The California Problem

greetings! this is a very long post about video games and capitalism. feel free to take breaks if you need them. make sure to stick around till the end, if you can. plz enjoy. and support me on patreon if you like (and read this post on patreon here for free if you don't like orange). i have a new indie music-related podcast, by the way, in case you're interested in checking it out. anyway......

- liz

"If silicon is prone to make your dreams come true
You could probably say the same thing about nightmares too"

- from 'The Future of History' by Tropical Fuck Storm 

 

the 0th Indie Game Jam

almost exactly 10 years ago, i made an account on Twitter to promote a fake game called "Gloomp!"

 

at the risk of over-explaining a not particularly deep joke, the idea was a spoof on a lot of games that were getting attention at the time, particularly mobile games. it seemed like there was an industry-wide belief that the growth of mobile and casual games could lead to a profound shift in how the public experienced and thought about games, especially among many influential game academics and industry figures. the surprise success of mobile games like Canabalt or Spelltower by new independent developers came along in this wave of games that were reaching increasingly larger audiences, breaking out of the usual demographics of console and PC gamers. 

 

this ran concurrently to a lot of growth happening in the tech industry at the time (i.e. the arrival of the iPhone, iTunes and digital downloads), as video games often do. many people around the industry saw this new direction as a way out of the current depressing path much of the video game industry had been on. (this optimism, of course, ended up being short lived due to large mobile companies quickly consolidating and pushing the quirky indies out of the space and the sad state of preservation of software on mobile platforms.)

whenever any space experiences a new wave of financial success and public scrutiny unlike anything else that came before it, it leads to a lot of industry hype and speculation. the shift from 2D to 3D development as the norm in the mid-90's was a massive sea change that transformed the video game industry in profound ways. the onset of the internet and its increasingly large role in society and culture of the last thirty years is one of the most consequential events to happen in the past century. drastic shifts in technology that alter modes of being are not new. the endless supply of new products that dramatically change how we construct ourselves around them is one of the primary features of capitalism.

all of this is to say, i wasn't particularly sold on this new wave of excitement towards mobile and casual games at the time. to me what felt particularly strange was the intensity of the rhetoric around a certain subset of games, especially when placed in tandem with how tiny and narrowly focused the insights it felt like you could glean from each of these things as experiences was. mobile games like Canabalt were fun byte-sized little action stories that brought back some of the artistry of vintage coin-op arcade games. 

social games that involved more human interaction like JS Joust could get crowds of people interacting with each other in ways often lacking in a space that mostly involves being sedentary for long periods of time (though the critique re: JS Joust was often that you could easily win if you were bigger/had longer arms). there are events focused on physical play like Come Out And Play that still attract a lot of attention and i can imagine will continue to do so as more people lack real-life communal spaces to gather together in. though the kinds of games they feature have never escaped being performed in very specific events and settings. some of which, like in school gym class or mandated corporate team-building exercises, feel pretty far from some of the grandiose theorizing about transforming society through play.

the main point was that these weren't new things at all. they were heavily informed by a fascination with the often underappreciated artistry of mechanically simple 80's video games and the hippie-infused New Games movement of the 70's. twenty- and thirty-year nostalgia cycles dominate so much cultural movement and are not a new phenomenon, of course. but this movement was deeply infused with an increasingly powerful streak of hyper-individualism pushed by the tech industry, which gave all of the rhetoric a special intensity. ever since the 90's, an increasing amount of power and money was being offloaded from other parts of society and onto tech industry entrepreneurs drowning in piles of cash. this only became more prevalent in wake of the Great Recession, which the tech industry seemed almost unscathed by. if you were in any space even vaguely tangential to technology at the time (which game development certainly was), it was completely impossible to escape the overwhelming predominance and full-throated embrace of this rhetoric. the tech industry had been fully empowered by the world to enact its beliefs on a massive scale.

allow me here to quote at length from a very influential (and prescient) critical piece about the tech industry by Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron from 1995 called "The Californian Ideology" (emphasis in bold is mine):

"the Californian ideology has emerged from this unexpected collision of right-wing neo-liberalism, counter- culture radicalism and technological determinism - a hybrid ideology with all its ambiguities and contradictions intact. These contradictions are most pronounced in the opposing visions of the future which it holds simultaneously.

On the one side, the anti-corporate purity of the New Left has been preserved by the advocates of the 'virtual community'... Community activists will increasingly use hypermedia to replace corporate capitalism and big government with a hi-tech 'gift economy' in which information is freely exchanged between participants.... Despite the frenzied commercial and political involvement in building the 'information superhighway', direct democracy within the electronic agora will inevitably triumph over its corporate and bureaucratic enemies.

On the other hand, other West Coast ideologues have embraced the laissez faire ideology of their erstwhile conservative enemy...

In this version of the Californian Ideology, each member of the 'virtual class' is promised the opportunity to become a successful hi-tech entrepreneur. Information technologies, so the argument goes, empower the individual, enhance personal freedom, and radically reduce the power of the nation-state. Existing social, political and legal power structures will wither away to be replaced by unfettered interactions between autonomous individuals and their software.... The free market is the sole mechanism capable of building the future and ensuring a full flowering of individual liberty within the electronic circuits of Jeffersonian cyberspace."

the piece then goes on to talk about how much Californian ideology came out of a massive amount of public money and government influence spent towards developing the internet. these tools were, of course, greatly dependent on labor exploitation and the suffering of others to build and maintain the technology necessary for this. but it set the stage for the all-encompassing fantasy of a new virtual frontier; a frontier that goes back to the original American founding myth of the frontier settlers of the west.

and that rhetoric of "the new frontier" and "the wild west" was inescapable at the time in the indie game development sphere. these were not the type of people who were particularly happy or even very conscious of being implicated in critiques of Californian Ideology. in a podcast episode i did in 2021 about this period of time in the space with games researcher (and friend) Alex Ross, he mentioned the influence of famous counter-culture huckster Stewart Brand, his Whole Earth Catalog, and the idea of the "cowboy nomad" on thoughts expressed by prominent indie game figures like Jason Rohrer or Jenova Chen at the time. they often spoke in romantic ways which conflated the idea of personal success with larger social success. these were developers envisioning themselves as wandering empowered tool-users, or anarchist squatters roaming the countryside and creating a space for everyone around to inhabit through their own personal achievement and self-belief. they were, to be fair, by far not the only people in the game industry who bought into these sorts of notions. this tweet from last year by game industry legend John Carmack is a perfect embodiment of this way of thinking for me:

so anyway, if you played Braid for the first time in 2009 thanks to a friend's recommendation and your interest was piqued by its novel use of time-manipulation, you might start looking for conference talks on game design to follow during this time period. and you might quickly notice that there was a lot of talk on short experimental games like Rod Humble's The Marriage or Jason Rohrer's Passage at the time. the dominant discourse around these works often revolved around their ability to demonstrate how you, as a designer, can Do Things With Video Games. their key insights were how they stripped games to their bare essential dynamics and expressed something deeper underneath. 

both of the above games were often tearfully presented by other developers at conferences as making meaningful and profound statements that changed the way they thought about video games at a fundamental level. they appeared like lightning rods for many game industry people that sent them into a tizzy about how they constructed their larger life and work. these games signaled that video games had arrived, that they mattered now, and that they were shedding themselves of their sordid past as violent shooter games and mere objects of "fun".

longtime game designer and Game Developers Conference founder Chris Crawford, while talking to Rohrer for the documentary Us and the Game Industry (which my aforementioned game researcher friend Alex Ross likened to "a Scientology recruitment video for the indie games industry" and you can currently watch for free on Roku afaik), said something related to this that i think about a lot:  

