The Future of Writing About Games 

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The reason half of my videos end up talking about the same 3 games is that it allows me to continue experiencing them even though I have no real interest in playing them anymore. Some games are now part of the lens I use to look at...everything tbh, so even if I never mention it, anything I make is at least a little bit about Outer Wilds. I love seeing that sort of thing in other people's writing. Getting a sense of the lenses that other people look at games through is fascinating to me, and I find some weird enjoyment at trying to guess what other games have influenced the way they look at games now. Your point on the Beginner's Guide resonated with me a fair bit because there are a ton of games that I don't think would provide a ton of value to the Average Consumer, but for me, their value is immeasurable.

Jacob is over here talking about, "when you find that special essay about whatever game you love or didn't know about and it hits just right." And I'm sitting here like, "That's you, man. Thanks."

That's literary analysis, baby!

you know, I've privately been writing about games a lot this past year with no intent to share the work with anyone but my friends. however, my college is offering a class called "writing about the arts" that I'm interested in. at my university, we have to interview professors before we can register for their class, so I've been debating whether or not to even interview for it. this video gave me the final push to do it! if all goes well and the professor is supportive of video games being my art form of choice to write about, then i may be spending a lot of time this next semester writing about video games. even if he's not, I'll continue doing it for fun. great video! as always, it's a delight to watch

this is good in a way that feels like I don't really want to watch anything else today

Stop putting out high quality stuff so quickly, Jake!

The line "I found the hours I wasted"gave me goosebumps

That is the first time I've ever heard Noah Gervais outside of his own channel, legendary.

In college, I had an amazing professor teach me about the small genre of Creative Nonfiction writing. To sum it up, it’s writing about real things but perhaps from your own skewed perspective. Most pieces that fall in this category aren’t aiming for accuracy, like journalism or reviews, but instead play with the emotions of both the writer and the reader. This seems to be the angle you’re advocating for, and it’s certainly the style from the Metal Gear New Yorker article you included.

y'know when you finish watching a movie and you're left with that fire in your gut like "holy shit, yeah, i have to do Something with this"? like, you see something that might not even serve as direct inspiration but is just a general, all purpose fire-under-the-ass to finally do something you've been thinking about doing forever? yeah. thank you for making this, i gotta go think about some stuff now

"I...developed my ideas on hostile architecture for 15 years...and...he just...put it on GameFAQs... he just...posted it out."

This feels like a season finale, can't wait for the series to get renewed

I paused this video halfway through after my head started spinning and I stopped paying attention to the video altogether. I then furiously wrote twenty pages about how I came to writing (through Dickinson, through Dickens, through the “literary”) and how I fell for criticism as something in conversation with rather than outside of art (Hanif Abdurraqib) and etc. and etc. and etc.... And I think might become my college essay. Thank you. (I did return and watch the video in its entirety immediately afterword.)

I remember having an almost concrete hatred for Night in the Woods after completing it the first time. I was unsatisfied with almost everything, the platforming, minigames, artstyle, music, It felt like I wasted my time entirely because of my friend's recommendation. My biggest gripe was the protagonist, Mae. I never once saw any real resemblance of a good character or person in her, which only made me more and more annoyed just *knowing* that I played as her. While hearing Shammy talking of his experience with Night in the Woods, I begun to regret every negative thing I had to say about it. I didn't just find out why the *game* looks, sounds, narrates, plays like it does, but I understood why *Mae* acts how *she* does. I have so much more in common with Mae, how she sees the world, how she treats people, than I *ever* let on at the time. I felt I understood her, *exclusively* because Shammy drew comparisons to his experience with dropping out, being upset at the world, and trying to find peace. It was something I never knew I needed to hear, but when I did, everything felt clearer. I was immediately ready to run back into the game and apologise for ever having doubts. But I plan to revisit it on Halloween, the anniversary of my first playthrough. No *analysis* of an album, movie, TV series, let alone the content itself, has that much power. This medium is very, very special. Thank you for this video Jacob, it means a lot

i havent been able to sit down and watch a movie or a tv show in like 8 months, only really watching youtube when i have other stuff distracting me, but man jacob your videos have some incredible power to make me sit still and just... watch. and listen.

I'm only a few minutes in. But I wanted to thank you. Due to a number of circumstances my life feels really low rn, and I got bad news an hour ago that made it feel worse. I can't even go home right now because I've had a bad fight with my family and everything at home is tense. So I've been crying at a bus stop, and trying to distract myself from misery and self hate through youtube. Your video has already helped me feel a little better--about how guilty I felt about "wasting time" on video games as a hobby and writing so earnestly about it, often to my friends and in private, about me as a person right now. It's still gonna be a long road and I'm still having a breakdown, but at least this has reminded me that I'm not worthless, neither is my simple love for things outside of a productivity obsessed capitalist world. Thank you.

