Failure, Inadequacy, and Why We Play | Monster Hunter World, XCOM 2, Doom 2016 & Factorio

Channel:

Ludocriticism

Subscribers:

1,440

Published on March 13, 2018 10:05:43 PM ● Video Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePXj_wnq_MM

Game:

Monster Hunter: World (2018)

Duration: 51:56

1,704 views

83

This time we're doing a whole thing. Failure, Inadequacy, and Why We Play uses Jesper Juul's Failure Paradox, and the idea that games promise players a way to repair an inadequacy that is created by the games in the first place. But is it necessarily so? Games can be wildly different things when you take a closer look, and I ask the question: what if games themselves aren't the only source of the inadequacy that motivates us to play?

We take a look at four distinct games—Monster Hunter World, XCOM 2, DOOM 2016, and Factorio—and think about how they relate to their player's sense of inadeqacy. How different are the games, and how would you organize them from this perspective?

In the end, we come up with a way to critically, and useful way to describe games beyond using analogies to other games or...food.

Video game criticism is growing rapidly, and this is a contribution to that communal project.

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Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
07:44 Monster Hunter Is Unethical
17:48 XCOM as the Antithesis
25: 55 DOOM
34:39 The Tetris Effect

Writing On Games' Dark Souls Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=viP4psS3MUQ&t=175s

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The first part of NoClip's impressive DOOM 2016 documentary:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PS6SBnccxMA

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Noah Caldwell-Gervais essential video about terrible games:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kivtv6wabBk&t=3724s&has_verified=1

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If I missed to include anything here, or there's something else you're curious to know more about, don't be afraid to let me know in the comments or on Twitter.

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Twitter: https://twitter.com/ludocriticism

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Thanks for watching!

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