JoJoestar wrote:I see a lot of people here meaningfully engaging with Tim’s review in a capacity I can’t conjure for myself and honestly, who the heck am I to tell them wrong? However, this message kind of assumes that what I said is not what I “personally was thinking” while watching Tim’s review or Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. Honestly, I don’t think I’m able of exercising the kind of solipsism you are pointing at. I sincerely don’t have the skills required to surgically extract my impressions of the video from the context it is being published on. This is doubly amusing because at one point of Tim’s review, he himself talks about how you can’t talk about something without acknowledging its context, and of course in this case that includes Tim’s illness and excruciatingly slow and painful production process, among other things such as the state of social media, the general stagnation of public discourse and a long long etcetera.
What I was trying to point at with the Wolf of Wall Street comparison is that when a critically conceived object of media crosses the boundary of being confused with the actual thing it’s trying to criticize, there is a huge problem going on right there. To offer a specific example, if in the lapse of 20 minutes you jump from criticizing the superficiality and banality of the neoliberal sillicon valley mentality to announcing your new Earthbound review with a dramatic shot of your one thousand dollar original Mother 2 jacket… I mean, I don’t know what to tell you, other than that it makes me feel hardcore levels of dissonance right there, rhetorical/performative distance present or not.
Being excessive and loud and over the top has been part of Tim’s presence on the internet since he started writing about videogames and I understand that, I also understand that there is a nuanced and deliberate critical process going on there with how he chooses to present himself in public. I also think that punishing myself with a several hour long maximalist self-referential video essay completely full of “labyrinthine” trains of thought is not something… that I find desirable to do on my limited free time. Just to be clear, I didn’t find this review so much BAD or WRONG as I found it exhausting, bloated, tiresome.
yeso wrote:The constant pre-anticipation and post-reaction to what viewers/readers are thinking combined with unspooling personal anecdotes framed as “personal disclosure” = more triangulation than I’m comfortable doing.
As yeso pointed out here in this message, it’s not that I don’t understand or share Tim Rogers’ aspirations on this long winded video essay, it’s that simply put, it’s more labor than I feel comfortable doing for any piece of entertainment/media. And that is honestly all there is to it. I think I see all the points being made on the video and agree with a sizeable amount of them, but the route taken to articulate those points is not… good enough for me. While I see “the point” of the whole season and understand the choices that were made, I did have to cut through a lot of noise to get to that point. I also understand that cutting through that noise was part of the point being made and I still don’t find it desirable/meaningful enough.
Mirroring Tim’s rhetoric, for me the Bottom Line would be: Tim Rogers’ Cyberpunk 2077 review is a parody/critique of the archetypical poisonous swamp area in videogames, which is, in itself, a poisonous swamp area… in video essay format.
Then again, Metroid Prime 2 is a videogame where at least half of its spaces are complete poisonous swamp areas and I quite like that videogame. I didn’t like Tim’s review as much as Metroid Prime 2, though, but I see what he was trying to go for, so take all this post as you will.