An Unusual Script! Videos! Audio! Living! Update! (Patreon)

Hey everyone!

Just thought I'd update you on what's going on with videos, as well as provide you an interesting script I'm turning into a video as we speak, and audio for one whose visual component is nearly done. Long story short, I apologise for the delays this month, but there is a lot to come in August, and hopefully in a much more sustainable way too.

July has been a weird month. After more or less two years spent doing not a whole lot outside of working, and getting/recovering from COVID at the end of June/start of July (thank you all for your comments and messages of concern when I announced that—my girlfriend and I are, thankfully and touching all the wood in my immediate vicinity, fine), it seemed like everything outside of work was suddenly happening at once. Music, weddings, travel commitments, etc., all made it feel like there was rarely any time where I could focus solely on work. As a result, production slowed a bit, beyond what I had envisioned, and I apologise profusely for that.

That said, I felt like I kinda needed to live a bit of life again. I've not been as bad recently, but thanks to the pandemic I was pretty much a hermit for a while there. Work really had taken over basically all of my life. Not only was this unsustainable from a health perspective, it had left me without the kinds of experiences that I believe elevate media criticism to something more unique, personal and, hopefully, interesting. 

I needed to get back into fitness. I needed to travel again. I needed to focus on music for a bit. I got to do all of those things. I started getting back into the gym again after recovering from COVID; I played a grindcore festival in the Czech Republic and, in the process, got to hang out with friends I hadn't seen in ages, as well as people who have made records that shifted the course of my life (namely Pig Destroyer—if you know, you know. Very cool guys). I got to take a nice trip with my family up north and hang out with everyone in a way that rarely gets to happen nowadays.

Crucially, I felt I needed to do all of this in a way that was as sustainable as possible for me. I was already feeling pretty overwhelmed getting back into everything all at once, and I've been aware for a long time that the way I was doing things before the pandemic left me exhausted in a way that was just as unhealthy. People—friends, family, and mainly all of you lovely people—have been telling me for a long time I need to slow down with work especially, and I'm trying to actually take that on board now. 

It's far from a frictionless process though, and trying to fit work in with everything else going on at points proved pretty fruitless for a while there. Writing the pieces is what takes by far the most time in the entire process, and requires prolonged periods of concentration typing away in front of a computer screen, agonising over every word and sentence—turns out I found it pretty awkward to find that time this month with everything going on. Editing video on my crappy old laptop, on top of all that, was basically an impossibility. I did bits and bobs where I could, but there's a lot that's in various stages of completion right now. 

I'm also aware that, as a result, the main channel has been pretty quiet lately. That'll change in August for sure, but part of it has just been figuring out what kind of stuff I actually want to do on there going forward. There are certain videos that, to me anyway, might not fit as well on the main channel and so the idea of posting that stuff here (as you've seen with at least, eh... 1.5 videos so far) for you guys, as bonus full vids for your support of the channel, feels good to me. 

As for the Patreon itself and how it's structured, and kind of as an extension of what I just talked about, I've been wondering for the last month if the way things are currently set up makes total sense for my plans—basically I'm wondering about things like whether I can afford to go "pay monthly" rather than "per creation" to take off some of the month-end deadline pressure (as many of you have suggested), if my current plan to focus on bigger uploads on the main channel proves stable from both a financial and health perspective. It might not, so this stuff is still in the realm of "working on it" at the moment. I'll be sure to keep you updated and relay any changes to you in good time. You are still the bedrock of allowing me to keep doing this and I cannot thank you enough for your continued support.

But you know, all that stuff will come with time hopefully. My schedule isn't as hectic in August so things will hopefully settle a bit. 

More importantly, what certainly didn't fade in amongst all of that madness was my inspiration—quite the opposite in fact. Indeed, turns out that getting out and living life a bit more gave me heaps of ideas I had to get down, and in some cases I think might represent some of the pieces I'm most proud of. 

With that in mind, below you'll find one of those scripts—3000 words on watching my nephew play Fortnite. As daft as that premise sounds, this one was a joy to write and I hope to read/eventually watch—it talks about getting older, becoming scared that I'm losing touch with a medium I thought I knew inside and out, but balancing that out with the fact that I'm finding genuinely thrilling mechanical experiences in the least likely of places, and further bonding with my young nephew in the process. My nephew means a lot to me, and so it was really nice to be able to try and convey some of that in a written piece. 

Again, I'll know for sure once the video is done but I'm fairly sure this will be a patron-exclusive piece for the time being at least. 

The Mad Max video I talked about in my last post is taking slightly longer to finish than I anticipated, so I'd rather give it the time it deserves and wait until next month to release it—I'm genuinely really excited for this one. I also have a video revisiting a game I technically can't talk about right now because embargoes are weird, but you'll see that coming very soon. 

