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The Errant Signal Thread

Israfael

Arcane
Joined
Sep 21, 2012
Messages
3,580
Yeah, most probably, it just seems all {INSERT YOUR LANGUAGE} majors are this kind of people... Judging from the amount of people supporting him, it's no wonder why there was only one LGS and Arkane is the only studios which tries to follow in their steps (with various degrees of success)
 

Rodcocker

Arbiter
Joined
May 31, 2018
Messages
193
This cuckboy is still going? Last video is him upset that Far Cry 5 isn't trying to make some overt political point or something? Always quite tragic to see people desperate for throwaway pop culture to be treated as high brow stuff. At this rate, 100 years from now the people that wrote the Marvel avengers films will be lauded like Shakespeare.
 

RoSoDude

Arcane
Joined
Oct 1, 2016
Messages
727
Ah yes, Errant "Quake is a mood piece and only a mood piece" Signal. This guy really grates on me, for all the reasons Israfael noted. He discusses games as if they're literature rather than, y'know, games. Sorry, the crucial parts of Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, and Quake were their level, weapon, enemy, and encounter design, not their thematic content. Civilization is primarily a strategy sim game, not a purveyor of colonialist rhetoric. Deus Ex is at its core an Immersive Sim RPG with deeply player-driven gameplay, not primarily a screed against "late-stage capitalism" which somehow has aged poorly due to the modern resurgence in conspiracy theories (huh?!). That last video was where my own patience with Errant Signal ended.

I can't stand the thought that people may be watching his stuff and thinking they're getting some deep, profound insight into games despite not even being given the barest surface-level analysis of the mechanics, systems, or content of the titles being discussed. All you'll learn by watching his videos is how to pass a literature analysis course, not how to think about level design, structure of game challenges, strategy and incentivization, player communication, and so on. I wouldn't be so bothered if he were more forthright about his own shortcomings in actual game design analysis, but he seems to honestly believe that this isn't relevant. He has an entire video arguing that a distinction between the study of gameplay and the study of narrative is bunk and that there's no overabundance of pure narratologists "writing about how games are exclusively a narrative medium", yet I would submit that he's a perfect example of such. Tearing down the distinction between gameplay and story analysis allows him to position himself as discussing games in general even though he's firmly on the narratology side of the spectrum, which I ultimately regard as a disingenuous move.

It's fine (good even) to have people on both sides, but I think it's obvious that they require different skillsets and that there's already a huge majority who talk about narrative/thematic/literary content in games at the expense of any richer discussion of the things that actually make the games medium unique. You can chalk this up to the fact that the majority of people who are enthusiastically engaged in analyzing entertainment media are people with literature degrees and the like, while the people primed to understand the gameplay side of things are mostly wrapped up in professions related to computer science, cognitive psychology, architecture, graphic design, economic game theory, and so on, not writing blogs about video games.
 
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baud

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Dec 11, 2016
Messages
3,992
Location
Septentrion
RPG Wokedex Strap Yourselves In Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag. Pathfinder: Wrath I helped put crap in Monomyth


Published on 27 Jun 2018
Hey all! This month we're looking at a small indie game that's sort of a hyper-stylized visual novel! It's about being a Very Online Teenager in 1999, and also about a young trans woman coming to realize that fact. It's pretty neat if you like vaporwave music, chilling on the internet with some friends on rainy days, or young adult fiction!
 

Dave the Druid

Educated
Joined
Dec 29, 2022
Messages
193
TWO LONG POSTS ABOUT TWO QUICK NOTES
Two things I’ve been mulling over in the wake of the most recent episode that I felt I wanted to share:


Note one: Yes, I have heard that the Casino level in Thief wasn’t added until Thief Gold. I have heard about it in YouTube comments, in a reddit thread, on Twenty Sided, and on Twitter. I’m really confused about why people keep bringing this up.

The original version of Star Wars: A New Hope was released in 1977. Twenty years later in 1997 The Special Editions of Star Wars were released and added a bunch of stuff, from CGI Jabba the Hutt to Greedo shooting first. While this was generally considered a Bad Decision™ for its content, it was notable more for the fact that it effectively replaced the versions that had come before. For years it was incredibly difficult to get clean, official looking, anamorphic cuts of the original films on modern formats like DVD. Meanwhile the special editions were available at every big box retailer in the country. “Han shoots first” wasn’t just a debate about which version is better but a frustrated rant against a preferred version being erased.

And that’s largely what happened with the release of Thief Gold. It has effectively replaced the original version of Thief: The Dark Project. Thief Gold is pretty much the only way to acquire the game legally these days – it’s the only version sold on GOG or Steam. Sure, one could always hit up fleamarkets or eBay for a CD-ROM copy of the original. But at that point it’s like dumpster diving for VHS copy of the original Star Wars. It’s more of a collector’s item than the way the work exists for most people today. And we certainly don’t respond to people who complain about Sy Snootles with: “Well, that wasn’t in the original edition.”

