-I'm MatPat. -I'm Stephanie.
-And we are the biggest nerds on YouTube.
We take the nerdy topics of video games, movies, and TV,
and we fuse them together with the even nerdier topics
of science, math, history,
and deep lore research to come together
with mind-blowing theories about your favorite franchises.
-This so-called hero of the Mushroom Kingdom
is in fact a murderous, womanizing animal abuser,
a cruel, misanthropic sociopath.
-Our third channel is a livestreaming channel.
We have the longest-running regular livestream on YouTube,
and we call that sort of a gaming-oriented talk show
where we play games, but we're not hardcore gamers.
We play a whole variety of games.
-Let's just hang out together and spend time together
as a community of people
who love to question the games that we play every day.
-She had taken with her the key to five deaths.
-What the heck?
! That's insane!
Gaming has been -- -Integral.
-Integral since moment one of our relationship.
We actually met in a video-game programming course,
competing for who had the better video game.
No joke. -We did not start dating for,
like, more than a year later or something like that.
When Matthew proposed to me, one of the things that he had
as part of, like, a whole proposal, like,
montage, celebration, he bought a copy of "Kirby's Epic Yarn,"
which is a co-op game
that I really wanted to play together,
but we didn't have a Nintendo Wii.
And so he proposed, he gave me the game, and I was like,
"I guess this means that your engagement gift
needs to be a Nintendo Wii."
We have some, like, perennial favorites
that just recur over the years, stuff like the classics --
"Mario Party" and "Mario Kart."
-"Scribblenauts" is really fun. -I thought that "Portal 2,"
which has the co-op mode, would be frustrating to play
because you're trying to coordinate complicated physics.
But actually, it's really seamless.
-You can't go wrong with "The Jackbox" party game.
-Wake up!
-Those are such a well-rounded slate of offerings,
those "Jackbox" party packs.
They apply to almost any get-together, any meeting,
any couple of 15- to 30-minute play session,
which is really nice and short,
and you can always kind of, like, cycle into something else.
-Welcome to trivia night --
a trial by fire to wash clean the unworthy,
but in a down-to-Earth, just us girls kind of way, you know?
-There have been a couple of games
where we have tried to play together,
and it has become so competitive and so trolly
so fast that we've had to be like, "No.
We're just never gonna play this game together ever again."
-"Yoshi's Woolly World." "Yoshi's Woolly World"!
It's the worst!
-You accidentally kill the other person frequently
or eat the other person, and they become an egg,
and then they get mad at you because they're an egg.
-For what is supposed to be a peaceful, friendly game,
it was the biggest, like, rage game for the two of us.
It was insane.
"Mario Party," I think, is one of those
where it is kind of a trap game
where it bills itself as a party game,
but if you're playing with people who are very aggressive
and care a lot about winning, the chance elements
and kind of unfairness elements of "Mario Party"
can be really detrimental to friendships.
-We wins almost every single time.
It's like the gods of "Mario Party"
have just, like, chosen him as the, like, omni winner.
I don't know how it happened. -There's a strategy.
-There's no strategy.
It's luck, it's luck.
Anything where there's a limited resource,
like in "Animal Crossing," you're always going to be
splitting experience and items with them.
Some MMOs can be kind of frustrating, too.
You're actually gonna be slowed down
by playing with someone else,
and if you're an aggressive player
who wants to progress quickly through the game, actually,
it's gonna be a hindrance to play directly with someone.
-A lot of it goes back to the open communication.
-If you're living with someone in the same space
and you're sharing a lot of responsibilities with them,
it makes a lot more sense to divide and conquer
and then communicate about the time
that you really need to just recharge.
-Understanding why you play video games
and thinking about kind of what you need out
of your personal gaming experience,
if you are doing co-op things together,
but, also, not being ashamed to ask for what you need,
recognizing that, like, "Hey, someone else
might need something that conflicts with me"
and finding a middle ground there.
Open and honest conversations
that are judgment-free zones are really important.
-A schedule is not a bad thing, right?
-Yeah.
-Because, like, let's say you're really into a game
and you just -- you're, like, thinking about it all the time,
'cause you want to play all the time,
but your partner always seems to be hogging the system,
whatever it is.
Having the schedule where you can be like,
"Tonight is my night to play a video game,"
you know when it is. You can look forward to it.
You can count down to it.
-Maybe we can swap off every other day or whatever,
so that way, there isn't a built-up resentment.
-We also sometimes do parallel play.
We like different kinds of games, honestly.
I'm really into open-world, story-driven,
highly narrative, intensive games.
Matthew leans linear -- like, really hard, linear platformers,
and those drive me crazy.
-I like how you just walk everywhere.
-How are you running?
-Casual Luigi is casual. -We're in the same room,
and we can still talk to each other, but we're both --
like, we're having the gaming experience that we want to have.
-Yeah.
She's updating me about whatever part of the quest
she's in or whatever cool thing that she just, you know, looted.
-I just got shiny trinket 3,705.
-Right, and her inventory is stocked full of cheese wheels.
-'Cause our interests are diverse in games
and we're not necessarily --
we can appreciate and celebrate each other's victories
without trying to compete with each other.
I'm so glad that everybody's playing so much
video games during quarantine.
I'm so glad that gaming is having a moment right now.
-It's been awesome that in such difficult times,
video games have been able to serve as an outlet socially
and as, like, an escape from kind of
like the day-to-day stresses that it's been really awesome.
So I hope that this kind of like positive moment in gaming,
you know, is able to kind of continue forward.