Reflecting on Streaming & Setting Some Goals
Streaming on Twitch is the first “creative” hobby I’ve worked on in a long time that’s stuck with me. The experience of learning Monster Hunter onstream from kind folks kept me going initially, and ever since then I’ve been surprised and encouraged by just how much I still have to learn and how many kind folks want to hang out with me as I’m doing it. This coming April will mark three years since I committed to streaming the majority of the week, and that milestone along with some recent thoughts on my broadcasts have me in the mood for some reflection.
Over those years there’s been times where I’ve felt more ‘in-tune’ or ‘a-little-off’ with what I’m doing on Twitch - a personal highlight being our journey through MH4U for the first time with its tough challenges, neat new fights, and custom-quest multiplayer nights along the way. That period of time on the stream felt especially in-tune, and it helped me find something to work on each night that resonated with folks even during the downer year that was 2020. There’s been other times where I’ve fallen out of touch with what I think might be fun to do onstream with Monster Hunter, with the most recent being the last few months. I’ve bounced around from game to game without getting fully drawn into any particular entry, and in general I’ve had a bit tougher time showing up some nights with the kind of ‘drive’ to learn for myself and entertain folks with onstream.
I think the last time I felt like this I just bounced between a few entries until lucking-into beginning a game that “stuck.” This time I’ve been feeling pretty worn out from life’s busy routine in-general as of late, so I did something I haven’t done in those 3 years of committed streaming and I took a week off. Not a week of travel, visiting family, moving house, or anything else besides rest and reflecting on what it was I want to be doing going forward.
Admittedly most of the past week was spent allowing myself slower paced days compared to the norm - I found binge-watching all of HBO’s Silicon Valley to be relaxing ‘junk-food’ - but that space brought some clarity of thought with it too. That clarity and a bit of journaling and reflection let me narrow down some goals I want to practice going forward with the stream this year:
Try to focus more on the task at hand:
Streaming is always going to be a bit of a multitasking bonanza; It generally calls for playing a video game, reading a chatroom, and keeping an eye on the technical aspects of a broadcast all at once. I’ve gotten used to handling those “baseline operations” over the years, but this winter I’ve begun noticing myself frequently trailing off in the middle of a thought or fudging my way through a monster hunt instead of thinking about ways to approach it intelligently with whatever weapon we’re using at the time.
I want the stream to be a place where I can focus on learning about how to use the different weapons against the various bosses in a way that’s active and hopefully ever-gradually-improving. And I also want our stream to be a place where in-depth discussion can be had between folks who’re willing to debate the finer points and come out the other side having enjoyed themselves even if still with difference in opinion.
To better enable both of those things, I want to spend more time focused on just the task at hand: be it hunting or a discussion. I want to frame hunts through the lens of “let’s learn and practice these specific aspects with this weapon” which means talking more about gear preparation, where to be attacking the monster, and what moves fit into the boss’s movements and patterns.
Realistically, this will mean not always engaging in the deepest conversations and thoughts while in the middle of actively hunting, but likewise when an in-depth discussion arises I want to give my full attention to the melding of MH-minds occurring. To that end, I’ve already made a new “chatting” scene in OBS that I want to begin organically switching to during the course of streams as we talk about the many minutiae of Monster Hunter. I wouldn’t have thought that a “just chatting” scene with chat onscreen would ever be a part of our stream, but for the purposes of attempting to foster better discussion in a way that’ll preserve those conversations in the long run I think it makes a lot of sense.
Be cognizant of what conversation and tone I bring:
Building off the realization that I don’t always do a good job of fully participating in conversations onstream, I think I need to be more mindful of my own conduct and how it guides chat one way or another through the night. I’ve heard the phrase “chat is a reflection of the streamer” thrown around with various degrees of sincerity, but I think a variant of that idiom I do believe is that the chatroom is a product of the streamer.
By this I mean that being “in the drivers seat” of the stream has an outsized effect on how small shifts in my tone/interaction ripple out to the entire conversation, chatroom, and broadcast. Maybe I’m having a rough day, maybe the hunt I’m in isn’t going well, maybe we’ve been struggling on something tough for hours, but I know if I fire off a snarky quip into the beginning interactions of a conversation it’ll carry a different tone than if I’d taken a moment and given more thought to my response.
It would be unrealistic to hold myself to never having some sort of “negative effect” in the room - it’s infeasible for anyone to be that kind of consistent while also being genuine - but also I don’t think it would be healthy for me to try and extrapolate or assign a value of “good” or “bad” to every one of my interactions. That’s not my goal, just to be mindful of the effect my tone can have on the room and keep that more front of mind.
Alongside that I’d like to work at focusing on asking questions and listening/reading the answers instead of spending so much time finding ever-more-specific ways of describing my own thoughts on the series. There’s a whole lot more opinions and experiences from chat members we could all be hearing about and discussing than what’s up in my brain. And I know for a fact it can get old hearing my opinions repeated for the umpteenth time, I can annoy even myself with them when repeated enough truth-be-told. Being quicker to listen and slower to speak is something I’d like to focus on in life overall, which is tough to do without gradual work in a bunch of different areas - I’ll try my best to make how I act onstream one such area.
