strange moon creature, infected with ff14 & exalted ttrpg brainworms
One thing I feel strongly about is, if you enjoy video games, you should play old games. Especially if you're a zoomer or a millennial like me, you should play games that came out before you were born.
This isn't me being like "the games I played as a kid because those are the GOOD games", like some kind of nostalgia freak. There's a lot of modern games out now that are legitimately fantastic, and do things that those old games could never do. There's just value in knowing what path games as an art form have taken over the years.
Video games have their own art history, and as far as I'm aware, this is largely ignored in the broader conversation about them. Often recommendations to play old games are pushed back against due to being "clunky and ugly", and by modern standards that's kind of true, but I think it's not fair to dismiss them off hand like that. A good understanding of the games that inspired your favorite modern games can help you appreciate them more.
Diablo* was a game I played a lot as a childe, and one I revisited as an adult. One of the main differences between my first playthoughs and my more recent one was that I had been introduced to the roguelike genre, and more specifically Nethack. Suddenly I became aware of direct lines of inspiration from Rogue in Diablo**. It gave me a new appreciation for Diablo's*** mechanics that I wouldn't have had otherwise.
Also play games made in flash, because those have been far more influential than you'd think, considering how completely out of the mainstream conversation they are.
I just think video game history is as important to the medium as art history as is to paintings or whatever. And it's kinda sad that this older stuff gets neglected, even if it's for reasons I understand. Also this is a way for me to indirectly encourage more people to play games I love, that they might ignore otherwise
Play old games!
Explore platforms you've never touched before in your life. Ones that died before you were born.
Explore genres that are long dead. Explore scenes that thrived and died, but left traces of their DNA in the most peculiar places.
Explore the dark corners of evolutionary dead ends. Take inspiration from them.
The history of games not only tells a story, it tells MANY stories.
Look, I'd never heard of James Somerton before Hbomb's video but I have to tell you that his release schedule was already a glaring red flag.
I don't make video essays but what I do have is a PhD in chemistry, published papers and a ridiculous 320 page thesis. That thesis consists entirely of my own work, the results of experiments I carried out on materials that I made in the lab. Do you know how many citations I have? 366. I checked. A lot of that is putting my work in context and, believe me, that it doesn't even cover a tiny fraction of the papers and textbooks I read over the course of the 4 years it took to make that thesis.
All of this is to say is that one) citing correctly is fucking easy if you're not a hack and two) proper research takes a LONG time. Now these video essays aren't 320 pages of script of course but I have also written 8-20 page long papers too. I've even edited papers for friends from my degree and the latest one took 3 days cause it was in a different area of chemistry than my expertise so I had to research it as I went to make sure that I wasn't getting technical jargon wrong or changing words that were correct in the scientific context even if it seemed like awkward English. And that was just me editing a paper. Writing one takes weeks, if not months. It's not enough to just report your results, you have to put it within the context of the other research in your field. After all, it has to be novel in some way so you have to KNOW what is already out there in order to add to it. This is, or should be, a pretty similar process to making a academic style video essay on YouTube, but also adding in extra steps like making a video and editing it too.
This is not a process that you can churn out in a fucking week. If you are watching someone making long form academic style video essays that are >30 minutes long on a weekly basis, they're either paying a LOT of people to do all the research and writing and editing for them or they're a plagiarist. It is blatantly obvious to me that there's no way Somerton could have ever been such an expert in such a diverse field as queer theory that he could make these seemingly professional and well researched videos on many different forms of media once a week or fortnight. It's simply not possible to do that level of research, digest it and then synthesize your own thoughts and opinions on it AND THEN film and edit a video in that time. It's... Just very obvious to me.
I've seen actual academics say that they were supporting him until now and I just can't believe someone who also does their own research didn't notice this?? You do this! You know how long this takes! Did you think he was The Flash of YouTube creators??? I guess I also know a lot of let's players so I also know how long it takes to make videos ontop of research but, please, people, take some time to engage your critical thinking skills and not just mindlessly consume.
Anyway, fuck that guy. Thanks Hbomberguy for the great video that has taken over my brain for the weekend.
sorenssss
I haven't had much to say lately because I'm just working hard until Christmas, no more days off for me!! But it's okay, I gotta make nice VFX at wor.