Only you can get this video into production.

I announced in this week’s episode a project I’ve had incubating for some months now–a lengthy special feature covering my favorite CRPG franchise–the one that got me started in this business. Of course, I’m talking about the Gold Box series. It’s been awhile since I’ve played them, but I have played almost all of them from start to finish on my trusty ol’ Commodore 64. I’ve also recently had the pleasure of interviewing several key folks on their design teams. In short, I love this series, and I think (and from what I’ve gathered from my informal polls of you guys), a feature on them is just the sort of bait I need to grow the show.

You see, this special won’t get made unless (or, hopefully, until!) I reach 25,000 subscribers on YouTube. I need to grow the show for various reasons, but the main one is attracting a steady stream of designers and other professionals to be my guests. The bigger my audience, the more likely I am hear to a big fat “YES!” to my requests to have them on. Matt Chat has its fans, but, sadly, the numbers just aren’t as appealing as they could be.

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Damn them all to hell!

By the Gods, I’ll quaff no more.

I’ve been having a small discussion on my last YouTube video about hoarding potions, scrolls, and the other sorts of temporary power-ups you tend to collect in most CRPGs. It seems that I’m not alone in saving all of these for some perceived future battle, in which I’ll need to use them all to overcome a particularly nasty fight. However, what usually happens is I simply never use them, and by the end of the game have a huge, mostly obsolete stack of low-level stat boosting and emergency stuff. For the sake of convenience, I’ll just say “potions” here, though I also mean things like healing scrolls or anything else that either grants a temporary bonus or is considered an “emergency” item, such as a healing or mana recovery potion.

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On the Sublime is a classic treatise, apparently wrongly attributed to Longinus, that has long been one of my favorite works of literary and rhetorical criticism. Essentially, what the author wants to do is figure out why some works of poetry, or prose, for that matter, are sublime. What exactly the author means by the term “sublime” is, of course, most interesting to academics and of little interest to anyone else. For our purposes, though, I will merely point out a few characteristics the author attributes to the term:

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Lately, I’ve been reading a fabulous book called Comics: A Global History, 1968 to the Present. I thought I knew a lot about comics, but, as I learned after just skimming this thing, my knowledge is almost totally myopic–that is, I know something about the D.C. and Marvel superhero comics of the 80s and 90s…but there’s a whole world of much more interesting comics that I didn’t even know existed. Yes, I was of course aware of R. Crumb and so on, but had no idea that such incredible work was being done with comics in France, Italy, Spain, and Britain. Furthermore, although I was familiar with the term “manga” and Japanese comics, I have an all new appreciation for it after reading this book.

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Meet Molly the Barbarian. Or, better yet, let’s introduce her to non-stereotypical gamers!

One of the most common (if annoying) gibes I get when I talk about gaming in an academic context is that there’s nothing culturally or rhetorically significant about these things as a medium. They’re just games. The very idea that games might exert some kind of influence on us beyond just eating up our free time is beyond most people. The most common retort is “yeah, but they make more money than Hollywood,” but I’d be the first to agree that money and popularity are insufficient grounds for studying something academically. No, what we chiefly need is to acknowledge their influence on our lives, and take at least some responsibility for that influence on us and our fellow human beings on this planet.

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