After posting my latest video about Killer Frequency for Halloween, one of my patrons left that comment. Now, I'm not trying to call anyone out or complain about it because, frankly, they're absolutely right. Most of the video explores the premise of the game, the mechanics, and a bit of the tone. There's very little in there that one could call serious criticism or a deep read of the text. The video is, functionally, "Hey, here's a cool thing." If anything, the comment is stating a truth about the video, and that is why it rubs me the wrong way.
Because the video was scripted that way by design, and I'm deeply torn on the approach. So I thought maybe I'd talk a little bit about it because it's an issue I stress over all the time.
A few years ago I wrote about the complexities of covering small games. And while some of the details have changed over the years (I think we're seeing fewer small games and more consolidation around mid-budget titles, and the number of publications able to take on this coverage is even smaller now than it was then) the core dynamics that are described there still hold. Basically:
- There's a massive number of titles released every year
- Because of their limited audience, there is little financial motive to cover smaller titles by most outlets until they become surprise mega-hits
- But these titles are also where the most personal, most experimental, least commercialized games (often from the most marginalized creators) tend to exist
Consequently there's a bunch of cool stuff out there that people just don't get to hear about unless they have the right contacts or spend an inordinate amount of time doing research on new games. Like, I know about Thirsty Suitors, and knowing Cohost's userbase many of you probably know about Thirsty Suitors, but how many of my YouTube subscribers would be aware the game just came out? And that's a sizable multi-platform AA production, not some tiny art-house itch.io project made by one person! Killer Frequency was similarly a mid-budget title and I had multiple people tell me they had never even heard of it. Imagine how hard it can be to get eyes on something that isn't releasing on every major platform date and day. I think that lack of discoverability and discourse is a problem, and it's one that I would like to use my platform to address! In addition to deep reads of games or game criticism I can shine a light on stuff that I just think is cool or warrants more eyes. But that presents a kind of tension that cuts to the core anxiety I have, which is: What the fuck am I doing when I cover a game?
Because there's kind of two modalities I'm bouncing between here, right? There's Errant Signal the Critic - the hoity toity pretentious dude who tries to treat games as capital 'a' Art and examine their thematic content through deep reads of the text. Then there's Errant Signal the Curator - operating as a channel that collects games you may not have played (or even games you may not have heard of!) and talks about them briefly, highlighting the things that make them unique or engaging or topical and trying to capture the shape of how it feels to play the game with my words and clips of the footage.
And both approaches when applied to these lesser known titles are kind of fraught, right?
Like, the problem with The Critic is that it's extremely hard to justify a 20+ minute deep dive into a game very few people have heard about, let alone played to completion. I promise you that a half-hour long look at Cyberpunk 2077's struggle with its anti-corporate rhetoric would play better and to a wider audience than a twenty minute examination about whatever is going on in Critters for Sale. And that lack of an audience is a problem when good criticism takes so much work. It requires real thought and examination - rumination, even! It requires multiple playthroughs to pick up on things that are missed or multiple endings, research into the author's history and other games and cited works and comparable games that did similar things thematically or mechanically. It's tremendous effort for very little reward. Some times some small games demand that kind of attention - I'm proud of my videos on The Space Between, for example, or Broken Reality. But that kind of video comes with a cost, and most games don't inspire me to put that kind of time in. Sometimes a cool thing is just a cool thing and I'd like you to be aware of it?
But the problem with The Curator is that it skirts extremely close to just being PR agent for games. If my coverage tends towards the universally positive and I have a non-trivially sized audience, even if the intent is pure the practical reality is that I'm doing something much closer to promotion for a title than engagement with a title. This kind of work is faster to produce and lower effort on my part, which means I can cover more games and get more content out regularly! Healthy for the channel and cool for all those games that need coverage! But it's hard to escape the sense that one is doing something of a sales pitch, even if it's for a product one believes in. Like, the goal of Curator Chris is to raise awareness of lesser-known titles in a way that leads to their having a greater cultural presence and place in our discourse... but the commercial aspect of all of this is inescapable. "Hey check out this cool thing" comes with an unspoken "...maybe you'd like to buy it?" tacked on. And that can feel gross, especially when these videos lack the depth of engagement the more critical ones do.
And people's response when I bring this up is usually: "Can't you just do both?" And like... not really? Part of the goal of playing curator is to cover lots of stuff - if I'm not doing that there's not much of a point. That means moving fast, which is antithetical to the needs of deep reads and thoughtful criticism. Similarly, some games simply don't support a huge video essay about their thematic heft. That doesn't mean they're bad or not worth checking out! But like... something like Supplice or Beton Brutal don't really ask for people to write about them, they just ask to be played, and talking about them helps them achieve that goal.
So I'm in this cycle* of trying to move fast, shallow, and broadly in order to bring as many eyes to as many cool things as possible... before I feel like a marketing clown who's putting out shallow work. At which point I need to pivot back to thoughtful, nuanced work that might take me two months to put together a 15-20 minute video... before realizing I've let a ton of amazing games slip by uncovered, and I feel unproductive, and decide the time is now to start putting out shorter/faster/more content to cover it... and repeat.
Both jobs feel necessary, neither leaves me satisfied because of my failure to do the other. So realize that I do see the criticism being levied here, and it's not that I'm ignoring it. I am thinking about it constantly and failing to solve the problem it presents.
* And in between all of this are long periods working on Children of Doom, but oh god that's its own bag of cats.
