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Wow, the origin of "deadname" and how it reflects our stories being told by other on our behalf...

Thank you for this video! I paused this video to watch Lake Mungo and I Saw the TV Glow so I could see them spoiler-free. I don't think I'm built to handle both of those films in the same day. I found them both deeply sad similar to the ways you described here.

This was really fascinating. Your video essays are some of the most valuable things on the internet.

My apologies to everyone waiting for something else. I did the thing.

What a journey. Many aspects of your experience are things I have become numb to hearing about; “Public treats real person like a character,” “Community tries to erase deceased person’s transness,” “Man harasses person on internet,” “oh look a funny cat video thank god,” are an average Tuesday on this here World Wide Web. However, as fiction is wont to do, the framing with the films walked me into a headspace where I could really feel the horror of the nonfiction. Seeing what you can accomplish with a video essay, I shudder to think what you would be able to do with an entire film.

“I do want people to know that I was here and that I was Amabel” and your following comments on the use of “deadname” gave me the same profound, twisting feeling that I sat with in We Are All Going To The World’s Fair, and when you transitioned (pun intended) to an analysis of that film I just about shot out of my seat. What a beautiful video.

Always incredible work! You take these nuances in these films and connect them in such a masterful and succinct way. Some of these films I haven’t yet seen-but still felt I could watch them and have my own experience.

I think I fear I'm trying to turn my life into a story, again and again and again I have delayed my coming out as a thing TOO BIG to deal with right now. When I finally did it, nothing much has happened yet. I feel almost dissapointed that it didn't blow up in my face. What a dumb thing to be annoyed by. Turns out life is messy, and slow, and thats fine.

Such a great food for thoughts. Thanks a lot

If you haven't already, you should check out the video game Void Stranger. It plays with rules in a very similar way to some of the ones you mentioned. Lots of experimenting... but also very frustrating, intentionally.

This is a great video. Thank you for sharing your knowledge and insight.

Really loved the video! Looking forward to browsing your channel and watching more!

Awesome + how you manage to go so deep and general in only 5min.

Would give it more than two thumbs, but the rules won't let - Discussions of starvation in Stone Age feel like part of this.

SB's channel brought me here. Glad I came and checked it out ;)

Another powerful video! Lots to think about and reflect upon. Thanks

This channel seems absolutely fantastic! Already shared this video with a few of my pals. I'll take a look at your designs in the near future, too. Catan would be terribly boring without the trading. I love how collaborative it feels, and the puzzle of "selling a trade" that my opponent is interested in, but will benefit myself more than them. It's a bummer that trade breaks down against the biggest threat at the table, or during a 2P game- the "forced trade" action is essential in the latter. In competitive Catan, I hear trading is still common, but I'm an outsider to that community.

I commend your bravery in uploading footage of you dancing, I could never. Neat music trivia too. I've run Tomb of Horrors three times, adjusted for Pathfnder 1E rules. None of the players made it to the end (and I never tried to convert Acererak bc I anticipated that situation) but the fun was in watching how long each of them got, with two players deciding "screw this, we're going home."

This was such an engaging video, it kinda felt short even. So many things to think about.

It's interesting to think about rules discovery as a gameplay thing, and while it's certainly been a part of more social games (if you ever got dragooned into a game of Mao at a forensics event - nobody? just me?) it's gotten a new renaissance in the digital era, where rules can be fixed but hidden from all the players.

Still trucking my way through Co6M, I love love love "rules discovery" style games and I can't wait to show some of my friends and get their input! I especially loved how... Cautious you were when discussing some of your opinions on the back of the box and booklet. It felt very aware of how we must have distinct cultures and points of reference. I LOVE stuff like that!

This is great, I'm glad I found this, and you did the research. I learned of the sentiment through Ebert so this is a good jumping off point. I think it's a good rhetorical device to question the role of these tropes in a film that is ostensibly aimed to criticize the events, we may have a strong reaction to the images and themes in ways that are uncomfortable to examine. Great to get the context of these now. Thank you

This is the most illuminating thing I've ever seen about The Campaign for North Africa. Amazing video all around.

