Around the end of September, YouTube comedian and critic Jason "videogamedunkey" Gastrow uploaded a ten-minute video announcing that he and his wife, Leah Gastrow, would be starting a new indie game publisher: Big Mode.^[1] At first blush, that might sound like an issue that impacts a limited community far from us. However, Dunkey is an entertainer and critic with over seven million subscribers and upwards of three and a half billion views on his channel. In his proportional reach, he's the modern equivalent of the editor-in-chief for one of those big 90s gaming magazines. Big Mode is games criticism news full stop, and Gastrow's views reflect and inform many of those in the gaming community. So, it's worth paying attention to this video.

Before I say anything else, I want to put out there that I'm writing this post in the interest of genuine criticism, not to hurt or offend anyone. I'm here because, given Dunkey's influence, I think it's beneficial to talk about misunderstandings and behaviour I see in his pitch and his other videos. Gastrow says that when you buy a game today, it's like buying a loot crate. There are so many subpar products coming out that we're drowning in them, and you're probably going to get saddled with some junk. However, his channel has been where "real" games fans go to find the cream of the crop, and Gastrow feels like he plays almost every game that releases. Because he has spent years drawing attention to stellar indie titles like Spelunky, Enter the Gungeon, and Hollow Knight, he is positioned to pick the best of the best and deliver them to audiences. Big Mode will guarantee success by selecting only the most passionate developers and using Gastrow's expertise on which ideas "always work" in games and which ideas "never work".^[1]

Dunkey is undeniably enthusiastic, but to start deconstructing these arguments, I don't think customers spin a roulette wheel when they buy a game. Online stores use customer ranks to float the most popular cargo to the surface, and even casual gamers pick their poison based on experience, word of mouth, and known brands. Those methods are imperfect, but they do inform purchasing decisions. And the enthusiast will shape their choices through reviews, forums, and other sources. Part of Dunkey's argument here is that he's helped players avoid randomly blundering into miserable games using his videos, and he's right. Although, his claim that his channel is the one-stop shop for serious gamers is absurdly over-inflated, and I don't think that Gastrow is the guy who put a lot of the indie games he references on the map. No one person did.

He's discounting the voices of other critics and community members, and not for the first time. Furthermore, many of the indie games he mentioned here he featured weeks or months after they first emerged. Day one reviews had beat him to the punch, and plenty of these titles picked up goodwill in gaming discussion spaces long before Gastrow spoke out about them. I'll give him serious credit for Celeste for which he posted a release day review, but Neon White had almost a fortnight of hype behind it before Dunkey uploaded his video.^[2] His pieces for Duck Game, Hollow Knight, and Undertale^[3] all came out more than a month after these games had seen the light of day. There's a gap of nearly a year between Rocket League's release and Dunkey's coverage of it, for Enter the Gungeon, nearly two years, and for Spelunky, about two and a half.^[4]

Not that his work didn't raise the profile of these games (again, this guy gets millions of views per item), and I don't think these pauses between release and review are failures. I think criticism needs more attempts to reassess older games with new eyes and essays where writers have given time for their opinions to percolate. Dunkey has said as much before.^[5] But if that's your approach, then you're going to be a smaller part of the effort to bring attention to games, especially when you factor in all the pre-release impressions that follow around media that's appeared at expos or gotten publicity from platform holders. Many of these videos also aren't reviews but compilations of funny things that happened to Dunkey during play. That's not an inferior media format to criticism but is categorically not the same thing.

And I have to say, the games he talks about are mostly not that obscure. There are exceptions like Furi and Monolith. But as indie software goes, Hades, Cuphead, SUPERHOT, Neon White, Untitled Goose Game; these are well-known names.^[1] In one video, he describes Alan Wake as being this incredibly niche material that no one played.^[6] Again, that's great for the entertainment he wants to make; he's speaking to a broad audience and aims to give them the games they have the highest chance of enjoying. Those are going to be the heavy hitters. But if you're starting from square one in games publishing, it's not likely that you're about to be pitched the next Hades or Enter the Gungeon. There are very few of those fish compared to the total sea of indie games. You need to have an eye for more subtlely promising titles, and that's just not what Dunkey's channel is about.

