 Is that a glove? Or a knife? Do you have a glass of wine there Paul? Yeah, look that way. It doesn't look quite so red in that. It looks more brown on the hood, yeah. So, good evening. Cheers. Cheers and welcome back. Thank you, thank you. Lovely to come back. Explain where we are. Where are we? The London bus. In Swindon Town. In Swindon, we're at the Tupney. Tupney. Tupney. Tupney. Tupney. Tupney. Tupney. And Paul told, what did you see at the bar, Paul? Well, I was amazed. It's suddenly the penny trucks. That's an outtake for you. Because at the bar it's kind of like, just on top of the bar, there's two penny pieces. Under the grass. Yeah, he's in. And then it kind of dawned on me. That's the name of the pub. Tupney, yes. Sousa. What's your red wine? My red wine tonight is it's called Sweet Cheeks which is a real good lush cider. People say I... It's from the Cotswell Cider Company which is... I've been there before. I've been there before. No, but you've drunk from that before. Have I? It's very nice. It's back-bring at LW Cider. It's nice. It's only 4% which isn't too strong. Very, very sweet. But it's like... When it's not apples, it's ribena. As long as I can drink it, it's like ribena. Yeah, it's very nice. Will ribena translate to our foreign audience? I don't know. It's not great. Anyway, imagine a fruit-based drink. That. I've got Cider Smith which I believe is the generic on-tap cider here. A dry cider, more dry which I prefer, I think, to a sweet cider. You do, do you? Yeah, I'm thinking about it now. I'm developing a sophisticated palette. It's not like... The bottle's coming right up from the bottom. That's fine. At least it's not scrumpy, as all I can say. It's very appley, a bit dry, lovely. 4.5%, I think, from memory. I'm drinking toast. Interesting. It looks like toast, actually. Is it really made from bread? Yeah. Not completely made from bread. Is it a local cider? I don't know if it's local, but there's money proceeds go to charity to reduce food waste. Is it made from waste food? Yes. Oh yeah, but you've got to tell us what you think of it first. Let's give us your taste. It's a very analytical palette. It's a bit tangy. It's a mixture of tangy and smooth, actually. My first thought was smooth, and then the tang hit me. A little bit fizzy, sharp. Nice. A drinkable pint would do. Definitely. I'm sure it'll be gone by the end of this episode. So, we've got a bit of a... You should probably do a warning. Oh, yes. Oh, hang on, yeah. It's warning. A danger, danger. It may contain spoilers. What was it that Simon Bates used to do? He used to do sexual swear words, another bad scene, whatever he used to do in front of the videos. Do you remember that? It won't contain that, but it will contain spoilers. And obviously, not everyone's going to be able to see this. This is a film-based episode. Cool. We've just come out of the cinema, the three of us, because Geoff, up until this point, had not seen anything. Avengers Endgame, and it had later transpired that Geoff didn't recognise many of the characters in Avengers Endgame during the performance. It's a lot of them look similar. They act quite as a scrum master and facilitate them through the process, whilst trying to whisper... I didn't whisper very quietly there. That's Captain Marvel! I heard that bit. So, we've just been to see Avengers, so it brought Geoff up to speed with the latest in the Marvel Universe. So if you haven't seen it and plan to see it, just come back, to the end of the public test. Is there also another thing we're going to talk about which is the other thing that I don't know anything about? Oh, Game of Thrones. So again, if you haven't seen any of Game of Thrones, don't listen to this podcast. Look away now, skip away. We're going to be talking about spoilers, etc. So hopefully, but if you've carried on listening at this point, you're happy for us to share some of those. We've given like a three-second tariff to turn off the radio in the car. We've done it already. But we wanted to tie into some of the purposes, was to tie in the subject of storytelling. So this is something that Geoff and I hint, we talked about this offline, off tape at various points. But we thought it would be an interesting subject for a podcast itself, how storytelling has been done within those two features. If you like those two products, they are products. Okay. Discuss. Well, which one do you want to start with first, Avengers or Game of Thrones? Well, I have to be honest, I'm one of those people that hasn't seen any a single episode of Game of Thrones. That would be interesting to start with. So why not? What was the difficulty for you? Well, I think it was timing. So in terms of, I think I was told to watch it by about the fact it was season 3 or 4 or whatever. It was a long way in. And I felt under pressure to watch a lot in a short space of time, so I never had that time. So I didn't invest in it. So there's too much up front investment for you? Too much to catch up on. No. Too much drawn on in advance. That would be my kind of... We're going to start with the one thing that we have awesome. Okay. Then there's then D. So what did you want? Is it a product in itself? Well, I think it's an interesting... To me, there