Architect Address Sept 2023 (Patreon)

Well well well wot do we have here then a couple of miscreants up to no good if I do say so myself probably lookin' to watch and or read some of that there architect address aren’t you well… you’re in the right place! Hello there and welcome to this, the architect address, a very special perk of patreon access which mostly comprises me rambling on for a few minutes about my thoughts on the latest videos and what’s being going on with the channel lately.

Now my usual talking about YouTube and general channel updates are going to take a bit of a backseat this time because I want to talk about patreon and how it kind of accidentally was dicking me over for years and I didn’t even realize!

So, as you are hopefully aware I have a special limited ten dollars per month tier on my patreon which gets you on the read your name out at the end list, it’s an iconic part of the channel, everyone likes it - even non patrons - and I’m a big fan too. It’s a bit of a hassle to record every time but I don’t mind because it’s a pretty significant portion of my patreon income. However, unbeknownst to me, in the event someone can’t pay for the $10 tier, like for example if their card gets declined then they are automatically removed from the list of people I see that are getting the $10 reward, but they’re aren’t removed from the limited pool of fifty people reserved for that tier in case they come back.

So, what this has meant over the years is that people on the $10 tier have stopped paying or their cards had expired or whatever and they’ve just been sat there not getting any reward and stopping actual paying people from signing up, and there’s literally no way to remove them without blocking and then unblocking them. I estimate this has cost me close to a four digit sum and let me tell you I am LIVID. Very upset with patreon but hopefully the issue is fixed and we’re going to be seeing a bunch of new faces at the end which will be fun!

Special thanks by the way to Ty Gurin who pointed this issue out to me, literally saved me a couple of hundred quid a year thanks buddy really appreciate it.

Anyway, let’s move onto actual video talk and take a look at the first video I want to talk about and that is RPGs were never about roleplaying and brace yourselves here because this is a video, wait for it, I think is actually quite good. I think the angle of it being a sort of evolutionary look at how RPGs have changed and diverged over time is great, I genuinely love my little graph showing how different RPG types are distinct and my tying things back into how Darwin's finch isn’t actually a finch was the last second fun fact that I think really tied everything together. It’s a good vid!

I think the historical angle is an element that I don’t tend to do very often because I’m always wary of just spending an entire video rewording a wikipedia article which is something that really hacky video essay people do and one of the hardest bits of the video was balancing my more typical analysis and observation with telling the more straightforward story of how all these genres branched off.

Actually getting everything down to those four categories of dungeon crawler, crpg, jrpg and narrative RPG was actually the hardest part of the project and I had to kind of fight my way through some common misconceptions in order to make a model that more or less made sense. Stuff like fallout or the witcher or mass effect are very tempting to sort of bundle in with other western RPG types particularly in the case of fallout which as a franchise straddles multiple RPG genres but actually thinking about what these games set out to do and how they play makes them quite different even if they share a lot of the same mechanical and design aesthetic space. Narrative RPGs in particular were a fairly late addition to the format and honestly rounding it out into four distinct groups with narrative RPGs kind of acting as a counterweight to dungeon crawlers in capturing the two distinct ways people tried to adapt dungeons and dragons is really what brought everything together. (ADAM'S LATER NOTE, NO IDEA WHY I SAID TWO SEPARATE THINGS TIED EVERYTHING TOGETHER MOMENTS APART, THAT'S DUMB OF ME)

One thing that I wish I did more of or at the very least had the patience to do was actually plan in advance and play more of these big long RPGs for myself, I did not have a good time just trying to rush through the intros to stuff like elder scrolls arena which is fairly miserable and trying to get halfway decent footage for baldur’s gate 1 and ultima underworld and the witchery games was similarly… not great. RPGs are very long usually so I can’t play all of them but still.

All in all the video did well, people seemed to respond more positively to the idea that role playing game is a silly term than I thought, there weren’t too many oldschool tabletop RPG grognards being boring and the video performed pretty well too, result I think. Yeah not much to complain about either really.

The next video why do we still hate tutorials… I think I’ve got a few more issues with, kind of a eeehh conflicted one for a variety of reasons. Ultimately my problem with this one is that I didn’t really get to talk about the thing I realized too late was the actually most interesting part of the video for anywhere near as long as I like. Videogames existing as sort of a continuum and there being entry level games and advanced games that expect you to know certain concepts is an idea that clearly exists but I don’t think I’ve ever seen directly articulated. I’ve touched on it a few times in recent videos and I think maybe it deserves a spotlight onto itself.

One of the challenging things about making this video, on that note, is that it was surprisingly difficult to find tutorials in games that showed the kind of bad habits and annoying bits I wanted to showcase in a visually obvious way. Often tutorials being annoying is more of a persistently subtle thing so meta stuff that knowingly and obviously does this like Toriel in Undertale and far cry blood dragon was actually quite helpful to give a big obvious highlight of the examples. On the subject of far cry blood dragon, that game is kind of fascinating because it makes fun of terrible unhelpful tutorials by giving you a really shitty tutorial and also the main character is complaining about having to do a tutorial. It’s a sort of very self-conscious irony that really we’ve kind of grown out of comedically and so it really doesn’t work at all which was surprising.

As for the rest of the vid, one thing I found quite interesting when making it was that I initially started with the premise that tutorials are bad and suck, which is the prevailing gamer opinion but the more research I did and the more I tried to construct the argument around that point the more I realized it just… isn’t really true anymore - if it ever was. I think one thing I do want to take away from this video is that the channel has a lot of potential to challenge some of the deeply set gamer opinions we kind of take for granted, and I should probably do more of that going forwards because whilst some people did miss the point I think also I did strike a chord with people too, sort of putting voice to a quite specific complaint not with tutorials specifically but how they get used which was good to see.

I think the video did… okay? I’ll cop to the thumbnail being really bad and the title’s a little bleh for my liking but it’s another case of having quite a complex central thesis and no way to get it across in a pithy way so I went for a more mainstream hook, playing off that initial assumption all tutorials are bad but equally that kind of made the video look a bit generic I think - it’s a tricky one. The marketing and social media side of the channel continues to be the worst part of the job for me, just… I do not have the brain for it or the talent to make pretty thumbnails which is a shame but DAMN if I'll let anyone else do it, no way.

Anyway I should probably get to work on the next video, no prizes for guessing which… slightly underwhelming space game it’s going to be about, and I’ll see you around - bye!