Architect Address September 2022 (Patreon)

Well Well Well, look who we’ve got here, it’s a patron stumbling unawares into this, the architect address oh how foolish you must feel. - you’ve been trapped, you’ve been tricked! Now you’re going to have to listen to a few minutes of me talking about the videos that have come out recently and maybe whatever other stuff I can think of.

First of all, one thing I’ve seen people ask about is my selection criteria when it comes to picking my little shoutouts of cool internet people at the end of each video and lemme tell you I just don’t have a good answer for that beyond the fact that I literally just have a giant notepad document full of names and ideas and what they do that I add to whenever I see something cool. It’s that simple!

I think generally there’s a balance to strike between picking people who are sufficiently small that most people watching my channel won’t have heard of them, but also people that I can guarantee are, y’know, worth the recommendation. I could recommend massive people everyone’s already heard of or tiny people who’ve made like, one video that maybe shows promise but ultimately I think it’s important to look for people who have been languishing in relative obscurity for a while and deserve the boost rather than people just starting out and who may very well be able to make it on their own or have already made it. The whole highlighting thing is basically about correcting an injustice on youtube’s part - the platform is historically terrible at pointing people towards good content and I’m ninety percent sure my dumb backside only got to the position I’m in right now because of dumb luck. So, I guess me saying hey, here’s a cool internet thing at the end of every vid is sort of like me doing youtube’s job for them. Great.

Next is the video Why We Love Hostile Worlds which is a terrible goddamn title that I came up with last second and I hate -b ut the rest of the video I think is pretty good! This is another case of me playing a series of games that I sort of looked for the overlap in and the one thing that stray and rainworld both have in common is a really interesting approach to their world design and also cats. Also cats.

Yeah, I’m not really sure why I did the whole cats thing I think I could’ve maybe done without that - I just thought it was kind of funny - although on reflection trying to cram an architect of games silly acronym into the constraint of cats whilst also wanting to talk about the three main game sin a particular order was… it was too much - I had to do a LOT of gymnastics  on that one.

I think the main takeaway here besides the fact that the video did very well is that I think I should spend more time talking about games I have mixed feelings about rather than games I either like or hate because both stray and rainworld are two games that are alternatingly brilliant and a bit rubbish and I think that’s because they take some pretty interesting risks here and there that give you a lot to talk about. Stray is a… very simplistic game and its focus on just sort of… being a cat is both the lynchpin of the entire game AND the reason why it’s pretty boring once the gimmick has worn off. Same with rainworld, damn if that game isn’t a work of uncompromising design vision but also it’s real god damn frustrating at times and not in a way that reveals anything new about the world or yourself or creates some interesting gameplay, sometimes the game or the controls just decides to muder you and there’s nothing you can do about it - but would rainworld be the same game if it made those concessions in the player’s favor? I don’t know - that’s a topic for another video I guess.

There’s this video out there in the ether that I’ve kind of almost made like three times now about various movement systems and how they affect games and I can never quite seem to make it work. One became the ancient terrible mario video I did back in the day, another is the celeste one from early in 2020 and this is sort of attempt three. I can never quite articulate how our relationship and the ways we interact with the physicality of a space affects the way we play, but I think I got CLOSE here, not quite on the mark but it’s a subject area I find very interesting for reasons that aren’t… entirely clear.

The second video I’d like to talk about is Why the hell are there so many fishing minigames. That’s an interesting title that is a little bit different from my usual format but I think it went down pretty well. One thing that I realised when finishing up with this video is that i’ve recently noticed that in my thumbnails I usually get a much better result if I make sort of an ensemble piece rather than a single game focus in the image, yknow? So here there’s me and a bunch of characters from the game I talk about sitting on a bench, in the previous vid there’s a lot of references to other games - you know. I think the same rule basically applies as titles where specificity actually isn’t what people respond to and my perspective has been completely warped by the success of the longing video which was framed around a single game so i’ve been trying to replicate its branding even though that wasn’t the reason why everyone liked it so much.

As for the actual content of the video, I’m simultaneously amazed and sort of disappointed that this video is 20 mins long. Because good god it is hard to make what are essentially boring chores interesting to watch but I think I managed to talk about the subject of diversions in an interesting way and put enough spinny graphics on screen. Normally stuff like this starts off with me thinking about a broader theme and then finding a more specific question to pin things on but this time I actually started with the fundamental question of why fishing minigames are more fun as side content and sort of expanded out from there, that’s why the back half feels a little ancillary and the ending in particular is a bit wishy washy but I think the fundamentals of the video as well as the more scientific explanation is pretty good. There’s been some debate on whether I was right to use habituation or not and I’ll be honest it doesn’t 100% describe what happens with games getting boring but I think it’s mostly there.

Beyond that, I genuinely don’t know why this video did well, I was dreading it being a complete flop because let’s be honest it’s pretty boring subject matter, but I think whilst the question itself isn’t that interesting fishing minigames and other diversions like the chao garden really struck a chord with people and they seem to be much more beloved than I expected. Personally I’m a horrible stress addict so I hate all those relaxing diversions but a lot of people seem to love them so… go figure I guess good for me.

Well that’s all the stuff I can think of, I think that’s it! Bye!