Im starting to contrast this with my experience at a comics symposium I went to recently. It was hosted by a guy who publishes a fanzine, which is sort of analogous to a youtube channel but far more respectable. One big difference I see is that the heart of this fanzine is its interviews. How many youtubers actually talk to people working on video games? There should be a space for learning and expanding your thinking about the medium instead of just hot takes and comedy routines. I’m bored with the schtick.
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Part of the difference is there is very little money in comics (both making comics and being a comics critic). It seems that Comics Kayfabe (based on tangential info unfortunately a consequence of one of its creators’ death), a very popular comics youtube channel, was likely generating a fraction of the money a very popular video game youtube channel makes.
People in the “comics space” are almost entirely there due to passion, there’s not much external incentive to spend hours making or writing about comics otherwise. This leads to more rigorous work and deeper work.
There’s too much money and fanculture in videogames, there’s no reason to work hard and more facile criticism is probably more likely to gain traction. The popular critical space for videogames has been for years:
“Funny” youtube videos that basically tells you whether a game is “good” or “bad”.
“Deep analysis” youtube videos that are at the analysis level of a high school english essay
Noclip developer youtube interview that is basically just an advertisement for the developer
Reddit comments to (possibly) astroturfed Reddit posts
FWIW, I do think a lot of the hate toward dunkey is sour grapes. We all wish we could have the clout and means to direct and create things with limited risks. It is somewhat rational to be annoyed that some of the people who achieved this in the videogame world are a handful of annoying youtubers. But the annoyance is also irrational in the same way it was irrational to be jealous of like paris hilton’s fame in the 2000s. Negative energy directed toward a very small number of lotto winners is wasted energy.
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well, god forbid i waste energy on a videogame forum.
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I agree with what you’re saying in the first part, but the last paragraph doesn’t sound right to me. Being annoyed at the way things are can have a huge, generative effect. I mean, look at Albini. You have to be able to talk about what you don’t like so you can begin to articulate a different way. Furthermore, friendship is a happiness multiplier and sadness divider. Let’s all divide the sadness of the miserable YouTube abyss together.
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I wasn’t clear on this in my post, but I was talking about the emotional part of this annoyance. This is purely from my own experience, so it may be wrong for me to assume this is true for others. I’ve found the emotional drawbacks outweigh the supposed cathartic benefits of the stewing frustration I get when a person luckier than me gets credit when credit is not due. This annoyance, for me, can become an emotional black hole that just makes me more and more upset and angry.
This is somewhat different than developing a taste and being sharply critical. Emotions often drive that critical response, but I personally feel that the best criticism lets go of a lot the emotion. A critical essay may be vicious and angry, but the stronger essays are written as if after finishing the last sentence the author will forget about their subject.
That someone like dunkey can throw his clout and money around to get credit for a videogame he did not create, the fact that he’s at point where he will always land on his feet no matter what venture he pursues, is obnoxious. It is annoying that this guy - a very lucky guy who’s main skill is creating youtube videos that appeal to videogame fanculture (which is a skill, I’ll give him credit for that) - is the center of this game release rather than the actual game developers or even the game itself. I’m reading about this game now and a lot of the articles, reviews, and comments are talking about dunkey or making what I assume are silly references to dunkey videos.
But I recognize ultimately my frustration is he represents how there are lucky rich people with strong networks in all industries, how these people can make decisions and succeed in way I will never be able to, even when I think there are situations I could do better. All I can do is try and keep getting better at what I do, whether it’s my job or the art I make or my personal thoughts on games I play or whatever. There are very likely people who feel I’ve undeservedly gotten lucky in the past. Not worth me dwelling on these thoughts too much.
Of course I did write this long post on the topic, so maybe I do care about this too much 
Also: I’d be curious how the developers feel. The game seems to disproportionately more popular with dunkey involved compared to a comparable game without this press. Not sure how this works out financially for the developers, though.
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gonna be thinking about how 15 years after becoming a breakout internet meme with 100s of remixes, the original composer of the Cheetahmen theme added his own remix to the pile last year:
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“Single developer spending 7 years on a passion project is successful because of one youtuber” is death for the culture.
it was bad enough with Stardew Valley perpetuating the myth of the single developer getting lucky but now it’s gonna be even worse. Trying to make a game that appeals to the sensibilities of youtubers is going to be the next vector of “making it”. Heaven forbid you put any “politics” in the game.
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I think @jdoe is onto something talking about the size of the industry and scale. The definition of success is very skewed for video games when there’s so much money that can be made. Video games have become this pervasive monocultural leviathan, so it takes a lot of effort to carve out a small space for you. I also think games just take more work to build at the level people generally think of as “finished” or “complete.” The economics of it all make it difficult for a healthy creative niche to thrive.
