Extra Credits

Umm what are you linking to?

Don't post links without context.

edited 22nd Jun '18 11:56:33 AM by dragonfire5000

It's a screencap of a 4chan post from 2012, saying that James used to have his own personal website where he posted his experience working for two mobile phone game companies and a cancelled third-person Call of Duty game. I checked out the link to the cancelled COD game, and it turns out to have been a 360 exclusive, not a mobile game. Guess I should've known better when believing people who try to force the meme that he and Spiritscience are the same person.

edited 22nd Jun '18 12:05:41 PM by Delphisage

Well, there's your problem right there. On the list of unreliable sources, that's a Top Tenner.

edited 22nd Jun '18 12:05:25 PM by TobiasDrake

"Screenshot of a thread" rather than "link to a thread" is something of a sketchiness multiplier, as well.

I'd link to the actual thread, but the archive page for 2012 /v/ is down.

Still is a rather shady and unreliable source of information.

That said, I will agree that James portfolio is far from impressive. It kinda seems he is more famous for talking about games than actually developing them. Kinda cast a doubt in how much he actually knows what he is talking about, specially since apparently he was not a good video game teacher either, from what at last 2 people mentioned.

Couldn't find much information about him as a consultant either. Not even about Rainmaker Games, his consultant company.

To be honest, "Being more famous for talking about games than making them" is something you can say about 99% of people who talk about games. Game Critic and Industry Commentators alike. From TB to Jim Sterling to ProJared.

By the standard of the average "game talking person" / "game journalist" / "Game Critic" even his modest portfolio puts him ahead of the vast majority of people.

To be fair, these other people haven't actually been teaching about video game development.

Knowing a subject, being able to teach it, and being able to run an institution are three completely orthogonal things. I speak from partial experience.

This is actually getting into a tendency I've seen around the Internet. When it turns out someone we kind of like is actually not so great, people rush to downplay and belittle their talents and abilities.

It's been going on in American comic fandom for decades. People saw that Stan Lee took more credit than he should have for the comics he worked on and ended up hypercorrecting in the opposite direction, to the point that people now think he's a bumbling idiot who stumbled into the Marvel offices and scrawled his name on the pages which sprung fully-formed from the hands of Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko; the fact that Lee did write the damn comics is dismissed and attacked.

Something similar happens with Michael Bay, though that is mostly based on the overall quality of his movies. I'm not going to defend his art here; only his first two movies are any good (seriously, The Rock is so good people are surprised to hear that Bay made it). However, when he's in the director's chair, he actually does know what he's doing, and turns out elaborate, technically-complex explosion-based movies on time and within budget; indeed, within Hollywood he is known for being able to get the most out of whatever money he has to work with, which is why he's trusted with the GDP of a small country. Yet because his movies are mindless schlock designed to get bums in seats with no interest in being good, people think he's an incompetent moron who just kind of points cameras at things and chucks the footage together.

And yes, this thread is starting to poison the well of James Portnow's knowledge of game design. There are two questions here:

1. Is James a good person?
2. Does James know video games?

The answers are entirely unrelated. Just because he's a jerk doesn't mean he doesn't know what he's talking about, and his arguments should be evaluated on their own merits, not on whether we like the man.

I've never watched TB or ProJared, but Jim is an opinion guy who mostly talks about the moral implications of business practices. James is more about the nuts and bolts of development.

Oh, and Delphisage? 4chan is only an acceptable source when discussing 4chan itself. The site is proudly a cesspit of trolls trolling trolls; heck, it's where Lamergate started.

edited 22nd Jun '18 4:14:03 PM by VampireBuddha

Can you really trust the reliability of somebody as a source of information about anything when they've proven themselves open to being intellectually dishonest and even preaching to their audience to take stances and beliefs that go against their own self-interest and benefit? And would anyone still want to take them at their word when they end up making themselves look like unlikable or horrible people in their personal life?

edited 22nd Jun '18 9:49:02 PM by Delphisage

Some surprisingly solid leaks have actually come out of 4chan, but I would certainly not take much from there at face value without a damn good reason (other than memes).

But yes, we shouldn't let these charges make James out to be a fraud in terms of his professional credentials - honestly the vast majority of the game related videos were quite insightful. It's that he let his knowledge in one area trick him into thinking that he was infallible that's led to all the problems facing EC, from what I can see.

(I do take exception of Stan Lee being used as an example of overcorrection, though, because the primary point of contention is over whether the Marvel Method meant that he wasn't really doing the scripting later on for a lot of the stories, or to what extent it shifted writing responsibilities from Lee to Kirby et al. The debate was never really settled and probably will never be without a time machine).

edited 22nd Jun '18 9:54:43 PM by Sigilbreaker26

TBH, I don't really watch any of EC's videos beyond the history ones out of fear that they're all incorrect and might harm my understanding of how gaming works, or end up contradictory to things I've learned from other sources. I've been down that road already with Digibro and his incomplete understanding of how anime studios work. Which videos from EC about gaming would you say have the most value?

edited 22nd Jun '18 11:12:03 PM by Delphisage

To be fair, teachers don't need to have done the thing they teach in practice to be able to teach it, not even to teach it well And sometimes having done thing in practice, while giving them perspective, also gives them lots of biases. Its kind of same thing as you can criticize movies without having studied how to make movies, same way you can criticize movies if you have studied film development without actually having made them in practice. All three(no experience, having studied and having done in practice) of those give you different viewpoint, but your views on the movie aren't less valid just because you don't have practical experience.

