Video Game Tirade
Video Game Tirade
Ep 4 (T) - Death Stranding - Games for Charity and Viewer Entertainment
Warning: This episode contains mature language. 18+ strongly recommended.
In this episode, I discuss a smidge of Death Stranding but, more importantly, watching gaming over the internet as its own entertainment thing and how that can affect our heads and positively affect the world. This is something I find very dear to me, particularly all of the things I watch for my own entertainment, and I would love to hear some similar stories from you guys! Hmu on Twitter or in my email for that, if you're interested. : )
Beginning and Ending links:
Beg: https://youtu.be/lOayfi7GhQw - Ellis - Clear My Head
End: https://youtu.be/yJg-Y5byMMw - Mortals (NCS Release) - Warriyo
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Hello, y'all, and welcome to Video Game Tirade. This is the show where I yell for an hour or so about games I've been playing and whatever they remind me of. My name is AJ and let's just go ahead and get this rant rolling!
Last week, I talked at length about why I was quite disappointed with Jurassic World Evolution, that glorified waiting simulator. Since then, I'm almost finished up on Xenoblade Chronicles 2 - "jurpegs" why must you be so long!! Kena is going to be next week's episode, for sure, I've built up my emotional resistance enough to broach that topic, and I've picked up Yakuza 0 to finish its achievements off, so look forward to me talking significantly about that sometime soon. I have already drafted the episode, uh, I'm gonna have to do separate episodes for all the Yakuza series for the plot as just its own episodes, followed by recap episodes after a couple of... I'm planning on doing, since the Yakuza series has 8 games right now, I'm planning on doing Yakuza 0, 1, 2, and 3, all the plot episodes and then a recap episode to discuss my feelings on those 4, and then the same thing with the second half. So, I have, as you could probably tell from that, I've got a lot of things to say about the Yakuza series as a whole, as well as - I really just want to explain to you guys why the Yakuza series is so ridiculous in terms of just strictly the plot. It goes bananas, and I also just wanna spend, like, at least one good episode talking about series husbando, Goro Majima! Did you think I was gonna say Kiryu? Kiryu may be a dad but he's no husband material! Arguably, he's asexual - but that's something to dig into when the recap episode comes up!!
So I'm still working on Xenoblade Chronicles 2, Kena is next week, and Yakuza 0 is - its - its gonna be a process - so what am I going to be talking about today? Well, while the games I've been playing may not be quite ready to talk about, I do want to talk about a game I've been watching. Not super in-depth yet, because its Death Stranding and the new Director's Cut version that came out allegedly has more plot content and I definitely need to actually play that game again to get my thoughts about it in order! But I do want to talk a little bit about the game, because one of the main cores of the game relates very hard to me as a gamer, and I imagine a lot of people in this world today, whether or not they identify as a "gamer."
So I've spent the f-fast? I've spent the past few weeks watching a specific playthrough of Death Stranding, that particular playthrough being Miles Luna's weeklong charity event of playing the game to raise money for Heart Support, a mental health nonprofit that helps people deal with issues such as depression, anxiety, abuse, addiction, etc. through acceptance, anonymity, and community support. I'm not sponsored by Heart Support, by the way, just mentioning that was the charity and what it stands for. It was a very reasonable choice for the game, which for now I'm only going to describe as a delivery-man simulator, combining walking simulator with interesting combat elements and brand-new mechanics of balance and weight distribution, a game which focuses on such topics as depression, fear, and loneliness and how to manage these to make connections with others, and finally how these connections change both our own lives and others'. Discussing the story and the themes is going to make the Director's Cut episode quite long, indeed - Kojima... Hideo Kojima is a marvelous man and he has a hamster's nest for a brain, and I for one am in love with straightening it out! I have played Death Stranding, base version, before, but the past few weeks, I've only been watching the VODs and re-experiencing the game through Miles and his Twitch chat as they played it for a good cause. That, in essense, is my topic today: How watching video games being played secondhand, over the internet, has become its own form of entertainment, and the good that actively does for the world.
