i just had it recommended to me a couple days ago. only a few minutes in i paused and pulled up the full channel, and ive been working my way through the videos. im sticking around for sure
The inescapable video was awesome, the emotional through line of how they scammed your brother mixed with the great callbacks/foreshadowings and jokes made it a great watch all throughout
"Unnecesaarily mean" Did you forget the part where he mentioned how he is pissed that they ripped off his brother who bought the game as a gift... only to be disappointed. I say its warranted and hilarious
I'm an earth sciences major and this never occurred to me! I guess I haven't equated games to real life when it comes to resource extraction and management because I instinctively assume those aspects of games are fictitious.
Well, I'm not dissimilar to you, tho I do agree and personally tend to think on how games and entertainment influences people with "less critical thinking". Critical thinking and media literacy are things that need to be told and sometimes it is excidingly annoying when you see disparity with it even between the "wealthy nations".
There aren't many comments yet, so I do wish to add onto the talk specifically with Gold in Minecraft's case. You are right about it being considered 'useless' for Minecraft... at least pre 1.16. That's the update that included Piglins, and Piglin bartering. That means that Gold is now, also, a currency in Minecraft. Sure, you'll need to go into the Nether to barter with Piglins, and they'll attack any player that isn't wearing any gold armor... but the most useful application for gold in Minecraft is as it is IRL... currency. That's, also, the update that introduced a stronger armor type to diamond... but you're still right with Diamonds being very important in that game still. I mean, you still need diamond armor, tools and weapons to be able to get the stronger type of tools, weapons and armor. I'm not kidding, either... you need to use a diamond pickace in a smithing table (Added in version 1.14) with the ingot of Netherite to make the Netherite pickaxe. Your point for diamonds still stand. Edit: I finished the video... yeah, nothing else needed to be added it seems.
If playing Halo Wars and Fallout in my youth taught me anything, it's that I will always ALWAYS have more money/resources than I will theoretically need.
Edit: seems our wording confused some people. We’ve got some form of multiplicity which is why we use plural first person, this is an incredibly new thing and the thing we’re mentioning, sorry for the confusion! A Viveros video right on the same day we’ve made a huge internal leap in our understanding of ourself? Hell yeah.
I found you from the InescapAble video (I have a thing for video essays about games I've never played), only now learning that your video essays are really up my alley - and your topics are really interesting! I havent considered how much gaming affects culuture and vice versa up until now.
This looks like a unique video and wow I'm early Edit: I think we should advocate for elementary/middle schools to have economics classes. Yeah they are complex, but so is math, and math is being taught from a young age, so it wouldn't be impossible for scarcity and resource management to be implemented into our schools.
Factorio is an interesting case because of the research mechanic. You extract resources from the environment and use increasingly complex refining chains to generate research packs, which are consumed by labs to unlock new technologies. There's a pollution mechanic, so extracting resources does pollute the environment and piss off the native animal life on the planet, so you also need to worry about defenses. There's something of an environmental message there, but it's overshadowed by the factory-building aspect which is, in essence, the right way to play the game. You have to pollute in order to win. But there's another side to it that I've seen people reference. The way research works, it enables you to extract more resources and make more complex factories which unlock more advanced technologies which enables you to build a bigger, more effective factory and that loop gives you this compounding growth. And it's given some people the impression that it's how it works in real life, that all you need to get better technology is to just throw the right resources and wait. That if you have enough copper, iron, stone, and oil, that you're guaranteed to get an AI or nanotechnology or some other huge technological advancement. But real-life research is full of dead ends, and there's no guarantee that a particular research path will eventually lead to an improvement. Or, say one technical leap took 10 years to develop. There's no guarantee that the next leap will happen in another 10 years, or 20, or even 100. Real life technology doesn't have a steady progression from one technology level to another. Factorio is a game, and its research tree has been iterated on and refined to keep players engaged and always feeling like they're making progress. It can't be used as an analog for real life research.
i strongly disagree with minecraft being a "resource management is the whole game" type of game. this *entirely depends on the way you play minecraft.* minecraft is ultimately a sandbox game, meaning that it's basically a toolkit for you to mess around and do whatever. this misconception that minecraft is all about resource gathering is common, and it's not inherintly wrong to play the game like that, but it's false to say that it's the main gameplay. personally i entirely play minecraft to build my city in creative mode, and even when i DO play in survival, i mostly do it so i can build and mess around with my friends. it's not about resource management to me - the resource management is almost always a means to an end. and that's why i think it's incorrect to say minecraft's main gameplay is about resources.