I believe him that he feels like he's selecting his starlets from almost every game that auditions, but that belief suggests he doesn't understand the mind-boggling number of games that get published. Over 10,000 were added to Steam last year alone, itch.io has taken on board more than 600,000 since it went online in 2013. Then there are all the games that get pitched but not picked up or get console-only releases or only show up in specialist development spaces. No one, not even the most ardent industry watchers, is playing almost every game that launches. In many videos, Dunkey heaps disdain on the kinds of titles that would be probable candidates for the average indie publisher. He looks down on Lawnmowing Simulator,^[7] he hates the encounter design in turn-based combat games, he implies that anything made in the Unity Engine is shoddy, he calls the graphics of Neon White "crude",^[2] he thinks that Undertale doesn't look very good,^[3] and he said that the only pleasing part of this year's Wholesome Direct was when his wife (the co-head of the publisher) called it the "Loathesome Direct".^[6]

It's also unclear to me how Dunkey thinks you find the value of a game. He describes the best reviews as "entirely subjective", but in the next sentence says reviews should also incorporate an objective element.^[5] It's also much harder to look at a game in development or worse, the pitch stage, and correctly assess its potential than it is to opine on whether people will find a game engaging post-development. For most of their production cycle, games are broken, and their features only partially implemented.

I suspect that it's Gastrow's knowledge that he may not be sizing up final products that motivates his talk of "ideas". But we often place too much emphasis on fundamental ideas and overlook the colossal importance of their execution. Having an intriguing idea behind your game can certainly draw attention to it. Return of the Obra Dinn stuck in a lot of people's heads because of that premise of being an insurance company investigator on an empty ship that drifts back to port. I added Silicon Dreams to my wishlist mostly because I was taken with the notion of an android interrogation platform.

But it's not that certain ideas "always" work or "never" work. What an idea contributes to a game depends on how the developer treats it. You can actually see Dunkey acknowledging the importance of the context around concepts in previous videos. For example, when he praised Super Mario Galaxy, he said that the restrictive movement of the game might sound like a flaw, but that it becomes a positive through how it forces you to interact with the level design. He gave kudos to Banjo Kazooie because of the thematic cohesion between its characters and items.^[8] In his review of Kirby and the Forgotten Lands, he states that Kirby's tweeness could be overwhelming, but that by placing him in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, Nintendo takes the edge off.

Speaking for my own opinions, you can see how a lot of the same ideas are copied from game to game, like "risk-reward", "hint systems", or "talent trees". But one game can take on those ideas and sink, and another can swim. And if you've got a title pushing the boundaries of the medium, as is common in the indie arena, it's going to work with ideas that have rarely or never been tested. So, how do you know if they "always" or "never" land? And we haven't even talked about technical implementation, which can fall apart at countless levels, regardless of the ideas that comprise the design.

Dunkey has stated that the problem with some mediocre AAA games is that they're "cash grabs",^[1] so avoiding get-rich-quick schemes could be a viable direction for his publisher. Still, we must be conscious that, by definition, all commercial games are made to make money, whatever other goals they may pursue. I don't think that's a healthy basis for the production of art. Yet, it is true that there's a fiscal force driving not just consumer games that turn out terrible, but those that turn out brilliant, and every product in between. Dunkey does have that other thought about what might jeopardise a game's quality: not working with passionate and creative enough people.^[1] Working with talented people certainly puts you on the course to publishing laudable games. However, when he goes on to talk about "weak games" and "spam" after that, it suggests that when art falls short of expectations, it's because the people behind it weren't talented enough or didn't fully apply themselves.^[1]

A lack of passion is not usually a problem for developers. A lot of people like video games, and in our digitised age, many people have gotten good at using the computer. Moreover, if there's anything the last few years of articles about conditions in the industry should have taught us, it's that game dev is rough. Hours are often long, with layoffs commonplace and sudden. Devs can be left unable to see their families or having to repeatedly uproot them to find new work. Industry burnout is the norm for a reason. You can earn the same money with less stress and higher job security in other white-collar professions. So, if you're toiling away, brow sweating, in the video game mines, it's probably because you care deeply about the work.

