10 years ago, on this day, I posted the first part of my Let's Play of Happyhouse, a custom level made for the indie puzzle game Deadly Rooms of Death, on my old YouTube channel BeethroBudkin07. It was far from my first foray into Let's Playing, but it was the first that didn't involve me literally pointing a 2009 digital camera at my TV screen. I mostly did this as a sort of personal archive of my playthroughs of DROD custom level packs that I was doing at the time.
Over the course of the next few years, I would go on to post nearly 800 videos on that channel. Pretty much all just me mumbling my way through commentary as I try to play through whichever niche indie game I was interested in that day. The fare mostly consisted of puzzle games, Boulder Dash clones, and platformer games. I had a handful of fans, mainly other DROD fans, who would tune in and watch me play through some of the community's forgotten gems and forgotten turds. I remember having a good amount of fun at the time making these videos. It was an easy way to put out something that people enjoyed. I ended up making a bunch of good friends through this, and even got to collab with some other YouTubers in the community here and there.
Mind you, this was hardly a successful venture. I never really got much higher than like 100-130 subscribers when I was still actively putting out videos. Though I have a bunch of Diamond Caves videos that blew up for some reason, my videos weren't exactly raking in Markiplier levels of interest. I was very much doing this only for the niche of people that wanted to see someone play through unknown games, or who wanted something more chill to put in the background. And that was fine with me.
However, the channel was last updated in 2020. It was my penultimate Subterra video. Since then, I never got around to uploading anything more. By that point, the channel was very much languishing; keeping it afloat was starting to feel like a constant effort. I was just too far removed from the community that had first propped up the channel years ago. And so I just stopped uploading to it.
What happened? Why did BeethroBudkin07 die as it did? I think the 10 year anniversary of the channel is as good a time as any to try and make sense of what happened here.
The Low Effort Content Dilemma
One of the first things you'll notice when you play any of these videos is that they are extremely lacking in editing and flashiness. I greet the viewer in a nonchalant voice, introduce the game I'm playing, and then go about the playthrough as normal. This is not really a purposeful stylistic choice. I was just doing what came naturally to me. Trying my best to voice my thought process as I played, filling the empty space with dumb quips, and just try to play the game. The only real editing I would do in these videos is a cursory review to make sure the audio levels were okay, and that I didn't accidentally say anything stupid. As I said earlier, it was very easy to put out, and it made people very happy to see me upload new videos.
It was content. And I unfortunately do mean that in a bad way.
A lot of fuss has been made over the years about low effort content on YouTube. About how some people will churn out tons of video with very little time to cook in the oven. Let's Plays at their peak in the early 2010s was considered by some to be such a thing. Reaction videos were one of the most widely hated forms of content for a time. And some people might even argue that video essays are falling into that trend now. And let's be honest... BeethroBudkin07 very much was low-effort content. That's what made it such a lucrative project for me, in terms of motivation.
You see, executive dysfunction plays such a massive part in my life. It's the silent killer that waits in the shadows, and always eventually catches up to anything I find enjoyable to work on. If you have ADHD, you're probably familiar with the trend in question: you start getting extremely into a new project, and it's all you can do, talk about, and breathe for a while. And then... something cuts you off for a moment. You come back, and everything has fallen apart. There is no interest left, and trying to get work done on the project is like pulling teeth. Sure, you can sit down and get a few hours of work done if you REALLY push yourself, but it takes so much effort it almost feels pointless.
The BeethroBudkin07 channel was an interesting counter to this problem. Yes, after I took a hiatus in 2017, the channel was already starting its death spiral. But I kept it going for many years after because it was a pretty easy project to churn out new updates for. Just play a game and record myself babbling, review it to make sure everything's fine, and then shoot it to YouTube. This is a loop that gets me back into gear pretty quickly. It's also a loop that can't really bear much weight without collapsing.
At some point however, I began getting frustrated with how cheap these videos were. I felt driven to punch up the editing, to give videos more polish, to use visual indicators to help highlight what I was talking about when I thought out loud about potential puzzle solutions. And that genuinely may have been the decision that killed BeethroBudkin07, above anything. The channel was only as engaging for me to keep working on because the effort to reward ratio was very skewed compared to most other ventures I had tried before. It allowed me to quickly finish a piece of content before my executive dysfunction could catch up and kick me in the shins. So if I introduce a lengthier editing process, like the one I tried to use for my last video to date, Subterra Prime #68... well the little bastard has plenty time to catch up.