I've wanted to write something like this for years, except I can't write for toffee, so had to wait for someone else to do it. Should've known it'd be you! What a fantastic video...

I recently rewatched the Designed for Violence video, and it's got me thinking about inaccessibility, and the psychological toll it takes on disabled people to be excluded, discarded, and forgotten about by things as simple as a 6-inch step. I'm a wheelchair user myself and I think that if anyone really wants to experience what it's like to live in a world of hostile architecture, rent a chair and take it out for a day. Buildings that hate you aren't just a thing of videogames if you're disabled, they're very real, and far far too common.

Words can't describe how glad I am there's someone on this criticism hellscape of a website who recognizes critique doesn't have to be passionlessly dry faux-objectivity or fruitless bad-faith quests to find """"hidden lore."""" All the MauLers and MatPats in the world couldn''t come close to how much it moves me to hear about how a game *feels.* Thanks for doing what you do, Jacob.

Noah Caldwall-Gervaiz is on the far end of the depth and analyses, talking through entire series. It always blows my mind the organizational skills he executes in his work. It threw me hearing his voice and a shout out until I remembered it was YOUR playlist of video essays where I first found him. I find y'all inspiring and keep wanting to do something like this... maybe I will.

Have you ever played Pathologic? That's the game that lives in my brain rent free. I think you would like it... I would love to hear your analysis on the architecture in that game. Pathologic 2 is good too, and maybe a bit more accessible if you aren't familiar with the game, but the architecture in the original has always been a bit more striking to me. [places my favorite game under a box with a stick holding it up] pspspspsps come here jacob geller it's got buildings in it

This was beautiful. Thank you.

You ever feel like a RU-vidr is talking to you? This is that, but it's a conversation.

Jacob: "How often do you think of it, reference it, dream about it?" Me, an Outer Wilds player: *yes*

This comment wil never be seen, but..... I genuinely love your videos. They have consistently stellar quality, they're about interesting things and I always feel like I've learned something. The music is great, your narration is great, and it all just feels very.... Memorable. It's quality content

"The reading of all good books is like conversation with the finest minds of past centuries.” --Rene Descartes

The thing I don't like about this video is that I watched it 2 weeks late

Y’all. Y’ALL. What you’re doing? This is how literary analysis and literary criticism works. Writers needs to come together and compile your works into an academic journal! This way we don’t get so wrapped up in the commerce.

There have been times in my life where I felt a real emptiness of critical consciousness. I grew up enamored with the heart and souls of art; of my favorite books, of incredible games, of powerful music. In college I studied English. The opportunity to read and reason and analyze and discuss and process all of the messy subtleties of art of any kind is one of the most satisfying things to me. After I graduated college, it's been hard to keep up with that type of thinking in the same way. Often now I read or watch or play something, and I more consume it than I understand it. Without someone to talk to, someone to listen to, some critical community or conversation, things that I've sunk so much time and energy into seem to just slip away as another thing I did on that one day. But I miss really internalizing a piece of art like you describe so, SO much. It's the best feeling. Thank you for this essay. It's a beautiful piece and reminded me of what is really important to me. It's the best defense of criticism as an art form itself that I've ever heard, and makes me want to fall in love with it all over again.

Remembering Cyberpunk 2077: Three Months Early had me rolling

I love how as soon as the sad music finishes you go and talk about recommendations. It's as if you know that the people who sit there in stunned silence, listening to the beautiful music, are the ones who felt very deeply about this video, and they are the ones who need the recommendations the most. Thank you for this beautiful peace of literature.

Noah gervais is one of my long time favorite game reviewers. I loved hearing him here

I'm just happy to see an "overboard, polygon's board game show" reference around here. You're deepening our para-social relationship, Jacob

Lately my mind has been pretty consumed with politics and it gets pretty grim. Then you release an essay and it reminds me of what else is good in this world

8:06 not to undermine your point here but is that "The haunting of hill house" from the haunted house video and one of Aristotle Roufanis' photos from the artificial loneliness video? Love the little easter eggs and throwback's you put in some of your videos.

love the noah caldwell gervais shoutout, you and him are the only video essayist types I watch, so much of them are nerwriter esque waffle

