Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Podcasting is great for multitasking. You could listen to this while you hack into the mainframe of that terrifying robot coming towards you. Welcome to TripleClick, where we bring the games to you. This week we talk about Pragmata, a first-person shooter that makes multitasking fun. You hack with one hand while dodging and aiming your weapons with the other. Shouldn't work as well as it does.
I'm Maddie Myers.
I'm Jason Schreier. And I'm Kirk Hamilton. And hello.
Hello. Hello. How's it going, guys? Happy Max Fun Drive, you two. It's Max Fun Drive.
Chapter 2: What unique mechanics does Pragmata introduce for gameplay?
The most wonderful time of the year. And we're going to talk about it. Gaming's biggest night. Gaming's biggest two-week night. gaming's biggest two weeks not just for gaming but for Maximum Fun our wonderful podcast network as a whole but here at TripleClick it's gaming's biggest two week period we're going to talk about that more later as the show goes on but
just like we have done in previous max fun drives of years gone by we are going to do a live stream the three of us we're going to play some games together and stream it on our youtube channel this year so that's triple click pod if you want to go subscribe to us right away Which you should do. Or you could wait all the way until the day of, which would, of course, be May 1st.
We're going to start at 8 p.m. E.T. Come tune in and watch us play games, and we'll answer some questions in the chat. It'll be really fun. I think that's technically the very last day of the drive, so we'll definitely be... And also May Day. It's a May Day stream. Yes, it's May Day. It's May Day. Happy workers' rights.
It's all a wonderful...
Yeah, actually, yeah, we are repping labor.
Yeah, with our work, our own network and everything.
Our own labor. So it's all the confluence is totally perfect. So May 1st, 8 p.m. Mark your calendars for our live stream. Before we get to our topic today, Jason, you had something you wanted to talk about.
Yeah. So last week we talked about AI and we cited a blog post by an astrophysicist named Minas Karamanis. And he wrote about like AI and how it de-skills people and so on and so forth. And since that episode we got an interesting email from someone going by the name boxo mcfoxo who wrote a pretty long blog post laying out a case that the essay that we cited was in fact written by ai
And so this guy, this boxo guy lays out a pretty compelling case, including one piece of evidence that I found most compelling, which is that the original essay quotes Frank Herbert in one of the Dune books and writes the sentence like, quote, things we do without thinking, semicolon, there's the real danger. But in the actual book, that semicolon is an em dash.
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Chapter 3: How does the story of Pragmata unfold throughout the game?
It's always occasionally I'll use Claude to polish just a little bit, a little bit of polish.
Yeah, we should say here that we don't actually know how much was really used here.
This is all a bunch of supposition. has led to this really uncomfortable and will become more prevalent ecosystem where there's accusations about AI. We don't know what's ever truly written by human or truly written in AI. There are all these tells, but some of the tells are inadequate.
And sometimes something that seems like AI, if you run it through a detector, might actually be human-written, and so on and so forth. And it's just all led to a very poisoned internet ecosystem.
Yeah, I think it's just kind of how things are now. I guess it's poisoned. I mean, I think that the conversation we had, the three human beings sitting in front of microphones, was interesting. And in the end, it really isn't that germane how much AI was involved in articulating those ideas. And I wouldn't say actually that Karamanos' post was like, you know, strongly anti-AI.
It was like a very nuanced and complex and very lengthy look at the ways that AI works and the ways that it doesn't. And in the essay, he talks about how he uses them and, you know, how he thinks they're appropriate at various points. So it was like this kind of very complex post. post that, you know, you could kind of read it either way.
That was a bit of the critique that we were sent was like, well, it's kind of a Rorschach test, right? You can look at it and see it as anti-AI or pro-AI, and that that kind of matches up with it maybe being AI generated in the first place, that it kind of toes this middle line and lets you, you know, make of it what you will, which is a very kind of AI way of being.
It says what you want to hear. It's what Sam Altman would have wanted. It's whatever you want it to be. That's what it says.
I'll throw a link to the blog in the show notes so you can check it out yourself if you're curious. But yeah, it's pretty wild. And speaking personally, just as someone who writes for a living, I find it very easy to tell when something is written by AI. I can almost always tell. And it's gotten to the point where it actively annoys me when I see something that is very clearly written by AI.
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Chapter 4: What are the main character dynamics in Pragmata?
Uh, and as I was watching it, it just became very clear that it was written by AI and I just couldn't watch anymore. It was just so insufferable. So, uh, yeah, it always, it gives me the ick when I read something and then it turns out it was written by AI. I really don't like it.
