It’s a new year, so it’s time for two little updates to my video presence online: A new trailer for the Youtube channel, which is here:
And a new introduction video for my Patreon!
These are essentially packing peanuts for stuff I make, but I also have to make them. Leaving these things unchanged over a long time is a great way to leave old mistakes, old mindsets on things, and I think that every time I make something like this, I get a little bit better at making the next one.
There’s a script below the fold!
Script for Channel ad
Hi there! I’m Talen Lee!
I talk about games. I advocate for making fun, and taking it seriously.
I want to talk to you about ways to think about games, I want to encourage you to make games, and I want to use games to talk about things in the rest of the world.
I’m a PhD student, examining people making games, and a game maker. I believe that everyone can make games, that games are culture, not product, and that you, yes you, can make games if you want to. I’m from Australia, I’m bi, I’m cis, and I grew up in a cult.
Anyway, why am I here?
I’ve been thinking these past few years about the idea of audience, about who I’m trying to reach, who I want to see responding to my videos and what I hope they care about. Let me then tell you a tiny story about Youtube, which is both very important and irrelevant, depending on how best we want to avoid criticism.
Youtube is a silly place. This is a forefront of a new media age with an unprecedented access to media creators that allow people to find the niche productions they love and that enriches their life, and uses an algorithmic system for ensuring you will always have access to new entertainment that you’re going to love. What this immense system of systems has become is slush pipe that encourages creators to think of their opinions and perspective as ‘content’ that’s made for ‘engagement’ and as a direct result, you get served rage bait from insincere incurious dipsticks who don’t know what they’re angry about, music channels that copyright strike the artist they’re supposedly sharing, minimally disturbing maximally engaging recap channels, educational generative media that may just be inventing dangerous nonsense, and a tiny percentage of really interesting stuff that reaches its dedicated audience through sheer luck.
This means that there’s a culture of games communication on Youtube that primarily treats games as commercial objects where the audience are centralised consumers and somehow invested in the success or failure of a company’s stock prices. To this end I hold true: I think most people who talk about games are doing it in a way that is boring and bad.
I don’t want to talk about games that way.
What I want is to do is talk about games as things people engage with, as critical texts and what they relate to and what that makes me think about. I’m not here to tell you what a game ‘really’ means, I’m here to talk about what I’m seeing in games, and how. I’m here to look at games as if they are texts with ideas and ways of expressing those ideas and what I, an interpreter, can get out of that, and share with you in ways that I think are interesting. Part of that is going to be talking about what I like in games, but also what I like as a designer, what I think is important in those games.
And, if these videos aren’t enough to sate your interest in what I have to say, well, good news! I also write a daily blog, over at press dot invincible dot ink; I post on Cohost and Mastodon if you want to reach me somewhere, or ask me questions. If you like this Youtube channel, or like my blog, and want to encourage me doing so, you can support me on Patreon.
And here’s the script for the patreon trailer
Hi there! I’m Talen Lee!
If you’re here, you probably already know about me, or you may have already seen my work somewhere. If you’ve not, here’s the rundown:
I talk about games. I advocate for making fun, and taking it seriously.
I want to talk to you about ways to think about games, I want to encourage you to make games, and I want to use games to talk about things in the rest of the world.
I’m a PhD student, examining people making games, and a game maker. I believe that everyone can make games, that games are culture, not product, and that you, yes you, can make games if you want to. I’m from Australia, I’m bi, I’m cis, and I grew up in a cult.
Anyway, why are you here?
This is my Patreon. This is a place you can, every month, give me a few bucks that signify ‘hey, I like what you’re doing and I want you to continue to do so, to the tune of some small quantity of local currency.’ It’s a like button, but bigger and shinier and you pay to press it, I guess.
There are only two tiers, which are the Normal Tier, and the Normal Tier But Cheaper. There’s nothing different between them. Just that one of them is for slightly more money.
I need to underscore, there’s nothing here that I consider ‘bonus material’ if you’re interested in that. No bonus videos, no script previews. Once upon a time there were micropodcasts stored here, but I wound up phasing that out. Partly because I kept forgetting to do them but also because I fundamentally think of Patreon as a thing that I shouldn’t get too focused on, because my brain does weird things when I start to think in terms of direct reward for the ongoing task of writing.
This Patreon is a scoreboard. It’s a way I can check, every month, and see hey, I didn’t do a bad job. It’s a sign that a quantity of people out there like what I do and want to show me they like what I do, that it’s worth a few dollars. I’m an internet busker, and to that end… and I think I extemporised here.