Episode 5 is up! It’s going to be tight, but I think I’m going to make my self-imposed goal of releasing four episodes in December.
Mostly new material this time, although there’s elements pulled from this post. Script below the jump.
Let’s Study
Let’s Study Horror Games, ep 4
Episode 4 is up! And, I have to say, at this point the first three feel like an elaborate throat-clearing exercise. This is where the deep dive really begins. Script below the jump.
Let’s Study Horror Games, ep 3
Episode 3 is up! I’m planning to step up the pace on these massively, far beyond the one-dropping-per-month rate I’ve been going at so far. Hoping to get 3 more posted by the end of the year. Script below the jump.
Let’s Study Horror Games, ep 2
Episode 2 is up! In hindsight, I should have released the first one on October 1st, instead of October 31st. That way I could have produced a steady stream of them while people were in a spooky mood. At the rate things are going now, I’m going to be releasing subsequent episodes of this series on Christmas, maybe even Valentine’s Day. Whoops!
This one is on the Silent Hill series, so there’s aspects of this post and this post folded into it. There’s also plenty of new materials, though. Keep you eyes peeled for episode 3. Script, as usual, is below the fold.
Let’s Study Horror Games
I’ve begun a new series of “Let’s Study” videos on horror games, just in time for Halloween. This first episode explores the historical roots of the survival horror genre, which means that it’s a new manifestation of this lesson plan.
Over the summer, I was working on a peer-reviewed video essay that’s quite thematically dense. As a result, this video feels a little bit shaggy to me: loose, casual, searching for a central raison d’être. I constantly had to remind myself that this is for general audiences, and not every audiovisual argument needs to be an airtight assemblage of well-researched examples.
The unqualified good news? This video is a massive improvement on the previous blog post version of this lesson plan. The future videos in this series will be a mix of original material and “enhanced remakes” of previous lesson plans.
Transcript below the fold, as usual.
It’s Finished: Let’s Study Half-Life 2
It’s been a long haul, but my series of video essays on Half-Life 2 is now complete.
I have embedded the entire finished series above. If you just want to watch the seventh and final part, it is here. In it, I look at how Valve’s “herding” techniques were adopted and expanded upon by subsequent developers, taking a peek at things like Insomniac Game’s Resistance 3, Monolith Production’s 2000s-era output, and DICE’s Mirror’s Edge Catalyst. I then investigate how the pleasures of the well-constructed linear first-person shooter have been transformed and absorbed into himitsu-bako/wander games (which I just give up and call “walking simulators” in the video, so that people will know what the hell I’m talking about).
Creating video content takes much longer than other types of blog content, but I also find it much more rewarding. (I was right when I predicted that, because my day job has me writing all day long, I would have less patience for it outside of work.) Expect more in the future.
Script below the jump.
Let’s Study Half-Life 2, Pt 6
Six down, one to go. Although expect a longer break before my next one. (It may not be out until the end of May.)
Script below the jump.
Let’s Study Half-Life 2, Pt 5
Part 5 is up!
Parts 1 & 2 were adaptations of existing material—namely, the first chapter of my dissertation, and this lesson plan. Parts 3 & 4 consisted mostly of newly-generated material. Part 5 returns to being an adaptation of existing writing—this time around, this blog post.
I had to scale back my ambitions for this particular video. Originally, it was going to feature a tour through some .OBJ outputs of the coastline maps, following in the footsteps of Robert Yang’s visualizations. Everything was going smoothly for awhile: I successfully extracted all the necessary textures with GCFScape, successfully opened the maps in Crafty, and got myself an education license for Maya. But try as I might, I just couldn’t quite pull off the trick that Yang did, and get the textures to affix to the .OBJ files. (He kind of glosses over that crucial step the blog post.) All I could produce were textureless grey blobs of level geometry.
So I fell back on a tried-and-true method of compositing a bunch of noclip screenshots in Photoshop. In addition to not having that cool 3D model look, it was also an enormous time sink, though, and slowed me down a lot. C’est la vie, I suppose.
Script below the jump.
Let’s Study Half-Life 2, Pt 4
So, I actually uploaded this one to Youtube on Thursday, but forgot to embed it here until now. Oops!
I’m going to try to teach myself some new tricks for Part 5, so expect a bit of a wait before that appears.
Script below the jump.
Let’s Study Half-Life 2, Part 2: The Horizon
Part two is up!
It will likely take me longer for me to get part three up. (I’m thinking Monday, April 2nd, at the earliest.) This is the last video in the series that borrows heavily from my dissertation and prior course materials—subsequent videos will delve deeply into new material, which means they’ll be spaced out more.
Script below the jump.
Intermittent Mechanism 