The transformation of a content creator to an institution

During my ongoing literature review I often discover interesting facts about things I’ve never thought about. Sometimes I can connect these facts with my own observations: The result is mostly a completely new idea why things are as they are. Maybe these ideas are new to you, too. Therefore I’ll share my new science based knowledge with you!

This week: This time, I think about the phenomenon that a creator of Let’s Play videos is regarded as a representative of a computer game.

Throughout the last years of watching and creating Let’s Play (LP) videos, I observed certain types of viewers showing a particular behavior across all YouTube channels I am subscribed to. The first group consists of viewers who play the game on their own and compare their gameplay with the content creator’s gameplay without taking into account that the content creator has a completely different approach. The second group consists of viewers who just started playing the game and regard the content creator as someone who can assist them with their initial struggles of successfully playing the game.

Creating LPs is a special form of playing a computer game as the player records and commentates the gameplay. In general, the main goal of content creators is to share their gameplay with others and to entertain their audience with an exciting commentary. The viewers, however, occasionally start to regard the content creator as a central fixed point for the way how a computer game is meant to be played. This especially becomes obvious when viewers start to compare their own performance with the YouTuber’s performance. Although it might be entertaining to compare the own accomplishments with a YouTuber, it neglects the fact that the content creator has a completely different approach to play the game than most of the viewers.

On average, a content creator releases one or two videos about a certain game per week. Each of those videos has an average length of about 30 minutes and hence the content creator accumulates a total gameplay time of one hour per week. The viewer, on the other hand, mostly has a completely different approach and plays the game for a much longer time per week, thus resulting in a much higher experience in playing the game.

The second group has a completely different view on the content creator and assumes that the content creator has internalized the knowledge encoded in the game throughout the process of creating LPs over a period of many weeks. In the end, they even start to ask the content creator questions how to successfully play the game. Although the content creator might know how to solve the viewer’s problem, the YouTuber is often achieving things in the game by trying different things, thus learning to play it by playing it. In addition, due to the fact that creating LPs is a very fragmented way of playing a game, content creators often have to relearn the controls of the game every time they start to record a new episode as they have played the game only for a couple of hours during a month.

In the end, both groups see the content creator as a reference point for their own performance and their own goals. The content creator ceases to be just another gamer or an entertainer. Instead, the content creator becomes to an institution for the game. This transformation provides the viewers with a positive feedback as they can compare their own performance with a central fixed point. Finally, they can get inspired by the LPs to train their skills and they can get positive feedback by comparing their outcomes with the content creator’s achievements.