As a longtime lurker on youtube and someone who discovered your channel through your video on the Secret Seekers, I have to say that I thoroughly enjoy your videos. In fact, you're one of the few 'reviewers' (though that term feels inadequate) that I make sure to witness every upload from. I do this in spite of occasionally disagreeing with your view (as that's the point. To formulate your own opinion even if you take from others) and in spite of preferring to not see modern politics brought into games; not because I believe they don't deserve their own place but through a joint combination of seeing many games making a skin-deep political statement just to sell copies and the fact that I personally use games to escape such dark discussion, preferring instead to theorize about these fantastical worlds that parallel our own. Because of this, I am regularly amazed by how deep and insightful your videos can be, regardless of the subject matter and regardless of my own perceived truths. Even still, most of your videos only have so much of an impact, they can only be so personal. This one, however, gave me genuine chills upon its completion and stopped me from just moving on to the next video on my list. It inspired me to sit and perform the mental equivalent of chewing my food longer just to savor it, to consider the information I'd been gifted, and the unique perspective it came from. This is information that will surely remain within my unconsciousness for years to come. So thank you, from the bottom of my heart, -A Grateful Consumer of Quality Content.

Hearing Jacob talk about his experience with Ico and PeterElliot was the most bizzare experience because it's almost an exact parallel to the way his Outer Wilds and A Thousand Ways of Seeing a Forest videos made me feel. Thanks for changing the way I see the world, man.

I like how Gameranx does game "reviews" they call them Before You Buy. They basically tell you what the game is about and its features and don't give the game a score, is up to you to decide if the game is for you or not

The "one" for me is your "Control, Anatomy, and the Legacy of the Haunted House" video. I've watched it so many times I can quote whole paragraphs, and it resounds so deeply in my mind. Like some of the games discussed here, I really didnt LIKE control at first but your video recintexrualized it so beautifully in my mind, especially alongside all the other pieces of media there.

There's an analytical essay about Metal Gear Solid 2, Driving Off the Map, that I first read when I was a teen, and I find myself thinking about it often. The way you talked about that ICO guide resonated with how I feel about it - it influenced a lot about how I interact with games, and thinking about games, and it's extremely fascinating to see that others have had that kind of experience with pieces of writing like them. And I think this video will impact people going forwards in a similar way, too!

This is what my masters level thesis research is examining. I'm asking what it means to play a video game with the history of it's reception in mind. I'm being told that the approach is innovative within the field and could be the beginning of my academic career. It seems we are all collectively entering into a new kind of spacetime where play is being embraced, explored, and understood in communal and interpersonal ways that are revealing deeply seeded elements of the activity that we usually dismissed as trivial. It's an exciting field to study in.

This is honestly how I feel about a lot of your essays/video essays. The Super Mario Galaxy one in particular resonated with me really heavily and still comes to mind every few days or so. I always felt there was *something* there that made me like Mario Galaxy so much more than I liked its sequel. But I could never figure out what that something was. That something that always drew me back to it. That something that made it feel like time spent doing nothing in the game was time well spent, a feeling that I cannot extend to any other game I have played, maybe Majoras Mask but that's it. Your essay made me understand what I felt and how I felt it. Your work honestly changed and keeps changing the way I experience and *understand* experiencing games far outside of the commercial conversations that are recognized as the norm. Thank you so much for adding to my life and expanding my world in so many meaningful and personal ways.

Alternate title: Art Appreciation as Art Music, movies, video games, etc. are more engaging and lasting when written personally and emotionally, so one could argue that moving the writing about those subjects into that same emotional space elevates it from art to Art.

"Understanding a piece of art, not as a simple solitary object, but as a part of our world makes everything feel like it means something..." This line is going to stick to me

Hey, this is late, but genuinely, thank you for making this video (and all your videos). Your videos made me start to view games as experiences, and that has influenced me greatly. Seeing you analyze games in broader contexts got me to start doing the same, and becoming more consciously aware of that has helped me grow from them in some cases. I've played some games in the past 3 years that I've gotten _deeply_ into. I have many pages of my (very personal) thoughts on them - before I saw your channel I think that would be entirely alien to me. I wrote "I think this game changed _who I am,_ " in my journal about several games, and I stand by all of them. Your videos were incredibly helpful in getting me to start that process, and they still are. You probably changed my life, or at least gave me the spark I needed to start changing it myself. I mean that completely sincerely. Once I have enough money, I'll start giving to your Patreon. (I'll also add that this has all caused an ideological shift too. Starting 2019ish, my views have done a near-180. They now largely align with yours, so you can infer what they were. I can't even read my old comments without cringing. Thanks for starting me on that path too!)

As soon as the theme from “Thomas Was Alone” started playing my head SHOT UP like !!!! I know that song!!! I know that game!!! I love that game!!!

