i discovered something neat the other week.
it’s a public access show called the gameshelf, and what i like about it is what i am going to stretch language and call its multidisciplinary approach to games (something i think costik would approve of). the show discusses board games, videogames and even pinball alike under broad themes like “tile-laying games” and “economic games“. they make a correlation between carcassonne and pipe dream that i never thought to make. it’s intelligent and insightful. it’s unfortunate that they havn’t produced any new episodes in almost a year. (their blog is pretty active though.)
the other neat thing about the show is that occasionally zarf makes an appearance. his adventure game reviews were hugely influential to my own critical style and are required reading, as far as i’m concerned, for anyone who wants to write about videogames.
the reason i bring this all up is there’s this other, new show that may be the complete opposite of the gameshelf. and yet, every week they give air time to freeware games who might never otherwise get any. annie’s on the show this week and unlike by some people there was no mention of high heels, so i suppose i approve.
3 comments
Thank you for your kind comments!
I, too, would like to make the show more regularly – I’ve tended to start every year since 2006 by leaping out of bed and roaring “This is the year of Four Gameshelfs!” before making even fewer than the year before. It’s a labor of love that requires a lot of cat-herding, and my life has sadly been too jumpy this year to support it.
Someday we’ll get our act together and push the result on the RSS feed, and pleasantly surprise a lot of people at once. I love the subscribe-and-forget syndication model, for stuff like this.
I just followed links from this blog to discover “The Gamer’s Quarter”, which looks rather like the magazine I wanted to start years ago before I got distracted by the idea of video production. I think my show and y’all’s magazine have the same starting point of impatience with mainstream game media, though!
(Second attempt at posting this comment… I hope it doesn’t appear twice.)
Wait, my reviews are influential? (Nobody tells me these things…)
Thank you. That is so good to hear. I feel like my adventure reviewing has been on a bitter streak recently, as I alternate between “that was enjoyable but I have nothing to say about it” and “that was good but flawed and I am going to pour vitriol on the flaws”. But I still try to keep in mind that the goal is *getting better games made*, and better critical discussion is part of that.
I appear on Jason’s TV show occasionally but on his blog frequently, and the blog is what we’ve been putting work into recently, so I unsubtly recommend it around to fans of me. :)
i did notice that recent trend in your reviews, and i think that may be because the general “is this good value for money” review just isn’t as useful as the specific “these are the things that stuck out to me as worth discussing” essay – at least to me as a designer. and frankly, there isn’t enough real discussion of design, which is why your reviews have always interested me.
jmac, we havn’t put out an issue of the quarter in over a year either so i can’t really chide you. i keep insisting we’re about to; it has be true someday.
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