Architect Address October 2021 (Patreon)

Well howdy there, welcome to the architect Address, an occasional video where I tell you all about what’s happened recently, talk about stuff to do with the channel and generally shoot the breeze.  Dunno why I’m using cowboy lingo there but I’m just going to roll with it.

Anyway, the first thing I wanted to ramble on about before we get to discussing the videos is the idea of working for youtube, which I think is a side of the content creation business which most people don’t know much about. Essentially, youtube is this unknowable, capricious god who doesn’t care about you but will occasionally just ruin your day seemingly at random. Over the last couple of days, for example, I’ve been fighting with them just randomly flagging a video as having sexual content when it didn’t have any - and you’d think that this would be a simple problem to resolve - some algorithm somewhere made a mistake, that’s all, but because Youtube is such a massive company even little tiny requests take an age and a lot of kicking and screaming to go through the system. It’s eventually gotten fixed and the ads are back up but I’ll still probably have no idea what actually happened or went wrong.

Basically all of youtube’s inner workings are mostly completely opaque, sometimes the algorithm likes short videos, sometimes it likes really long ones, it’s all magic and superstition really so I guess i’m just going to try and keep making stuff people like and hope youtube and its mighty algorithm leave me alone

As for the actual videos, the first one I want to talk about is How Storytelling Saved Psychonauts. Now, I absolutely love Psychonauts, I think it’s right in that sweet spot between being a scrappy underdog and having some genuine talent behind it, in spite of how objectively broken it is. Now, I don’t know if I’ve got a lower jank tolerance than everyone else but apparently a lot of people don’t think psychonauts 1 is unfinished? Which is weird because it’s kind of all over the place in a lot of places, in particular the back half of the game - psychonauts 2 is a much better put together game though, and it was actually very encouraging to see people have totally different favorite levels to me because that means the game is much more even quality wise where one definitely isn’t.

The video as a whole is another one in a long series of videos where I wax pretentious about storytelling and arcs and communicating ideas to the player and all that nonsense and they almost never do well. You’d think I’d learn my lesson but I just really like the storytelling side of games and getting to chat about some of my favorite environmental storytelling in half life 2 and bioshock was a bit of a treat. I noticed when writing that there’s this weird period in, like, the mid 2000s where there were a bunch of games with great environmental stuff and I’m not sure why? It might be a coincidence but a lot of the good examples I point to were released within like 5 years of eachother, it’s weird.

Anyway, psychonauts is a fairly niche game all things considered and the premise isn’t that grabby so the vid didn’t do too well but I’m happy with how it turned out, play psychonauts if you haven’t already it’s probably one of the best platformers ever in spite of the fact that it’s a terrible platformer… yeah.

Anyway…

The other video released recently was Finding True Freedom In Videogames, although I always mentally referred to it as Finding your own fun which is a much catchier title and that’s why I put it on the thumbnail. This one was kind of a bastard to write because the concept of player freedom is such an abstract topic that simply by virtue of existing also sucks in a bunch of philosophical stuff about free will and authorial intent that’s kind of irrelevant and also crucial to properly understanding the problems with this sort of idea.

So, basically, the original draft of this would’ve been like 14 pages and it was horrible and unwieldy and bleh, so I had to cut a lot out which was totally the right move. I actually didn’t end up talking about Sable all that much in the video even though it was the game that inspired the whole thing. I think the reason why that’s the case is because explaining too much about sable would’ve just been me spoiling the game’s best moments and also probably would’ve strayed into me complaining about some of the bits I don’t like about it such as how horrendously buggy the game is.

There’s one more thing about this video I’d like to talk about and that’s the fact that I made a little booboo in saying yugioh had four copies of a card max in decks instead of 3 which wouldn’t have been that bad if I didn’t follow it up by saying that Yu Gi Oh sucks. Now, whilst I stand by not liking Yugioh, I think it’s badly balance and that it’s been mismanaged on a big picture perspective I think I was a bit harsh here - I sort of added that section back in last second, didn't double check things and ended up looking like a dickhead.

It’s an interesting paranoia that all youtubers have that you can’t change videos once they’re up, so they kind of have to be perfect, or at least good enough because taking it down and reuploading is a sure fire way to get the algorithm to hate you. Which is to say, if you play yu gi oh… I’m sorry, for more than one reason.

Right before I upset anyone else I’ll call it there, thanks for baring with me and if you don’t mind I’m going to go back to playing inscription because it’s amazing, see ya!