was so much so many things going on. So it raises an interesting point to me about stories and the... When does a story become something bigger than a story? So this... The Marvel Universe that the Avengers, the Infinity and Saab has known as within Marvel has been... Has been restarted, as you know Jeff, in Iron Man back in 2008. The original Iron Man? Yes. Iron Man 1 where in the end credits sequence... What was the full Iron Man 1? No, it was just Iron Man. But Nick Fury appears at the end of credits and appears in Tony Stark's house and first shares the idea of the Avengers with him. You with me? Right. So that was something, obviously that's something that started that idea started 10 years ago. 11 years ago. And it's only really come to kind of an end now. That saga has kind of reached a conclusion. So my question was, and my process behind it as well, did they have all those... Probably didn't have all those ideas, those details up front. But they started this idea 10 years ago and they've managed to keep people, keep their audience invested in that product. The Infinity product or the Avengers product. The Avengers as a team. Because you always make it two, it's almost two episodes the Avengers and then the Infinity War. So, but the Infinity Stones has been running through the whole lot. That probably came in a bit later. But the idea of this Avengers team has started 10 years ago. And that's kind of what's kept each film, 22 films has kept Rick feeding you elements of stories. But while films within themselves that keep you... that deliver... The stock, aren't they? Slice of the value that combine together and give a bit of those a value, you know. This whole idea of around there was always, it always left you wanting a bit more. It's left you wanted to know what happens next. And it's kind of come to that point now, with Endgame that a firm line has kind of been drawn under that. But now, for me, certainly just talking from my own perspective, it's left me wanting to know what's next. Not from that, that story, because I kind of appreciate that a lot of contracts have come to an end. But what's the next saga going to be? And that's going to be two interesting things because there's two things they've drawn from from the comic book world. I don't mean plots or storylines but I mean storytelling concepts. One, they've contradicted and one they've obeyed quite a lot. So one is the retcon, or retroactive continuity. So for instance the cosmic cube was never going to be a stone at the start. You know, that's something very different. So you don't think that they are? No, that's not. Or even the cosmic cube not even a stone in the comics. So it wasn't when I was reading them back in the 90s. So that's retroactive continuity. By using previous storylines and being clever, they can make the storylines mean a bit more. So they've done some good retcon tricks there which comic books are notorious for. But what they haven't done is the thing about comic books always used to be so bear in mind I stopped reading comic books in the early 90s. I did. I did. No, don't. Stopped in the early 90s. And that comic did change then, become more narrative driven. It used to be very much as the appearance of change not change. So comic books would be very serious, the same sort of thing every week. They would look like things are changing and developing. They would try to keep the change quite limited. So characters would die but they would come back. Plots would move the story on but wouldn't really move the story on. The idea was to be published in this comic for 60 years to keep going. And that's what they haven't done with Endgame. Because Endgame is very much a sudden stop. Now you've got to do it with actors, haven't you? Because actors age with comic book stones. So all the Downing Juniors getting older, there's no getting around that fact. Even if you wanted to play Iron Man forever, he's going to be too old at some point. They very deliberately not being able to get rid of it. But you will see things through our own lens. I saw it as a metaphor for leadership not being the person because they handed off Captain America Shield to the Captain America the next, the throne for Kundo to the next. Always differently. So that, who's going to be the new Iron Man? Iron Man will carry on. But that's something that historically, comic book wise you didn't have to worry too much about being in the back. You know as a Tony Stark stop being Iron Man in the 80s and then came back to be Iron Man. Stop being Iron Man in the 90s, came back to be Iron Man. He didn't age in the comics then? Well he did age, he died a couple of times if I remember correctly in the 90s but he came back to life because it's comic books. But in films you can't do that you know. What's Downing Juniors is getting older his contract only runs a certain length of time. So he came up with some good plot lines to cover that which is good. And I don't want to get into much of the specifics but what interests me is just the fact is because it's films are made by humans there is a timeline, you know all things come to an end. And so they've chosen to do that with Endgame which is very fascinating because I don't know where they're going to go