I realise this leaves me with a couple of videos I owe you guys now—this and the ludonarrative dissonance one I posted the script for a few weeks back. I sincerely apologise for the delay and can assure you the videos for both will be with you soon. I've attached the audio for the dissonance piece which you can listen to while you wait for the video component to go along with it! 

I want to say that even though this month has been weird and tumultuous in a lot of ways—trying to fit the channel stuff into a new, more sustainable schedule that allows for other things in my life—the one thing that has stuck out reflecting on it all is just how much this whole thing means to me. No matter how strange or difficult it can get, I still love writing and creating these videos. Hell, with everything else vying for my time right now, it's made me appreciate making time for telling a story even more. I have so many ideas and I'm so excited to bring them to you, just hopefully in a manner that is healthier for me than it has been for the last however many years. 

It is entirely down to your generous support that I can even think about that kind of thing—there is no way this endeavour could possibly be sustainable otherwise. I say it every time but I mean it—I am eternally grateful for that support. You are why this channel can keep going, and you are all the best. 

Anyway, that was a long spiel but hopefully it was informative! Below is the script I mentioned previously about being forced to come to terms with getting older... by watching my young nephew play Fortnite. I sincerely hope you enjoy it and are as excited to see the final video as I am to show it to you!

Thanks again,

Hamish

Writing on Games

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Is 31 too young to feel completely distant from your youth? It’s the kind of age where you feel justified talking about Getting Older; as cliché as it is, you start seeing “what the kids are into” become increasingly and perhaps confusingly divergent from what you’re into. And yet, it’s also an age where, when you joke about this stuff with someone older than you, as if a bit of newfound light aching is somehow the harbinger of the end, and that your prime has long since faded from view, you inevitably get the spiel of “you’re but a wee bairn! You know nothing of the ravages of time yet! Just wait until you’re my age!”

But, like… I played a festival with my band the other week, and after half my life of throwing myself about the stage for show after show with reckless abandon (as the aggression of the music I gravitate towards often invites me to do), I thought I had fully thrown my back out on stage after a bit of comparatively gentle headbanging. I’m now thinking about how I might need to take things a bit easier from here on out.

I’ve gone from excruciatingly long periods of not being able to sleep in my teens, to learning to work with it in my twenties—pulling countless all-nighters whenever the work needed done, schedules be damned—to now, where recently I’ve found that my body is just saying “STOP. YOU CAN’T DO THIS ANYMORE.” I can get to about midnight now before my body decides it’s time to pass out. What a sorry state of affairs.

Even sorrier, perhaps, is the idea that I like to think of myself as pretty au fait with all things video game related. It’s my job, after all, to dissect these things, and one thing I was pretty sure of until a few days ago was this idea that I could at least look at any video game and get a pretty decent picture of what was going on, even if I didn’t know the ins-and-outs of its specific mechanics.

Video game control setups have largely become standardised over the last couple of decades—WASD to move, right analogue stick for camera, left and right triggers to aim and shoot, all of that. Anyone within vague proximity to video games knows this. In the same way we read sentences by clustering words rather than having to laboriously decode every individual letter, you don’t need to think about holding Up to run forward—your brain just intuitively makes the connection between the control and the action.

And yet, a few days ago I witnessed something that left me genuinely stumped. Far from the physical pain and the need for a good night’s sleep, this thing I saw instilled in me a genuine existential crisis. Any ambiguity of age 31 be damned—I am now a dinosaur. I am losing touch and, one day, what I used to love will be completely unrecognisable to me.

On a recent family trip, I watched my young nephew play a game of Fortnite.

I have played Fortnite before—I made a video about it back in 2018. Hell, I’ve even played Fortnite with my nephew fairly recently, but I’ve never been sat next to him while he plays—witnessing directly the connection between his hands on the controller and what happens on screen from his point of view.

Now, it doesn’t take this kind of proximity to see that Fortnite is an entirely different beast now to what it was back when I first checked it out—it seems like every day there’s a report on a new mode or playstyle (as well as a much greater emphasis placed on items you can buy in the ever-lucrative store) that have it at times looking like one of those janky survival games you see on Steam, just with the polish that only the Biggest Game in the World can afford to apply. Remember when this was a simple 1v100 elimination match? Well now you fish as Bruno Mars.

And sure, that’s a wild path for the game to have taken, but what I’m talking about here is more than just my distant interest in Fortnite, the ever-evolving cultural behemoth; what was more confusing than any of that was the barebones mechanical experience of it all. That is to say, here I was, witnessing this child playing a game mainly marketed at children (and not even particularly high level play, mind—my nephew is definitely good at the game, but this was basic matchmaking stuff and everyone else seemed to be playing the same way) and yet… somehow the action is so frenetic, so of a different mode, that I cannot parse what’s occurring before my eyes.

