This follows from Dunkey’s handling of characters and physics. He documents the irrational limitations of games and exploits them to entertain, communicating their experiential potential. In this way, Dunkey’s playing has its own aesthetic. The game crashes into a hilarious mess, as Dunkey pretends to role-play normally amid all the chaos. In his most popular video, he loads the best-selling Dungeons And Dragons-esque sandbox Skyrim with ridiculous player-created modifications that change dragons into Thomas the Tank Engine, a player character into Sonic the Hedgehog, and attack moves into farts. To capture the gaming experience, Videogamedunkey’s reviews push games to their limits. Plus, he generally avoids social commentary and can’t be understood as progressive.īut if this is new games criticism, it’s of an extreme sort. Post-escapism puts games in a politically progressive “social, political, and cultural context.” Dunkey focuses on what the editors call the mere “joy of play,” so he can’t be a post-escapist. Their approach stands in opposition to what Daniel Goldberg and Linus Larsson, editors of the critical games writing anthology The State Of Play, identified in their intro as the “post-escapism” approach.

New games critics therefore critique as players, focusing on experience. And his crudity is the very thing that puts his critical approach into context.ĭunkey is an example of what gaming journalist Kieron Gillen influentially called the “ New games criticism,” an approach that draws inspiration from often problematic New Journalists, who at the time differentiated their work by inserting themselves into stories. This probably increases his appeal to the stereotypical white, male gamer, and of course turns off sensible gamers understandably concerned with political correctness in a medium that’s seen as being overrun with bilious ideologies.ĭespite his unfortunate tendencies, Dunkey’s saving grace is that he makes pretty engaging videos when he manages to steer clear of problematic language. At worst, he is using his influential platform to amplify traumatic aspects of our society, and doing it under the guise of irony doesn’t excuse it. At best, Dunkey offers us extreme examples of misbehavior to deconstruct. In some sense, though, this really is how people talk on multiplayer games that are massive enough to make players feel anonymous. Though he doesn’t seem to harbor hate for anyone in particular, he’s certainly not playing by anyone’s, much less Madison’s, liberal standards of basic decency when he’s calling other players faggots and pussies. That stance says a lot about where he’s coming from, as he stubbornly upholds the patriarchal assumption that it’s okay for video games to reinforce white-male-dominated space. He later defended his abusive language as part of the game, doubling down on a position that’s increasingly indefensible. In one of his more high-profile and least auspicious moments, Dunkey was banned for hate-speech from the online multiplayer game League Of Legends, one of the games he covered the most extensively. He frequently uses racist, sexist and ableist language. He also rarely gives interviews (multiple email requests for an interview for this piece went unanswered), which doesn’t help.įurthermore, Dunkey’s humor, while sometimes brilliant, is always crude. This might be one reason why he receives no attention from Madison’s media outlets. While his occasional nods to Madison are nice- playing Pokemon Go at Hilldale Shopping Center, and dancing on Library Mall-his work is about a global industry. But most Madisonians have no idea who he is.įrom Dunkey’s digital position, location matters little. box address to contact him as recently as 2016. He has a Reddit page and a Facebook fan club and is likely the highest paid cultural commentator with connections to Madison-it’s not entirely clear that he still lives here, but he gave fans a Madison P.O. His YouTube videos, which command a following of 3.5 million subscribers, blend crude humor with insightful videogames criticism. Jason Gastrow, known online as Videogamedunkey, is as immature and promising as the medium he critiques.

Video game dunkey on garry's mod rp