Week 7 stuff.

Not sure if I'm doing this right, but what else is new?

For this week we're supposed to view some user-led content creation devices and study/comment on them. I figured I'd talk about something I'm already vaguely involved in - the Let's Play scene. Here's a few links as an introduction.

http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/lets-play

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ptitle8zx0nomxzqc5

Essentially, a Let's Play is when someone records him or herself playing a video game, with their commentary dubbed over it. It's distinct from a walkthrough in that the commentary is generally meant to be entertaining in an of itself (though the 90% of everything is crap rule applies - they tend to devolve into boring stories from the writer's day and talk about how the recorder can't think of anything to talk about). In fact, the best Let's Plays tend to be of games the recorder has never played before. This is interesting from a few angles - you've got the weirdness of the video game's assumed user, the player, producing (aha!) a product from their own playing of the game. The majority of people involved in LPing just subscribe to their favorite LPers and watch their videos whenever they come out, but a few make their own videos after being inspired by discovering the subculture (is that the right word?). I tried, personally, but ran into too many technical problems. Anyways, I guess that could arguably demonstrate the "producers and consumers merge into a single prosumer" idea. What's also interesting is how much interrelation there is between the maker of the LP and their viewers. The best LPers strike up a dialogue with their viewers and let them vote on various gameplay decisions - on something as simple as to what game to play next or what to name the character, to how the character should be built (if they're playing an RPG), where to go next, and even accept impromptu challenges from their viewers.

I think the Most Triumphant Example of this confusing entangling of producers and users would be this LP, in which popular LPer Raocow plays a game made for him by his fans, using a hacked and repurposed version of Super Mario World, which itself incorporates content that Raocow himself produced back when he was still making his own games.

Raocow plays A Super Mario Thing

The game itself starts with a sign reading "Hey there Raocow, this is everyone," mirroring Raocow's catchphrase from the start of all of his videos, which strikes me as incredibly cool.

Anyways, let's go down the vocabulary list and make certain I've touched everything.

Open Participation, Community Evaluation. If you've got a video game, a decent computer, and a microphone, everything else you'd need to make an LP and show it to the internets is free. There's a whole, surprisingly huge subculture surrounding it, with good LPers collecting fanbases, and occasionally pointing their fans towards under-appreciated LPers.

Fluid heterarchy, ad hoc meritocracy. I am reminded of the sad fate of once-famous LPer Proton Jon, who practically became a pariah after he became too busy to make LPs at the same rate. Still, while the guy making the LP ultimately has control over it, community participation is becoming more and more common, and I've seen channels dedicated to collaborative LPs, with multiple recorders swapping saved games, popping up more and more.


unfinished artifacts, continuing process. While most LPs end when the game itself ends, there are lots of games (like MMOs and the Elder Scrolls games) that don't end, or are so vast they can take what seems like forever. I don't think I've seen a case of an LPer doing just one game constantly, or of another LPer picking up where another one abandoned a project, but it's not hard to imagine.


Common property, individual rewards. Again, the guy making the LP usually is thought of as being the sole owner and the audience as just the audience, but audience participation is becoming more and more important. There are sites that seek to aggregate their own body of LPs with multiple contributors, which could be considered a form of this as well.


The class appears to be filling up again, but that's really all I have to say. I hope it's enough...