#Kinda Funny Games | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

breakingarrows · 8 months

Text

Games Media in Review: Kinda Funny & Kinda Funny Games

Kinda Funny had multiple starts before its official start as Kinda Funny and Kinda Funny Games on Patreon on January 5, 2015. It really started on Greg Miller’s personal YouTube channel, GameOverGreggy, on August 16, 2012 when the first Conversation with Colin episode was uploaded. In it, Greg gives roommate and coworker Colin Moriarty a random topic to discuss. The first topic: ants. This continued for over a year, being joined by an Oreo review show, Greg’s own vlogs, and occasional behind the scenes clips of his job at IGN. On December 9, 2013 Greg and Colin were joined by Nick Scarpino and Tim Gettys on the first GameOverGreggy Show podcast episode. The topics: which Disney princess would you like to fuck, Tim Allen, fat people, and being either Marty McFly or Ferris Bueller. On September 15, 2014 they launched their first Patreon under the name Kinda Funny. Within two days they had 894 patrons and were projected to be earning $10,042.32 (gross) per month. At the start of 2015 the four would reveal they had left their jobs at IGN to relaunch Kinda Funny full time and launch a new channel: Kinda Funny Games, both with separate Patreons and shows to go along with the separate channels. As of January 7, 2015 they had grown to 2667 patrons and projected to earn $15,253.81 (gross) per month, with Kinda Funny Games accruing 2325 patrons and was projected to take in $14,306.19 (gross) a month. Kevin Coello would aid them in lots of behind the scenes production and officially join the team in 2015. All of their content was filmed in Greg and Colin’s apartment, with a majority of the shows being hosted in their third (spare) bedroom. This continued until the summer of 2016 in which Kinda Funny launched their new studio space.

Despite the success there was turmoil in the beginning of 2017 when in March Colin announced he was leaving Kinda Funny. It was clear Colin’s political leanings and thoughts did not sit well with the larger games media crowd, especially after Trump won the 2016 election. His infamous tweet of, “Ah. Peace and quiet. #ADayWithoutAWoman” in response to women at large not tweeting in protest of the Trump presidency was a breaking point and he would soon depart to found Last Stand Media which continues to this day. Later that month Andy Cortez would join the team as a video editor alongside Joey Noelle and Greg Gettys. Barrett Courtney would join in January 2019. Blessing Adeoye joined in January 2020. Roger Pokorny joined in January 2021. Other’s have come and gone. Alanah Pearce, Danny O'Dwyer, and Andrea Rene were regulars for some time before moving forward in each of their own careers. Currently Snowbikemike (2020), Janet Garcia (2021), Parris Lilly (2021), Gary Whitta (2017), and Tamoor Hussain (2021) are all listed as Kinda Funny members in all of their video descriptions. It was in October 2022, after the years of Covid and remote work and a lengthy tease of a new space, that they moved into a larger studio that has been utilized since.

Much like when writing about IGN (a profile, which upon looking back, seems much shorter than it should be now), I have a long history with Kinda Funny. I was there as a Podcast Beyond fan following Greg and Colin’s every article, podcast, and tweet. I was a big fan and wanted to do what they did. This led to launching the YouTube channel IllustriousMagic with my then closest friend Matt, a channel whose 10th anniversary is quickly approaching in November. I followed Greg and Colin, and later Tim and Nick, as they launched Kinda Funny, gave them money via patreon, attended Kinda Funny Live 2015 (that’s me at 55:24), and even made my own fan videos such as my own Oreo reviews and a skit based on a podcast conversation. I was somewhat involved in the community and made many friends, including now staff member Barrett Courtney, some of whom I still talk to to this day. Kinda Funny helped connect me to someone who I would somehow convince to move across the country to live in Las Vegas with me and remains to this day. As with IGN, I eventually drifted away as tastes changed and I found myself wanting something different from games and media coverage than Kinda Funny was offering.

So what do you get watching Kinda Funny? Well you have two channels: one for general entertainment and another purely for video games. Their daily games news show lists out the stories of the day with their commentary and frequently will feature guests from their friends in the industry. Afterwards there will be a stream that could be anything from streaming games to going in a car to drive around and rank fast food french fries. The vibes are very casual, laid back, just a bunch of friends hanging out, shooting the shit, trying to get the biggest laugh. Lots of self promoting throughout their videos talking about what’s live, what’s going live, how to support, and where to find them.