To discuss this topic, we obviously have to discuss the 2 major platforms for gameplay as entertainment in our world today. The first is going to be YouTube. The extremely, extremely well-known website began in 2005 allegedly to share videos in an easier way than email, which has a hard limit to data volume it can hold, or physical means. At the time, DVD was the format of the day, and transporting a DVD to Grandma ran the risk of the disk breaking. The other option is portable external storage- the thumb drive - ranging in 2005 usually from around 512 MB to 8 GB as the affordable options, although the 8 GB was on the extremely expensive end of the affordable options . While thumb drives may seem easy to manage to us modern humans, in 2005, the internet was exactly half as old as it is today in 2012 - 12?!? 21, 21. 2021! (Well, "exactly" - ARPANET was officially launched in '69, but the World Wide Web in '89 so... exactly according to SOME definitions!) Anyways, Grandma in 2005 may have been more used to computers as a computing device rather than the main communications device of every modern household they are today. Sending Grandma a small plastic rectangle, asking her to stick it into a specific port, open her file browser, and look at all the things loaded on said small plastic rectangle - might be stretch! And VHS and cassette had definitely been deemed vintage already, so no sturdy methods of sending videos without also having a minimum hour-long phone call with Grandma to explain to her how to even watch them. So YouTube's generation was filling a valuable niche that the internet could be uti-utilized to satisfy.
At first, YouTube was absolutely used for just sending family videos to each other. The first video on the site was from one of the creators, describing in an extremely vague way his trip to the zoo over about 19 seconds - its called "Me at the zoo," posted by jawed, j-a-w-e-d, if you want to watch it yourself. It very quickly became used for a meme congregator, gathering all the various scattered memes from the early internet together - things like Peanut Butter Jelly Time, How Do I Shot Web, Badger Dance, Hamster Dance, Homestar Runner's video and gif bits, Numa Numa, Tunak Tunak Tun, etc. 2007 is when the first bits of gaming get dumped into the cesspit that YouTube was becoming, with "I herd u liek mudkipz," The Weighted Companion Cube, and "The cake is a lie" becoming extremely popular at the time. It's hard to pinpoint when exactly gaming became a mainstay on the platform - one of the oldest YouTubers I follow, NintendoCapriSun, his oldest video is from March 2008, almost exactly 3 years after YouTube's launch. Another oldie but goodie, Chuggaaconroy, who I very strongly recommend if you like Nintendo co-content, has also been around since 2008, a couple months after NCS launched. Smosh has been around since 2007 but they start as skit work, and the first time I found that they directly reference anything video game-y is in 2009. I supposed a sufficient estimate would be right around the end of the 00's, and within the latter of those first 5 years after YouTube's birth. That leaves a minimum of 11 years for watching gameplay to surge into the multi-billion dollar industry it is today. The industry itself, of watching gameplay secondhand over the internet, at least by using YouTube as the benchmark, is old enough to be in middle school in the United States. How's that for making you feel old?
From a personal standpoint, I started getting invested in YouTube gameplay videos in about 2011, first by looking up gameplay videos of Super Mario Sunshine to see where the last 20-odd blue coins I was missing were, which then led to a channel called Versus. This channel was a collaboration channel between two fledgling Let's Players named AttackingTucans (spelled without the "o") and JoshJepson. The channel is now known for playing quite a few Nintendo games, usually in the vein of Mario or Zelda, in a head-to-head first-one-to-beat-the-game-wins kind of style. And that first versus, their first time competing in Super Mario Sunshine, is something very full of nostalgia for me, even though I will admit that by modern standards there are quite a few problematic topics of discussion in these early series! The two folks have grown as people since then, so no need to judge them by very old statements they no longer agree with! This channel, for extra content of why - context of why I am so nostalgic of them, #1) was the first example I had seen as a young'in ANYBODY doing anything in entertainment with comedy that actually appealed to what I found funny, because these guys are a lot closer to my age than the writers and actors of big-shot shows and movies at the time, and #2) these guys are the people who pointed me in the direction of NCS and Chuggaa as well as a company called RoosterTeeth, which has been a significant positive influence in my life since 2012. At one point, I began learning how to do video and audio editing under the idea that I might be able to apply and get accepted to RoosterTeeth someday. You might be more familiar with RT from their headlining title, Red vs. Blue. RvB and RT actually pre-date YouTube, with RvB generating RoosterTeeth and coming out in 2003, on April 1st, hilariously enough. Arguably, this property is the first successful example of something generated from gaming that is neither the game nor just straight-up gameplay. It's arguably parodic and original content simultaneously, making fun of the Halo games while also using the Halo games to create a narrative completely separate from the world of Halo despite being filmed in it. In much the same way, YouTube Let's Play and Twitch content can be argued to be giving extra value to playing video games that make them respectable as their own thing, although to a significantly lesser extent - no added narrative, at least for most of them. V-Tubers are doing their own narrative thing, 4 for them, go for - good on them, its interesting and cool and I'm glad they're having fun even if I don't fully understand it.