"game developers are very defensive about the sordid reputation they have. ...one reason is that games should form character, and build your body, and so forth - or, at least, they should be mentally like Chess: that's a respectable game! and video games don't have any of those traits. they're just fun, and nothing else. and there is a puritanical streak in American culture that says fun without any redeeming value is sordid"

i can only imagine this desire to escape the sordid reputation of games fed the aura of excitement that hovered around influential industry people so visibly buzzing about an extremely spare prototype involving growing and shrinking squares, or a tiny 8-bit walking simulator. i can't imagine this happening at any other point in the short history of video games. the mainstream industry was awash in the time with gritty military-themed first person shooters and bloated open-world games. development cycles of AAA games had become increasingly more expensive, high stakes, and stifling of innovation. 

the late 00's was also when i checked out of video games in general as a casual consumer, because it just felt to me like so many games were becoming more samey and bland in their design and going in the wrong direction. unbeknownst to me at the time, a growing crowd of influential people in the video game industry were vocally advocating for new forms of innovation to break the industry out of its stupor of derivativity. and parallel to that, the idea of the self-styled entrepreneur was growing in power in larger culture. so the tech industry was increasingly in an excellent place to help empower some new individuals to "disrupt" the space with innovation.

in general, in broader culture it felt like games wanted more and more to be taken seriously as consequential art, but also didn't want to have the same scrutiny level applied to them as other art.

all of this applied even more to the indie space, which was growing in prominence and influence thanks to the breakout success of games like Braid and the sudden monumental juggernaut of Minecraft. to anyone who gleefully espoused the value of some formative indie works, you likely never were allowed to stop for very long to interrogate what questions the themes of games like Passage or The Marriage presented, and what they may say about troubling dynamics in gendered relationships. they were more just signifiers that represented that the possibility of deeper expression was there, and should be taken seriously and given more scrutiny. but the moment you applied more scrutiny and started to ask questions about the themes in the work, that was often handwoven off as irrelevant to the point at hand (which was, again, that Videogames Have Arrived). 

this always begged the question for me (a question which remains unanswered): why is the vessel for this new wave of serious important experimental art games that are poised to transform the industry seemingly all about failing or dysfunctional marriages? the unintentionally funny jankfest Façade from around the same period, co-authored by future military contractor Andrew Stern, was another notable example. and what's the deal with the oddly large number of games featuring dead wives, for that matter?

basically - even if you were willing to ignore how much this space was soaked thru with romanticized hyper-libertarian beliefs about cowboy nomads empowered by the tech industry, it was hard to ignore the implications of the themes that kept popping up within a lot of creative works. Rohrer's game The Castle Doctrine (based of a famous right-wing ideology about 'standing your ground'/property defense) was a particularly notorious example that Rohrer doubled down on in a bizarre post about self-defense and that defense was backed up by many in the space - which felt especially egregious coming in the wake of public outcry around the Trayvon Martin murder. and, much less egregiously, other notable indie games like Dear Esther, embodied the dead wife/death of marriage trope so common to art games at that point in a commercially-facing, mainstream accessible way. my favorite response to this whole odd phenomenon is the satirical game "The Virtual Museum of Dead-Wifery" by Lilith and Zoë Sparks, by the way.

but, for me, this underlined the point that these games perhaps weren't, in a sense, actually about what they were about. they were containers signifying the capability of larger meaning that could theoretically exist. they were meaning machines capable of eliciting empathy (a rhetoric that got even more intense later on in the 2010's around VR), but exactly how that empathy manifested itself was a placeholder. if games were to have a greater purpose in society, they simply must be able to do this. that capability of evoking empathy and containing larger meaning mattered far more than what specifically was being expressed.

so in that case, even though i don't think most people either got the joke or thought it was as funny as me (shout-out to Kepa from Rocketcat Games for getting on the train though), my fake game Gloomp! was a stand-in, for me, which represented the ideal form of art within the commercial indie game space of the time: an entity that is both transformative but also empty, without any particular meaning assigned to it. a squishy container for the over-romanticized ideal of transformative or meaningful 'play' that was poised to take over the space around it, but didn't correspond to anything in particular or make a statement about anything in particular. an object that signified importance in some kind of vague, market-friendly way, by virtue of simply being in the space at that particular time and place. a response to games like flOw that were so focused on the act of expression without having much of any interest in what, exactly, was being expressed. a perfect commodity, basically.

like most things, "Gloomp!" was an inconsequential one-off joke that was quickly abandoned. the era of games it's meant to skewer is, more or less, over by now. the joke's not very funny anymore, if it ever was. Ian Bogost's "Cow Clicker" sort of did another version of that anyway. 

networks of wealthy indie and ex-industry figures who popped up in the wake of the indie games boom i.e. The Indie Fund which chose projects and entrepreneurial new personalities to elevate based via whispery connections of private mailing lists and secret forums and reflected the interests of influential people in the space, were once incredibly important. the tech industry broadly never really got behind funding the game industry outside of whenever it needed to drum up a wave of hype around some new tech i.e. in the big VR push of the mid to late 2010's or the great NFT and AI debacles of the past couple years. so the funding was usually left towards other sources.

so now things in the space have given way to one increasingly dominated by indie publishers and acquisitions by larger companies, which are both basically replicating what happened to the game industry in the 90's. the same sort of creativity-stifling forces all those early indies were fighting against in the 00's are back in a different form. and there has been an increasing amount of discontent with the shoddy deals many of indie publishers are reportedly giving indie developers as well. so this totalizing fantasy of transforming a space forever thru 'Meaningful Play' may still exist in places like games academia, but in the commercial industry they have mostly given away to the hardened faux-wisdom of what i often semi-disparagingly call "The Industry Realist" (a term which i think i borrowed from Emilie Reed).

 

Beyond Gamergate

note: you can also read this post over on my Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/37840892

Back in late 2014 when gamergate was in full force, there was a lot I or others couldn't predict about what would come out of it. It seemed curious that it had achieved national media attention at all, especially given that it was happening in tandem with the Ferguson Black Lives Matter protests that were rippling across the US. But the videogame world has been notoriously insular - the idea of any of it filtering into the public consciousness in a more sustained way seemed hard to fathom. That's probably why in some venues of popular media, the thing was almost treated like a joke, like a "can you believe this actually exists?" sort of gawking at the idea that it might be worth covering or recognizing.

A couple years later of course we saw it morph from the "lol, can you believe this?" incredulity to it being the prototype version of the young alt-right Trump voter, who now suddenly became a political force mainstream media had to acknowledge and pay attention to instead of roll their eyes at. But now we're a few years removed from that and the issues of conflicts in videogame spaces seem far from the biggest concern on a lot of people's minds, I think we have arrived at the lasting cultural image gamergate as a cultural phenomenon has provided to the mainstream media establishment: an easy scapegoat.

Something about the gamer as furiously unkempt, downwardly mobile, pathetic, entitled, basement-dwelling white man is deeply terrifying to the average blue checkmark twitter media pundit. These are the men who are at the center of trying to single-handedly prevent a more enlightened world from happening out of fear and pettiness from losing his own status in society, they claim. And there is, of course, some degree of reality to these claims. The image of this man is particularly invoked with even more ease now, when it's extremely easy (and lazy) to make the analogue between it to our current US president himself: a truly disgusting, unhinged human being who only inherited his fortune, fails to educate himself about basic concepts, and only seems to use his platform to engage in bullying when he's not just being totally incoherent, and angrily tweet from the White House instead of doing his real job (which somehow, to the people who make these sorts of statements, is better than the alternative?).