Even annualised franchises that Gastrow is understandably frustrated with are developed by incredibly talented people. You can't turn out a presentable AAA game in a very tight window without developers who are experts in their field. The problem there has more to do with resource allocation. Not all developers don't get the time they need to mature their game. A talented developer without enough money ends up in a similar position. You can have a master sculptor, but if the marble budget runs out before their work is done, they won't create a magnum opus. And most of the games that fall on their face aren't entries in annualised franchises. Sometimes a title does crash and burn because the people working on it don't have the knowledge or experience they need. Every developer has to start somewhere. Yet, in many cases, we just have different tastes from the developers. And first-hand records of work in games dev uncover complex interlocking factors that prevent many devs with skill, money, time, and dedication from achieving their visions. Jason Schreier's exposes on big-ticket failures like Anthem and Mass Effect: Andromeda have been particularly illuminating in this area.

It's interesting because Dunkey has repeatedly used Andromeda as a prime specimen of the modern industry letting fans down. He's also called out Anthem before. Yet, the inside stories of what went wrong at Bioware, and other studios that fell from grace, don't have much to do with a lack of passion or an attempt to underproduce SDKs for quick cash. They're stories of failures of management, differences in creative vision, and clogs in the production pipeline as much as anything else.

Digital interactive entertainment is not just the result of a programmer's programming or an artist's modelling. These are collective labour efforts, and so live and die on effective communication within companies, smart organisation and budgeting, and realistic timetabling as much as ideas or devotion. It's not sexy stuff, but it's how the sausage is made. And again, much of this information comes to us from the traditional games writers that Dunkey dismisses.^[5]

Due to game development's interpersonal, financial, and production aspects, the job of the publisher becomes not just to get the word out about games based on great ideas, but to practically operate a business and production outfit, facilitate connections between people, and/or provide advice. That's besides the PR, community management, QA, porting, localisation, and merchandising that they might have to do. Critiquing games doesn't inherently teach you to perform any of these tasks. The list of services two sentences back isn't mine. That comes straight from the Big Mode site, so why doesn't Dunkey's video describe how he's qualified to perform these jobs? It also stands out as a red flag that that list does not contain "marketing": one of the essential functions of the publisher.

There's an old problem of gamers thinking that because they have strong opinions about games and even some knowledge of the medium, they know how to escort a game from conception to storefront. Yet, in the same way that being able to deconstruct the charm of a film doesn't make you Stephen Spielberg, knowing that Ratchet & Clank is more polished than Psychonauts doesn't mean that you understand the mathematics of its lighting. Being able to tell^[5] why a platforming section in Crash Bandicoot is unfair doesn't mean that you know what expertise to allocate a studio to brush up their level design. Being able to point out that it's grating when the characters in Xenoblade keep repeating the same lines doesn't mean you'd know how to jot up a budget for it.

And taken as a whole, Dunkey's videos suggest that he's confused about how a lot of the industry works. It's not just his pronouncements about the quality of games. The "Unity is a bad game engine" line has become a bit of a cliche in misunderstanding game dev. Unity is inappropriate for games aiming to be technical powerhouses, and sure, some Unity games lack polish. However, many other projects running on the engine have knocked it out of the park, so it can't be an inherently low-grade tool. Gastrow uses Untitled Goose Game, Hollow Knight, Cuphead, and Ori and the Will o' the Wisps as examples of quality indie games and they were all made in Unity.^[1]

He claimed a while back that Microsoft would imminently triple the price of Game Pass,^[7] which they didn't. He made the audacious statement that "everyone knows" Microsoft doesn't spend money on the Xbox LIVE servers or perform upkeep on them. He accused Blizzard of running "a scam" because the matchmaking times in their Overwatch 2 beta were long. He says that LA Noire was the big breakthrough in facial animation, and he's correct that it was a landmark technological achievement. Still, the sharpening of motion capture and human animation in general was a gradual process with a lot of hands in it that went well beyond the games industry. There wasn't one breakthrough.

He explained that the reason a lot of video games are substandard now is that developers use "recycled" tech from years ago.^[7] We could spend a lot of time picking this point apart, but he doesn't provide a source for this claim, nor can I tell that it's based on anything. Suffice it to say that the software tools used to make games are mostly updated on a regular basis, while even consoles years old (like the Switch) still support quality experiences. This is an especially puzzling comment given that Dunkey believes that there are games for the N64^[8] and PS1 that stand as titanic accomplishments in the medium to this day.

