Shy Bean · 2y
If most people who talk about games are doing it in boring/bad ways, who are the exceptions? Obviously yourself (and I'd be curious what your favorite videos/posts are about it), but is there anyone else that stands out?
Some stuff I like in the 'talking about games' category, just off the top of my head:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQ0katDtrE4
Sophie From Mars here did a piece about Pathologic that tries to dig past the conversation about the game's interface (how it resists your ability to engage with it), to a reading of the text informed by an academic form. This is multiple layers of interpretation but it's all cited and connected, where Sophie doesn't position her presentation as objectively true nor disconnected from greater context, she explains ideas in the text, what the text uses them to do, then how they apply to the game, and it doesn't take fifteen goddamn hours.
Polygon has a lot of structural presence that gives them access to industry insiders, which is largely going to be because Polygon are Serious and Good, which means that they get to do investigations of things like specific animations and the like. It's kind of a prestige newspaper, yes, there's stuff they're not GOING to do, but the fact they stay out of some spaces is a tool that lets them cover other things. I also quite like this kind of thing where the presentation is that very specific individual experience, considered as a narrative that can be usefully shared (which is a type of autoethnography).
i am error does a lot of good pieces about focused examinations of games that are not necessarily regarded as 'important' and tends to look at games with that narrative of 'here's why a person could care about this,' and I'm not just saying that because she's more or less on the same page as me with Minesweeper and Solitaire.
This is literally just a bunch of stuff that sprung to my mind as from recency. And you may think 'oh this is just the same general stuff lots of people in that space already share,' and yeah. But remember, that these are minority voices in minority space - and then consider how vast the spaces are of players who look to and converse in review scores.