Plan for satisfying payoffs and tailor the pace as we go:
Something I noticed upon sitting down and analyzing the last 6 months of the stream was “huh, we haven’t really done anything exciting in awhile have we?” I don’t mean there haven’t been intense moments or things that have challenged me, but it’s also been awhile since we did something like solo Gogmazios, do a naked hunt, or have a really satisfying goal that myself and chat can enjoy the leadup to into a satisfying payoff.
Part of the reason we haven’t gotten to do something like that in awhile is because I’ve been playing through almost exclusively early-portions of MH games. First low-rank in MH Freedom, then low-rank in MH3U, low & high rank in MH World, and now low-rank and high-rank again in MH Rise on PC. I’ve been having trouble settling into which game I’d like to focus on, but I also think this is a fundamental failure on my part to structure the stream “schedule” well and then see it through.
Our stream doesn’t really have a proper schedule - I don’t even start at the same time most nights - but if I had to summarize how I want things laid out it would be split up into overarching ‘seasons’ roughly 3-6 months long each. Those ‘season’ blocks will focus on playing through a sizable chunk of a Monster Hunter game, give an overview and get a sense for what makes that stretch of each game unique, and then try to culminate in finishing a challenging or otherwise meaningful section in a neat way. Along the way there ought to be a mixture of progressing through the game, collecting gear for fun while building out equipment to draw from, and doing challenges for the sake of learning or showcasing something unique in a memorable way (also just for the fun of doing something stupid-hard if I’m being honest.)
Straight-up, I think I’ve butchered this essential pacing for the last 6 months. There’s been a bit of progression scattered across four different titles, an absolutely oversized amount of collection, and little-to-no memorable challenges. Like I said above, that’s owed to the early parts of the games we’ve been playing through, but it’s also up to me to tailor our pace and goals in order to balance those different aspects of a Monster Hunter game. It’s been difficult to feel like doing all of those things when not quite “clicking” with what we’ve been playing - but I think pacing things well has a large enough impact on the stream for me to set my own indecision aside and spend more time planning and following-through.
Right now we’ve been revisiting Monster Hunter Rise on PC, which is the first time I’ve replayed a MH game fully - much less only 6 months since initially completing it. Truthfully, while it’s been fun to experience an entry I love again with the fidelity PC gaming provides, and a huge joy to finally play alongside friends who favor the PC platform, I’ve had a hard time with sinking effort into the same content we already cleared so recently. Where I thought I might re-play the entire game from scratch just like we did on the Switch, now I’m thinking I may try to move on to something fresh in the series sooner rather than later.
It’s tempting to just ‘peace out’ and jump to yet another game, but I think for the sake of continuing to enjoy Rise with others and to provide a satisfying payoff to our PC-MH visit I’ll dedicate time to reaching Rise’s endgame and experiencing the new event quests that I didn’t get to on Switch. I hear they’re pretty hard, I bet they’ll teach me some new things about MH Rise, and I hope it’ll make for a well-paced ending to our time in Rise. Thinking through pacing like that will hopefully be more satisfying to watch, and I think even if it’s not always easy I’ll find myself feeling more fulfilled through balancing those different aspects too.
Not playing what’s new just because it’s new:
This past year was my first time streaming through a new Monster Hunter game on-release with Rise on the Switch. It was also the first time I got in contact with the publishers and community managers behind upcoming games to get early streaming access - and you know what, I’ve realized I don’t think it’s my preferred way to experience a Monster Hunter game.
Some of my fondest memories from streaming have been learning my way through MH-content that chat members have recollections about and can tell their stories with. The older games are full of memories, well-learned information (hard as it may be to find sometimes) and drama long-past-by. No one I hope gets into heated Twitter arguments about the shift in design ethos between MHFU and MH Tri anymore, but you’re guaranteed to find your fair share of opinions about MH Rise’s new Defender-weapon-update. Between the seemingly-constant stream of “drama” to have opinions on if you care about following the details of new releases, friends who may be worried about spoilers, and the new trend of drip-feeding out content after launch it can feel burdensome to try and contribute to the online frenzy of a new release.
I’ve been weighing the burden of that frenzy against the excitement and buildup of playing through a fresh new Monster Hunter game, and I think my personal scales are beginning to tip in favor of focusing on playing whatever Monster Hunter feels good at the time, rather than trying to schedule an entire year’s worth of “seasons” and their above-mentioned pacing around releases, updates, and events designed more and more to be near-constant. I don’t think that cadence really suits me or the stream, so I’m seriously considering hunkering down into an older entry in the series this year and sitting out of the new Sunbreak expansion’s release this summer. Now I’m saying this having only seen a fraction of the exciting things the MH-team has in store for that game, so I may still change my mind. That aside, the experience of playing through a new game launch differs enough for me from the cozy playthroughs of long-since-wrapped titles that I think it might be worth waiting it out and enjoying things later on, at our own pace and without those other pressures.
I’m not under the impression that any of these goals will become completely natural overnight - I have several years-worth of nightly habits to contend with after all. My week’s break also didn’t allow me all the time I needed to re-introduce exercise into my routine, revert back to a monophasic sleep cycle, or complete the numerous home-improvement projects Anné and I have been putting off around our apartment. Oh well.
- That’s just life, I think. We rarely are afforded the time to take things one after another and truly without distraction. A week with some clarity has helped me sight some goals I’d like to work on piecemeal each day, and hopefully the nuance and balance those foster will be worth grappling with in practice. Thanks for reading my thoughts, and wish me luck.
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Mike