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WBUR

Hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson dig into the internet's vast and curious ecosystem of online communities to find untold histories, unsolved mysteries, and other jaw-dropping stories online and IRL.

Endless Thread

While some people find Labubus terrifying, millions of others find their big eyes and furry features irresistibly adorable. Why? From Labubu dolls taking over TikTok, to emoji taking over our text messages, cuteness is all over the internet. Ben and Amory talk to Joshua Paul Dale, professor at Tokyo's Chuo University and the preeminent cuteness expert about how cute has conquered all.

Show notes:
Irresistible: How Cuteness Wired our Brains and Conquered the World (Profile Books)

The Cute Studies Project

This episode was produced by Grace Tatter, edited by Meg Cramer, and co-hosted by Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson. Mix and sound design by Emily Jankowski.

Labubus, lafufus, and Hello Kitty: How cuteness conquered the internet

Everybody get up, it's time to slam now... again! Yes, we're revisiting our episode about the website for the 1996 movie "Space Jam," which is still up and functioning nearly 30 years later.

Amory and Ben talk to the hilarious team behind this digital artifact and hear the unlikely story of its continued existence.

Show notes:

 • The 
Space Jam • website

 'Space Jam' Forever: The Website That Wouldn't Die • (Rolling Stone)

 • The 
TIL post • on Reddit

 Hollywood in Pixels
 SpaceJamCheck • on X

 Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in 14 Days
 Welcome to the Space Jam, Again • (The New York Times)

Episodes we love: Welcome to the Jam

In keeping with Endless Thread tradition, Ben and Amory are celebrating spooky season with another installment of "Endless Dread." This time, we're bringing you along on both an actual haunted hayride — thanks to McCray's Farm in South Hadley, MA — and a digital one, through a handful of spooky stories from the internet.

Ben introduces Amory to a TikTok commentary on recent ICE raids disguised as a parody of consumerism.

Amory tells Ben about an auditory illusion that has risen from the dead (Twitter) to unsettle the living (TikTokers and Redditors), and about a "vampire" from Rhode Island who was exhumed and turned into a tonic to cure tuberculosis. Spoiler alert: it didn't work.

Endless Dread: Haunted Hayride

New to Endless Thread? Wooooo! We're revisiting some favorites from our archives to welcome you.

First up: The cover art for the 1976 paperback edition of Madeleine L'Engle's classic, spooky sci-fi/fantasy novel "A Wrinkle in Time" — featuring a rainbow-winged centaur and a green, glowering, red-eyed face — is iconic. And yet, for nearly 50 years, no one has known who illustrated it. Well, not NO ONE. Not anymore... Endless Thread cracks the case!

Episodes we love: Artist Known — Illustrator for 'A Wrinkle in Time' gets long-overdue credit

The final episode of Hidden Levels explores the story of SEGA developer Tez Okano and the bizarre, meta-game he created: Segagaga.

Okano joined SEGA in 1992, witnessing firsthand the company's tumultuous experience in the "console wars" against Nintendo and Sony.

In the mid-1990s, SEGA struggled to make hardware that kept up with its rivals. The SEGA CD, the 32X, and the Saturn were all commercial failures. For Okano and many developers at SEGA, the console wars were both an exciting time to be in the video game business but also an intense and stressful time. They worked long hours, slept at their desks, and faced relentless deadlines. And so Okano decided to turn the chaotic nature of his professional life into a low-budget, self-parodying game about making video games at SEGA.

In Segagaga, the player is a young developer tasked with saving SEGA's market share from the rival DOGMA Corporation (a stand-in for Sony/PlayStation). The gameplay is a mix of a role-playing game (RPG) and a management simulator, where you recruit demoralized, mutant-like SEGA employees by convincing them to join your team for the lowest salary possible.

The gameplay reflects the absurd reality of game development. Players can spend a long time creating an original, hit game or they can quickly make a bunch of trashy titles (or shovelware) that barely keeps the company afloat. Okano even told us that the insults characters used in "battles" were actual quotes he heard in the office.

The game was finished in 2001, just as the highly anticipated Sony PlayStation 2 was effectively dooming SEGA's Dreamcast. As game journalist Simon Parkin notes, Segagaga was released only two weeks before SEGA exited the console business entirely. This timing transformed the game from a self-parody into a memorial for a dying era, inviting players to literally defeat SEGA's failed consoles as bosses.

Though Okano’s bizarre proposal was initially met with laughter by executives, the game ultimately got made and, in a strange twist, benefited from the company's decision to stop making video game hardware. Even in the face of industry chaos, some creators simply can't help but pour their love and energy into making games.

Credits
This episode was produced by Jayson De Leon and edited by Meg Cramer. Mix by Martín Gonzalez. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia. Original music by Swan Real and Paul Vaitkus. Jocelyne Allen helped translate and interpret our interview with Tez Okano (truly the best).

