Communities Abuse Their Creators - Electric After Dark Podcast
Added 2023-07-02 09:35:58 +0000 UTCIn today's episode I discuss my recent revelation about the role of "community" and how even though we often discuss the benefits of community (like meeting like minded people) there is also the uglier side of community where people get away with being treating others (especially new people) unfairly and also can suppress truth in order to meet some kind of larger goal. This is why I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the community label and instead have been wanting more and more to be seen as an independent critic.
Comments
Just caught up with this episode. I wanted to let you know that I am one of the people you indirectly got into shmups with non-shmup content. I first ran into your channel through your Fight 'n' Rage review and I was impressed by the depth of your genre knowledge and how well you made your points. I watched a few more videos and now I'm playing shmups on stick with ShmupArch to get the lag down super low and importing M2 ShotTriggers ports, lol. Your channel is my favorite gaming content on the internet because I really vibe with your approach to criticism. I like that you actually focus on the gameplay (to contrast, I just watched another channel's review of Sekiro - it was a 15 minute review and it took them 10 minutes to even start talking about the fucking gameplay) and make well-informed critiques backed up with deep genre knowledge. And I really like that you're not afraid to say exactly what you think about the subjects you cover, but without dipping into cartoonish, ultra-hyperbolic Butthurt Gamelord territory. I appreciate what you're doing. Keep up the great work.
Joey JoJoJoestar
2023-12-08 03:47:30 +0000 UTCOh what an awesome comment my dude! Yes that's exactly the vibe i am trying to go for, I don't want to be seen as a leader in the sense of dictating what people do and think and policing things ha, but rather as a resource for thoughtful analysis of the genre :-)
The Electric Underground
2023-08-16 18:41:31 +0000 UTCBeen listening for a while, but am a new patreon subscriber (really interesting episode). I have always appreciated your unique perspective and approachable discussion of game mechanics. I can totally see how exhausting it would feel to be pressured to be the genre's ambassador. I'd think most of your fans in particular are interested in your analysis over your association with the broader community, since as you mentioned you don't fall into lockstep with popular opinion. I'm a better player and more importantly, enjoy shmups more thanks to your content. Will watch in whatever form the channel takes!
Draino
2023-08-16 00:11:01 +0000 UTCIts something like enthusiasm meets 'enthusiasm'... style/substance = naff
Taze Roiu
2023-08-12 20:27:03 +0000 UTCThanks so much Chase!!! Yeah I think this coming slam is going to be a ton of fun, but it's such a beast that i look forward to next year too where I'm just going to do a more chill meet up at an arcade ha. I think finding that balance is really important because if you go too hard on the whole community thing you end up feeling alienated, as the concept does have its natural limits. I think keeping it cool and balanced is always the way to go :-)
The Electric Underground
2023-07-19 22:57:48 +0000 UTCThank you for reading my diatribe ha. But yeah good luck with everything I really like these podcasts, you never know what you're gonna get which as you note there, is kind of unique nowadays ha.
Wolfwatching Music
2023-07-19 16:26:16 +0000 UTCSorry for the late comment but another banger of an episode! Whatever you choose, I hope you can find a healthy balance that works for you..
Chase Palumbo
2023-07-19 06:45:11 +0000 UTCWHAT A FANTASTIC COMMENT! I really like the point you made about in the 90's and 2000's people being much more adverse to using labels and defining themselves into preset groups. I do remember when people had more individual impulses back then and would say stuff like "i don't want to be labeled." Vs now where everyone is like, bring on the labels, all of them (ha). I'm glad to hear that my channel has a bit of a more oldschool feel, because that is absolutely how I feel ha. Early internet stuff was really cool because is was more open ended and more tolerant to different personalities and modes of expression. Whereas now people all say the same things in the same way ha. And the faster you buy into this, the less interesting you become, at least in terms of being a broadcaster. There are so many youtube channels, most of them in fact, where I know what the person will say without even having to watch, so I just end up not watching by the end ha.
