I saw Roger is making some game videos, and I remember Scopique posted last year about editing video game videos, which reminded me that I meant to write more about this topic myself. I’ve been relentlessly (some might say quixotically) chipping away at making and uploading videos to my YouTube channel for I guess nine years now, but I’ve never written much about it.

Part of that is my current philosophy to never try to help anyone on the Internet anymore unless I’m asked directly. It’s just better for everyone that way. Mainly me.

Another part is that I can’t help anyone with publicity or “the hustle,” which is arguably the most important aspect of content creation. I just know the technical stuff.

But as it happens, I’m writing this at a time when I’m completely burned out on playing and recording games, so this is a good time for me to do some reflection.

I think the original reason was because I thought it looked like a fun and interesting project, and somewhere around the 2014-2015 range I noticed the tools were readily available and it was easier than ever before.

I was inspired mainly by Masterkizz videos where he played Dark Souls for the first time. I really enjoyed watching how he tackled the same things I had, how he dealt with and overcame those problems, his ongoing analysis of the game systems, and to top it off it looked like he was having a lot of fun in the process. I was struck by how a kind of narrative arc developed in how he played the game from start to finish, almost like a documentary.

I’m still more-or-less copying that same style today.

It turns out that recording game videos brings together a lot of things that I’ve enjoyed doing all my life: Mainly playing games, talking about games, recording sound and using microphones and audio engineering, and tinkering with video. In olden times I did that kind of thing with boom boxes and VHS video tape decks and an Amiga Video Toaster. Now I use OBS.

I’ve been fascinated by recording gameplay in particular since the olden days of Quake, when a revolutionary new thing called FAQ-Proxy came along in 1997. (Note: It is a travesty that Crayola Clan is not listed on that page.)

My clan would record matches and share the demo recordings in IRC afterward to see the match from each others’ perspectives and, in the process, pick up new tips and learn to play better. Also it was the only way at the time for others to see the match if you weren’t in it.

Here is one of the first such FAQ-Proxy recordings to have ever existed on the Internet, at least on the East Coast of the US: A 2v2 match that I played in, which I converted from a demo file to video some years back.

I’m “Salamander” in that video, the one with the purple shirt on the red team, whose best moment of the match, charging into the enemy base with a haste rune to duel 1v2 and return the flag at a crucial time, was unfortunately not captured by the cameraman. Sigh.

These are the main things I get out of recording game videos:

Things you won’t see on that list are:

I don’t know how to do that stuff. Early on, I thought it might be cool to make a few extra dollars a year doing something I enjoyed doing anyway, but then YouTube increased the monetization threshold to one thousand subscribers and that pretty much ended that. Also I don’t really like talking to people so “engagement” is rather difficult for me, which is the most important part of growth. I’d need to hire an intern to do that for me. It’s why I don’t stream on Twitch… I have little interest or patience for monitoring a live chat.

* I’m currently not in the mood for talking. That usually stops me from playing games altogether, because I don’t want to record gameplay without live commentary. Sometimes I do it anyway and record a post-game overdub later, but I find that wastes too much of my time. As I’m typing this, I’m pondering abandoning all of my principles and uploading commentary-free videos anyway just to keep things moving along. But if I were a viewer, I’d hate that, and I’m guided often by making videos I’d want to see.

That’s a big subject. But it gives me a chance to plug a video I made two years ago. I’ve changed some things since I made it (e.g. the type and location of my gaming desk) but it’s still pretty accurate to my current process.

When I made that, I wanted to start making more essay videos like that. When I look at it now, I’m embarrassed I ever thought it was a good idea to publish that. Ah well. Maybe the next one will be better.

For now, I’ll end with a list of software I use, roughly in order of most essential to most optional.

You can see a little bit about how I use those in the video. If you don’t want to watch a video (who can blame you), just plug that video link into NotebookLM and it’ll describe it.