1 Year Anniversary + Why Review Scores Kill Artistic Expression | Patreon Podcast
Added 2025-07-23 17:27:10 +0000 UTC
Hello Everyone!
On this week's episode of the Patreon Podcast I give a little update on what the past year of being a full-time youtuber has been like (thank you everyone for making this possible in the first place) and how a personal goal of mine for the year is inspired by Kurt Russell in that to take what I do really seriously and be compelling, but not to take myself too seriously in the process because ego management is a real battle as a youtuber in the roller coaster of the highs of outputting work people engage with, and the lows of self-hatred.
I also talk about another project I want to be working on for the year :-)
The 2nd half of the ep I talk about why I think review scores are a mistake and why I think they undermine the artistic poetic nature of critique and instead treat games as products rather than art. The false objectiveness of things like metacritic and universal review scores certainly isn't helping either.
Thank you again for making the past year possible and supporting the channel :-) I try my best not to be too sappy in the episode ha.
Sincerely,
Mark
Comments
Before i forget yes thesis is important for writing. I think comedians think of punchline first and then work backward and when writing a script start with the logline short few sentences of the explanation of what the movie is about. If you dont have those you have nothing.
Sky_Katchr_Gaming
2025-09-08 13:26:29 +0000 UTCI come back to this one repeatedly!
Michael Faircloth
2025-09-04 16:42:08 +0000 UTCGreat comment! I’d suggest that if you want Mark to see this, either DM him or share it in a newly created post.
cuto
2025-08-25 08:03:11 +0000 UTCHey Mark! New Patreon here. I just wanna say thank you for putting out your views and opinions in a very authentic way, and I want to wish you the best in this second year. About the podcast. I agree. I have been thinking on starting a youtube channel myself just for fun and to express how much I love some games, albums and movies. I feel like putting attaching a number into it does the expression of that love injustice, and as you said, makes it comparable with other scores. I feel like a lot of reviewers use the score as first statement and then create a video to justify said score, rather than jumping in and really breaking down game play elements like how does the controller work, how is the balance, how do you engage with enemies... I also believe that video games are art, and I feel like your review style really does justice to games by highlighting the abstract concepts of their gameplay, which I also think are the most important part of a game, way above their story or other things they way to preach. I just want to leave a few recommendations of things that can inspire you or create some thoughts, and feel free to take them or leave then: - About games without mechanics, have you thought about playing Famicom or even Atari games? I recently got into the Shmup Famicom library. I know you enjoyed Recca, but there also some super fun games for the system both old and new. The Famicom / Nes got a lot of inspiration of arcade games and their games tend to follow that structure, or at least a lot of them do from the ones I have tried. 2 buttons, 3 if you count select. Games really need to work with that. I actually started creating a Famicom / NES game myself. Some games I think you could enjoy are the newer bullet hell Over Obj, both Natsume's Final Mission (the Japanese version is more challenging and more fun than the west version in my opinion) and Dragon Fighter. I played also recently an Atari in a gamers meetup and I was surprised how much and engaging those games were. I played quite a bit of Berzerk and Moon Patrol. They didn't look super fun when I was seeing gameplay, but I enjoyed them a lot once I started playing them. - There is also a book that, it didn't change my believes, as I already followed that kind of approach without being aware of it, but it helped me seeing it though. It is "Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: The Myth of the Objective" by Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman. There they explore the idea of how setting ambitious objectives can be actually be detrimental to achieving them, and encourages the readers to take a more exploratory approach to life, without objectives. I am happy to finally have access to more of your content. I really appreciate your views and I hope you just keep them coming without thinking much of what we think of them :D. Your authenticity is what this world needs :P
Rrrulo
