The Strange State of YouTube Gaming Content

 

While I'm at my office I like to put on long form YouTube videos about video games.  Reviews, retrospectives or just long ramblings about some game that the user enjoys, its nice background noise to break up the monotony of putting together road infrastucture and recreating bits of Japan in Blender.  I have my usual suspects that I like to rotate through, just comfy listening while I work but sometimes my brain craves some fresh blood and I go clicking around the suggested videos to see if I can find a new creator whos channel I can ransack with my ears.  While occasionally I do find some new stuff that I find interesting, I've started to notice something worrying about the YouTube video game video essay and if its starting to infect this genre of content I'm sure its probably way worse in other places

Before I start ranting though, let me put some usernames out there for people that I think are cool.  At time of writing I've just finished re-binging most of the videos of ThorHighHeels, a guy who covers various video game oddities and has a very chill, very positive outlook on the medium that may inspire you to look at some games a bit differently than you usually would.  Then there's a user called KBash who I quite like.  Again, he covers various oddities in a sort of review format.  I discovered him when he did a video on fucking Red Ninja of all things.  That alone didn't get me to hit the subscribe button but then he did a MASSIVE video on JUST Ys 1 which is an undertaking I would never be willing to take on myself and I respect the effort put in to a game that only a small number of people give a shit about.  I've also been quite fond of a user called ZERO who does challenge videos for the Resident Evil games.  His video where he beat Resident Evil 7 without running is extremely cool and this man has an iron will when it comes to bullshit Resident Evil challenges.  One final suggestion is Civvie11 who does review style content almost exclusively for boomer shooters.  He's pretty funny, clearly is steeped in the ancient texts of the genre and through his channel I've tried a number of games that I've ended up really enjoying.  There's plenty more users than this whos content I enjoy but if I was to go through every YouTuber I liked then I'd be here all fucking day and that's not what I'm here to yap about.

What I'm not here to complain about is just people I don't gel with.  For example there's a guy I can't stand called Jacob Geller but I'm not concieted enough to put him on blast for being shit.  He's not shit and clearly puts a lot of effort into his stuff, I just don't like it.  The users that I'm about to talk about I'm not going to name because 1) I don't have proof of what I think they are doing and 2) if they are doing it, I don't want people giving them any views but I have run these videos by a few people I know and we all are suspecting the same thing.  

So I hope we're all on the same page about generative AI being complete fucking bullshit right?  Not that I'm a complete AI hater, I can see there being use cases for such a thing existing but the majority of people using it are doing it for bad purposes; generating shit that can then be easily packaged in the form of an article or video that can then be served onto a social media platform for the purpose of generating clicks and therefore generating money.  "Slop", the kids these days tend to call it.   

What I've noticed in the last few weeks when clicking around and looking for new content is that there are a lot of videos out there with human voice over but that sound like the scripts have been generated by AI.  Weird sentences, information that's incorrect or missing important points, delivery that sounds like a high school student reading a presentation where they Ctrl C Ctrl V'd a wikipedia page.  Not so subtle hints that these users are just going to GPT and asking a vague question to the machine rather than going out and engaging with gaming and then forming opinions on their own.  The one other big hint I have that AI is being used in this way is that I had one user in my discord (username related to Lovecraft, for the regulars) who was begging for info on a game from the General channel because GPT wasn't giving him enough to work with.

Another bit of evidence I have to indicate that this is going on is that I found one video about "disturbing video games" and I clicked out of the video about 15 minutes in because the things the guy were saying sounded just sort of...off? its hard to describe.  So when I started writing this post I went to ChatGPT and asked it about disturbing video games and the result I got not only matched his list, but the bullet points I got for each game matched pretty closely the things he was saying in his script.  A real "copy my homework but change it a little bit" ass moment.  

I've got too much going on in my life to get mad about this kind of thing but it is annoying to find a video on a topic I think is going to be cool only for the delivery to sound like its being delivered by a robot thats been through the trash compactor once or twice.  Is this really what people want? To just listen to a guy rattle off the result of a GPT prompt? you don't want something a little more from your media than that?  Maybe hearing the experiences and opinions of people who are interested in the same or similar things to you?  I love, for example, hearing people talk about the Megami Tensei games because which ones we consider to be the best and how we approach each game is interesting to hear about.  It would be considerably less interesting if someone just went "What is the best MegaTen" on GPT and then every video was some monotone fuck head going "Nocturne, Persona 4 and RONDE" every video for hours and hours at a time.

 Demand more out of your media diet.  Find things to inspire or give you new perspective or something.  Something that might get you to try something new and expand your horizons.  Put the fucking skibidi toilet, italian brainrot, 30 second shorts of fat old americans talking about how much they like Chrono Trigger videos down, and pick up something that's even just SLIGHTLY deeper.   Also if you get a whiff of AI, just fuckin close it out, fuck anyone who would use that shit.   