The Electric Underground
2023-07-18 22:34:50 +0000 UTCReally great podcast. It all reminds me of the beach by Alex Garland if you've ever read that book or seen the movie (which is vastly inferior to the book). But in general when we find something really cool, people tend to ruin it eventually as everyone hears about it, and the more you try to stop the ruination, you become in some ways tyrannical like those trying to gatekeep the beach. I believe the internet is dying as we know it, it's become really small the more people know about things, on bigger platforms with bigger "communities". The excitement around certain scenes dies down and people start to get into the far out weeds in terms of discussion. "Time for another 7 hour Dark Souls retrospective". But I feel the specificity and uniqueness of old websites and forums was far better. Now mods are similar everywhere, arguments are similar everywhere, opinions are the same. Excessive positivity or pure reactionary stuff. I really wish there was someway to go back to the old internet, even the early days of youtube, your channel has often reminded me of that kind of stuff. Maybe you remember if you were around then, but I have memories of a time in culture where the word community was really mistrusted. It was like people in the late 90s early 2000s could smell the inherent problems with "communities", and their downsides. It was clear people were part of scenes, but they also rejected being labelled as part of it. It was kind of ridiculed, and you can kind of see some of the battlegrounds between this culture and the emerging "hipster" culture which came along in the 2010s. The older group ridiculed the lack of authenticity, but they were eventually labelled gatekeepers and their attitudes fell out of favour. This comment is super long I just find the topic interesting. There really does seem to be a point however, where like, Thomas The tank engine dies as soon as the "Thomas the tank engine enthusiasts" take over. The Thomas The Tank engine community in other words. Because it starts appealing more to people who want to be part of a community about "anything" rather than people who follow the hobby for it's own sake. If these point seem to contradict each other it's because I think many of the concepts are in themselves contradictory. I really do think we need to move beyond, either by going backwards or forwards, but beyond the way things are currently being done. You can see the death of it with the changing of the four or five big platforms like reddit or twitter, and people realising the internet is not offering the home it once did for people who wanted to get away from a kind of banal hive mind in real life.
Wolfwatching Music
2023-07-17 21:55:08 +0000 UTCYay! Funny enough I am probably going to record another ep soon because I need to be prepared for some upcoming shmup slam stuff, so the next ep will be sooner than later
The Electric Underground
2023-07-14 21:17:11 +0000 UTCDirectors commentary is my favorite podcast. Keep ‘em coming.
RipTheJacker
2023-07-13 02:35:46 +0000 UTCHey my dude what a fantastic comment! Community as a concept is a very interesting one because there is no doubt that as a broadcaster and online personality, I will start to influence people and that group of people can absolutely start to come together and share similar thoughts and outlooks (such as in the case in my channel, a shared taste in games). I think the concept that I have been pushing against more lately, in my mind especially, is the idea of making this concept of community as formal as I once did. Where in the past I was pretty into the idea of having a formal identity of "shmup players" and trying to bring together as many shmup players as I could. and try to have us act as a cohesive unit. Which has its benefits no doubt, but also its issues, that are just baked into the concept to begin with. Instead, I'm more interested in fostering an informal association among people, so that if my content and videos are connecting with people, that connection is spread more evenly across people. So you could be a shmup superplayer or someone just getting into the genre, or someone who doesn't play shmups at all, it's all equal in my mind if my content is connecting with you. So that is the idea I'm getting at in this video (I hope ha), that shmup credibility or credentials in a community sense aren't as important as being engaged with the material and concepts that I discuss on the channel :-)
The Electric Underground
2023-07-10 15:19:37 +0000 UTCUnfortunate. I wonder what they might have been capable of doing. Quite alot of tweaks are conceivable. Faster lock on field spreading maybe topping of the list. Possibly easily tweakable. If that is done though, the bonus needs to be shot down. In fact I'm in favour of deletion of the whole multiplier thing. Especially for those bombs. Totally broken. Parity of outcome with minimal reliance on sheer luck is surely the main thing if scores mean anything. And what if bombs were a bonus for destroying certain enemies (rewards for shot kills)?? Tweakabilty - high difficulty?? Even cooler will be if the bomb icons were graphically representative, and the power-ups plasma charges that absorb into the player's ship... Sounds like this guy just wanted to provide the Shmuppers with a neater competetive angle.... Nothing too ambitious.... Unless we were to crowd fund such efforts, maybe?!?