2025-08-24 19:17:59 +0000 UTCTwo thoughts: 1. As far as critiquing games or art in general is concerned, I don't think it results in yet another piece of art, i.e. conceptual analysis is not art, but simply theory. This doesn't mean critique involves no creativity, but simply that not all creative work equals art. However, there is no shame in it! A good analysis is as important as the piece of art itself and doesn't merely parasitize upon it, as so many philosophers have shown with film and literature, where their analysis in many cases incites new attention for the piece, or the piece is only known through it. 2. Reviews today are so much more performative than 15-20 years ago. Today, anyone can get footage of someone playing a new release at the click of a button, and get a pretty good idea of whether they will like it or not. Few people, I wager, still even read reviews, because, as you said quite correctly, it's the number that matters most. In what can only be described as the yellow-pressification of game reviews, the number carries all the drama that the celebrity photo or headline holds. Thus, in a dialectical twist, the number has become more social than the word, which is now more individual. However, as such, reviews are no longer critique, nor even proper product assessment anymore, but operate exclusively at this performative social level. That is why a lot of "reviews" boil down to whether the particular reviewer, like e.g. Yahtzee, likes the game. They have achieved a mysterious social standing which allows them to sway the tide simply by expressing their liking or disliking something (Facebookification). The rest of the review is mostly window dressing where most of the work goes into being snarky, funny, or the visuals. (I apologize for this long and somewhat incoherent comment)
eazteregg
2025-08-14 16:49:36 +0000 UTCYeah I have thought about what the role of advanced AI for fighting games could look like, and I think what would be cool is if they took really advanced AI, like Philip, and then combined it somehow with a scoring/ranking system so that you could play the fighting game single player, but still have your performance be somewhat measured so that other players could compete on a leaderboard of some kind. DOA 4 survival mode is a bit like this, but yeah the AI is too under developed to make that mode really pop the way it could if the AI was really robust and adaptive somehow.
The Electric Underground
2025-08-11 22:58:42 +0000 UTCThank you so much my dude!!! I really appreciate you taking the leap and supporting the channel, that's really awesome to hear!
The Electric Underground
2025-08-11 22:56:49 +0000 UTCI've been thinking a lot about the "tragedy of fighting games" lately because I recently learned about this neural network that plays Melee called Philip which is already able to consistently beat world class players, I really think you should look into this if you haven't already because I feel like it's not a total sort of solution, but it is very much an interesting path forward. Philip is trained on Slippi data and then further trains by playing against itself. Hypothetically you could do this with any other fighting game. So let's say Qudans plays a bunch of matches and gathered data for a bot—you could literally create a bot that might not be as ingenious or creative as Qudans, but that approximates his play style well enough to at least spar with. This would solve the problem of CPUs not being able to actually participate in the developing meta of the game, since of course it will be able to play even remotely on the level of a godlike player let alone do stuff like KBD. It's very much like a way of keeping these old games alive and almost immortalizing the knowledge, along with creating actually effective single-player content. Think Ghost Battle but actually really fucking good. The technology already exists, as is very much demonstrated by Philip, which has been around for like eight years now. There's even one from Street Fighter V from back in the day. I would love it if Emery Reigns had a bot train with him so that we could play some competitive DOA even if there is no one available to play with, or at the very least to be able to spar and train. I think the introduction of new technologies can really revitalize a game and raise its skill ceiling even more. Look what's happening with Melee just as a result of Slippi. Suddenly low to mid-tier mains are able to have consistent high-level practice, and so the game is evolving far more quickly, with characters that were once seen as non tournament-viable being contenders. I'm generally pretty anti-AI hype bullshit, but this is the kind of thing that it could be really neat for. i'm not really sure what the point of this post was other than to bring it to your attention if you weren't already aware of it. It's very interesting to me, I don't know. I tried talking to some friends about this and they mentioned how the most important part is the human aspect or whatever and I don't know, I just found this to be very humanistic and not very substantial. Sweating with a real human being next to you is amazing, but ultimately it's not really what I'm there for. If such technology can solve pretty much the biggest reason why fighting games die, which really boils down to completely insubstantial single player content compared to multiplayer, essentially making it a complete or near complete package, one that can adapt and change on its own in a way... yeah, I wouldn't mind not playing another human being again. EDIT: shit, just realized you mentioned this in the video haha
Florida sucks
2025-08-09 18:27:36 +0000 UTCCongrats man. I’ve been listening to you for a few years now. You’re the only person I give money to because I think your original take on art is important to support.
Kuma_Wamu
2025-07-30 21:59:23 +0000 UTC