Weird Fake Gaming Shorts

 

A couple of years ago there was a video put out by a group(?) going by the name of Badabun.  To my understanding Badabun are a shitty content farm type of channel that produces low grade insipid crap for 6-13 year olds, not the kind of thing worth looking up.  This video consisted of a guy sitting in front of a camera pretending to play Super Mario Bros on the NES while a TAS speedrun video played in a window next to him. He was claiming to have beaten the game in under 5 minutes which is certainly a feat that has been done by a great many people it seems but the fakery of this video was so obvious that it was laughable.  A number of other creators made their own videos clowning on this guy for being a dipshit, we had a good chuckle and we moved on.

Fast forward to current day however, in a new age of short form content and these fake gaming videos have become pretty widespread.  Not only that but the number of people now falling for it seems to have grown a great deal and it's making any faith I might have had in the general audiences in gaming spaces has now been well and truly crushed.  The short that inspired me to make this post was a guy playing a Super Mario World romhack where the footage he was using was so obviously either TAS or spliced that you would think a child would recognize the fakery but the comments section was filled with things like "omg this guy is the greatest mario player ever" with only a couple of comments calling out the obvious fakeness that went mostly ignored.  What made it even worse is that he had included a webcam feed at the bottom of the video showing his hands and the controller to add legitimacy to the video but even just glancing at it you could see it wasn't matching up.  Despite the guy in question putting the fact that it's fake blatently on screen for all to see, I guess most people's mindset is that "oh there's a controller feed there so it must be legit" and then go no further than that.

I've also noticed that this has been a massive problem for short form content regarding rhythm games.  There's a very simple rhythm game called A Dance of Fire and Ice that is just CRAWLING with hundreds of fake videos of people getting all perfects on meme songs like Rush E or really cringeworthy songs about that cocksocket, Mr Beast.  A lot of rhythm games come with autoplay features so you can see and maybe study the chart a while if you are struggling but these guys are taking autoplay footage, slapping on some footage of them mashing the keyboard like a child playing with a word processor for the first time and then uploading.  The fakery here is even more obvious that the Mario videos as well because just listening to the clacks of the keyboard while watching the gameplay clearly shows they aren't hitting those notes and yet at the end of the short they have a no miss all perfect clear AND EVEN THEN the comments are filled with praise by idiots.

The big question I have is just "why?", why go through all that effort to get a couple of thousand views on the most ass type of content that can be made on a platform like YouTube.  Even if you suck at rhythm games, let's say, and then you did a series of videos where you documented yourself practicing to full combo the hardest song in whatever game it was, I think that would be infinitely more appealing to more people.  People love seeing a shitty underdog struggle and train and then do a thing.  Uploading fake videos to get a couple of thousand fews so you can make a few bucks in ad rev is actually fucking pathetic.

I guess the solution is to stop watching YouTube shorts, I dunno why I bother anyway.  For some reason I click that shit every so often and I just end up mad or disappointed.  But either way, my bad habits with shitty short form media aside, fuck these users, put some effort into your fucking hobby

Plans For Identity Gaming 2022

 

It's mid-November at time of writing I've come to the grim realisation that I've barely posted anything here or on YouTube for MONTHS.  Here I've been posting once ever so often but YouTube has been particularly barren of content for maybe over a year.  So the purpose of this post is to layout a plan for the 3 main platforms that I use for this charity page and maybe then I'll stop procrastinating and not let things like this or the YouTube channel fall to the wayside.

The Blog

It's been sort of hard to give a shit about updating the blog over the last year or so.  My main method of content production for the charity effort has been through the Twitch stream and on there I'll discuss things that I'd usually write here but live and with a chat.  I don't need to write a piece about my thoughts on a game I've been playing here because while I'm chilling with chat I can just talk about it there and hear other peoples opinions on it in real time, which is much cooler.

But the blog is where this whole thing started so I don't just want to let it die, so starting from either this evening (I'm writing this around noon) or tomorrow evening I'm going to start using the blog space as a sort of "Game diary".  Just a place I come to every evening before bed to write out what I've been gaming on that day and how I felt about it or some quick thoughts about some piece of news I found or whatever.  A pure stream of conscienceness with no real rhyme or reason, just to give people a little insight into what I've been doing and what kind of game-related thoughts are flying around my dumb brain.

