[Music]
This is a special episode
of the Bryant Review Podcast.
This is going to be a far less produced
episode of the podcast,
where I'm just going to kind of talk
about my experience researching, writing,
and creating the Bioshock retrospective.
Over the last year, I have been working
on articles for the site.
A lot of the articles were basically me
just reposting the scripts that I had
created for my YouTube channel.
I didn't really recognize this at the
time, but YouTube had kind of forced me
into a rabbit hole, a
content hole, if you will.
What I found was that my scripts were
consistently about 1200 words, and it
forced me to be really concise.
In a way that maybe every
story didn't necessarily tell.
1500 words, I mean, what I found is that
1200 words is about 8 minutes.
And perhaps
coincidentally, perhaps absolutely not.
8 minutes is the minimum monetizable
length of a YouTube video, at least to
have multiple, like, mid-roll ads.
If it's less than that,
you can't have mid-rolls.
So many of the articles that I've posted,
like I said, have been rehashes,
recycling, if you will, from the channel.
As the Bryant Review has developed, as
it's become a bigger thing, I have found
that more people are
interested in longer content.
And I've really tried to push myself.
I've found that people's attention spans
are quite different when it
comes to the written word.
But I've also found it rather difficult
to write long-form content because I have
been exercising that 8-minute
monetization muscle for 11 years or
something for my channel.
But this last month, I've been picking
away at "Would You
Kindly?" a BioShock retrospective.
I've done a few retrospectives on the
site. Dash has done
many more than I have.
But most of the retrospectives I've done
have been a day's worth of work.
Not really narrative-driven, like some of
the developer stories
that we've done on the site.
And I don't know, I wanted to do
something different because BioShock is
such a meaningful title to me.
It's one of the most
influential games I've ever played.
Not just in terms of gameplay or
influencing me as a gamer or as a game
developer, but influencing me based
solely on the story the
game is trying to tell.
If you've listened to the podcast version
of the article, then you'll
know what I'm talking about.
But essentially, I'll just
quote from the article here.
Despite having left his church, I hadn't
separated myself from his off-brand of
perverted conservatism that worshipped
violence and authoritarians, nor the
ideology that mistook blind,
pseudo-intellectual confidence for merit.
I credit BioShock's narrative as
influential to exercising
that partisan demon from my mind.
The story, the themes, the allegory, the
setting, perfectly balanced and
profoundly astute, a sprawling, masterful
and effective critique of an ideology
that was polluting my
post-exit worldview.
So if you can't tell, BioShock is
incredibly important to me, and that
importance informed my desire to make
something that I had never made before
and push myself to work on something for
longer than I really ever have before.
So over the last month or so, I've been
working on this
article and it's exciting.
And it's kind of taught
me something about myself.
In comparing my work with something like
Dash, where Dash is writing these 3,000,
4,000, 5,000 word articles,
incredibly thorough, like no stone
unturned reviews of hardware or
retrospectives for, you
know, their favorite games,
I was feeling kind of inadequate. I was
like, "Why can't I write something that
is that thorough or that deep
or that long?" Not to say that length is
everything, of course it's not, but it
was, it was, for some
reason it was something
that I was a little bit insecure about. I
can't put my finger on exactly why.
Except for now. Now that I've actually
published this article, it's really been
educational for me in an introspective
way. As I started to
say, I've never really
thought about, I've never really
considered why my articles were as short
as they were until I
started to really put pen to paper
with this retrospective, right? Like,
yes, eight minutes is the monetizable
amount on YouTube for
mid-rolls, right? Of course.
But also like eight minutes is what I
could achieve in a day. From starting
from scratch with a script
to filming and then editing,
doing a thumbnail and getting it uploaded
to YouTube, you know, 1200 to 1500 words
was the, like pretty much the absolute
maximum of what I could actually
achieve in a day.
And that and it's so interesting to me
the the idea that like
for the last 11 years,
I've like honed my workflow to a point
where I know what I can do
in that that whole pipeline.
I know what's achievable and I've been
writing for that. It's forced me to be
concise and develop a
voice that's unique and I appreciate
that. But at the same time,
like I said at the top of this
episode, I look back and I think many of
the stories that I've
tried to tell might not have
been serviced fully in
that 1500 word window.
found my way to this realization as I was
editing the video portion of this
article, this podcast episode. It's very
interesting how much
work I could have put into
the episode. I could have put so much
more work, I'm talking, I'm not even
kidding, like a couple
more days worth of work into the video
version of the article, and I
decided not to for a couple of
reasons. You know, first of all, the
story is really being told
through the what I'm saying,
right? And the idea is really to drive
people to the website. I'm
not really keen on YouTube
anymore, if you can't tell. It's pissed
me off. Their policies and their
contribution to ruining
the world is palpable. It is
identifiable, and I really hate the idea
of being part of that now.
And the fact that they're playing the
FOMO game against TikTok,
where shorts are unraveling people's
attention span even further.