Lacking in-depth knowledge about software development is not a disadvantage if you just want to give your impressions on games, an ambition Dunkey fulfils with flair. It is a problem if you want to comment on the gears of the industry, which Dunkey also does, and it could be a death sentence if you're running a publisher. One of the reasons that Big Mode feels like such a weird fit for Gastrow is that while he describes the company as a "harmonious continuation" of his YouTube channel, that channel is not about viewing games from an industry perspective.^[1] It was always premised on this idea that Dunkey was a guy experiencing video games the way any regular player does, giving it a contagious relatability for his audience.

Another reason that Big Mode is an odd fit is that while the job of publisher has you trying to connect together people from the industry, critical space, and community, Dunkey has spent a lot of time insulting those people. I think I should mention that this is part of his comedic style and that he has shown genuine thanks for his fans, but all the same, he's attacked video game critics as a class of professionals and even demeaned specific reviewers in a video back in 2017.^[5] There's this telling moment when he references then-IGN editor Kallie Plagge by saying, "this guy is being paid to write dumb shit". And at the time, Plagge noted that Dunkey didn't seem to be aware that she was a woman. You might think that this could shake someone's confidence in their knowledge of games criticism. Yet, in a 2019 follow-up video, Dunkey characterises Plagge's comment as "an embarassing meltdown".^[9]

Another one of the tweets he declares part of that "meltdown" was IGN editor, Chloi Rad, saying that it can be scary to be a full-time freelancer and be called out in front of millions of people, as some writers were by Dunkey. She then says that she hopes those people don't get bullied.^[9] Gastrow makes it clear in his 2017 video that he believes not just that reviewers are mistaken in their critical methodology but that they're literally burying the truth because of the economic pressure publishers place on them.^[5] In an appearance on the H3H3 Podcast, Gastrow told Ethan and Hila Klein that he'd tried to focus on systemic issues in games criticism rather than laying into the critics themselves, but the video does publicly pillory individuals. Even on that podcast, Dunkey said, "game critics suck". Gastrow thinks that critics being reliant on access to games from publishers, and publishers advertising on review sites, creates a conflict of interest.^[5] It's therefore unclear how he thinks Big Mode being, in his words, a continuation of his YouTube channel, wouldn't create a worse conflict of interest.

He describes the video game community as "stupid and inconsistent" people who made poor purchasing decisions, and chides them for not having the historical knowledge of the medium he does.^[7][9] He claims that they have become so conditioned to seeing bugs and glitches that they don't even perceive them anymore, but he does. He says in his E3 2022 video, "fuck everyone" who was involved in organising the event and states that Twitch streamers don't play games and only pretended to care about them at the expo.^[6] He also has this hair-trigger for saying "fuck you" to developers who make a game that disappoints him, like those at Ubisoft and Bungie. In his Big Mode video, he boasted how "developer-friendly" their contracts are,^[1] but three days earlier posted a video where he complained that eliminating crunch at Rockstar will cause far greater delays for Grand Theft Auto VI. And it doesn't get much better from here.

In a couple of early videos on Dunkey's channel, he calls women who play League of Legends "stupid bimbos" and various specific female gamers he encounters "bitches".^[10] In 2015, Dunkey, a white guy, came out with a Red Read Redemption rap in which he repeatedly uses the n-word (no link to that for obvious reasons, but you can find it). He's said the r-word in multiple videos (also no link due to community rules) and constantly used gendered insults to describe female characters. That Spelunky video and one of the League videos I mentioned have him making jokes about being violent to women.^[4][10] During one livestream, he repeatedly used a homophobic slur before saying "fuck Twitch" and calling it a "pussy-ass website" for disallowing use of hate speech (community rules). In 2015, he was temporarily suspended from League of Legends for saying the following to a player who he thought was performing poorly:

"You are a fucking worthless braindead scumfuck bastard pile of trash mental dickface that should be gunned down in the street like the degenerate you are".^[11]