We could say why it's not the greatest idea to make the connection between angry disconnected basement-dwelling white men who may or may not share a lot of beliefs with Trump but are not in a particular position to do much of anything to act on it aside from harass people lower on the totem pole than them socially to Trump for many reasons as well; Trump has existed in our pop cultural consciousness for many years, he's been good friends and associated with famous people both liberal and conservative including the Clintons, he's a creature created out of the very same media ecosystem who wants to frame him as an anomaly. In spite of Trump's garishness and his perpetual frauds (which has never stopped other more supposedly legitimate rich people) he's managed to be quite successful too. He's not exactly an isolated, disconnected, downwardly-mobile basement dweller.

At the beginning of this era you could perhaps assume that these endless pontifications on the disgusting deviance of our Desiccated Despot or Mango Mussolini or whatever were done more out of a naive need to vent on a mainstream stage than provide any serious political or cultural analysis. Maybe we just all needed a collective moment to say "what the fuck, world??" and admit that we had no idea what was happening instead of putting our serious caps on and trying to find an explanation. Perhaps these were just the idle opinions of unenlightened pundits spouting off in much the same way Trump does, anyway, and should have been taken with a grain of salt.

But as time rolls on and those takes only persist with ever-increasing intensity, it's become so much more obvious now that they're less about catharsis and more a tactic purposefully employed to redirect all anger towards an easy target. And it shouldn't be underestimated how much those media pundits who serve to direct all anger to Trump and Trump-like figures have had a power to shape how everyone talks and thinks about these issues in the popular consciousness. Bad things are happening because of white male entitlement, and that's all that needs to be said, we say, as we wash our hands of the whole situation. And that seems to satisfy many people. But what does that even mean?

Language and terminology that might have served a much more complex purpose in the past become buzzwords, and buzzwords become a shortcut substitute for having to address larger problems. Once we have the right buzzword, we've found a magic key which we can now explain everything through and suggest a requisite fix to the program. Suddenly the curtains open up and the whole world makes sense. Except, invariably, it still doesn't. So all the cognitive dissonance we have about still not understanding why the world is exactly how it is via this magic key we've been provided just lingers around and fuels more anger and confusion. And that confusion is invariably just used to reinforce the belief that actually, it does explain everything even better than we'd ever thought before. The failure to fit the bad guys fully into this model actually means we're even more right than we ever thought before, because it shows they've become shockingly resilient and all-powerful.

In short, the failure of a model of thinking justifies why that model is actually even more good and better than you will ever know. We've descended very deep into the realm of cult groupthink and conspiracy theory than any attempt to provide a clear coherent picture of reality. This is deliberately the point. All of the people who have spent years of blood and sweat giving us a complex articulation of how to identify the nature and form of white supremacy, American capitalism, imperialism, neoliberalism, etc that could help us move outside of this reductive buzzwordy way of thinking and provide a more holistic model are done a tremendous injustice. Sadly, more holistic conversations don't track or spread the same way on social media and beyond; and besides, pundits intentionally butchering the concepts others fought tooth-and-nail to articulate while pretending they are educating the masses on these concepts is part of our great liberal cultural tradition of co-opting and defanging radical movements in order to strip them of their power and erase them of their radical origins.

In the case of the world of videogames, where the menace of gamergate made an actual impact, time showed the actions of alt right-adjacent figures, doxxers, serial harassers, sockpuppet accounts etc to be a extremely annoying and PTSD-inducing to those who have ever had to face the other end of them. Yet they clearly turned out to be a far less potent and crushing boogeyman than the game industry itself, which largely turned a blind eye to confronting the problems that led to a right-wing nationalist surge in its own space and continued to treat people who existed inside its landscape as an extremely disposable resource. Even now when there are more structures in place inside various vectors of the videogame world to deal with harassment and lack of access that didn't exist before: good luck being remembered or cared about long enough for anyone to stand up for you! Because someone new who complains less than you do is going to be there to replace you at any moment anyway. The truth is: this was always far more about nature of the status quo these self-elected right wing nationalistic enforcers of "videogame ethics" were trying to protect and maintain, than who any of them actually were or what they were doing as individual people.

I've said before that "the game industry created gamergate" and it's a topic a lot of people won't even bat an eye at at this point. Many media pundits who waded into the Gamergate Discourse framed the world of a gamergater as a pure fantasy fabrication somehow borne from thin air, something that was bound to disappear and become irrelevant in an increasingly more enlightened industry and world (except, oh wait, it never did). It's easy to see how ridiculous this idea became once 2016 rolled around, but let's take the argument on its own terms here. One could ask the question - if these white male basement dwellers were living in invented fantasies inside their head, then where did their fantasies come from?

No clear or coherent explanation ever is really ever provided from those sorts of media pundits who say things like that. They might admit that these problems came from somewhere, but that things are better now and we can't dwell too much on the past. But of course that's on purpose, because again the idea that it's all a fantasy reality of a pathetic entitled loser that is in no way connected to actual reality is a way to obscure deeper inquiry and pathologize bad behavior from an outsider who simply won't understand and accept the established way of doing things instead of something that existed inside the system from the beginning and still exists to this day.

Because really, for anyone actually paying attention, it doesn't take longer than two seconds to find out where those fantasies come from (both in the past and present). Many Western marketing departments in the game industry collectively realized that after a certain point of growth for the industry in the 1980's, reaching the kind of universal audience of Hollywood with their products were not going to be broadly possible because they just weren't selling in that sort of volume, especially after Atari overloaded the market and spurred on what is referred to as The Great Videogame Crash of 1983 (game critic LeeRoy Lewin has some great thoughts about why conventional thinking about this moment is probably bullshit by the way). So many forces in the industry doubled down on hyper-specialized marketing towards particular demographics (white, male, middle class) that reinforced existing hierarchies. This ensured that access to these spaces from people outside those groups would always be harder in multiple ways: materially (you can't access these spaces if you or your parents don't have the money to invest in them), and socially (i.e. finding support and solidarity and a way into game development in the West was way harder if you're a non white male). Not being able to access the fruits of an industry due to lack of material or social resources is not exactly a problem unique to the videogame industry, and it's not exactly something that has gone a way in a time of extreme economic precarity for many.

Our grand old USA has also pumped an insane amount of money and resources into feeding our bloated, world-destroying military-industrial complex, so it's not hard to see how arms manufacturers would come around towards working with a popular medium like videogames via Call of Duty-esque games as a recruitment and propaganda tool. The desire to use a popular medium to increase attitude of military jingoism in our culture that justifies aggressive interventionism as patriotism is shared in much Hollywood military propaganda as well, not just through your American Snipers or Blackhawk Downs but in recent superhero blockbusters like Captain America: Civil War or Wonder Woman. So, not exactly a problem unique to videogames.

Hardware that's manufactured from minerals mined in countries mired in corruption and ravaged by civil war becomes a way for various industries to cheaply supply electronics to the world in the first place, and a testament to who is able to see the most benefit of these consumer goods (the richer countries) and who isn't able to (the places these minerals are mined). Like many other things, this doesn't really distinguish the videogame industry from the tech industry at large, or many other industries that depend on a surplus of cheap electronics.

If I'm being charitable, one thing could say that the world of videogames lacks that others have is access to videogame creation and distribution has yet to have broadly established political movements attached to it like there have been with film or music or the art world, though they've begun to at least pick up a little momentum in the past decade or so. This is merely because games as a medium have had less time to develop a serious, powerful alternative to their own status quo because games have been developed in a time where neoliberalism has been in full force, worker's movements have been substantially weakened, and any sort of ideological political alternative to the status quo has been quashed aggressively. Perhaps this might partially explain why the videogame industry has less of a baseline "enlightened liberal" surface image like Hollywood or the music industry does. The cycle of co-option is not nearly as far along.

