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.
---
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment