Architect Address March 2024 (Patreon)

Hello one and all and welcome to this - the architect address, wow huh I said I’d make the next few videos quickly and boy was I wrong wasn’t I jeeeeesus christ. Yeah, so, after taking a bit of a break post christmas it turns out everything that could have gone wrong went wrong and uh, to be honest it was pretty miserable but I’m not going to dwell on that because it would be what is known in the business as a bummer. So, instead I’m going to talk about sponsorships because it’s something that I’ve been getting increasingly frustrated about and I thought it might be interesting to let you all know sort of how they work.

Now, obligatory disclaimer here that whilst I personally am never likely to take any sort of sponsorship for anything because I am cursed with too much pride, I absolutely do not begrudge anyone else on youtube or elsewhere for doing them because people need to eat and honestly I think doing the occasional ad read or bit of sponsored content is the lesser of two evils compared to reducing your output to horrible algorithm sludge so please don’t assume anyone doing sponsorships or whatever is a cynical sellout or whatever.

Now a large part of this is because sponsorships probably pay a damn sight more than people on the outside of video making often assume, for reasons of professional ethics I’m not going to name any specifics here but for putting a brief thirty second mention of a product at the start of a video or whatever I could quite easily make a four digit sum and that number only goes up as you increase how… err… intrusive the advert is. Doing something like making a baked in midroll advert or sharing an affiliate link or even doing a ten minute dedicated video of whatever it is would easily pay several months worth of rent and I’m not a particularly large channel. It’s a big moneymaker and I do not enjoy thinking about how much money I leave on the table because I want the videos to be good.

Basically the reason why companies pay so much to youtubers is because direct targeted advertising through youtube videos is waaaay more efficient in terms of people actually checking out the product than more traditional styles of advertising and these ad companies get to cut out the middleman that is youtube by going directly to creators so a few thousand bucks to one fairly large youtuber can often be just as effective as an advertising campaign on social media with ten times the budget, it’s a big industry and that sort of targeted micro sponsorships is really only going to get bigger as the internet gets more atomized.

As for why I don’t do this stuff, really it’s just a matter of I don’t want it colouring what I say - the moment I take cash from anyone even remotely involved in the games industry, you can’t trust a word out of my mouth on… basically anything because there’s always the question of whether I’m giving someone favourable coverage because they paid me, or that I’m overcompensating in being negative because they gave me money or whether I’m being nice or mean to someone else because they didn’t give me money and it corrupts the whole thing forever pretty much. I’m sure many people would be fine with me making some extra cash but honestly I value the quality of my work too much for that to be a real option currently and it’s why I value patreon so much as a means of generating cash. I am obviously professionally tainted in favour of all of you but that’s not going to affect my judgement when I talk about games and people generally seem to like the after the video segment so it’s not making the things I make worse either. I hope that clears some things up… I guess.

Anyway, on to the actual videos and these two are both ones that I had a real DOOZY of a time getting together my god.

So, the first video I want to talk about was all about games with layers and this one I owe almost entirely to the snap decision to give Void Stranger a second chance. Normally I can find myself getting on with almost any genre of game but for the life of me I just do not gel with block pushing sokoban games and so I was willing to chalk void stranger up to being a puzzle game that I understood the vibe and appeal of that just wasn’t for me. However, I for reasons I don’t quite remember went back to the game to play a little bit more and ended up stumbling into one of the game’s biggest secrets waaaaay earlier than I should have and that ended up with me figuring out that the game was way more interesting and way more tailored to my specific tastes than I thought and wow what a game!

I think basically the entire video sprang up around the idea of realising that I’ll never be able to look at the puzzles and story in quite the same way again and that there’s some complicated emotions behind that feeling. On one hand I desperately want to be able to experience those emotions again but equally I feel the warning signs that this is my brain being poisoned by nostalgia in a way that will prevent me from having any new experiences that build on my old ones. Originally in this video I had this whole segment going off on people who think that videogames have gotten worse and that the golden age of the medium is behind them - you see these kinds of youtube videos pop up now and again - and whilst me bashing these people for playing precisely two different multiplayer shooters and then having the gall to say that gaming is dead and also blaming themselves getting older on the medium was more or less accurate and debatably on theme it didn’t quite hit the vibe.

