The Epilogue – The Castle Doctrine

The Epilogue returns for VideoBrains November: The Castle Doctrine! This was Hannah Nicklin’s final talk as resident speaker, but fear not, as our next resident speaker has been announced! It’s Rob Morgan, who’ll be starting his residency in February 2016. If you’d like to learn a little bit more about him, you can check out his website or his Twitter. He’s even given a few talks for us before, which you can view on our YouTube channel.

A castle is a home to somebody, and Helen decided to talk about her homes. Not her real ones, though, the ones she made in Minecraft. There’s no plastering the walls or worrying about how you’re going to get that sofa up those stairs when you’re building your home in Minecraft, and what you make can say a lot about you. I make a lot of log cabins, clearly because I’m all warm and cozy inside.

‘Sometimes being comfortable is fine, because otherwise you might get blown up.’ @Alecto101 #videobrains

— Tom Battey (@tombattey) November 23, 2015

It’s tough to look back on a game you love and realise it’s pretty rubbish, but that’s what Nick’s talk was about. Kane & Lynch: Dead Men is an odd title, receiving generally good reviews, but in hindsight, did it deserve them? It’s been 8 years since the game was released, and we’ve all grown up a bit since then.

.@np_marshall takes us on the journey of revisiting an old favourite game with adult eyes. Let’s say…it’s not holding up. #VideoBrains — Nicole Williams (@EliElicole) November 23, 2015

It’s a great shame that we’ll be losing Hannah as our resident speaker – we try to make sure each resident speaker is unique in some way, and I don’t think anyone could replicate the style of talks she has given. Her final talk on the psychogeography of games was with Llaura Dreamfeel, who is talking at ChristmasBrains 2! You can check out Llaura’s work over on her website, and Hannah’s, as always, written up a slightly edited version of the talk over on Rock, Paper, Shotgun.

We’d like to thank Hannah for all of her fantastic talks, as well as you lot for supporting her. In case you want to follow whatever she does in the future, you can check out her Twitter, website, or Patreon!

In a somewhat impromptu talk, we had a VideoBrains first this month: a talk about films! Grant gave a hilarious synopsis of the classic The Fast and The Furious series, and gave perhaps one of the best lines we’ve ever had at VideoBrains

‘He moves like a glacier on cocaine’ – @gshowitt on The Rock

— VideoBrains staff (@VideoBrains) November 23, 2015

This talk was based on something Grant had written for his site Look, Robot, and you can give it a read here!

Coming from her perspective working on GameHub HQ, a site which aims to teach parents about games and if certain ones have anything that might be deemed inappropriate for children, we had the founder of GameHub HQ to speak about how parents need the information as well as the children. When marketing a game, it’s important to make sure that you’re making it relevant and clear to the parents as well as the kids!

‘It’s very hard to sell someone a product if they’re scared of you.’ — VideoBrains staff (@VideoBrains) November 23, 2015

When you’ve got “Bearmageddon” in the title of a talk, you’re onto a winner. Thryn had to endure the greatest battle the Earth has ever seen – human versus bear – in The Long Dark. When moving from house to house, clearing out supplies and doing her best to survive, an encounter with a bear turned Thryn’s experience in the house into one in a home.

Darling, beautiful #videobrains folk: thank you for yet another fascinating, thoughtful, incomprehensible evening. FUCK THAT BEAR.

— Ludi Valentine (@ludi_val) November 23, 2015

To finish off this VideoBrains, we had our very own Jake Tucker take to the microphone and give a talk based on a popular piece he wrote previously for Vice. It’s a story of how Jake began to eat everyone in Fallout: New Vegas. Everyone. It’s “good, solid meat” according to him. Not sure if I can agree, but I’m not the one who has eaten hundreds of people. He’s clearly the expert here. It even got onto a deep philosophical question: is cannibalising a cannibal like eating a turducken?

If you’d like to read the original piece this talk was based on, give it a look here!

Normally I’d plug our next event here, but we’re sold out! Instead, you can take a look at our Patreon page, or follow us on Twitter for some more updates when tickets are available for our first event of 2016 in January.

Thanks! Hopefully we’ll be seeing some of you this weekend, for ChristmasBrains 2: ChristmasBrains Harder!