Sneaky Noah Caldwell-Gervais shout-out there. He's got 140k subscribers but this is the first time I hear him mentioned at all. Edit: And he's even in the video xD

Jacob, your passionate belief that video games and all of life we experience can be full of meaning and beauty if we are just willing to look for it is a blessing. Your essays feel like they are speaking to me personally. Keep searching for beauty Jacob

An excellent video. I’m glad videos like these exist. They’re like...the shiny, glass-like bits amongst the sand that, when the view is taken as a whole, make the beach sparkle.

Ah yes, the power of retrospect put into words. I love this

The epic games launcher says I have 24 hours in Outer Wilds. Maybe 20 of that was before the DLC was released. By comparison, I have over 3000 hours between Destiny 2 and Kerbal Space Program. But Outer Wilds has occupied more space in my brain by farr.

Theres this nonbinary person who goes by Arcade Idea i have been reading lately who has, as someone who has never played video games until recently, been going back and retroactively doing critical analysis on the entire "canon" of video games. arcadeidea.wordpress.com Its well worth a read, especially the article on The Prisoner, a little-known game which offers amazing pre-emptive critique of video game worlds (especially management sims), and how they ultimately are bound by the socioeconomic conditions and views of their creators.

You genuinely have me thinking about games writing now -- feelings and the experience through a particular kind of literary analysis. I have a much easier time discussing systems and mechanics and translating player feelings to the gameplay rather than literary analysis and the like that you mention, but I wonder to what extent I can experiment with the format. I'm not sure, but perhaps that's the point.

I- this video was uploaded 2 minutes ago how are there comments from 23 hours ago???

Interesting as always, but I'm not sure I agree. Reviews should stay reviews, they serve a very specific purpose and work well as they are. Unlike other artistic mediums, games have a technical side which needs to be checked, in the sense that they're softwares which need to "work" as expected. Of course that's subjective too, but most reviews can at least give a pretty good impression of whether it will be the case for you when you play the game in question. And that remains true regarding other aspects, even if admittedly the most part of a review will be based on completely subjective impressions, there are things you can measure and which constitute informations that the reader may expect, like the framerate and texture resolution. My point is, essays such as the ones presented here will give a further insight, and I'm all for it, but reviews will provide the first and possibly more necessary one. We can't play all games, nor waste time on broken ones just because someone wrote a mindblowing personal story about it. Even if there's no such thing as complete objectivity in an appreciation, that's still what reviewers should at least aim for.

You can add this video to the list of inspirational pieces on gaming as this has inspired me to begin writing critically on video games. Your channel has been a huge inspiration in general at making me look more critically at many things I interact with from your piece on the intimacy of everyday thing to your dive into the architecture of gaming and how that plays a role in every game we play. Thank you for making these essays at the insane quality that you do.

Don't mind me just feeding the algorithm so more people can see this amazingness

This is such a good piece. Despite how much writing about games there is to find, so many of them still engage with games as products over art. I really love reading/watching pieces that interact with what games are saying and/or the author's personal experiences with games, how that shapes their perception of them. Thank you for making this, it's fantastic.

So I hungrily have watched your videos since I found the value in RU-vid outside of my son's constant streaming of twitch-type players screaming and reacting and posting shocked faces in the corners of their thumbnails. I must mention that I have shared the video on cave exploration very often and have watched the video about Control multiple times over. I love your work. And of all of the videos, this one would be my absolute favorite. While watching, it touched me in so many ways. I've blogged and written about media for years on tons of private blogs, trying to be the change I wish to see (or some version of the axiom which suggests to us not to complain but instead improve the things around you). And for all of the writing I've done, all of the distance I've built between myself and "writing reviews", this perfectly encapsulated WHAT I've been trying to do by writing ABOUT media and also WHY I've been trying to do it. Revisiting. Reshaping. Inviting. Using games and songs and albums as analogs for internal machinations of mind and heart. Thank you, Jacob. As always. Thank you so much for your honest and dedicated work to games and art as Art (and sometimes just as art [or sometimes just as whatever we find within it]).

Damn, so you mean that ALL THIS TIME we read the word REVIEW wrong? Through a review we can (re-)view someone else's experience of a game allowing us a (re-)view the game in a new light... This might sound stupid but it's the most shocking thought I've earned from your channel, I believe.

i will always wonder how creative people like you manage to organize their own footage in addition to paste them perfectly in their videos and collect them, would be a great help if you'd also grant and insight how your personal process from the idea and gameplay by yourself makes its way to an amazing video like this just my small request in that regards, since i've been hit a wall with capturing my gameplay .. Thanks for your video as always

16:19 "What is the hour count that a game lives in your memory? How often do you think of it? Reference it? Dream about it?" Best quote I've heard in a while. Bravo!

i haven’t really delved into the world of video game journalism but man this makes me feel like i’ve missed out on so much!! i do think one video essay that will always stay with me (and idk if it really falls into this realm, perhaps it is more investigative) is P.T.’s secret meaning. Man, felt like going down a rabbit hole but is something i’ll never forget and made me think so deeply about the video game industry as whole.