Anyways, back to the added value thing. Usually the selling points of Let's Plays and Twitch channels are the players' personalities - can anyone say Markiplier or, say, JackSepticEye would be even half as popular as they are if they weren't just the most hilarious, honest, and genuinely kind men to come out of the mid-teens internet? By contrast, like I stated earlier, RvB is its own narrative content that combines writing, acting, and directing all on top game- of the gameplay aspect, focusing more on the story than the personalities characterizing it. Let's Plays and Twitch can be considered a form of talk show or semi-auto-biographical content, whereas RvB is an actual show, with extremely little if any personal info from the real people involved being used to draw and maintain interest. It all comes down to those dirty Reds and stinkin' Blues and their never-ending fight against both each other and that age-old question: why are we here?
This all leads me to my next talking point, actually: the personal draw of gamer influencers. Taking Markiplier as my example again, he is extremely popular because of how personable and relatable he is. He seems so friendly and fun, and so we as his audience, or the audience of any major gaming personality like Ninja or Dream, we feel rewarded for following their content in similar ways to how we feel rewarded from hanging out with friends. Strong enough personalities develop strong parasocial relationships with their audience; their viewers believe themselves to be friends of the influencer, or at least regard them with a lot more emotional investment than traditional celebrities. I know I personally get nervous when I read headlines about Markiplier being in the hospital, but I could not care less about Kim Kardashian's seventh divorce or the British royal family flinging themselves across the world to protect themselves from racism and classism. I'm interested in that latter one in a political sense but do I actually care if any of these royal personnel have a good day or not? Absolutely the fuck no! Strong personalities can become professional influencers because they convey themselves so earnestly that their audience wants to support them in similar ways to friends.
In other words, we want Ninja to do well because he's funny and relatable and young like all of us and entertaining and fucking good at Fortnite. So we pay him so he can keep entertaining us - being our online friend who's good at games.
And speaking of enabling entertainment, the finance team would like to say a few words about this project! That's a lie, I'm still without sponsors, but I do have a Patreon if you feel like supporting me directly! I also have a Twitter and business email, linked in the description, if you want to talk with me about today's topic or suggest new ones! Today's hashtag will be #VGTLP, all caps. Links to today's opening and ending themes will also be in the description, as well. Alright, with that update installed, let's get back into the action!
Before the break, I was talking about parasocial relationships and explaining how they directly contribute to influencers' successes. And I'm painting these parasocial relationships in a negative light intentionally, if you haven't *gibberish* - if you haven't noticed yet. Parasociality isn't inherently negative - we are social animals and require connection, deep emotional connections, in order to exist and have healthy lives. However, I'm pointing all this out as an introduction, if you weren't aware of this aspect of your consumption of content online, and if you were, as a friendly reminder to monitor your parasocial relationships. Its always wise to ask yourself "is this person actually a friend?" especially in regards to people you don't and can never know personally, no matter how much personal information they share - people like Markiplier and JackSepticEye. Allowed to go too far, and we have another situation of that guy who killed that Beatles member. We don't want that, parasocial relationships are supposed to make us feel good, not vindictive towards the other end of the relationship.
That's the negative side of parasociality. The concept and the existence of these relationships have benefits, and more than just letting people maintain relationships when it can be hard to do so in real life. This podcast, this specific episode, mind, started with me talking about Death Stranding and watching a charity event taking place through playing the game. A directly positive benefit can be seen from that charity event: Miles was leveraging the parasocial relationships he has with his audience to help support a very good cause. This, in my experience, is one of the more common, probably the most common ways influencers can cause actual tangible good for the world - there's more positives, like free marketing or exposure to a wide variety of games for those of us who are fiscally challenged, but those are more personal or capitalisitic, compared to things like political activism, like the way Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is pointing her parasocial audience at the causes they all believe in, or the altruism of fundraising for charity. RoosterTeeth, like I mentioned earlier, holds a yearly charity event for ExtraLife, a charity that helps kids in hospitals and other medical care facilities experience games to help them through their treatments or outright make significant contributions to various medical facilities and organizations to improve care. (Again, I'm not sponsored by them, just explaining.) A not-for-profit organization that I'm also not sponsored by, Game Done Quick, is a speedrunners' collective that currently holds around 3 to 5 events every year for various charities, raising money by showcasing a week's worth of speedrunning and challenge incentives, usually to the tune of a few, few million dollars per event. Mr. Beast got started in being a gaming influencer, specifically with Minecraft and Call of Duty, and he had that extremely successful fundraiser a few years ago to plant all those trees. Remember that one, Team Trees? (That's still going, by the way, and just $1 equals 1 tree! #NotSponsored!)
