Based on the first 10 podcasts, Austin is a little too interested in semantics for my taste, though I do appreciate his academic approach to games. I'm much more interested in their personal interests in games than I am in having an answer to the question, "Why is this game important?"
Yeah, to add to this, if someone really wants a comprehensive rundown of why some people aren't too hot to Austin on the Beastcast I feel like I can get thorough enough with it since I share some of their concerns.
Like, there's a time and place for academic-esque discourse and it doesn't really jive with a lot of people, especially when there isn't a counter to Austin's diatribes - not that he's necessarily wrong but Vinny and Alex don't really dispute or debate anything he's saying, and it's not really fair to them or the audience when Austin goes into his whole thing about "movies are interactive too!" like, no shit, nobody's disagreeing with what you're saying but there's clearly a uniqueness to games as a medium with their level of designed interactivity through mechanics and what not - that's clearly different from a film. It's a pointless pseudo-intellectual semantics segway that adds nothing to the discussion.
Another thing that's hugely frustrating is Austin at one point saying "talking about gender studies can be fun" and then going on this whole diatribe about Atticus Finch in Go Set A Watchman and completely choosing not to mention the fact that Harper Lee is senile and immediately after her protective sister's death her new lawyer "discovered" the manuscript for GSAW, which was written before To Kill A Mockingbird and was never to be released, and isn't a sequel in any way - beyond the clearly different characters retaining the same names (her editor told her to ditch GSAW and focus on the main character's childhood) and was only released as an easy cashgrab on a senile old woman who stated several times in better health she only wanted TKAM released - and even after all of this we're caught up arguing a fictional man's morality over a real woman being violated.
Pretty damn insulting, honestly, to call gender studies "fun" and then play into a manufactured corporate narrative that a decades old, previously unreleased and unedited manuscript is a legitimate "sequel" that Harper Lee said she'd never write.
It's just a lack of balance, honestly - you need somebody to argue Austin's points and reel him in when it's curtailing the discussion into academic abstractions that deevolve into the pseudo-intellectual drivel that a lot of games criticism has turned into over the years. He's not bad, but there's certainly the frustration he talks over the other guys on the podcast sometimes and a lot of people are still warming up to him, they also don't like feeling talked down to or feeling like they're sitting in a university lecture hall during a podcast that's hosted on a website that used to be about eating weird foreign candies and rotting fish in a can.
