Why did I want to be a gaming youtuber?

Looking at desire

My generation grew up with early youtube as one of our main sources of entertainment. Gaming youtubers in particular were big, all the Let’s Players and review channels, they were who we wanted to be. I can still remember casually tossing around ideas for our own gaming channel with my friends in middle school that never came to anything.

In some ways I still have that desire to be a gaming youtuber, so it’s about time I looked deeper into it. What was I really after when I talked about doing Let’s Plays despite never actually watching one to completion? What precisely about those people do I still want to mimic even now?

After some introspection, this is what I’ve uncovered within myself and those daydreams of being a youtuber.

Spreading love for unappreciated games

Word of mouth is a powerful tool for promotion, and big youtubers do a lot for it, so some make a point of highlighting the overlooked. GuileWinQuote for example is a youtuber who goes in depth on different fighting game related topics, usually either a niche game or a specific mode. His videos tend to make me go from ‘oh what’s this’ to ‘I’m buying the Capcom Fighting Collection for Red Earth/War-Zard alone.’

As someone who likes a lot of niche things the power to increase the popularity of something even a little appeals to me. I’ve thought of speedrunning some games just try to generate some interest in them.

But on closer inspection this is something I’ve already mimicked, since I have a whole section here where I ramble about different things I like, with the hope of getting more people interested in them. And people have gotten Murdle at least because of my post on it.

So that’s one appeal of the video game youtuber status marked under ‘already accounted for as much as possible.’ Meaning there’s no need to get into video making just to accomplish this.

Gimmick runs and narrative

Another aspect of the gaming videos I like that I want to mimic is digging deeper into games, either by exploring overlooked mechanics or just trying new things with them.

For example Fir is a Super Mario Odyssey speedrunner I watch on youtube for all of his joke runs, often involving some kind of mods for the game. My favorites are the ones that have a story to them, like explaining a ‘lose one coin per second’ mod as the result of Mario being in debt to the mafia.

For a while I also watched a youtuber, Excelblem, who did unconventional playthroughs of Fire Emblem games (and Advance Wars Days of Ruin) comedically summed up chapter by chapter. In Fire Emblem Shadow Dragon he killed off almost all of the main units to rely on generic replacements, while in the Gameboy Advance Fire Emblem he went for the lowest possible ranking.

In a way this is also something I’ve already mimicked, minus the part where I share it to that extent. I did a playthrough of Pokémon Y where I used Pokémon Bank to give myself a team made entirely of breedjects (baby Pokémon with suboptimal stats) I had gotten from the wonder trade feature. The premise inherently had a touch of narrative with it, taking Pokémon discarded for being too weak and making them champions. It also made me fond of Pokémon I was barely aware of before.

And watching speedruns of the Olimar’s Shipwreck Tale mode in Pikmin 4 inspired me to attempt a minimum in game day run of it (not a speedrun), which was a long struggle involving a lot of resets for each of the four in game days. But it felt very satisfying when I finally accomplished it. My suffering along the way might have made for an amusing stream, but I definitely don’t want to be a streamer.

So do I need to share these abnormal playthroughs? I feel content with them without making a whole video on them. And a video isn’t even the only way to share a playthrough. Comic adaptations of people’s Pokémon challenge runs is an entire genre in itself. I could try writing short narrative summaries to avoid needing to novelize entire games to talk about my odd playthroughs. If I wanted to.

Now that I think about it, I do have a Super Smash Bros fanfiction that I wrote like a mode for the game, with matches I played through while writing it. It isn’t a full playthrough of a game, but it is playing a game with made up rules for the sake of an invented narrative, and then sharing said narrative. So once again it turns out I already sated the desire without realizing it.

Actually, wait a second, I used to do this kind of stuff all the time as a kid. My siblings and I had a whole made up story for Super Smash Bros Melee (apparently we did that for Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 as well, which they remember but I don’t), and I’ve definitely made up touches of added story in other things too.

Maybe in truth I like those videos because they were different takes on the kind of things I had already done. Meaning there’s no real need to try and become like them, because I’ve been someone who tells stories in games and does weird stuff in them since I was first playing video games.

What I don’t want to mimic

There’s an odd thing that sometimes makes me feel like an outlier when it comes to video games, even though I doubt it’s actually the case. I put games down to play something else instead of making my life revolve around them.

Many online games now are designed to be the only or at most one of the few games that you play, with daily log ins and battlepasses and so on. With that design a lot of online gaming communities tend to give the most presence to those kinds of players, people who play everyday and think that once they stop playing a game it’s dead.

Even without the multiplayer/ daily log in aspect there are plenty of examples of people building their online presence around a specific video game or series. But my interests are too varied for that to work for me. I can’t play and talk about only one game.

Also I believe we could do with a lot less brand loyalty than we have now. I don’t want to be obligated to keep playing a game because I built my online persona around it, or play games because they’re in the franchise I built my online persona around. Left to my own devices I will talk often and at length about Smash Bros, but I need the freedom to talk about other games.

Oh and don’t expect to see real faces with exaggerated facial expressions or red circles/arrows in the thumbnail for any videos that I do make.

Reflections

It turns out that I’ve already done the things I wanted to do as a gaming youtuber, just not in video form. This wasn’t what I expected. I’m glad that I’m pretty much freed of any need to become a youtuber to feel like I’ve expressed certain things that I want to express.

I’m not writing off the possibility of making videos in the future. For example I’ve thought about making a little machinima (movie made with game footage) adaptation of the Smash Bros fanfic I mentioned. But it doesn’t feel like the only way to do what I want to, it feels like a fun experiment to try when I have the time.

My main lesson from this is that I need to take a step back and go ‘wow I did do all these things.’ I’ve had people tell me they got Murdle because of my post about it. I’ve played around with games to make my own stories inside of them that I then shared, even if it was just with friends or family.

How about you, the reader? Do you have any dreams that you had achieved without realizing it until later? Is there a desire of yours that you think could do with a bit more examination? Share in the comments if you feel like it.