Recording Minecraft

Today I will be releasing my sixth video in my Hardcore Minecraft series, and it represents the culmination of a few side projects and me stepping forth into a very changed Nether. That however is not exactly what I am going to talk about this morning. What I am going to talk about is how I don’t fully understand what lead me to start a Minecraft series after having been largely dormant on my YouTube channel with anything other than the weekly podcast videos for years. The last non-podcast video that I released was me trying to record evidence of an issue I was having with Avengers.

My Minecraft videos are relatively low quality as far as videos go. I am doing next to zero editing… and that is in part because the first few attempts at recording from OBS were using a format that I could not easily import into Adobe Premiere. I’ve since remedied this and that might shift up my workflow to do some stuff like add title cards to the beginning or something simple like that for starts. I like the concept of Streaming, but I always feel super anxious and awkward whenever I do it. I never know what to say and the fact that I am trying to interact with people makes the gameplay experience odd. Truth be told I don’t actually watch many streams and the only time I do tune in is for a few minutes when one of my already established friends is streaming.

I think the way I am recording short snippets of gameplay feels more comfortable because it is a lot like blogging. In order to sit down and make it through a blog post in the morning, I sorta pretend that I am just talking to myself. I am having an internal monologue and not something that is then going to get read by other people. I am letting you into my own thought processes and then just happening to write those down on paper, or in this case the digital page. For my Minecraft videos I have been trying to do the same sort of thing. I talk through what exactly I am doing and why I am doing it, and some of my long term goals.

The big thing that has sort of hampered me to this point is there are projects that I have that are ultimately going to be time consuming. Given that I am playing Hardcore… I have been super hesitant to do much of anything while the “camera” is not rolling for fear that something significant would happen and take place “off air”. However I think as I open up the world a bit more I am going to be spending more time working on those larger goals which are going to make my base feel like more of a home.

That is the other thing that has happened as I have been recording these episodes. I’ve found myself getting rather attached to this little hovel that I started with. I’ve never really started up on a hillside like this before, and I have to say I really like various aspects about it. The problem in the past has always been that it was very hard to tell if it was day time or night time because digging into the side of a mountain at ground level meant that something was always blocking my field of view. However being up high like this and overlooking the nearby village means that I actually have something resembling a proper view of the world.

This is the danger I guess of getting attached to something as fleeting as a hardcore world. There are ways of course to fix this, but they involve some shenanigans. I am enjoying myself and since I am absolutely allergic to trying to turn a profit from anything that I do… it isn’t like I actually need much of an audience to make it work for me. I’ve always sorta felt like an outsider artist that blogs, podcasts and now apparently records gameplay just for the fun of it and can not give two shits about how popular it is. That said I have been a bit shocked at just how many of you have been watching along as I did this particular brand of nonsense.

This is the playlist that I attempt to keep up to date as I release new videos. Right now I am shooting for 20-30 minute segments. They started rather long and have been getting a bit shorter as I recorded the last few of them. So here is the moment of letting you all behind the scenes… I am about to release episode 6 today, and I recorded 7 yesterday and will likely record 8 today. So I am a few episodes ahead of the release schedule at this point. This is going to get awkward as folks share advice because there is going to be a bit of a delay between when I read the comments and when I am next recording something.

As always I am going to plug the REAL person you should probably be watching as I am just a pale imitation. DavidAngel64 otherwise know as X, is the real reason why I am back engaged with Minecraft. In August of 2010 it was his “X’s Adventures in Minecraft” series that sold me on the experience of playing this game as an Adventure and I was completely hooked. As soon as I realized he was back playing the game, I was absolutely going to start watching these adventures on a daily basis. I am doing what I do because I enjoy it, but he is absolutely the real deal in a way that I likely never will be. I still find it criminal that this man does not have more subs than he does, because for me at least this is what started so many future hours of enjoyment. That original video has almost 5.5 million views so I am guessing that he was also the first entry into Minecraft for many people.

For now however I think I am going to keep doing what I am doing because I find a surprising amount of enjoyment from the process. What I am doing is not special or good but going through the motions is currently engaging for me. I sincerely doubt that I will ever gain much in the way of a following, but that is okay because I don’t really need that. I will never turn these hobbies of mine into a career and I have avoided monetizing any of them for fear of tax liability. So for now I am just going to keep piddling around and doing my thing, and apparently occasionally writing about it on the blog.