Brief: Cult of the Lamb Anti-Cult School? (w/Riley MacLeod)
We cover conspiracy theories, spiritual abuse, and religious and right-wing extremism. We cover showmen and charismatics suffering from King Victim Complex. Last week we had to study a goddam assassination attempt.
But sometimes we get to peek into the worlds that younger people are making within our cursed digital environments, and we realize they might be laughing at some of the problems that fill us olds with despair right out of existence.
Gaming journalist and Master of Divinity Riley MacLeod joins Matthew to talk about whether the hit indie game Cult of the Lamb might be all the inoculation against cultic dynamics that generation Alpha ever needs.
Show Notes
Riley MacLeod - Aftermath
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Hey everyone, welcome to Conspiratuality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Matthew Remsky.
We are on Instagram and threads at ConspiritualityPod, and you can access all of our episodes ad-free, plus our Monday bonus episodes on Patreon, or just our bonus episodes via Apple subscriptions.
And I want to just say here at the top that I recorded this interview about Cult of the Lamb with gaming journalist Riley McLeod several weeks ago in a more innocent time.
Back before Biden drove the DNC into a ditch.
Back before the Lancet estimated the real death toll in Gaza at 186,000 people.
And back before Thomas Matthew Crooks, in failing to kill Donald Trump, made him into even more of a god.
So, I hope this provides a little diversion and relief from a timeline that has become extremely bleak.
Now today, I've got a brief for you called Cult of the Lamb Anti-Cult School, and my special guest is gaming journalist Riley McLeod.
Hey Riley, how are you?
Good, how are you?
Thank you so much for doing this.
I've been looking forward to this.
We've had to delay it a number of times, so I'm glad that we're finally getting to it.
You're the chief editor at the gaming news site Aftermath.
You've got bylines in Washington Post and at Kotaku.
But you also have a Harvard Divinity degree.
So my first question is, is God just a game to you?
No.
I think that my past faith and where that's gone is strange and winding.
And I think many Americans could be spiritual, not religious.
But I think the best way that someone summed it up to me once is that
I think God is incredibly important to me, but the question of whether or not it's real doesn't bug me that much.
I don't really care, which I recognize is very weird.
I don't think so.
I think you're ideal for our beat, actually.
And I wanted to start with a lightning round because we're going to be talking about a video game.
So that's pronounced a video game for our older listeners.
I think the instinct of the olds is to dismiss gaming as frivolous, but I've seen how fervent and engaged folks can get in it.
And I'm wondering if you think a video game can be ultimately meaningful to a person or maybe even a form of spiritual practice.
I think that it can be.
I think the question that's interesting to me is, like, video games are at their core, like, play, right?
And I think that play is, like, this fundamental part of the human condition.
It's one of the first things we do.
It's one of the first ways we learn to, like, function in the world.
And I think that play teaches us these things that I think dovetail with spiritual beliefs, that dovetail with my own spiritual beliefs.
You can say that it's Antithetical to capitalism because it's like unproductive in the in the Marxist sense.
And it teaches you about sort of like openness and experimentation and how to sort of deal with what is in a situation.
And so, like, I would say that, like, you know, play is this way that we that we celebrate being alive.
And I think spirituality is also one of those ways that we do that.
All right, so more specifically, and tying into your Divinity School experience, I'm wondering if religious rituals themselves, like postures, mantras, pilgrimages, are they like grinding in video games?
I think that's a great question.
We actually had a class at Harvard about ritual and games, which is It came after I think I left, but it was very cool.
I mean, I think it depends what you think, you know, rituals are for, and what you think grinding is.
Like, grinding is not necessary to games, and I think it's often a pejorative.
It's a sign of an unhealthy relationship to a game, or it's a sign of a bad game.
I think about, like, you know, grinding the Battle Pass in Fortnite, and it's because, you know, the game wants to keep you in its ecosystem to spend money, and it's, You know, predatory.
And I think the same way, you know, if you see ritual as this tool to just level up your faith, like it's definitely used that way and you could do it, but I think you could also, you know, ritual is valuable for itself.
And so I think it, there are similarities, but it kind of depends on you and how you're approaching it or how the system that you're working in, you know, approaches it.
Okay, and now the last sort of lightning round, top level question is, and this is related to the game we're talking to today, do you think a video game could inoculate users against getting wrapped up in a cult?
Short answer, yeah.
I think, you know, we can talk about this more later, I think that we mostly see cults and religion in games.
They're sort of the bad guy, the enemy that you, the player, fight.
And at a very basic level, I think especially, you know, young people play games and that's kind of the first place that they're introduced to lots of political ideas.