So I’m confused as to why that seems to be the reaction to criticizing extraneous missions in Thief Gold. Does the fact that the original iteration of Thief: The Dark Project didn’t have this level make it any less of a digression? Is the level’s aimless design any more exusable because you didn’t have to play it in 1998 butdo have to play it now? I’m not sure I buy the “An expansion added this forced two hour digression that goes nowhere after the fact, and that makes it okay” argument any more than I buy “This song and dance number by a horribly animated CGI monster that kills the pacing of Return of the Jedi was added later, and that makes it okay.” Just because the level was added later doesn’t make it any less meandering or tangential. Nor does it cut my overall argument down, as it was just a singular example of a problem endemic to the game as a whole – I could have just as easily chosen the first Haunted Cathedral level or The Mages Tower or Escape! or the Horn of Quintus level as my example.

Note two: I’m not sure the current way I produce these big Errant Signal episodes is working. Hm. Maybe this should have been Thing One. Anyways.

To produce a video like Thief or The Novelist or Quake I have to play through the whole game (sometimes multiple times!) to ensure I record everything of value I’d want to possibly cite. This takes several hours, as games aren’t generally a medium known for their brevity or respect for the player’s time. At the end of that arduous process I have hundreds and hundreds of gigs of raw game footage that I can’t easily store anywhere. But I also certainly don’t want to play through the game and re-record all that footage ever again. It may seem absurd to complain about not wanting to play a video game again, but try playing your favorite game not just as a player but as a camera man interested in usable footage that conveys cogent points for the entire length of the game.

So it becomes a sort of use-it-or-lose-it scenario, with a game’s worth of footage laid out in front of me destined for the trashbin if it isn’t used right now. As a result Errant Signal episodes become a huge mishmash of everything I could possibly have to say on a game. This works well enough if I have just one thing to say about a title – my looks at Hotline Miami and Sleeping Dogs are pretty focused to one idea (a single reading of the game).

But some games are just too large; too culturally relevant to boil down to a single neat perspective. Thief was one of those games and I think the episode suffered as a result. I had to talk about the stealth model, I had to talk about the changing way violence is framed in stealth games, I had to talk about how movement mattered, I had to talk about Thief’s ties to the *Shock games, I had to talk about Garrett’s position as a natural balance bringer between order and chaos… and the result was an episode that had the flimsy pretense of comparing new stealth games to Thief’s approach when really I just had to hit all of those checkboxes. And it’s not like people didn’t notice.

The real problem is that I don’t know how I want to fix this. I don’t want to stop doing in-depth, comprehensive analysis and contextualization for games. But at the same time there are going to be games that are so malleable and cover so much ground that a single topic is all but impossible. I don’t know if a structural change would be better (rigidly segmented sections instead of a freeflowing essay?) or if it would be better to do a series of smaller, shorter videos on each section of the game I want to talk about (an episode on Thief’s ties to the *Shock games and a centrist worldview followed by another brief episode about Thief’s lighting and stealth model, etc). Or maybe the rambly, aimless video essay is an aesthetic choice? I dunno. But it’s given me something to think about.
I know this thread is ancient and no one likes this guys' brand of pseudo-intellectual, droning nonsense anymore but I'd just like to thank Infinitron for saving this. I got into an argument with a guy about who makes the shittiest Youtube video essays and he bought up good ol' Errant Signal and I said something along the lines of, "Oh yeah, that dude's a shocker. Years ago he made a video essay about the original Thief where he spent ages criticizing this one level, the Thieves Guild, and how it didn't add anything to the narrative and that it shouldn't have been in the game. Not realizing that level was added for Thief Gold, which was kinda like a GOTY edition re-release of the game. And to be clear: that's fine. People make mistakes, just maybe pin a comment admitting your error or something along those lines. But what ES did was he instead wrote a fucking long-ass blog post where he basically said that he wasn't at fault for failing to do the bare minimum of research, instead the game was at fault for being sold in that way. The guy literally can't take critisism despite basically being a critic, even when he gets basic facts completely wrong." But when I went to go look for said blog post I couldn't find it cause his blog disappeared into the ether years ago.

Now I've found it. I even managed to get an archive of it via the Wayback machine here. Thank you Infinitron, it's even worse than I remembered it being. Just one quick point:
And that’s largely what happened with the release of Thief Gold. It has effectively replaced the original version of Thief: The Dark Project. Thief Gold is pretty much the only way to acquire the game legally these days – it’s the only version sold on GOG or Steam. Sure, one could always hit up fleamarkets or eBay for a CD-ROM copy of the original. But at that point it’s like dumpster diving for VHS copy of the original Star Wars. It’s more of a collector’s item than the way the work exists for most people today. And we certainly don’t respond to people who complain about Sy Snootles with: “Well, that wasn’t in the original edition.”
So there's one tiny problem with this. Sy Snootles was in the original version of Return of the Jedi. Here's the proof:


I get what he's trying to say, but he literally didn't bother to do the research. Again. Take that youtuber from a decade ago
 

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