It’s common to try one’s hand at creating art as a hobby outside of work. “It’s wonderful to create” proclaimed Japanese film director Akira Kurosawa. Creative hobbies are a fruitful endeavor for people to engage with, as well as for the revisioning of arts and culture towards a less elitist’ mode. Recently, I began watching the YouTube channel Pixel a Day created by such a hobbyist, Kat. Simply put, Kat is one of the best video essayists analyzing games. Her principal mission is novel and its execution superb. Aguas’ Points spoke with Kat to discuss her channel, the different intersections of criticism, and the communities nurturing and creating new standards for video game analysis.
For Kat, Pixel a Day is her venue to critically analyze games and explore how they make us, the players, feel. She requests for her audience to help support her work “…so I can keep wasting my PhD to do this.” Talk about killing one’s ego. I’m fascinated by people like Kat, part of a unique cohort of video essayists with a high level of academic training who have demanding day jobs yet devote precious free time to analyzing games. Why spend even a grain of our hourglass’ sacred sand on writing and making video essays about games? Talk about a profound waste of time. Forced pun aside, the answer is unsurprising. Kat is deeply passionate about video games as a medium. “I like to try and express how games have moved me”, she declares.
A Plum a Day Keeps the Doctor Away, but What about a Pixel?
The process of cultural reproduction (e.g. making art and critiquing it) takes on new dimensions when performed by those whose time is consumed by the demands of work. Creating in one’s spare time leads to certain insights, and what is created takes on different qualities frequently absent in the work of full-time artists and critics. Take for example writer and poet William Carlos Williams, a medical doctor who wrote in his off hours. His work has a cutting quality. It’s to the point, no fluff, nevertheless surprisingly pensive. Williams was inspired by the people he met and treated during his time as a practicing doctor. Somber ruminations on his patients’ material realities also inspired his inventiveness – no ideas but in things. He was an artist who created while not being siloed from the world.
So, what inspired Kat to create Pixel a Day? Some of her inspirations were Mark Brown’s Game Maker’s Toolkit and the writing of programmer turned CEO Rose Brie Code, whose column in gamesindustry.biz from 2016 to 2017 has become a rallying cry for critics and video game developers alike wanting a more inclusive video game culture. In “Video Games are Boring” Code states, “I’m not remotely interested in shockingly good graphics, in murder simulators, in guns and knives and swords. I’m not that interested in adrenaline. My own life is thrilling enough. There is enough fear and hatred in the world to get my heart pounding… I’m interested in care, in characters, in creation, in finding a path forward inside games that helps me find my path forward in life. I am interested in compassion and understanding. I’m interested in connecting… I want to make games that help other people understand life.” Code expressed what needed to be articulated. This spoke to Kat. Code’s words are felt and seen throughout her work.
Kat was also spurred to create Pixel a Day because she had “…a lot to say about games that I played.” Another motivation was “because I want to see more intelligent criticism of games as an art form and less toxicity in the community. I like to think I’m making a small contribution in that direction.” Though YouTube is Kat’s main creative platform, she has been uploading video essays there since 2019, she also has written about video games for Into the Spine, Uppercut!, and Medium, where she also posts her videos’ transcripts.
Most of the video essays on YouTube are passion projects. Countless game video essayists make videos in their spare time. Eighteen years after YouTube’s creation most video essays are bland affairs, riddled with plagiarism, languid performances, and plastered with Ill-informed assumptions. It’s a world congested with well-intentioned arguments eviscerated by a lack of time and amateurish enthusiasm fueled by nostalgia. At best it’s Media Studies 101. My time on YouTube is typically rewarded with disappointment.
Even great video essays heavily rely on the analytical framework conceived in the academy, often to a fault. These videos, though informative and sometimes well-produced and realized, end up being pedantic and wordy. Foucault as presented by an undergraduate student covering games. This is primarily done to gain an authoritative stance. It is difficult to dismiss an argument based on such analysis, right? Maybe. Why watch a four-hour video when I can read the twelve-page academic paper instead?
Kat’s training and work as an academic distinguishes Pixel a Day from other video essay channels. She honed her writing skills and developed an ability to edit her work during her time in graduate school. All of which are transferable to making video essays. Her videos contain more information in twenty minutes than the usual one-hour-plus video on the platform. Pixel a Day offers provoking and informative videos. They are rigorously researched, nevertheless they are not overwrought with dense academic jargon. The videos are not boring or out of touch with the grander topics that they cover, a trait commonly found in much of the work coming out of the academy.