We just read an article on Aftermath about how somebody learned about Ecological activism through playing this game, Final Fantasy, as a kid.
Wow.
And so you could say that, like, you know, it does teach you these ideas.
And I think Cult of the Lamb is really interesting there because it looks at the mechanics of how a cult, like, actually functions.
And I think if you were in one of those spaces, you might be playing it and seeing how everything that happens is just to, like, make the cult leader, the lamb, more powerful.
And you might be like, hmm, like, sounds familiar.
Right.
So like, you know, definitely yeah, but I think it's on you, the player, and how you interpret it.
That's the question that has brought us together, because I reached out to you pretty much in amazement after my 11-year-old got me hooked on this incredible little game called Cult of the Lamb.
It was released only in August of 2022 by a tiny Australian company called Massive Monster.
Now, to say it's been popular, I don't think really sums it up.
But maybe we can start with that.
Like, how well has this game done in terms of sales, revenue, reviews, online buzz?
Like, are there comparables here?
Yeah, so it's an indie game and you could argue like the definition of that, but it stands in contrast to like Triple A games, we call them, which are like, you know, Call of Duty and the big company games.
But it was, you know, very well reviewed.
Everyone I know was talking about it when it came out.
My understanding is that as of like January 2024, it sold like 3.5 million copies, I think is what they've said.
And like, Amazing.
For comparison, like Hogwarts Legacy, which is a game about Harry Potter published by Warner Brothers that, despite being a Harry Potter, has sold 22 million copies.
So the scale is very different.
But, you know, indie games don't work on that same scale.
Cult of the Lamb was published by Devolver Digital, which is this sort of very well-known indie publisher who are kind of known for, like, edgy, provocative games.
And they're very well respected.
So, like, Has everyone you know who plays video games, like, heard of and played this game?
No.
But, like, people who play games have heard of it.
It's in the ecosystem.
You could say, hey, you know, Cult of the Lamb, and some would go, yeah, yeah.
And it has been very well received.
It got an update, I think, in the winter, and it's getting another one in August.
So there's still, like, You know, it's still around.
They're still working on it.
Yeah, a co-play update, which is going to make my house even more immersed in its culture.
And just to be clear, Massive Monster, I think, is probably a development crew of about 12 or 15 people or something like that.
And what was the sales number that you gave?
3.5 million?
I saw 3.5 million, which I think they said back in January.
I think they announced that.
At $20 per unit, we're talking about a gross of $7 million for that tiny little company over two years.
And it sold a million copies in its first week, I believe, which is usually a hallmark.
It's quite impressive for an indie game.
Before we go farther, this is for non-gamers in the audience again, I just need you to give two definitions from your expertise, because Cult of the Lamb is described as a roguelike game, and that is as opposed to a roguelite type of game.
So what is a roguelike game?
Oh man, it's such a minefield.
People have really strong opinions about this, yeah.
I saw this question and I was like, oh no, friend!
But basically, roguelite and roguelike all come from this 1980s game called Rogue.
And like, someone could leave an angry comment disagreeing with this definition because gamers love to argue about it.
But a roguelike is usually it features like procedural generation as opposed to hand-drawn maps.
Every run is different.
They usually feature, like, permadeath, so if you die, the game is over.
There's usually not this, like, overarching progression.
And then a roguelike, in comparison, only has some of those features.
Right.
And, of course, it's very contentious, you know, what those features are.
I've definitely written an article called Something Roguelike and gotten a ton of angry comments, like, well, it's not.
You know, so I would call, if I had to, I would call the Lamb a rogue-lite, because you have this overarching progression that sticks around.
You know, the dungeons are different every time, and that's done on a code level.
Someone didn't hand-draw all of those.
So when you say procedurally generated, it means that you return to the same space of combat or the dungeon, and you can do that repeatedly, but you're going to have different experiences each time, because the software is going to throw you different stuff.
Yeah.
Okay, now second term is people describe Cult of the Lamb as a management simulator.
What does that mean?
Yeah, so the whole other level of the game when you're not like fighting enemies in these dungeons is that you manage a cult and you feed it and you keep it running and you design stuff and there are tons of games that sort of Gamify the tasks of daily life.
You know, I think you could say like Stardew Valley, which is a farming game, which if you haven't heard of, will take over your life, is like one of those.
Right.
There are others like that.
There's a city building game called Frostpunk, I really like, where you manage a city around a generator.
But they're basically about like, you know, doing chores, basically, which, you know, we talk a lot about why do chores suck in real life, but in a video game, it's like, this is the most fun.
Well, Animal Crossing comes to mind as well.
Yeah, yeah.
So it's like games like that and they think, you know, Cult of the Lamb combines those two.