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This is a genuine question, what would a “healthy” games space look like?
Something closer to Glorious Trainwrecks is the answer off the top of my head
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Yeah, as an outside observer, my head immediately goes to game jams. Expectations are graceful and there’s no pressure to create a commercially viable product.
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One thing about a scene is that you should feel compelled to participate at any skill level because you see works of varying levels of “Quality” being put on the same platform. For the Sonic Fangame showcase video you see some people’s GameMaker platform alongside some really well put together 3D platforms and you think “maybe there’s a space for me here”. In most of the issues of Gay Comix I’ve read there are amateur artists alongside professionals and because they’re on the same platform, there is less of a pressure to be “the best” and meet an arbitrary quality bar. In a “market” driven platform like Steam or Youtube everything has to meet some kind of arbitrary quality bar, which is what all the egalitarians think is good and correct, but what it means is marginalized or less professional works get shut out.
The thing with modern platforms is you only see hyper success and hyper levels of polish, it’s impossible to imagine making something like that in one’s spare time or in isolation all monk like.
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I own NBA Jam: On Fire Edition for PS3–delisted 2018-ish–for some reason. = o
Neat, I guess. ^ _^ Maybe their weird 3D-ish fish-out-of-water stares will grow on me. ; D
(Turns out this and certain other games that convert from trial to purchased version on PS3 take a little extra finagling to run as full in RPCS3: Unable to run the full version of c00 trial games · Issue #3097 · RPCS3/rpcs3 · GitHub – Tutorial: How to make a C00 edat to unlock the full game. - NextGenUpdate .)
i think it has been that way for awhile. the aesthetics of so much “indie horror” are really constructed around this. and a lot of games that take off are streamer/youtuber bait in various ways. sometimes this means that things that are weird or unconventional blow up, but there are always hard limits to what that kind of expression or ideas an audience in that context will accept and metabolize - like so many things.
one where game studios are collectively owned, resources are redistributed collectively among developers of multiple levels and used to support struggling developers who might be making interesting games that won’t be commercial smashes, there is actually an opportunity for continuity and mentorship between older devs/critics and younger ones, there is a healthy modding and hobbyist space that interacts with the commercial industry in healthy ways, and power in the critical landscape is more spread out and at least somewhat aware/deferential to people with actual knowledge who have done substantive work and/or research in the space. also one where a lot of the mechanisms to extract profit from like, casino-type mechanics are made illegal. and developers are incentivized to not do games as a service shit and make the source code of their games freely available when they’re no longer able to support them.
there are so many different answers to this question. but a lot of it comes back to how to support arts and culture in general in the digital age - definitely go far beyond videogames. it is probably a good idea for people to start thinking more about these things given how so much art and culture has been totally strip-mined for parts and so many things feel spiritually/morally destitute under our current system.
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i’m sorry but youtube guys who can do irony posting but don’t have much perspective on the world or real life experience outside online forums and don’t have anything interesting to say probably shouldn’t have millions of unquestioning adoring fans and wield outsized power and influence over an entire space. i don’t know how anyone can pretend this space is fair for some kind of egalitarian thing whatsoever. it’s just absurd and delusional. so much online media is “guys who won the lottery” vs. everyone else. i don’t see how anyone can defend that without sounding like some kind of fascist. we really are at that point.
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its also but a stones skip away from politics streamers/youtubers wielding that same influence like thats how you get fuckwits like destiny who use games irony screaming as a medium to communicate their dumbass views and make the world a worse place on multiple fronts
Couldn’t agree more. I think we’re seeing some corollary effects here where the indie publishing scene have ‘failed’ the gamers by not being immune to the same forces that are causing financial problems at big publishers, so people are primed in this exact moment to be relieved that someone like video game donko has come to heroically infuse cash into the content hose. Bigmode has already positioned itself in opposition to the institutional indie publishers in the way it has done nintendo commercial spots and stuff, its a great moment to swoop in and reassure people they don’t really need to think too hard about how this space works and everything will be fine.
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yeah in retrospect we all could probably have just dug up the discourse about how apple arcade was gonna end up being good for everybody and changed the names around. indie games can feel like a world where capitalists are bad unless they’re a publisher, in which case they’re a benevolent jobs creator until proven otherwise. i don’t really care who people sign with but it’s weird to see people scrambling to be optimistic about this stuff when it comes at around the same time as other streamer-led models like “come to us with your game when it’s already nearly done, we provide you with feedback from design titans like asmongold, which is surely worth the 30% of revenue we’re charging.”
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