There interview was delayed a little thanks to E3, but here it is with Hamish Black of Writing on Games.
I want to quickly apologize for how I sound and my less than stellar ability in asking questions in this one. At the time I thought I was normal and all right to go. Only during the editing did I realize how loopy on antibiotics I was.
I also want to make some observations on the changing nature of these interviews that isn’t appropriate to say in the official post. I started last year with James Portnow of Extra Credits because that was the earliest YouTube essay channel I knew of and have been working my way forward, chronologically, ever since. Thing is, we are rapidly approaching the present which has presented some problems I didn’t consider a year and a half ago when I began.
The closer I come to the present date the more difficult it is to find that hook about my interview subject. With nearly every interview last year I had someone on doing something completely different. There was a new and fresh angle to take with each person. That’s because they started when YouTube was far more of a wild west and any format could work, but newer critics are more and more falling into the formula. That’s not to knock them, it’s a formula because it works, but at the same time there isn’t much unique to talk about and I fear the interviews may end up sounding too much the same.
I actually had someone different in mind to invite on and Writing on Games was going to be next month, but upon rewatching the other person’s videos, I felt there wasn’t anything to talk about that hadn’t already been said. No unique twist, no hook as it were.
The other problem is as the potential subject’s start date becomes closer to the present, the less of a body of work they have to talk about. There’s one or two people at the end of my list of potentials I’d like to talk to, but I fear they simply don’t have the body of work to sustain a full-length interview.
All of this isn’t really a bad thing, unless you happen to be running a podcast interviewing YouTubers about their work. It just means I’ll have to move on to new topic, new mediums of criticism. But that’s not for a few months yet. I still have a handful to get through I think I can get a good interview out of. I only bring all of this up because of the recent struggles I’ve had getting at those interesting tidbits that flowed like wine in previous interviews.
That and I shouldn’t to an interview the day after its scheduled while still on medication.