I'd be lying though if I said the editing process was the only aspect of this that made me not want to continue BeethroBudkin07 as a project. It was also the fact that in hindsight... I am just not really happy with the kind of content I made back then. It's why I don't really link to it on this website. It's still there if you wanna experience the stupid shit I said back in like... 2015 (I said a lot of stupid things in 2015. 2015 me was stupid.) But I'm just not happy with it. These days, I have so much more respect for video essayists, people who have something of value to say. Meanwhile... BeethroBudkin07 just kind of lays bare a lot of my worst tendencies: barely audible mumbling, incoherent thought processes, an inability to fully finish voicing a thought for the viewer's sake. It just makes for a tedious viewing experience, and I seldom feel motivated to go back and rewatch these videos, even as background noise. And I feel like even at the time, there was a part of me that was aware of those issues, but trudged on and hoped for improvement. There were some, I'm sure. But it was marginal at best. It's overall just... empty calorie content.
The Conundrum of Structure and Archival
As stated earlier, one of the stated goals with my Let's Play channel was to act as an archive for my completion of DROD level sets (also known as "holds" in the community). This led to a strange dynamic between me and games: I felt like anytime I would play a game, I had to record it or I would lose out on the experience of me playing the game. This mentality followed me when I began doing streams between 2018 and 2023 (more on that later), and it was one that took me forever to truly shake off. It felt like if I didn't turn my gameplay into content, I was wasting it. Having fun that had no purpose.
How fucked up is it that I can't have fun without having to capture it?
I think this touches on something that a lot of people nowadays might experience, especially as social media has pushed us to increasingly make our very beings into commodities for others and data scrapers to consume. Turning our souls into content. (Shoutout to CJ The X's video on Inside) Everything is content. It's exhausting. You have nothing left for yourself; every moment is spent with the knowledge that it will be seen by others. It turns the moments you spend with a game into a performance. This doesn't just hold true for Let's Plays of course; even video reviews and video essays somewhat fall into that pit. Hell, even my blog posts do. You don't get to just enjoy a piece of media and let it sit with you; it becomes a matter of how to express to your audience how you felt about that thing.
The weird thing is, though... The structure of Let's Plays and streams led to me playing far more games than I would otherwise have. As I've outlined before, executive dysfunction is a pain when it comes to getting anything off the ground. When it comes to playing games, however, it was an even tougher tough sell. There was always something more valuable I could be doing than playing a game, and so it was seldom worth the energy to do so. But now, gaming had a purpose. It actually gave me an excuse to sit down and engage with games I never really got to truly sit down with. Games that I had malformed memories of at best. And through commentary, it allowed me to find the words to describe my own experience, and find a deeper enjoyment of them (or hatred, in some cases).
This is the conundrum that I am faced with, as someone who seems to enjoy structure, and preserving memories. I can try to give a purpose to an activity that I struggle to motivate myself to return to. This also applies to other forms of media as well, such as movie nights with friends, and album song-by-song ratings. These are structures that also gave me an excuse to engage with media that I had little interest or motivation in checking out by myself. They also had the negative side-effect of dissuading engagement with those forms of media outside the scope of those metrics. If I listen to an album without ranking it, then it's a waste of time as I'll have to listen to it again later. If I don't stream a game, then I ruin the first playthrough experience for viewers. If I don't watch a movie with friends, I'm not sharing that communal experience with them. Fun without purpose becomes a sin, and thus doing nothing becomes preferable to wasting a fresh experience.
Who's Watching Me?
At some point in 2018, as my output was slowing down on my YouTube channel, I started streaming on Twitch under the BulletBillTime name. It was a deliberate attempt to distance myself from the BeethroBudkin07 brand, for me to focus on other kinds of games than I'd typically play. Instead of DROD and other puzzley games, I started branching out more towards Nintendo, platformers, and the like. There was still slight overlap of course; I played Pikmin on both YouTube and my streams, for example. (Though on streams I was trying to push myself to beat the game in as few days as possible.) But in essence, it was a clean break from YouTube. A fresh start.
Predictably, the streams did very poorly. More often than not, I was talking to an empty room. That wasn't necessarily a bad thing though. It would be very similar to me just recording my Let's Plays, so I already had experience with filling in the void without audience interaction. Only difference was being in a more casual format, and longer form. There's still elements of performing for an audience (even if there is none), but it's more chill. It was fun in its own way!
