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Comment by searine | Hacker News Reader

That was the most pretentious review I've ever read.

Someone needs to beat this guy over the head with a copy of The Elements of Style, or at the very least confiscate his thesaurus.

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Games writing is currently a race to the bottom in terms of seeing who can render the most meandering, self-important quasi-review of game X. My personal theory is that the phenomenon of absurdly self-important critics accompanies the legitimization of any new art form; I can't think of any other reason for the explosion of facile garbage in games journalism.

Agreed, and this goes waaaaaay beyond just mere online review journalism too. Even textbooks for game engines are now cluttered to the brim with self-important lessons on "objective morality" and even "serving social justice" (e.g. Gibbon's Intro to Game Design for Unity). It's just amazing how, despite all the improvement in the medium, game-writing has actually become worse than it was in the days of just forum posters writing guides, faqs, and reviews on GameFAQs.

Yet there are still brilliant writers out there.

Although I am unsure of where all of this narrative comes from, it's so good it nearly brought a tear to my eye:

Nuclear Fruits https://youtube.com/watch?v=15dxuAbTC0A&itct=CBQQpDAYBSITCJS...

Origins of open worlds: https://youtube.com/watch?v=EdV_2svrDVc&itct=CB0QpDAYAiITCK_...

I highly recommend watching all his feature videos.

"Prison walls entrap subjectivities as much as they corral physical beings."

Yikes.

I'm sure "carceral" is a nice word, but five times?

A PARTICULARLY CAPTIVATING AND COLORFUL ANT FARM

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