Channel update #3 (May) – Dragon Age takes ages (Patreon)

 Good day fellow humans.

There’s not much important in this update. It’s mostly going to be complaining about dragon age (not for being bad, more for being long) but I’ll mention the non dragon age things first:

1. We will have a new poll for a future video soon. It will probably be on the 1st of June and run for a couple weeks. I’m not sure whether to just stick to what I think will be the two most popular options or just include a few, but I guess it doesn’t matter too much. I will say now though that the next poll is going to be kind of boring, but that’s because I have big ambitious videos I want to get made in the coming months so the poll video has to be something shorter. So I thought I’d tell you this now so you can set your expectations low.

2. I’ve been thinking about a new patreon reward idea. However, rather than explain it now I’ll just do it once and then people can see what they think. Anyway, expect that soon™.

3. There were no credits in the last video because of technical problems. This isn’t a usual thing and there should be credits in all future videos but sorry if anyone was disappointed by this.

4. Coronavirus is a thing. I’m guessing you might know this already but I still feel this strange obligation to mention it anyway, like an itch I have to scratch, even though I’m sure I have no words of wisdom or anything meaningful or substantial to add to a discussion that people are probably starting to get sick of hearing about. Still coronavirus is a thing, and it’s quite sad. I hope you are all okay.

Anyway Dragon Age. 

Fuck these games are longer than I remembered. I guess that’s what dlc, combined with a greater desire to be thorough, can do to your perception of a series. But it’s not just the games that seem long. I always keep notes in a word doc when I’m playing games for a video, where I jot down thoughts as I have them while playing. I try to keep these notes short and to the point, to make life easier for when I come to write the script. Yet despite that I’ve passed 16,000 words for my dragon age notes. (By comparison, for the fallout video, which covered 5 games, the notes were 6,000 words). So that’s kind of a problem. I guess I just I didn’t realize my thoughts on the dragon age games were as complicated as they are. 

Before replaying them all it seemed so simple: Origins good, next games bad because they strayed from their rpg roots, naughty naughty Bioware. But then as I’ve come to look at the evidence that underlies my opinions and assumptions on the series, a lot of the ideas I thought I had haven’t held up. For example, companions. I like Origin’s companions more than Inquisition’s and I thought that’s because Origins had better written companions, but after actually replaying the games I don’t think that’s the reason. There is a reason, but it’s not something that can be distilled and summarized so as to slot into a broader narrative as easily as I’d like. 

I guess the dilemma I’m currently facing comes down to wanting to be fair without allowing the video to become too long. I think, even more so than usual, I want to avoid being too dismissive or reductive, because when you play all games in a series (and then spend ages on a video about them) you want to meet the games on their terms, to give each a fair chance and to consider the perspectives of others who may feel differently about them than yourself… but doing that while keeping a video focused is hard. 

I know I make long videos, but I do try to stop them from feeling too long. I try to have an overall argument and then connect my points to that, rather than just go over all my thoughts and feelings about the various aspects of a game. So I don’t always try to show both sides of an argument, and I don’t always try to go into maximum detail about how I reach my conclusions and I don’t include everything that could be included. And this means I always face a difficult decision in what to include in a video. I create a long word doc full of notes while playing a game, and then manually select which notes are important/relevant enough to make the cut and be in the actual video. But my dragon age notes are insane, like 40 pages of thoughts that are just all over the place and I need to somehow convert than into a (hopefully) under 2 hour video that doesn’t miss anything important but still remains fair.

So that’s my problem and this is where I’m at right now (right now for me, not for you, because by the time I post this channel update a few days will have gone by and I’ll be past this stage… hopefully). This is also making me look back and wonder how the fuck I kept the fallout video as short as I did. But to be honest that’s partly because I cut a lot of corners. I skipped fallout Tactics (which I regret), and fallout 76 (which I have no idea if that was the right decision), and all dlc (I played them but decide not to talk about any which I actually think really helped keep the video focused). So do I cut corners on the dragon age video? Or do I relax my arbitrary time limits and make the video longer than I wanted, or do I just get ruthless with what opinions make it into the video and which don’t, or do I transcend these problems to produce the greatest video I’ve ever made.

Only time will tell. 

But one thing’s for sure, you will get to find out before the end of May because there’s no way in hell I’m failing to meet my first official™ deadline for a video. 

Youtube video recommendation for you (Is this a thing I’m doing regularly? Fuck if I know):

Running Shine | YIIK Review

https://youtu.be/VH7JQtp5Jkc

At 2 hours its good length for people stuck in isolation with nothing to do. The video provides comedic commentary on the not-so-successful indie rpg YIIK. It’s a good video and I’m sure the youtuber will be very successful if he uploads more often. So check him out now before he inevitably blows up so you can feel like a smug hipster and say you were a fan before it was cool.