Let's play life
May 4, 2024 4:00 PM Subscribe
the internet has produced many things, but its driving force is cowardice. it's there in the collective failure to conceptualize how the things one does online manifest themselves in the larger world. it's there in the lionization of an almost spiritual level of intellectual laziness in the need to endlessly double down on whatever your personal brand becomes. it's there in the desire to tear down anyone who might attempt to shine a light on your own personal failures and limitations, in either your work or your larger perspective on the world. the internet is a refuge for the bad faith. Let's play life, a long post about "let's plays", internet culture and youtube by Liz Ryerson (previously)
I could barely follow this. That's fine; this person's Extremely Online is not my Extremely Online, but it's nice for essays like this to at least lay out how much context is required at the outset. I had to slog pretty far before I realized that the context I needed was going to be assumed, not provided.
posted by phooky at 5:13 PM on May 4 [4 favorites]
posted by phooky at 5:13 PM on May 4 [4 favorites]
I'd comment on the article, but seeing the author's name triggered a memory of the "Ned! RYERSON!" scene from beloved childhood film Groundhog Day which left me so verklempt that I had no choice but to join my local patriots militia.
posted by Rhaomi at 5:23 PM on May 4 [2 favorites]
posted by Rhaomi at 5:23 PM on May 4 [2 favorites]
The graphic design and color selection is so awful I couldn't get beyond the second paragraph.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 6:57 PM on May 4 [3 favorites]
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 6:57 PM on May 4 [3 favorites]
I read the first 10 paragraphs or so. I have no idea what it's talking about, or what stories it refers to.
posted by signal at 7:32 PM on May 4 [1 favorite]
posted by signal at 7:32 PM on May 4 [1 favorite]
Partway through—I am just culturally adjacent enough to understand this, and have read The Raven Tower by Ann Leckie recently enough to twig to the purpose of the second-person narration. Unfortunately I just took a medication that is rapidly sending me towards unconsciousness so I may or may not report back. 🫡
posted by brook horse at 8:29 PM on May 4
posted by brook horse at 8:29 PM on May 4
The second-person narration is dropped very quickly in favor of first-person anecdotes and analysis from the author's own life, all of which have full explanations and abundant context included.
posted by one for the books at 8:47 PM on May 4 [1 favorite]
posted by one for the books at 8:47 PM on May 4 [1 favorite]
I'm still reading it but it's fantastic and mirrors many thoughts I've had myself about the mainstreaming of the internet and the rise of influencer culture. There's many links to interesting videos and other essays as well, I've got a nice collection of tabs blooming from this.
posted by signsofrain at 9:01 PM on May 4 [1 favorite]
posted by signsofrain at 9:01 PM on May 4 [1 favorite]
The second-person narration is dropped very quickly in favor of first-person anecdotes and analysis from the author's own life, all of which have full explanations and abundant context included.
that doesn’t make it a good choice
posted by knock my sock and i'll clean your clock at 10:45 PM on May 4
that doesn’t make it a good choice
posted by knock my sock and i'll clean your clock at 10:45 PM on May 4
Sorry for this rather meta post, but I agree with outgrown_hobnail's graphic design and color selection comments. I never thought I'd turn into a design critic, but something 'book length' also needs to be 'book readability', and this isn't that.
I suspect that I'm square in the middle of this essay's expected readership, but I can't look long enough at the black-on-burnt-orange to get through one paragraph.
I even installed the readable bookmarklet but that had no effect. Perhaps Blogger has installed counter-countermeasures.
posted by BCMagee at 2:28 AM on May 5
I suspect that I'm square in the middle of this essay's expected readership, but I can't look long enough at the black-on-burnt-orange to get through one paragraph.
I even installed the readable bookmarklet but that had no effect. Perhaps Blogger has installed counter-countermeasures.
posted by BCMagee at 2:28 AM on May 5
I think that part of what this article is talking about is the profusion of videos online where you watch someone play a given video game. Right?
If so - well, that's not the only thing that you can see videos of. I somehow managed to keep my own youtube feed "Watch Me Play This Game" video-free.
This is a big category pushed by Youtube's algorithm, though. Interestingly, youtube cook-turned-debunker Ann Reardon did a video about the Youtube algorithm and how it's started emphasizing that. She also has a couple tips for how to combat this as well.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:36 AM on May 5
If so - well, that's not the only thing that you can see videos of. I somehow managed to keep my own youtube feed "Watch Me Play This Game" video-free.