Taze Roiu
2023-07-09 09:13:05 +0000 UTCYo Mark, Keep it real, dude. You don't need to be a mouthpiece. I don't think you'd even enjoy being a mouthpiece. Keep it real, speak your truth, and I think you'll garner plenty of fans who enjoy that and you'll like it better that way too. You have a great style you're developing; keep honing it. As for building a community, I think it needs a set of rules that are enforced fairly and evenly. And if the rules included "don't bully people. Don't bash people. Criticism and open discussion are encouraged", I think those are fair. The enforcement of those rules would naturally limit the number of people who want to be part of the community, but that's how it always occurs. Although you're a critic, I think you're naturally an influential member of the community, and that's because you bring a lot of value to it. You influenced me to try out more shmups than Jamestown, how I play them and train, to start a YouTube channel, and you influenced the development of my critical/analytical lens. And _we_ don't even talk. You're just posting into the ether and influencing people. The Discord, for as many people as there are, has hardly influenced me. I guess this is all to say that "influence" just kind of happens as a function of how you participate in the space and the space itself. Change how you participate and you'll change your influence. In the end, if there's something that feels wrong about the way you've been participating, make it right. And if you're doing right and people don't like that, that's their problem. Thanks for the director's cut podcast, man. It's always interesting to tune into these. Cheers!
Arcade Hell
2023-07-07 15:29:35 +0000 UTCAbsolutely and also a crowd builds a false sense of authority in people. So that they begin to "own" what they gather around. So that if you don't agree with the crowd you somehow are also against what they like (this happens a lot with fandoms)
The Electric Underground
2023-07-06 16:30:15 +0000 UTCAn ugly thing about crowds are their tendency to be swayed by generalizations, I think that's what drives most people towards cruelty.
Climby_coyote
2023-07-06 14:56:55 +0000 UTCHa Jake I think you are 💯 right lol. I think it s more of myself sort of figuring out my own internal motivation more explicitly, whereas I have really acted on instinct for a lot of my track record. Like in my heart I knew pulling punches on reviews was wrong to do, but I guess my logical justification for why I feel it's important to be critical has been hard for me to fully understand ha
The Electric Underground
2023-07-03 21:39:51 +0000 UTCI've been watching for a couple years now and I've never gotten the impression you were ever "promoting" a game without regard for its quality. I think the most hyped up I've seen you was the DOJ port announcement, which, according to your review criteria plus track records etc. makes sense. So the shift in your channel may be almost imperceptible to most. Definitely down for a galloping ghost meet'em up!
Jake G
2023-07-03 20:52:23 +0000 UTCOhhh that sounds not cool, wouldn't surprise me though
The Electric Underground
2023-07-03 04:11:46 +0000 UTCI'd be interested in that. It seems like just watching footage of the game that it constantly is taking control away from the player for a flashy skill/spell or a QTE moment in a boss fight.
Viewtifu1
2023-07-03 04:11:02 +0000 UTCSo I have been thinking about making a video looking to see if the combat in ff16 is actually good in an action sense, a few people have asked me about it :-)
The Electric Underground
2023-07-03 02:46:32 +0000 UTCHe ended up leaving the server sadly and basically completely lost interest. I messaged him directly and he was like ehhh I m over it basically
The Electric Underground
2023-07-03 02:45:32 +0000 UTCI always look forward to another episode of director's commentary! I'd be curious to see what your choice would be if you covered an RPG and what your angle would be.
Viewtifu1
2023-07-02 23:02:33 +0000 UTCHopefully the modder who was talking about Terra Diver improvements is as well grounded as U and will be going ahead regardless. Only if its for the Sega Saturn though.... otherwise he can go take a leap! Hehe.... Oh I do make myself laugh sometimes... I only half mean that 😜
Taze Roiu
2023-07-02 13:22:07 +0000 UTC