It's, it's, um, I don't know, it's the first game to do that.
There's another game, a very small game called Moonlighter, um, that came out at some point, um, where you do dungeon runs and then you take the things that you found and you sell them in a shop and you manage the shop and that's really cool.
And so there's other games that combine them, but it's cool that, that Cult of the Lamb combines them in this way.
So, that's some good architecture.
To speak specifically about Cult of the Lamb, I'll just give a little bit of the pre-game backstory as I understand it, because I've been playing it for a little bit, I've looked into it.
There's a prehistoric pantheon of many gods in the land of the Old Faith, and they eventually get dominated and organized by five bishops who are actually siblings, and they gather power through these special crowns and they enforce order over the primordial soup.
But they also preserve the ancient weapons, curses, and magic of the old ways.
But before long, one of the five siblings, who's named Narinder, distinguishes himself not only as the god of death, but as a principle of transformation.
But that threatens his other siblings, who are all given mythological names from different cultures and different parts of the world.
Now, in order to maintain the universal status quo, the four siblings plot to imprison Narendra in chains, and so he becomes the one who waits.
However, there is a prophecy that a little lamb will come to free the one who waits, and the siblings know all about this, and they set out to sacrifice all the lambs.
And that's how we arrive at you, the player, who Art the Little Lamb, somehow spared at the last moment from being beheaded and sacrificed.
Now, the Little Lamb has been left nameless by Massive Monster, but he's also, or they have also been named Lambert by faithful Redditors.
So, maybe we'll begin with Lambert, who I just find so incredibly adorable.
Riley, like, can you tell me a little bit about him?
Or them?
I always say he too, but that's probably... We can think about why we do that.
I mean, there are more male than female assigned at birth cult leaders, I imagine?
Yeah.
Okay.
You know, I think who the lamb is, like, depends on you, the player, and how you shape them.
I think the beginning of the game, you know, when you're making that slow little walk, he's, like, so hapless, and it's so easy to be like, oh, way to go, buddy, you've been saved, and then, like, takes to running a call very well, like, regardless of the decisions you make, he's awful good at it.
Um, and I think through there, then you shape, like, is he this, you know, sweet little good guy doing his best in a weird situation, or is he this, like, evil monster who's super adorable?
It's like, kind of your call?
He's adorable, but then he can also, as you're suggesting, he can pulse with wrath.
You know, his eyes can glow red and then splatters of icor can arc out towards enemies.
So he's got this sort of like primordial, almost like, I don't know, black bile that that will come out and cover the people that he needs to convert or do away with.
Is there anybody like that that you've seen?
The game is super adorable and cute.
And then you have this, you know, it's about a cult and you have all this this violence.
And I think it's obviously Part of the vibe the game wants to give and the theme that it wants to highlight, this contrast, I think it's part of, you know, the provocation of the game.
What makes it stand out?
What makes it interesting?
As you're like, look at this adorable, you know, Animal Crossing looking game.
You do what?
And so then obviously people, you know, want to check it out and they want to play it.
So it's, I think it's, you know, very intentional to, Yeah, for anybody who's not familiar with Cult of the Lamb, but who knows Animal Crossing, imagine if you, like, founded or you established your own island village, but then everybody that you invited over to your island, it was possible that you might enslave them or you might...
Or you might imprison them, or you might cook them up and eat them or feed them to other people.
So that's kind of what it's like.
But because Cult of the Lamb is about cults, we've got to ask about a little bit of context going back in history.
How does the Massive Monster team build upon or break free of prior cult themes and games?
Because, I mean, cults are just nothing new in this space.
Yeah, this is like a big topic that I'm into and I wrote about this a while back on Aftermath, but I think that usually in games we see cults and religion as like, they're the generic bad guy.
And I would argue that's probably a It's easy narratively.
It's easy to say, here's a bunch of people who all believe the same thing and will do something that some leader says.
And so it justifies why they're attacking you and it justifies why you're fighting them.
You may think about a couple of games that I've played personally.
There's this 2018 game by Ubisoft called Far Cry 5, which is just about a cult that takes over Montana and you have to fight them.
And Far Cry is this long running series, so it's basically all Far Cry.
You clear outposts and you shoot people.
And if you haven't played actually the soundtrack for it, the cult has its own radio station and the soundtrack was written by the guy who made Beasts of the Southern Wilds.
And the soundtrack is actually great, which I feel really uncomfortable about because I'll listen to it and then I'm like, this is weird, but these are like Christian rock bangers, like all the way down.
It's really good.
And you know, it's, it's weird.
I don't think that's how we think of cults taking over places.
