Yahtzee's Webcomic Spiel

[FearfulFerret]

First of all, hello. I would've registered a long time ago if Comcast hadn't blocked my registration email. Been lurking for months now and finally got up the motivation to contribute my thoughts. So, without further ado...

Many of you may be familiar with Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw, the genius behind Zero Punctuation, the (rather NSFW) weekly review movie about games and general console and Internet stuff. His most recent movie released today concerns webcomics and the creation of such. His stance is essentially that the Internet is full of losers that see the money, prestige, and money that Gabe & Tycho receive for their efforts and try to imitate their success in rather embarrassing fashion. He has previously said that Penny Arcade is the only good webcomic out there and, to be honest, were it not for XKCD, I would likely share his view. Fortunately, I have the sort of mindset that appreciates minimalism and jokes meant for an elite few (i.e. geeks) and can thus appreciate XKCD.

His webcomic rant focuses quite largely on Control+Alt+Delete (though never directly by name) and is generally an absolutely hilarious how-to guide that presents his perspective quite well. I'd argue that his view can be applied to comics such as XKCD only insofar as it is done from the perspective from the average person. Obviously, since none of us are average people, we are blissfully able to shrug off his allegations as pure nonsense and continue to do what we do best.

I'd highly recommend checking out at least his latest comic, as it does present things that I had never really thought about before. Yahtzee is good at presenting familiar things in a new and rather disturbing light that way.

EDIT: I also found his list of the only good comics on the internet. Quite a good read. And XKCD is on there, no less.

[Jessica]

Luckily XKCD isn't a gaming comic, so it isn't necessarily being critisized.
But, yeah... "I didn't mention any names in my rant so if you think I'm talking about you, then that's a problem with your feelings not mine"... wow.
And the random line at the end was also good. Random's funny, right?

[Vak Beacon]

Actually, on his personal site, he made a list of "The Only Good Webcomics" XKCD can be found on it, along with VG Cats, Penny Arcade, and Dinosaur comics, all of which he mocked in the video. So I don't think anyone should take it to personally.

Don't believe he mocked them, look at the "Drama is the balh balha blah holds webcomics together" part closely.

[cephalopod9]

Ridicule of xkcd seems inherently tongue in cheek coming from minimalist cartoons (with a hat).
More to the point, I think it's directed towards people who think they can copy xkcd.

I've also noticed a lot of webcomic drama started by people who think they're reveiwing things. Pretty much anything can be done badly, and [THE INTERNET] makes mass production really easy.

Also, I kind of wish I knew how ironic his song choices were. (I do like the Kinks)

[Jorpho]

His most recent movie released today concerns webcomics and the creation of such.

To be precise, he seemed to be most significantly concerned with gaming webcomics, which do indeed tend to share many of the features he describes to a greater extent than other webcomics.

[SecondTalon]

The funny thing is, if the OP hadn't said they were lurkers, I'd have left the links alone. As is, I presume someone who lurks would have read over the rules at least once, and I get to be a dick. So that's why the links are gone. Anyone interested can simply google the thing and carry on the conversation in the Video Games forum, where there's a topic for Zero Punctuation.