next with it. But does it leave you like me and maybe it's just because I'm too heavily invested but it's left you wanting to know well what is the next thing? What is the next thing? Well I think most good stories, whether in our world or in that world is there's no real happy ever after is there. There's always something that could be what happens next. I remember as a young... But I didn't see any of that in Endgame What's going to happen next? Falcon is Captain America You know Gwyneth Park chose probably Iron Man I heard some of the internet story rumour that at the end the funeral sequence at the end where Jeff didn't know any of the people on screen there's a young lad He's a wireman too So he's the kid in the garage which they're now saying he's going to be the next time No it won't be Why not? You tell me why not He's an in-e-matter Back to Catties as well The fact that they wouldn't just ring Tom Holland was a relative and no matter Spider-Man They'll do something differently Do you think Iron Man will be back in some way, shape or form? They'll all franchise come back Are they going to reboot it? Or are they going to use succession planning with someone like Gwyneth Paltrow Which will be interesting as well But they've got to make some choices on that What I think they may do in terms of storytelling is let some of those characters they follow for a while and then reboot them in the future Same actors or different actors? Different actors definitely The Batman has been rebooted multiple times Badly Other than the Chris Nolan films But what I liked about the Marvel films was that we saw that storytelling in that the incremental iterative nature of it in that each story on its own is valuable But it also builds and creates a larger narrative And I think there's something to be said for that They're not too bitty, there's actually an overall story Though having said that Infinity Ward did finish on a cliffhanger didn't it? Because I left the cinema in Infinity Ward a little bit disappointed in terms of I've got no closure at all That's not the end Because it was originally supposed to be one film wasn't it? It could have been an ending So the interesting thing as well back to the story idea is the protagonist in the story So a lot of you could say in Infinity Ward everyone thought it was about the Avengers but in fact it wasn't it was about his story arc he went through his beginning and then in terms of an anti-hero he got what he wanted at the end of it That was closure for that character So do you remember the last time we got together for the last podcast we spoke about two interesting things One was like abuser stories by looking at stories from an antagonist point of view rather than a protagonist point of view and the other one was endings at uplift So you know most people's favourite Star Wars film is regardless and by the way it's back but actually it's the lowest of the box office was it? I think all the Star Wars films There's finally some Darth Vader is his dad it's a sledge he's a ghost Have another spoiler alert for that anyone who's been alive in the last 20 years hasn't seen it But the idea is that it's ending at uplift I don't remember saying when I was single figures of age I want stories I want stories where the good guys don't win I don't know what to say There's a lot of good guys who the good guys don't always win I think it's interesting it's going to be a cathartic It can't just be rubbish bad guys come weird as long as there's a sense of the journey you've been on There was a spoiler alert No Country of Old Men where they go to play Stanos Josh Brolin isn't it and Dice but there's still like a narrative journey to it you sense the stories going in that direction Game of Thrones is different in terms of was Egypt Game of Thrones is a fascinating product management conversation I was just going to say something both ways but when you said you wanted some kind of sad ending the bad guys to win I mentioned this to you the other week but improv actors are told this thing in terms of when you're on stage you've got nothing to go on you've got no scripts no storylines the thing they always tend to head for is either death death gives a natural end to the story the only thing that actually surpasses death in terms of audience enjoyment is love some kind of matrimony marriage where love conquers death that was all Game of Thrones is fascinating from a product management point of view because there's a huge large story arc that is left unfinished by the original architect so the product managers have to make up the later feature sets to a greater or lesser extent time lines get compressed because they just want to move on and so all of a sudden the later series even though I think the arcs are quite clever the implementation of them in the last few series has been part of every part and that's interesting but some people confuse the implementation with the message so they're disliking the overall idea because the implementation is done for them When you say implementation what do you mean by that I did a Game of Thrones open space at one of the Las Vegas I think it was back in 2012 or 2013 basically I said my big favorite time was Danny who's the chief one of the