For some social context, "degenerate" is an old eugenics term for people who "pollute" the gene pool. In the eugenicist's mind, this included mentally disabled individuals who many believed should be killed. Such targets were, for example, mass-murdered by the Nazis. So, when Dunkey rants about how a "mental" "degenerate" should be shot dead in the street, that carries some historical baggage. I'm not saying here that anyone should be defined solely by their worst moments in the past or that Dunkey is a Nazi or that people can't change. Gastrow has also phased out most of his hate speech. That being said, he's never publicly apologised for it or for his many instances of degrading other people in the gaming space. He was doing it as recently as this summer. And when pressed on his behaviour in League of Legends, he defended it, blaming the toxicity in the community on League's gameplay and saying:

"I can understand being banned for cheating, or going AFK...or feeding on purpose, but talking shit to some guy that is a total dumbass? What is this, fucking pussy ass baby preschool time?".^[11]

He also argued that as he gave Riot so much publicity, he should receive special treatment in the moderation process. There's that conflict of interests again.^[11] Not only would it seem that Dunkey can't help but alienate many of the people who he now needs help from as a publisher, but abuse by people in positions of power and demographic discrimination are two of the most deep-set injustices in the games industry. Meanwhile, much of the community remains rife with toxicity, a lot of it similarly targeted at women and people of colour. With that in mind, and all these examples on the slate, is this the guy who you'd want running communications or managing the community for your studio, either from a business or ethical perspective? Would you want him interacting with your female colleagues or employees who have mental illnesses? It also feels less than equitable for anyone he's going to hire that he says he and his wife "are not just the face of the company. We are the company".^[1]

I don't believe Dunkey is entering into this publishing venture in bad faith. But when you lay his videos end to end, I think you discover a paranoid and combative perception of the gaming space that is very popular and very damaging. There's a lot of examples in these videos of Dunkey talking about who in games is legitimate and genuine and who is illegitimate and faking their positions. In his publisher announcement video, he says his channel is "for gamers that actually play and care about video games", he's speaking to "the real deal gamers out there", he's calling for "the people who really care out there in the gaming industry", and he distinguishes bad games from "true games".^[1] In other videos, he believes critics are scared to say anything "real", while he isn't, or says that one critic "hates this shit" as he gives mixed impressions of New Super Mario Bros., while Dunkey undeniably loves games.^[5] When critics provide counter-arguments on Twitter, he doesn't frame that as legitimate criticism but a public tantrum.^[9]

He claims that Twitch streamers are lying that they play or care about games and that Blizzard is trying to "scam" people with Overwatch 2. There's an insinuation that Microsoft is trying to trick people by claiming Xbox LIVE is a quality service when "we all know" they don't perform server maintenance. Other people don't know about all the glitches in entertainment software, but Gastrow does. There are all these developers out there who aren't as passionate or talented as they could be and so are liable to be treated by gamers as less legitimate. Maybe they're the reason games are bad. If you look at the comments on Gastrow's videos and their ratings, you can his audience eats these statements up.

There are actually a lot of points that Dunkey and many other people in the gaming community make that I agree with. I think they're basically right that language in popular game reviews is too homogenous and that we have a richer experience with the medium for revisiting the classics. I believe that a lot of bad games do come out, and feel that same frustration when playing a title that doesn't pass the bar. I do think that economic interests compromise the technical stability and originality of plenty of games, and that new AAA games are overpriced. I sometimes also get annoyed seeing such titles hit the top of the charts while more creative and well-behaved games languish in obscurity. There's also nothing wrong with being disappointed that critics are not helping you sort through the mountain of games that come out as well as you'd hoped.

Yet, the causes of catastrophic disasters and long-running systemic issues in the games industry are complex. In part, because video game development is complex, and because the business is notoriously opaque. Structural issues like managers compromising the quality of games or profit motives degrading the robustness of the medium also constitute one corner of sophisticated, deep-set hierarchical and economic problems that affect our whole world. That doesn't mean they can never be understood or overcome, but it does mean that there's a lot of relevant information we don't have access to and that there are no easy answers or quick fixes for what ails gaming.

But what if there was a more accessible explanation for these crises in games that made their production, and failures in production, simple to understand? And what if the problems, instead of being systemic and intangible, were transformed into people you could identify? Maybe you could even target those people to solve the problems, or at least, vent your frustrations. What if developers or publishers, rather than contending with an incredibly challenging and complex job and being subject to abrasive material forces, just didn't care enough about games or weren't talented enough or didn't know what ideas make good games because they're not huge fans like us?