Most videos are tied to a specific show, you have the standard video podcasts covering everything from the latest franchise IPs being watched and recapped in order to complete a ranking list, you have current shows being discussed the day after with Star Wars Ahsoka, a conversational podcast, a PlayStation podcast, an Xbox podcast, a throwback to the IGN Let’s Play days with Greg and Brian Altano playing Tears of the Kingdom for short periods, reviews, previews, and archives of live streams such as Snowbikemike playing Kingdom Hearts for the very first time. Kinda Funny is all video, on Twitch and YouTube, which makes it easy to follow, and they have an offering of Patreon exclusives as well which I wasn’t able to get into as I wasn’t contributing during my two week period of watching everything they were putting out and going backwards when the new stuff ran dry. The production pipeline is somewhat similar to outlets such as Giant Bomb: long uncut and unedited footage of a group playing, commenting, talking over, or reacting to games and other such topics. Livestreams become videos on demand on YouTube, there is rarely the heavy editing you see in some other channels as videos frequently are close to an hour or more, though thanks to their new studio they have a massive video wall that they can place graphics and videos onto in real-time to provide additional or info for both the hosts and viewers.

Unlike IGN becoming more regimented in structure, which directly contributed to my no longer following them closely, Kinda Funny encouraged getting off topic at all times, which is what kept me around for so much longer than I thought. Checking through my YouTube likes it appears to be sometime around 2018 that I stopped really following Kinda Funny closely, whereas I thought it was closer to 2016/2017.

I was, and still am, a fan of RedLetterMedia and their conversations about movies ever since I started watching videos on YouTube. RedLetterMedia in January of 2017 launched a comedy series called “The Nerd Crew” which satirized the geek culture podcasts whose mentality are, as Jay Bauman stated in one episode, “Don’t ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next product.” This sentiment can broadly be applied to a lot of enthusiast press culture, and I think Kinda Funny can often fall under that sentiment as well. In a recent series covering the latest Star Wars show, Ahsoka, while discussing Episode 5 guest Saige states, “I’m a simple Star Wars fan and Carson also references Leia. We have to acknowledge that Carson also says Senator Organa is running interference, Senator Organa. I’m a simple Star Wars fan, I hear Organa and I go *clap* Yay!” Carboni, “We know who that is!” This bit is pretty much 1:1 the conversation RLM paradies in Nerd Crew and is the number one reason why I don’t find much insight amongst their critical stuff then, and now.

Another recent example of differences in opinion showing the opposing mindsets would be Bethesda’s latest game, Starfield. Kinda Funny had an extra long 48 hour stream dedicated to Starfield and their review and further coverage have been mostly positive in talking up the size, scope, and breadth of the game. However where they see the quantity of things to do I see a procedurally generated level of quality in most of its activities. They talk about high highs and low lows and I write in my notes how three out of the nineteen main quests had anything genuinely interesting or fun or thrilling or evocative to offer. They share “fishing stories” about cool things they’ve come across and I upload a video of bunny hopping amidst a barren wasteland to my objective as “The Starfield Experience”. I don’t think Starfield is very good and align most with Blessing and his complaints, especially when it comes to “exploration” being a load of bullshit as you’re pretty much going to go into your fast travel menu to get anywhere efficiently. There is just a chasm between the way we think about games. Microsoft’s internal marketing for a mid-generation console refresh is that it will use slightly less power. Who cares! Your Xbox using less kilowatts is not going to combat climate change in any meaningful way. This is like the individual shaming of failing to recycle, meanwhile corporations are dumping truckloads into the ocean. Microsoft has trillions of dollars worth of assets, they could more directly combat climate change than through a low power rest mode in their consumer device. These things are not celebratory.

As an example of those that I do find insight from nowadays I really enjoy Noah Caldwell-Gervais’ video essays, as well as Tim Rogers dba Action Button. For podcasts it’s places like Bad End, Abnormal Mapping, and Insert Credit. I also still have a love for the written word, both for what it can do that the video medium can’t, and because translating an essay into a video is time consuming and hard work. Text sites I frequent include: Bullet Points Monthly, Deep Hell, No Escape, Radiator Blog, and other individual blogs such as Autumn Wright, Liz Ryerson, Grace In The Machine, and Bobby Schroeder. The main difference between people like these and Kinda Funny is that Kinda Funny are entertainers first and critics second, whereas the others are only ever critics. And Kinda Funny are good entertainers, I found many literal laugh out loud moments watching them again, reminders of why I had such a love for the channel earlier. When it comes to sitting down and talking about a game critically though, is where the aforementioned differences appear. We are ever evolving, as every year I look back at my beliefs and work from a couple of years ago and think, “What a fool!” which I believe is a good thing and gives hope that others are ever evolving and changing as well. I do find it depressing how entertainment is valued over criticism by the general audience. I keep a spreadsheet of gaming-centric Patreons and even based on their 2020 data before it became private, Kinda Funny’s two channels were the top earners when it came to gross estimated income from Patreon alone. Meanwhile a good majority of the critics I follow closely would never be able to sustain themselves full time doing the work.

Reluctance to be critical of a work has been recurring when watching conversations at IGN and GameSpot. I’m not deluded enough to believe in the moneyhat but I think being friends with so many within the development side of the industry, as well as frequently doing marketing events on behalf of publishers within the industry, does create a reticence to be very critical save for when the occasional stinker like Gollum comes out. As many others have written out before, criticism is done out of love, and I partly write this piece out of love for Kinda Funny and what it could be, in my mind, in terms of promoting a diverse range of critics.

