up and she has some ridiculous runway with, like, moving platforms, and they’re all unstable and floating on the water – which is something that she made these girls do, in high heels, in constricting outfits that were difficult to walk in – [it becomes obvious that it’s a game]. Nobody is ever going to make you walk a runway like that! But she did on [America’s Next Top Model].
Nathan: Nobody except Mario in Mario Party. He would have you do that. He’d be right there with you, though.
Gita: He’d be like [Mario accent] “Oh no, so scary!”
Nathan: [Mario accent] “WaaaaAAAAaaaaAAAh”
