BioShock and Seeking Your Insight on "The Gaming Book Club" (Patreon)

Hello everyone!

The BioShock video is well underway and it's actually turned out to be a bear in more ways than one. I forgot just -how much- you need to do on PC to get the thing in a good spot for playing it smoothly, and also just how rough the "remaster" for it was that came out a few years earlier. I'm actually not sure how the remaster is seen nowadays since it's also over a decade old now, but having worse visuals and sound while somehow also being more unstable wasn't in my cards to the point it would actually need more tweaking to get it into a better spot. Most annoyingly of all some basic issues like the mouse controls still being scuffed even though they were fixed in BioShock 2 which -also- was remastered in the same pack. So I wasn't really going into it approaching it as a remaster comparison thing (it would still be for the set-up mainly) but I ended up finding a lot more to talk about here than I thought. Regardless it's likely I'll just pause the charge for this month if it ends up not being in a spot I'm happy with over next weekend, but it's still up in the air so we'll see! Otherwise nothing crazy going on there.

Otherwise the Water Womb World video gave me a lot of great insight, because a lot of people actually did stop watching in about the first minute to go check out the game when I recommended doing that which was pretty cool to see the effects of. It got a lot of reviews and more attention on Steam which should be great for giving Yames more visibility there compared to the attention his games got just through Let's Plays. As a video though it felt weirdly tricky to edit since I was both trying to make it something worthy of being a good video, but also not outstaying its runtime especially when the game is so short. At times it felt like something that would be easier to make if it was targeted to people who had actually played the game, compared to reviewing what was there to people with both fresh eyes and who had played it. There were a lot of people leaving other micro/very short game recommends though, which I think has given me more push of an idea to run by the benefactor board here.

Patreon has added a lot of tools like group chats, a community board (there was an old one Patreon just auto-shut down and I have to enable the new version I think?), some kind of live streaming thing built in, and most recently something like a quasi-Twitter I don't understand, but it's much more robust than it was first starting this years back. So I'm thinking it might be fun to -actually- have something like a gaming "book club" for all of you here. Basically it'd operate similar to the regular videos but with a few different aspects:

The games are short. We're talking maximum 2 hours at its lengthiest but ideally under an hour. They're also free or cheap, at most ten USD but ideally under five especially if there's region fuckery. Think something like Water Womb World/Paratopic. A lot of games I really love end up having shorter videos ala Cryptmaster or Northern Journey but those are definitely not short games. I had quite a few short game recommends, so a poll will vote on what it'll be from some options at the beginning of a month. This would be available to everyone at the lowest tier, so I'm not trying to upsell anyone who got here for posts into anything fancier.

There's a video! Ideally it's something I have edited in less than a day or so and it's under ten minutes of run time. It gets posted to the community board (?) where people can basically use the post as a discussion/thread about the game. This might also be a good place for people to post their own recommends separate from the regular game list, though there's quite a few titles like that on there to pick out from. I still need to learn more about the features here to get a full sense of it because the interface has changed so much.

If the length of a video -does- spin out of control into something crazy longer, it becomes a regular channel upload, but would still go on the club board. Otherwise once a year there'll basically be an upload with the shorter game videos combined for the public. It might also be easy to fold in any updates or developments that happened with game in there that had news in the meanwhile. I think it's important that people who aren't paying still get videos, this is just a little more "community oriented" in a way that might be weird on YouTube to have. At least when it comes to expectations for a general audience having played a weird small game to a few hundred thousand people or seen as "watering things down" if they get especially short, so saving them for a combined upload of smaller games makes sense to me. That's not to say the edit would completely assume you've played the game and just give 0 background at all, but it might just give me more edit wiggle room if I'm not as worried about missing some minutia.

The gaming book club will aim to be once a month, but there will be times it's either delayed or people just post things to each other for a period. A good example would be something like the Total War Warhammer 3: Immortal Empires video getting into full swing, a long RPG, holidays, etc. Basically if I was already in a tight period, or something that would lead to a slower upload actively disruptive compared to playing a game, outlining some notes and then sleeping on it and getting an edit done the next day.

In short I greatly appreciate everyone who has contributed over the years and I've been trying to figure out a way to "give back" more in a way that's not pay walling communication, or videos people have been clamoring for, or anything else that starts leading into me working on videos for a council of barons instead of the general public. I think this could strike a good balance, and also be helpful on my own end for being able to break out of any writer's block or game tunnel vision by having some "book club homework" and it could end up being a lot of fun to play smaller games with less dread of the sheer amount of people it'd be blasted out to that could be let down by the nature of the game where it'd make more sense to be in a collection video of them. The "short game collection video" has been something a lot of people have asked about over the years and I've always answered I wasn't sure of a way I could make that work, and I feel that this could be it since it has you all deciding what they are in the first place and then bundling them together later.

I thought of doing this as a simple poll whether to investigate this or not, but this actually might be a good test run of how many people actually use Patreon for commenting or interaction in the first place beyond the video credits questions which are the most active for obvious reasons. Patreon does seem gunning to make it some kind of social platform (which seems bizarre to me) but while I'll be ignoring a lot of the things they've added there and I assume most of you do as well, they have built a lot that could make this possible and low maintenance. If this did get going it wouldn't be until July most likely since BioShock is in such a twilight zone of where things will go with my schedule, so there should be plenty of time to read through things I might not be considering or other reasons it could be a good idea.

Anyways I won't ramble any more, but that's all for now. Let me know what you think, and thank you as always for your support!