Like, one of my teachers on game development was this british dev who worked on Crackdown among other thing. Having someone who has worked on game development is useful for realizing what the production and development is in practice(also apparently that you have to wring all money out of publisher you can :p), but it also means they have their own biases. Like, he thinks Mario is pretty much perfect example of basics of good design in game, that including that story ain't that important.

Anyhoo, I can actually say that EC videos on game development stuff are actually accurate when compared to stuff I learned from that dev and my 3 years stumbling around the course failing to do anything You can occasionally find stuff like "This is common industry belief that you as viewer think they should challenge more" and what seems like writer's personal opinion, but you are gonna find them anywhere.

On side note, I think everyone interested in game development should try out reading IGDA's books. Game writing narrative for video games and Fundamentals of Game Design are both rather good books. Jesse Schell's The Art of Game Design: Book of Lenses is also good book.

(on another sidenote: Teachers in general, in my experience, are prone to believing the common industry belief such as video games NEEDING micro transactions to stay in business because of how expensive they are to make. EC aren't exception in that)

edited 23rd Jun '18 12:36:18 AM by SpookyMask

Is James actually intellectually dishonest? He can be mistsaken, sure, and Soraya's claim indicates he has blind spots regarding his own behaviour, but I'm not aware of him being intentionally deceptive.

You mean like his pro-corporate, anti-union stance, and arguing that game development should be hellish because that's the way it currently is? James is seeking to give people advice that is in the self-interest and benefit of his audience, and from all I've seen he genuinely believes this stuff. I do think he's incorrect in this instance, but that doesn't mean he's trying to deceive or harm people.

By that logic, classical mechanics is wrong because nobody was willing to spend time with Isaac Newton, the theory of relativity is wrong because Einstein ordered potential wives to wait on him hand and foot and let him fuck other women, and DNA isn't part of a natural Turing machine because James Watson is a racist and Francis Crick went full crank.

Yeaah, you can avoid supporting people financially who you don't like, but you can't say someone's argument is wrong based on not liking the person. I don't remember whats name of that logical fallacy

It's probably a form of Ad Hominem.

edited 23rd Jun '18 6:08:17 AM by Redmess

Crash Course has its own problems. It's simplified and occasionally ocntrarian for the sake of being contrarian, and while I applaud their expansion of the World History curriculum to be outside of Europe and the Americas, a lot of their medieval European history in particular is nonsense. Plus, the whole perpetuating of the 'medieval history as feudalism' narrative, but in fairness that's still a debate being held in actual academia. It also drastically simplifies the cultural and social shifts happening in Europe at the time as 'they were collapsing after the fall of the Empire and not a lot happened.' Whit?

Their episode on slavery is also...well intentioned, if extremely problematic.

edited 23rd Jun '18 6:22:04 AM by math792d

The distinction is that these people are not famous for being developers talking about video games. They are explicitly just outsiders. EC are insiders, so their gaming credentials are more relevant.

Not one need to have worked on multiple successful games to be able to talk about the industry. But EC is always touting about James work in the industry but, when we try to look for it, it doesn't seem it have been many games at all. I couldn't find anything recent either. It is kinda weird.

EC has always leaned at least as much on their academic credentials as their industry credentials. Both are valuable, I think, as the majority of similar content comes more from the perspective of game critics than anything else.

Which isn't to say that game critics don't have anything useful to say about games, but having multiple perspectives is valuable. That, and the academic aspect of games-as-art is in its infancy and I think it's important for that to develop.

That's the main thing that pains me about abandoning EC. As far as I know, they were largely unique in that perspective.

It's a form of Poisoning the Well.

As for how EC compares to Jimquisition and the like, other commentators are speaking as players, but James speaks as a developer and EC is intended to be a resource for people actually looking to make games.

To take the movie analogy that came up earlier, if you want advice on how to be a movie critic, or just how to appreciate movies more, there's nothing wrong with learning from somebody whose background is in the academic study of film. If you want advice on how to make movies, you'll want to learn from somebody with some form of hands-on experience. They wouldn't have to be a big-name director like Stephen Spielberg, but they would want to be someone who has worked on at least a couple of movies.

James is the guy who has worked on the medium and gives useful, practical advice.

I've actually never seen it brought up in their videos (though I've not watched all the main EC videos). Heck, first time I saw this was in this thread, so I'm not sure I agree about the touting bit.

This. Which is why I find weird there is so little information about his work on the industry. I found Call of Duty and Farmville, which are actually big games, but also kinda old ones (by his own addition the Cod he worked on was before it became a massive success, so it have to have been an old one). I was under the impression James was still actively working on games even now, but I can't find evidence on that.

Really? I remember Dan often saying stuff like "Dan worked on X" or "James worked with Developers who were working on X".

Like, maybe it is my fault for misunderstanding, but I always took their videos as being from the perspective of active developers, people who were still working directly on games, not just on an academic position. If that isn't the case, it kinda changes how I see them. I doesn't mean they have no value, but it does change my perception of them.

Dan is an animator. While he always wanted to specifically work in games, and studied with a focus in video game animation, he spent years doing video animation (including working at Pixar Canada when that was a thing) and only in the last couple of years managed to get a job with a game studio.

As of 2012 James runs a consulting firm and teaches master-level game design. He doesn't actively develop anymore but development studios hire him to go over their design documents and concepts and provide an outside eye on any issues they may not have thought about.