This is a big category pushed by Youtube's algorithm, though. Interestingly, youtube cook-turned-debunker Ann Reardon did a video about the Youtube algorithm and how it's started emphasizing that. She also has a couple tips for how to combat this as well.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:36 AM on May 5
Back to say, I finished reading this and I'm now exploring some of the linked stuff in more depth. I'm fascinated by the "Helter Skeeter" youtube channel...
posted by signsofrain at 7:27 AM on May 5
posted by signsofrain at 7:27 AM on May 5
Finished.
Thank you simmering octagon for posting this and everyone contributing to this thread in a beautiful demonstration of the premise which in itself makes it a kind of art. I hope someone makes an explainer video for the essay so we can truly come full circle. I’m going to go watch that Petscop thing I think.
posted by brook horse at 7:56 AM on May 5
Thank you simmering octagon for posting this and everyone contributing to this thread in a beautiful demonstration of the premise which in itself makes it a kind of art. I hope someone makes an explainer video for the essay so we can truly come full circle. I’m going to go watch that Petscop thing I think.
posted by brook horse at 7:56 AM on May 5
I realize that was an unfair comment to leave while people are struggling to access the article. As linked in the opening note where she acknowledges the orange background issue, here is a copy freely accessible on her Patreon without that visual flavor.
posted by brook horse at 8:27 AM on May 5 [1 favorite]
posted by brook horse at 8:27 AM on May 5 [1 favorite]
The blog post now has a (professional) white background!
posted by adrianhon at 8:45 AM on May 5 [1 favorite]
posted by adrianhon at 8:45 AM on May 5 [1 favorite]
It's white on mobile which appears to remove her blog customization, but the orange and the graphics remain on desktop, which is a commentary on something somewhere. Funniest use of "professional white background" this year though.
posted by brook horse at 8:57 AM on May 5
posted by brook horse at 8:57 AM on May 5
I think that part of what this article is talking about is the profusion of videos online where you watch someone play a given video game. Right?
With the right commentators and the right games, these can be quite fun and not encumbered with....whatever that is she's talking about. Why should the youths of today be denied the experience of standing next to the arcade game watching someone else spend their quarters after you've already blown yours?
posted by praemunire at 9:55 AM on May 5 [2 favorites]
With the right commentators and the right games, these can be quite fun and not encumbered with....whatever that is she's talking about. Why should the youths of today be denied the experience of standing next to the arcade game watching someone else spend their quarters after you've already blown yours?
posted by praemunire at 9:55 AM on May 5 [2 favorites]
Thanks for pointing out the patreon link, brook horse, I completely missed that, and the note about people complaining about the design -- which I totally get. You work for a thousand (subjective) years on something and publish it for free, only to get moaned at by a bunch of CSS fops and other ingrates.
I'm looking forward to this.
posted by BCMagee at 10:37 AM on May 5 [1 favorite]
I'm looking forward to this.
posted by BCMagee at 10:37 AM on May 5 [1 favorite]
Just gonna point out both Firefox and Chrome have reader modes for exactly these situations.
I skipped probably the first several paragraphs but wow holy shit did this hit home in a way I didn't expect a bit further through. I feel like I found something I didn't know I was looking for to help think through my online coming of age, the mood of video games in a friend's basement, the varied bits of internet weird shit I was adjacent to but not actively seeking out.
posted by spbb at 2:51 PM on May 5 [1 favorite]
I skipped probably the first several paragraphs but wow holy shit did this hit home in a way I didn't expect a bit further through. I feel like I found something I didn't know I was looking for to help think through my online coming of age, the mood of video games in a friend's basement, the varied bits of internet weird shit I was adjacent to but not actively seeking out.
posted by spbb at 2:51 PM on May 5 [1 favorite]
Her hiraeth isn't my hiraeth.
shockingly little of substance ever seems to worm its way out from the sharing of such anecdotes.
I dunno if I understood this right, but I think this piece has an arc about people sharing anecdotes to justify their memory of those events -- and this misses the in-groupiness that legitimises the person using the nostalgic anecdote.
there's a phenomenon i call "poster's narcissism": the desire to feel that you deserve credit for being attached to some part of internet culture that has affected the broader world in all kinds of ways, but an intense hyper-sensitivity to any further outside scrutiny or dialogue being applied to you.
I understand "works first time every time" as a joke when speed-runners miss a trick and need an umpteenth attempt to get it right. I also understand "don't @ me" or curating a milquetoast comment at MetaFilter to synthesize the comments above mine -- don't @ me.
for every successful 500k+ subscriber channel there are many other people laboring over multi-hour epic video essays in complete obscurity. does this mean their essays are necessarily worse than the ones that net millions of views? no, not necessarily at all. ... i just have real fundamental problems with the idea that presenting my work in the form of a four hour youtube essay is more culturally valuable or important than presenting it here on my blog
Please don't think length makes anybody's point well. This was a slog, there's also other succinct ways to communicate.
