THOTH, And How I Talk About Games

Just a little thing I made at the end of last month while fighting off some sickness.

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This episode was made possible by generous support through Patreon!
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[LittleJimmy]

For that graph to be an accurate depiction of Jim Sterling you'd need a fourth quadrant for "Pogs and Boglins".

[Chauzuvoy]

I thought it was pretty good. One thing that Mark Brown does that might help is looking at a game or a mechanic in the context of other games. Part of the challenge is that while you can break the literary and cultural aspect of a game more or less in isolation, looking at purely mechanics-focused games or looking at games through that formalist lens doesn't have as much impact unless you can contrast with alternative decisions in a similar area. The literary and cultural analysis is all about connecting the game with ideas that exist independently of the game and seeing what it has to add to the conversation about those ideas, but it's harder to put formal design decisions into the kind of context that makes that conversation really work. We're not constantly immersed in formal game design the way we are in... culture and life and everything. Your bit here about the lack of scoring and leaderboards and how it makes Thoth easier to appreciate casually or as a puzzle game rather than a twitchy top-down shooter is a good example of what I'm talking about. Drawing the comparison makes it easy to understand the impact of the design choices on the overall experience with the game.

[CTKnoll]

As someone who's a huge fan of Mark Brown and mechanically focused reviews in general, I really liked this video. It spoke to me a lot like your Devil Daggers video did, in the sense that you talk about the "feel" of the mechanics from your own personal viewpoint. It does kind of lack the depth I'm used to from you, however, and I think you kind of mentioned that yourself. I don't think you need to review every game that you like, if the inspiration to have a real talking point doesn't come to you.

I am subscribed to you for a reason; people like you BECAUSE you can express what a game is like in a cultural, social, or intensely personal context. If I want hard mechanical analysis, I go to Mark Brown. If I want a critical, muckraking journalistic take or something more fanboyish, I'll go to George over at Super Bunnyhop. But if I want an analysis that delves into, for lack of a better word, the "game studies", academic aspect that a lot of Youtube critics and analysts tend to be very bad at, I'll go to you.

Long story short, you did really well on this video in a space you aren't comfortable with. But I don't watch you to pretend to be Mark Brown or George Wiedman. I watch you because you bring to the table what few others do. Keep up the amazing work.

[malcolmcosh]

Definitely wasn't too dry! I'm glad to hear you're interested in incorporating more discussion of mechanics and game design in your videos as I think they can and will increasingly be important to the overall meaning or message of games. Interactivity is what makes the game medium different than other artistic mediums so to gloss over how that element influences the cultural impact of games would be like judging a movie based solely on its script. Love your stuff and can't wait to hear whatever you got coming next!

[patrikkarlsson]

I like your approach, you managed to tie all the different mechanics into a whole, to analyze why the individual mechanics are there and how they contribute to forming the your experience while going through the game. I think that is the right way to cover these kind of games on this channel. Keep doing it, and I think you will get really good at it (This was already good, but you know, insecurity and all that). There are alot of great tips in the comments, but from what I see, most of them think you are on the right path, saying something like "this is good, add this and it'd be even better". So just keep doing it and keep improving and expanding your mechanically focused game coverage. You've already got the talent for it.

[Narratorway]

Long Answer: Really, this just sounds like an issue of confidence. In execution, what you do is largely talk about your feelings. You talk about how a game makes you feel. That is a perspective that is certainly easier to contextualize with narrative/theme/tone, but doesn't _require_ it and I think this video effectively proves that point. What you had to say here in this video doesn't have much difference in content or execution from any of your other videos. You have a definite knack for articulating emotion as it relates to play, which is no small feat. Too often, videogame 'analysis' is degraded by focusing on aspects that are easier to quantify, which are easier to justify as right/wrong and therefore usually end up becoming thinly veiled exercises in bias. Since your approach is far more personal and less interested in those quantitative aspects, I'd say it's actually suited very well to talk about a much greater range of videogame concepts than other analytical approaches I've seen.

Short Answer: S'all good bro!

[professorizzy]

Loved this vid, a nice change of pace for your videos, love old format but giving it a little rest with videos like this is much appreciated.

[jacobdriscoll]

Just an idea: you could try to humanize the mechanics by talking about specifically what those mechanics speak to in the emotional experience of the gameplay. Tension rise and release. The discovery of figuring out a puzzle. What makes THOTH a different experience than OSMOS, and why. Mechanics tell a story in their introduction, education, and execution.

[MrCalijor]

I am a fan of all of your work on this channel even if I don't always agree with all of your critique or comments. When you're commenting on just raw mechanics I think you do a good job of summarizing the mechanics and noting on how well it works as you go, as well as keeping the video interesting, not just in your sort of essay-format speech but also in the way the video is edited, which I think can go a long way to maintaining interest in something like this.

