I am back with a random blog post that I have created, because… Well, I was bored and this seemed like an interesting opinion article to write, based on my own experiences in the world of YouTube Let’s Plays, both as a spectator and former content creator (who might return to the game sometime).
If you watch gamers on YouTube, you’ll see that all of them brand themselves as gamers and “Let’s Players”. Gamers, they are, but I have always seen a specific, distinct separation between different types of gamers. We have, according to my three categories, the true “Let’s Player”, walkthrough gamers, and entertainers.
Based on gamers I’ve seen on YouTube and my own personal feelings, I believe the true Let’s Player is one who plays the game purely for the joy of doing so, and videos can span episodes or series while including victories, failures, jumpcuts after a “You are Dead!” message that happens every few minutes, and they do the entire playthrough in a light-hearted way, typically coupled with their own giggling at their ineptitude and funny side stories that aren’t always helpful to the progression of the game, but serve to keep the mood light when things are tense. The victory for the true Let’s Player is not completion of the game, but the (mis)adventures that take place between Part 1 of the series and the last part of the series. The games played by the true Let’s Player tend to be whatever the player will find entertaining, not what is necessarily going to garner subscribers, a view count, or so forth.
A good true “Let’s Player” to use my opinions, would include YouTubers of the likes of Veriax, SorcererDave, and Miss Lollypop. Veriax and SorcererDave do remarkable thoroughly roleplayed and mostly in-character playthroughs of Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim, with the latter doing Fallout games and others as well, so those are good recommendations for TES LPs. Miss Lollypop is a player of The Sims series, with concurrent Let’s Plays of The Sims 2, 3, and 4, if that’s your thing.
The walkthrough gamers are into gaming for the sake of completion. They only post videos that show a game’s mission in a 100% completion scenario. These gamers are down to business when it comes to their gaming, and will redo the same mission off-screen until they have the perfect completion of the game. The walkthrough gamer is its own special type of gamer, and one that takes a particular dedication to the game, because of the effort it takes to get perfect completion on a level of challenging difficulty. These gamers, in my experience — though not necessarily all of them, tend to play the newest games to completion and then discard them for a new series upon their 100% completion of the main “Core” missions of the game.
An example of a good walkthrough gamer I like is Centerstrain01. He’s into the action games like Metal Gear Solid, Splinter Cell, Hitman, and so forth, and he focuses on getting only a 100% completion of a given mission with a stealth walkthrough of the game, if a stealthy approach can be taken.
Then there are the entertainers. These guys have a game on the background to be the background, and in many cases they enjoy playing the game, but the game itself is not what the point of the video is going to be, necessarily. An example of an entertainer is Nerd3, who by his own admission will edit to the comedy of his dialogue, rather than editing to the game footage itself, while scrapping entire videos that he doesn’t find “funny” in the commentary department.
These Let’s Players are excellent to watch if you want to watch them specifically for their commentary, and if you want to get a quick glimpse of a game, but don’t particularly care for the intricacies of the game.
To use the example of Nerd3, he does his videos in 15-25 minute segments at max, with a lot of jumpcuts to string together his brand of comedy, which can be quite entertaining (sort of making up for the disorientation of excessive jump cuts), and he tends to edit out the in-between content that doesn’t directly help his progression of the game or his progression of the things he’s saying. While he has at least one “Completes” series at a time going (with the aforementioned jump cuts), most of his videos tend to briefly touch the game and provide an overview, but seldom return to the game. Of course, over 1 million subscribers, which is tenfold or greater what the other people I referenced, show that his videos aren’t bad, and numerous other entertainers prove that this is an existing marketplace to work in when it comes to YouTube gamers.
Again, while I am preferential to my definition of a true Let’s Player when it comes to YouTube gamers and who I want to watch, all of these above listed YouTubers (Miss Lollypop in particular) are fun, easy to listen to gamers who play games of a wide spectrum and are fun to watch. We could get even deeper into the different types of gamers, but I feel like these are about as broad as I can explain things while keeping a reasonable sized post. And, these subsets can all clearly fall into one or more of these lines given, so they aren’t hard to observe, even without the half-decade of watching Let’s Plays that I have under my belt… And the few months of Let’s Playing before I shut down the shop due to issues at that time in real life.
Anyway, I shall return in the future the next time I have a posting worth wasting 45 minutes on typing. Bye bye!