The YouTube Channel 

This is the one facet of Identity Gaming that's basically been dead for a long-ass time.  I used to upload off the cuff lets plays and I experimented with some kind of unscripted ramblings about various topics to not a lot of success.  I'm not usually one to care about subscriber counts and video view counts and I was happy to upload that kind of content to an minescule viewership just because it was fun to turn on my mic and ramble randomly about something while I played odd games that interested me.  Back then though, the YouTube channel was making a small amount of money.  I forget what the network was called but I was getting about $20-$40 a month which I would then funnel into the charity.  My low effort content was generating cash for the Alzheimer's Society and that felt good.

Then YouTube changed the rules to me needing 1000 subs, I lost monetization and, since the point of Identity Gaming is to raise money for a charity I let the YouTube side of things die almost completely, acting more of a sort of repository for when I did something cool on stream like a speedrun PB or my Cuphead 200% deathless run. 

But that's sort of defeatist isn't it?  I'm ignoring an entire avenue of potential charity raising just because I'm too lazy to put some effort into a video.  Well then I got to thinking, I hate the state of modern game reviews and I'm a big fan of YouTube made analytical content, so why don't I do that?  The YouTube channel going forward will be used for long form video essay type shit about games wot I love or games wot I hate.  I've already started working on recording and scripting for the first one and for the first time in a while I'm actually having fun producing for YouTube again.  Even if it gets 1 view, 1 like and my channel doesn't grow at all off the effort, it's better to at least try than to just let the channel die.

Twitch

I don't even need to say anything about Twitch really, do I?  Nothing is really going to change here.  More streams, more donation incentives, more prizes being added to the list via the streak system we have going.  Hopefully I can find a little bit more time to work on emotes, overlays and all sorts of other stuff to make the viewing experience overall better for you guys but generally speaking it's business as usual here.

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There's some other minor things like Twitter where I'm planning to stop doom-scrolling through bad takes written by IGN journos and being toxic and instead I can just fill my timeline with me just enjoying things that I'm playing or finding cool indie projects that I think are worth keeping and eye on.  There's also instagram which is about as equally dead as the YouTube at time of writing so maybe I can put more effort into posting some cool game stuff I find on my travels while drowning the image in hashtags.

I'm hoping we can meet some BIG goals next year both for the content and for the charity and I cannot thank you all enough for your continued support up to this point.

Cuphead 200% Deathless Run Stream Highlight

Cuphead Any% Deathless Stream Highlight

Final Fantasy 7 No Materia Final Bossfight [Stream Highlight]

Plans For 2020

Since my New Year Holiday at work ended and I'm back to the old grind stone I thought I'd take the time to let you fine people know some plans for Identity Gaming in 2020.

The Stream

Nothing huge really happening to the stream but  I'm hoping to do a marathon at least once a month this year.  What the marathon IS will be dependent on if anything gets donated for but if there are no completed goals I'll probably just do long versions of the current stream rotation.  In case you don't know what that is it's

Variety Stream
NES Challenge
Donation Requests
Speedruns/Variety
Challenges

Speaking of challenges hopefully we'll make short work of FF7 No Materia and I think before the years end I'd like to accomplish FFX Single Character, A souls game deathless and MAYBE depending on how well I can do the previous two, Undertale hitless? We'll see how that goes, maybe I'm being too ambitious there.

The Blog

The blogs been sort of sporadic and inactive since most of my efforts have gone into the stream.  I want to balance things a bit more and get a more consistent posting schedule.  Also I want to add more donation incentives and maybe start doing some actual giveaways to further incentivize charity donations.  I've been toying with the idea of moving from Blogger to a different service but this is a pretty good (and most importantly, free) way to write my silly articles.

YouTube Channel

Completely neglected for a long time now and I want to fix that.  I've got some ideas for play throughs and some other types of video but first I need to organize the channel and cut some of the crap that I uploaded in the sites very early days.  Don't forget if you donate for a playthrough and you'd rather have it for YT rather than done live, just specify that in the donation comment and I'll do it.

Expect maybe some video essay type stuff, some more Japanese arcade coverage and maybe even a hall of fame/shame type show if I ever get time to script anything.

Of course this is all just a rough idea of what I WANT to do in the coming year, I'm sure things will change or I'll have inspiration for more ideas and challenges in the near future.  Of course, on top of all this if we could smash those charity goals that would be even more awesome but just having your support for the above is more than enough <3

2020, lets go!

Silent Hill Part 11 [Final]

Silent Hill Part 10

Silent Hill Part 9

Tau and Friends Play Silent Hill Part 8

Tau and Friends Play Silent Hill Part 7

Tau and Friends Play Silent Hill Part 6

Silent Hill Part 5

Silent Hill Part 4

Mahjong Madness #1

Gun Nac 1 Credit Clear

Had this video set to private for ages, oops!

Tau and Friends Play Silent Hill Part 3

Tau and Friends Play Silent Hill Part 2

Tau and Friends Play Silent Hill Part 1