While I've said I love thinking about this, I hadn't really considered how games "clean up" the act of extracting resources, since I've seen the costs of it irl. You're absolutely right that that can skew somebody's perspective if they don't know any better. Glad to have voted for this topic haha. Though if I'm honest I'm not sure the distinction between games where resource extraction are the game and those where it's a means to an end was useful. I mean, I'm not entirely sure what distinction you're making is (though I may just be stupid lmfao), and you don't seem to actually use this distinction later on in the video? But I may have just missed that. Idk. Either way, good video. Learnt some new lenses to view things through.
idk I think games do a good job of determining our perception of resources in the real world. It's quite something to watch how violent Rust players get when they find out which player on the server has the most of X/Y valuable resource in said server. I kid. Only partially. It goes either way. It's fascinating to think about how many real world historical parallels are found in PvP survival experiences. In theory, cooperation would be the best synthesis for everyone when it comes to limited resources. In reality, I want the most shinies because then I'm the bestest. This is a very interesting, nuanced topic. The way video games challenge our interpretations of the world, and skew of biases and views towards certain trends is quite interesting; like how red barrel is universal language for "it go boom".
i love u sm i wouldve been cool and gay so much earlier if u were around during overwatch launch period. Having a gay vtuber sharing leftist thought in video essays with overwatch gameplay in the background would've fucking exploded my pretransition brain. hope thats not weird to say i think ur videos r neat
I was introduced to you through your last video - the Inescapable essay - and I took a huge chance on what I'd find when I clicked. I'm incredibly glad I did, because between that, your study videos, and this one, I'm already having a great time.
I want to leave a comment just to mention how fresh your content feels in terms of the video essay genre. Popular video essayists seem to get stuck in the same loop of topics, and you just keep bringing new stuff to the table. It's good, keep it up! :)
Super interesting and important topic and handled really well!! That said, I have a nitpick--I think it's a slightly missed opportunity (around 30:30) not to mention the extractionist nature of even non-fossil-fuel energy sources. Even if we somehow swapped every energy grid in, say, North America to renewable sources, the level of resource extraction to create all those solar panels, wind farms, etc. would wreak HAVOC. This is another thing I think things like the Gathering Storm DLC and similar implementations of pollution mechanics almost always overlook, which sucks because it's just generally a concept that seems to be super missing from public perceptions of environmentalism (although in their defense it uh, probably wouldn't make them any more fun to play lmao). The cool solarpunk utopian future we share that meme image of would still probably require hollowing out a lot of poor people's backyards and a lot of poisoned wells. THAT SAID once again really great video, can't wait to circle through more of your backlog now that I stumbled on your channel!