[Waste Land] came out of a time where there was still a broad belief that art could be a vital window into the future of humanity. art's power had not been fully subsumed by capital.
This masks that art always had patrons, but civil prestige put buildings on show, or organisational prestige built temples for deities filled with ornate art. The contrast is to individual capital rather than collective (civic or organisational) capital. (The version of this story written by someone five years older.--might raise the idea about 'selling out', if only sellingnl out to conformity to retain monetisation.) It's Alphabet's prestige that has these creators present work on YouTube, but it's shaped by the recommendation engine. This locked-in cowardice art suffers from the same recommendation engine that stifles long-running series like Star Wars, Star Trek and the output of Marvel Studios.
people occupying ambiguous roles with ambiguous interests means a crisis for the market - our ultimate arbiter of power.
You raise the Millennial's "just get on with it" earlier on, and maybe your sense of 'the market' isn't mine. There's useful interaction at mutually beneficial rates, there's market-making by the people who don't need to be reasonable and can absorb money losses to control the market, and there's the people excluded from the market. Art on its own won't feed my kids, some notion of value has to be attached but a communal collective could put up with my bullshit (or follow my cult), feed me and profit from my art.
all the culture born from the internet needs to be saved by the internet's endless eating of itself.
Remix Culture won. Your reputation, for creating something I can riff on, goes undiminished -- but what of the lack of canon in Nintendo's storylines, where each playthrough and each streaming view is a remix and re-contextualisation? Or watching a rangenof streamers who reach pick different choices in the same games?
posted by k3ninho at 4:05 PM on May 5
shockingly little of substance ever seems to worm its way out from the sharing of such anecdotes.
I dunno if I understood this right, but I think this piece has an arc about people sharing anecdotes to justify their memory of those events -- and this misses the in-groupiness that legitimises the person using the nostalgic anecdote.
there's a phenomenon i call "poster's narcissism": the desire to feel that you deserve credit for being attached to some part of internet culture that has affected the broader world in all kinds of ways, but an intense hyper-sensitivity to any further outside scrutiny or dialogue being applied to you.
I understand "works first time every time" as a joke when speed-runners miss a trick and need an umpteenth attempt to get it right. I also understand "don't @ me" or curating a milquetoast comment at MetaFilter to synthesize the comments above mine -- don't @ me.
for every successful 500k+ subscriber channel there are many other people laboring over multi-hour epic video essays in complete obscurity. does this mean their essays are necessarily worse than the ones that net millions of views? no, not necessarily at all. ... i just have real fundamental problems with the idea that presenting my work in the form of a four hour youtube essay is more culturally valuable or important than presenting it here on my blog
Please don't think length makes anybody's point well. This was a slog, there's also other succinct ways to communicate.
[Waste Land] came out of a time where there was still a broad belief that art could be a vital window into the future of humanity. art's power had not been fully subsumed by capital.
This masks that art always had patrons, but civil prestige put buildings on show, or organisational prestige built temples for deities filled with ornate art. The contrast is to individual capital rather than collective (civic or organisational) capital. (The version of this story written by someone five years older.--might raise the idea about 'selling out', if only sellingnl out to conformity to retain monetisation.) It's Alphabet's prestige that has these creators present work on YouTube, but it's shaped by the recommendation engine. This locked-in cowardice art suffers from the same recommendation engine that stifles long-running series like Star Wars, Star Trek and the output of Marvel Studios.
people occupying ambiguous roles with ambiguous interests means a crisis for the market - our ultimate arbiter of power.
You raise the Millennial's "just get on with it" earlier on, and maybe your sense of 'the market' isn't mine. There's useful interaction at mutually beneficial rates, there's market-making by the people who don't need to be reasonable and can absorb money losses to control the market, and there's the people excluded from the market. Art on its own won't feed my kids, some notion of value has to be attached but a communal collective could put up with my bullshit (or follow my cult), feed me and profit from my art.
all the culture born from the internet needs to be saved by the internet's endless eating of itself.
Remix Culture won. Your reputation, for creating something I can riff on, goes undiminished -- but what of the lack of canon in Nintendo's storylines, where each playthrough and each streaming view is a remix and re-contextualisation? Or watching a rangenof streamers who reach pick different choices in the same games?
posted by k3ninho at 4:05 PM on May 5
Her hiraeth isn't my hiraeth.