chief protagonists is one of the villains I literally got booed at the word most it turns out that it's true she's the main villain basically however that only came out in the last two episodes really they kind of rushed her turn to the dark side so if you read the novels you don't know the first half basically but basically Danny's Anakin from Star Wars you know a turn to the dark side on a mission basically but like in Star Wars when Anakin's rush was rushed it changed so Danny's was to a certain extent the TV show they had less shows this season than all the others it has a choice by the product owners by the executive producers the story is they're trying to get off it quick to get them to leave this show they're going to leave this show that's allegedly the story I don't know if that's true or not but it does feel rushed the last couple of seasons they've taken some things too slow some things too quick and they need to work some of that back a little bit and actually be a bit smoother with that introduction of her villainy introduction of the other stuff or is that film over three hours wasn't really rushed no it wasn't no it was a bit long I think it could have been shorter there was a lot of parks story arts there was a lot of character arts that kind of had to complete I was wondering whether they were actually going to so you can change it slightly but if you've got an author who has a series like a detective series and you pick up the third look at that you can pick that up and read it without having to go to because the author will go out of their way and explain the backstory the necessary bits of backstory I was wondering whether that would happen in this one and it didn't this one dropped you in cold or did it so I was trying to think of that having you sit next to me that wasn't familiar with all the characters and the backstory did you need to know who Captain Marvel was if you don't she's a juicest machine literally got out of the sky but did you need to know that it would have helped a little bit but equally Ant-Man tried to explain even when he got to the Avengers facility he tried to explain what had happened would that be more fundamental they don't explain who Iron Man is who Captain America is so you've got to have that knowledge because if you don't know any of that you've got none of these characters but it's not supposed to be at this point it's part two but story wise that means they can get into the story quicker so in terms of storytelling you've got the mythos, the back written which is good but it can make that story very difficult you could take that back to user stories and teams have got a lot of background in domain knowledge and mythos you can start them and write them into the story they always say as a writer should start their story as late as possible people don't want to see lots of backstory on screen they want to get into the story as soon as you can so writers spend a lot of time world building sometimes when they should just get into the story first and let the world evolve naturally same thing with what we took away from work teams have got loads of domain knowledge you understand the mythos, you can start deep in the story but if you don't understand the mythos you'll do a bit of world building and that can be a bit, oh I'm vlog son of erg, barbarian from the minos distancing or whatever I don't know what you're talking about mate you just dialogue, they didn't do that in game there's a couple of good quotes in there you looked everyone fails at being who they're supposed to be so you might as well go on with being who you are yeah part of the journey is the end yeah there is an interesting point for you just again, a drifting of ideas slightly I felt Captain America and Tony Scott was certainly saying that we're very unauthentic to their characters at the end with Captain America he was the ultimate good guy really just abandon everyone and go off and have a life but he didn't abandon anyone he did because he could have been he's only gone to five minutes but he's now 75, he's always incapable of carrying it forward he could have used all that 30, 40 years of sustainability he does it, he used it horribly didn't he but he would have been like be 13 hours, imagine like he's 13 hours he's like 40, 50, up to 60 probably still being Captain America he could be working on the Earth that's what we don't know he abandoned that for his own but we don't know what happened in that timeline I think you do get married but that's one thing he could have done all that at the end of that could be a whole what it's done very well in the game is it's opened up multiple timelines we've got Captain America in the 50s and things secretly behind the scenes but it just seemed to be quite unauthentic to the character of Captain America it was about sacrifice, if you think about it just overthinking about it if there was one character who would sacrifice himself Captain America not Iron Man Iron Man's always the guy who gets out of trouble isn't this quite a closure but what redemption does Iron Man need so he's got a child he's got a child but he saw his dad didn't he his dad said a greater good never won out against my selfish needs so he used to say I'll save