Podcasts, Indie Films… and Video Game Streams

This week, I’ve been consuming some different kind of material from various social connections — podcasts and indie films. And I’m becoming aware of just how awesome some of the creators involved are at entertaining… and by comparison, how terrible gaming live streaming broadcasters can be.

I follow hundreds of channels on YouTube Gaming, and I find many of them entertaining for different reasons. I’ll watch one channel because the broadcaster engages with community in a sweet and cheesy way, and I’m a fan of cheese. I’ll watch another creator because I love hearing a discussion about many of the weird and wacky events of wrestling over the past twenty years. I’ll watch a third because I find the engaged creation of an artistic work to be a relaxing background noise.

But earlier this week, I was watching another creator on the YouTube Gaming platform — spiffymarc — and he mentioned that he had done a podcast for 6 years. 6 years is a long time to do anything on the internet, so I dug around and found some of the old episodes… and I was blown away by the entertainment value of the content.

There’s nothing magic in this: I was listening to a team of 3 people who had worked together for years on creating content riffing on each other in an awesome way. But one of the things that I began to learn is … these folks did less prep than I do for my streams. Instead, their success comes from a great ability to just create an interesting story as they go, largely built from experience.

This really came home to me when I was listening to an episode where they invited a couple guys creating an independent film on to promote their work. These were folks who clearly had a lot of passion for what they were doing… but they had no radio presence. And then I realized that the amount of presence that they had was actually pretty similar to the amount of presence that most people have — even among people I watch who are live-streaming.

They had a passion that they cared about (their film; for me, it might be games). They could talk about their film (how excited they were for the script; like I can talk about how much I loved Ori and the Blind Forest). But at the same time, they had limited radio presence (compared to the hosts), and they spent a bunch of their time talking trying to get funding for their passion, without being able to really make other people believe in it. (Ori and the Blind Forest is a beautiful game, but it was one of my lowest viewership streams in months… because it was about the game instead of about engaging with the audience.)

After having listened to this, it was clear that there is such a massive difference between the radio personality and the behind-the-scenes personality… and I realized how much I see the mix of these in the live streaming space. It also brought home how nice it is to have someone who’s really good at telling a story be the front-man for your piece… or in the case of a current independent film production I’m looking forward to, the front-woman.

My friend Cameo has been working on a project called Real Artists— a sci-fi short film “about AI and the future of film”. And unlike the short film being broadcast on the podcast, Cameo is able to share her vision and passion in a way that engages me.

One of the things that I’ve been amazed by is how engaged she is in the project — from sharing behind the scenes commentary and footage, to attempting to build up their Seed and Spark crowdfunding campaign. (Which I hope you will follow, especially after you read the rest of this post.) Throughout this, she has struck me as someone who is able to turn their passion into something that other people can really engage in.

And again: it’s incredible in part just because of how I didn’t realize prior to this what goes into these projects. This film is already all recorded, but in order to get distribution to major video platforms, how do you even do it? Who do you talk to? How does a video get on Netflix?

Turns out that, as usual, the answer is “You know somebody.” Or in the case of Seed and Spark… you know 1000 somebodies. For projects that reach 1000 followers in 30 days, Seed and Spark offers a “filmmaker’s box”, which includes $8000 worth of goodies, and also includes online distribution through platforms like Hulu and Netflix. This is one of the few times where “following” a project can actually really help: with just 1000 followers, this film could have drastically higher reach than it might otherwise.

From these things, I’m feeling reinvigorated into creating more entertaining content. Tonight on stream, I’ll be talking more about my thoughts on this, as well as pulling quotes from the podcast I’ve been listening to, and talking about how I think even gaming livestreams could be different. The reality is, it’s been the case for a long time that most folks who consume my videos don’t do it for the games. I’ve been saying this since day one, but really acting that way hasn’t necessarily followed. So tonight, you’ll hear another episode of “Chris Plays Games — Video Gaming While Trying to Be Entertaining.” I hope you’ll stop by at 9:15PM Eastern.

(Also: Follow Real Artists on Seed + Spark to help them hit their 1000 followers! I want to watch this movie on Netflix, damnit!)