Mine either; I grew up on on Inkpop eaten by Figment eaten by Underlined with Fanfic.net languishing somewhere in the middle to eventually be shouldered aside by AO3. My Let’s Play Sonic 2: Special Edition was TheNamelessDoll’s ILLUMINATEDJane (Tarzan) x Captain Amelia (Treasure Planet) crossover edit. Yet the anthropology she outlines does track with my observations around the collapse of fandom in a different space.
But it’s hard to know how much of this is truly vanished versus my inability to keep up with where things have moved. Just because I can’t find stuff like the infinite proliferation of Warrior Cats roleplay or oekaki BB forums doesn’t mean the same thing isn’t happening in Roblox or whatever. In fact I know some of it is happening in the in-game chat system for Star Stable Online, because my partner keeps having to politely reject 12 yr olds who want them to join their roleplay group or yellowjacket-themed dressage performance whenever they log in to look at pretty horse models.
My main criticism of the article is that I don’t know if this is really a change in culture or in how we find the kind of “outsider art” we remember from our childhoods. And how much of that has to do with the increased space and creativity to find or make that art that comes with childhood and in some cases and to some extent young adulthood; would you find it if you were able to spend a few hours a day wandering through spaces outside of the walled garden? Or is that sort of exploration choked out of us by the increased demands on our time and energy?
People with kids are welcome to weigh in but I don’t know a single parent who knew what weird random shit their kid got up to in an AJAX chat, but then again. The whole premise is that Things Are Different Now, so maybe the surveillance works now and all the adults are hip to the weird stories kids are telling each other in obscure but thriving spaces.
posted by brook horse at 5:46 PM on May 5
Mine either; I grew up on on Inkpop eaten by Figment eaten by Underlined with Fanfic.net languishing somewhere in the middle to eventually be shouldered aside by AO3. My Let’s Play Sonic 2: Special Edition was TheNamelessDoll’s ILLUMINATEDJane (Tarzan) x Captain Amelia (Treasure Planet) crossover edit. Yet the anthropology she outlines does track with my observations around the collapse of fandom in a different space.
But it’s hard to know how much of this is truly vanished versus my inability to keep up with where things have moved. Just because I can’t find stuff like the infinite proliferation of Warrior Cats roleplay or oekaki BB forums doesn’t mean the same thing isn’t happening in Roblox or whatever. In fact I know some of it is happening in the in-game chat system for Star Stable Online, because my partner keeps having to politely reject 12 yr olds who want them to join their roleplay group or yellowjacket-themed dressage performance whenever they log in to look at pretty horse models.
My main criticism of the article is that I don’t know if this is really a change in culture or in how we find the kind of “outsider art” we remember from our childhoods. And how much of that has to do with the increased space and creativity to find or make that art that comes with childhood and in some cases and to some extent young adulthood; would you find it if you were able to spend a few hours a day wandering through spaces outside of the walled garden? Or is that sort of exploration choked out of us by the increased demands on our time and energy?
People with kids are welcome to weigh in but I don’t know a single parent who knew what weird random shit their kid got up to in an AJAX chat, but then again. The whole premise is that Things Are Different Now, so maybe the surveillance works now and all the adults are hip to the weird stories kids are telling each other in obscure but thriving spaces.
posted by brook horse at 5:46 PM on May 5
Just thinking about analogues—back when I was deeply involved in this kind of art, Facebook was the dominant form of social media and where most teens I knew hung out (hard to believe I’m typing that). And none of this shit happened there. You might get glimpses of it—a posted note containing some polished version of a story hashed out live in the chat of an obscure forum, art made on an oekaki board shared in a carefully curated album. But that’s not where it was happening.
So I wouldn’t expect, if all I hang out on is Youtube and Twitter and Reddit and even Tumblr, to see much of this kind of art around. But as the Star Stable example illustrates, that doesn’t mean it’s not out there. Unfortunately “is it gone or are we just shit at finding it” is not an easy question to answer, especially when there’s so much of a shift in how technology is used by later generations (apparently Facebook is getting popular with the teens again?? Meanwhile my Facebook profile is basically a memorial page to millennials who left and never came back).
posted by brook horse at 5:57 PM on May 5
So I wouldn’t expect, if all I hang out on is Youtube and Twitter and Reddit and even Tumblr, to see much of this kind of art around. But as the Star Stable example illustrates, that doesn’t mean it’s not out there. Unfortunately “is it gone or are we just shit at finding it” is not an easy question to answer, especially when there’s so much of a shift in how technology is used by later generations (apparently Facebook is getting popular with the teens again?? Meanwhile my Facebook profile is basically a memorial page to millennials who left and never came back).
posted by brook horse at 5:57 PM on May 5
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Maybe it would help to think of it as an internal monologue addressing herself?
posted by juv3nal at 4:40 PM on May 4 [2 favorites]