But really, there is nothing surprising or unique in a space (i.e. "gamers") that was intentionally created to play off already existing hierarchies (i.e. misogyny and white supremacy) leading to the beliefs that lie at the core of those hierarchies to be fully articulated and acted upon in that space later down the road. The signs were always there, and they continue to be there. The idea of the gamer was invented to sell products in the first place, and it still serves that purpose. But something about the specter of this gamer as lone, depressed, downwardly mobile white male adult living in their parents basement is now the ultimate boogeyman. Maybe just because this represents a new cultural archetype that is far and away much bleaker than previous ones. American culture has produced many monsters, but somehow a white male who isn't working in a conventionally "productive" way and can't find a way to integrate himself into established institutions of power and dress himself in a more civilized outfit of liberal platitudes American Psycho-style is just a bridge too far.

These white male basement-dwellers become a really great scapegoat in other parts of culture as well. According to several blue checkmark pundits (who are definitely friends of the struggle for racial justice in America and not intentionally obscuring facts here or anything), the people who are supposedly destroying property and tarring the grassroots social movement of Black Lives Matter are really, in effect, the shadowy Antifa. No matter that Antifa, who are often considered a terrorist organization in the media, aren't even an organization at all. No matter that in spite of somehow being compared to white supremacists, their existence comes from resistance to white supremacists. Their unhinged menace for the established authority is now a sign of white entitlement and is singlehandedly what has prevented the struggle for racial justice from receiving a better outcome. Somehow as outsiders with little support they have the power and organization to destroy and undermine a movement that is not about them and make it about them. Therefore: sorry, but the protests are invalid now. No more rights for you.

That's not to say actual white supremacists haven't shown up to destroy shit and cause problems, as Charlottesville or many chaotic Berkeley protests showed a few years ago. But many who have attended protests where both the shadowy Antifa (which, by the way, wearing a mask is just a good idea for protests in general) and actual white supremacists have attended before can tell you that the first thing everyone suspects when property gets damaged or a situation escalates suddenly is that it came from undercover cops. The phenomenon of undercover cops coming in to destroy property or otherwise instigate things and create a more dangerous situation for protesters and make them look bad is provably a real thing that happens across the board. Many have recognized and recorded undercover cops doing this. Even when white supremacists show up to protests on their own accord to create problems, they invariably have some police support and backing. And that's because they're almost always in a big minority and could not function at all without police protection.

These undercover cops or white supremacists who have full support from cops give blue checkmark  media the perfect feed to work with to try and invalidate a protest movement. Because, really, imagine some media blue checkmark who makes a career off of spouting condescending platitudes to black people like "I hear your pain" or "I will grant space to you" ever admitting to this being a thing. Imagine them acknowledging that police intentionally and purposefully (not accidentally) protect white supremacists, or that undercover police instigate situations in order to make protesters look bad in the media and potentially turn protesters on each other. That would be a bridge too far. That would also make them look terribly bad and like they're in on the racket (which, you know, maybe they are!) The blame invariably has to fall on some outsider with their own agenda instead of the police themselves, who somehow are also treated as victims here in spite of their existence and their continued antagonism of black people being the thing that is being protested in the first place. It's always the shadowy boogeyman on the outside, not our precious cops.

That's because these pundits aren't concerned. They are intentionally obscuring facts for a purpose. And they are, whether they know it or not (I think most of them do) trying to create infighting within protest movements and shift the public sentiment away from protesters. They are trying to make them look like whiny kids who don't want to get a real job out of one side of their mouth while still doing all the condescending liberal platitudes about how they're on the side of struggle on the other.


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To go back to videogames for a second: perhaps another way to look at gamergate is it was pushback against games going from a large but still somewhat controlled, tightly-knit space that echoed the industry's tactics of heavily marketing towards middle class white men in the West... to a more mainstream part of culture, like film or music. This was bound to happen from the getgo, as consumer habits are always changing over time as culture and technology changes, and much of regular life now is all digital anyway. Videogames are now irrefutably mainstream in spite of what some older voices might still say or believe. The battle against that becoming a reality was always a losing one, because the people who made up gamergate had no control over that to begin with. The spaces that stoked and coddled them still exist anyway, and still define a lot about videogames - they're just not the only dominant mainstream voice anymore.

But this is the problem. Games becoming a mainstream industry is not a good thing in itself because the status quo of all of these industries is bad for a vast majority of people. And that's obviously not because it means marketing to broader demographics or making more diverse hires or whatever, but because it just opens up more vectors of exploitation and inequality. While the game industry is going to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic better than ever thanks to quarantine leading to a huge surge in people who wouldn't normally have the time to do so obsessively playing videogames like the new Animal Crossing, creative industries like music or theater that are the lifeblood of cities like NYC (where I live now) are in an extremely precarious, very dire place. And now they're being forced to clumsily adapt to platforms built primarily for videogames, like Twitch, or like broadcasting a concert from within the ingame worlds of major games like Minecraft or Fortnite. The tables, seemingly, have turned.

Except they really haven't. Videogames are headed in the same direction all of these older creative industries have ended up in now - where working in the space at all is considered a privilege, where you're extremely lucky to have any visibility or interest behind your work, where all the money and hyper-visibility that exists in the industry filters up to a small number of people who get massively rich while the vast majority of people who work within it can't even sustain a living doing it and have to get other jobs, where you have no right to complain about your lack of success because the space is a meritocracy and you must have just not worked hard enough, where there are very little protections or rights offered to you and employment is always precarious even in the best of times. There was no chance for most people working in the music industry or theater to get more stability or support before the pandemic, so there's certainly no chance now.

I'm circling around this point, but: what years of watching as the collective memory of what gamergate was and wasn't seemingly morph in various confusing and troubling ways has solidified to me is really dire need to move beyond invoking the boogeyman of the scary white male loner in the parents' basement. The only purpose that serves is for people with power and platforms who clearly don't have an interest in actually empowering you as a marginalized person to force your eye to continually focus on that as a sole target of ire. Whether or not that type of person really deserves that much of your empathy, depending on who you are and what you've dealt with, is really irrelevant. Because it's enough of a deftly employed distraction to absorb all your fears and force you to search for comfort in the arms of a lot of people who are carrying a knife behind their back.

Over the years I've become disillusioned with how social media reinforces this need to monitor your friends. All I've ever seen it do break a sense of solidarity that might exist before in a space where people communicate more easily and equally, and foster burnout among people who are struggling for something better but feel the mountain is just too high to climb without paying a massive price for their mental health. I've lost friendships and support due to stuff like this. We're all on edge having nightmares about the demons that might be unleashed out of the mouths of friends or acquaintances at any moment that might prove they were toxic and using us all along than find a way to get on the same page, even when we are all clearly at different levels of need and desire.

