Mr Biffo of Digitiser (who I am a Patron of here on Patreon) posted an interesting (and slightly sad) article earlier, on the subject of creating things for people to enjoy.
Biffo was concerned, among other things, that he was spreading himself too thin between his Digitiser 2000 website, which was originally intended as an attempt to recapture the magic of Digitiser on Teletext, and his new YouTube channel, where he has been greatly enjoying putting together both his full-length "Digitiser: The Show" episodes and his more recent short-form content.
Biffo's concerns stem from something all content creators tend to bang their heads on at some point, which is whether or not you're doing something "for the numbers", or if you're doing it "for the love". At some point you need to contemplate whether what you're doing is a business or a hobby, because increasingly in this oversaturated modern world of free expression, it seems impossible to do both.
Treat something as a hobby and you run the risk of stagnating in terms of "growth"; yes, you may well get a loyal core audience and be incredibly grateful for them, but there often seems to be something of a "glass ceiling", as Biffo describes it. I sometimes feel a bit like this with what I do — my projects are much smaller scale than the various forms of modern Digitiser are, but I still find myself struggling to reach simple milestones like, say, breaking $100 a month here on Patreon.
Treat something as a business, however, and you risk sucking all the joy out of it, making it become "just a job", and in the worst case scenario something you absolutely hate. This is something we regrettably see every day with professional games journalists, who increasingly seem to churn stuff out with absolute resentment for their audience (who, in turn, become defensive, and thus the whole cycle continues to worsen) and professional YouTubers, who it seems we're increasingly seeing suffering from complete burnout and exhaustion.
"It gives me respite from what I do for a living, it's a place where I have creative freedom, and I probably wouldn't want to rely on it for the entirety of my income," writes Biffo of his various Digitiser projects. "I think that would place too much pressure on it, and mean I'd end up tailoring my content for views. And I've never really been one for watering down my own voice."
I feel exactly the same way. The reason I enjoy doing what I do so much at the moment is the creative freedom I have, and the fact that I'm not beholden to things like embargoes, publication schedules and the whims of a prissy, stick-up-the-arse editor-in-chief who won't allow me to cover certain games that there's a proven hunger for fair coverage of because they offend his delicate little sensibilities and might make him look bad to his super-rad hyper-woke little friends.
Ahem, sorry, got a bit off the point there. Anyway, yes. I do what I do because I enjoy it. My day job isn't unpleasant, but it is boring, totally bereft of creativity and fairly soulless, and as such the time I get to work on MoeGamer, YouTube and Atari A to Z is precious to me. I know that if I was in a position where I needed to tailor all those projects' content to clickbait views, I wouldn't be nearly as happy, and thus I'm thankful for the freedom I have.
Of course, that doesn't mean I wouldn't immediately jack in my day job if I won the lottery. Were I to suddenly find myself with "fuck you" money, I would most certainly quit the day job, and devote more time to these creative projects. With the money to be self-sufficient, however, I'd be free to continue doing what I do now, the way I do now; I'd just have the time to do it more, and better.
Ah well. It's nice to dream sometimes, isn't it. Go tell a favourite creator (it doesn't have to be me!) that you appreciate what they do today, because sometimes it's just nice to hear a simple "I enjoyed that, thank you".
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