How the YouTube kids stole my dream job

How the YouTube kids stole my dream job

I had pretty inconsistent life plans. I assume very few children pick their destiny at age 5 and see it through. I wanted to be a fireman for the longest time because my mum used to watch a TV show on ITV about them and it seemed pretty cool. Lacking even 20-20 vision and being the pitiable owner of asthma ridden lungs ruled that out, the inevitable outcome of said career being a swift and clumsy death. After being pretty indecisive for a number of years I picked up guitar and started playing that. I wasn't, and am still not, particularly good at it but obviously I was going to be a professional rock star and Sid Vicious barely played bass so whatever man. Needless to say, that was not to be.

I've played video games for as long as I could remember so when part way through my Film Degree I got to know a tech journalist who wrote about tech...obviously... It piqued my interest. He managed to get me an internship for a big site in the tech world which I squandered quite horribly, but it did make me realise that maybe if I could write about video games perhaps that could be a dream job, one I'd never really thought about as a kid. Play games. Write about them. Tell people about them. Make your friends and peers buy them and/or demand they avoid them like the plague. I could do that. I basically did that already. I just couldn't write all that well. (see this exact piece you're reading for further evidence of this)

YouTube is a crazy place. If I could go back and tell myself one thing, it would be to get on this whole 'Internet Video' thing. The idea of reading game reviews now is often frustrating to me, in a place where a lot of the writers who matter most to me in the industry have moved to places like YouTube. Danny O'Dwyer and the team at Noclip are doing god's work when it comes to videogame journalism in a video format, producing great informative pieces about the developers and studios in the industry. Look no further than his piece on the team behind Psyonix, the team behind Rocket League for proof of that. If what I want is critique then the Jimquisition can fill me with more than I can handle. Jim Sterling is weird as all hell and I love that! He reads the world of videogames so well, and calls out some of the seedier elements in a fashion replicated by far too few in the 'journalism' sphere of video games.

The team at Kinda Funny are who I blame for my increasing disinterest with reading traditional pieces about video games. When Greg Miller and co walked away from the video game mega site that is IGN, I had to wrap my head around some of the most likable and interesting faces there going somewhere else. They had been toying with YouTube for a while, and The Gameovergreggy Show was already a mainstay in my week along with Podcast Beyond, so it seemed a bit weird for them to walk away from it all. But Greg was/is kind of an idiot and I liked that, plus Colin Moriarty had been writing some of the more interesting stuff at IGN like his 'History of Naughty Dog' series' so with him going with them it seemed kinda cool. It was cool. Really cool. They could do and say whatever they wanted and over time their opinions were held by me in much the same way that I held the opinions of my closest friends. Who cares about a snooty review. Colin said it was cool. Greg agreed. I like those guys so I'll probably like that thing they like too.

This is, I think, what so many YouTube kids have made a fortune out of. You can talk about personalities all day long, but I think people are attracted to authenticity. No one likes being preached to. We like the "real" (even when the real is super fake). YouTube has become a platform for Gaming voices in an unfiltered fashion for better or worse, and I think it's the best thing to happen to the damn thing. I can look up a million-and-one reviews of a movie and listen to them rant and rave about it. I can take or leave the opinions put forward but at least I know for the most part, they're pretty genuine. Most of them. Sometimes. But I can pick and choose now. I don't have to go to the same three or four websites. Now I can go to three or four reliable YouTubers instead, and that works for me.

I wish I was a school kid. I'd be a YouTube powerhouse! Probably…..maybe…..

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