Maybe those games sell in spite of criticism, not because we have different palettes or because people can see a game as flawed but worth playing. Maybe they sell because gamers are stupid and inconsistent and don't know the classics and can't tell when a title is full of bugs. And because critics are being dishonest with you. It's not that they have different interpretations of games or views about how review scales should work than you. Instead, it's that they're out of touch, don't understand the games, secretly don't like games, or are being paid under the table. So, they provide misleading but positive endorsements for bad games, and the solution becomes for all of us real gamers to set the record straight for the industry and writers.

This mode of thinking tends to be catnip for insecure, angry young men. It can be difficult to accept that there are people with opinions that are different from yours but as valid as yours, or maybe that they've even worked out more than you have. But you can avoid this problem of having to contend with other peoples' views in good faith by declaring them inauthentic. You are the real gamer; they are the fake. And that "fakeness" of other gamers or their active intent to deceive us becomes a fixation for some people. For plenty, these traits of insincerity or duplicity are seen as unvirtuous aspects of their personality that justify abuse.

I'm not saying that Jason Gastrow tells you to go off and harass people on the internet or that he is spreading far-right ideology or speculating about why he says what he says. But this false conception of illegitimate devs, critics, and community members ruining games does not give you a sturdy starting point from which to debug the industry. And by combining it with baseless attacks on these people in front of a large audience, Dunkey opens the door to wide-scale harassment. He puts fuel in the engine of people who'll commit more severe abuse. A key concept in gaming's reactionary hate movement has been that prominent marginalised people and those fighting for equitable treatment in games don't really care about the medium. They are "fake gamers" that are aiming to erase the "real gamers" and "push an agenda". They "hate this shit", they're "writing dumb shit", we know they "don't play games". Therefore, standing up for games and gaming means purging those people from our social groups.

Consider the parallels between Dunkey saying "Fuck Ubsioft" or "Fuck Bungie" because they created games he didn't enjoy and gamers taking to the web in droves to scarify studio staff. There's a link between him normalising attacks on critics, spreading panic about "fake gamers", and publicly insulting Kallie Plagge in 2017 and 2019, and the hate comments she received in 2020. Plagge was abused, often using sexist language, for giving a tepid review of Cyberpunk 2077. A recurring argument in the mouths of her harassers was that she didn't really play Cyberpunk or like games. Even in Plagge's descriptions of her mistreatment at IGN, in which she talks about her contributions being seen as less than male editors', there's that spectre of the fake gamer who isn't as passionate as the real ones.

The bad news of this article is that there are no quick fixes for problems in the games industry like just identifying the fake gamers or working out which are the effective ideas and which are the terrible ideas. It's also that there's a lot of misunderstanding and abuse out there. But the good news of this article is that we're not surrounded on all sides by enemies and liars. Most critics, developers, and community members are in the same boat as us in that they're people who share an authentic and constructive love of the medium and have its best interests at heart. If we are to affect how games are made and talked about, it would seem to be rallying around those common values, rather than pushing each other away, that will give us the most collective power with which to effect change. Thanks for reading.

Sources

1. My Indie Game Publishing Company by Jason Gastrow (September 22, 2022), YouTube.
2. Neon White (dunkview) by Jason Gastrow (June 29, 2022), YouTube.
3. Dundertale by Jason Gastrow (October 24, 2015), YouTube.
4. Spedunky by Jason Gastrow (January 3, 2015), YouTube.
5. Game Critics by Jason Gastrow (July 8, 2017), YouTube.
6. Dunkey's Anti E3 2022 by Jason Gastrow (June 18, 2022), YouTube.
7. Video Game Pricing by Jason Gastrow (August 15, 2021), YouTube.
8. Banjo Kazooie (dunkview) by Jason Gastrow (December 15, 2015), YouTube.
9. Game Critics (Part 2) by Jason Gastrow (July 29, 2019), YouTube.
10. League of Legends: Guide to Girls by Jason Gastrow (August 22, 2011), YouTube.
11. I'm Done with League of Legends by Jason Gastrow (September 12, 2015), YouTube.

All other sources linked at relevant points in the article.