Thank you so much! And yeah, you're definitely correct - I honestly could've made a whole second video just about how video games can oversimplify the environmental stuff in terms of overstating how renewable energy is a fix-all. Civ is a particularly egregious offender on that front for the reasons you mentioned - eventually you can just build a bunch of solar farms and wind turbines and it's treated like the energy end-game with no consequences. In the real world, we know that building enough solar farms or geothermal plants or wind farms or whatever else would have significant environmental impacts, and there would still be extraction and pollution around the manufacturing, transport, and installation of them. It's a trade-off, and it's one that you can still argue is worth it, but a lot of these games oversimplify progress as a linear process of outright improvement. The same could also be said about the game's approach to agriculture; Civ's farms never reckon with how farming, especially factory farming, can cause massive issues for the environment, *especially* when you put them right next to a city's fresh water supply. It's one of the difficulties of making a video like this because it's a massive, sprawling topic, and you've got to make tough calls about the scope of the specific video to keep it entertaining, engaging, and concise enough that someone can follow along without being able to know in advance how knowledgeable the audience you find will be about the subject. Plus, there's always the risk of making a false equivalence in the eyes of a viewer - some viewers, acting in good faith or bad faith, might interpret including a lengthy segment about the environmental impacts of renewable energy as meaning that fossil fuels aren't really *that* bad because the alternatives aren't perfect, and my logic was that that would undermine the core message of the video. Your critique is definitely a valid one, and it might just be a skill issue on my behalf that I couldn't find the way to make it work for this video, but I hope that that explains why it was omitted a bit. And I hope you enjoy the rest of the videos! There'll be a new one out tomorrow (at least, that's the plan, I'm editing it rn) so if you somehow manage to get through the rest of them there'll be more coming soon lol
@@TheViveros Oh god I didnt even think about factory farming @_@ but yes yes absolutely!! And that for sure makes sense why you didn't include it, I definitely categorize this point as more of a nitpick than a major complaint with the video :}
14:48 Real life diamonds are hard, but they break easily. They're used for drills and polishing machines. But if you would use diamonds for pickaxes or axes or swords or armour, it would just shatter like glass. So realisticly diamond equipment would be worse than wood irl edit: I don't really agree with you that you have to know all about minecraft ressources irl, but maybe that's because I already know about them irl anyway. Maybe the education system in my country is alright enough
When I was a kid I uses to mine for gold and make stacks and stacks of blocks and use them as decoration. I also watched those videos telling me how to craft the wither on mc mobile back when It wasn't even in the game yet. Kind of like how to summon herobrine at 3:00 am videos lmfao.
This is a video where I ramble about nonsense in video games, I'm not adding anything important to the conversation to begin with lmao (also you're adding yourself to the conversation and YOU'RE important so there)
For part 3 foxhole can be a pretty good example of power and politics, the wardens have a system in place for clans/regiments to claim oil fields at the start of every war. It's all organized by the bigger clans and they call it WERCS, it stands for Warden Expedited Resource Claims System and its basically a social credit system for clans lol. The system does cause bigger clans that are part of WERCS to bully smaller groups of players and clans to leave the "claimed" oil fields. Well anyways please check out foxhole if you haven't played it. The game does feel like a social experiment time to time, that's just because of the semi-real logistics in the game but its pretty fun. Siege Camp is the studio that developed foxhole and they are working on another game with logistics as the main focus of the game. Funny I was Scrooping/salvaging in foxhole while watching this video it made me think Im lucky not outside swing a sledgehammer on old scrap metal irl. Great video and thank you for taking the time to make a video about resource gathering. Legend o7
if theres one thing im takeing from this its how funny a simulationist resource extraction game would be. something along the lines of the way arma is as a milsim.
Trying to tell people that diamonds are actually really brittle in real life still never goes well. I have no idea why they defend it so much too, like, mf what would you know about diamonds??
I discovered you through the inescapable video but I looked through your backlog and now I’m a huge fan. I’m excited to see what you do next. I’m not in the financial position to be a member but I’ll just state I hope that may is Hero bans aren’t the solution. Also I feel like the devs don’t listen to players has already kinda been covered by your pros aren’t game designers video but if that gets picked Ill still watch it
Thank you! And yeah I’ve touched on the topic a few times as part of bigger topics, but it’s also one of those slogans that people repeat and I felt like it might be one worth looking at in isolation as well.
The whole thing has been frightening, and I'm really hoping the fossil fuel industries are forced to eat some of their own consequences, before the world's too broken for fixing it to mean anything... (Oh! And I found the rules! Yay!)
But is diamonds really not that big? Nowadays Russia on the way to steal the top 1 place, and there are a lot of other players, and yet it's still quite expensive.
I disagree with your general premise (humans get a LOT of our information about the world from stories, which tend to simplify those facts for an audience, and this has been the case for just about every subject since the invention of storytelling) but I like the video as an educational intro to the subject of resource extraction.
I would argue you looking at it the wrong way. It's true that games might place some wrong perception about resources, but if we compare two cases where there are games and there isn't you would easily see that the biggest difference is not myths, but on contrary the knowledge taken out of it. And the global politics are just not for everyone, so it wouldn't came out the way it should even if you somehow make the right type of games.