the world I'll save the world rather than I'll save the world as well that was his redemption and save you with dad and Captain America never put himself first and that's his I'm going to move on everyone needs to move on he needs to move on from being Captain America it just strikes me as one's about being selfish and one's about being unselfish but I would have suggested there would not be the other way around I just felt I don't agree I think in terms of how the Ark of Iron Man has been up to this point and obviously he didn't could do it he didn't have to use the crawl at that point he could just shot a laser beam one of the stones that Thanos had killed him he doesn't need all of the he doesn't need to wipe out the entire force give them Captain America the snap was fine Hulk did that earlier when Iron Man snapped that was just to kill the bad guys so he could have just shot Thanos with his finger and not done any damage to himself at all and then give them Captain Marvel who could have snapped the fingers and destroyed them all there was no need for them to if he was bringing them back and understanding it would have been brought back it was literally an actor so they could have written him off into the virtual sunset like they did with Captain America I would have thought they would have retired Iron Man killed Captain America not killed Iron Man but there's various points they almost set up the various points that you thought or this is it, he's going to die now or this is it, he's going to die now you never really knew who the character was we all kind of knew that someone was going to die but we never really knew who or when because he was Iron Man at the beginning if we thought that maybe this is it but you obviously knew it wasn't that's something I've always had a problem with and I don't think anyone could fit generally in films you know he's not going to die at the start false this is plot armour, they call it plot armour but even worse than plot armour is when the characters seem to have read the scripts ahead of time so characters do stuff that no one would do because it's deadly and they survive because they're heroes but it's because they've read the script and they're not going to die at the end of the sequence and Iron Man has been notorious for that through all the Marvel films I know I'm not going to die they kill him off at the end that way I would have a verse to death I would have had Iron Man having a talent wasn't that what that's working backwards they want to kill Iron Man off so they work to plot backwards to make it happen so like that should be the finger one and the thing you want to do if I told you it wouldn't happen so he knew that you had to do it you could just count as what that is Captain America it would have been it just seemed to me more the Captain America being to-do than the Iron Man thing the Iron Man thing would be like the man in the shadows like how was it named the Hank Pin Hank Pym like him, like a man behind the scenes type character, I would have thought. Any other game of Thrones kind of interesting, agile comparisons? This is quite the end of Game of Thrones, you've read it out to me there. The story can't be beaten. To do with no enemy can defeat it. The story is win. So I think what was interesting with Game of Thrones was it seems very open for sequel. It moves over, yeah it does. So they've sent Jon Snow up to the north, probably the king of the north. So did anyone die at the end of Game of Thrones? No, everyone dies. But the point was, I guess the point GRM is making with his books is in events, you know, happy ever after. Things keep rolling, rolling, rolling. So even though the books have ended, you can see the world is coming up, you know. There's no happy ever after basically. But again, the end is at elevate. So he always said that the end of Game of Thrones was to be bittersweet. And it was just bitter for most people. Was it? Yeah. Because it was a mixed response, wasn't it? It was a hugely anti-response. The favourite house won. Yeah. But they won in a way they didn't want, they didn't want Bran on the throne. They didn't want Aerys setting off. They didn't want Jon being exiled to the north. They probably wanted Sansa to be queen of the north, that's about it really. And so that's a little bit of history and a lot of bitter. I find it, I was finding that a lot of people really viciously didn't like it. But what I was saying in terms of what we do, in terms of storytelling, is having an idea where you're going with your story. You can be episodic, but you need to be iterative as well as incremental. You need to learn to build on each other. And you need to have some overall luck. So I think that with the Star Wars films, I'm worried the way, I think, new ones are terrible. They seem to be going really, really wobbly-wobbly with now of all art. There's a new trilogy coming as well, isn't there? Yeah, which is the Game of Thrones plays. They're doing new trilogy. So where will that arc start? That's probably going to be the past, they're saying. It's the old Republic, it's the rumour. Tens of thousands of years ago. But for me, the new ones, they seem to be very, they haven't got an arc on it. So it might be concerned