Chris Franklin is a game designer and critic best known for producing the web series Errant Signal on YouTube. He’s been making videos about games for over eight years, and in that time, he’s developed a style that’s both academic and casual. His videos are often holistic close reads, exploring the narrative and mechanical themes of a game and drawing conclusions about what a game is trying to accomplish, but his videos have also covered design concepts and games criticism history. In 2019, he started Errant Signal: Blips, a video series about overlooked, small independent games.
Chris and I talked about the process of writing about games, the challenge of defining a “small” game, and the times he has made mistakes in his analyses. Below we have some excerpts from that conversation, which have been edited for length and clarity. If you’re interested in hearing everything he and I discussed, you can download the full audio below.
How much do you read about games before you write about them, and does that contribute to your decision to write about them?
I don’t want to read this really good take and that take is now my take and that’s just me, you know, my video is going to be rephrasing someone’s entire piece ‘cause that’s not good, and I don’t want to do that. But at the same time I feel like, in the Internet, in sort of this take-based culture that we have, where everyone wants to pretend like their take is amazing and is made of whole cloth, and everybody wants to sort of own their angle and nobody else shared or helped inform it—I think that’s really toxic and dangerous.
You’ve talked about the need for—or the lack of—editorial oversight in the YouTube space, and I guess you sort of have to find that for yourself…Does anyone take a look at your scripts that aren’t about more sensitive subjects?
I think a lot of my griping about the lack of an editor—as much as I do think that editorial oversight can help the actual output of the show as it stands—is just that I remember watching a lot of games writing positions dry up and die, and I’ve always kind of lamented the idea that like, critical writing as a career largely disappeared before games criticism really came into its own. So, there was no long tradition of your, you know, Pauline Kaels and your Roger Eberts and people who could professionally do this sort of stuff. It’s largely been people doing freelance work.
So like, as much as I lament the fact that I don’t have editorial oversight because I think it would help the actual output of the show...a lot of it is just me lamenting the fact that in some parallel universe where either Internet monetization’s figured out or print never died, I could be doing this as like a real job and a career...where like I could be, you know, having—have an editor over me, giving—helping sharpen my skills and find my voice, and then eventually maybe I could be promoted to an editor to help the next generation Or, you know, senior editor of my own publication—or whatever—it's a whole career.As opposed to the dog eat dog, every person for themselves world of digital content creation, where there’s no accountability, no real peership, no real exchange of skills, no real sense of community. It’s just a bunch of people screaming into the void hoping the algorithm picks them over the next guy, and that just sucks….
But being employed full time and doing Errant Signal on the side…how does it offer you a unique perspective on games? Does it give you a generosity or does it make you a lot less generous to a game?
I don’t like long games at all anymore, for one thing. I don’t finish long games…
I come home at the end of the day from a day job and I can choose to play games for myself, like self-edification, relaxation at the end of the day, whatever...
And then I guess the only thing I would say is that like, the benefit of having a day job is that I can cover anything I want…
And I’ve been trying to reorient my thinking on things, such that that’s… the strength of the show. That’s my superpower. ‘Cause at this rate, I don’t know if I’m ever going to be able to do Errant Signal full time. And if that’s the case—if it’s like this perpetually an evenings and weekends thing—how can I make peace with that? And I think the answer is to turn that into a strength. To be the guy that can cover the games other outlets can’t because it’s just not financially viable, and that’s sort of how I’ve been trying to reorient what I’ve been doing.
Blips obviously doesn’t do the typical thing that you have done for a very long time, which is to say, it doesn’t provide these in depth, holistic close reads…What kinds of games support that kind of in depth, holistic…close read?
Talking about the nature of something like, you know, “What does Civilization have to say about humanity and history?” Whether…it’s intentional on the part of the developers or not. Or you know, Night in the Woods’ philosophy about turn of the century Rustbelt life. Or what Sim City has to say about municipal government through its systems and its assumptions about how those systems work.
That stuff is all really rewarding to me—to be able take a big, complicated system that relates to something [in] real life or a narrative that obviously might just have its own built in thematic content based on what it’s about and what the conflict is and being able to run from there.
But like, I learned early on you need to be careful about how you’re approaching the text, and that you’re approaching it on its own terms and not just dragging crap into the text. You don’t want to go [out] on too much of a limb, and you don’t want to start looking for depth that can arguably be supported by the text, but isn’t really there.
Like, when I was in college, I wrote up a big long forum post or LiveJournal screed or something—I don’t remember where I put it—but it’s something somewhere about how Pac Man was this big meta commentary about the 80s. And how it encapsulated the greed and the drugs and the aesthetics. And it was this critique of Reagan-era Americana. And the thing is, Pac Man came out in 1980. The 80s had not even really started yet. Reagan wasn’t even elected yet when Pac Man came out. None of that commentary was in the text. And it was all just stuff I was inferring. And I know that now, as like, a grown adult.
So I think a lot of games support a close reading, but you have to be aware that the text itself has to support it either through its systems or its narrative…I think more games can support close reads than you’d think, but you have to be willing to recognize that there is a limit to how far you can carry the text without you just dumping stuff into it. And [that] can be difficult to know when you’re first starting out. Although these days I’d like to think that I don’t do too much of that.
What do you do with those connections that aren’t necessarily supported by a close read? I mean, is there anything to them, or…is it all just filler—it’s not useful in any way?
No, I think it totally is useful. I just think it doesn’t amount to necessarily a close read of the game, right? Like, you’re not reading the text at that point. You’re taking the text as a springboard for some totally different direction that the text may not have really intended, but takes your mind in interesting ways, and I think you can totally do criticism of the game through that lens...
Like, I think you could use Pac Man as a metaphor in a piece about the 80s, and how maybe it is prescient or maybe how it’s you know sort of [synecdoche] for the 80s. Where it is both at once encapsulating everything that is the 80s and also just this one part of a bigger picture of what the 80s was... And I think that’s worthwhile, absolutely, but I think that starts broaching more cultural commentary, and talking about the impact of art...more than a close read of “This is what Pac Man is about. This is what Pac Man says.”
This is why I have rants about fan theories—and I’m going to rag on Game Theory entirely too much. But like, the whole like, “Is Mario really about communism? He wears red, and he collects coins?” and all the hammer and sickle and all the Mario is a communist stuff. “And he looks like Stalin.” And it’s just like, clearly not the intent of the text.
That’s not to say that you can’t, maybe use that to inform a greater discussion somewhere, but it’s the line between talking about, like, “Oh, you could totally co-opt Mario as a communist text—or look at it through that lens” and saying “Mario is a game that is about communism” if that makes any sense. It’s more of a framing thing than anything.
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The most refreshing thing about a conversation with Chris Franklin is the confidence he has when he tells you he has made mistakes. Whenever you write about anything, especially independently, you run the risk of saying something wrong. Chris Franklin provides a model for engaging with the mistakes you make as a writer in a way that is constructive, and if you’re interested in hearing more, I recommend downloading and listening to the full conversation.
Disclosure: the interviewer David Bowman supported Chris Franklin on Patreon from January 2014 to July 2017.
David Bowman writes about games, music, and literature at dwbowman.com. His work has appeared in DomiCile and Thrice Fiction. He's @DavidWBowman on Twitter.