For contrast, fighting games, no matter the complexity of control, still operate on the basic principle of trying to make fist connect with face. Here, I genuinely had no idea what I was even looking at, as after a brief period of wondering what the hell my nephew was talking about as he casually wandered the map hoping that the treasure chest would have an ice cream in it for some reason— going through the battle royale motions of dodging the circle and occasionally picking off a speck in the distance I had no chance of seeing—we both began to notice that the circle was getting really small. He had found himself in the top 10, and now he had gotten a bit more serious about the whole thing.

I was still trying to figure out the barrage of new visual information that had appeared on screen since I last picked the game up—the sensor ring that seemed to be alerting him to what other players were doing around him that had began pulsating at an alarming clip, the fact you can drive cars now (sometimes on water), the werewolves and sharks and bots guarding discrete levels on this map, clearly no longer uniform in its function—when all of a sudden the mood shifted as swiftly as my nephew’s tactics.

Obviously building is a key component of what makes Fortnite unique, but this was the first time I’d become aware that the kinds of architectural manoeuvres once associated with esports level play had become mundane; expanded upon by a young, amateur player base. I swear, in the second that a shot was heard—the kind that would have me stopping in my tracks, gawking as I searched for its origin, not realising the massive target I was painting on my back—I started to see these insane structures erupting from the ground in the near-distance, as if in some magical realist novel where the king ordered the planting of new living quarters and stood in watch, awaiting the spoils of his concrete harvest.

My nephew, quick to follow, had instantaneously switched from gun to clipboard, entering build mode as his own structure started to emerge, in what was clearly an attempt to create the high ground where previously there was none. What shocked me was the speed at which this was all occurring—prompts to press… circle? I think? Wait, what’s that about an edit? All of these were whizzing on and off the screen, as this impossible wooden and metal stalk materialised and spiralled morphed towards the sky, with my nephew finding the most tenuous of connections between pieces before placing the next platform down, jumping all the while to keep up with it; all moving at such ludicrous velocity that it appeared as if his character was levitating upwards.

And no sooner had my jaw reached the floor—turning to see my nephew’s hands near-blurred in motion and face unmoved, as if all of this was totally mundane—than his ascent had stopped at what looked like an arbitrary point, so his trajectory could now move outwards towards the fray. He created a roof over his head as if he was tunnelling his way over to his enemies—occasionally fretting over already placed items and turning them into a kind of 3x3 grid system that he would pore over as if he was speed running tic-tac-toe. No idea what this was doing but it seemed to be getting him somewhere. Again, this all happened near instantaneously.

Quickly, the enemy counter declined until it was just him and another guy, apparently right next to each other; the sensor pinging all over the place, suggesting that this one remaining foe was bouncing all around, trying to get a read on my nephew hunkered down within. I think my nephew was organising his items in just the right order, before he took the initiative and unleashed the final assault, which resulted in perhaps the strangest sight of them all—a firefight where each person attempted to switch instantaneously between rapid bursts of fire and fortifying their rickety defences.

For some reason all that comes to mind is that final gun kata battle from the gloriously daft Equilibrium, where Christian Bale and Angus MacFadyen are simultaneously firing and swiping the opponent’s pistol away while staring directly into each others’ eyes. I had no idea how either player was pulling this feat off mechanically, and yet I was vocally cheering my nephew on regardless—I’m not kidding, it was genuinely explosive. One slip up led to my nephew gaining just enough of an upper hand that he was able to get the final shot off—his opponent fell, and the hallowed “VICTORY ROYALE” appeared above his head. We shared a momentary cheer and a joyous high five. I was floored at what I’d just seen. To him, it was just another match.

Still reeling from trying to understand what I’d just witnessed, the controller was shoved in my hands as my nephew demanded I have a go. Almost immediately after dropping, I got called trash for picking one type of shotgun when, quote, “there’s a perfectly good pump action right there!” Oblivious to the differences, I proceeded to play Fortnite the way I’ve always played Fortnite and similar battle royales—badly. I hid away for ages before being shot at, proceeding to perform my usual panicked stand-and-stare in a futile attempt to locate my aggressor; my nephew screaming “EDIT! EDIT! BUILD! EDIT!” at me as if I have any clue how to do any of that.

I somehow made it into build mode and, extremely slowly, went about creating a nice little hut, square by excruciatingly placed square. Before I was able to place a fourth wall down, a guy in a John Wick skin unceremoniously took me out, presumably flossing over my earthly possessions after I exited to the menu, left with nothing but the humiliating gaze and piercing laughs of my nephew sitting next to me (I kid, obviously—it was hilarious to me too).