The mechanisms of social media make us feel like a newer, bigger monster is always around the corner that we have to stay vigilant against. This feeling is exhilarating, and that's why it sticks around so insidiously, like a parasite. It's also extremely paralyzing and debilitating, like a parasite. This outcome of this isn't a mistake: it's very intentional. And I'm tired of playing into it, and I'm exhausted from trying to justify to myself that anything good is coming out of it.

make stuff and be free! (to vanish without a trace)

note: if you don't like orange (what's wrong with you?), you can also read this post on my patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/28896472

from: https://www.wired.com/2014/10/video-game-literacy/

in a Discord channel i started recently to talk about art games, someone brought up Eric Zimmerman's "The Ludic Century" and it made me re-read the manifesto published on Kotaku that so aroused my ire in 2013.

someone in the chat pointed out the similarities in the manifesto between the Italian Futurists, and other people criticized it for being exclusionary of various peoples. but really, from re-reading it now: it was hard to find anything to respond to in the manifesto at all, because it seemed so bereft of new or interesting, or even mildly controversial ideas. it's a re-statement of conventional wisdom from the last couple decades of Gamification and Games for Change-ish bland neoliberal rhetoric about using the market to teach people more empathy. at the end of the day it seems to be more about affirming career choices of game designers or academics with the general sense that "videogames are actually really important, you guys!"

and you know what: they are important! let's be like Nancy Pelosi and clap back at the hypothetical gatekeepery middlebrow Roger Ebert man-demons of the world who were probably never going to listen or care anyway.

stuff like The Ludic Century manifesto is just empty affirmations of the importance of digital culture for the sake of digital culture. except for whatever digital frontiers we may be able to explore and colonize in the future, it's the end of history! it all just has to happen the way we said it does because it has to happen: it's an inevitability, and imagining anything else is an impossibility. just make stuff and be free!

i'm sure you've seen the headlines if you're reading this. videogames and game culture have become an increasingly mainstream aspect of pop culture. Twitch consistently draws in more viewers than Netflix and many of the biggest youtube stars (many of whom got their start doing Let's Plays of videogames) have consistently more views than the highest Nielsen rated shows on tv. because the audience often skews younger and there's an impenetrability and unreliability to the metrics used by companies like Google or Amazon, it's often still ignored or dismissed as not as relevant to culture by more established voices. but it's hard to ignore the impact the culture for and around consuming games has had on especially younger generations.

but, you might say: What Does This New Youth Culture Stand For? are the kids really all right?? or are they being programmed to destroy all culture, nay, the fabric of space and time itself by the Pewdiepies, the Minecrafts, the Fortnites, and God willing, the MEMES??!!!

in the past year i've started teaching game design part-time (as an effort to have something that slightly resembles more of a "real job"). and after a few semesters of teaching, it's become very clear to me that basically all game programs, even the ones that aren't explicitly in the mold of manufacturing kids to be good game industry workers, are all extremely practice-oriented. there are obvious reasons for this: there's no real agreed-upon language to use, nor is there a large body of criticism or existing artistic movements to draw upon in videogames. (but there sure are a lot of random essays on blogs like this one that no one remembers a years after they come out). plus there's a cageyness for many who work in the games industry to having their work be described or theorized about in a broader way... because of how many important cultural critics of the past have punched themselves in the dick ridiculously mischaracterizing, downplaying, or just downright insulting the medium of videogames.

so what does exist are sort of vague statements designed not to offend anyone or really take any particular stance on anything beyond saying "yay games!". and that's stuff like The Ludic Century, or also intentionally vague and overly broadly defined concepts like "Game Feel" that game designers often treat like a bible and create a religion around the Great Gods of Polish and Accessibility. we all must serve the God of the market: and he thirsts for more blood. any counter-narratives that try and bring in material or political realities to the theorizing of games, when they do exist, basically have to be created entirely by the teacher and are no doubt promptly forgotten by students once they leave the class. the end result is a bunch of university programs that are pumping out students who are filling Steam and itch.io with their games without much of a sense of cultural participation or continuity or like... sense of exploring concepts in general in their work.

digital spaces and technology, more broadly, often extol the virtues of "maker culture". we feel greater than ever impulses to just make stuff for the sake of making stuff in order to serve the Content Gods. being a craftsman is seen as better than all those pretentious highfalutin' types who are out for themselves and don't understand what you're doing. but maker/craftsman/practice-oriented culture leads to digital platforms that are filled to the brim with stuff that's made with barely any context, or continuity, or exploring larger concepts in general... with virtually no one who knows how to talk about any of it in an interesting way. and we all know who the first people disappeared and resigned to permanent irrelevance are on these platforms (hint: it's not the people who have lots of money and connections).

it may sound funny to say this as a critic, but i do think i'm more practice-oriented than theory-oriented at the end of the day. i think creating a work of art can be much more powerful and impactful than just theorizing about it. and i think theory has increasingly become weak and ineffectual at addressing broader societal issues and more concerned with justifying the career of whoever is spouting it at the moment. the post-modern academic tendency to over-theorize that took over in the latter half of the 20th century is part of what has slowly led to artistic communities that are in love with the concept of having a concept and so choked out of any life or inspiration to them.

the arts have become very bifurcated between the children of rich who live "the art life" to feel more relevant and less alienated from the rest of the world because of their privileged existences, and everyone else who does it to exist and compete with other artists in a brutal battle royale in the good old sphere of commerce. undoubtedly, public investment of resources away from the arts has been the biggest factor in making art communities increasingly just a space for the children of the wealthy and powerful. and it also contributed to this internalized guilt towards the idea of making art at all, and the need for the artists to find new ways for justifying the idea of "meritocracy" as it applies to singing the praises of of the free hand of the market. that general uncritical affection towards mass-manufactured commercial culture is probably something you've gotten used to seeing now if you're around people who need to make a living in that space at all. if you're rich you get to think about concepts (at least to the extent that those concepts don't implicate you), but if you're poor you only ever get to think about the market. anything else is a ridiculous indulgence.

but when The Arts become merely a copy of a copy of a copy, a lifestyle accessory for the rich, and a hyper-effective venue for gentrification, the sense of overall context or struggle gets sucked out of the work. apoliticization of art and artists also leads to this myth of the isolated genius laboring over their masterwork. there's a sense that if your work does manage to jump out of this commercial battle royale while still being unique and having lots of resonance with people, it must be a product of your mind being acutely sensitive, or more attuned to the cosmic powers of the universe. if you are around my age (early 30's) and grew up following indie rock music, i'm sure you'll recall the obsessive cults of personality around people like Jeff Mangum or Kevin Shields: the lone isolated eccentric genius. who knows to what extent they intentionally cultivated that view of themselves vs. if it was just an accident, but those myths are invariably destructive to the people who live inside them.

the thing is, we should be so lucky now. for anyone coming into this new media landscape to get that sort of treatment is a laughable fantasy. there's no space to be cool now. a vast majority of people who are making art now and don't have access/resources to larger structures will never get to live inside those kind of myths, no matter how "genius" their work is or how quirky their personality is. it's of course always true that myth-building around these things, if they become popular, tend to serve a purpose for people in power in one way or another. and it's not a healthy sort of way to approach someone's work beyond a certain point of getting larger recognition to it. but the landscape around art has become so unimaginably unequal that the ability to reach a larger consciousness to the point where anyone would even react or respond to your work EXISTING AT ALL without some kind of weird viral fluke is basically impossible.

and, even more darkly: we're not even close to having a basic foothold on how to talk about the deluge of stuff that's put out on digital platforms from this culture that values endless production for the sake of production of more stuff. we can frame this sea of stuff as a new explosion of creativity: maybe it is, at least in some limited ways. but if we can't find an interesting/enlightening way to sift through stuff, most of this wave will disappear without so much as a peep. it'll go up in smoke without most people knowing, just as a significant chunk of recorded music history did in 2008. except with not a bang, but a whimper.

