A Century in Review

A few weeks back, my stalwart colleague Influx posted a comment on my YouTube channel to congratulate me on reaching 100 subscribers.  It's encouraging to think that, somehow, I've fooled over 100 people into thinking that what I am doing is somehow watchable.  And thanks to our ten-digit hands, 100 is a good, round number and is thus a milestone.  Hence this post, and hence your current discomfort.

I didn't start making Let's Plays for the stats.  Preliminary exploration into the LP landscape showed a world that could be unwelcoming at times, being strewn with abandoned channels whose owners were unsatisfied by their own numerical progress.  Elsewhere, I'd read too many posts from folks bemoaning their slow acquisition of views, subs, likes, comments, pokes, hugs, anonymous caresses, fnurps, glorbs, and hickeys.  It seemed to me that an obsession with digital metrics of success would be a Bad Thing for me as a fresh-faced LPer.  So I decided not to worry about it.  It's been a good policy.

However, I will confess that I love data.  I am a gamer, after all.  High scores are awesome.  I generally love to observe trends, finding causal relationships in numbers that give me pseudo-valuable insights into my tiny world.  And I will absolutely confess that, in spite of the fact that I supposedly don't care about the stats, it's nice to see my views and subscriptions accelerating the further I pursue this silly little hobby.  I would probably feel differently if my numbers suddenly cratered or were non-existent to begin with.  But then I could conveniently revert to the whole "well, I'm too cool for the numbers" thing and be happy again.

After all, the act of LPing itself does make my little reptilian heart happy.  I guess the whole "why I make Let's Plays" thing would warrant a post of its own, but it's probably enough to say here that I like it, and I like it in ways that numbers can't really capture.  They are the intangible, experiential elements of gaming that everyone loves, like laughing my ass off when I manage to get some of my troops killed in Myth or when I split a ship in half in Silent Hunter 3.  What makes Let's Playing even better than just sitting and playing the games I love is that I get to actually share them with people and interact with them.  There's no statistic that captures the quality of the experiences I've had doing this.  Even though my channel is relatively small, I've become acquainted with people all over the globe.  It's pretty damn cool to find people with a common appreciation for what are often the underappreciated games that I play on my channel.  It's even better when I introduce someone to a new game and watching them become a rabid fan themselves.

You might argue that I'd get more of these experiences by being more numerically popular or whatever.  I guess it's possible.  But when I look at the LPers with thousands and thousands of subscriptions and millions and millions of views, I don't know that I see a lot of that interaction happening.  I'm grateful to be where I'm at and to be able to interact with the people I've met.

So I guess that this post is a thank you, in my own clumsy way, to all of the folks who are watching, enjoying, and sharing in what I do.  I'm not really keeping very good track of you, but I'm personally very grateful for the opportunity to pollute your minds with my mumbling digital idiocy.  Here's hoping I can get even worse!