A massive thank you, and an update on what's to come. (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

First off, I think some thank yous are in order. When I posted that update video I honestly had no idea if I was going to be able to continue the channel for much longer. I didn't know if after all this time maybe people had just moved on from what I was doing—that fact alone didn't bum me out or anything, no one on the platform is owed relevancy and I know from personal experience there are creators I moved on from over time. Still though, with that in mind, the response to that video could not have been more overwhelming for me. I wanted to type something up sooner but I honestly needed to take a couple of days to process it all. 

Almost immediately I was able to breathe a little bit. Not just in the sense of "hey, I can maybe say no to more sponsors that I'm not comfortable with going forward," or "making rent is a little less unpredictable," but like... "hey, I can take some time to focus on getting my completely fucked sleep schedule back on track." For so long I've just kinda worked myself into absolute oblivion because, well, this is a train you just kinda have to keep piling fuel into no matter what. It's resulted in a vicious loop where you know that that kind of overwork and lack of self-care is likely not even going to help the work itself, but you can't get away from it because otherwise the work doesn't get done and you suddenly can't pay rent. 

This is what I mean about the Patreon suddenly making things so much more sustainable going forward. The go-to response to people talking about burnout is "take a break!" but because of that aforementioned cycle of needing to constantly produce just to keep the lights on, it just hasn't worked out in the past. Even when I tried to take some time off late last year... looking back it was about as far from time off as you could possibly imagine. I was still basically working seven days a week but trying to convince myself I wasn't. 

Now, I can actually take that bit of time off. I can focus on myself a bit and get things back on track, which hopefully should result in me feeling better about the work itself. That is, like, unbelievably huge to me. This is just one of the things I will never be able to thank you all enough for. The Patreon has been the thing that's kept this channel going for so long, and now it might actually be able to make my life noticeably better. Just... jeezo. Thank you thank you thank you a million times thank you.

More importantly, the messages of support I received from so many of you were so kind and thoughtful. You are all seriously the best and again, remind me why I do this. I'm so happy the videos have the opportunity to connect with you and that so many of you take some real deep stuff from them. It rules!

When I say I'll be focusing on myself a little more towards the end of the month, that's not to say you won't be getting videos. I'm working on a bunch right now actually. I feel pretty energised right now despite the lack of sleep, so I'm making the most of it. The videos for this month might be shorter and more overtly game related as I've been planning stuff since before I made that update video. I've got one going up in the next couple of days about revisiting Red Dead Redemption 2 and how it turns loss into a narrative device, and I've potentially got another one going up before the end of the month on why I love the daft Tekken lore, and how it might actually be one of the most narratively flexible choose-your-own-adventure style tales out there (god I'm having fun writing this one, this is a topic I've wanted to cover for literally years haha). 

In the interim though I have to mention for disclosure's sake that I have a piece going up in the next week or so that represents something a little different. Hopefully you understand as I detail this below! Afterwards I'll get into the wilder ideas I have that you're all actually here for BUT HERE'S SOME SUPER FUN DISCLOSURE STUFF.

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In the update video I mentioned I have a few sponsor obligations left in the pipeline. Most of these are your simple 60 second ad reads or whatever, but there's one that'll be coming in the next week or so which is something I've never done before (and will almost certainly never do again) - a dedicated video on a game.

The bullet points of the situation (that I am happy to expand upon if people have any questions or concerns) are as follows:

- About a month ago a PR team asked me if I'd consider making a dedicated video on the game they were representing. I can't say what the game is until the embargo lifts on the 20th but I can guarantee there will be full disclosure so you know exactly what you're getting into. It's a game I was already very interested in prior to receiving the offer.

- I don't normally even consider dedicated videos for a number of reasons. 1) the ethical concerns of building a following on honest critique of games and the ways in which money inherently taints that, 2) the games in question usually being pay to win mobile nonsense, 3) the difference in work between a 60 sec ad with provided talking points and a full video is obviously staggering, and 4) the money offered is usually pittance.

- In this instance, I treat it with the same flippancy I would any other such outreach, suggesting a pretty stupid rate that no agency would accept, just to see what would happen. To my shock, the PR agency gets back a month later to say "yup, we'll approve that." This is money I simply could not afford to turn down (especially before making that update video and the massive outpouring of support that followed), and will allow me even greater flexibility in the coming months to spend time exploring less algorithmically-friendly video topics in a sustainable way.

- More importantly, they remain remarkably confident in ensuring I get to do my own thing with this. There is zero pressure to spin things into a positive. At my request, they've made multiple alterations to the contract to make sure my style of video is accommodated and that I feel totally comfortable giving my opinion on their game. Regular sponsors are never this easy to deal with, and offer far less money to boot. I can come away from this able to sleep at night (well, in the sense of the expression at least—my actual sleep schedule is fucked right now lol) that my opinions are not for sale. 

- The icing on the cake: the game is legitimately great; as in, "part of me wishes I wasn't being paid for this so I didn't have to couch my genuinely positive opinion in all this disclosure stuff" good. As I say, that disclosure stuff will be front and centre and I would obviously highly encourage you to check other sources/try the free demo to gauge for yourself, this is a game I would absolutely recommend were I not getting paid to make a video about it.

