game analysis

Roaring Kitty's July 2020 analysis of GameStop, arguing a bullish deep-value case when the stock was about $4 and short interest exceeded 100%. It covers fundamentals, cash balance and technicals.

A videogamedunkey video essay on video game critics. It argues that a critic's taste and integrity matter as much as their score, and tries to explain why major outlets give such inflated ratings.

Ross Scott's Game Dungeon episode on Deus Ex, a long review of the game covering its narrative, politics and economic philosophy as well as its design.

ArtosisTV's commentary on Game 1 of DeepMind's AlphaStar (Protoss) against top Zerg player Serral at Blizzcon 2019. Artosis analyzes the match with beginner-friendly commentary.

Stuart Ashen presents a talk at the 2017 Norwich Gaming Festival on Hareraiser, a notoriously bad video game tied to the Masquerade treasure hunt. He explores why it may be the worst game ever made.

Ross Scott of Accursed Farms makes a 76-minute argument that selling video games as a service is a form of consumer fraud. He lays out legal arguments that games are goods, covers ownership and programmed obsolescence, and discusses game preservation.

An hour-long, carefully sourced video essay from Ahoy asking what counts as a video game and which one was truly first. It examines Tennis for Two, Spacewar, Pong, the Brown Box and a 1947 CRT device.

Razbuten has his wife, who has never played games, try a sampling of titles and shows where she struggles. It highlights unspoken game conventions that experienced players take for granted.

Ross Scott's Game Dungeon episode critiques Deus Ex: Human Revolution, looking at its design, politics and visual style. It is part of his series of opinionated game reviews.

Digital Foundry's Alex Battaglia analyzes Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, the first AAA game built around ray tracing. It covers the new global illumination, emissive lighting, DLSS and performance on AMD and Nvidia hardware.

Jacob Geller's video essay examines how architecture in schools and in video games, such as cover shooters, is shaped by violence. It touches on brutalism, campus policing and protests.

Ross Scott of Accursed Farms lays out a campaign to stop publishers from permanently shutting down games, using The Crew as the test case. He covers government initiatives and the legal options, and the stopkillinggames.com site.

A Jimquisition episode examining the human cost of predatory videogame monetization, focusing on loot boxes and microtransactions. It features testimonials from people harmed by gambling-style game mechanics.

Joseph Anderson's long critique of Jonathan Blow's puzzle game The Witness, covering its gameplay, its hundreds of puzzles and its philosophical pretensions. He argues it is a great game that he nonetheless advises against playing.

Karl Jobst investigates the retro video game bubble, examining who caused it, who profits, and how graders and auction houses like Wata Games and Heritage inflate prices. It runs almost an hour.

A short, deadpan Sony instructional video from E3 2013 showing how to 'share' a PS4 game by physically handing the disc to a friend. It was Sony's jab at Microsoft's planned restrictions on used games and game sharing for the Xbox One.

An Onion News Network parody of a 'hyper-realistic' modern warfare game whose gameplay consists of paperwork, waiting for orders and repairing trucks.

The Game Theorists analyze how PewDiePie rose to become the most subscribed channel on YouTube. The video looks at why let's plays and gaming channels thrive on the platform.

An Ars Technica War Stories episode in which Richard Garriott and Starr Long describe Ultima Online's planned virtual ecology and how players wrecked it. Players slaughtered the animals and also broke the in-game economy.

A short clip of the audience at Valve's 2017 announcement of Artifact, a Dota 2 card game, reacting with visible disappointment. The footage captures the awkward silence and the logo reveal.

The video argues that machine-learning-based aimbots, which read the screen and drive the controls externally, could make cheating in FPS games undetectable. It explains how conventional aimbots work, how the new approach differs, and speculates on possible detection.

Morphcat Games explains how they fit Micro Mages, a full-featured NES game, into 40 kilobytes. It covers compression of sprites and level layouts and other space-saving tricks.

Modern Vintage Gamer looks at OpenLara, an open source Tomb Raider engine, running on the Game Boy Advance. The video explains how the port achieves playable speeds on the GBA's slow ARM CPU, with input from the developer XProger.

Michael Steil's 33c3 talk explains essentially everything about the Game Boy: CPU, video hardware, peripherals, and the tricks used by games and demos. It revives the era of counting clock cycles around hardware limits.

Jonathan Blow speaks at UC Berkeley's CSUA about how to program independent games. He argues for keeping code simple, avoiding unnecessary work, and shipping.

Jonathan Blow's first talk on designing a new programming language for games, which became Jai. He explains the problems with C++ and why Go, Rust and D do not fit game development.

Jonathan Blow's CreativeMornings talk arguing that business models shape game design, drawing an analogy between 1970s TV and HBO and between free-to-play and premium games. He calls for games that inspire awe rather than chase constraints.

Jonathan Blow's 2010 Rice University talk argues that game designers refine their techniques in ways that can manipulate players, as with A/B-tested social games. He discusses the ethical responsibility of designers and what games can offer beyond addiction.

A 2017 GDC postmortem in which Sid Meier and Bruce Shelley tell how Civilization came together from board game design and sim game experience. They cover its development history and design decisions, including fairness and luck.

Tom Scott plays the Royal Game of Ur against British Museum curator Irving Finkel, who deciphered its rules from a cuneiform tablet. Finkel teaches the game and explains its history as the oldest playable board game.

The first lecture of Francis Su's Harvey Mudd real analysis course, covering the construction of the rational numbers. It begins a full lecture series that follows a standard analysis text.

Eric Chahi's GDC 2011 postmortem of Another World (Out of This World), describing how he built the game. He shows his polygon art approach, rotoscoping and animation tools.

Jake Birkett of Grey Alien Games explains at GDC 2016 how an indie developer survived eleven years without a hit by building a long tail of games and redefining success.

Bob Nystrom, author of Game Programming Patterns, gives a Roguelike Celebration 2018 talk questioning whether entity component systems are the only way to structure a game. He walks through alternative architectures drawn from roguelike development.

At GDC 2019, Bennett Foddy and Zach Gage ask why game developers rarely sign their work. They argue that indie developers could benefit from putting their names on their games.

Zach Oakes explains why Clojure suits making games at runtime, so designers can experience their work as they build it. He combines abstract discussion with live demonstrations, drawing on his play-clj library and Nightmod tool.

RimWorld creator Tynan Sylvester explains at GDC 2017 how Ludeon framed the game as a story generator rather than a game. He covers the design methods that came out of that frame.

David Crane's 2011 GDC postmortem of Pitfall, the classic Atari 2600 game. He explains how he created the game under the severe hardware limits of the console.

Lucas Pope, creator of Return of the Obra Dinn, explains in Ars Technica's War Stories how localizing the game's logbook nearly sank the project.

Extra Credits explains from a game developer's perspective why AAA games have stayed at $60 despite inflation, and how that pressure drives DLC, microtransactions and loot boxes.