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thecatamites
@thecatamites
Anonymous User asked:

Hi, bit of a long ask. As someone that has experience with media coverage; How do you feel pre/reviews of small, short, personal games should be? I got into media critique and game study so I could attempt to increase exposure of these works, but find the more I learn, the more complicated doing so in a productive way becomes. I don't want the video to be as far as audience interaction with the media goes, and hope to increase the income of artists through these videos by more than popularization.

As someone with no formal education in games or critique, doing this in a respectful, poignant way is hard. To increase audience, without taking away the need to engage with the game yourself. Do you have any examples of coverage falling under this, or any advice on how to go about covering these games? People are resistant to exploring small games themselves. I don't want to leave the games with an imprint of my opinions coloring its perception, or a popular complete coverage taking away need to engage personally and directly, as I've seen with many smaller titles. I want sales. thank you for any thoughts!

i'm not really an expert on this myself! but my own feeling is that maybe right now criticism is more important than visibility?


haraiva
@haraiva

fully agree. also speaking from experience as someone whose body of work is in part "small personal games that are 10 minutes long" i think the most annoying type of write-up about these games is well-meaning people who i guess want to direct their audience into playing the game invariably going "im not going to spoil it, just play it it's so short" and never actually talking about what they actually think of the game? absolutely maddening. it's this weird double-sabotage of their own 'tastemaking' because i can guarantee most people wont just play the game without really knowing what's so good about it, AND as the creator i also dont get to have access to the apparent critic's honest opinion lol


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in reply to @thecatamites's post:

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this and to anon for such a great question! I want to see honest reviews for media myself, maybe even write some when I have thoughts on obscure/indie works, but I'm afraid to say negative things because it feels like "punching down" or an aggressive act. I'm in the entertainment arts and know that making any work yourself is a small ordeal. It's good to know that engaged criticism might be more welcome than nothing.

hello, I'm an internet rando offering unsolicited advice in the replyguy section.

so, I just wanted to say that, the audiences of people who are interested in coverage of games outside the mainstream are going to have different priorities than the mainstream. this means that, as frustrating as it can seem at first, the click-thru or the sale is not really a meaningful metric here. this is probably just frequency bias—the reason why coverage of mainstream games seems to translate to sales is because the audience for that coverage is in the hundred million. for diy games, the audience might break a hundred. and these hundred people are more a bit more judicious than the hardcore gamer, although I mean that in a good way lol. readership priorities for serious writing are stuff like:

// getting a sense of what kinds of games are out there or have been missed out on
// understanding other ideas, or ways of seeing, or thinking about games
// relating to, or with, other cast-off weirdos, for whatever reasons
// maybe, maybe to put another game on your to-play list, the one that already has 100 entries (that's me)

I think user thecatamites already did a great job outlining ways to approach writing, and why to approach it that way. so I'm just here emphasizing the "post through it" part. whatever happens down here (creator owned games) will not look like what happens up there (publisher party with publisher money).

the paradox of the "youtube bump," those videos that can impact the livelihood of an artist, is that, in the current climate, you're more likely to get there by doing what you're trying to avoid. a more general use-case for criticism is outsourcing the "failure" state of art. people are time poor or rejection adverse or both and want to find critics that they feel align with their tastes and do the work of curation for them. this is basically a neutral observation of the labors of a generalist critic vis-à-vis their audience. that trust comes more easily from parasocial behaviors, talking over artworks (to show that you're an expert), and acting like you're all chums.

anyway, I'd just say, follow your impulses, and do what you want to see in the world! the results that follow from doing what you feel is lacking, or doing what you like, is unpredictable. so my advice would be to make doing the thing the goal, the result of the thing is largely out of your control.

asker, appreciate the thought out response! Getting opinions on this has been very useful, and the idea about the audiences in these spheres desiring a tastemaker rather than preview is gonna be hard to grapple with. I had hoped to emphasize the game itself above all else, uplifting it through these devices and audience wants to sales, even hindering other aspects to do so. The point of not being able to control outcome was something i'm surprised I didn't consider, its relieving but also sad to think that the best way to uplift these games is through sorta exploitative means.
I suppose I'll have to play the evil algorithm game.. cheers!