Kat is particular about what games she covers, keeping Pixel a Day well-curated. Though Kat grew up playing games, she finds most AAA games released today, at least those forcefully advertised, uninteresting. This list also includes most of the games shown in trailers at the Game Awards, the myriad of Bioshock (2007) clones, 4X games and JRPGs due to their length (even though Final Fantasy VII (1997) is one of her favorite games). She’d rather play games with unique mechanics, like Before Your Eyes (2021) where every time you blink your eyes the game transports you forward into the future.
Pixel a Day presents Kat’s passionate critique of modern games as well as her love for a medium that, with the right perspective, broadens our understanding of ourselves and society. Kat clearly engages in a highly inspired process when making her videos. Four years into making video essays she has mastered more than a few of the skills required to create in the form. Her scripts are tight and to the point. They don’t meander in their introduction or get lost in labyrinthine concepts. Look no further than “In Defence of Walking Simulators” where she uses the radical stripped-down form of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006) as an example of how certain adventure games (pejoratively called walking simulators) strip away gameplay to hyperfocus on what is most important to immerse players in an interactive narrative. “In Defence of Walking Simulators” is persuasive. My opinion of walking simulators, a sub-genre that I previously dismissed as derivative, changed after watching the video.
The purpose of an essay as criticism, regardless if presented on the page or in video form, lies in providing insight and perspective. Much of what is presented as video game criticism is fixated on games as consumer products. Game reviews are procedural, descriptive writing whose content veers into the dull. You’ve seen the bombardment; the game plays like this, the music is like this, the graphics are like this, blah blah blah. This type of information is a service for those wanting an opinion on whether they should purchase a game or not. I don’t know about you, but I have enough stuff in my house and on my hard drives.
Pixel a Day is exceptional because it treats its subject, games, seriously. It’s one of the few video essay channels that has helped me better understand games. It also increases my appreciation of games that I have dismissed (What Remains of Edith Finch [2017]), strongly disliked for whatever reason, or already love. Pixel a Day is a channel whose worth is both intellectual and emotional. It makes me think and therefore I am enlightened.
During my conversation with Kat, we discussed what aspects of critiquing games pose the most challenges. One aspect that stood out was the importance of memory when critiquing games and creating video essays. Memory is a topic that one of the greatest visual essayists, Chris Marker, was obsessed with (for a masterclass of interweaving memory into a video essay see his landmark film Sans Soleil [1983]). Though Kat does not use the same cinematic language as Marker, she is nonetheless utilizing and contesting the faculties and faultiness of memory when creating her work. For Kat, it’s paramount to replay games that she will cover because in her words “memory is oftentimes incorrect.” She elaborates, that memory “starts from a feeling… and one often misremembers.” She notes a time when in an initial script about From Software’s Bloodborne (2015) she described part of the game as she remembered, yet later found her recollection to be incorrect when replaying said section of the game. Memory is forgetting.
In “Seven Role Models for Game Developers” Code discusses ways that women and minorities in the industry can “reinforce each other’s courage” in hostile and unwelcoming spaces. Kat feels fortunate that her channel is not a “super success” on YouTube. This diminishes the attention that she might otherwise receive from unwanted internet interlopers. She also states that her Discord server is invaluable for having a place to collaborate and talk with like-minded and sincere video essayists, writers, and fans. Pixel a Day, as a channel, also benefits from Kat “having a life outside of it.” So, finding success on YouTube does not mean the same to her as it does to others who do it full-time as a way of making a living.
Wondrous Pixel
Let’s end at the beginning. While Kurosawa was making his last films (Kagemusha [1980], Ran [1985], Dreams [1990], Rhapsody in August [1991], and Madadayo [1993]) he increasingly relied on his skills as a painter utilizing blistering bright colors to tell stories. “It’s wonderful to create” was not merely an invocation of the pleasures of creating through artistic endeavor, it was a refinement of a master’s craft utilizing his skill to create meaning. I create therefore I am. For Kurasawa creating was an affirmation of existence. As we look for ways to unwind or escape the monotony of daily life, we might find ourselves increasingly engaging in artistic pursuits in hopes of achieving leisure (a tall order) and a better understanding of our world.
Kat didn’t tell me if she loves to create her videos or not, and frankly, I never asked. The reason being is that what was evident to me from her work on Pixel a Day is the time spent crafting each word recorded, capturing every image. Pixel a Day is not a vanity project, nor empty escapism, or just more nostalgia-fueled “content”, it’s an examination of a person’s view of a culture through a medium that is wonderous, and equal parts fucked-up. Kat succinctly says in “What Is the Games Industry Missing?” that “We can love and validate individual works and still point out how needlessly predominant they are compared to other types of content we’d like to see a lot more of.” Kat is making what she wants to see in the world and thus video game criticism is all the better for it. It’s wonderful to see the work that Kat creates.
Aguas' Points 