Paolo Pedercini has said several times that if you're any kind of outsider or pushing for some kind of substantive change in your field, you have to actively label and contextualize yourself and the work you're doing, otherwise someone will do it for you. i think this comment was partly in reaction to how the queer games scene i was semi-a part of that got framed as "The Queer Games Scene" against pretty much everyone involved's will. that label ended up defining the scene in ways which probably contributed to it falling apart faster and more violently than it might have otherwise.

i agree in part with what Paolo says there. but the reality i see now is far more dark than that. i don't think anyone in this day and age can depend on anyone talking about or contextualizing their work at all. i think being viewed as irrelevant and vanishing without a trace is the far more inevitable reality for most people than being framed in a negative light (let alone any kind of light at all). one of the strange ironies to me about GamerGate in 2019 is imagining the idea of anyone getting that mad about a Twine game getting written up on a few videogame websites now. when people are mad at you en masse to the point where it leads to harassment it at least tells you that you're having an impact on the culture in some way. now there's just too much stuff for anyone to care or notice for more than two seconds. unless you're The Last Jedi or Ghostbusters.

i think we need to start to view criticism far less as an exercise in pontificating about the nuances of a work or as a venue to place personal narratives onto a work, and much more as just a form of preservation of culture. especially in the context where giant corporate conglomerates like Disney are doing everything in their power to keep audiences and entire critical industries fixated on them. if you can create curiosity towards an artist or cultural object that might have not existed at all before, people are way more likely to remember that and have it impact them later on in the future. really, the biggest obstacle is just getting people to care at all.

do i know how to do this? absolutely not! but i think there has to be a point where we all step down from our high horses and our "no ethical consumption under capitalism"s and "i need to do this to pay rent"s and acknowledge that the preservation of all culture that doesn't flow out from big corporate giants like Disney is what's at stake here. someone, somewhere needs to decide to go against the flow of the hand of the market that's pushing us all helplessly downstream. we're all, in effect, the servants of oligarchy at the end of the day if we don't do this.... even if we don't feel we have any choice, or just have to pay rent.

and if you're an artist: and you don't want to risk your work or the work of the vast majority of us who don't have the Big Buxxx behind us lining the dustbin of history, you have to find some way to contextualize what you're doing, where you're coming from, and why you're doing it. otherwise you're free, like the rest of us, to vanish without a trace.

Here's A List of Some Videogame Youtubers Who Aren't Terrible

It shouldn't be too crazy to say that videogames have a lot of problems right now. For a variety of different reasons and factors, a lot of shitty people with shitty opinions have taken refuge in the videogame space, and have become very popular doing so. And as youtube establishes itself as the premiere land of video punditry for far-right reactionaries and more and more popular game youtubers to air their sexist/racist/homo/transphobic/etc opinions and help people harass anyone who gets on their shitlist (including game devs), it can be hard to want to go anywhere near the world of videogame youtube. But I think this is precisely what is to be avoided, as our favorite problematic Marxist troll Slavoj Zizek says! I think there's still a lot of potential for really interesting video content about games. And part of the reason my opinion about this subject has changed over time is I have spent some time immersing myself in the youtube trenches and found a handful of channels I actually legitimately like. This is a post to share these channels with you all!

Please note that these are by no means the only interesting or non-shitty channels on youtube - they're just personal favorites. I also wouldn't say any of these channels are exactly perfect. Both online video content and especially video content about videogames are things that haven't really been figured out. It's a new format. And even the good stuff you're liable to find tends to still stick to some tropes or cliches to survive in the current landscape.

So maybe it's instead better to look at them as the beginning of something rather than the end-all-be-all of video content about games. And maybe it will spur more of you all to action to get involved, and do something new and interesting in this space that is often so dominated by reactionary ideologues, clickbait, and the same old boring and toxic conventional "gamer" wisdom. It's definitely a toxic space that's hard to exist on, especially if you're trying to do something new and different. But maybe it can still be done, and maybe - like a few of these channels do - it can reach a bigger audience than you might think. So go forth and embrace the new flesh, fellow comrade!

Without further ado... the list:

Classics of Game

https://www.youtube.com/user/ClassicsOfGame

Classics of Game is basically like a well-curated little digital art gallery. Out of context snapshots of particularly strange or alienating or funny moments from mostly obscure older games come in and out of focus before quickly moving onto the next strange snippet. It functions kind of as a document of some of the silliest, most alienating, and most unique elements of games that are often forgotten about. And because it's highly curated, it's potentially more accessible to people who are outside game culture and just want to be exposed to some quick concentrated weirdness. I do wish it credited individual games, but there are other people who have taken up the work of sourcing where the footage is from (which I can't find right now... will update when I do). Regardless, ClassicsOfGame is still a highly surreal and essential encapsulation of game history and very worth tuning into.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/ClassicsOfGame

Retropals

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqvgC_MKv4CM0clToGfACvw

I discovered Retropals, formerly Adventure Pals, originally via their Playstation Year One series. There are a lot of "game historian" type youtubers out there, especially on Nintendo-related subjects and 90's era console wars, but this one struck me as a very highly specific and interesting subject to pick for an entire series. And indeed, longtime games journalist/writer Danny Cowan goes all in on covering all aspects of the PSOne's launch in a way that is well-written and informative, if sometimes a tiny bit dry. Still, PS Year One is absent a lot of the usual gamer platitudes and conventional wisdom echoed by a lot of game historian youtubers. It seems to include original research and has its own unique tone. It's also still an ongoing series, so definitely keep an eye on this series as it develops.

But honestly the biggest reason I love this channel is because Danny and his partner Alex are perhaps my favorite game streamers out there. Streams are generally laid back but entertaining and they generally pick interesting and highly unique things to play. Danny has a lot of knowledge about a wide variety of obscure games and oddities, especially a lot of FMV games and mid-90's era games that are fun to watch them fail gloriously at. Danny also generally does his research and has interesting things to say about the games they pick to play. Lightly edited highlights are available on their youtube channel and are just as much, if not even more, worth watching than the PS Year One series overall.

Here are a few recommended videos of theirs:

Double Switch 1 Credit playthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXF9xFKB5-w

Jurassic Park Sega CD playthrough: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VlX9bUunxw

XBLIG Silver Dollar Games Postmortem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeeDWzdkRl8

They do have a small but spirited fan following, but I am really sad they don't have a larger audience. So please support them on atreon here: https://www.patreon.com/retropals and subscribe to their channel on youtube! They deserve a much larger audience!

Twitch: http://twitch.tv/retropals

Twitter: http://twitter.com/retropalshq

Accursed Farms/Ross's Game Dungeon

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJ6KZTTnkE-s2XFJJmoTAkw

Ross Scott is best known as the creator of the well-known humorous Machinima series Freeman's Mind, a narrated playthrough of Half-Life 1 where he gives voice to the game's voiceless protagonist Gordon Freeman. Freeman's Mind is very... of its time. The humor, while certainly not poorly written by any means, is very of the internet of when it started in 2007. But if nothing else, Freeman's Mind seems to have been a launching off point into a more recent project of his - Ross's Game Dungeon.

I discovered the Game Dungeon because it kept showing up on youtube search results when I kept searching for different obscure PC games. I have to admit was really baffled how a series that picked games that were so obscure seemed to have as many views as it did. I admit I also assumed it must have been the usual youtuber shouting over how these old games all suck. But I was totally surprised to find that it it wasn't really that at all! Ross, while he doesn't shy away from complaining about a games's flaws, usually manages to be respectful and have something interesting to say about every one of the games he reviews - even the obviously bad ones. Ross's Game Dungeon grew on me a lot, especially after seeing his Deus Ex video which actually seriously analyses the way the game takes on issues of inequality and government corruption in a sincere and accurate way. That's a lot more than you'd expect for a videogame reviewer on youtube.