I mean, maybe the cult in like the Wild Wild Country documentary, but even that wasn't like, they just came out with guns.
There's a 2019 indie game called Church in the Darkness, which is sort of about infiltrating a cult that's, I think, based on Jonestown, which I've been really excited about.
But in interviews with the developer, it's kind of more about the game changes every time, and it's sort of more about that.
And in that case, you know, Jonestown is like an obvious space to do a stealth game.
Oh, so it's not, so it's not a choose your own adventure or it's not a save the Jonestown people, but rather a choose your own outcome for what Jim Jones is going to do.
You're supposed to like infiltrate and like, I think take them down or save people.
And every time, it's an interesting game.
Um, every time the, like the cult and its motivations, it's like projected over a live, a loudspeaker and it changes what the cult is motivated by, but mostly you're in it, you're sneaking around.
Right.
There's actually a recent game published by Devolver Digital that just came out called Children of the Sun, which is this game about you're a kid who grew up in a cult who's come back to take violent revenge.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, it's like interesting.
The whole setup is basically you do this, you have like one bullet and you can like move it around and change it.
And so mechanically, it's very, very interesting.
But even that, I think I would argue that the cult It's a cult because it's an example.
This is why people are standing around your cars that can explode, right?
And we don't see a lot of examples of people coming back to take violent revenge on their cults that we'd like have seen that.
And so I think all these things kind of just use the trappings of cults as easy narrative shorthand.
And I think that The Cult of the Lamb.
I definitely thought before you had brought it up and I started playing it was like, oh, it just does that, too.
Yeah.
I think that by going into the mechanics of the cult, it does something really interesting.
And even that it's not like it's not like the game Lemmings, right?
Your followers aren't these faceless masses that you send in a direction like you.
It's so interesting to me how you have to do all these chores like you have to literally clean up shit and you've got to feed them and they have problems and they want stuff.
I'm like, How much you relate to them and personify them is, you know, up to you.
But at the same time, also, they are means to an end.
They help you level up.
They help you beat the dungeons and beat the game.
And so it's such an interesting tension.
And I haven't really seen a game dig into the actual ins and outs of what a cult would be and how it works before.
And so that's, like, very interesting.
I'm going to get into those very specific elements in a moment, but I have one comment about, like, the stuff that Lambert has to do really reminds me of the fact that when you're in a high-demand group, if you get close enough to the leader, you will see that they are harassed and overburdened.
They complain about all of the people that they have to take care of.
They are like, everybody wants something from me!
Like, they're pathologically resistant to taking responsibility for, you know, what they've actually set up around themselves.
But there is this kind of like, oh my god, what do I have to do now to keep these people happy?
And yeah.
Can I ask a question back?
Yeah, sure.
If your experience, I don't think that's a thing we think of when we think of cult leaders.
We think of them as, you know, underage women are fanning them and feeding them grapes.
Yeah.
So that's really, that's interesting.
Well, okay.
So that's the public face.
Yeah.
But when those underage women are fanning them and feeding them grapes, that's kind of in the... I don't want to characterize all cult leaders as being bipolar, but there are manic and then there are depressive aspects to almost all of their stories.
And publicly, there's a lot of energy that gets contributed to maintaining the charismatic messianic face.
In private, more often than not, the underaged woman puts down the fan and they're like finding the medications, or they're like doing the laundry, or they're making the phone calls that the person can't manage to make, or they're wiping the person's ass, or they're doing the things that the person is absolutely incapable of doing because either they're dysfunctional, Or they are in a mental health crisis.
So, yes, you're absolutely right.
It's a major flaw, actually, I think, in the rash of cult literature and documentaries that we currently have, that we don't really see the fragility of the leader.
With the exception of the recent material on the Mother God cult in Colorado, where it goes a little bit too far in the other direction, which is really sort of concentrating on...
I would say not always the most empathetic way on her absolute dysfunction as somebody with substance issues.
So, yeah, there's a real facade.
I mean, I think we have to remember that...
The cult in general is about appearances.
You know, nobody really is allowed to know, uh, in the public what's really happening under the surface.
There are layers of secrecy, and usually, a lot of that secrecy is designed to protect the leader
against the realization that they are a mess as a human being. And, and...
And this is just consistent all the way through.
By the time Chogyam Trungpa is at the end of his life, he has been taken care of by his assistants hand and foot for 24-7 for years.
By the time Swami Vishnu Devananda is at the end, he's been dysfunctional for 15 years.
and he's completely, he's been dysfunctional for 15 years.
So, that woman holding the fan is actually holding everything together.
It's not just that they are subservient.
It's not just that they're being exploited.
