In 2026, I want to improve my writing about games. I feel like this whole year I only rarely got At Something with my videos. Of course reading broadly is useful, but have other folks found success with certain techniques to improve their critical/analytical work?
perhaps what I am not chasing is better quality work, but instead, to FEEL better about my work. In which case the solution is simple: Get really high on my own supply and dismiss all criticism as beneath me. Now THAT'S an approach I can get behind!
while i have not indulged in the genre of video essays (...yet...) perhaps some lessons from academic writing can be applied:
what is the gap in the research? what is missing from the community conversation? what has not been analyzed or examined or explored that could be fruitful to the community and further the ongoing conversational project?
don't go into your research phase with an argument in mind. go in with a question to be answered and let the texts speak for themselves about what that answer might be. ie start with a research question, not a hypothesis. open of mind, open of heart, thicc of ass
who cares? the world is increasingly busy, media is increasingly plentiful, attention spans are increasingly atrophied. why should anyone care what you have to say about this? what does it Matter? who is the specific person who is going to pay attention to you and why is it necessary that you deliver this message to them? find the angle that makes this discovery worth someone's time, even if it's just worth the time of one specific sliver of one specific community
what is the takeaway that you want to further develop the community conversation? you want someone to be able to chime into a conversation and say "actually, i watched a video last week that argued X" and have that X be a meaningful divergence from the currently dominantly held line of thought. while "water is wet" studies are hugely important in STEM, they hold less ... water in informal artistic communities like ours. why is what you are saying different and why should that matter to people? give them a soundbite or a quote they can easily share if you can!
i hope thats helpful :) everyone say yay yippee ttrpg analysis
Corporate Heartbreaker
One line of thinking that i've been pursuing is "What if we ignore 'by definition, this cannot be' and go ahead and analyse corporate output through the lens of the fantasy heartbreaker?"
A core feature of heartbreakers is a tendency toward having that one golden idea...which is held back by a lack of exposure to systems outside its corporate parent. By interrogating corporate systems this way, we ask such questions as "What does this system do well?" "What tools can we extract from this system?" "In what directions, both obvious and not, can we push this tool? How far?"
"What does D&D want?"
I feel that this has been a fairly fruitful endeavor. If the headmasters don't want something, i do! By maintaining an attitude of "not the canvas, but a brush" i can remain sober and ensure the corporate extracts are just a few tools among the many I've accumulated. I got what I wanted, built my own [better! imroved!] tools, pocketed the results, and moved on.
Recently, however, I decided to revisit D&D with an extra decade of research and alternate opinions at my disposal: D&D is not a heartbreaker. D&D is two heartbreakers. They're not even bolted, or taped, or chained, together. Two paradigms were just kind of...dropped loosely into a box without much to integrate them at all.
They disagree violently on almost everything.