So the idea of posting my...
The idea of putting another 24 to 48
hours worth of actual work
into making a YouTube version
just didn't sit right with me,
especially knowing that this video
version is only going to
get like 5 or 6,000 views.
It's just like even if I put 48,
even if I put the next week's worth of
work into this video version,
it would not...
The cost versus benefit would just be
next to zero, right?
So I had to cut my losses.
I was...
I just...
And honestly, I'm
willing to bet like $100
that the YouTube version of this article
is going to get fewer than 6,000 views.
And it's like...
Like, what's the point
of posting it on YouTube?
Now, of course, I
wanted to do a video version.
I was thinking to myself like,
"Oh, I'm going to do
the audio version anyway,
and I'm going to put a lot
of work into the audio side."
And it wouldn't be that much extra work
to do video for it as well.
Well, turns out it actually...
The audio version was
finished on like Friday,
and today is Sunday, and I finally...
Like, it's... What time is it?
It's like 3 o'clock
on a Sunday afternoon.
And it took me another two days of work
to get the video to where it is.
So the video version took way too long.
I'm so torn because I
want to make videos.
But the amount of investment in terms of
time to make videos on YouTube now
is so high for me because I'm not...
I'm not content to just
make reaction content.
And that's really the only stuff on the
channel that gets any views anymore.
And I really hate...
Hate capital H, right?
Making reaction content.
It's so lazy.
I just can't stand it.
And so the idea of just kind of making
reaction content like,
"Oh, yeah, Linus Tech Tips
did another Linux challenge."
Bro, I can't stand it.
It's like, what am I doing?
Like, why am I doing that?
So really, my goal has been to drive
traffic to the website.
And I know that YouTube punishes that.
You can see it in the analytics, you
know, of my last video.
I did the unboxing of Steam Link and
Steam Controller, which was a narrative
take on an unboxing video.
I've never seen anything
quite like it on YouTube.
What it actually reminded me of the most
was, you know, of the things that I've
seen anyway is the YouTube
channel This Does Not Compute,
where he talks about
unboxing, you know, old tech.
We're talking like vintage Macintosh PCs.
We're talking like, what was he had a
Bose radio that he unboxed or restored?
I'm not restoring anything.
And my Steam Link is like, you know, 11
years old rather than
rather than, you know,
20 or 30 or 40 years old.
But that's what the closest it reminded
me to of content that I've seen.
But what I found really interesting is
that the analytics on that YouTube video
are absolute garbage.
I mean, there's a small
spike in the first day.
It gets about 2000 views.
And then in the next almost
week, it gets another 2000 views.
It's a slow drip.
It's I mean, in the first let's see,
wait, in the first day, this video got
two thousand nine hundred views.
And then after that, it got nothing like
it got another thousand
views in the next almost week.
It got net three subscribers for the
channel and it earned six
dollars and seventy four cents.
Six bucks for what I put in for time,
which was quite a bit.
I put in probably two days worth of work
into this in this video.
Whatever. Right.
And this is starting to sound a little
bit better and I am a little bit better
because I feel like YouTube has just
advocated the promise that they made to
creators when the platform was created.
When I first joined, I mean, YouTube was
a great place to find an audience.
Within the first couple of months, I had
a couple thousand
subscribers on my channel.
But to bring it back to the reason that
I'm actually recording this is because
the fact is I really am
focused now on the Bryant review.
I'm focused on.
The work that we're doing there, I'm
focused on the audience
that we're building there.
I'm focused on you.
I want to.
I want to make the world a better place.
That's been my goal with everything that
I've done in my entire life.
And I feel like it's just not possible to
make the world a
better place when you're.
Tailoring.
The things you're trying to say.
To a machine learning algorithm that
holds attention in contempt.
And make no mistake about it, that is
exactly what the YouTube algorithm and
TikTok algorithm and
Instagram algorithms are, right?
Like they are machine learning algorithms
and they hold your attention in contempt.
They hold your mind in contempt.
Yeah, everything is weird right now.
And I don't know, I
just wanted to say my piece
and kind of talk about my feelings.
Because recently, the
prospect of posting this
Bioshock retrospective has actually been
quite nerve-wracking.
I've been absolutely nervous.
In a way that I have never been nervous
about posting anything before.
And I think it's because I am pretty far
outside my comfort zone.
This article is 4000
something words long and I am...
I've put in so much work into it.
Yeah, I mean it's even to the point where
like I reached out to a friend who I know
knows Ken Levine or at least is
acquainted with him.
And I was like, "Yo, could we get an
interview with Ken Levine?"
And I never heard back
from Ken, unfortunately.
But I really wanted to go a step beyond
where we are, where I've been before.
And so with that said, I
hope that you like this article.
I really do because I had
a lot of fun writing it.
I had a lot of fun
producing the podcast version.
And I had a lot less fun
producing the YouTube version.
I think that tells me a lot about where
my priorities should be going forward.
All right. Peace.