Click here when you have some time. And a page to take notes
This youtube channel and the team who runs it have made hours upon hours of simple-to-understand, short, and incredibly insightful videos about game design, storytelling, characterization, player agency…the list goes on. Whenever I get stuck in a plothole (pun intended), or need to brainstorm about a new charater or story twist, I put this on in the background. It has made me a better critic, certainly a better writer.
Yea I love these guys. Used to watch them when they started on the escapist magazine and they’ve kept up the work after leaving.
Check out extra history as well if you get a chance
I would love to see these guys do an episode on IF or text games, but it would probably be outside their typical scope. Maybe an episode on the uses of text as a medium…
write to them. they take questions and are looking for ideas for future episodes. also they do a mailbag every now and then.
Some Episodes that especially apply to CoG:
Illusion of Choice
I might just do that.
I’d also add this to your list.
Romantic Dilemmas: How Witcher 3 Builds Character Through Choice
This is pretty amazing. I just want to give it a big +like.
I used to like them a lot, but it was kinda disappointing the way they seemingly hopped on the Feminist Frequency bully bandwagon. I haven’t really watched them much lately. They seem to say a lot of the same things other people do, just with better production values and less credibility.
Oh cool, I haven’t looked into many other people who do similar things. Who would you recommend thats more credible? Love to watch more videos like this
I thought the Feminist Frequency stuff on video games was okay, but I wasn’t especially impressed. The gamergate unpleasantness was the only reason I had even heard of it, and I did not watch any of them until the whole gamergate thing was pretty much dead. It kind of went like this.
ANITA: Hey you! Did you know that there’s a lot of sexism in the gaming industry?
ME: Yeah…
ANITA: Yeah, but there’s like, a lot of misogyny and stuff. Did you know that?
ME: I’ve played the whole God of War series.
ANITA: 'Cuz the industry is dominated by male writers, many of them about your age, and you grew up in the eighties when boys and girls were herded into their own separate pink-and-blue cultural ghettos and the girls were taught to be pretty and bake stuff while boys were taught that girls were basically rewards for male achievement? Remember those days?
ME: You’re supposed to be controversial. Are you going to tell me anything new?
ANITA: Nope! Would you like to hear more?
ME: I’m kinda busy.
ANITA: No you aren’t. You’ve been unemployed for almost a year. How’s that writing project coming?
ME: (sigh)
ANITA: Great! Let’s talk about how often women get cut up and stuffed into refrigerators. Isn’t that messed up?
ME: That’s how you got famous? Gail Simone talked about that over ten years ago.
ANITA: But that was comics. Plus she’s white.
ME: (sigh)
I’m paraphrasing a little, but that was the gist of the series as I recall.
Yeah, the main problem I have with Feminist Frequency (Which is not just Anita alone. She’s the face, but you can’t discount the influence of Johnathan McIntosh) is the general distain for gamers their videos seem to imply and the influence they exert over the culture. There are a lot of example of glaring factual inaccuracies or disingenuousness. I would just brush that off if not for the fact that Anita Sarkeesian has such an aggressive following.