Man youtube videos make me want to do stuff like this and have a exciting life but I know I just couldn't do it

I love this video! It sums up a lot of how I feel about criticism and writing about art in general - its use, its value, exactly what it can do and why I wish there were far more people reading it and far more people (including myself) writing it. Music is my territory, more than games will ever be, but the sentiments and ideas in the words of both this video and those in so much other great Writing On Art are universal to the whole practice of art, whether creating or appreciating. I spend more time thinking about art criticism than I do remembering all the things I've forgotten to do that day, so I think my bias is pretty clear, but this is my favourite Jacob Geller video. If you, or anyone else who likes to write and talk and make things about the things they're passionate about are reading this, keep going and never stop.

Wonderful piece. I love how you got other critics to voice the writing you quoted, I love trying to explain why criticism is important, and the examples you use, and I love how personal, and positive the whole thing is. Like yourself, it was a story analysis on gamefaqs that opened my eyes in the mid-late 00s to the wider world of criticism, only mine was on Killer7. All the best!

16:18 this reminds me of my feelings about a game called OneShot, a little 10 dollar game thats around 6-8 hours long for the true ending. its honestly a good amount of money for the cost, but honestly, if the game was 60 dollars, i would still say it was worth it because of how much that games meant to me, how much that games affected me, how much i think about that game, its story, its characters, its music, its ending... just. everything about it is amazing. its a game that, like you said, at 17:00, i connected almost spiritually with. its a game thats most likely going to be with me for the rest of my life, and im not being hyperbolic. this doesnt have to do with much of the rest of the video (by the way, this video is amazing, some of your best work), that section just spoke to me and reminded me of oneshot. and im not afraid to admit that i genuinely almost cried thinking about this silly little RPGMaker game while you talked about being connected to a game for a long time, even after the credits roll. this comment kinda got away from my initial intent with writing it, but that only goes to show how good this game is, and how thought provoking jacob's video essay was. also, if you ever want to play this amazing indie gem of a game, with a highly impactful story, gorgeous music and art, great characters, and some fun puzzles, please go buy oneshot. like i said, its only 10 dollars, and the game is extremely worth it. if it impacts you the same way it impacted me, its a game that youll think about for a long time after its over. if you do, play it in windowed mode without any windows behind it, just your desktop. youll understand why i say this eventually.

Jacob, thank you so much for this video. You're message here unlocked something for me that I've been trying to bypass for a long time. A fear, I guess. To write and produce and to be a content creator, or something like one. One less wall in my way. Wonderful piece here, my friend! Extremely grateful. ^^

Thank you for this video; thanks for all of your videos, and all of your thoughts. You inspire and invoke. Hope that you're managing well through this particular form of discomfort and inconvenience (one specific one in a string of long ones, huh?).

My latest 83-minute review was 15,000 words and I was inspired by so many 1,000-2,000 word reviews from back in the day that I feel really just scratched the surface of what a game did. I do not envy the day-and-date game reviewer who needs to distill their thoughts into something concise with a lack of nuance or philosophy that your videos have. So many reads come across as a slurry of game features rather than a cohesive verdict. This became especially, infamously true with games like SimCity 2013 where verdicts shifted and were reconstituted as the game was exposed to real-world conditions. It also makes "provisional"/scoreless reviews look more like a business decision than one to dictate a verdict on a work of creativity. I feel that's how essayists like Lowtax and OMM were able to get away with their essays during the aughts because they were absurd, but also absurdly honest about the games they reviewed, even if they did ultimately come across as trope-y. They weren't being held to a marketing and business department, they could talk about games honestly and realistically in a way that canned Gamespot or IGN reviews couldn't. Today, they'd be video essayists. It's far easier to watch an 83-minute video than read a 15,000 word essay which is why videos like yours work so well.

It always feels like you're able to distill and isolate a deep existential truth with every video, and every time I'm moved so DEEPLY. Stop making me cry!! But also, don't stop. Thank you for sharing insight that resonates so deeply with me. :')

I had an experience with a similar idea in terms of my start into fanfiction. Taking something you've had the opportunity to begin to understand and then using an abstraction of time or context that allows you to more fully explore that world beyond the scope of what is simply presented. I was most inspired to start writing by a friend sharing the first couple of chapters of their idea with me for review. It was inspiring to see how they were interested in exploring the same questions I was, that the game itself left ambiguous, or simply didn't touch on in depth. Although most games I spend a lot of time thinking about are also the ones I have played a lot, I always appreciate listening to a perspective on a game I have not yet, or may never play. I think it comes back to perspective. I am interested in knowing what other people thought about it, where those experiences overlap, and where they diverge. This was a lot of fun to watch, thanks for putting it together.