So, Maddie, this is something that you didn't get a chance to talk about in our episode last week. But the fact that you're accepting freelance submissions and then now part of your job as an editor is sort of, you know, putting it through the sieve to try to tell is this AI or not is kind of a new aspect of your job now.
Yeah, I would say it's easier said than done. I think if something is just straight up written by AI, Jason, I agree, it's very easy to tell. But it becomes more and more difficult if somebody does what Minnis did, what I suspect he did, we don't know for sure, which is have some parts of it that were perhaps composed by AI, but then...
If a lot of it is human written or if a human goes in and then fixes it afterward to add in their own thoughts or make it sound like their voice, then you might be reading something and be like, well, this is a bit stilted, but maybe this is a beginner writer or...
For example, those AI checkers that you referred to, Jason, a lot of times they'll flag non-native English speakers because that'll be somebody who writes in a more formulaic way or traditional or even academic way. And so those checkers are flawed as well.
it's just been a real challenge i mean i i think it's i think it is getting harder and harder to tell especially when it comes to people who are using their own skills as writers to bolster an ai written text and that i feel like is what has really poisoned the well is that like we'll never know we'll never know if somebody like made an outline and themselves and then had something else write it for that like it's i don't know the whole thing is it's just a mess
It's just the new normal. Yeah, it's a minefield out there. It's a very complex space now of artificial and human-made thinking and writing and material.
And like, what is the nature of work?
Speaking of artificially made things, what are we talking about today?
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Chapter 5: How does Pragmata's world-building enhance the player experience?
And Jason, you have played, I believe, a healthy chunk of it. So this is a really cool game. I didn't actually write a big intro for this. It's a pretty straightforward game. And I've also just been very busy. So I figure we can just kind of summarize it on the fly. We can do it live and describe for everybody what this game is. So let's see if I can do it. So Pragmata is a third-person shooter.
that has a unique mechanic behind it, a unique hacking mechanic. It is set on the moon at some undisclosed point in the future. You play as a human named Hugh, who is part of a sort of salvage check-in corporate team that's kind of sent to this moon base that is a corporate-controlled research base on the moon. They're sent to check in because there hasn't been any communications from the moon.
And as we know, if you make a moon base and they're doing top-secret research and then suddenly their comms cut off, everything is probably fine. You don't have to worry.
about it yeah it's gonna be okay that's what the game's about he goes there and everything's ship shape and then he goes home he's like they show him a little bit around they show him how they're doing their research and then he takes off it's pretty cool no mad scientists there doing weird shit no rogue ai it's like the artemis mission it just goes well yeah they just he just takes right around the moon and like take some beautiful photographs it's
Kind of a walking simulator.
It's so true. Oh, man. The Artemis mission is funny because I just watched Project Hail Mary. And, like, having seen this incredibly high wire act, you know, the fictional outer space adventure where everything goes wrong and they get by, you know, on the skin of their teeth. Then watching just normal astronauts, like, doing a good job.
Yeah.
And like landing safely.
But also the voice actor who plays Hugh David Menken was talking about how he felt like he couldn't share photos of the Artemis mission because he was worried it would like break his embargo, which is so funny to me. He was like, I know I'm not supposed to talk about the moon, so I'm not going to post anything about the moon.
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Chapter 6: What are the combat strategies players can use in Pragmata?
Yeah, he really shakes it off.
Maybe he didn't really like those guys. There's also one line where Hugh is like, God, kids, who would want kids? Ugh, or something like that at the very beginning. So Hugh is alone pretty quickly. All of his friends and his teammates have been killed. And there's a rogue AI rampaging. There's no human beings in sight anywhere on the base. And something appears to have gone horribly wrong.
Hugh is really quickly kind of injured. He gets knocked down into a pit. He's knocked out. And he is awakened by a little girl, or what appears to be a little girl, who is actually Diana, whose actual name I have written down. Oh, she is DI03367. Diana.
She is an android who happens to look like the cutest little girl you've ever seen, like a little six-year-old, but is in fact an incredibly powerful, artificially intelligent robot called a Pragmata. So she teams up with Hugh. She's really nice. Hugh kind of is drawn to her immediately, like they kind of have a nice little rapport.
And then he teams up with her, and it becomes clear that she, through her cybernetic powers, can hack into these robots who are attacking Hugh, which, if she does the hack properly, renders them vulnerable to his weapons that he carries. Bing! Kirk here.
I'm editing the episode, and I'm realizing that I forgot to mention maybe the most important thing in this game, which is that when Diana hacks really hard, like when she's doing a super difficult hack, she goes 0-0-1-1-0-0-0-1-1-0-0, like really, really fast. She just says zeros and ones. It's incredibly silly and very funny, and I just feel like I should probably mention that.
