Game Theory: The Smartest Show in Gaming

https://www.youtube.com/user/MatthewPatrick13

I find this show pretty fascinating. You pay recognize MatPat for his voice-over on the DYKG episode based on Portal.

This place-list is a pretty good place to start.

P.S: The channel also hosts Gaijin Goombah's Game Exchange series and Ronnie Edwards' Digressing and Sidequesting series. You can talk about those too.

edited 23rd Feb '14 1:33:09 AM by Alucard

No one started a Game Theory thread until now? Odd. Anyway, thanks for starting it!

I think VSauce once talked about speed and somehow related it to Sonic The Hedgehog. Someone mentioned in the comments that the assumptions are too inaccurate and said that Game Theory did it better. That's how I was introduced to this channel.

Good to know that the host Matthew Patrick rarely use pictures of sexy women nowadays. He used to do it so much to the extent of putting up a picture of his bikini-clad wife. I think he once admitted that he did so to attract more viewers, especially male. He was surprised that the majority of his viewers initially were female.

The best episodes by Matthew Patrick have to be the ones which talk about games of a franchise which were once mentioned before previously in another episode, such as: "The Legend of Zelda", "Super Mario Bros" and "Pokémon". Maybe it's due to Continuity Porn. In these videos, He keeps making references of the other videos which feature the same franchise. My favorite video by Matthew is ironically not about video games but his explanation on how Pewdiepie became popular.

Matthew loves nitpicking but that's why we like him so much.

My favorite Digressing and Sidequesting episode is the one in which Ronnie explains why he prefers "Zelda 1" over "A Link to the Past". I mean, I didn't play both games but I kept enough attention on both installments. Yet, the host Ronnie just blew my mind for telling me details on things that I don't pay attention on previously.

Gaijin Goombah is my least favorite of the three. Over time, I find his videos getting boring. Maybe listening to someone talking on Autotune is slightly irritating for me. Or maybe it's because the only thing he focuses is elements in video games which are inspired by Japanese culture. I'm interested of culture but Japanese culture, which is too foreign for me, just leaves me cold. I think Youtubers who incorporate their personal lives in their videos are more fun to watch. However, Gaijin's inclusion of his personal life does nothing much to interest me although his life in Japan is related to the main content. My favorite video by him, ironically, is about Russian video games.

edited 24th Feb '14 8:07:52 PM by tropeslave

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kG5gkSl_IjA

This Gaijin Goombah episode was pretty intriguing if you ask me.

You know, I found Game Theory when I was looking for some actual video game theory (you know, like music theory, or theory of literature) so I was kind of disappointed that it was a guy looking for empirical evidence of whatever point he wanted to make.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FS1p7W5dmBE

This video. He nailed it.

Everything after 8:44 is right on the mark.

Smartest? I not sure if Matt being the "smartest" theorist, but he does certainly know how to cause a stir of controversy because comparing the Wii U to the Virtual Boy is a hyperbole at best (outright lie at worst).

edited 8th Mar '14 9:27:04 PM by Shadao

In one particular episode he bases his findings on the size of the physical sprites represented in the game...suffice to say I'm not a fan. Also he resorts to a lot of vlogger tools. Sporadic and needless jump-cuts, overuse of plain white background and ripped images...and the actual evidence he uses to back his arguments are...questionable, to say the least.

Aren't these theories supposed to be for the fun WM Gs with "evidence"?

edited 8th Mar '14 10:50:45 PM by SpookyMask

The way he phrases things I'm not too sure of it. Also his Wii U is analogous to the Virtua Boy video...he clearly did not put in any of the most bare-minimum of research to determine that financially Nintendo is on more solid ground than both Sony and Xbox division. Also fails to mention the quality of many Wii U titles, and outright ignoring that in several cases the platform performs better than its competitors on a visual level. Just comes across that he read some forum posts about it somewhere along with the usual video game journalism sensationalism instead of looking up any hard facts.

edited 8th Mar '14 10:56:59 PM by Mr.Gaben

He made a video about Mario being a sociopath That is rather self expository to me

I don't really care about the Virtual Boy comparison. 8:44. THAT right there is where he's completely on the mark. The Wii U tried making an innovation for innovation's sake, without any regard for how 3rd-party publishers would feel about it. He went into detail on just how many ways that artistic vision cut into their profit, almost inconsiderately so. They closed themselves off even further from the industry into their personal bubble with the system, creating a less powerful system that developers have been given no reason to even look at now. The publishers aren't running from the system due to spite, but pragmatism; I see that as entirely Nintendo's own fault.

I said it in the PS 4 thread myself like this: "Making an innovative console over innovative games is frankly an assumption that your own engineers are better artist then all the other developer who will work on it."

On the matter of actually learning things from his videos, I say check out the Major's Mask video he did with PBG. If nothing else, he put that theory into better words than anyone I've ever heard. In my opinion, his channel has mastered the art of tangential learning through games.

edited 8th Mar '14 11:20:15 PM by Alucard

Is this that show that did the whitesplaining thing about Jinx?

I don't really like the tone or attitude he uses in his show, in comparison to the other shows in that channel, which I feel expect the audience to be smarter than his show does

Measuring characters' body sizes by physical sprites is not exactly accurate. I remember in some Game Theory episodes in which he measured it that way, some viewers noted that the characters' body sizes have already been revealed by the game creators via the game manual or the official games' websites.

How do they come up with these official sizes, anyway?

An interesting Gaijin Goombah episode based on Bravely Default, featuring ProJared:

MatPat's follow-up to the "Wii U is the New Virtual Boy" episode.

I'll be honest: there are tons of games I'd like to support but can't. To this day I still kick myself for not picking up Valkyria Chronicles when it was new. I fell in love with that demo, playing it over and over, but never managed to scrounge up the money/time to go get it. I guess that makes me a statistic in this Extra Credits video.

That does a good job of explaining why I could never get behind Yahtzee's opinions that game sequels should have more than incremental improvements yet Nintendo was wrong to experiment with "kiddie toys" to hook a wider market.

MatPat comes full circle with this 3-part series.

I heard plenty of comparisons to Jim Sterling's Perfect Past Sauce and Damn Fine Coffee episodes (I've watched plenty of Jimquisition to have seen the superficial similarities immediately). I kind of think that while Jim reached an excellent point, his arguments tend to drift off into rants about how one genre is getting ignored by the evil publishers, and how we should all be angry about that. MatPat pushed that point even further and perhaps more neutrally by analyzing the curve by which an innovative idea gets popular and tying that to Nintendo's phobia of the internet.

So in my mind, Mat said it better.

edited 18th Apr '14 12:27:14 PM by Alucard

Wasn't it in case of nintendo company lawyers being zealous again and they took back that thing they did? <_<

Mat made it relatively clear later on that PewDiePie and Flappy Bird were just an easy example in a trend of human nature. Their reaction to Let's Players was simply a symptom of their overall attitude towards the internet that this industry is so quickly growing on.

? He did just claim Wii U isn't popular because Nintendo doesn't allow videos on youtube, which just isn't really the case

And he never calls that the sole reason, which you'd find in the first two videos.

Yeah, but I was talking about this particular video