And then, someone would show up in chat. Sometimes it's a friend, sometimes it's a stranger. The former tends to be pretty easy to work with, as the familiarity is there. However, the latter is where the best and worst parts of streaming come into play. When you get a new viewer, you're rolling the roulette in a sense. They might be someone who just kind of posts a few messages and vanishes. They might actually engage with what you're doing. They might be a troll. They might be someone who speaks a different language and doesn't know how to use Google Translate. They might be an asshole. And mind you, this was pretty much a solo affair for the most part; I didn't have any long-term regulars that were mod material, and even the handful of people I gave mod status to were simply not always around (I do get it; life happens.) So it was up to me to deal with that. And... depending on the day, having chatters will either be extremely rewarding, or weirdly exhausting. I was lucky as a nobody streamer to never really get haters; I had a handful of weirdos that asked dumb questions, but never full-on hate mobs. That's one of the better parts of being unremarkable, the trolls don't give a shit.
Of course, the public performance began to wear me out, little by little. The idea of sitting there for hours every week, waiting for chatters to pop up and spin the roulette on whether they'll be chill or oddly stressful, began to feel less tantalizing with time. I think one of the big moments that really set that anxiety in was around 2021, when there was an epidemy of hate raids on Twitch. Dipshits would set up bots that would spam queer streamers with hate messages, and follow-botting as well. It ended up requiring a whole set-up to lock down the stream until they would bug off. So you can imagine that my sorry ass with no frequent mods and very little planning was less than enthused by the concept of having to handle those things. It made me stop streaming for a while, as I waited for that whole mess to die down. After that, I ended up adding protections and cool-downs to avoid hate raids. It made a streamer that tried to raid me angry because I had a message cooldown and email verification on. It was all just too much to bother with. Why do this when I could just play games in a Discord call with friends?
My time streaming was kind of a notable catalyst for me not really feeling motivated to be a "content creator" anymore. The idea of being out there in the public eye, having to manage all this stuff, having to network and set up software and hardware, troubleshooting issues, all just to constantly find myself with an empty chat on 50% of streams... it was frustrating. Burnout was also a problem, as I frequently found myself in a loop of feeling like my life was dominated by streaming, with no room for anything else. Trying to find a balance between streams and other projects, only to have my hyperfixation for streams kick in for a while and make it impossible to think of anything else, then leading to burnout again. Then, by the time I feel ready to return, I end up losing the few regulars I had made along the way. But streams, just like the Let's Plays before, were really just junk food. Content, with a capital C. Unsubstantial fare that might be nice for quick entertainment, but wasn't creatively satisfying. So hyperfixating on them, and them only, was not good for me. I wasn't doing something I could feel genuinely proud of.
Post Mortem
In late 2022, after wrestling with my never-ending pile of projects for the umpteenth time, I made a thread on my Twitter stating that I was officially killing off a bunch of my projects, in an attempt to clear my plate of the several zombies in my To-Do pile. My YouTube and Twitch channel were among the victims. Although I had dipped my toes back on Twitch since then (never really making a full comeback though), and tinkered around with a good chunk of the other cancelled projects in the intervening time... BB07 has still not seen any activity since then. This is despite the fact that I have the final part of Subterra Prime edited and primed to be uploaded. I've wanted to upload it. And yet, I feel like I can't. Because then people would think I'm back. So I'd have to make a video saying that I was just tying up loose ends. All that effort for a 3 year old video of gameplay footage with subpar commentary. Just one more French Fry in the menu of junk food. And then I would want to upload the other things I've had on the backburner. And then I'll find myself wanting to continue this thing, because that's what always happens. I get a taste, and the hype comes back for a while. But like the last few times, it would sputter out all too soon, and I'd only end up further down the road, ending on another unsatisfactory note. It just... isn't worth the trouble. I feel like my time would be better spent on other projects.
I will say, I'm admittedly a bit torn on how to feel about the channel. Even though I don't feel like it was the best use of my time, I can't deny that it was fun in the moment. I got to experience things I wouldn't have really sought out otherwise. And it brought joy to many people. I do not want to come across like I'm not grateful for all the support I've received for those videos. I'm just... being honest with myself; this was never going to be something sustainable in the long run, nor was it something that I could look at and truly feel proud of.