Special thanks to Lewis Cox and Tom Charnock over at The Dreamcast Junkyard. Their insight on SEGA, the Dreamcast, and Segagaga was extremely helpful in the making this story. Additional thanks to Adam Kuplowsky and 17 Bit’s Jake Kazdal.

Simon Parkin has a book about the history of the Dreamcast called Sega Dreamcast: Collected Works. It’s rich and beautiful and has even more details about Segagaga that we could not fit into this story.

Tez Okano would like to thank the small team that supported Segagaga. Especially Hisao Oguchi, Tadashi Takezaki, and Taku Sasahara.

Hidden Levels is a production of 99% Invisible and WBUR's Endless Thread. The Managing Producer for Hidden Levels is Chris Berube. The series was created by Ben Brock Johnson. Series theme by Swan Real and Paul Vaitkus. Series art by Aaron Nestor.

Hidden Levels Ep. 6: Segagaga

Video games are arguably the antithesis of nature; highly constructed worlds, synthetic, inorganic. If you grew up gaming, you may recall grown-ups telling you to shut down the console, go outside, and touch some grass.

These days, though, touching grass isn’t something you have to do outside. As gaming has grown into a 200 billion dollar industry, the boundary between screen and soil has muddied. New technologies and types of play are getting gamers ever-closer to the experience of real nature. And yet, in a kind of weird feedback loop, those same technologies and types of play meant to simulate nature are now changing the real thing in ways that could outlast us all.

Credits:
This episode was produced by Dean Russell. Edited by Kelly Prime. Mix, sound design, and music composition by Paul Vaitkus. Additional mixing by Martín Gonzalez. Fact-checking by Graham Hacia.

Special thanks to Samuel Åberg, Alex Beachum, Tracy Fullerton, Will Matthee, Kelsey Myers, and Mike Rougeau.

Hidden Levels Ep. 5: Press B to Touch Grass

Dr. James "Butch" Rosser was a pioneer in minimally invasive surgery in the 1990s. When he credited his surgical skills to video games, people dismissed him. The prevailing narrative was that kids who played video games became killers, not doctors. So Butch set out on quest: to show how video games can help make better doctors.

Show notes:

 • The impact of video games on training surgeons in the 21st century (
JAMA Surgery • )

 • Study: High-School Video Gamers Match Physicians at Robotic-Surgery Simulation (
Slate • )

 • We Have to Operate, but Let's Play First (
The New York Times • )

 • He’s really on his game (
Orlando Sentinel • )

Credits
This episode was written and produced by Grace Tatter and edited by Meg Cramer. Mix, sound design and music composition by Emily Jankowski.

"Hidden Levels" is a production of 99% Invisible and WBUR's Endless Thread. The Managing Producer for Hidden Levels is Chris Berube. The series was created by Ben Brock Johnson. Series theme by Swan Real and Paul Vaitkus. Series art by Aaron Nestor.

Surgical Precision: One doctor's quest to show how video games can save lives

Machinima — a portmanteau of “machine” and “cinema” — refers to movies filmed inside video games. The art form had a renaissance in the 1990s, and many thought it had a future in Hollywood. Among the early pioneers were the New York animation collective the Ill Clan, who puppeteered characters in real-time inside the video game Quake, bypassing traditional animation rendering. This technique exploded into a cultural phenomenon through the 2000s with hits like Red vs. Blue, South Park’s Emmy-winning World of Warcraft episode, and This Spartan Life, a live talk show filmed inside Halo 2's unpredictable virtual world.

However, machinima.com faced controversies and eventually shut down, erasing its archive and leaving many original artists sidelined. Today, machinima is experiencing a powerful resurgence in documentary filmmaking. Projects like Grand Theft Hamlet, filmed during the pandemic entirely within Grand Theft Auto 5, proved that sophisticated feature films could be created in active, real-time virtual environments. Award-winning documentaries like The Remarkable Life of Ibelin showcase the medium’s emotional depth and its potential for democratizing creativity. What started as a technical workaround has evolved into a legitimate art form that continues to redefine the meaning of movies, and games.

Credits:
This episode was produced by Andrew Callaway and edited by Chris Berube. Mix by Martín Gonzalez. Original music by Swan Real, Jamilah Sandoto and Paul Vaitkus. Fact-checking by Lara Bullens.

Hidden Levels Ep. 4: Machinima

Today, Stef Sanjati is a creator on YouTube with over half a million subscribers. Her content mostly focuses on her two greatest loves — makeup and gaming — often combining the two with her otherworldly video game-inspired beauty tutorials.

