Blogroll
Links to other websites that Doctor Professor finds interesting, entertaining, or useful.
Link Categories
Blogs and Analysis
If you like reading what I think about games, you’ll probably like reading what these folks think about them too.
Videogames, programming, tabletop games, and nerd culture ephemera. Shamus Young is a prolific blogger on game design, storytelling, industry practices, and more. He also used to be a columnist for The Escapist and his old Experienced Points articles and Stolen Pixels screenshot comics are worth an archive binge. His writing is insightful and approachable and I’ve picked up some very useful concepts from him. His blog also hosts a few regular guest writers including Rutskarn and Bob Case. Start With: My favorite is his Mass Effect Retrospective that covers the entire trilogy—but if you want to start with something that isn’t fifty parts, Games and the Fear of Death is a quick writeup of good and bad ways to scare the player. Or you could browse his curated list of entry points on his home page and pick something yourself. Raph Koster's personal website: MMOs, gaming, writing, art, music, books Raph Koster is a game designer known mainly for his work as lead designer of Ultima Online and creative director of Star Wars Galaxies, as well as his book A Theory of Fun for Game Design. His blog ranges a bit but most frequently discusses the design of online games. Start With: Do auction houses suck? Deranged Rantings About Games Jeff Vogel founded Spiderweb Software in 1994 and has been making old-school RPGs ever since. His writing reflects lessons learned from his decades of experience as an indie developer, starting long before Steam and its ilk. Archive binging encouraged—but note that after 2020, he stopped updating his Blogspot blog and moved to Substack. Start With: Make Your Game Easy. Then Make It Easier. The Art and Business of Making Games Game Developer (formerly Gamasutra) is a community site for game developers. While some news gets posted, the emphasis is on shared learnings and analysis of various aspects of game development. It’s a great place for soaking in the collective wisdom of the industry—there are articles and blog posts by people with a wide variety of experiences and perspectives. Start With: Player Relationship types in Hades’ Star The resource for people who make and sell games. GamesIndustry.biz is a news site focused more on industry happenings than on specific games. It’s a good way to keep a finger on the pulse of the games industry as a whole. Start With: As a news site, most content is not evergreen, but Our Uncertain Streaming Future is a solid example of what to expect.
Comics
Because games are funny, but these people make them funnier.
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary. Started in 1998 and still going strong, Penny Arcade is the video game webcomic. Creators Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik have also since gone on to create many more related properties, including a children’s charity and a series of gaming conventions. With their attention split thusly, the comic itself has arguably passed its best days, but it’s still enjoyable and if you’re familiar with gaming culture of the past couple of decades the archives are still there for your enjoyment. Start With: It’s hard to pick just one, but how about Mancraft? It’s a solid strip, but if you read the associated news posts it turns out to be so much more. Awkward Zombie is a comic by Katie Tiedrich that pokes affectionate fun at the ridiculous things that happen in games. Jokes are very well framed, though it helps to have at least a passing familiarity with the games being lampooned. Start With: Culture Schlock. All the Ace Attorney comics are personal favorites of mine, but I have lost count of the number of times I have linked this specific one to people. A light-hearted comic by Matthew Taranto starring the cast of Super Smash Bros. Brawl and the worlds of their respective games. It’s finished now, but if you’re a Nintendo fan the archives are absolutely worth a binge. Start With: Security A comic by Zac Gorman that celebrates the way games can capture our imagination. Dramatic moments are recreated in emotionally evocative panels or strips, expressing not how the scenes were but how they made us feel. There hasn’t been a new one in years, but there’s plenty to enjoy in the archives. Start With: http://magicalgametime.com/post/48470399171
Videos
I don’t even watch TV anymore. I just watch these people talk about games.
In-depth video game reviews and critiques, with a sharp focus on gameplay and narrative where applicable. Joseph Anderson makes longform videos analyzing and reviewing games. They’re quite meaty, ranging in length from around 25 minutes on the low end to multiple hours on the high end. His analysis is insightful and he’s quite good at pacing and organizing his videos to keep them clear and engaging. I’m a big fan of his work and always happy to see when he’s put out a new video—the longer, the better. Start With: The Witness - A Great Game That You Shouldn’t Play Balanced, thoughtful and mature gaming coverage of core games. Episodes produced by Sam P. Skill Up’s videos are insightful, entertaining, and well-researched. While they are mostly reviews of recent titles (or previews of ones currently in beta), they also include the definitive look at the history of loot boxes: The Untold History of EA’s Long (and Rich) Pay-2-Win Love Affair Start With: A VERY Serious Review of Blood and Truth (2019) Join Masahiro Sakurai, director of several Kirby games and the Super Smash Bros. series, as he reflects on his work in the games industry and offers insightful and easy-to-understand advice about game development. The goal? To try and help make games around the world a little more fun! Legendary game director/designer Masahiro Sakurai (best known for Kirby and Smash Bros.) shares approachable and digestible nuggets of wisdom gleaned from his time in the games industry. His insights are useful for anyone looking to make action games and are backed up by years of success. Start With: Stop for Big Moments!! Hi, I'm Alanah Pearce, I'm a 27 year old Australian living in California. I am a video game writer at Sony's Santa Monica Studio, and wrote about video games for various media outlets for nine years before that. Basically, this is my personal channel, which is a hobby that I update in my spare time. Even though it is intended to be a personal channel, I apparently end up talking about video games majority of the time anyway. Alanah Pearce is a former games journalist and a current games writer. Her personal YouTube channel is mostly games-focused and ranges widely, featuring news reactions and commentary, analysis of industry events and trends, gameplay streams, video podcasts, and more. I’m mostly