I used to be very into Extra Credits and it did have a lot of extremely good information on it, but there's a difference between looking at your viewers as people who are interested in being educated, and people who are ignorant fools. Too often EC's presentation has been very much based along the lines of them viewing the audience as a group of fools who they have decided to enlighten, rather than a group that they're presenting information and theories too.
They've got a lot of high minded concepts and ideals about gaming, but they're on a different level, which I can understand, but the fact is they feel that they're better than the average gamer and that they don't need to regard us ordinary decent gamers as anything less than an unwashed and drooling mass who should be despised for feeding into the bad issues that the games industry is filled with. It often feels like they're looking at us and saying 'this is your fault, you need to change because we know better than you'.
Jim says a lot of the same issues, but he's not speaking from some mountaintop (despite the god complex joke he has going) he has the pure and simple message that he's one of us, he's a regular gamer, he's just normal and he's talking about issues that we're concerned about and bringing in information that we might not be familiar about, plus he's spurring conversations about issues that might not be in our heads.
Jim is the buddy you know saying 'Man, did you hear about this?'
EC is the stuck up boss saying 'You need to do this.'