Growing up in small-town Ontario, though, Stef was a quiet, introverted kid who was bullied a lot. For one thing, she looked different from her peers. Having been born with a rare genetic condition called Waardenburg Syndrome, Stef has several distinct physical features, including wide-set blue eyes and a natural streak of white hair.

But there was something else that she didn’t quite have the words for back then – something she felt closest to while playing as her favorite avatar in World of Warcraft, the massively multiplayer online role-playing game by Blizzard Entertainment. That something else was that Stef is trans.

Choosing your player is a near-ubiquitous experience in gaming. Whether it's picking from a stock of ready-made options in Mario Kart or carefully calibrating a custom avatar in World of Warcraft, a gamer's choice of character has a huge impact on the gaming experience. But when a gamer is given the chance to choose, or even build, a brand new identity outside of the one they experience every day, the potential impact goes far beyond simple gameplay.

Credits
This episode was written and produced by Frannie Monahan and edited by Meg Cramer. Mix, sound design and music composition by Paul Vaitkus.

"Hidden Levels" is a production of 99% Invisible and WBUR's Endless Thread. The Managing Producer for Hidden Levels is Chris Berube. The series was created by Ben Brock Johnson. Series theme by Swan Real and Paul Vaitkus. Series art by Aaron Nestor.

Hidden Levels: Choose Your Player (Side Quest)

For decades, the U.S. Army has been on edge about recruitment, hitting its goals for a few years, only to miss them again. As part of their strategy to combat recruiting concerns, the Army has turned its focus online: to the world of gaming and competitive eSports.

With nearly 80% of Americans between the ages of 13 and 28 playing video games weekly, the Army has identified this community as a vital demographic for potential recruits. The core goal of this outreach is to use gaming as an entry point, which is nothing new — the precedent was set decades ago.

With the end of the draft in 1973, the U.S. Army found itself faced with new recruitment challenges. Campaigns like the “Be All You Can Be” ads of the 80s were popular and led to short-term bumps in recruitment, but they didn’t last. The Army failed to meet its recruitment goals in 1998. It failed again in 1999. In response, a U.S. Army lieutenant colonel spearheaded the development of America's Army, a free-to-play first-person shooter launched in 2002.

The game was designed to offer a "virtual test drive" of Army life. Before the players could enter the full combat portion of the game, they were required to complete certain training modules covering topics like physical fitness and weapons use. The game was designed to reflect the Army’s values and structure. And despite the game’s promise to represent the true Army experience, the relatively limited depiction of gore and gruesome violence raised concern from some critics. Other critics, including anti-war activists and the ACLU, condemned the project for "gamifying war" and serving as propaganda that targeted impressionable youth by design.

America's Army became a significant cultural and recruiting success, accumulating over 1.5 million downloads in its first month and eventually earning the title of the "Most Downloaded War Video Game" from Guinness World Records with more than 42.5 million downloads.

After a two-decade run, the U.S. Army officially shuttered America's Army. The way Americans played video games had changed since the game launched in the early 2000s, and the Army began to pivot its approach to gaming to leverage the success of existing games and opportunities posed by the increasingly popular competitive eSports scene. Today, the Army eSports team competes in commercial titles like Rocket League, Call of Duty, and Valorant, continuing its outreach. This modern presence remains contentious — critics continue to question the ethics of military outreach in spaces that include children.

Credits:

This episode was produced by Katelyn Harrop and edited by Christopher Johnson. Mix, sound design and music composition by Paul Vaitkus. Additional mixing by Martín Gonzalez.

"Hidden Levels" is a production of 99% Invisible and WBUR's Endless Thread. The Managing Producer for Hidden Levels is Chris Berube. The series was created by Ben Brock Johnson. Series theme by Swan Real and Paul Vaitkus. Series art by Aaron Nestor.

Hidden Levels Ep. 3: This Game Wants YOU

In 2017, Rhett Barker and his friends needed a way to stay in touch after graduating college. They were ecology majors, and meme groups were in vogue, so they created Wild Green Memes for Ecological Fiends on Facebook.

It began as a place to share silly nature-centered memes. The jokes were comically esoteric: about, say, the scientific name of a rare wild feline or the bites of Brazilian wandering spiders. You needed to know the science to laugh.

In spite of this — or because of it — the group attracted hundreds of thousands of fans from around the world. Now the group is a sprawling ecosystem of memelords with a “relentlessly optimistic” take on the natural world. Rhett decided to put the group’s popularity to good use. The results were overwhelming.

Endless Thread examines the psychology of conservation online and how people are using hope, fear, and humor to repair the planet.

=====

Credits: This episode was written and produced by Dean Russell. Mix and sound design by Matt Reed. The hosts are Ben Brock Johnson and Dean Russell.

P.S. Thanks to Derek for the rad story rec!

Can memes save the planet?

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