with stories is when characters act inauthentically to carry the plot along. So the plot has got to go in a certain direction, so we get characters to say and do certain things to make the plot move. Classically in, like, the soap opera. There's someone, yeah, but it's the classic half over-hearing something and getting the one end of the stick. When in real life, you say, oh, what did you say? You wouldn't say, oh, I've heard you having an affair. That's one thing I dislike. Taking a rekt to what we do with user stories. I always get annoyed when you have an act on a story, and then someone says, oh, the act wants to do this, this, this, this, and there's the exception square too. We don't want to do that at all. You want them to do that. They do not want to do that. That actor does not want to perform those behaviors. That's not who they are. You're acting authentically for a user-centered designer, whatever, what do these people actually want to do? So I think plot should come from characters, not from plot. I remember Keith Johnson said to me from an impromptu side of things, he said, do what the audience expects, and they'll be delighted. So if they expect that character to do something, just follow it, even if it seems obvious, if it doesn't seem original, just do the obvious stuff. Yeah. I think when people are trying to get clever, it's the new line on the internet kids saying, subverting expectations, which is a little bit annoying. People don't want that. They want to be surprised, but they don't want to be subverted. They want to be able to say, oh, that's, of course that was going to happen. That moment of I never expected, oh, now I get it. Yeah, of course that character would do that. That's what you're trying to do with stories, really. You don't want to just shock the audience for shocking sake. But I think Game of Thrones has been accused of occasion. But the books, I don't feel like. No, I feel the books cover that quite nicely. So yeah, so for me, I felt there's some pros and cons in that in terms of, I like the end game. No, I like Game of Thrones, I think. Game of Thrones ended in a not so great way. Even so, will you carry on watching Game of Thrones? You'll save it now. You said that they're self-seekers. They'll probably do. Yeah, they're going to have some people. I'll watch them, but with no great, no, it'll be fine. Yeah, as a casual viewer, it'll be fine. I think I'll be very heavily invested in it. You know, I think it's something with Marvel. I'm interested in where Marvel's going. Interested by doing, I'm not 100% invested in the future direction. You know, and see what they're going with it first. New Star Wars films, terrible. I'm uninvested in that. They're doing them, so I would watch them. You did say, I remember you saying you weren't going to go and watch. I think it was The Force Awakens. Yeah, I saw them in film. I saw them on a plane. It was terrible. I saw The Last Jedi on a plane. They had the far sword bits, it was so bad. Generally terrible. But lastly, they've broken the, not just the characters, but the mythos. So if you build a world, you're going to be true to that world. You know, as a writer. So it's like for me, again, back to polytenorship. If you're going to write stories and tell stories and work, you're going to make sure they align with the right values and principles. You know, they break the values and principles and how authentic your individual story is, maybe rejected by the audience, I would suggest. So I don't understand enough about it, but what mythos did they break? Some Star Wars? Oh my God, how long you got? So basically, The Force and Star Wars is effectively Buddhism or Zen. The later Star Wars films seem to have brought a very Abrahamistic or a sort of good evil aspect to it that didn't, as they have before. And even worse than that, a moral relativity to The Force that they never had. Hey, aren't we all just grey? There's no white, you know. And the idea of The Force wasn't good evil. It was balance and imbalance. Still and chaos, you know. It was about being emotionally centred or being very aggressive. It wasn't about good and bad. It was about that, you know. Stillness, towels then. Or disruption, chaos, disorder. Not good bad. So in the sense of aspect of grey, no, because grey is like the good and bad thing, which of course we all are, but you can still be still. You know, I think they've lost that a little bit. And so they've lost track of what they're doing. And betrayed their characters. That's my lack of knowledge, because I always imagined it was good and bad. Yeah, a lot of people did, but it isn't strictly to be watched as about anger, hate, fear. Which is just a negative emotion. It's not, let's say, evil emotions. It's anger, not evil. Okay. And so it's that sort of thing. But that's breaking the mythos behind it. And we're back to what we do in our work. There's a certain mythos in our environment. There's a storyteller. You've got to work with that mythos and work with that environment. If you start breaking it, you're rejected quite quick. Looking back to the Scrum Alliance, when it had its old MD or CEO where it was. Someone who was quite capable, but had a different mythos behind them, a different