- Even with all of this positivity, I'll never say never but there's still enough of an ethical discomfort personally (combined with the fact that I now have a much more robust Patreon community backing my work) that means I'll almost certainly never agree to do something like this again. 

- Don't worry, I absolutely won't be putting this through as a paid post. I'm reticent to even post it on the Patreon at all since ostensibly it is a paid placement on my channel, even though I think I still have some interesting things to say in the piece. 

- The TL;DR is that the accommodating nature of the PR team, the flexibility I'm allowed in this piece and the abundant quality of the game in question eliminate three of the four problems I outline with dedicated videos up top, and while slight ethical concerns will obviously remain, the money being offered is simply not something I could afford to turn down and will dramatically aid in allowing me to pursue the creative endeavours I have in mind in the coming months. This should go without saying but I'll say it anyway—you will not be charged for the video. 

So yeah, sorry I have to go into all that spiel, but I feel like it's important to make sure you all know what's happening. Once the embargo lifts I can at least let you know what game I'm actually talking about and like I say, I'm happy to discuss anything you want to know about the process. You have all shown such generosity and trust in what I do and I so I want to be as clear as I can be with you at every stage. That said, I sincerely hope you can understand why I would take this deal in particular and how much this one-off deal, alongside your unbelievably generous Patreon support, will help the channel in the coming months. 

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OK boring stuff out of the way. What's beyond this month?

Well, thanks to your support I now don't have to feel so weird dedicating so much research time to obscure topics when more SEO friendly stuff is right there. To be clear, I do still plan on covering releases I'm excited about (Elden Ring and Sifu being two big ones), and I do plan on continuing with reflecting on games of old (I have plans for some series retrospectives that could be interesting), but as I said in the video, I have plans that are wilder than that, will take more time, may not be as focused on games but I'm sure as hell excited about. 

The first couple I have in mind are using games to talk about cinema—a piece I've had in mind for a long time involves the rather fiery premise of "why the Kurosawa Mode in Ghost of Tsushima sucks". My opinion on that game as a whole has softened over time to the point where I actually quite like it as a big daft open world checklist ticker, but there's something about that Kurosawa mode that has only grown more confusing to me over time—it both downplays the strengths of the gameplay, as well as showing a fundamental misunderstanding of Kurosawa's legacy as a filmmaker (making the fact they actually sought permission from the Kurosawa estate all the more baffling). Basically the game is just a jumping off point though—I want an excuse to write about a bunch of Kurosawa films I like a whole bunch, and how that legacy can perhaps be seen in other video games/how one would actually envision a true Kurosawa style video game. 

Another cinema focused one (and one I've already started researching) is the influence of yakuza cinema on the Yakuza franchise itself; or rather, how the Yakuza franchise subverts a lot of expectations set by the genre in cinema. That is to say, the image that people might get in their heads when they picture "yakuza film" is likely that of jitsuroku eiga—the grittier style of gangster film that emerged in the 70s and was largely popularised by directors like Kinji Fukusaku (who you might know better as the director of Battle Royale) and a style of film I've always been really into. 

Thing is, in terms of tone, these films are about as far as you can get from the wackier, more upbeat melodrama of the Yakuza games—films like Graveyard of Honor and Battles Without Honor and Humanity are steeped in this inescapable, poisoning nihilism, as their selfish, dishonorable characters fall deeper and deeper into destructive despair, in a way that's often harrowing to witness. 

Even the later efforts of directors like Beat Takeshi and Takashi Miike, while much more similar in their often surreal tone, often had at their heart a nihilism (or at least an absurdism) that seems at odds with the more hopeful, valiantly heroic messages of the game franchise—messages I think are fascinating to examine in the context of yakuza cinema production prior to jitsuroku eiga, where characters were far more commonly depicted as honourable, samurai-like individuals... in an era where the propogandist Japanese government monitored film production much more carefully. 

So yeah, whole lot of fascinating angles there I think. Outside of those ideas though, I have ideas for games found within literature—I've discussed Nabokov's Pale Fire before, but it's far from the only example of what you might call a literary "game," and I'm excited to dive into that whole world and possibly illuminate it for all of you. 

I also have ideas for a piece on circuit bending in music—the process of taking toys and altering their electronics to produce all kinds of weird sounds. The jumping off point for this being that we're taking tools of play, and distorting them into something less predictable and more harsh—a process that, in itself, becomes an odd example of game design. 

These are just a few ideas I have for pieces, and I have many, many more like it (including pieces on gameified theatre, literary theory in modern game narratives and other such things). These all draw from various passions in my life and for the most part use games as a jumping off point to explore them, in exactly the same manner as the cheese kit video. Hopefully I'll be able to communicate that passion to you all in the same way too. 

And so that's kind of all I felt I needed to touch on right now. There'll be other content for you patrons too, and we just hit the weekly streaming goal which will get me into a more regular schedule with all of that—details to come. For now though, I'm genuinely so, so excited for what's to come and I am positively giddy that you're all here for the ride. Thank you all so much.

Hamish

Writing on Games