Ian here—
A quick break from the regular flow of student blog posts to announce that the fifth episode of the Shape Up! series is posted. It is on Save the Date and Elsinore, both games that I have taught before but never written about myself on the blog before, despite them being favorites of mine. More videos in this series are forthcoming, although it will be awhile before I can return to the one-a-month schedule.
Full script below the jump.
Continue readingIan here—
Fourth episode of the Shape Up! series is here, this time on a game I’ve taught several times in classes and long wanted to do a video about: P.T.
Due to the busyness of this academic quarter, I won’t be able to keep up with the one-video-per-month schedule I’ve set for myself since October. Hoping to get at least one more episode of the Shape Up! series out between now and summer, and then return to the one-video-per-month schedule during the summer.
The script that follows below the jump is the shooting script for the video. (It differs from the actual transcript in one key respect.)
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This will be my last post of year year, slipping in the third episode of my Shape Up! video essay series before 2023 comes to a close.
Any longtime readers of the blog will know that I have a longstanding interest in what Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky has dubbed “the process genre,” applying her concept to games well before her book on the subject even came out. This is my first video essay to dabble in the subject, with a suite of all-new examples to chew over. (Be prepared for a surprisingly lengthy introduction about the historical reception of Jeanne Dielman for a video nominally about videogames.)
Full script below the jump. Happy (almost) new year, everyone!
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This is the second episode of my Shape Up! series of video essays about form, structure, and pacing in games. This time my primary focus is on Else Heart.Break(), which is one of the most ambitious games I’ve ever played, but also has what is probably the worst opening act of any game I’ve ever played. Bit of a meandering structure to this one, as I spend the first twelve minutes finding common ground with my dad’s frustrations playing games, and also dive into the varieties of irony games can use when conveying instructions to players—and the dangers of using it sloppily.
Full script below the jump.
Continue readingIan here—
Here is the first real episode of my new Shape Up! series of video essays about form, structure, and pacing in games. My central case study is Skeleton Business’ 2019 game Vignettes, although before I get there I spend a whole lot of time placing it in the context of what Joel Goodwin has termed “secret box games” or “himitsu-bako games.” This has been a topic I’ve written quite a few blog posts on. For years, I wanted to coalesce some of those disparate ideas and game appreciations into a video essay, but I never found the proper way to do that until I inaugurated this series.
Script below the jump.
Continue readingIan here—
Almost a year ago I offhandedly mentioned that I was planning all-new series of videos for 2023. The start date is later than I had anticipated, but I’ll still be sneaking a few in by the end of the year.
It is my pleasure to introduce Shape Up!, a new series of video essays about form, structure, and pacing in games. It is the fruit of a whole lot of academic work I’ve done in the past year, including two different courses I taught about shape and form in art (narrative and otherwise).
Episode one is uploading as I type this. In the meantime, as we wait, the script to this introductory video is below the jump.
Continue readingIan here—
I’m making some plans for some all-new series of videos to start premiering in 2023. But since it’s been such a long gap, I wanted to make sure I posted at least one thing to YouTube in 2022, and Halloween gave me a nice external deadline.
The low-poly aesthetic in horror has been one I’ve been interested in for awhile, all the way back since Back in 1995 was released in 2016. 2022 was the year I devoted to finally diving into a scene that’s become quite deep and diverse in recent years, to coincide with the horror class I taught in the spring quarter, and am teaching again right at this moment.
Script below the jump.
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Flying by the seat of my pants on this series, really hope to time the fourth and final video to drop on June 19, which will be the one-year anniversary of the release of Last of Us Part II. Script below the jump!
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It’s back to The Last of Us—this time, Part II. I’m trying my best to finish one entry in this series once every three weeks, even in the midst of my current teaching schedule. So far, so good! Script below the jump.
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Intermittent Mechanism 