here for her commentary and analysis—she applies her insider experience and perspective and the results are consistently insightful, even-handed, and engaging. Start With: Why are games announced early, then delayed? Here at Errant Signal we felt the world was lacking in internet reviews of videogames, so we set out to fill that void. Upon realizing it was standing room only, we decided to try that new Italian place instead. Chris Franklin makes video essays that function as reviews but are more about critical analysis. Often focused on a specific game, occasionally focused instead around an idea or trend, the videos examine games on their own merits but also consider how they fit into the broader context. Videos are generally ten to fifteen minutes long, though sometimes range down to five or up to twenty. Start With: Errant Signal - Sonic and Speed I make video essays about games, web culture, and social politics. Ian Danskin doesn’t just talk about video games, though they (often adventure games in particular) are the subject of most of his videos. Regardless of the topic, he anchors the discussion in a broader context and applies critical theory for a deeper understanding. Start With: The Artist is Absent: Davey Wreden and The Beginner’s Guide, an examination of The Beginner’s Guide that digs into the nature of storytelling and communication itself. In-depth games reviews and analysis, nothing more; nothing less. Matthewmatosis analyzes, critiques, and occasionally recommends games and series, with a focus on mechanics and the effect of design decisions on the player. There are even a couple of full-game playthroughs with commentary: Dark Souls and Devil May Cry. His insights are valuable and I’ve learned a lot from his videos. Start With: Tetris - A Perfect Game? is a bite-sized intro to his style. In-depth video game critique, analysis and retrospectives plus video essays on game design. Thinreaper likes shining a light on games that didn’t receive much critical analysis. His videos range from looking at a specific aspect of a game’s design to an in-depth review of an entire game, with a focus on overlooked games or examining popular ones from new angles. Start With: Red Dead Redemption - In-depth Review. And if you make it through that hour and a half, check out the 17-minute followup, Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare - In-depth Review. I do a mixture of in-depth video game critiques, standard reviews, and random opinion pieces. I'm still new at making videos, but working hard to improve. You can follow me on Twitter at @cdavis_games or email me at chris@cdavisgames.com. Chris Davis does look at some triple-A games, but spends more time with indie titles—which I appreciate. He takes in-depth looks at games that don’t otherwise get much attention, and I find the results useful and entertaining. Going even further niche, he has an ongoing series specifically looking back at A History of Isometric CRPGs. Start With: CrossCode Review | A Hidden Gem Recipes and artisanal cakes. Medium- to long-form analysis of games and franchises. His look at Metroid II clocks in at a mere half hour, while his Pokémon Omega Ruby video is more of an abbreviated Let’s Play with analytical digressions that is over seven hours long and totally worth it. Shay has a knack for identifying and explaining the core of a game experience and how aspects of the overall design enhance or diminish it. Start With: Sonic Spitball, a look back over the entire Sonic the Hedgehog series (as of 2016) and how it might better embody its core strengths in 3D. Welcome to Super Bunnyhop, where we make pseudo-journalistic content about video games! Your host: George Weidman George Weidman reviews and analyzes games, but he also does some honest-to-god investigative journalism, researching topics like what gaming was like behind the Berlin Wall or the state of the art for preventing motion sickeness in VR and wrapping up his learnings for your entertainment and enlightenment. Start With: Garry’s Mod Nazis This Earth is not well. At some point, Shammy pivoted his channel to focus on in-depth reviews, and I’m glad he did because the results have been great. His writing is clever and makes for very entertaining delivery of his insights. He makes a lot of off-color jokes, but they aren’t a crutch—one of his best videos is A Mom-Friendly Review of Outlast 2 made with the constraint that the video has to keep the language clean and avoid jargon. Start With: An Actual Review of Titanfall 2 How does Half Life teach without tutorials? Why didn't Capcom tell you that it was manipulating Resident Evil 4's difficulty? How are Nintendo's level designers inspired by Chinese poetry? Find out, in Game Maker's Toolkit, hosted by Mark Brown. Mark Brown provides what is essentially an intro course on game design. Sometimes videos are focused on specific games, but more often they are focused on a class of problem or solution—aiming to give game makers another tool for their kit. Mark has an unfortunate tendency to label certain approaches as better than others rather than noting their tradeoffs, but he’s still a good source for an intro-level view of some important and valuable concepts. Start With: Super Mario 3D World’s 4 Step Level Design My name's Bobby the Tongue. I'm a part-time tenor saxophone player and part-time investor, primarily in long-odds NFL parlays. When I was a young man touring with the Count Basie ghost band, the bandleader asked me if I liked gaming. I thought he meant something else, so I said yeah. Turns out he meant video games, and I had to play them every day on the bus from then on (it was a weird situation where there were three tenors and only one alto so I thought it wouldn't hurt to be polite). Long story short, now I like them, but if they fall even slightly short of my expectations you'll never hear the end of it. Bob Case’s posting schedule is a bit erratic, but he puts out quality review and editorial videos. There’s an emphasis on RPGs and his channel got started by ranting about Mass Effect 3, though he also talks about broader topics and non-game nerdy things. Start With: Tasteful, Understated Nerdrage: A Tale of Two Companies, an eerily prescient look at what will inevitably happen to BioWare after its then-recent acquisition by EA. The study and discussion of game design Daltrey Waters’s channel has changed a bit, but I found his design analysis videos interesting and enjoyable. His older stuff is worth an archive binge, though you can skip anything posted after 2016. Start With: 4 Reasons Why PlayStation and Nintendo Games were Different watch my stupid ass videos In the world of gaming humor videos, there are two types of creators: Dunkey, and people who wish they were Dunkey. He’s also gotten pretty good at reviewing games seriously when he wants to. Start With: Dunkuza 3
