Let’s (try to) Play

Because of my particular brand of madness, I’m currently dipping my toe into the giant ocean that is YouTube Let’s Plays. Let’s Plays, if you didn’t know, are basically videos of gameplay footage with narration or commentary over it. The nature of these kinds of videos mean they’re relatively easy to do – all you need is a decent microphone, video recording software and a game to play while you talk over it. You don’t really need to edit them beyond cutting down videos to viewable chunks or adding in effects. The reason I’m trying this is simple. If schmucks like these can be famous and/or successful for talking while playing video games, I don’t see why I can’t do it as well!

Just kidding.

(Psst, those people I linked to are pretty good so if you’re into Let’s Plays and you aren’t already aware of them, go check them out)

It would definitely be nice to be YouTube famous and YouTube rich for playing video games, but I’m under no illusions that I’m going to be the next PewDiePie (Google him if you don’t know of him). The reasons I want to try this are twofold: 1) I play a lot of games and 2) I want to tell stories. I just think it would be nice to play a game and have a little chat. Of course, the irony is that I’m a significantly more eloquent writer than speaker. I no speak gud. Let’s Plays, of course, require a lot of talking. I do plan to approach this casually, though. If I just think of it as recording my shennanigans for my friends to watch – which is a primary goal for starting a Let’s Play channel – then there’s less pressure on me. Plus my ultimate goal is still becoming a writer, so there’s no point in putting so much focus on this. Besides, one of the best advice I heard for starting a YouTube channel is this: ‘Don’t do it to get rich or famous, do it because it’s fun or for a hobby’ – paraphrased from Jesse Cox.

(You should seriously check out Jesse’s channel, he’s way underrated. Down with PewDiePie! (Actually I hear Pewds is a pretty awesome guy, though I’m still not a fan of his videos))

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing lately. I’ve managed to get settings for pretty decent quality recordings and compressing the raw footage for upload, all I need now are better commentary skills and to learn how to edit videos. I don’t have anything uploaded publicly yet, but once I do I’ll probably put a link on my blog and viceversa.

In other news, I tweeted a while ago that my next story would be titled ‘The Golden-eyed Child’. I haven’t done a whole lot on it yet (only 597 words so far), since I was playing around with recording game footage, and also because I’m trying to come up with an idea for a 3000 word short story for a competition. If possible, I also intend to enter the 5000 word category and a different competition with a different 5000 word story. Before anyone asks, I’m not going to enter The Golden-eyed Child because that one’s going to clear 5000 words by a wide margin. It’s going to be longer than Heist, and that was 7000 words or so. Unfortunately I have no ideas for any of those stories yet.

Anyhow, that’s what I’ve been planning and doing lately. Once I figure out what I want to talk about and how I should do it, I might put up another book series recommendation. Until then!