Meaningful Video Games #16
Duck Souls
A s you’ve read over the past weeks, I don’t just play games for the fun element. I also use them to cheer myself, to relax, to learn, to socialise and sometimes to celebrate. This week’s entry is very much in the celebration camp. And also has a mighty fine selection of hats!
Duck Souls, its name a pun on Dark Souls (a notoriously hard action fighting game), is a pixel-art platformer starring a cute little duck charged with rescuing lots of eggs. One hundred, to be precise, over one hundred increasingly difficult levels, filled with fiendish spike traps, lasers and all manner of things trying to kill you. The controls are simple — jump and dash — but mastering them is not.
Progression is achieved by trial and error learning. You die, a lot, and the game kindly keeps a tally of just how many ducks you have killed. Lovely.
Every five levels you are rewarded with a new hat to equip on your duck. It’s a small detail but it adds variety and character, and is just ridiculously cute really. My favourite so far is the propeller hat, though the top hat is dapper AF.
I’m not much cop at platforming games, especially ones where you have to think fast and can’t plan out a route, so Duck Souls might seem like an odd choice for a meaningful game post. But there’s a very good reason.
I mention fairly frequently in these posts that I’m a Twitch streamer. To clarify: it’s never a shameless plug to try and entice you to watch me. It’s just because it’s one of the most important parts of my life, and obviously it goes hand-in-hand with the theme of this series.
I started streaming about two years ago — partly for fun, partly as a personal challenge to build my self-confidence, and partly because a lot of my friends were starting too (and I’m easily swayed by mild peer pressure).
After roughly five months, I met all the criteria that Twitch require for you to monetise your channel — known as becoming an affiliate. This hadn’t been my original intention, I’d kept on streaming purely because I was enjoying it. Feeling my confidence in ‘performing’ growing was amazing, having avoided the spotlight pretty much forever. I never for a second thought that anyone would want to give me money for playing games on the internet.
How wrong I was.
It’s taken me well over a year since becoming an affiliate to really deal with my feelings about the monetisation aspect of being a content creator. For a long, long time I suffered from epic imposter syndrome. I believed that people were donating out of politeness, or because they were my friends. Or worse, that it was some kind of sympathy thing — similar to how a parent might tell their small child that “yes dear, that’s a lovely song and dance routine, aren’t you talented?”, when in fact they know full well that it rivalled the very worst acts on Britain’s Got Talent.
I almost felt bad, like I was somehow guilt-tripping people out of their money. Sure, I could have turned off the donation function and just carried on for fun, but there was a little part of me that was curious to know how far I could go. Whether I could actually be good enough to earn a small side income through a creative outlet.
There is no rational reason whatsoever for me to have felt any of that doubt. I always knew it was my inner critic talking, I just didn’t know how to deal with her. Then I reached a turning point! That’s a whole story in itself though, so if you want to read more, you can do so in this Patreon post I wrote.
Once I realised it is indeed possible to override ‘Bitchy Vicky’ (naming the inner critic has helped me understand my relationship with her) I’ve been able to turn my mindset around. I don’t want to be a full-time streamer, that’s not for me, but I understand now that it’s okay to treat it seriously and operate in a business-like way, even though I’m small-scale.
More importantly, I’ve accepted that it’s okay to be proud and confident in what I’m doing. To acknowledge that if people appreciate it, and want to support it then I shouldn’t be embarrassed or awkward about that.
My motto from 2019 onwards is “be bold, be brave, be proud”.
So in that spirit, I’m now proudly believing in myself as a legitimate brand and being bolder about promoting myself. I’m being brave in the face of Bitchy Vicky (who is screaming at me as I type that I’m being arrogant and big-headed) by gradually increasing the variety of ways people can offer me financial support, should they want to.
I cannot stress enough that it is always 100% optional. I love what I do, and would be doing it even if nobody gave me a penny…but people do, so I feel it’s my responsibility to make it as convenient as possible for them.
One way is the in-built Twitch mechanisms, and my god do I have some loyal supporters on there.
Another is having a Ko-Fi page, allowing people to make a small one-off donation, as not everyone has the means or desire to make a monthly commitment.
A third is having a Patreon page, and it’s that which brings us back to Duck Souls. (I bet you were wondering if I was ever going to get there, right?).
Earlier this week I did a very special stream to celebrate hitting my first Patreon goal: earning $25 per month. The reward I promised to deliver was one hour of challenging platforming, and my associated anger and swearing. I’m generally quite mellow, so the chance to see Ragey TC in action was quite the draw!
My two best buddies have both completed Duck Souls on stream, so it was the natural choice for me to tackle. How poorly would I fare, compared to them?
Well, I didn’t complete it. Obviously. This is me we’re talking about, after all. But, I wasn’t as shockingly bad as I’d expected and there was far less swearing than anticipated. I’m not sure whether my lovely viewers felt let down on that score or not, given that I’d promised them an entertaining display of abysmal skills and sailor talk!
My suspicion is that any negativity I might have felt was overridden by the warm glow of knowing I was there because eight wonderful people chose to set up a monthly pledge to help fund my little enterprise.
It might seem odd to dedicate a whole post to a game I’ve only played for an hour, but it’s not really the game itself which is meaningful. It’s what it represents. It’s the knowledge that people believe in what I do, to the extent that they’re willing to put their own hard-earned money towards supporting it.
My mind will always be blown that anyone would have that faith, but I suspect that’s the same for an awful lot of creators out there. We all listen too closely to our inner critics sometimes. Time for Bitchy Vicky and her friends to take a back seat and let us shine.
So to wrap up:
- It’ll have a special place in my heart forever because of what it represents
- It gave me a smidgen of hope that I might not be terrible at all platform games
- It’s chock-full of amusing hats!
And that is why Duck Souls is Meaningful Video Game #16.
** I’m aware that I have linked to my ‘support me’ methods throughout this post: please do not think this is an attempt to ‘hard sell’ to you. I’ve done it to provide extra context to what I’m describing. But if you find it interesting enough to want to come and see what I do, you’re more than welcome! **
This post is part of the #Write52 challenge. Why not join us? See who’s involved on this Trello board!
I’m Toyah and I write. I also proofread and — because I’m hugely curious — spend a lot of my time discovering and learning about new things. If you’re looking for someone to wrangle words, get in touch via any of these methods.