I would also like to note that your visualization of critics is actually really cool and something I've not really thought of. The only flaw I can poke in it is that technical reviewers - that is, people who largely cover the technical aspects of games also exist but aren't fully represented by this representation, although it could be argued that technical information could be included in the value portion of it, I think that what, say, Total Biscuit does is entirely different from what someone like Jim Sterling does, though they would both be heavily biased towards the top of the pyramid despite being fundamentally different and generally covering different things.

Overall, cool video, though I can't finish the Night in the Woods video because it looks interesting and I'd rather not spoil myself further, it looks pretty good too. Your videos always have some interesting commentary and I look forward to them, even though you often cover story-focused indie games that I miss or simply can't afford to buy at launch and thus spoil for me, your analysis is interesting enough to create value that somehow transcends the games often-times.

[UofU]

I loved your review and it felt really well thought out and planned. You stroke a wonderful balance between the gameplay itself and then the reasons why you liked it and was overall very engaging the entire time!

[Nkanyiso_K]

What a treat! 2 videos in day, 🤓Great birthday present

[linden]

I think that was a neat review, but maybe add discussion on why it captivates you in the same way you would a story or theme.


Looking at the footage you captured you could perhaps have talked about:

-What is the aesthetic? You can't necessarily look at every game in terms of theme, but you can usually look at the broad aesthetic that the game is going for. How does the game achieve that with sounds, colors, UI, menus, transitions, fonts and the actual ingame visuals? Obviously just a break down of all of those separate things would be dry, but talk about how they come together, and how they impact on play, and the type of play it encourages.
For example I thought that the presentation of the level number on the background, and how the font choice creates a seamless slide transition when completing the level, not only looks real nice but also supports the smaller scope objectives/arcadey flow of the game;

-The basic components. It looks like you move slower when you shoot, but you don't mention that anywhere. Just talking 4 seconds to say that would give your audience an idea of the basic premise, and enable them to intuit how that risk and reward scales with all the other mechanics.

-What cool stuff has this game got? Like how the game plays with 2D representations of 3D objects, where 2D hitboxes are changed based on the rotation of a 3D object, and how that's represented with the fixed star texture. On it's own, mentioning this doesn't add much, but if you relate it to the rest of the game and it's presentation, it adds some more insight into the game and it's design. It's good to point out cool design things;


But regardless it wasn't at all dry, it could just do with a bit more. Establishing how the game works, the type of play it encourages, how presentation affects them, and cool unique elements of design.

[Mcraisins]

Mechanic based reviews usually go with a very neat format: VERY light description on how it works (usually with the video explaining most of it), pros and cons, and an important, lengthy discussion on how it pushes itself. For example, in the case of Thoth, it's tight on ideas and seems dense, but its small size makes it easy to be dense with ideas. It never pushes how the enemies react to the ship (no variations on bullets, size, speed, or anything for that matter) and arena; they are purely static elements, and if they weren't that was something important to the viewer that was never shown in the video or discussed.

I never caught on to this channel since mechanics are what I really like, but it seems you do a great job on the narrative aspects. But for mechanical discussions, just like describing a narrative in-depth, it takes an understanding of what the game DOESN'T do as much as it does do. Also, players pushing for time and score are useful for replayability. Without great difficulty, score/time, or further complexity, why would I come back to it? <-That's what you write about!

[BenanaBoy]

I really like these videos where you reflect on your own writing, and discussion style. Great job!

[StormyKnight]

I personally really appreciate that you have a passion to talk about games in a way besides just saying if you think they are worth buying or not, and that you're trying to find new and creative ways to do that, even when it feels unnatural to you. I do think good consumer advice is valuable, but discussions like these are interesting and insightful in such a fresh way, and I will always love it. It's quite challenging to articulate the kinds of things that you do in these videos. At the very least, I think they succeed in getting people to think about aspects of games that they otherwise wouldn't have.

[sonny]

I think there's always humanity to find in mechanics, not just in narratives.Even an abstract game like this expresses trough its rules its own view of the world and evokes certain emotions, which you are great at pointing out and analyzing. I'd actually love to see you tackle more games like this, since mechanical-based games are my favourites and I consider you to be one of the best game writers on youtube

[shachna]

I liked this. I'm newer to your channel, but I enjoyed this video. I'm also a fan of games and enjoy anything that helps me think deeper about them, especially on the design side of things.

[IvoryOasis]

I like all the content you put out. What makes you different than other people is the thoughtfulness you put into the stuff you cover....you approach things from different interesting perspectives (no matter what it is, even something so simple as this game).

For stuff like this you could dig into talking about how the game is evolving a mechanic or why it is fun to you. Or even go into some of the history of this type of game and whatnot. Or just fire off really short "hay look at this" videos which are a couple minutes long.

[JaredEMitchell]

Keep doing stuff like this, man! I've been wanting to get a really formalist level design video series off the ground for some time now, because I personally like the really formalist stuff but don't really see enough of it on YouTube.

[translucency]

I enjoy your videos greatly and I think that as long as you talk about what the games you play convey, you'll do great.