I think one aspect of it that I haven't really touched on is that I'm a creative at heart, and those projects are reactive. I take someone else's work, and just filter it through my experience. It's still transformative, for sure, but not enough to feel worthwhile. Creating things is probably my biggest passion in life. Even though most of my work is found within pre-existing formats (custom levels, fanfictions, hell even my game is a recreation of an old standard with modern sensibilities). There's still a vision, informed by the amalgamation of all the things I've taken in during my life. One that differs from that of the original authors. And it never really felt like Let's Plays were the path for that vision to be expressed.
Still... I do think that I learned from that experience. No time spent on something you enjoy is truly wasted. Even if you look back and think you could've done better, you still gain knowledge and wisdom. The only thing that truly counts as waste is time spent doing nothing. Time spent thinking about what you should do, but never actually spent doing something. Again, it may have been easy content to make, but I still made it. It may be below my standards now, but it was a finished product, in a way. Which, for all my grand talk of having higher standards now, kind of lays bare that those higher standards have not yielded much fruit. I need to give myself more grace to be underwhelming, because at least that leads to something getting done.
With that all said, I don't think a return to Let's Plays is in the cards, though. I'm kind of done with that stage of my life. BeethroBudkin07 was a product of me from 10 years ago. Every time I think of bringing it back, this fact stares me in the face, and it goes back into the shadows. Even the stuff I recorded for it in 2020 feels out of date now. It might be because these are things I made before I fully figured out my identity. It might be because it's not something I feel much pride in anymore. Whatever the reason, it's just kind of old hat at this point. I think I'm fine with that channel being dead for good, and perhaps something else will take its place in due time.
Of course, it's always hard to definitely kill off a project. Who knows what will come in the future. Maybe I'll cap off that Subterra Prime playthrough. It does feel cruel to leave it so close but so far to finished. But I don't think anyone should expect a revival. I can't say never of course, but for now... I want to try new things. I think in that path lies something more engaging, more exciting for me. And I really do think it will make me happier as a result.
I'm grateful for the time I spent as BeethroBudkin07. And now that I've allowed myself to look back on that project from a decade ago, I can finally put it to rest, and move on to greener pastures. To anyone who came here from that channel, that community, thank you for the support through those years. I will always be thankful for that.
So... What Are You Doing Now?
Since I stopped uploading to YouTube, I started making a puzzle game named PuzzBlocc, one that was inspired by an old favorite of mine from my childhood, Puzzlic Advanced (itself a clone of an older game called Puzznic). That project saw its own rise and fall of interest, now sitting in a close-to-finished-but-still-needing-polish phase that makes it near impossible to pick up again. Still, it's something I have a lot of pride in. And I do think that actually finishing it is within the realm of possibility. Which is not something I could say of my Let's Play channel, since there's always more things to play. It feels manageable. It feels doable. And that's refreshing.
Aside from that, I've mostly been holed up on Tumblr, hyperfixating on Life is Strange of all games, drawing art and writing some fanfiction for whatever I'm currently into (mostly Life is Strange these days, really). It's a cozy life. Frankly, there's a part of me that feels like I was probably always meant to be some queer dweeb on Tumblr, rambling about whatever their heart wants, and fangirling over ships. Sure, I don't really get much interaction on there, but I've made some good friendships already. Besides, having a quiet little corner to just ramble about whatever I want is nice. Hell, that's why I made this website to begin with.
I've also been toying with making a Video Essay channel. It would give me a better structure for voicing my thoughts, allowing me to discuss topics I love and finding new lens through which to appreciate them. It's been tough getting anything off the ground for the time being, because again, executive dysfunction is hell. And also, the standards I have for a video essay are pretty daunting. To kind of combat this issue, and push me to write more, I've started making blog posts on this site instead. For now, I actually think this format might be better for me. It gives me a looser structure for voicing thoughts, one that doesn't need to be rigid and burdened with intensive research. It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to be coherent enough. And it scratches that itch of self-expression that I never fully got with Let's Plays. And hey, who knows? Maybe some of these posts could be turned into a video essay someday. I know my previous post on Life is Strange 1 could make for a good video. But I won't burden myself with the expectation of turning all these thoughts into videos. I don't need to shackle myself to the content mill anymore. I can just live my life.
Something I feel like I haven't allowed myself to do in ages.
-Billie (formerly known as BeethroBudkin07)
| Feeling: | Contemplative |
|---|---|
| Listening: | Some Are Lonely - This Is What Remains |
| Watching: | Bringle's Paper Mario Challenge videos |
| Playing: | N/A |
| Reading: | The Tomb of Time by SunnyLucy31 (Life is Strange, The Locked Tomb and Percy Jackson crossover fic) |