Over time Ross's Game Dungeon has become easily my favorite edited youtube series about games. The fact that he is able to talk about games that are highly obscure in a way that is interesting and weigh the good with the bad to a pretty large audience is kind of a miracle. It's thrown a lot of my own cynicism and conventional wisdom about what is or isn't able to get traction on youtube on its head. Maybe doing something different and new on youtube is actually possible! Maybe we shouldn't be so cynical! No doubt many of the views to his videos come because of the popularity of Freeman's Mind. But the fact that Ross's Game Dungeon does exist in its own universe at all is kind of a miracle, and I'd like to hopefully think of it as a model for future things to come.

Other videos especially worth checking out are his overview of the existential Tetris horror of Nyet 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KG0ANGRwSl8, the disturbingly bizarre and highly cursed 90's adventure game world of Armed and Delirious: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3qRCzIj9QEo&t=12s, and his take on lost classic and GTA precursor Quarantine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=abrKxAHJ7qU.

Website: http://www.accursedfarms.com

docfuture

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeY9LCpPs50BdCNLhKaV_xw

Here I have to talk about one of my favorite video artists of all-time, videogame-related or not. The work of Docfuture, aka Topher Florence, is really hard to describe. Generally, he does a lot of bizarre and strange mashups of pop culture and videogames. Recently he's known for strange and funny videos like "ASMR Roleplay: Caring And Supporting Funky Kong Picks You Up From The Airport". But he got his start on the Something Awful forums in the mid-2000's. This spawned what would be my favorite work of his, and what I still to this day, easily consider to be the best Let's Play of all time.

Sonic 2: Special Edition (which is also up here) is a fake version of Sonic 2 docfuture was trying to convince other forumgoers on Something Awful that existed, so he made a Let's Play of it. Initially he starts out trying to present the game matter-of-factly as some kind of version of Sonic 2 with extra bonus cutscenes and other content that he has access to because he has an uncle who works for Sega (which perhaps the Twine game The Uncle Who Works For Nintendo might be a reference to?). The game initially looks like Sonic 2, albeit with a lot of strange jokes added in, but over time it slowly dissolves into a surreal mashup that encompasses so many bizarre and obscure pop-culture references and surreal video editing techniques. At times, it feels like a very strange comedy sketch. At others, it feels like a video art piece from another universe.

Docfuture has perfected the art of Let's Play as performance. The fact that this was done so early on in the history of Let's Plays, and that these ideas have basically never caught on just shows how much of a singular achievement it is. It's also, honestly, really sad because it makes you reflect on the potential of what that medium could be vs. what it largely is now. There's a sense of anarchic wonder and possibility here that is missing from the unwaveringly stiff and sad format of current game content on youtube. I find that incredibly depressing, and very much desire to see this kind of work come back. And maybe it will some day.

Less of an artistic statement, but still wonderful and surreal are his narrated Sonic 1 Easy Mode playthrough featuring a nice jazz fusion soundtrack, his playthroughs of Sega Saturn platformers Super Tempo and Thrybrush Deppy that include things like a fake interview with Super Tempo's star and a Maya Angelou narration of the game's action, and a couple bizarre video skits he did over a gameboy color game based on the cartoon Doug.

Sadly because of their age, the versions that exist online of most of these are pretty low-quality. They also aren't on docfuture's own channel, making them harder to find. BUT - they are still uploaded by other people on youtube, at least. so I've linked them below. And in spite of the low-quality these are still essential viewing.

If you want to know more about docfuture and his interest in preserving a sense of mystery online, I would really recommend checking out the interview I did with him last year on my podcast Beyond The Filter: https://archive.org/details/beyondthefilter07nostalgiaandstrangeness_topherflorence

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/topherflorence

SiIvaGunner

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9ecwl3FTG66jIKA9JRDtmg

Explaining SiIvaGunner is like trying to unravel a giant ball of yarn of in-jokes and internet lore. According to TVTropes, apparently its inspiration was a channel named SilvaGunner (with an "L" and not an "I"), which uploaded Soundtrack rips from videogames that was taken down several years ago due to copyright violations. It then eventually got resurrected as an account named GilvaSunner, which also uploaded OST rips until it eventually also stopped due to fears of more copyright takedowns.

In response, the parody account GiIvaSunner was launched. The joke being that the uppercase I made it appear to look exactly like the real GilvaSunner account, making it look like just an extension of that well-known and respected OST ripping account. Uploads are also presented in the format of typical game music uploads, also making them indistinguishable from the usual GilvaSunner uploads. And then when you clicked on the track it would usually play a bait-and-switch with some kind of humorous musical mashup - either referencing pop songs or other game music. The channel is the most famous for the recurring joke of the Flintstones theme which is a reference to some pirate version of Flinstones for the NES named 7 Grand Dad that appeared on a popular Vinesauce stream.

The funny thing about the channel, though, is because of its popularity, if you want to search for the actual OST or track from a game it is very likely that you could get the joke GiIvaSunner version instead. It confuses and complicates the format of youtube to bring you something different. In an era where a lot of mystery is gone from the internet and corporation tends to have consolidated control over the distribution of content, this kind of thing doesn't happen too much anymore.

The other part of the background to this joke is that a lot of modern software that is either able to emulate (i.e. Famitracker for the NES) or accurately extract samples from old games has made doing seamless rearrangements of the game in their natural sounds possible. This can be a trip to hear if you're used to the original game audio, and adds to the feeling of traveling into an alternate universe with these tracks. However, the channel is obviously full of all kinds of musical in-jokes and references in ways that can make it alienating to anyone but a particular audience of people, so you sort of have to pick and choose.

GiIvaSunner eventually turned into SiIvaGunner after being deleted, and attempted to end the channel at the end of 2016, but it came back not too long after that. I'm not sure how many people run the account, but it's still extremely active. And like I said - while the quality can also be inconsistent (and it's worth searching some "best SiIvaGunner rips" playlist or something) - this channel is still an essential and fascinating part of the videogame landscape on YouTube.

I enjoy this Earthbound song that quickly turns into a Beatles song (fitting, given how much the Beatles inspired the Earthbound OST): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liU-hxGbUAg

this mashup of the Super Mario World Star Road music from and David Bowie's "Star Man": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibM-zGTK_5w

and this Silver Surfer/Jet Set Radio mashup: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-TxnK5z__M

Twitter: https://twitter.com/GiIvaSunner

Hbomberguy

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UClt01z1wHHT7c5lKcU8pxRQ

Probably the most well-known traditional youtuber on this list is Harry Brewis aka Harris Bomberguy or Hbomberguy. And while he makes many game analysis videos, he is perhaps more well-known for his funny takedowns of hateful, racist and anti-feminist, alt-right youtubers, as well as his analysis of TV and film. I'd say his political takedowns are probably his best videos, to be honest, because he's one of only a handful of people operating in that space successfully from a left-wing perspective who still manages to be funny and entertaining. More than anyone else on this list (barring one..) I could imagine him pulling off his own tv show because of how he's able to cover a broad range of topics deeply and in an interesting way. His production values, editing, and comedic timing are very impressive for being all presumably done by one person as well. So that alone is enough to recommend his channel.  

That said, I don't think he's brought as much to the field of videogames as he has with some of his other videos. Long analyses of popular AAA and indie games are kind of their own subgenre on youtube, but most tend to be fairly surface repetitions of gamer conventional wisdom or else far too dry and detail-oriented to be terribly engaging outside of a particular niche. He kind of joins in on that tradition and doesn't completely break the mold, but in spite of that his videos are definitely still very entertaining. I particularly like his feature-length videos on why Fallout 3 sucks https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLJ1gyIzg78 and his defense of Dark Souls 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRTfcMeqhig. In spite of all that I've said, these are both really good videos and the fact that he's able to keep them both interesting and engaging over an 1+ hour of run time is pretty impressive.

