Devsporation

Let’s see if I remember to dig it up. I think it struck me in some dark souls 2 video…

Good luck, that video is like an hour plus.

there arent a lot of solid academic games critique people on youtube but thats just because video essays are fun and no one expects you to read a lot of books in order to make them.

video essays work well to say things about moving images but i don’t think they do for games. “the beginners guide” is maybe the best game essay but its not even about real games

I think Campster / Errant Signal does a decent job, though I don’t think he’s what you’d call academic.

Errant Signal is alright.

Noah Gervais is good. Two-thirds of what he plays is AAA trash though, which is both good (because I get to hear about stuff I’d never play) and bad (because I prefer to hear about good games usually)

And there’s of course our very own James Howell/Adilegian

Links?

This is forum granddad adilegian:

It’s all great content, but check the longer video essays. The series on Last of Us (frustratingly unfinished) and No More Heroes (blessedly complete) absolutely rule

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hear, hear

Sorry to disappoint you.

kenzie & @Bee i’m having a hard time assessing your tone here, what’s the subtext?

i remember ppl talking about the artist and the dog piling, didn’t know about the programmer! but also i’ve already bought the game i’m probably just gonna play it so i know what people are talking about

idk what do people feel about small scale stuff by problematic people? its not like AAA games or movies are exactly moral fodder for consumption but it’s like, a shitty small business is probably easier to bankrupt than a shitty megacorp right?

To be clear, this is in reference to The Red Strings Club waypoint thing, right?

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i don’t remember what it was actually about lol, just that it was about bombsfall ;(

what’s this about the red strings club though? that game looked cool from what little i’d seen of it, this is a mild bummer

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It was bombsfall directing his audience towards a trans woman who wrote about seeing Trump-adjacent themes in NitW

This is exactly what I am getting so anoyed about lately. You’re already writing the game off based on what?

The Red String Club is a good game, afaik, but I have never played it because waypoint ran a review that declared it problematic and transphobic. Turns out the reviewer was mad about a character being deadnamed, and when a dev reached out and said, ‘hey I’m trans and I did that for a reason and it wasn’t because I hate trans people’ the reviewer ran the quote in an article with a big transphobia content warning and editorialized ‘I don’t knooooow, it’s pretty bad to deadname!’

Like, dog piling is a pretty thin line, but it was a really bad take and I would think there would be some responsibility to not make the primary association of a trans dev’s game ‘oh, isn’t that game transphobic?’ (which is still what I think whenever I see the game on sale). And like, I know we’re all punching up at white dude like good little leftists, but I’m old enough and I’ve been around trans communities long enough and I remember when being declared cancled or problematic or toxic or abusive was a death sentence because it meant you were homeless without any community and I get iffy when I see it thrown around based on some real vague shit.

Also Danelle isn’t trans, or at least not out, so I do hope I’m misunderstanding what dogpile we’re talking about :woman_shrugging:t2:

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If you’re talking about NitW, Danielle wasn’t the writer I was referring to.

The writer and I were mufos back when I had a twitter.

He’s been linked in the good gaming youtube thread but here’s Noah:

He’s recently posted three essays, one on Dead Space, other on Far Cry 5 DLC and another on Wolfy 2. Previously he made a huge Neverwinter Nights retrospective

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Oh yeah, that was pretty bad.

It was, and Benson still acts like he was the victim in the whole scenario, so… yeah.

i didn’t say i was cancelling the game! from what i hear it’s still really good. i literally just said i was still gonna play night in the woods!

i’m also a trans woman of a certain age lol

robert yang, taken from a convo between him and nina freeman thats in a book i found @ the library called design/play/disrupt

this convo was the only cool part other than tale of tales revisiting the realtime art manifesto. i rly needed to read this paragraph

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