Walter Rodney, born in Guyana on 22nd of march in 1942, Pan-African, Marxist intellectual who was assassinated by the Guyanese government in 1980 at 38 years old.
Rodney attended the University College of the West Indies in 1960 and was awarded a first class honors degree in History in 1963. He later earned a PhD in African History in 1966 at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, England, at the age of 24.
Rodney traveled extensively and became well-known as an activist, scholar, and formidable orator. He taught at the University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania from 1966-67 and 1969-1974, and in 1968 at his alma mater University of the West Indies.
On October 15th, 1968, the government of Jamaica declared Rodney a "persona non grata" and banned him from the country. Following his dismissal by the University of the West Indies, students and poor people in West Kingston protested, leading to the "Rodney Riots", which caused six deaths and millions of dollars in damages.
In 1972, Rodney published "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa". Historian Melissa Turner describes the work this way: "A brutal critique of long-standing and persistent exploitation of Africa by Western powers, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa remains a powerful, popular, and controversial work in which Rodney argued that the early period of African contact with Europe, including the slave trade, sowed the seeds for continued African economic underdevelopment and had dramatically negative social and political consequences as well. He argued that, while the roots of Africaβs ailments rested with intentional underdevelopment and exploitation under European capitalist and colonial systems, the only way for true liberation to take place was for Africans to become cognizant of their own complicity in this exploitation and to take back the power they gave up to the exploiters."
On June 13th, 1980, Rodney was killed in Georgetown, Guyana via a bomb given to him by Gregory Smith, a sergeant in the Guyana Defence Force, one month after returning Zimbabwe. In 2015, a "Commission of Inquiry" in Guyana that the country's then president, Linden Forbes Burnham, was complicit in his murder.
"If there is to be any proving of our humanity it must be through revolutionary means."
Walter Rodney
How Europe Underdeveloped Africa
Decolonial Marxism Essays From The Pan African Revolution
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Watching/rewatching Time Rogers/Action Button videos I either didn't watch or stopped watching and realizing that it's like 80% him talking about himself and how many times he's played the game and how much other related media he's consumed, 10% game summary, and 10% actual analysis/insights.
Edit: it's 85% talking about himself, 5% summary/describing the game, 10% analysis/insights.
Borderline slop. Which I guess is fine as like time-waster videos go, but I'm so burnt out on stuff that exists on the internet merely to take up time and accrue money.
And I don't really like the established art-critics of games like Bulletpoints or whatever that much. There's some good stuff there too, but it's not like a good marxist analysis you might see on here or some blog that gets shared because it's moving and insightful. You get people who I believe and seem to play games totally different from me talking about them like they're either productivity software or you get the opposite where the game or game experience is treated as the personal diaries of the (video) reviewer that's so hyper-specific to their own lives that I'm basically just watching a video about a person describe their own life. Which again, isn't bad but it's not the gaming content I'm looking for.
You also get sorta documentary/research journalism stuff that talks about the production and the people who made the games semi-frequently and that can be really good too. Fine settling for that most of the time, but that's sorta' dancing around actually talking about the game too.
Online forums are just people talking about talking about art. So they'll ask why there are so few RPGs on N64, if 30FPS is acceptable, top horror games, etc. But they're still not actually talking about the thing in itself: gaming. It's honestly weird how resistant people are to talking about art in general, but especially video games.
It's slop, but it's like...really high effort slop. Idk, I normally have no patience for the typical YouTube algorithm bait "why [random cartoon] is actually incredible" four hour ramble, but I absolutely loved the Action Button videos on Tokimeki Memorial and Boku no Natsuyasumi. A big part of it is that Tim Rogers can offer unique insight as someone who lived and worked in Japan in the industry and speaks fluent Japanese, and I enjoy when he digs into the cultural and linguistic minutiae.
As you said, a huge percentage of the videos (especially the Boku no Natsuyasumi one, holy shit) are just him talking about himself, but he's got a very weird brain so I totally eat it up. I'll even let him get away with that thing where he repeatedly says the full title and platform of a game everytime because it's his shtick and when he does it I find it almost hypnotic. That said, I remember bouncing off of the Doom video, and I haven't watched any of his other Action Button reviews, so it could be that the Japanese angle holds everything together for me.
I don't have any great recommendations for proper criticism of video games in video form, but for an academic perspective you can check out the open access journal ROMchip. On the history side of things, you can't go wrong with the Video Game History Foundation's podcast. They are serious about preserving video game history, so they focus on the people and processes behind video games rather than hagiographies of Miyamoto or Super Mario 64 or what-have-you, and rather than spitballing for an hour (my least favorite type of podcast) they have on either people who have extensively studied the topic or people who were directly involved. Akin to that AnimEigo interview you introduced, they also have a lot more stories covering the business side of things than you typically hear in video game enthusiast spaces. One of my favorite recent episodes was this one featuring a pair who worked at GamePro.
Thanks, I'll check those out.
And yeah, those Boku No Natsuyasumi & Tokimeki videos are the 2 I enjoyed. Seem to be bouncing off the others, but I'll give them all a chance I guess.