I'm coming up on the annual Extra Life marathon, where I livestream myself and
whoever else I can wrangle into helping me for 24-ish hours, and we play games
with the pretense of helping raise money for sick kids. It's a good cause, and a
good excuse for me to play some video games, which is something that I still
enjoy, but is tougher to find time to do.
This will be my seventh year doing that, and it's a lot of fun. But I do
sometimes think that I could try to do more with this streaming setup. It seems
silly to do things one weekend a year, and then leave it mostly idle for the
rest of the time.
I've tried putting stuff on YouTube, including doing Let's Plays and variations
on 'two guys sitting on a couch playing a game and making comments about them',
but those went nowhere, really, and these days I just occasionally put up low
effort stuff that nobody watches anyway under the assumption that if nobody is
looking at it, then it doesn't really matter what I put there.
But, since it's almost marathon time again, I started thinking to myself that I
could maybe try a little bit harder. I could try making something that someone
else might actually want to watch, and who knows what might happen?
I'll admit that part of what brought this line of thinking on is that I'm
getting older in a field that values youth and inexperience (because they're
cheaper), that values globalization of the workforce (because it's cheaper),
that has, as a result, nearly eliminated all paths between being an underpaid
beginner and an underpaid expert. That's another article for another time, but
the gist is that I'm at the point in my career where I need to have either spent
the last ten years learning about and becoming an expert in the correct areas,
or I need to spend the next ten years learning whatever I think will still be
around and in demand in the next ten years, which will put me that much closer
to just plain being too old for consideration.
So, I decided that I needed to come up with some kind of plan. I won't be giving
up on IT completely because that still butters my bread, and I'll always be an
IT tinkerer, but I have an imagination good enough that I can envision a
scenario where my job and jobs like it could be phased out (or at least be made
unrecognizable), and I need to have a 'Plan B', and maybe Plans C-Z, just in
case.
Making videos about video games seems to be a logical choice for one of these
Plans since I already have all the equipment that I need and the barrier to
entry is low enough that there's essentially nothing for me to lose by giving it
a try.
Except.
Except I tried a lot of times, and I failed. On the Internet I tried a
traditional website and failed. I tried a blog with no plan and failed. I tried
a blog with a plan and a regular update schedule and failed. And so on.
Failure, for me, is always an option, it seems.
And I've read reams of advice of people who have 'made it', and when you ask
someone who has been successful in something like content creation, you get the
same boilerplate responses.
They say that you have to be consistent. I read some article by some guy who
said that all you needed to have a successful blog was to blog every day for a
year. I blogged every day for two years (twice!) and proved that that is not
true. Consistency is important, sure, but it's no good if you're spending your
time creating something that nobody wants to look at.
They say to do what you're passionate about, and that passion will shine
through, and people will come because they can sense your passion and et cetera.
That's also not strictly true. I have created videos and blog entries and
websites and all kinds of things that I was passionate about at the time. Things
that I'm still passionate about, but I reached a point where I was constantly
telling people about the thing I was passionate about, and I was constantly
getting nothing back (no interest, no feedback, no nothing), and I decided that
I would instead create things for myself and not publish them, because clearly
the things I was passionate about are not the same things that other people are
passionate about. So this is also partly false.
I won't dive into the nuances of all the advice I've ever gotten on the subject,
but all of this conflicting information has led me to conclude that nobody knows
what it takes to be a success in a creative endeavor. Anyone who is trying to
coach other people into being successes are looking back at their own success
and trying to pick out the things that they *think* they did that contributed to
their success.
Did they work hard? Definitely. Did they work consistently? Almost certainly.
Did they work hard and consistently for years with no recognition before 'coming
out of nowhere'? Most likely.
But there are a few factors that aren't considered as much. One is that it's not
enough to just create 'content', you need to create 'great content'. What's
'great content'? It's unclear. As far as I can tell, 'great content' is content
that someone wants to consume. You can't get any more specific than that,
though, because if your potential audience is anyone and everyone, what
qualifies as 'great content' will vary so widely that it's not quantifiable.
You can emulate what others have done, but then you're derivative. You can do
something that absolutely nobody has done before, but then nobody can find your
stuff because it's so different that they don't know how to look for it, and if
they do find it, they won't understand it because they've never seen anything
like it before. I know this because I've encountered both.
If you're making videos, you also have to have a personality that someone will
want to watch. You can be a great editor, you can have amazing ideas, you can
have the best gear in the world, and so on. But if you don't have a personality
that people want to watch, you're sunk. If you work hard, you might be able to
tease out a personality that will resonate with people and get some viewers. But
then you're not 'you' any more. You're a character putting on a show for an
audience. Not that there's anything wrong with that, lots of actors do that
every day. But you need charisma. You need that 'it' factor that can't be taught
and can't be defined. You can develop it and improve it, sure, but if you don't
have 'it' to start with, you might be sunk before you've begun.
I think one video I watched on the subject accidentally hit this nail right on
the head when he was giving advice. He didn't linger on it, but he said that,
"All you have to do is create great content, and people will find you."
(paraphrased). The trouble is, though, that 'great content' is so vague and
undefinable that it's *really hard* to come up with something great once, much
less repeatedly, and even less so on a regular basis, with the added wrinkle of
stuff that I think is great someone else (or most someone elses) might think is
worthless.
Not to mention that if I start using a platform like Twitch.tv, which is the
biggest video game streaming site as of this writing, then I will join 2.2
million other streamers who are competing for the same 15 million pairs of
eyeballs. Those numbers will only grow as time goes on. I don't see video games
declining in popularity much over the next few years, and YouTube, Twitch, and
other video sharing sites are the new Television, and I don't think those are
going away any time soon, either. But, I might have better luck hitting the
lottery.
So why do it?
I came up with three reasons.
1. It gives me an incentive to play through the mountain of games that I have
under the pretense of making videos. I have enough video games and consoles to
last me for the rest of my life, possibly twice over, and I keep buying more for
some reason. The problem is, though, that I keep doing other things rather than
playing through them, and convincing myself that I just don't have the time to
play them like I used to. This is a way that I can make time for something that
I'm pretty sure that I still like to do.
2. Even if I don't become a streaming megastar, I'll get some valuable
experience in production, and, assuming that I don't absolutely hate it, I'll
have something that I can do well into my retirement, if it comes to that.
3. Making things is awesome. Being creative and making things is something that
not enough people do. And, yes, I fully expect that this venture will not be The
Thing(tm) that makes me a whole bunch of money and makes me Internet Famous(tm),
but I can't let that stop me. I may give up trying to make money off of my
creations, but I won't stop creating things.
Because, if I keep creating things, if I keep making connections in my brain,
there's a chance that those connections might end up inspring me to create
something that's actually amazing, and if my skillset is deep enough in the
right areas, I can make whatever that might be into a reality. And the best way
I can think of to get my skillset there, is to practice. So that's what I'm
going to do.
