i love being a fan of media. ur favorite character shows up on screen or page and ur just like hiiii baby
villain apologist
i love being a fan of media. ur favorite character shows up on screen or page and ur just like hiiii baby
Legendary horror manga artist Junji Ito loved the Barbie movie (x)
breaking: lil nas x to rebrand as lil nas twitter
dreaming up a syllabus for an imaginary course on metanarratives about gameplay, which i think would go something like:
unit 1: who do you think you are i am - auto-documentary & games
- Vlogs and the Hyperreal, Folding Ideas
- The Slow Death of Let’s Play Videos, Meraki (to ~10:00)
- World Record Progression: Mike Tyson, Summoning Salt
- ROBLOX_OOF.mp3, hbomberguy
- Life as a Bokoblin: A Zelda Nature Documentary, Monster Maze
- optional: Braindump on the History of Let’s Plays, slowbeef
unit 2: what like it’s hard? - intro to challenge narratives
- Chapter 26: Games as Narrative Play: Two Structures for Narrative Play, Rules of Play
- A different kind of challenge run: Minimalist 100% (BOTW), Wolf Link
- Surviving 100 Days on Just Dirt, Mogswamp
- Can You Beat DARK SOULS III with Only Firebombs, the Backlogs
- Is it Possible to Beat Super Mario 3D World while permanently crouching?, Ceave Gaming
- The Pacifist Challenge - Beating Hollow Knight Without Collecting Soul [CHALLENGE] - Sample
- optional: How to 100% Snowpeak Ruins in under 15 minutes, bewildebeest
unit 3: nelly you don’t understand, i AM the narrative - form and function
- The Future of Writing about Games, Jacob Geller
- Can You Beat GRIME Without Weapons?, the Backlogs
- Mushroom Kingdom Championships, Ceave Gaming
- My Life as a Barber in Hitman 2, MinMax (Leo Vader)
- MyHouse.WAD - Inside Doom’s Most Terrifying Mod, PowerPak
- optional: Mega Microvideos, Matthewmatosis
the theme and structure is mostly intended to introduce at least one critical or historically contextual work followed by examples of the type of narrative in question.
in unit 1, this is the idea of “How do people talk about their own experiences in the context of YouTube and playing video games?” across three rather different kinds of documentaries. unit 2 is intended to take that lens of who is telling what tale and dial in on challenge running, where i first noticed the way some videos turn the story of overcoming a challenge into its own narrative that is distinct from but related to the narrative events of the game itself. unit 3 circles back to the bigger picture with a variety of examples that, to me, are maximally metanarrative, the emergent story of the player-narrator now functionally replacing the game’s embedded narrative.
bonus unit: broken narratives
- Glitch & the Grotesque at the MLA, Sylvia Korman
- Watching time loop movies to escape my time loop, Leo Vader
- The Stanley Parable, Dark Souls, and Intended Play, Folding Ideas
- Breaking Madden, Jon Bois
- The TRUTH about the Pizzaplex in FNAF: Security Breach, AstralSpiff
this one is highly underdeveloped, but i’d love to work out something more robust building on randomizer challenges that produce intentionally bizarre, semi-ironic “lore,” and bois-esque endeavors to break games so hard the story itself crumbles. but that’s really out of scope so i’m just including the links to things i couldn’t bear to get rid of. more rambling abt the challenge runs I chose under the cut.
chronic illness mood of the week
Did I stutter
Hey yeah in the midst of all the hype and the strikes, can we PLEASE fucking talk about this
grocery store mission barely accomplished took massive damage to the hull and all internal systems. shield repair could take days