Differentiating between the spirit and the letter of the rules really speaks to me. Plenty of years ago I Dm'd a group of new players in dnd 4th, and whenever we would encounter a complicated or new rule, we would do what made the most narrative sense if players felt overwhelmed. At one point a more experienced player felt frustrated by this however, as he felt like mechanics were sacrificed for a narrative he felt uninterested in. I don't think these two things need to be in conflict, but I failed to accomodate both ways to enjoy the game fo all people that time. One part of the group wanted to experience adventure, while the other wanted to experience conquering a ruleset. In the end he found a group more in tune with his sensibilities, moved to norway and lived happily ever after. I think. Our campaign ended up with the players simultaneously dying and saving the world. Lots of fun. Some tears. Both ways play within the spirit of the game it strikes me as i write. Dnd is both rules to follow and ignore. Thanks for the video. I had fun!😊

love your shirt <3

This game is brilliant. Thank you for creating it.

my wife got me this for my birthday and it is so amazingly fantastic! I think there may be a typo in the rules, though: on page 🔺, the setup tableau shows both the front *and* back of one of the 4 red/blue cards - the one with the plant in center on the front and "3 city for blue pawn, 1 yellow city for red pawn, two data for six bunny-ears" on the back. since every other example-image in the rules shows a possible coherent board state, I feel like this may have been an Amabel error from not correlating which fronts were paired with which backs (or even from the printing process mis-associating the fronts and backs of those 4 cards, or a balance pass that didnt update the rule reference) rather than an intended obscurity from the alien language. is there any chance I could get a confirmation of whether or not this was printed as intended?

What is art? Your editing choices at timestamp 22:53.

A personal touch, really means a lot. Congratulations on the success of City of Six Moons, a very special game.

Congrats on the success. You deserve it. Does this mean for-ex 2 is backed up? Noooo

Happy for your success and congratulations on 8 years!

I'm going to make more work for you ... and order today! 😉 💸

Congratulations! I am thankful for coming across Hollandspiele about 7 years ago. Not to be dramatic but it changed my life in so many positive ways. Cheers to Hollandspiele’s continued success and looking forward to the many weird and wonderful pieces of art to come

Thank you for all the care and humanity that goes into everything you do. The hobby would be much worse without the two of you!

Congrats on 8 years! Thanks for producing unique games that explore so many different topics (especially Heading Forward and Doubt is our Product, both giving me deeper empathy for some of the struggles my mother went through in her life). Thanks also for the humor you put into these as well. Most importantly, thanks for being you!

Interesting. I've watched a lot of old westerns but never heard of this one before.

From a young age, I've been interested in video game design, and I remember the slight insult and confusion I felt when learning about how much more vaunted the title of game "developer" was than "designer", as one implied that you could "wear more hats" and, more truthfully, make more money than what many seem to treat as just the "idea guy". But for me, the beauty of such games is almost entirely in their design, in the concepts that underlie the systems that produce memorable and meaningful experiences. The technology used to program them and the illustrative artistry that goes into presenting them are entire disciplines worthy of merit, but I have seen comparatively little respect be paid to the curation of those elements so they work in harmony to produce stories that people can share with each other. I have interest in all of those instruments in the orchestra of a wonderful game, but I don't just want to tell stories, I want to provide a canvas for others to tell stories. I remember learning about the shift from when the people who worked on games were not routinely credited (and how they often smuggled their own credit in unorthodox places), and how the value of the art they produced changed when video games started to really take off as commodities. I'm sort of rambling at this point but I wanted to thank you for sharing your thoughts and for caring enough about this topic, which is very much a special interest of my own, to talk about it at such length and invite discussion on it. So thank you!

That's kinda sad at the end about the uncredited BG inventors. 😢 Thanks for the video. 😊

Wow I had no idea this existed. We only got the Cartwright Brothers syndicalised here, and that was during the nineties. so while cowboys were popular, most are unknown. This feels miles better than most stuff. On a completely unrelated note, I once read an old science fiction novel about a one armed cowboy, who is teleported to the moon and fights a prehistoric ape dictator and his sabretooth tiger, in his evil harem empire on the dark side. Very strange, and a lot of monologues on self reliance and the virtues of tech skills, mixed with gratuitous old school scifi.

I've been binging through your videos and I have learned so much. You have a really engaging and easy to understand way of discussing game design concepts. Motivates me to make more

My copy just arrived today, and I'm obsessed! It really is like an archeological discovery, trying to infer the meaning through context and patterns. I love cryptography, semiotics, puzzles, and games, so this really hits a sweet spot for me! I think 75% of the fun will be making sense of the rulebook and trying different iterations to see if it starts to make sense for me.