background, different culture, and tried to storytell new ideas into the organisation. And initially it was successful because their storytelling was compelling, but actually it broke the core mythos of the organisation and that's why they were rejected in an immediate long term. So to bring this back to my initial, what it made me think about this whole Marvel Universe idea is how the kind of planning levels work, or the features grow. So you've got a low level task-scrolling story. That's almost like a film or an episode in itself. It's got a start, it's got a beginning, a middle, and we get some sense of exposure, some sense of value from having that done. But beyond that, so the stories, I don't like the word, but the idea of epics is some kind of layer above where there's a group of stories so if you look at Iron Man 1, Iron Man 2, Iron Man 3, possibly the Infinity War, the Avengers as well, is there's a theme of those episodes that fit together for that particular character. But above that, I like this idea of the word, it's not necessarily straight to vision, probably beyond that, there's this idea of strategy or saga. So beyond epic, there's a saga which is a number of epics, a number of characters that are going through this journey together. So that's again a way of, it's something for me underneath the overall product vision, but there's an extra layer here about strategic direction which might last in this case 10 years, but the product itself is probably the last, well hopefully the Marvel Universe, which is probably the vision, is I imagine going to last a lot longer than that. Well you could say the Marvel Universe, the Game of Thrones is episodic, the Marvel Universe is episodes. In the Game of Thrones, not every character has end of closure on their arc in an episode. No. Those arcs go across the series, when in fact in the Marvel Universe, characters have closure at the end of every film basically. How long is the Game of Thrones episode? 60 minutes, 55, 50 seconds. And how many in a season usually? 10, I think was 10 or something, but last season was 6, but the point I'm making is that, so you look at each episode of each Iron Man film, Iron Man goes on an arc a journey with three acts, and yet that's all, whilst it's being a close experience, it's also part of a bigger picture. It's both incremental and iterative. That's very clever, and the interesting thing again, is even when it started that, they didn't know the end of that arc. I don't think they did. So they didn't know what was going to happen to Iron Man at the end. But they've tried to build an arc within the arc. And that could be something I think, in terms of what we do, the thing about how we do stories in our classic work at the moment, it's all very primitive still, story, story, story, story, whatever. I think some of that layered aspect, not going back to big vision up front, or big planning up front, but that way of using small slices of journey to tell a bigger story, I think it's quite compelling, and there'd be something interesting in there if we could work out what it was. I remember Terry Patchett and whoever in a few of his books, not all of them, talking about the idea of emergent storytelling. Now, when he writes a book, he doesn't know where it's going to end up. And he doesn't know where that book's going to fit into the series, and he'll regularly come back to something and include it. And they sort of tie in. He doesn't refactor the, doesn't change anything that he's already written, but he leaves as many doors open as possible, as he can. Yeah. That's what they call plotters and planters, isn't it? Planters is that. Plant a few ideas, see where they go, and plotters, I've got this overall arc, I'm going to ram the stories through his arc. Game of Thrones is written by, and touristy, a planter, someone who's wandering off, and the trouble he's got is, he's now stuck in the middle. He's got two more books to do, and he's 70. And those books are slow, because he's stuck a bit, you know, and as he gets the plot forward, he's got himself some really interesting plants growing, they've all entangled in each other, and those got some I get to, yeah. He's also tainted because he's got the anchoring that's happened in the show, right? Yeah, well, that's his ideas, he's got high-level ideas, they've implemented it in the show. They've not made that up, he's given them where it's going to go, but yeah, right, that's going to maybe anchor him if he's not careful, or if he goes in a different direction, we upset people. But either way, it's still difficult for him. They called it, in one of his last books, it was called The Mere and He's Not, where he literally got himself in the tits where he couldn't physically work out how to get certain characters to certain points to do certain things. Which is difficult when you're not a plotter, but might as well say, we're not a plotter, because characters do inauthentic things to move the plot along. Yeah. I don't like that either. Actors do inauthentic user stories. Okay. You're going to be behind today, mate. Did that go where you expected it to go? No. But that's part of the, the whole part of the subject. Is there closure? Clanter, not the