i have such a huge beef with GMTK and design doc’s approach to things good god, they’re the cinema sins of game design. and i hate that theyre almost certainly the biggest design-focused channels, and are putting extremely limited ideas into a lot of peoples heads, theres like multiple people i know who watch them and feel like they’re getting a peek behind the screen of what design is like
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tbh i felt like Extra Credits was like the precursor to that, and doing a lot of similar things. maybe it was slightly more Respectable or whatever but i always found it kind of condescending and annoying. they were def already kind of a force by the time i started writing about games in 2010. but there are a lot more channels like that now too. yeah… it’s bad. lol.
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also just because i mentioned it above in my reply to @Khan, here’s a playlist of all the Errant Signal videos i found that are either game studies or critical discourse themed:
most of these videos are pretty old and def use outdated references (lol at using Passage and Flower in the first video) but i think he does a pretty solid job of covering the basics of these subjects without being reductionist or presenting a heavily skewed side of things. so probably worthwhile to share to younger folks who don’t know about any of this stuff if they can deal with a guy who isn’t super Gamery sounding.
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I wrote for this and streamed and found the format limiting, and I remember talking about this. The video segments were aimed at pedagogy, the type of material that would go in a textbook, not at criticism, and when I was evaluating what I wanted to say I remember cutting out subjective and perverse feelings in favor of standard, best-practices judgment.
I think it’s a format problem. Without knowing your audience intimately, it’s always sensible to teach the core before getting to the exceptions and the material that’s actually interesting. It was always easy to conclude: every statement is more useful aimed at conveying basic principles, rather than conveying the three layered ironic twists based on that knowledge that I find interesting. And it makes it very, very dry.
Streaming was a way to get deeper into this and visibly show that things that are wrong-by-the-book can be enjoyable are affecting. But the act of performing and vamping is so detrimental to so many types of thought that it’s not a good medium for making these subtler points.
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I think the current media landscape is pushing people back to the personal/local/communal in terms of in-depth engagement and contextualising of a thing. It’s one reason I think SB is such a haven, the traditional forum (with certain caveats) is just a really good place to have pseudo-public discourse about an object of interest. Gigantic social media platforms can only really feature or sustain attention-grab content. Almost everything is trying to emulate this form that social media constantly spews in order to keep up with the endless scroll. Journalism, critique, video, streaming and so on have been dragged down with it for the most part. The good stuff still exists but good luck curating it, or having the media platform attempt to curate it without an algorithm that works off the most base instincts or abstract models of the human psyche.
These newer media forms aren’t necessarily the cause of a lack of media literacy or interest in criticism, they’re just not really compatible with the kind of discourse that thrives here imo. There needs to be trust from all involved that no-one is going to recoil or lash out when exposed to a strange or different perspective that isn’t just trying to soothe you or turn up the heat on the hottest take. There was an article a little while back about how the nu God of War was getting 10/10 everywhere and yet it isn’t really anyone’s favourite game, rarely does anyone go to bat for it as the best thing they’ve played in their life, especially a year or more later. The answer to why this is is pretty obvious but from the mass audience, answer came there none. No-one has any reflexive, challenging friction to get a good bit of crit started in that space - perhaps because the space is the wrong shape. Also we’re in a right-wing surge where the arts are treated like a collective shame and blight upon humanity.
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The nationalism in 13 sentinels is getting really uncomfortable, there’s this Japanese hat-wearing kid from the far future on a space station who goes « I wish I lived during the Pacific War,… a time of great turmoil » and then through some at this time unexplained plot development does end up in WW2, and he immediately goes « Wow I can kill the entire American army with this sweet mecha, cool !» . Damn. The kid with the hat is cancelled… he was my MVP
This gets really bad when you consider all the kaijus as stand-ins for any foreign power at war with Japan, I mean the game pretty explicitly draws the parallel between them when it could have… not done that lol
I feel like neither the story or gameplay are even that hot TBH. I really love the open-ended puzzle structure though. Battle and story times are fairly independant from each other and can be progressed at any time, yet they still feed each other in a satisfying way (Story gives XP, Fighting gives Mystery Lore Unlock points) and I am enjoying eating those mysterious breadcrumbs and trying to make sense of this completely convoluted fragmented story, especially knowing it’s all contained within one game.
New Videogame Thing I Will Think About is spending One Mystery Lore Point to unlock the Mysterious Lore Entry for Hot-Dog in this game’s Lore Encyclopedia and the description being :
I can’t believe I spent my hard-earned mystery points on this, though really: what did I expect
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I’ve also been tempted to remove a bunch of Steam games at times. But I’ve hesitated because I can’t decide whether it’s even worth the thought and effort. And what if I decide for some reason that I do want to play a Batman game one day? (That’s a joke. The only Batman video game thing I am interested in is the soundtrack to the Genesis game.)
I’m also a little ashamed of all the games I got through that Humble Monthly subscription. Out of the months I’ve been subscribed, I’ve played exactly one game. And it wasn’t even one of the featured games but one in the “trove.” (It was Wilmot’s Warehouse.) (I should have just bought Wilmot’s Warehouse instead of ever subscribing.) (I did give away a bunch of the keys, so at least someone got some benefit out of what I paid.) (I should post more of the keys at SB.)
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We’ve got to wrest abdn from tim’s stained claws. I think you could even get kids to visit a Web Site, they’d find it charmingly retro maybe
I couldn’t get past the Angela Anaconda-ass visuals to take this game in any way seriously
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do you want that particular domain or a wordpress site you can post to? the latter is probably easier
Oh, the domain, for nostalgia + revenge. And also some kind of web admin who can turn a txt file into something that looks good. I will also need some videogame opinions I’m not tired of writing on sb for the past 15 years
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we should bring the site back but every article is just written by an ai trained on a diet of exclusively select button posts
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just lock me in a dark room with a laptop and some coffee
I’ll write you some goddamn opinions
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IMO make a twitch channel that just scrolls through SB threads with different robot voices reading the posts. Give every poster their own different automated Vtuber avatar, whatever. This is how we reach the kids!
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are you telling me I could horse post live with a horse girl model
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this makes me want to unplug the internet
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i can do maybe 5000 words on Dillons Dead Heat Breakers for the 3DS
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Accidentally posted this in the news thread woops.
The Matrix Awakens might be my favourite thing I played this year, but it is just a tech demo. I’m just really frothing for a Matrix game and, surely, SURELY they’re making one right? I like flying around low to the ground but wish the max speed was a bit higher. I get that a design problem for any Matrix game is that, fictionally, agents are impossibly strong but then I think just fuck it. Make it entirely training missions or GTA sandbox. Do it in one of the early versions. Hell, make it an anthology series. Let me mess around in that world. I like the little preamble about marketing even though it’s dumb as hell. In the spirit of Resurrections, I’d like them to just have fun with any game project that [surely] comes out of this.
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Played another Witch Queen campaign mission and Destiny 2 is a lot harder than I remember
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13 Sentinels is all about unreliable narrators and fiction substituting for reality, so I thought it was interesting to include teenagers from 1945 who were trapped in that era’s particular information bubble.
They’re part of a continuum with the characters obsessed with sci-fi plotlines, the ones with amnesia pursuing dimly remembered quests, and indeed all of the characters who start off believing they’re normal teenagers going about ordinary activities in the year 1985.
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