@“kory”#p33801 well heck! I’ll check it out. I just quickly read the Wikipedia description and this seems like it would be a genuinely cool one to do an actual letsplay
It's on my list of things to play. I thought 80 days was excellent and inkle is a talented group
@“yeso”#385 @“kory”#525 so now I'm in an email chain with the director of media outreach and vice president for academic affairs talking about video games. What a strange time to be alive.
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@“CidNight”#p33768 ridiculously colorful shirts to show off
In grad school everyone's favorite instructor wore Hawaiian shirts and tea saucer sized jade pendants every class. so keep up the good work is what I'm sayin
@“yeso”#p34094 my doctoral adviser dressed exactly like Indiana Jones would dress if he was actually an archaeologist. Apparel is important
Hello my dears! New episode is live:
https://youtu.be/1rh2aRgFQqk
@“CidNight”#p34539 my gameboy camera photos of Jomon era terra cotta counts as video game archaeology ?
I keep on meaning to watch these all the way through, since from what it looks like from the introduction of the first video they will be extremely useful in thinking about a side project I’m working on. I’ll watch them eventually! (Maybe this weekend.) Each time you post a new one I scrub through it real quick, and I’m definitely looking forward to see what you have to say.
@“saddleblasters”#p34546 Awesome! Can't wait to read what you think (and am intensely curious about your side project).
@“treefroggy”#449 Absolutely! On several levels.
late to the party but just watched the first episode and thought it was great. i enjoy the balance you strike between like, “hey this is an interesting way to think about this stuff,” but also a skepticism of how intentional some of the art direction is wrt conveying meaning about lordran. the knight's family saying lol
i mentioned it to my spouse, also a social science person, and now they want me to wait to watch the others so that we can do it together so gonna do that
also just as someone who has wached dozens of hours of playthroughs of this dumbass game, you have a knack for the casual funny commentary and a nice voice to listen to so keep it up!!
also i think it was posted by @"Video_Game_King"#136 at one point but there's some website with an in-browser app where you can just zoom around video game spaces with the camera? i used it for FFX Calm Lands but I believe some Dark Souls levels were on there too, could be useful
@“tapevulture”#p34565 It sounds like something I‘d have posted, but I’ve tried finding the site myself in the past and haven't been able to turn up anything. Not even in the OneNote doc full of random links I have for just this situation.
@“tapevulture”#p34565 Wow thank you for the wonderful feedback! I love the idea of you and your spouse just hanging on the couch together watching, that's like…the coolest. Next step I think is to invest in a modestly priced microphone to bring the sound quality up.
That tool does sound like it would be very useful, especially if I really wanted to do an in-depth analysis of some bit of architecture or something. I'll do some google sleuthing to see if I can find it.
@“tapevulture”#p34565 @“Video_Game_King”#p34566
Are you talking about https://noclip.website ?
@“rejj”#p34571 That would have to be it.
@“rejj”#p34571 yep thats it
@“CidNight”#p33340 Best video so far! Back in the day when I was playing lots of Dark Souls and smoking weed, I‘d have thoughts like "It’s all a metaphor for society, man"…………. Now there's a video series describing why it was all along!
@“treefroggy”#p34588 Haha, I love it! Getting a degree in anthropology is a whole lot like smoking a bunch of weed and thinking about Dark Souls.
I mean... I don't know what that means.
i actually played Dark Souls while studying anthropology. completed the game but not the degree 
not sure how related the two are lol
but it's true that one of the most remarkable things about Dark Souls is how it pushes the player to pay attention to their surroundings and to be constantly wondering about its significance in the immediate present (is it useful to the player right now?) the future (will you be able to access it later?) and past (what's this place's significance within the lore? what did it use to be?).
looking forward to seeing how you marry that wild claim that DS2 is the best in the series with its bonkers world map.
i think it's worth re-treading and explaining the lore a bit more when you're making these connections, i only vaguely remember the story now (and yes that might be because i was high)
@“tombo”#p34615 Well, consider these videos exactly equivalent to completing an anthropology degree (they're definitely not).
I really want to do DS2 eventually, and it will certainly present some challenges. I think there's a kind of regional sprawl to DS2 that will be interesting to think about archaeologically, with the different kingdoms kind of spilling into each other. I think @kory and I discussed this a bit further up...or maybe in DMs I can't remember... but there's a palimpsest sort of nature to DS2 (the idea that there are thousands of years of worlds and kingdoms piled onto one another) that really makes it the perfect candidate for archaeological analysis.
Also thank you for the feedback on the lore thing. I've thought about that quite a bit - how much should I retread the lore? I know there are tons of videos about Dark Souls lore on youtube, and I don't want to get bogged down in it. At the same time, if I don't give enough context some of the analysis will be alienating to anyone who hasn't played the game and studied the lore fairly intensely. With other games this might not be such an issue, but Dark Souls is real dense. I'll have to continue refining this!
This could also go in Essay Recommends but also relevant here, and I'm really digging this space.
https://youtu.be/lre3qF9USFU
Highly relevant. Zen Buddhism is the driving philosophy behind Souls.