You really didn't explain why the resources were so much more valuable/different than how they are portrayed in games well. It sounds like the difference for coal and gold is just the presence of other people more than the material itself. This feels like a video that you wanted to do a long time ago, and either never did until now, or reworked it from a draft or earlier version from then, it feels as if you didn't have a central thesis until the last quarter and was just going through the motions otherwise. It feels like you could have removed at minimum 10 minutes from the video if you stuck to the idea that this was about how video games alter/skew our perception of resources divorced from their real world contexts and politics, under that perspective you could have skimmed a lot of meat and kept a clear line from start to finish because as my first comment said, it was more like you were trying to say that their portrayals in video games are inaccurate to how they actually are in real life. Which is only true for Diamonds. It feels like you also had the chance to talk about how games like minecraft skew our perspectives of diamonds towards being about their durability. Do you really just not start on the video until it actually wins, or do you start with a base preamble/demo of what you want the video to be like first? Frankly I think it's just better to do whatever you want in the moment and let the votes just decide which to prioritize.
I discussed the differences in how the resources are used between games and the real world, the way that it minimizes the reality of resource extraction as an aspect of power and control, and the way that environmental impacts are not modelled in these games in a way that risks making resource extraction seem less harmful than it is. Talking about how the portrayal of resources in games is inaccurate is related to how games skew our perception of them - they’re not separate discussions, and failing to acknowledge that the disparities in how they function would mean failing to acknowledge the reasons why they’re managed differently, and as a consequence, why our perceptions of them are skewed. The argument that it’s “just the presence of other people” doesn’t really make sense to me - for one, that’s a major component of why these resources function differently in the real world that these games don’t engage with, meaning it’s worth talking about, but I also spent an entire section focused on environmental impacts beyond just that one aspect. Beyond that, the video is the length it is because I wanted to address these topics in this way. I think it’s interesting to use the expression “you could’ve skimmed a lot of meat” because you’re unintentionally making my argument for me - the expression is “skim the fat” when you’re talking about removing unnecessary fluff, whereas skimming the meat would mean removing things that are actually relevant. It also is not only true for diamonds, as the video repeatedly argued with both coal and gold. Now, when a topic is added to the members’ choice polls, it’s because it’s usually a topic I’ve thought about for a while and had a rough outline of what I wanted to cover with it. I am not writing 5 extra full scripts a month just for the one that gets picked, especially because the subjects often change as I think about them more. It’s been five months since this topic was first introduced, which is five months of time spent considering it alongside all the other topics and ideas that came up during that time, including the 11 other videos I’ve made since then. “Do you really just not start on the video until it actually wins” is genuinely just pretty rude. It takes a lot of hours to make a video even if you only count the hours spent writing, recording, and editing them. For all that time put into this video, I made $10. Most of my videos only make $20 to $50 for the weeks of work that I put into them. This is something I do because I enjoy it and want to make something good, but I’m only one person making stuff that - aside from a handful of times where I’ve gotten extremely lucky - is mostly just a fun side hobby that makes me a few bucks here and there. Some of my videos like the study from last month or the Inescapable video are months-long projects, and half the time those still flop. This is a labour of love being done for usually at or around a dollar an hour as it is, and unless someone rocks up with a bunch of money to hire writers or editors this is the best I can do with what I’ve got to make it manageable.
"the original plan was also to make this a study, but i think i burned through my good will on that front for a little bit" would the study you considered doing involve more lies yk you cant just throw out a study every year lying to us and hoping we forgot last year's you gotta throw in some more mundane ones to throw people off maybe you won't even use some of them, they're just for trust-building
No, the study would’ve been a straightforward one just asking people to describe the games they’d played and some basic questions like “How common do you think coal is/how deep in the ground do you think it forms” sort of thing. Ngl, I’d thought this topic would’ve been picked much sooner and so was going to be the mundane study video, but after it performed poorly in the past I kinda thought it just wouldn’t get picked so I moved on. The timing of it was just wonky, but even though this would’ve been straightforward and not involved any deception I think people would’ve been on guard for it given how recently I’d tricked people with one, and that would’ve skewed their responses.
