Architect Address - January 2023

Well hello there, it’s been a little while but I’m back and ready to dazzle you all with the first architect address of 2023, which is… somewhat predictably not actually about 2023 at all and is instead a little look back at the previous year, and some of the videos I released in the last hectic dash to the finish line.

Let’s start with 2022 at large and I think it’s been an interesting year? There were some ups, some downs and whilst I think on balance it’s been a slower year for growth I’m mostly entirely happy with the videos I did put out. A large factor in that is the decision I made to shoot for slightly longer video lengths this year simply having more time spent editing or writing gives me a little more wiggle room to fix mistakes or structural stuff that doesn’t work and I think with one or two major exceptions I’ll get back to later there aren’t many videos from 2022 that I outright dislike.

However, of course, this higher number of longer videos approach has come with some downsides - simply due to the fact I put out fewer videos it meant that fewer new eyeballs got put on the channel but it is heartening to know that in spite of the lower youtube uptake, I think these longer, slightly more detailed videos resulted in better patreon uptake per video, though I’d need to do a bit of maths to be sure of that. Either way, very glad to have you all here new patrons.

In terms of the patreon itself, I made a little shakeup with the addition of the $8 tier, and I’ve got to say it’s… not been a huge success? I am obviously super grateful to everyone who has jumped on that tier but I assumed getting the opportunity to have me say whatever you want would be more… alluring? I dunno, I think I’ll stick with it for now but it’s certainly been less successful than I’d like. I think I had a similar problem with the architect address actually which was originally supposed to be more of a Q&A format but people weren’t really interested in that portion so I just shelved it. Maybe audience participation is overrated? I guess I go out of my way to stop parasocial attachments from forming so I imagine that’s an element too, hmm.

More generally, I think my big objective for this year is to really knuckle down and make more stuff faster, with less screwing around - I really hate that it took almost a month to make some of these videos and whilst I don’t want the quality to drop, the fact that I put out three videos in december is proof that I can do it I just need a bit more discipline and work ethic. I also want to maybe look into expanding the sort of thing I do…  Not sure if I want to figure out youtube shorts or maybe look into some sort of audio content, who knows - actually if there’s anything else you’d like to see out of me, let me know! That’s a thing I can do, why did I not think about that before?

Anyway, enough about broad stuff let’s get serious and look at the last few videos starting with the one all about economies. MAN this one was a real tricksy one to put together I think my broad structure went through about five or six different iterations here and I couldn’t quite figure out a way to make economies as a subject interesting because it always felt like if enough time passed, they always became boring because you work out the optimal way to play. And that was when I figured out that that’s exactly the point! They’re all broken!

I think getting my head around this “all economies are broken” idea was kind of the cornerstone of making the video work and it gave me a lot of interesting ways to talk about the more traditional game designy topics of how economies can encourage us or discourage us from playing in particular ways and what makes economic games, y’know, fun. This video was a chance to play quite a few management or trading games that I’d not really had a reason to check out before and honestly I was surprised by which ones I liked, recettear and diaries of a spaceport janitor were a real highlight despite being fairly ancient and cumbersome whereas Moonlighter, a game I thought was pretty popular was a real disappointment I just found both sides of its dungeoneering and shopkeeping loop really dull and shallow.

What I wasn’t expecting out of the video was for me to get quite so… overtly political with it - usually I don’t like to get preachy in my videos because it’s a bit boring and doesn’t really fit the vibe but there’s this inescapable conclusion at the heart of the why aren’t videogame economies realistic question and that’s that the real economy isn’t designed to be fun or fair. I feel like you can’t really talk about broken economies without addressing that particular elephant in the room and the games that use the flawed nature of digital economies to talk about real ones. Overall the video did well and I’m pretty happy with it, I think it’s a bit long in the tooth and I probably whine about EVE online a bit too much but broadly, it’s okay.

The next video, I should probably remind you of because… no one watched it, yep, the companion characters vid is by far the worst performing video of the year and I’m fairly sure that’s because I released it late on the 23rd of december, whoops. However, one of the other least watched vids on the channel, my old one about FF15 is also on the subject of companion characters so maybe people just don’t like that particular topic? Who Knows?

I think maybe part of the mistake here was the emphasis on Marvel’s Midnight Suns which I really like as a game but a lot of people apparently don’t because of it’s fairly massive cheesy dialogue factor which… you know what I can’t really blame people on that one but I love anything even resembling XCOM so it’s all good in my books.

Anyway as for the video itself I think it’s kind of an interesting central premise that a lot of character’s we’re ostensibly supposed to like end up being kind of annoying because it’s often their role as part of the game to stop us from doing things, creating this interesting ludonarrative disconnect between what the game wants you to feel and what we as players actually want. Honestly a huuuge help making the video came from the director’s commentary mode on half life 2 which genuinely is one of the single best features I’ve ever seen in any game it’s got so much really cool design insight and behind the scenes bits

At one stage I was literally going to make the whole video about Alyx because a lot of the conclusions I reach in the video and a lot of mistakes games make to this day valve already identified and fixed. It’s such a small change to have Alyx and the other NPCs constantly demonstrate their usefulness rather than being helpless and follow the player rather than leading but it really goes a long way towards making half life 2 work. Literally the answers are right there just do that video games, god.

And finally we’ve got 2022 games you should have played. As I mentioned in the video, this was one of the single hardest years worth of games to narrow down to 20, I think at one point there were 50 things on the shortlist and I’ve really had to part with a lot of games I really liked over the year to get things down. I’m surprised to see how well my top list seemed to match up with other people’s though, usually my top game is totally off the wall and no-one else likes it but citizen sleeper seems to be doing very well for itself as does neon white. It’s an interesting balance I have to strike with these videos because there are lots of really obscure games I *could* recommend, but I also feel I should be showcasing good games as well, and it’s a matter of finding games that are underrated without already being popular. Stuff like Vampire Survivors was an early entry on the list and is a great game I hope to talk more about at some point but it’s just too popular so I couldn’t talk about it!

I actually can’t think of too many major omissions that people wrote me up about, Hyper Demon is one mentioned that I neglected to show simply because it’s borderline nauseating to watch and it’s a relatively safe sequel to devil daggers, Curse of the Golden Idol was great but I didn’t have the chance to play it until recently and I saw NORCO pop up a few times and I just genuinely don’t really rate it, it’s a good looking game but i’ve seen the same thing done better elsewhere in my opinion.

I think 2022, even outside the scope of my yearly wrapup might be one of the strongest years ever for games, so much great stuff came out, presumably as we catch back up from things delayed over the pandemic which means that 2023 has a LOT to live up to and honestly I can’t wait I’ve already played at least one game which has gotten a spot on the preliminary list so we’ll have to see how big it gets this time.

Phew, this is an incredibly long architect address so I think I’ll leave it there, thank you for watching, joining the patreon and generally supporting the channel, and I’ll be back with you soon for another proper video, won’t that be fun? Okay, bye!