Spookiest Questions and Answers of the Year (Patreon)

 Hey y’all! Hope everyone’s doing well. A quick update before the As to the Qs: the production of my next video is well underway, but I’m actually filming it for the first time ever! As such, it might take a little longer than usual to get out. Or it might not! I have no idea how editing live footage is going to be, but I’m excited to find out. In any case, let’s get into it. 

Nicholas- Are there any early 2000s rhythm games you'd like to see re-interpreted with 2019s VR tech(amplitude, etc)? Also, when are you and Select Screen Drew going to do a collaboration?

Honestly the first thing that springs to mind is Rez, which thankfully already has a VR adaptation! It just fits that lawnmower man aesthetic so well. You know, I think the key to VR rhythm games being so satisfying is actually the movement and hyper-accurate motion controls, even more than the whole headset deal. I’d really like to see games adapted that could take advantage of that.

I’ve been thinking about DJ Hero a lot recently- Cane and Rinse did an episode on it a few weeks back- and I’d really like to see what that would look like in VR. Obviously you couldn’t do a 1-1 translation of the plastic decks the game came with, but a more abstracted kind of spinning and mixing seems like it’d be really fun to mess around with. Maybe that’s not early 2000s per se, but that’s big on my wishlist right now.

Drew is great- I’ve been voices in his videos before, and I need to get him to do one for me. He was one of the first people in the video community that found me when I started doing this, and has frequently given me edits, tips, and a whole host of other helpful things.

Deven- 1. What got you inspired to make this type of content as opposed to others? 2. What games would you show someone who said that video games are not art?

1. “Type of content” could go a number of different ways, so I’ll take it to mean “video essays.” I wrote for a good couple years before I started making videos, and there are a couple of reasons I’m finding this more satisfying. For one, there are just a billion more eyes on it than pretty much anything I could write. I had stories on the front page of Game Informer’s website for days, and they’d get as many reads as one of my videos gets in an hour now. YouTube algorithms are a complete gamble, but even low-level content gets seen way more than individual blogs and the like. 

I also think videos push me to examine the content more. It was easy for me to write an essay, publish it, and never think about it again. When I have to spend dozens of hours editing around my script, I’m forced to confront myself on what I’ve written- and I think it leads to better results.

2. That’s a hard question because the idea of needing to prove something is art through quality just feels so misguided (though frequently necessary, I know). Early on, I would lean heavily on games like Journey, Dear Esther, Shadow of the Colossus- basically anything to show that video games “weren’t just about shooting people.”

Now I think I’d just ask that person to define what “art” means to them. To paraphrase Ian Danskin’s excellent video on tomatoes, when people say that something isn’t art, they often care a lot more about “the thing” than they do about what art is. I think we need to get past the idea that the title of art is a pedestal; I’d ask that person “do you think there’s bad art?” and then figure out where they drew the line between that and “not art.” 

Hard to go wrong with something like Gris, though.

ScreamBeam- What video of your own would you consider a personal favourite? What are your thoughts on games like the Talos Principle and the Turing Test that deal with the nature of human intelligence vs AI?

1. Ooh, talking about myself, yes please. The Wolfenstein video is probably the most important one I’ve made, since I think it really pushed me to step up my research and analysis game. I think the Headshots one is my best script. Honestly though, from a purely creative standpoint, the Outer Wilds one is my favorite.

2. It’s funny, I love that topic and yet I haven’t played either of those games. I think my favorite part of that genre is when ideas about AI are really just a way to inspect how we think of ourselves. Horizon: Zero Dawn does this exceptionally well, I love the way that game talks about human interactions with technology, and reckoning with the fact that AIs are still ultimately created by people and reflect those people’s values. 

My all-time fave is probably Soma. And Soma barely talks about “artificial” intelligences at all, but it really makes us come to terms with how fragile our idea of our own intelligence, and our own “self” is. I genuinely think Soma is like, in the running for the best science fiction story of this decade. 

Fans of the channel are already familiar I’m sure, but Universal Paperclips is a pretty great story of AI as well, and how its goals don’t have to be anything like our own.

Madi- (In memoriam of flash being phased out of browsers) What were your favorite flash games when you were a kid? 

1. Oh man, killer question. I was a BIG flash game kid, because I didn’t have consoles and my family computer wasn’t good enough to run most CD games. 

Motherlode, a 2d digging game, is one of the first games I remember basically dreaming about because I was so obsessed with it. Heli Attack 2 and 3 both kicked ass. I remember playing a Teen Titans-themed fighting game almost similar to Marvel vs Capcom on Cartoon Network’s website- CN had some good games, as did the lego site. 

There was also the subset of games that could bypass school content filters. I played a lot of Bowman with friends at school, practicing physics by shooting each other through the art with arrows. 

Shoutout to Interactive Buddy.

Jessinya- are there any channels similar to your own that you would recommend?

1. Oh man, tons. A lot of them are probably well known, Movies with Mikey and Lindsay Ellis and Philosophy Tube, etc etc. Noah Caldwell-Gervais isn’t under the radar by any means, but I think that his barebones editing means that people sometimes ignore that he’s maybe the best games writer currently living. 

A recent and small (but growing!) channel I want to recommend is Huntress X Thompson, who does powerful sociological readings of games and has genuinely fresh perspectives on topics I thought had been talked to death. She had a new take on Dark Souls in 20-freaking-19! Also a big shoutout to Lambhoot, who’s editing style is so effortlessly charming it makes me legit mad. 

That’s all! Much love to everyone, stay tuned for lots of fun stuff soon.