As with any modern YouTube channel there are sponsored ads that are edited into the shows, though one in particular caught my ear. Draft Kings, a sports betting website (aka gambling), has a sponsored ad in which the final section is a sped up disclaimer about help for gambling addiction. It doesn’t sit well with me for several reasons. The presumed audience for Kinda Funny, to me, is a reflection of what I was at the time of my fandom height, a young 20-23 year old looking to show my support any way I can. Kinda Funny has for a long time referred to its audience of fans as “best friends,” a sentiment that conjures up the worst aspects of parasocial relationships online as detailed by Shannon Strucci in their two part series on the term and its elements. Engaging your audience as best friends, asking them for support, and offering one of the ways of support as a Draft Kings offer designed to get you into gambling, a pastime well known for its preying upon those susceptible to addiction, isn’t right. A pastime that has been slowly making its way into games and has been the main subject of a recent Twitch competitor, Kick, whose main draw, and potential funding, has been to encourage gambling after Twitch finally came down against gambling streams on its platform. All of this is to say, I don’t like that they’re advertising for a gambling website, even if it earns them some income, and other fans have also voiced their concern.

If you pay close attention to the faces behind the list of Kinda Funny members you’ll notice there’s a higher ratio of people of color compared to most gaming media outlets, namely the two I’ve profiled previously: IGN and GameSpot. Tamoor Hussain even doubles as an employee of GameSpot. Seven out of the fifteen staff members listed by Kinda Funny are people of color, a proportion I don’t believe is even close to being matched by any of the other gaming media sites out there. It reminds me of the little incident of Dan Stapleton tweeting out, “I think I can speak for just about everybody in games journalism when I say that we’d love to hire more black and other minority writers. But we can’t if we don’t hear from you. When you see job postings go up, apply apply apply - or recommend someone who should.” To which Blessing responded, “I applied to IGN more times than I can count. If you think not enough black and minority content creators aren't putting themselves out there, you're not looking hard enough.” Whereas most sites fail to bring on diverse talking heads to be featured on camera, Kinda Funny frequently has lots of diversity in their cast and who they bring on. People such as Imran Khan, Kahlief Adams, and Belinda Garcia have also been featured numerous times on their various shows.

Kinda Funny has a history of collaborating, bringing on, and featuring, other online personalities, from larger ones like Comic Book Girl 19 to smaller ones like LiteWeight Gaming. Some of their staff were recognizable figures in the gaming space prior to being brought on, and some were not so well known. This approach of platforming and promoting smaller personalities as equals is commendable and I think does help to foster a cooperative and helpful community of people.

I have found that when it comes to Greg Miller most have long made up their mind, they either like him or hate him, find him charismatic or loud and obnoxious. Beginning to watch Kinda Funny again for this profile I found myself being reminded why I had become a Podcast Beyond fan so long ago, the man is simply entertaining to watch. It is obvious that being entertaining is the main goal of all Kinda Funny content, and while I’ve mentioned my issues with this approach, I would like to commend Greg for creating a channel that frequently raises and promotes other voices. As I mentioned in my write up of IGN, they are siloed off and rarely acknowledge that there is other stuff out there to read and watch. GameSpot had a different approach, and Kinda Funny is one of the most willing, I believe, to work with and bring on smaller talent onto their platform. Obviously there is the parasocial criticism of their naming of the audience as the best friends, and despite the best attempts at fostering a loving and cooperative community, with any large enough audience you’re going to find some snakes and segmented opposing groups within that audience. Still, I think Greg as an individual has proven he is willing to listen and learn and attempt to make up for what mistakes he may make. Despite attempts to turn opinion against Greg, such as Bob Mackey’s failed attempt in 2020, the industry at large continues to embrace him. Without him we wouldn’t have Blessing’s wonderful video about how We Need To Fix Black Hair in Video Games.

Despite my criticisms I still find myself jealous of those who work there. Kinda Funny comes across as offering a type of place that allows their creators to chase after what interests them at the time and what they find meaningful. Having a daily talk show to espouse my own views on the news and encourage the change I’d like to see would be a great opportunity, and by all appearances it does seem to be a place where everyone is friends and enjoys each other's company. A fear would be that this familial relationship brings about long overtime hours of unpaid work (whether knowingly or simply felt as an implicit responsibility). Still, watching the Games Daily with Sam Lake I find myself, a huge Remedy fan, chomping at the bit thinking, “That could have been me!” and once again daydreaming of all the things I could do was I working there. As a source of entertainment, Kinda Funny is strong, though as with anything, is quite dependent on taste. I do think that their willingness and history of platforming and promoting smaller, and more diverse, people is a great help to an industry predominantly white and full of insulated staff lists where names transfer between IGN, GameSpot, Polygon, before the ultimate end of most games media: public relations or game development.

#Games Media in Review #Kinda Funny #Kinda Funny Games #Writing #video games

1 note · View note