Extra Credits

Dan is actually a fairly good animator. He posted a demo reel of stuff he worked on while at Pixar and it was all rather solid.

Yeah, not knocking Dan's skills at all, just to contextualize that if he worked on Game X, that's as an animator and not in the writing, design, and mechanics capacities that Extra Credits tends to focus on, and he won't have many games on his CV yet.

Yeah, I was thinking mostly about James, since he is the writer. Dan animation background don't come much in EC proper anyway.

Yeah but, like, which games did he consult for? I found that question difficult to answer for some reason. I genuinely couldn't find a list, or even an example.

Daily reminder that it's impossible to tell if Dan using the generic "I" is referring to himself or James pre-EH, and nowadays is literally always referring to James. I still don't understand why James even has people paid to be his voicebox when there's nothing stopping him from putting the chimpmunk filter over his own voice.

In general you don't find list of consultants used for any game project unless they are mentioned in game's credits

Dan is the one who started the show; he drew and wrote the first few episodes himself before bringing on James and Allison.

Hmm, it is weird that there's no listing anywhere on the Internet of games James has worked on or consulted. Even if he doesn't want to list everything, you'd think he'd have a basic website with some selected highlights. Sure, there might be NDAs for games currently in development, but there's no reason he couldn't list games that have been released.

edited 24th Jun '18 1:59:43 AM by VampireBuddha

According to this Kotaku article on game consulting, that's actually normal.

As noted, it's a matter of client confidentiality. If you don't want to admit that you needed an outside opinion to come in and tell you how to do your job, then you're going to be more inclined to hire such an opinion if that person isn't going around blabbing about who he's worked for.

James doesn't need a resume of companies to sell his knowledge of the industry to prospective clients. He produces Extra F*cking Credits. Anyone thinking about hiring him can watch his videos and see that he knows his shit. And they can do that secure in the knowledge that he's not going around saying, "Well, Capcom didn't know what the hell they were doing with this new game so they brought me in to fix everything."

edited 24th Jun '18 8:25:45 AM by TobiasDrake

Except one of the main questions here is whether or not that’s true. If what James preaches in his EC videos really is accurate and relevant to games development, and his videos really are valuable credentials that potential employers could garner reason to employ him from, then how come his only experience has been for two defunct mobile phone game companies and a cancelled 360 game in 2007?

That's your question, but with all due respect, James doesn't care what you think. You're a random person on the internet. The only interaction you have with James is your decision to watch or to not watch his show. He has nothing to prove to you, and certainly no reason to violate client confidentiality for you.

Delphisage, assume everything you read on 4chan has [citation needed] at the end.

Yeah, looks like that's normal. Even if it's not Extra Credits, I guess he'd find clients by networking.

It's still a bit strange that there's nothing anywhere about games he worked on as a developer (as opposed to consultant), but I guess that's understandable if he's focusing on consulting work these days.

I'm pretty sure the 4chan crowd has hated or at least disdained EC for being "SJW's" for years anyways. While we now know that there's plenty wrong behind the scenes with the show, they didn't and without a source we have no reason to take anything from there seriously if they have no source.

Doesn't seem to have stopped them taking credit or using it as 'proof' that they were right about 'SJW's all along.

Yep, that's exactly what I expected unfortunately.

they're like the annoying guy at the back who goes "I TOLD YOU,DID'NT I TELL YOU?"

And you just want to punch them but that just gives them attention so you have to pretend they're not there in the corner

The screencap was from 2012. From what I'm aware of, Social Justice didn't become something people were attacking en masse until around 2013 with Gone Home and Anita Sarkeesian. If EC was hated for anything back then, it was for overhyping Missile Command and for the chipmunk filter.

Also, playing the "he doesn't need to care about what you say, he's a grown up adult making his own decisions" line? Are you seriously resorting to that when what I asked was "if he's so smart, then why isn't he more employed"?

edited 24th Jun '18 5:50:38 PM by Delphisage

Thing is your premis is that he’s not more employed, all we know is that he doesn’t advertise that he is, that doesn’t translate into him not getting plenty of work.

Coz he's getting paid 15K a month to make videos, on top of consultation fees, and whatever the teaching job pays him?

How much _more_ employed does a man need to be?

Exactly that. You're trying to establish a premise that absence of evidence equals evidence of absence. You're saying that the lack of information about what clients James has worked for in an industry that involves client confidentiality privileges proves that James, in fact, has no clients and has never worked for anyone.

That is equivalent to saying that because a doctor will not tell you who his patients are, he must never have practiced medicine.

So, yes, I am saying that James is under no obligation to violate his client confidentiality by posting a list of his clients just to win an argument with some rando on the internet that he doesn't even know is taking place.

We get that you're upset and disillusioned. There's every reason to be. The man's an asshole. But trying to tear down his professional credentials because he's an asshole is an ad hominem attack, plain and simple. You can, in fact, be an asshole and also an experienced and talented professional.

edited 24th Jun '18 7:44:19 PM by TobiasDrake

I can confirm though that game industry folk like to pretend to be more competent than they actually are, so them not telling anyone they hire consultants for game design makes sense

Like, most common problem in game development is apparently "Programmers/modelers/whatever didn't do what they were actually supposed to do, they did whatever they wanted to do regardless of whether it was in the plan or not". You don't ever really hear anyone say that outside of game design courses

SJW first appeared as a complimentary term in the mid-1990s for people who fought for justice. The first known negative use was in November 2009 in a blog post by Will Slatterly, a progressive fellow who contrasted social justice warriors with social justice workers. In Slatterly's view, SJ workers are sincerely trying to bring about more justice, while SJ warriors are just looking for a fight and to feel superior to others.

Within a few minutes, conservatives latched on to the term; reasoning that nobody could possibly feel sincerely that social injustice existed against marginalised groups, everybody more left-wing than the American Republican Party was labelled an SJW, and since SJW clearly only refers to nutters who take social justice too far, obviously every remotely progressive or merely liberal person is just a troll.

Plus, people have been complaining about SJWs since before the term existed, except back in the day they complained about political correctness.

If you only became aware of progressive voices in gaming being harassed in 2012, that's a problem with you, not with 4chan's hate boner for Extra Credits.

2013, and it was for Gone Home.

Well, in the immortal words of Wade Barrett, I'm afraid I've got some bad news.

This is much, much older than Gone Home.

In case anyone's interested, Daniel Floyd has just created two new channels.

A game animation channel, New Frame Plus: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=6&v=Ri4mA1VWO50

and a lets play channel, Play Frame: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-7oMv6E4Uz2tF51w5Sj49w/videos

Right now the channels are composed solely of leftover from the old Extra Play channel, but Dan says he's working on some content for New Frame Plus and that Play Frame will get a new video every week.

Is that in reaction to the controversy, or unrelated?