Gaming on YouTube

I watch a lot of video game content on YouTube and I’m pretty sure I’ve never talked about it before, so let’s list off some good ones now.

Mark Brown runs relatively short videos about specific game design topics. He doesn’t have a specific theme, but if you play all and put his channel on shuffle, you’ll get a lot of interesting ideas thrown at you. Since his videos are usually under twenty minutes, he’s great for listening to as a quick cooldown between doing one task and another without accidentally losing the entire afternoon. Provided you remember to turn auto-play off.

Raycevick mainly covers shooters, a genre I don’t play much of. He usually does long analyses of specific games or series’, and apparently was one of those stereotypical fifteen year old Halo/Call of Duty fanboys before growing up and becoming smart. This gives him a unique perspective and ability to explain what these kinds of games do right.

Joseph Anderson was originally that guy that reviewed Souls games but later broke out into other games and genres. He’s reviewed everything from Subnautica to Super Mario Odyssey, although in fairness Odyssey did have that one Dark Souls level out of nowhere. Like Raycevick, he mainly reviews single games in extreme detail. His upload schedule is slower, but I find his encounter-by-encounter reviews of games like Bloodborne to be helpful for figuring out how to design my tabletop encounters. Obviously, a lot of the things he discusses don’t map 1:1 to a turn-based game and efforts to make Dark Souls RPGs usually end in failure for not understanding that, but there are some things that do translate well.

Summoning Salt holds some kind of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out speedrun world record. In celebration of achieving that record, he made a video about the world record progression from the game’s release to the moment he took the throne, and his YouTube channel has been about speedrun histories ever since. He shares Joseph Anderson’s glacial upload pace, but I found his archive fun to binge.

I can’t promise that my enjoyment of Spoiler Warning isn’t because I first started watching it when I was about 19 or 20 and had never seen or heard this kind of analysis before (except in written form, when members of that show’s cast blogged about it in a similar way). Assuming my rose-colored glasses haven’t totally impaired my judgement, though, Spoiler Warning is a let’s play series (peppered with some other stuff, especially as time went on) in which the hosts are mainly thoughtful, analytical types. Although sometimes that thoughtful analysis is used for evil.