And it was in that moment that I suddenly realised, this is exactly how my parents must have felt watching me play games like Metal Gear Solid as a kid—where I remember often wondering how they couldn’t seem to understand basic things like moving forward and choking out guards, let alone the idea that “wait, so you hold L2 and use the directional buttons to scroll through to your rations, which I guess is the healing item, which you can either equip to be used passively once you run out of health or you can also press circle to use one right now to free up inventory space for another one before you head back into the menu to… select a cardboard box?” To return to a previous analogy, I was fluent in a language while they were having to read each sentence letter by letter—a contiguous flow of understandable action to me; a rigid, stop-start mess of endless mechanical abstractions to them.

Likewise, to go from my nephew reacting instantaneously to a single shot being fired in the distance by forming this borderline Escher-esque structure out of absolutely nothing, to me taking control in a futile attempt to fill in those mechanical blanks, felt equivalent to the kind of knowledge and skill gap you might find if you’d transported a Medieval peasant to present day, and demanded they fix your car engine. “Please sir! I dunno where da gizmo goes!”

But the thing is, as much as I joke about an existential crisis and being completely out of touch with a medium I once knew inside and out, there was something about this experience that was downright rejuvenating. It was fascinating to me to think that, for a game as monolithic as Fortnite—one that to many represents the absolute worst of cynical, money-focused, sanded-down AAA game design (and not for no reason, mind—believe me, I’ll come onto my own concerns in that regard shortly), there existed, on the basic mechanical level, an experience that could leave me fundamentally shocked. When people complain about every game looking and playing the same, I’ll think of that field of architectural monstrosities being created, the frenzy of the action I witnessed within, even if such pulse-pounding, tense gameplay came from the least likely of places—a kid playing Fortnite.

Where my parents back in the day understandably viewed the deluge of, to them, incomprehensible commands with some frustration and ultimately light dismissal (a by-product of the then-prevalent notion that games were mere toys), in my case, presented with such mechanical unknowns, I was thrilled to know more. I began asking him question after question about how he was achieving all of this stuff—how these strategies came about and how he became so proficient at executing them—and he was equally thrilled to talk about it. He seemed to enjoy the fact that, as can often feel infuriatingly rare when you’re a kid, he was the authority on a subject and an adult was genuinely engaging with him on it on his level.

And it’s not like I was totally useless in this scenario either. It’s always been fascinating to have a first hand look into how the cultural monolith of Fortnite is affecting the game’s key demographic, in a way you don’t often get from coverage written and read by set-in-their-ways adult gaming enthusiasts. I’ve always been eager to compare my nephew’s experiences to similar kinds of crazes that swept my generation back in the day, knowing just enough about how these things work that I’m uniquely positioned to also act as caretaker—lightly steering him away from potential harm. “Mate, I know you’re convinced this guy sending you friend requests called “496972 NEW SKINS AVAILABLE” works for Epic Games, but I survived the Habbo Hotel furniture scam rooms—I know a charlatan when I see one.”

This seems like a good place to state that, as lovely as it was to further bond with my nephew over something like this, I definitely have more than my fair share of concerns about Fortnite—you know, it’s sad to see that my nephew’s generation hasn’t been spared the same need to play the Hot New Thing for playground cachet. It’s just that the Habbo Hotels of my day seemed so quaint—their cheeky prods to get your parents’ permission to use their credit card paling in comparison to this cultural monolith, existing in an age more dominated than ever by a need to be online—where purchases are easier and more convenient than at any time in the past—that demands you not only play but buy your way to popularity. What good is skill if you didn’t achieve it with the Darth Vader skin with the gold crown or whatever?

From talking to him about it, it’s created an anxiety that I don’t remember being so prevalent when I was younger—it’s not just wee weirdos like I was online anymore, it’s everyone. It really can’t be overstated for those that don’t have a frame of reference for this—to reject Fortnite as a kid these days, is in many ways to reject the most basic of social interaction and recognition. It’s brutal.

And it’s perhaps this anxiety that, a couple of Christmases ago, led to a whole lot of confusion and shouting as my brother’s phone dinged, alerting him to the fact his kid had just made around £200 worth of V-bucks purchases in seconds, while they were in the room, without them knowing. It’s easy to say in situations like this that the parents are the ones at fault, they should have paid closer attention to the console parental controls (and sure, they aren’t blameless here) but the resulting go-around with all sorts of website FAQs and calls to game companies and banks still led to that creeping realisation setting in—that, for a game so aggressively marketed at kids, there is vanishingly little recourse for families when said kids make expectedly juvenile mistakes.

So yeah, needless to say, I strongly dislike a great many things about Fortnite as a cultural and industrial entity. All I know is that, putting that individual game to one side along with the existential dread it potentially brought up in me, the subsequent thrill that came from realising that there are still experiences to be found in this medium that are so novel that I don’t fully understand them yet—and that my previous experience in games can potentially help guide my nephew more safely through the scarier aspects of this industry—cushions the blow somewhat on that realisation of just how quickly time is marching forward. I may be distant from my youth, but I may be getting older, but my childlike wonder with this medium clearly isn’t going anywhere.