It's that they are ironically holding the group together and making it look as though it's functional.
And that's a very deep tragedy involved in all of this stuff.
Yeah, I mean, it's interesting.
I don't know how you would make a game that had that management layer under the culture.
I think it would be hard to do.
Yeah.
Well, they come close here.
They come close because they at least gesture to the fact that Lambert has to do all of those things.
Yeah.
You can assign people to do things, but I've definitely had the problem where, like, my followers don't do the thing.
Like, the problem in my run now is, like, there's so much poop everywhere.
And I assign guys to deal with the poop, and then the guys don't deal with it right, or people will go off and poop other stuff, and I'm just like, why?
Somebody just clean up the poop!
It's not hard!
Look, I'm doing it!
Come on!
Okay, so before we get into how good they are at the details of cultishness, a more general question about, like, is there something about the social architecture of gaming The sociology of gaming that welcomes these themes.
In other words, when people are getting together to commune over games, is there something particularly compelling about investigating what it would be like if they were all together in real life?
Or what it would be like if they weren't disconnected by the technology?
I mean, it's a good question.
I think, you know, games lend themselves well to... There is around games a kind of cultish behavior, or there can be.
I think games have long been seen as this fringe hobby and There's a segment of gamers who see themselves as, like, maligned and everybody hates their hobby.
There's little factions and, you know, the war between, you know, Xbox and PlayStation.
And so there is this kind of nefarious cultishness Um, I think, you know, we had Gamergate in 2014, which was this hate movement drummed up about ethics and video games.
And like, right now we're having another one.
There's this whole conspiracy theory going on around this consulting company called Sweet Baby Inc.
and the worst people you know have decided that.
There's this little company that's forcing wokeness and diversity into games and everyone's in on it and there's millions of dollars.
And, and of course, they're using this to harass, you know, mostly women and queer people and people of color and basically, you know, Anyone they don't like.
And so these ideas of, you know, when dovetailed with how often games have given you power fantasies, you're the only one who can save the world, you're uncovering dark conspiracies, blah, blah, blah.
It very much lends itself to these kinds of things, both growing and these kinds of things.
You know, being things we talk about, I think it's also easy to, like, just say that, and I'm always really aware that I don't want to, like, let those people win by saying that's what gaming is.
Like, I think we have to take those things really seriously, and there is the alt-right and neo-Nazis and men's rights people are finding gamers in Discord, and they're Preying on that loneliness, I think probably very much similar to how you see in the spaces that you cover, that you find these lonely, misunderstood people and you say, here's a thing to join.
I think that's one of the main reasons that I wanted to have you on, to talk about this, is that, like, for, I mean, we haven't really touched gaming on this podcast at all.
Except through the work of Dale Buran and his book, It Came From Something Awful, where he shows the evolution of QAnon discourse from a combination of gaming culture and the chans back in 2014, 2015.
Yeah.
And that's a super dark story.
And then I've got these kids in my house who are opening the door into a gaming world that is nothing like that at all, right?
And is actually just as diverse as the rest of the world.
So, yeah, I think it's really good, especially for people, you know, my age, Gen X and older, to recognize that Just like in the rest of the world, the vast majority of people engaged in a culture are pretty normal people with pretty normal desires.
And they're trying to, and they're doing the best they can.
And these fringe stories are, there's a real liability in thinking that they're at the center of everything.
Yeah, I think that's the counterpoint.
And I think if we see games as play, if, you know, it's so easy, and we even see this in like, coverage of video games that it's like, you know, they're not just in the arcade anymore.
And we still see them as this fringe weird thing, but like everybody plays games.
Like you probably play Words with Friends on your phone.
Like you're playing games with your kids.
Like it's not this strange, dark fringe culture.
People play games and as games get more diverse, like topically and mechanically and more people can play them.
And as they're, you know, we have more diverse Developers making more diverse games, I think that it changes that perception and it keeps those darker elements from flourishing.
And maybe the backlash that we see to that, which, you know, all of this, I think, narrows down to just like, women are making and playing games and that makes us mad, right?
Right.
Like, and then as the more as that loses ground, I think the more that it makes, it makes gaming more accessible.
It lets those dark things, you know, I think that Not taking Gamergate seriously in the broader culture and not taking games seriously in the broader culture has done a real disservice.
I think that I saw a lot of talking heads be like, Trump draws from the Gamergate playbook, gasp!
And it's like, yeah, we were like telling you that.
It's like, we were out here doing our thing.
And it's, you know, I was at the Washington Post, which had a gaming vertical, which they Closed shortly after I got there, which I have personal feelings about because it was my job, but also I think does a real disservice to the public broadly, not for big outlets not to cover these things and not to talk about them.