This is all to explain that gaming has a huge impact on our world's entertainment now, and the industry of emotional attachment no longer ends with just the games and the teams surrounding their creations. I would be remiss to end a discussion about watching games as it own form of entertainment with positive benefits without mentioning livestreams - namely, Twitch. The platform launched in 2011 under the name Justin.tv but it rebranded to Twitch in August 2014, the same month Amazon acquired them. 2015 was when it started becoming a household name, averaging around 100 million viewers per month according to Wikipedia. Subscriptions via the Partner Program were part of the platform since launch, but definitely contributed to the rapid growth immediately - the ability to use both global and channel-specific emotes creates several layers of insularity and live excitement that's harder to find in recorded content like on YouTube. The in-jokes that breed emotes and the real-time aspect of the site contribute HEAVILY to a fear of missing out, which then makes it easier for viewers to develop those valuable parasocial relationships, as a lot of studies have been done that show high, HIGH causation between nervous feelings and rapid development of strong emotional connections! That's why the leading idea of "take your girlfriend or datemate, whoever, to an amusement park and go on all the rollercoasters and scary haunted house rides to get her - them - to like you, immediately" is so popular. Its because the sense of fear and the sense of adrenaline, excitement, makes our brains form those strong connections to the person we're with - makes a strong relationship, very quickly. Anyways, digression aside, livestreaming was certainly not a new thing in 2011, and neither was the concept of unique emotes. Cell phones and smart phones have had that pretty much since they launched. Livestreaming, however, was hard to manage, even for Twitch, before Amazon threw their back into Twitch, and Twitch also had a secret weapon that threatened other competitors, a secret weapon that skyrocketed their viewership and put their name on the map: esports.
We're all familiar with DOTA, League of Legends, COD, etc., and the draw of watching these "twitchy" reflex-based games comes down to how fast the reaction speeds of the players are and how the game tides can turn super quickly, usually waiting until the last few milliseconds in a match before a winner can be crowned. Esports, like physical sports, can struggle a lot without the intensity of real-time reactivity - knowing who wins going into a recording of the Super Bowl or a match in the Olympics takes a lot of the excitement out of it, at least for me, and being able to skip through boring or frustrating parts takes a lot of the wind out of the sails, too. If you can just watch the juicy parts, then there's no stakes, no sense of "what's going to happen???" that invests you and ties you to those events and players. Neither can be done - spoilers or skipping - with a livestream, and that real-time unpredictability creates a lot of hype, a lot of adrenaline, the perfect environment for our brains to make snap connections and develop parasocial relationships. We end up rooting for a side even if we had no investment whatsoever 5 minutes ago, siding with the clear winners or cheering for the underdog, or picking a specific player to root for or maybe against, a skillful player or an earnest dork who makes us laugh or a jerk who's rubbing their luck and skills into everyone's faces in a very unsportsman-like way. Our attachments may end up looking very much the same as physical sports fans, having a favorite team and player, rocking their merch, defending against fans of our rivals, especially when a rivalry match is happening, etc. In a way, the introduction of livestreaming brought sports online, in the most fantastical way possible, since games can be and often do whatever we can imagine, all while maintaining the same audience investment and entertainment value - and a lot of the same risk, too!
But that risk factor is a can of worms to feed to the buzzards another day.
That's going to be the end of my rant today. Today's episode was a little bit on the shorter side, I mostly wanted to talk about a couple of examples of video gaming as a - watching video gaming as its own industry, and dig in a little bit of the positive side of that - how there's all kinds of different charity events and how, you know, we all get those positive warm-fuzzy feelings when our favorite YouTubers and streamers start giving us new content. Um. I will eventually get around to talking about Death Stranding; like I said at the top, I want to play the Director's Cut first and get my thoughts in order while playing through the game, uh, in order to do an episode about that. Ken's gonna be next week, uh, probably gonna do Xenoblade Chronicles 2 after that, and then probably Yakuza 0 after that??? Um. We'll see how everything shakes out, I might start playing another game and want to talk about it before any of those things... any of those later things, Kena is definitely gonna next week 'cause I need to talk about that. Its - its a weight on my soul! Um.
Anyways, today was a little bit of a shorter one, uh, but I thank you regardless for tuning in and listening to me talk about something that definitely means a lot to me. If you enjoyed today's episode, please give the episode a like wherever you're listening, it lets both me and the system know what I'm doing right so I can keep entertaining y'all! I have a Patreon, Twitter, and business email for interacting with and supporting me - reminder that today's hashtag is #VGTLP, all caps! Links to those, as well to today's themes, are in the description. Those opening and ending themes are, respectively, Clear My Head by Ellis and Mortals the NCS Release by Warriyo, spelled with two Rs and a Y in between the I and O. All the plugging done and my rant wrapped up, I hope y'all enjoyed today's episode, and I hope you have a good weekend. Bye!