Thoughtful, fun video so naturally I am most drawn to commenting on the brief segment about the most tedious question of all human existence. McCloud's definition of art is surprising and inclusive but it is also practically difficult to cleanly define what behaviors correspond to survival or reproduction. David Graeber has a wonderful essay about evolution, play, and the meaning of life (What's the Point If We Can't Have Fun?) that is inspired by how resistant many biologists can be to the idea of animals playing for the joy of it. E.g., dolphins get high on puffer fish to practice socializing for mate selection, foxes chase each other to train for hunting, etc. Neo-Darwinists often have a analogous view of humans that any activity unrelated to evolutionary fitness is deviant or dysfunctional. I guess they would say that according to McCloud, art is everything that is frivolous. All this rhymes a bit with the philosopher Bernard Suit's work to define what a game is. For him, it is about players striving to bring about a state of affairs while subscribing to rules that they obey for their own sake. Like, solving a Yuu Asaka tile game is only a game for you if you would reject someone offering to solve it for you. I can setup a checkmate on a chessboard but it's only a game if my opponent and I pursue checkmate while following the rules of chess. Even if I am given a 100% surefire way to cheat and win, if I am playing a game, I will refuse it. Otherwise Suits thinks it's better to describe me as completing a task. The video made me appreciate how toys' materials and physical design can be wonderful inducements to enjoying the rules of a game. Tic-tac-toe is bad but holding chunky stones under the gaze of whimsical animal statuettes makes the idea of obeying its rules more appealing.

23:35 oh, "RPG" is a real weird one. What it means is "this game reminds me of D&D", and how it got that meaning is a real corker, told in full in Jon Petersen's "The Elusive Shift", but if you want the Cliff notes: the original version of D&D rules were for "fantastic medieval wargames" and barely even brought the words "role" and "play" into the same sentence, but Gygax brought it out as a clapback in some early 'zine banter as a thing that D&D _wasn't supposed to be about_. It was supposed to be about solving the puzzle of the dungeon in front of you. It wasn't about pursuing power and agency in a fantasy world, creating a role that you would enjoy playing. But after that, the phrase caught fire in the discussion community, and games whose play was intended to be a social activity like D&D would label themselves "role-playing games", and so in 1977 the first edition of Basic D&D is now for "fantastic medieval role playing". But as a socially adopted term of genre, its strike zone is just as wide as the audience it reaches. Maybe as more people play games that are social activities like D&D to explore questions of identity and foster relationships, more visual novels will be called RPGs. (Well, that's the descriptivist take, anyhow. The prescriptivist take doesn't explain why people call Pentiment an RPG, but might explain why its developers only call it "a narrative adventure": a computer RPG has elements of character identity separate from player interaction and there are interesting decisions pointed at those character elements. In Disco Elysium you're there to solve the crime, and you can make decisions to pursue that end or to define Raphael Ambrosius Costeau; Pentiment centers its narrative much more in that all the decisions you make to define your characters are part of it.)

Great new channel to binge!

it was really cool subject for a video, and love the progression of the chapters. I wish it was a little less of a review for some parts, but still a really strong message.

Really enjoying these videos, Amabel! Your ending question about what art could look like without the constraints of capitalism made me think of a local, modern art museum called Glenstone. It was privately funded by an incredibly wealthy couple, and it has free entry. The museum showcases lots of really thoughtful pieces, and spares no expense when using space to help convey meaning. Efficiency is not remotely their goal. And there’s no need/desire to make money from it. Kind of fascinating. We need more super rich people supporting artists!

I want to like this video--I am interested in various types of games and puzzles, but somehow, to use your own term, the video is just not very "compelling". I get what you mean by the physicality of a game. There's a game called Shuttles, which is an interesting physical form, but the game itself isn't all that fun to me. At an estate sale, I found a solitaire puzzle called Magnetic Square Puzzle, where these different sized blocks of wood are supposed to moved around from the starting position to another position, without removing them from the board--you have to simply slide them around. There are variations of this game, and the solution (TWO solutions, actually) can be found online. It probably wouldn't be too hard to simulate it on the computer, but the puzzle goes back decades before computers were around. I'm always a bit frustrated by computer adventure/mystery games because the puzzles usually seem unrelated to the storyline of the game. Not always, there's some good ones out there. But often enough to make me one of those complainers. I want to be part of a story and uncover the mystery, OR I want to work out puzzles, but I usually don't want to do both at the same time. And if you really want to talk about the physicality of a game, what about miniature golf? I just love the wackiness of some mini golf designs, which are of course much more fun in real life, with actual golf balls and putters, than on a computer screen.

Wow, just wow. Thanks for doing this Amabel. It was really well put together and I learnt so much.

Prima material! Thank you for this wonderful tribute to tactile media, the art of design, and the design of art! As a puzzle designer myself (even though primarily in a not-so interactive style of books/PDF files) this was a treat to watch and I will love to share this with other people.

High quality content, just scrolling through recommendations