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/Hbomberguy

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/Hbomb

PushingUpRoses

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCTNXqhWPba9Xh8gx0EKOtQ

Because of the hostility that women face online - both women youtubers AND women gamers, making your living primarily as a female videogame youtuber who puts her image out there has to be super difficult. So I have a lot of respect for a woman like PushingUpRoses who are able to pull that off successfully. And she's certainly not the only visible female videogame youtuber out there by any means (and maybe this is my apology for not including more women on this list... I'm sorry... but there's always potential for a sequel to this list), but she's just a favorite in general so I had to include her. Her niche is primarily older PC adventure games, and she generally comes from the perspective of a fan of the genre. She also talks about a lot of her personal experiences and history with games, and some of her past problems with depression and eating disorders. While her videos fit into standard game youtuber tropes in some ways, they're still definitely consistently high-quality and worth checking out - especially because they often cover territory lesser explored in the game space and genres like the often highly mocked graphic adventure games.

She also does LPs that you can find on her channel as well (and streams on her twitch channel).

A couple of her favorites are her review of the Harlan Ellison-penned game I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nzr64-ESJ1A

...and her video on the infamous controversial 90's game Harvester: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=51LFXWlmFMg

Patreon: http://patreon.com/PushingUpRoses

Twitter: http://twitter.com/PushinUpRoses

Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/pushinguproses

videoGaiden/Consolevania

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6OvausCVNuenV6PpWdgDbAAVFl1OQxtv

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecVDzKzLrhk - videoGaiden season 4 episode 1

I can't mention gaming youtube channels without mentioning Consolevania, an important part of the history of internet videogame shows. Former comedy writer Rab Florence and Ryan Macleod (later joined by others) filmed their own series back in 2004 which they distributed on BitTorrent and other filesharing networks. Eventually due to its popularity, it got picked up by BBC Scotland as the show videoGaiden, which ran for three series until ending in 2008. It was also resurrected a year or two ago for a final, fourth series which you can watch on youtube. Most of the old episodes of Consolevania and videoGaiden are available on youtube too (and note that Consolevania doesn't just talk about game consoles in spite of the name).

Both Consolvevania and videoGaiden are notable because they're written by professional comedy writers. There are sketches, there's commentary on game culture, there are in depth personal narratives about experiences around games. They film on location and, in the case of videoGaiden, actually have a budget! That's right - it's actually a legitimate tv show. Admittedly it might be a bit impenetrable for American audiences who might have a hard time navigating their thick Scottish accents or don't know so much about British staples like the BBC Micro or ZX Spectrum computers. And some of the old episodes are no doubt dated because of being 10+ years old. But I think this honestly just helps give the show more of a fresh feel, again especially compared to a vast majority of contemporary content about videogames. Both Consolevania and videoGaiden help remind us what a show about games can actually be.

Maybe as an effort to keep that flame alive, Consolevania has recently resurrected, and you can support them on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/consolevania

and they have a youtube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb5dkmeyjJ9kHbDoWGUATVg

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So... that's the end of my main list. However, I wanted to include some quick extras that I thought were worth mentioning. Buckle up for the conclusion of this list, my partners in crime!

Sonic 2006 LP:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XO1klBtIzn8&list=PLPZd8MPtv0viNz7Ua2QpFQK1-TKi9HVc_

I have to give this a mention because, circa 2011, it's the first Let's Play a friend of mine who professed his love for "surreal let's plays" sent to me and said I absolutely had to watch. This let's play, like Sonic 2 Special Edition, has its own TV Tropes article and is one of the most famous let's plays out there. Basically, a handful of friends in 2007 decided to rent Sonic 2006 for 48 hours and record themselves beating the entire game uninterrupted. As you might expect, they gradually descend into madness over the course of that time.

Also like docfuture's Sonic 2 Special Edition let's play, this was released in installments on a forum thread on the Something Awful forums (which I missed out on at the time because of not wanting to pay the 5 dollars for membership). It's also on the not-as-active anymore LP Archive that was also driven by Something Awful. This was in the era before Youtube let you upload high-quality videos. LPs like Sonic 2006 were uploaded on a separate service and I remember waiting forever to watch each chapter. But I eventually made it all the way through this let's play, and it was definitely a formative experience for me seeing a Let's Play as some kind of potential for deeper entertainment.

Thankfully this LP has made its way to youtube in more recent years without any quality loss. Unlike Sonic 2 Special Edition, though, I'm... not entirely sure it holds up. While their gradual descent into madness makes for an entertaining arc, it's very drawn out and not as dramatic as some accounts make it out to be. And there are the occasional sexist or transphobic joke you might expect from internet forum humor circa 10 years ago but still weren't fun to be reminded of. While the group certainly is more articulate and less obnoxious than a lot of more recent let's players, they're still very much young dudes.

But there is something to be said for how the LP captures a whole progression of time, and also captures a little snapshot of their night - like them ordering Chinese food, the abrupt departure of NoTimesForSocks sometime during the night, or the famous billiard ball puzzle that causes them to lose their minds. That kind of outside ambiance is something you miss in more edited, sealed-off experiences. The generally surreal, broken quality of Sonic 2006, it's incredibly overwrought and stupid plot, and the insane amount of repetitions of stages it forces on players only adds to this. So this is definitely a worthwhile watch for those who are interested, even if I definitely recommend it with reservations.

And hey, if you like that they did plenty of other Let's plays you can find on pokecapn's channel. They don't have the mythic quality of the Sonic 2006 one though. https://www.youtube.com/user/pokecapnLP

Errant Signal

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm4JnxTxtvItQecKUc4zRhQ

I want to at least mention Chris Franklin's youtube channel Errant Signal before I forget. He does a sober and articulate analysis of games in a way that is generally more well-considered and lacking in the usual gamer platitudes. He will also sometimes cover smaller indie games that don't get a lot of coverage otherwise from a critical perspective, which is much appreciated. Definitely check his stuff out if you like more serious analysis.

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Campster

Play Different

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGKs6yhZo9gBwP3ZXpwISsw/videos

I wanted to also give a shout-out to my friend Andrew's videos. He focuses a lot on basically documenting a lot of highly obscure Mac games which you can't really find anywhere else on youtube. He also provides commentary for each video which gives a little personal background or background into creators of the works. It's generally a low-key channel and good to put on and chill to. It's also updated very often.

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/playdifferent

Twitter: https://twitter.com/Boogadrew

This also leads me to a handful of channels that also document obscure games and curiosities and are worth checking that out if you like that sort of thing (though usually don't include commentary like Andrew's channel)...

Quarantinesim

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCjsfRIVCFB7Z9ODi2ntH1qw

Super obscure and strange mostly fps games with a unique character all of their own. This channel sort of feels like it's own weird little universe and is definitely worth a look. I'm sad it hasn't been updated at all recently though.

MarphitimusBlackimus

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVgZw2hguslwhERp-BRYFAg

The obscure FPS series is definitely worth looking at, among other things

Retro Pixel Lizard

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCIRucQk0cOaZsKCwzJeYKNg

More obscure DOS/Windows games that aren't documented anywhere else and other assorted curiosities.

Curly Brace

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRcLI-JPNerzN4fiqZlbIlw/videos

Curly appears to just be getting started on her channel, but I really enjoyed her one upload so far about Ape Escape and look forward to more!

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That's the list! I'm sure there are a lot of things I left off, but these should at least get you started - and maybe will be a launching off point into something new. I think quality videos about videogames are totally possible and are something more people are willing to explore. Enjoy and spread your newfound knowledge out into the world, my comrades!

AND if you like this list, please consider supporting me on patreon at http://www.patreon.com/ellaguro and follow me on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/ellaguro as usual. Thank you!

- liz ryerson