It's interesting that games can be an amazing way to communicate ideas, but the people who feel this most strongly communicate about games with essays and videos. Does anyone try to express their thoughts about a game in the form of a game? That seems fascinating and under explored

Huh. I was just thinking earlier that it felt like time for a new jacob geller vid. Thanks!

How dare you reach into MY FUCKING BRAIN THROUGH A RU-vid VIDEO. How dare you have the audacity to make me think, "oh this might be the video that makes me write about the things i love, this entire youtube channel, along with leadhead, has inspired me to truly let the world know about the reason i cant stop playing these stupid fucking games" and then HAVE A ENTIRE 5 MINUTE LONG SECTION ENCOURAGING ME TO DO JUST THAT. NOT JUST TALKING ABOUT MAKING REVIEWS TO A NOBODY, YOU TALKED DIRECTLY TO ME, AND EVERYONE ELSE IN THIS COMMENT SECTION. You encouraged me to do what i truly want to do with my life, i havent cried this much in a while and i think i needed it. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you, so much

Earlier this year I played The Flower Collectors, and I couldn't stop thinking about it since. It's a bit clunky and clumsy, especially compared to my previous experience with The Lion's Song (an earlier release by the same studio), but the ideas it had on free press and police brutality under authoritarianism really hit me. Maybe it's because I see some parallel between it's depiction of Franco's Spain, and Marcos's Philippines. Maybe it's because I'm gradually witnessing my country slide back into it again under the current president, who works with Marcos's family in government. Maybe someday I'll do something with the few words I've privately written to myself about it, and expand on it.

For me and many others in the coment section- you, mr Geller, are the special esseyist who explains the subjects in a way that even if you don't know them they "Hit just right". Hell, thanks to you I got to know about Neisance, Kitty Horror Show, BLAME and several other mind bending and reality questioning media.

"What was the point of all this?" Asking this question is so important: its an indicator of the level at which one engages with the content. The first time I ever asked that question was after my second or third playthrough of MGS2. It might not be the best entry in the series, but the themes had such a profound effect on my critical consciousness. I have now played it 30+ times and I learn/notice something new each time I do. It is such an important work of art to me that I wrote a 15 year retrospective on the game - focusing on mass control, the inversion of the hero myth, masculinity in gamer culture, and media spectaclization - that landed me a short-lived job as a writer for an indie magazine. What helped me attain this critical consciousness was not only by reading other pieces by fellow fans that were gracious enough to share their thoughts online, but through hours of interactive analysis that I went through with other people on a MGS fan forum I moderated (remember those?). Unfortunately, fan forums are few and far between these days, and the format of our interactions and analyses have relocated and are highly centralised, but I find it remarkable that after almost two decades, I continue to have meaningful conversations with the game and the people who have similarly been affected by its messages.

What a beautiful video. You may never see this but thank you so much. You've changed the way I think about art forever so thank you.

I think that not only can you move beyond the essay, you must do so. Otherwise, who's to say that what you're remembering is the game itself and not the essay? To just consume well-written, thoughtful essays one after another because you don't want to make the commitment to actually play anything, you might be gaining skills, yes, but you won't be able to connect to that emotional, spiritual level as you hope when playing the damn thing. Essays, even the most artistic minded and theoretically obtuse of the bunch are still "light", "easy" entertainment in comparison to the game they analyse, likely by definition. They are derivative to it. They are contained in it. Their very function is to be a more practical, and therefore less elegant, less beautiful way to get across the message. In the past months I've found myself doing this, and while I can perhaps theorise a little better now, I'm so, so starving for an emotionally powerful narrative... game. But the limitations of my dying war dog of a computer don't let me play Yakuza 7, or Persona 4, or Wolfenstein, or AC Unity, all games that I just _know_ I will love, for various, often highly personal reasons (I've often had this feeling that I know I'll love something before even getting into it, and I've yet to be wrong. It happened with Shakespeare, with the Brahms Violin Concerto, and with AtLA among others). Coupled with my manic, do-the-whole-thing-from-start-to-finish-in-one-sitting approach and the heavy and ugly responsibilities of real life creeping into my head; I cannot help but see that these well-written, insightful essays can also be consumed in a weirdly destructive, mildly addicting way. This is my fault, of course, I'm writing this mostly to provide some solidarity to anyone else who might have the same problem. All in all, I think that if you're going to watch or read an essay about something, you should think of it as advice, and my stance with advice is that you should always consider it in the middle of forming your opinions and memories of things, but never in the beginning or the end of that process. Those should be always yours to fully control. So if an essay changes your views on a game, you absolutely must experience that game again, to internalise those views, understand them in your own language, make them a part of yourself, and get the emotional payoff, as well the cerebral one.