bottom. Yeah. Where's, what's closure for you here? Um, just, for me, closure is that there's a beauty and kind of a a connection that we make through that, that I made personally through that whole saga, that whole journey. In terms of relating it to Angel, where's your closure there? Well, in terms of, they do relate to the small, even the small low level day-to-day stuff that you do that you complete, where it's important that you can see that part of that overall journey. Okay. See where you're going? Art, quite. We don't know the event as those characters, and that's that. But I think you need to know your customers are art. Yeah. Beginning, middle and problem. Yeah. Kind of, you know, tipping point, where we call it solution, resolution. Understand that resolution will be the start of a new problem. Things are just stories, isn't it? Yeah. A bit of a after for one person is the start of the tale for another. Mm-hmm. I definitely think there's something in what we've been discussing here, that sort of nuanced arcs and how we work and how we go into the skated modern products. I just don't know what the answer is today. So it's slicing the story halfway through. So halfway through, what was it? War of the Third. So Infinity Wars was the first part and then games the second. Yeah. So was Infinity Wars having that arc at the, what do you call it? The midpoint. Cliffhanger. Cliffhanger. Yeah. Is that a complete story? Well, think of product management. So they've done that delivery to get you back. So as a product manager, I'm selling individuals, and it's a subscription model. I've got to sell each slice. I need to get them back to the next slice. By giving them perfect closure, they can walk away. I need to keep them interested for the next slice. You always talk about in comics, you don't want jumping on off points. People were thinking, oh, brilliant, I closed the comic and I'm done with that one. They want to sell it every month for 50 years. They want jumping on points. They don't want jumping off points. And so the argument we made, having a cliffhanger, that's brilliant for an episode. It's delivery of value to get more sales. If you do it too much, you're going to annoy your customers. You've got to give them a closure in the end. The good guy's got to win at some point. The healer's got to be defeated at some point. But for them, that's a reasonable slicing model. But it's done deliberately. It's done to attract more customers and attract you back. Depending on what we would do, you want someone half way through a registration process saying, oh, come back next month. Will you finish registration? I'm not totally sure that looks like people. So even though you were disappointed, it didn't stop you coming back? No. Even though Endgame reached a closure point, I'm invested now as a customer. I'll be back to Spider-Man for the next film to see what happens next. But he kept a Spider-Man by the way. No, I don't think that was a good idea. I want to say I was silly because just by him being there and saying there was a trade-off. But you heard what's been happening. They've been showing the Spider-Man the trailer in front of the films. And it just spoiled the whole thing. But some of you did that as well, certainly. Yeah. Maybe they gave it to him saying, watch it, yeah. Do you know another Spider-Man film? Spider-Man was up there. They've been showing the actual trailer in front of the film. But people didn't know that our Iron Man dies. And then in the trailer, it's quite clear that he does die. And he says, whoops, that's where he did that. It's a clever way of... They've got to try and advertise new films and stuff. We all knew Spider-Man's coming back. Somehow. Well, you kind of knew just from the amount of people that died. There it was. Some of them were kind of like that. Also, just spoiler alert, I think Scarlett Johansson is alive. She's signed up. Click my fingers, but she didn't appear. Doesn't mean she's not alive just means she hasn't turned up. What are you talking about now? You remember you said, I clicked my fingers. The whole thing, I clicked my fingers, wishing her back, brought her back, but she didn't come back. No. She hasn't turned up. That doesn't mean she isn't alive because of the fingers. That's right. So I'm sure a film's coming out. But they're saying there might be a freak one, won't they? Yeah. They're saying there might be a freak one. They could look at Solo, kill off Han Solo, launch Solo, so he died at the box office. Why do you want to see that? Yeah, maybe. Doing adventures when he got murdered by a son. It's interesting. So I didn't have any interest in it. And plus, in comic books, no one's ever dead. Ever. It seems to say no one ever stays dead in comic books, apart from Bucky and Uncle Ben. And when Bucky's come back, there's one of those who didn't know who it was. So... I don't read comics anymore, but I bet Uncle Ben's come back as well. With great power comes great responsibility on Ben's life. Anyway, we're done. Well, you're not done. But I'm done. Finish up. So, we'll say cheers. Nice to see you again now. Good to see you. See you again soon. So shall I not leave it so long next time? No. See you soon. Next Marvel film. Bye. It's 43 minutes.