I mean, it's also wild from a business perspective, too, because like how could how could it possibly be a content winner to close a gaming vertical at a major paper?
Like it doesn't make any sense to me because everybody who's reading Washington Post A lot of them are going to have kids in the house who want to understand games.
Yeah.
And Bezos himself must know that, you know... Amazon has a game studio.
Yes!
Right.
Like, why wouldn't you cover that?
Why wouldn't you want to put money into that?
Even a little bit of money.
I think it's easy.
It's been funny because lately we've seen a lot of outlets that closed gaming verticals, Variety, and...
Rolling Stone both just opened up gaming's coverage.
They used to have gaming coverage, which they canceled.
And so it's sort of, I think, as with like all online media, everything is cyclical.
And every three years, the suits in charge are like, hey, what about this thing that no one's thought of before except us two years ago?
And then we laid everybody off.
So in a way, I'm just kind of like, here we go again.
And the New York Times has been leaning into gaming coverage more.
And so it's, it's both exciting to see and also like personally, deeply hurtful because it's like, I, I remember like right after the Coles launcher, the Discord leaks happened and we had so many people in the newsroom coming to us being like, what's Discord?
What's this?
And we were like, You know?
My most out there theory is that as...
My generation, I'm 42 and I should be in charge by now, but thanks to baby boomers.
But if that ever happens, you know, I think it changes because I would hazard that like, you know, my parents see games as something that lives in the arcade, but someone my age or your age or like my sister's age, games are in the house and they're very normal and they're not a strange, mysterious thing.
And so I think that the perception will change just as like, The people shaping the perception, you know, ages of.
Right.
So I'm hopeful for that.
As we sort of close out, I want to do a couple of things, and one is I want to really make sure that listeners understand how smart Cult of the Lamb is.
There's a really nice breakdown on a blog called geekculture.com that talks about ten things that Cult of the Lamb really gets right about cults.
So, yes, it has a charismatic and messianic leader.
Yes, the beliefs of the group have to obey the leader's needs.
The exalted ends justify questionable means.
The cult has to grow bigger and wealthier.
The leader is emotionally manipulative even though he's a bouncy little lamb who's
totally absurdly cute. The followers are isolated and micromanaged. There are mind-altering
practices to increase loyalty.
You come back from a particular quest and you have a piece of a doctrine tablet and then you
can go into the temple and you can proclaim a new doctrine and that will raise the faith level of
the group so that everybody sticks with you and people don't start dissenting. There's hierarchy
based on loyalty. There's extreme treatment of dissenters.
There's followers given new identity.
So I reached out to Massive Monster and And to the lead writer, Jojo Xu, to ask whether anyone on the team had personal experience in cults, because I can't believe that there isn't anybody running that show.
Like, because it's so good and so tight.
No one got back to me.
But I just wanted to ask generally, is this level of research impressive to you?
Is it common in the industry?
It seems really, really sharp.
Yeah, it's super common.
I mean, games have huge research teams and people do all kinds of fascinating research and they dig into things.
And so even if a lot of that doesn't show up on the screen, I think that most games are undergirded by a lot of thought.
And I think especially in a game, maybe similar to like a movie or a play, you know, you're building the whole environment.
So the same way that we're like, there's a Coffee cup in the background of that movie that wouldn't have existed that year or whatever.
You know, game developers are obviously very aware of all that stuff, so I don't know if anyone in the... who made the game had that experience, but I obviously believe that they had, you know, researched it in depth.
I hope they get back to you, because it'd be great to know.
Yeah, I would love.
So, Jojoju, if you can find my email somewhere, I'd love to talk with you about how it's going and how you came up with all of that stuff.
I think you've got co-writers, too, so anyway, I'd love to talk to anybody.
All right, so back to my swing for the fences question.
Lambert, we know him.
He's adorable, but he's also befuddled and burdened.
He has to feed, shelter, you know, clean up after his followers.
And there's a faith meter that's continually draining whenever his followers get bored or disillusioned.
And this is hilarious because, you know, when that happens, Lambert has to go out and convert more followers or defeat heretics to bolster his following.
And this includes these quests where he goes up to beat up the bishop bosses, and that allows him to gather more materials and wisdom for the cult.
And then he can use that to inspire or to punish his followers.
He comes back from battles equipped to issue these new doctrines, to perform new rituals, and it's often just in time because his followers can get disillusioned while he's gone.
They can start to dissent.
So, as the listeners know, you know, as I've discussed already, I've been in a few high-demand groups, and so this feeling I have is that if I had played this game, Like my 11-year-old does now when I was 11 or even older, I would have learned, I think, the basic game mechanics of real cults, because cults are actually power games.
