October/November Update

Hello, you wonderfully exceptional Patreon people!

I hope that all of you are having the time of your life, that everything you are doing is working out perfectly and that your local weather is beautiful and sunny (except if you prefer rain - then I hope it’s disgustingly stormy and extraordinarily wet!)

The 3D platformer video is out and as some of you probably noticed the video took me a bit longer to produce than I originally thought.

That is mainly due to some coviding.

So do you recall the last patreon update where I mentioned that I was recovering from a mild covid infection?

Well, as it turns out I was not recovering from a mild covid infection - I was actually building up to a really unfun covid infection.

Sneeze, cough, sniff, sneeze.

So yeah, the plague called me and I answered her call with hundreds of handkerchiefs - which is the main reason why the video took a bit longer than I originally thought.

As for the video itself - the views are slightly up this time, which is great! 
The reception of the video however is a bit mixed in a really unusual way that I wanted to waffle a bit about.

You see - after uploading the video I almost immediately got the feedback that some viewers felt that the video was a bit long and dragged around the middle part - which immediately filled me with despair.

You see - if there is one sin that YouTube audiences are not willing to forgive, it is the sin of boredom.

If a video drags just for a minute usually a significant part of the audience turns off the video for good - never to be seen again.

YouTube has this tool where it shows what percentage of people are watching a video around which timestamp - and if a video drags for just a minute or two it usually causes a devastating drop in the viewership.

People really do not like to be bored - it is the one thing YouTube audiences do not forgive.

So ... there is barely anything that annoys me more, than spending weeks of my life to produce an hour long video only to lose half of the audience after fifteen minutes due to some easily avoidable stumble in the script.

And thus I was anxiously waiting for YouTube’s viewer retention data, expecting the worst.
The data arrives.
I look at it.
And it left me deeply confused.
You see, the viewer retention is not down.

It is actually higher than usual.

There are roughly ten percent more people still sticking around at the 30 minutes mark of this video than people are on the Celeste video at the same timestamp for comparison.

What is going on here?

You know, a part of the audience gave me the feedback that they found parts of the video a bit slow and that something annoyed them.

Those people aren’t wrong.

They might not be identifying the issue correctly, but they certainly are not wrong in noticing a problem with the script.

And while there is nothing I can do about whatever is causing the issue after uploading the video, I should at least understand what went wrong so that I can learn something from it for the next time.

Which is why this whole thing left me so confused, because some people were feedbacking me that the video was dragging in the middle, while the factual data was showing me the opposite - which … huh?

What a mysterious mystery!

So after thinking about this little riddle for the better part of my weekend I think I know the answer - and funnily enough I think the problem is that the video is too short and needed to have been longer.

You see, the first draft of the script was actually significantly longer than the final video.

I originally planned to have a discussion about how people tie their identities to games - up to the point that they develop moral ideas around things like optimization issues or character designs.

You see, some folks are so kookookachoo that they feel justified to send developers death threats over things like framerates.

The very same thing that hooligans do in sports.

The original idea was it to explore how and why people tie their identities to random things like a soccer team or a video game. 

(I believe there is a nihilism issue at the center of what’s going on there. People lack a system in which their existence feels meaningful and thus they just make up a random moral system in which their live has context. And if you are already making up the system of reference in which your own life makes sense, then why not do it around something you already enjoy, like your favorite soccer team or your favorite shooty shooty live service game!)

The idea was to parallel the idea of why people would hang a pig over a bridge with the question of why someone would send a death threat to someone over a delayed release date of a game and to point out that the root cause for both things is probably something very similar - and then to loop back to 3D platformers via making the argument that this thing is probably at the root of why we even play games in the first place and to lead into the tedious game mechanics part from there.

The only problem ... well, the script just wasn’t coming together, and I was writing under even more time pressure than usually because of all the coviding, so I thought let’s cut out this part and let’s get back to it in a different video in the future.

Which I did! 

What I did not realize however, was, that without this section the whole sports part doesn’t really pay off in the end.

I think that explains why the watchtime is above average but people still felt like some parts of the video were unnecessary. It’s because I did not realize that the part is dangling in the air a bit without a payoff to the build up.

So funnily enough it might have been an attempt to streamline the video that caused the issues.

All of this super duper annoys me to no end for two reasons.

First: Well, of course the video with the small stumble in the script is the first one to get decent traffic in ages.

But second and equally annoying: The whole sports part would have worked perfectly as a build up for what I originally wanted to discuss but now it is stuck in the wrong video, which …

Wrglgrrgh.

With that being said, most people seemed to have enjoyed the video overall so I don’t think it’s that big of a deal - I was just wondering what went wrong so that I do not tap into the same mice trap twice.

So what’s next?

Well, next it is time for us to take a vacation from perspectiving. 

You see, a lot of you wonderful people have been pointing out to me that I actually have another channel with a larger following - and I finally got around to look into this. 

As it turns out you folks are right! 

You see, the next video will be about Echoes of the Wisdom and after having written a rough outline of the script I realized that there is just no reason not to release the video over on the gaming channel.

The idea of the perspective channel is it to be a place for videos that are too different to what we have been doing over on the other channel - but an exploration of the current state of the Zelda franchise and the strengths and weaknesses of Echoes of the Wisdom are perfectly fine to discuss on the gaming channel. (And so would have been a video about TTYD or Mario Wonder or about the state of 3D platformers in retrospective.)

So going forward I plan to use the gaming channel more again.

But don’t worry, I’m not planning to do a massive shift in style or anything and there will certainly be video’s on the perspective channel going forward as well, I just want to utilize both more.

(Also I’m still getting comments from people that think I am dead - so we probably should get those people up to date, shouldn’t we?)

Awesome!

I plan for the Zelda video to be a bit shorter than usual and to hopefully be done with it in three weeks. 
So expect a roughly one-hour long video in five weeks.

Finally - as always - a huge and gigantic thank you to every single one of you wonderful patreon people!
I really can't thank you enough for your support - this whole endeavor would not be possible without you! <3