2024 05 26

Pedestrian overpass through the trees. East Nashville, Tennessee. April, 2024. © Clayton Hauck

Happy Sunday. Happy holiday weekend.

Are you someone, like me, who watches people play video games? It’s quite strange to think that millions of people watch other people play video games instead of doing so themselves. Why is this the case? Entertainment, obviously, but I do it largely for time reasons. I’ve gotten into playing a few games in my adult life, but because my work schedule is inconsistent and because now my downtime is also spent working, I just don’t have much time for games.

One of the games I did get quite into actually playing myself was Cities: Skylines. The sequel came out recently and I found myself really wanting to buy and play it. Perhaps luckily for me, the release was a disaster and the game was rushed out before it was completed in hopes of a big payday for the company. Fans of the game were quite upset about how everything went down and much of the community which grew up around the first game and posted a crazy amount of content covering it has not moved over to C:S2, which is probably also good for my productivity.

That said, the core of the game does have some rather cool features and you can see the potential for perhaps a future popular and amazing game. Whether or not the developer sticks with it and continues to spend money on further developing and whether the fans stick with it and wait for improvements to be made is all to be seen. This morning, I found myself watching a forty minute video covering these developments and the conversations between fans and the company making the game and found it interesting that this is, first of all, content that even exists and, secondly, content I find myself actively interested in when you consider I’ll likely never even play this game myself.

Thinking on it so more, as a kid I recall subscribing to magazines which covered the development of video games. I was excited to read about what games were coming out and what games were popular or highly rated, so it’s not like this is something that hasn’t been done before. All that said, it’s another example of how all media is slowly transforming away from the structured, official, companies releasing products covering things to people on youtube with a following self-producing content which covers these things.

Anyway, I still have a free hour to kill so back to youtube I go to see what adventures await me.

-Clayton