And I would have found the Enterprise, like, so transparently laughable.
I can't imagine having been fooled, and so I'm wondering if this is a unique anecdote or, you know, if you know of any sort of broader value.
We touched on it before.
I think you said that it's possible that it could have that effect, but I want to dig into that a little bit more.
I'm not running the show here, but I'd love to hear you talk more about that.
I think I tried to look up if other people had similar experiences, and I found a Reddit thread where a couple people who had been in calls and a couple Mormons said that they found it relatable, but that the cutesy aesthetic kept it from being deeply traumatizing to them.
Oh, wow.
Interesting.
So there was something safe about it, actually.
Yeah, which is super interesting.
I think that if it Something that's cool about games is that you, the player, kind of co-author this experience.
It's, it's different to reading a book or watching a movie.
And so you're able to, to shape that experience and be empowered by that experience.
So I think like, you know, if it had value to you, like it's, it's not just a, you're not like a weirdo, you know, like that's a thing that like games can do and that's super valuable.
And people have those kinds of experiences with games all the time.
I mean, I don't know if I'm allowed to ask questions, but like, Yeah, go ahead.
Do you want to talk more about, like, what that was like to have had those experiences and played the game?
I think I might be particular and a little eccentric because, of course, so much of my business is not just, you know, having this personal experience in the background, but having gone on to do investigative journalism and to, you know, read a lot of cult theory and to speak to a lot of cult researchers and to be sort of impressed throughout that entire arc with how serious and weighty and alarming the entire discourse is.
And so when I hear about Mormons saying, yeah, you know, I could see the functions played out and because it was like a cartoon, I felt safe in being able to look at the dynamics involved.
That's really kind of That's an important thing to me because there's a lot of cult literature and research that has a very kind of hyper-vigilant and alarmist tone.
Like, for instance, it's very common for anti-cult activists to talk about how, you know, the numbers of cultic groups in the U.S.
are growing exponentially.
There's over 5,000 cultic groups and You know, it's very hard to actually corroborate numbers like those, but the general energy of the industry is to say, this is a present and imminent danger, and there's a high demand group around every corner.
And so there's a feeling about it that, you know, if you brought one of these experts into a high school, they would give a very stern talk with everybody in the same way that kind of like the retired cop would come in to give a talk about drugs or something like that, right?
And I don't know that that is...
The only approach.
It seems to me that Cult of the Lamb provides a kind of, for me anyway, a landscape of transparency around how easy it is to see these dynamics.
How easy it is for them to operate, how ridiculous they actually are, how grandiose this little lamb has to make himself be in order to control everything, and how that's probably not really his nature.
It just really diffuses the entire premise.
Not to the point where, you know, it validates some, I don't know, reactionary thing in me that says, oh, there's nothing wrong with cults.
I think high demand groups are very dangerous, but I don't think that...
Thinking about them in horror movie terms or in true crime terms is the most effective way.
I felt, like, really, really kind of exhilarated by the fact that this was funny and that it was, like, absurd.
And there was something very, sort of, just transparently brutal about the choices that you had to make.
That all proceeded from the kind of subtler levels of, oh, you're just going to educate your follower.
You're just going to re-educate your follower.
Oh, now you're just going to, like, try to, you know, cast a spell over them with a ritual.
Oh, now you might have to imprison them.
Oh, you know, like, like it progresses.
And I think that means that it allows the player to see that at that top level of attracting or rescuing the follower, you're actually doing something that involves a power dynamic that can go south.
Yeah, it's, I mean, I'm sure that there are educational games out there about cults.
And I think, you know, one of the great challenges of, there's about to be a conference here in New York called Games for Change, which is often about games made by like NGOs and stuff like that.
So I'm sure that there is a game like that.
And like, I think one of the great challenges with those games is that they aren't.
It's fun often.
It's hard to make them fun.
Right.
And so the idea that there's a game that looks at these things, but also it's fun is like, you know, a big deal.
Yeah.
I think that's a really interesting question about, I think a lot about how cults are portrayed.
And I think a little bit similar to you.
I worry sometimes that I'm like too sympathetic.
I think that I'm, I'm personally just incredibly interested in how people believe strange things and how those things help them make meaning, how those things shape their lives.
I'm really fascinated.
I bet you could probably talk about this a ton, is what the kind of rise in calling things cults and the accusations of cults.
I know you all did an episode about the TikTok dance cult, and I definitely saw that documentary and I was like, well, is it a cult?
And I was watching the first episode and I was like, This just sounds like a church.
Like, churches are okay.
And by the end, I was like, oh, no, this is like a bad thing.
