Architect Address November 2023 (Patreon)

Oh well look who it is it’s… you… you’ve got a lot of nerve showing up here after what you did back in 92 heck, well in case you’ve forgotten in your many years as a fugitive this is, err, the architect address that thing I do where I talk about some stuff, cool right?

Anyway I tend to ramble a bit too long at the start of these things so let’s get right into talking about an interesting question I was asked about how I pick games for the yearly games you should have played video and that’s an interesting one because contrary to a lot of my work I do actually have… sort of a system for that. So basically throughout the year I will make a note of promising indie games that are going to come out this year or have come out and sort them all into a biiiig list of stuff I want to play that looks cool - note this is usually how and why I end up playing big indie games and talking about them later than everyone else because they’re later on my list!

Anyway, so after I play a game enough to get a feel for it, it gets sorted into one of four categories, the first being disqualified because I don’t like it or because it for whatever reason got too popular, a lot of games I really like end up in here like vampire survivors last year or Celeste from a few years back or Baldur’s Gate 3 which I really should have anticipated being absolutely massive and it’s barely even an indie game at this point but oh well. The series is about games you should have played not games you definitely already had the chance to play. Next is the sure things, these are games I absolutely love and will fight to put on the list, usually this is only maybe between five and eight games and all of the top 3 will come from this group, almost always these games will have a video dedicated to them already so you can probably tell what they are beforehand if you’re really paying attention.

The other two are a bit more straightforward, the Play More’s and the Maybes - basically the drafting process for any given games you should have played ends up with me playing all the play more games to get a bead on them, then me whittling down the fifty or so maybes into about fifteen to round out the rest of the list. It’s a bit more complex than it just being the best games of that group because I like to get a good spread of genres and vibes so that everyone can find something they like. Some years, like last year, there were lots of sort of simulation style games that were really good like hardspace shipbreaker and power wash sim and I cut a few to make room for other more varied kinds of games I think deserved the spotlight more, I actually kind of have some mixed ish feelings on Signalis, despite it being a critical darling elsewhere but it’s a really cool game that I knew some people would really love if they heard about it and so I put it on the list despite thinking it has issues.

It’s weird, ultimately there are so many good games out there that the end list is ultimately kind of… political - I decide based on a lot of factors beyond the quality of the games because at a certain point their level of goodness is kind of arbitrary and it’s more about which ones deserve the spotlight and whether I’m unduly focusing on a particular kind of game. Lots of puzzles and horror games this time around hoo boy I’ve got some tough cuts to make.

Next up let’s talk about some videos shall we and these two are interesting in of the fact that they both sort of, uh, failed, for different reasons that I think are at the very least worth exploring. The first one is can a game be too realistic slash Starfield versus reality which I think is a cracking title really and this one is one of those videos that just sort of comes to me and is powered almost exclusively by frustration because man is Starfield just… kind of shit. I really think I went a bit soft on the game in this video because I thought maybe my disappointment with it would cool as I played more or saw other people playing the fun bits but man no it’s just this bland dry husk of a videogame. Like, every single decision they made was to make the game have as little personality and take as few risks as possible and although starfield is of course going to be financially successful I’m surprised to see as many people as I did sort of turning on the game because it sort of deserves it.

As for the body of the video, realism and what I ended up calling idealism for a joke is one of those things that’s kind of hard to pin down and I’m not sure I did a greaaaat job in this one to be honest but I do think that it’s an important thing to talk about. A lot of games are obsessed with this idea of providing a true to life simulation, which, y’know, fair enough go for it, AND a totally fantastical world that warps around the player at every turn and that’s invariably a recipe for disaster. Honestly this conflict is the rot at the heart of basically every Bethesda game and it’s why stuff like, say, The Witcher is able to deliver a setting that just feels so much deeper and more lived in that you can actually get immersed in, and why the likes of a Bioware game back when they were good can give you that great feeling of agency in the way your Skyrims or your Oblivions simply can’t. I find it interesting and it’s possibly something I could’ve stood to talk about some more that idealism and realism are two diametrically opposed ways of doing things but they both ultimately work towards the same aim of immersion, it’s something you don’t see very often in games and I think that’s an interesting dynamic we don’t explore very much and can explain why games that are on the surface very different end up satisfying that itch to sink into a world in different ways.

Overall, this video was… briefly, pretty successful but it dropped off hard and I think that’s because I like and IDIOT forgot to put tags on it and by the time I’d realized it was too late. Really bummed about that one because it seemed like it was doing well and I was pretty ahead of the curve on the now pretty ubiquitous Starfield dislike but oh well it was bound to happen eventually that is a mistake I’m not going to make again.

The other video I want to talk about is H.P Lovecraft Lives Inside Your Computer and let’s just get this one out of the way, this video did awfully and I think that’s a shame because it’s a really cool topic but I didn’t get it done until after Halloween and it’s got a weird as hell title that I like and evidently no-one else does so no-one watched it, bleh. Not great to have two stinkers in a row but what are you gonna do.

ANYWAY the thing I really really like about this video is that it talks about a thing I’ve been annoyed about for years and that is that there are loads and loads of Lovecraftian games out there and they’re all absolutely terrible at doing justice to Lovecraft’s actual writing, I think a lot of them get so wrapped up in the tentacle monsters and the theme of insanity that they forget to do anything actually insane. The comparisons to Freud and the uncanny too are pretty interesting, nothing that hasn’t been seen before in academia but it’s a pretty novel comparison when it comes to games that I haven’t seen anyone else do yet.

Also, the central metaphor of computers being Lovecrafian, I’m kind of surprised by that being not as much of a talking point or thing to loudly disagree with as I thought, I was expecting a few people to say that I was nuts for calling computers Lovecraftian and saying that the reason why we’re attracted to glitches and creepy pastas and in fact the broken bits of all media is because it reflects the uncertainty of our uncanny relationship with art, that’s a nice little observation.

One thing I DID see coming were the Lovecraft defenders getting very upset that I called him racist, and I did have more to say on that subject in the video but I cut it out because I didn’t want to be needlessly inflammatory not to mention going on too many tangents but part of me wishes I kept it? Denying Lovecraft was a huge racist isn’t just categorically incorrect revisionism, particularly in the case of Lovecraft it kind of shows a lack of understanding of his work. If Lovecraft WASN’T a fearful bigoted little bubble boy then he never would’ve tapped into that existential fear that the whole world couldn’t be trusted. So, people why try and say he wasn’t racist are really just outing themselves as not really understanding the man himself or his work and also revealing what everyone already knew that they were more interested in defending racism than defending Lovecraft all along, shocker.

On a lighter, ish, note myhouse dot wad is great and I was really glad to have an experience as unique as that one to pin the video around seriously i’ve never played anything quite like it. It’s constantly surprising, has a great I think possibly queer love story at the center and on top of that is just a mod with really well designed combat and puzzles to boot, the final fight with the song I played during the credits is a sublime experience and well worth powering through to get to. If you’ve not played very much of the original dooms I hardly blame you and would recommend looking up one of the many sort of tiered spoiler guides on the internet that go through the map step by step and letting you only see spoilers for stuff you want, they’re good!

Anyway I’ll stop there because youuu need to play myhouse in case you couldn’t guess, a little spoiler for you patrons, it’s definitely going on the end of year list, yeah I know it’s pretty popular but it’s my thing and I’m allowed to bend the rules if I want so there.  Bye!