But Why? - Game Video Production - Part 1 of ?

13 February, 2025. 1,390 words.

I saw Roger is making some game videos, and I remember Scopique posted last year about editing video game videos, which reminded me that I meant to write more about this topic myself. I’ve been relentlessly (some might say quixotically) chipping away at making and uploading videos to my YouTube channel for I guess nine years now, but I’ve never written much about it.

Part of that is my current philosophy to never try to help anyone on the Internet anymore unless I’m asked directly. It’s just better for everyone that way. Mainly me.

Another part is that I can’t help anyone with publicity or “the hustle,” which is arguably the most important aspect of content creation. I just know the technical stuff.

But as it happens, I’m writing this at a time when I’m completely burned out on playing and recording games, so this is a good time for me to do some reflection.

Why Did I Start Recording Games?

I think the original reason was because I thought it looked like a fun and interesting project, and somewhere around the 2014-2015 range I noticed the tools were readily available and it was easier than ever before.

I was inspired mainly by Masterkizz videos where he played Dark Souls for the first time. I really enjoyed watching how he tackled the same things I had, how he dealt with and overcame those problems, his ongoing analysis of the game systems, and to top it off it looked like he was having a lot of fun in the process. I was struck by how a kind of narrative arc developed in how he played the game from start to finish, almost like a documentary.

I’m still more-or-less copying that same style today.

It turns out that recording game videos brings together a lot of things that I’ve enjoyed doing all my life: Mainly playing games, talking about games, recording sound and using microphones and audio engineering, and tinkering with video. In olden times I did that kind of thing with boom boxes and VHS video tape decks and an Amiga Video Toaster. Now I use OBS.

I’ve been fascinated by recording gameplay in particular since the olden days of Quake, when a revolutionary new thing called FAQ-Proxy came along in 1997. (Note: It is a travesty that Crayola Clan is not listed on that page.)

My clan would record matches and share the demo recordings in IRC afterward to see the match from each others’ perspectives and, in the process, pick up new tips and learn to play better. Also it was the only way at the time for others to see the match if you weren’t in it.

Here is one of the first such FAQ-Proxy recordings to have ever existed on the Internet, at least on the East Coast of the US: A 2v2 match that I played in, which I converted from a demo file to video some years back.

I’m “Salamander” in that video, the one with the purple shirt on the red team, whose best moment of the match, charging into the enemy base with a haste rune to duel 1v2 and return the flag at a crucial time, was unfortunately not captured by the cameraman. Sigh.

Why Do I Keep Recording Games?

These are the main things I get out of recording game videos:

It’s an easy way to maintain a record of the games I play and what I think of them.
It lets me practice talking out loud, something I’ve never been particularly good at and otherwise don’t get much of a chance to do every day. (Most days I only interact with cats.) Essentially, it’s exercise for my vocal cords.
It lets me practice verbally constructing sentences in my head, something that does not come naturally to me at all. During the course of making game videos, I learned that I don’t have very good language recall. I’m constantly vexed by thinking of a concept I want to express but not being able to find the words that describe that concept. If you ever watch any of my videos, you may notice that I stop in the middle of sentences a lot. It’s either because I get distracted, or because I can’t think of the next word in the sentence, or both. One of the things that I’m constantly trying to work on is 1) noticing that I stopped in the middle of a sentence, 2) remembering to go back and finish the sentence. It’s probably the #1 thing that annoys me about my own videos (another is accidentally forgetting to mute the microphone if I cough).
It lets me practice creating something imperfect and putting it in front of the world on a regular basis. I’m an artist-type at heart and it’s mortifying to publish anything that isn’t perfect or that people might not like. Confronting that extremely normal and universal fear is a skill that needs constant practice, just like anything else.
I’m a programmer and there have been some interesting automation problems to solve in the process of developing my recording workflow. I’ve written a lot of scripts to automate things I don’t want to do manually, like rendering and uploading videos. The majority of the time, all I need to do is start and stop the recordings, and my scripts take care of everything else.
Recording has turned into a good way to filter out games that aren’t for me. If I find that I’m not enjoying recording a game, it’s usually one of two things: 1) I’m feeling reclusive and don’t want to talk*, or 2) the game isn’t engaging or challenging enough to require my full attention, and those games don’t last long in my library anymore.
I discovered late in life that it’s really fun to dramatically read text. When I was younger it seemed like a magic trick to hear people doing that. It’s kind of like singing. So I love any opportunity to read something on the game screen out loud, especially unvoiced dialog.
Uploading videos to YouTube makes a backup copy in case I have a local hard drive crash.

Things you won’t see on that list are:

Making money.
Growing a channel or a community.

I don’t know how to do that stuff. Early on, I thought it might be cool to make a few extra dollars a year doing something I enjoyed doing anyway, but then YouTube increased the monetization threshold to one thousand subscribers and that pretty much ended that. Also I don’t really like talking to people so “engagement” is rather difficult for me, which is the most important part of growth. I’d need to hire an intern to do that for me. It’s why I don’t stream on Twitch… I have little interest or patience for monitoring a live chat.

* I’m currently not in the mood for talking. That usually stops me from playing games altogether, because I don’t want to record gameplay without live commentary. Sometimes I do it anyway and record a post-game overdub later, but I find that wastes too much of my time. As I’m typing this, I’m pondering abandoning all of my principles and uploading commentary-free videos anyway just to keep things moving along. But if I were a viewer, I’d hate that, and I’m guided often by making videos I’d want to see.

How Do I Record Games?

That’s a big subject. But it gives me a chance to plug a video I made two years ago. I’ve changed some things since I made it (e.g. the type and location of my gaming desk) but it’s still pretty accurate to my current process.

When I made that, I wanted to start making more essay videos like that. When I look at it now, I’m embarrassed I ever thought it was a good idea to publish that. Ah well. Maybe the next one will be better.

For now, I’ll end with a list of software I use, roughly in order of most essential to most optional.

OBS Studio
FFmpeg
Avidemux
REAPER
Davinci Resolve

You can see a little bit about how I use those in the video. If you don’t want to watch a video (who can blame you), just plug that video link into NotebookLM and it’ll describe it.

Why Did I Start Recording Games?

Why Do I Keep Recording Games?

How Do I Record Games?

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