That's bad.
Well, I mean, I would direct listeners and maybe you too to the episode that we did on how a primary leader in the anti-cult movement, Steve Hasen, I think has pretty much sullied his reputation by starting to apply cult analysis to... He was actually kind of drawn into a gender critical discourse and started talking about how people who are discovering that they are trans are probably being indoctrinated online through things like sissy hypnoporn.
So, yeah.
Oh, God.
That's a whole other episode.
But, yeah, the term has been overstretched and used to the point of, I believe, almost meaninglessness, and it's having some reactionary impacts as well.
So, yeah.
Yeah.
I share that concern.
Okay, so last question.
This is very quick.
Well, it's not a quick question, but I think your answer is probably quick.
There's a very moving conundrum that little Lambert has to face, which is that some followers just can't be reeducated.
They can't be pacified with better food, or they can't be impressed with new teachings.
At a certain point, Lambert acquires the power, through defeating one of the bosses, to create prisons.
He acquires another power that lets him kill and sacrifice followers to control dissent.
So, my choice is to play as the best, kindest cult leader that I can be.
And my follower, Mikey, despite my best intentions, he's getting really frustrated, his eyes are glowing red, he's openly defiant of my instructions, he finds a megaphone, he starts preaching his own heresies against my leadership and other followers are starting to listen, and my faith bar is going down.
And so my 11-year-old leans into me and he says, very grimly, you're gonna have to do something about Mikey.
And so we discussed the possibilities.
You can put him in prison.
You can secretly kill him and cook him into a stew so that other members feel super nourished and happy until they wonder where Mikey went.
But, Riley, I cannot pull the trigger on any of these drastic, horrible actions, and I'm wondering, am I just not cut out for this game?
Yeah, you know, a lot of games, I think, have, you know, in the parlance of the Mass Effect series, whether you play as a Paragon or a Renegade, games like to make you wrestle with these choices.
And I think the game is carefully designed to balance the pros and cons.
Of these things, I had a similar thing where I have a follower that I really like to take with me on runs.
You can turn followers into little demons who can help you.
And I have a really good one, but he's getting old and he's going to die.
And I was like, oh, but I need him.
But that was like, oh, but I could make him eat poison food, kill him and then bring him back.
And I was like, yeah, I'm going to do this.
And so I make it a little poison food and I go over to him and I tell him, hey, go go eat the poison.
But because he's old in the game, he like toddled slowly across the screen and he's smiling.
And I have all of this time to be like, what am I doing?
And like, even though I know he's going to like he's going to come back, it's going to be fine.
And then, of course, I'm like, what if another follower eats the poison?
Well, I'm not ready.
So I'm like rushing back and forth, making sure no one else eats it.
And it's like, you know, dark as heck.
And then he dies and I bring him back and now he can like Serve my needs again and I feel awful about it.
You know, I don't know.
I'm sure people have tried to play the game only making good choices or only making bad choices.
I think that's not the ideal way to play the game.
But like, to your question, like it does make you good for this game.
That's what the game wants you to do.
And I think that games can be a space where you can play with morality without, you know, consequences.
And that's one of their like, Strengths, you know, what did you do about him?
Because I also like, I'm very anti-prison and I was not going to build a prison.
And at some point the freaking dissenters and I'm like, I'm building a prison.
And it's fun because when you take him to prison, like you kind of smile and you rush him across and it's really fun.
And now I'm like straight to prison with everybody.
Like I have five prisons.
Like I don't have time for that.
Riley, I've paused out just on Mikey.
Oh, no.
Yeah, like, I can't do it.
I can't do it.
I mean, I'm wounded.
I come to this game with a burden.
You can re-educate him.
It'll be OK.
I'll try.
I mean, I'm trying.
I'm trying.
Like, my strategy is to go out and get more doctrines.
Yeah.
But the doctrine preaching, I take them all into the temple.
It lasts for like a couple of days.
Yeah, it's not going to stop him.
Because that's what I thought, too.
I would just re-educate them in the camp.
And then at some point, it's like, this is not, like, Because the faith, if you lose faith for too long, the game is over, and faith is always going down.
I had the problem because you can do a ritual to lock the faith for a little while, you get a ritual that does that, but it involves psychedelic drugs, and I'm sober, and I like to not have drugs, so I had this moment of like, but this is a little bit contradictory to my values as a sober person.
And I did it because it's really useful, but I was like, ugh, I don't want this.
Well, Riley, thank you so much.
It's such an adventure, and I hope to have you back because this is such a fascinating world, and I think there's a lot of interesting and potentially even healing things in it that are unexpected and maybe counterintuitive.