In terms of writing the script, the big breakthrough and the idea I’m most proud of is the notion that our ignorance, or the layers of a game we still have yet to uncover are a finite resource and games can spend our lack of knowledge in different ways for different effects. It’s kind of an unintuitive idea I think and I’m not quite sure how well I explained it, god knows I went through a million drafts trying to nail the concept down but equally I’ve never heard anything quite like it and it’s a unique lens to view the idea through I think.

Relatedly, this topic made finding footage for the video really hard indeed because not only did I not want to spoil people for obvious reasons, but it’s also really hard to demonstrate the process of having your perspective changed purely through little gameplay clips because whoever’s watching, ironically doesn’t have the context to see how your perception has changed, so I did a LOT of googling for games with like, perspective changing mechanics or mechanics that let you see through walls or physically change how the world is presented to you because I literally had no idea how to demonstrate the idea visually. Is my commitment to having zero B-roll and having every frame be directly relevant to what I’m talking about a curse? Yes, yes absolutely it is.

Performance wise this one did, eh, it did okay I got a lot of lovely feedback from people and it seems that void stranger has a bit of a cult fanbase, some of whom found the game through my 2023 end of year video so seeing them jump in and say how glad they are to have given the game a chance is really cool. They also informed me that the creator has another game called zero ranger which is initially a top down shmup which plays with a lot of the same ideas so I’ll need to check that out at some point and so will you.

Finally, the other video released recently was… recently is doing some heavy lifting there isn’t it… all about the fun of breaking games except it kind of wasn’t except it kind of was, look I wanted to talk about Balatro and man did I have a tricky time coming up with explaining what, exactly this one was about. Broadly, I wanted to talk about the idea that whilst power fantasies in games are a very common draw we often misinterpret where they really come from. SO much of the discussions and perhaps more importantly the advertising of power fantasy games are framed around ideas of ultraviolence and super insane spectawcle and whilst those things can absolutely be sources of power fantasies it’s not the only way to go about it as Balatro helpfully proves. I really wanted to avoid the obvious route of handwringing about ooh waaaah games are too obsessed with killing people because I think that line of inquiry also doesn’t get to the heart of things, murdering powerful bad guys with cool weapons does feel cool, the real question is WHY that feels cool, which is the thing we often forget.

One thing I dislike about this video is that I was never able to come up with a good bit of terminology for power fantasy because not only is that a very loaded term but it’s also kind of… inelegant when it comes to actually talking about it, I wanted something pithy, single word just an idea that means feeling powerful and in control without the inherent baggage of the word power because that kinds of drags us right back into the exact subject area I wanted to get rid of.

That kind of brings me onto the title and the thumbnail, now the thumbnail is something I am genuinely super proud of it took me ages to cut Raiden out of that metal gear rising key art and my photoshop art of the balatro joker getting cut in half I think is pretty good. However, the fun of breaking games or whatever it’s called is… I dunno it’s accurate but I can’t help but feel like it’s a little on the clickbaity side. Me figuring out the fun of breaking Balatro and doing all those cool infinite combos was the genesis of the video and I do talk about it a fair bit but equally it isn’t the WHOLE topic and I’m not sure whether that makes it manipulative or not and whether that’s okay to do, I have complex feelings about it.

One thing I don’t have complex feelings about though is Balatro, wow what a fucking game it’s so good, I’m so glad that it’s become massive because stumbling upon it in a steam demo event I could INSTANTLY see it’s potential to be an all-timer game changer. It’s so slick there’s loads of depth to it, loads of things to do and the core mechanics are so cleverly expanded upon seriously if you don’t like deckbuilder roguelikes I really suggest you at least check it out because it’s a truly special game and the person behind it is great. Not felt that instant lightningbolt of “oh wow this is genius” in a long time.

As for the video, eeeh not great both videos this time did slightly below average but I’m not too broken up about it because they were very good, for reasons that aren’t clear to me for patreon uptake so that’s something. I think it’s just a speed issue so I’ll try my best, still not feeling 100% to be honest but I have some fun plans and that you all won’t wait too long. With that, I’ll be off, hope you all had a good… uh… easter? Yeah easter if you celebrate, if you don’t hope you enjoyed the cheap chocolate and if you don’t eat chocolate then um, you know, hope you have a nice life. Bye!