Image from ProZD Plays Games YouTube channel, used with permission
Over my middle school years, I saw YouTube go from a place where people posted funny skits and AMVs and Avatar: The Last Airbender episodes in three parts to a place where people would upload videos of themselves playing a video game. And I in my thirteen-year-old wisdom thought that was the dumbest move ever. Why wouldn’t you just play the video game yourself? I thought. And won’t freely putting an entire video game online destroy its ability to make money in the future?, not quite seeing the irony in holding both of these thoughts in tandem.
I did not watch PewDiePie or Markiplier those days, instead spending my time on Pokemon forms where people recorded their gameplay in extremely creative but also extremely convoluted ways (drawing comics that spanned hundreds of pages, taking screenshots and using them to build an entire character arc over multiple games, writing original stories dictated or inspired by in-game runs) or, you know, playing video games myself. But as life got busier and games got one hundred percent more expensive for me (because my parents weren’t buying them for me anymore), the scales fell from my eyes and I saw the light of Let’s Play videos.
For a minute, I found myself on the peripheries of a few Twitch communities. I would occasionally tune into my favorite Kingdom Hearts YouTuber, lured by the engagement bait of community-made Kahoots (now Blookets) based on Kingdom Hearts trivia, and I stumbled into a duo whose bread-and-butter were long graveyard shift streams. They were slowly making their way through the entire Kingdom Hearts series (are you seeing a trend), and I would put on their five hour long VODs on my lunch breaks or as I tinkered around my kitchen. During one of my spring breaks, I gave myself a treat and stayed up for their entire stream, getting to engage in the chat live as they played through one of my favorite entries. I never was involved enough in either community for anyone to know my name, and soon enough I was captured by something else and never quite made it back to either of these streamers.
More and more, though, I am finding that there are some games I prefer to consume via Let’s Play model, specifically the YouTube model—a bit distanced from the audience. I always have wanted to understand what was going on in Ace Attorney, and watching playthroughs has both unlocked that knowledge for me and made me thankful I wasn’t the one driving the car, as I know I wouldn’t enjoy trying to figure out the logic puzzles. I had similar feelings towards the Danganronpa series, which I was delighted to see on ProZD Plays Games (which has become my go-to channel) since the titular ProZD is a seasoned voice actor and goes all-out voicing these wacky characters. I have zero interest in playing horror games, but I got deeply invested in their playthrough of Telltale’s The Walking Dead series with their friend Marie, who screamed as much as I would if I had played the game. I’m still holding out hope that I’ll find some decent Fire Emblem: Three Houses and Persona 5 Royal playthroughs as those games are simply too long for me to even entertain playing on my own time.
I still don’t fully understand the complexities of why copyright laws allow videos like these to exist, and there are still games that I am glad I got to play on my own, like Disco Elysium which has infected me so deeply that I finished the game and immediately said, “Okay, time for round two!” But I enjoy experiencing the story of games that I don’t have the energy/time/money/availability to play, and I enjoy having it in such an accessible manner. So I guess everyone else was right; it just took me a decade to catch on.
Alex Johnson (‘19) is a high school English teacher in Massachusetts. She spends her days being an uncool adult who enjoys reading romance novels and explaining niche rhythm game strategies.
