research project

powerpoint link

hey everybody this time I'm making a research project on the guy I was kind of trying to rip off, Tim Rogers! I kind of forgot that there had to be a blog post to go along with this so I'm just gonna put what I wrote for my (rough) outline instead of writing a lot of the same stuff again ad nauseam. enjoy!

 Hello, and welcome to video games… today we’re going to be talking about  games journalist, critic and developer Tim Rogers.

Tim Rogers is best known for his recent work on his action button YouTube channel but has been writing about video games since the early 2000s, originally for his site Actionbutton.net (though he wrote for other sites and magazines, some under different pseudonyms he alleges,) he then went to do video work for Kotaku.com and then again for Actionbutton this time as a YouTube channel. His games journalist work largely consists of long form reviews and essays on specific video games, but has also included lets plays/streams, vlogs, podcasts, interviews, etc. as well as more comedy/improvisational work done at Kotaku. He’s also a game developer and has developed a couple of games with his team at Action Button entertainment. He’s also done some light music work, as well as a host of non game related writings found on medium. Rogers’ has often talked about the work he never made, including a lecture talking about video games he never made as well as a section in his tokimeki memorial review describing books he’d never released.

His reviews are perhaps best known for his verbose run-on scripts, One thing that stood out to me when talking about his writing, Rogers describes using a genie rule, in which he comes up with everything he wants to say in a draft and then only allows himself 3 changes per writing. For as verbose as he is though, Rogers’ is also something of a minimalist when it comes to game design. When talking about his work in video games we can see this exact philosophy, he describes “It’s sort of like an episode of Gordon Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares,” referring to the idea from Ramsay that it would probably help to make the menu into a few smaller items. Rogers often avoids talking directly about how a game, instead weaving narratives about his life and the culture he lived alongside, Rogers’ does not have a photographic memory but it is notable, he describes it as “remembering mundane things with extreme autobiographical clarity” and “living in an ocean of defragmented nostalgia” but it’s also something you see pretty directly firsthand in his work, as he will often recall these sorts of memories (usually ones with at least some relation to the games he talks about) in detail during his reviews, take for example, his DooM review in particular, in which he recounts a lot of his personal history with the game some directly involving playing it and many more supplemental memories and asides, his Pac-Man review involves a story starting with literally one of his first memories, before actually talking about the gameplay, oftentimes. When he does talk about gameplay, he tends to use expressive language to more accurately describe games “feel” rather than a literal approach, my personal favorite example being his God Hand review in which he spends pretty much the entire review using absurd analogies to describe how it feels, [excerpt from god hand review]. When he does describe direct game experiences he tends to take a different approach, using the games story and his experience to create elaborate stories, taken to an extreme in his L.A. Noire review this year, a 9 hour recounting of the games plot told directly in the tone of a pulp noire narration.
Looking into Rogers’ personal history before starting his work in the games and journalism industries is kind of a mess for precisely this reason, he’s often very detailed on select details while others are left vague,  we know certain things for a fact, for example he went to University of Indiana (though he claims he could’ve gone to a better college) but other parts of his history are left vague, this could be because part of his personal history are lies, or at least exaggerated, while not a direct piece of his life, he’s claimed that his essay on Metal Gear Solid 2 was written as an elaborate joke to troll a user of a forum user, or when he admits to largely filtering out parts of his life that aren’t embarrassing. Tim Rogers is, somewhere on the line between performer/ storyteller and actual journalist,  he’s more interested in creating a narrative around something than being 100% honest, which itself has garnered some controversy and questioning that I shall not go into right now.
There’s a couple of (admittedly unsourced) quotes from David Bowie where he describes himself as an actor or clown,  rather than a singer due to the performative nature of his work, whether or not Bowie said these direct quotes, and while Rogers’ is far from as eccentric as Bowie in his performances, I feel the shoe still fits. Rogers brings a performance to his work, in some cases literally making it a form of performance art like the aforementioned L.A Noire video whether it be in narration or text that elevates the work. Rather than performer however, I would describe rogers as a storyteller.
Games are a uniquely difficult medium to review and describe, due to their tactile nature involving interactivity, and yet, Rogers uses his exciting language to draw out this difficulty. His focus on the exaggerated and the personal are in large part what makes his reviews so special. By taking the format of a review and turning it into a story. His work is all about intertwining his own personal narratives with those of the games.