I really appreciate Tim Roger's game "reviews", because it gives you a window into his subjective experience of existing in the game more than it does the "is it GOOD?"

I felt something like anger well up in me at the very suggestion of ignoring the external in art. Every great art movement has been a response to the world at the time, and the history that made it so. Every artist is a citizen of that world, as are their critics, and the audiences that consume both. Many of the best books and films and paintings were made in conscious response to it. Art is expression. It’s meaning. And meaning *is* the external; it cannot exist inherently. Even those “visceral” aspects- do the guns feel good, do the colors pop, are the levels fun- are based on the judgements of people. And hell, the entire point of a review is to*respond.* How can you analyze anything without acknowledging that your thoughts and the art they’re aimed at both exist in context?

Love this one, just like I love all of them, but damn. I suspect it hits me a little differently than it's intended to because I have memory issues. How long will a game stick in my mind? I dont know. How long will the face of someone I love stick in my mind? I dont know. My memory is full of holes and I'm constantly stumbling into things that I know I've seen or done before but i cant remember them and i wish to god i could. I'm a little young to be forgetting things the way my grandfather does. And yet I have almost none of these formative memories of the games I've played and the books I've read.

I think why I love video games so much is because while having fun with playing with whatever the game has in story for me, at the end, what got me to actually LIKE the game is because of the story be it as motivators or as something that I care about. Even now when I don't have any Playstations or Nintendo consoles anymore and I haven't got the money to buy them, I think the story and writing are two of the things I unconsciously look for in games. I'm actually glad that video games are being taken more seriously and as storytelling medium.

I’m disappointed in my RU-vid feed for not notifying me about this earlier.

So glad someone called out the terrible mentality that games need to be long. The discourse around VIIIage right now is so mind-numbing "how is 10 hours worth 60 bucks"

I was looking for some content on youtube and i clicked in one of your videos by accident. I dont remember what video was, but it gave me the F E E L S. I finished the video and couldnt stop thinking about it for weeks. It was so good. Different from everything i saw on the plataform 'til that point. I never found your channel. Until last week. I saw the haunted house video pop up in my feed and i felt that curiosity that i almost never feel. I watched the video and i realised it was from the same channel i watched some time ago. It was like meeting a friend you didn't see i years. This time i devoured trough the channel, watching every video. And still, i felt the need to go "DEEPER", so i subscribed to the channel. Today, i saw, a new video. It was yours.

every time i finish something i really enjoy, whether it is a movie or a game or a book... i always look up reviews. Not really because i cant form my own opinion or anything, but because it somehow feels satisfying for someone else to pinpoint exactly how it made me feel and more importantly, why it made me feel that way. After i finished rdr2 i had this hole, because after spending every minute of my spare time on it for weeks, it was just gone... and there was no more of it. there are no similar games or continuation of the story... sure i could play rdr online or the epilogue or replay it but that wasnt the same. so instead i spent my time watching video essays about character analysis, watching videos of weird mods that they then used to make an incredibly surrealist piece of art that has to be my favourite fanmade video of any game. youre exactly right, reading these reviews and watching these essays etc makes the experience feel sort of complete.

This channel has some of the best commentary have ever seen from an analytical youtuber. In fact I would say that this is the first piece of writing on youtube that has made me cry from it's beauty alone, as in the last monologue that is exactly what it did. Thank you and continue to do what you do.

Art is an examination of the world around us, shown in a way unique to its creator. An examination of the art itself feels almost like a prism, refracting the light even further and showing colors that otherwise we would have missed. I love the style of your videos because of that.

Wonderful video, man.

The way someone writes about a game tells you a lot more about how that person sees and experiences games than it does about the games themselves. To some, games are just toys. To some, they're a way to pass the time when bored. To some, they are a spectacle to be enjoyed simply for its aesthetics, visual, audial, or tactile. To some, they are a challenge, meant to provide a frequent catharsis of accomplishment that real life doesn't. And to some, they are personal experiences that completely and utterly immerse them and become real memories as if the events in the game were real events in their life. I've experienced each of these feelings towards video games at different points in my life, and sometimes the changes in my perspective are about the same game. A game I loved as a child becomes hollow and repetitive as an adult. Or a game I was never interested in as a child suddenly becomes utterly enthralling as an adult. I have sometimes written about video games. Eulogized, memorialized, theorized, and criticized. But it was always a completely different experience, every single time. So I can't exactly blame someone for doing a handwavy review of a game that is more or less: "I mostly enjoyed it. There were things I didn't, but whatever." It is, after all, the way they experienced it.