Okay, back to my description of the game. So thus comes the mechanic of the game. The game is you're walking around as Hugh. You have Diana kind of standing on a cute little backpack sort of stand on Hugh's back. So she's like looking over his shoulder all the time.
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Chapter 7: What challenges do players face in Pragmata's gameplay?
It's basically Donkey Kong Bonanza. She is standing on his shoulder. And when a robot comes at you, you will aim at the robot with the trigger. And then a hacking screen pops up, kind of, you know, this is a third-person shooter, so Hugh is over on the left-hand side of the screen.
To his right, this grid pops up, and you have to use the face buttons, like a D-pad, to manipulate this square through the grid, moving through different squares from the kind of start point in the upper left to wherever the kind of end hack button is.
which means kind of moving through different squares, moving around, hazards, and playing a kind of a little grid-based location game, like solving a little puzzle. While the enemy is coming at you, sometimes you're being shot at by multiple enemies, complete the hack, and then suddenly, boom, the enemy becomes vulnerable, and you can start shooting them.
So that's the main idea of the game, this brilliant, I think, idea where you have to hack and then shoot. And soon you're fighting all different kinds of enemies with all different kinds of attacks. You are shooting enemies in order to hack better. You're hacking enemies before you can shoot.
It's this constant cool back and forth between these two offensive mechanics that Diana and Hugh are doing in tandem. That's pretty much the game. We'll talk more about the story and how it all works, but that is the gist. So now let's just talk about some broad opinions of it, some broad thoughts. Maddie, let's start with you since you have finished the game. What do you make of Pragmata?
Sure. I did finish the game. It took me about 18 hours, if anybody's curious about how long it is. I appreciated that this game wasn't too long. I definitely could have done it in less time. But like I said, that that final gamut and lead up to the boss is pretty hard. So I did go back and collect some power ups.
I was thinking I was going to marathon that last night and then I was like, okay, I don't want to rush through this. There's a lot going on. I'll finish it.
There are some kind of RPG elements, as we might call them, where the more you collect around the world, the more you can level up Hugh's suit and Diana's hacking abilities and your weapons and all that stuff is, in my opinion, the best part of the game.
Like what Kirk described, all those combat mechanics, the idea of doing this hacking minigame while you're also dodging real-time fire from these robots that are solely meandering towards you, it seems like it should get irritating over time, and it just never did for me. It stayed pretty fun the whole way through.
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Chapter 8: How does the game design of Pragmata compare to other titles?
There's some variation in the kinds of enemies and the kinds of hacking that you can do. Over time, you unlock all of these different kind of hacking nodes, I
think they're called that have different effects on each of the enemies and you'll you'll end up having different preferences like oh maybe i want the enemies to get confused and start attacking each other or maybe i want to make sure to have like the overheat attack and overheat all of them etc etc and like just kind of creating that uh immersive sim aspect of making all the robots uh have these different effects happen is is very fun to watch i i really liked the combat of this game really could take or leave the story though like i
I'm sure we're going to get into it. But I felt like it was pretty ignorable, which is kind of all I have to say about that. But I had a great time playing the game overall. And I obviously finished it and I had no trouble doing so. I had a really, really lovely time with the combat in this game.
And I think there's a lot of room for a sequel in terms of where they could iterate on it and things they could do.
Yeah, nice. Jason, how about you? What do you think of the game? And how far are you in it?
I'm on the farthest level. Okay, cool. So like the third major area. Yeah, the third major area. You're like coming up on halfway. Sure. I mean, I've played as much as I need to play. I don't feel the need to play.
but it but it's fun i like it it's like it's unusual that a game like this is coming out in 2026 it feels like a game that should have come out 15 years ago um it feels like it's it's meant to hang out alongside vanquish and bayonetta and dead space on the on the xbox 360 dark void i always think of the jetpack game dark void with no one amazing everybody has forgotten but me
Because it feels like that was a time of experimentation and new IPs because you could get away with it because it only costs you $10 million to make a game as opposed to $100 or even $300 million to make a game. And so I'm glad that this game exists because it just feels refreshing at a time when mostly what we're seeing is sequels or continuations and or live services as kind of new things.
There aren't a lot of new just kind of standalone, big budget, single play, just traditional narrative games the way that this is. So that's cool to see. And yeah, I really enjoyed it. It's actually the way that Kirk, you described the combat with the Hacking and shooting and trying to dodge enemies while at the same time you're doing this hacking mini game with your face buttons.
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