I have a hypocritical view on art. "This story is about finding yourself", "this scene mean that the machine can't ever beat the perfectness of human being", "this game is about mindless violence". I reject those notion, constantly. It's too simple, too reductive, and sometimes it's like the person themselves only speak in sophistry, with their own narrow view they probably only learn in school and schlock media they consume or something. "This story is about finding the meaning that's yourself.", "this scene is about the conflict, not between human and machine, but about those who fight for what they loss, and their answer.", "this game is about the ethos, the evolution of mindless violence as a video game itself, as well as the evolution of it own avatar.". So I said those notion in return, trying to "explain" to people what they really mean. It should be deeper, it should be more complex, the meaning isn't some string of word people talk to feel better about themselves, but something people can understand...and such. Like I said, Hypocritical view on art. Who else to said their view isn't also correct? Who else to said that the story is supposed to be that simple, and it's only my snobby self that try to make it more complicated by themselves to put them in higher pedestal? Who else to said that I'm not doing something similar myself too, just to better my own ego? All of these thing could be true, and thus that mean all of myself, saying those thing, could be wrong. Not like I actually think all of myself could be wrong though. No one does, most of the times. The way people see art is hypocritical sometimes. They go to a museum, go onto a novel page, see their favorite work of art, reading their latest chapter, buy the latest game and play it,...They then, upon finding something they like, something that feel like it change something in them, they then declare that "this will change the way I live my life forever" and stuff like that. Most of the time, it ain't. People just going to table it to the side, never think about it again, and then live their life like normal until the next favorite thing arrive and the cycle repeat. Heck, I don't even know if they even think like that at all. The nature of entertainment, is that people seek it for temporal, ephemeral feeling, that, while trying to find the 1 masterpiece that will finally change their perspective, they will skim through hundreds of others that won't. That it will give only the most brief of feeling, and then forget about it the next day, but only a vague recollection left behind that show you watch it. And that's okay, because not all art need to be some world-changing piece of media that will rock the world, and people sometimes only want it for that precise and brief feeling...I know that, while also know and demand that art need to be deeper, beyond all the sophistry and the pretentiousness that people have placed upon it. Thus, both of them are true, and as such, make art hypocritical for me. It's also that it's fine for it to be such though, as since art reflect the nature of people, art can be hypocritical, to reflect the need for the people that is also hypocritical...for me that's also hypocritical. Each paragraph of this comment is long, and it's worded as if the writer itself feel like it's filled with word of wisdom and clarity. But it's piece together in chaos and incoherent that only reflect the amateur, spontaneous, pretentious and immaturity,...of only trying to sound smart while actually screaming to the void, and half-cringing at every sentences. I as a person demand deeper meaning while I myself is shallow, I tried to keep myself on higher standard, but I am also a lazy and a coward, who read many schlock media without reading the classic, who also know that one need to accept themselves, but nevertheless can't, who keep trying to crawl upward, but always never put more effort... Hah...I'm too tired writing this. I don't even have any idea why I wrote this in the first place. To maybe put this with abit more flair so that you may be happy about this, seeing your video definitely spark something within me, to write this nonsensical mess that's supposed to be about the hypocriticalness of art and end up just a rant about my own self. You can ignore it if you want, as it's only writing on the wall of the white void of apathy, though I would be abit happy/cringe if you maybe reading it and referencing it as some point in your next video, lol... Welp, there I goes and be hypocritical again. So yeah...Art is hypocrite, I am pretentios, yada the need for art to recognize it own selfishness yada thematic to end this comment unsasifactory yada end of comment.

i re-visit this video every so often and everytime i do i'm stuck with how true it is. ironically enough this video has given me a new lense to view analysis of my favourite media, as well as a guide to doing it myself. your videos as a whole have a special place in my heart, but this one in particular is special to me

Oh man this was absolutely beautiful! Well worht watching and remembering when engaging with any kind of art, not just video games. Also made me want to get back to writing more often.

some things that live in your mind pay quite a lot of rent, which is to say that their presence becomes a positive and useful part of your experience as a human being. so much writing on media has been like that for me

Thanks a lot Bruv I was just last night crying cause every single person and things meaning all came into my recognition at once and I cried because everything was so meaningful

Oh my god I absolutely love that you included Getting Over It With Bennet Foddy and The Beginners Guide in this. these are two of my very favorite video games, and I've always thought they played a role in games criticism. especially the beginners guide, which tells about 20 different stories all at once despice it ostensibly being just about games criticism. Also thanks for including thomas was alone music too :)