I’ve been doing content creation since the beginning of the pandemic, and it started off for me with such high hopes despite the bleak circumstances. I hope to impart some wisdom onto you as to why I continue to make things for this website, my YouTube channel, and why sometimes creating things requires a unique brand of positivity. Things are not always easy for someone who is any sort of creative. We do a lot of grunt work for something which is not valued by the almighty dollar in the same way that things like commerce or industry are. Yes, I’m basing my entire theory of socioeconomics on the zoning tools in Sim City. Even in school my work felt more valued than it is as a mediocre content creator though.

School is one place where my love for geeky things started. I was always captivated sitting in on classes in college learning about art, science, history, and technology. I actually majored in psychology as a college student but graduated with a social science degree because I just loved learning about how culture works, which is sort of where the whole geek connoisseur aspect of my life started. School is good, and I think people shouldn’t play too many games that they let their studies fall behind.

It’s so easy to look at big content creators and think that there’s a lot of glamor in that lifestyle. I’m glad I started, but for reasons other than glamor or fame at this point. The real reward from making articles and videos about games has been the reward of creating something tangible instead of consuming content without creating it. It’s just been nice to create things. I look at the numbers for my website and videos all the time to see what people are interested in, and it always makes me smile to see somebody watch an old video or read an old article about something I had fun with but which wasn’t super high on the search engine algorithm.

Yoshiko Yamamoto’s Inspirational Art

I want to share more about this creativity mindset I’ve been having too. I’ve been watching a show on PBS called Craft in America, because 1. I’m old and like watching documentaries on PBS now more than playing video games, and 2. it’s a great show about working artists in my country. I watched one episode that covered a Japanese woman named Yoshiko Yamamoto in Washington who made little woodblock style greeting cards and had basically started an extremely successful business with it. You can watch a clip from the episode on the PBS website here if you’re wondering what on Earth I’m talking about, VIDEO: Craft America Yoshiko Yamamoto Creating Block Prints. (Note: This has a super strong cozy aesthetic if you’re into that sort of thing.)

It was inspiring to me to see somebody take an idea and carry it out without worrying about how much money it would make or if it had been done before. Art should really be about creating something new, even if it means taking something old and remixing it for a new audience. Maybe that sounds paradoxical, but this little documentary made me realize something I hadn’t been able to acknowledge enough, which is the joy of creating things because it is enjoyable.

Expert in a Dying Field, the Death of Gamers

A couple of years ago, I heard this indie band from New Zealand called The Beths. They wrote a song called Expert in a Dying Field. It’s a great song that was probably written for me in all honesty. It’s also written for you, the gaming artist and content creator. I highly recommend you listen to it if you’re getting fed up with content creation. It transformed how I think about what I’m doing with my videos and writing, yet it’s just this twee little indie rock love song. I almost had the chance to meet these guys when they came through my town, but I’d only read they were here two days afterward as I was discovering the band. What are the odds? Anyway, if you’re making gaming content you’re an expert in a dying field per the title of this song. Gaming content creation is dying. Everybody likes to blame artificial intelligence, but I think it’s just a lack of creativity.

What’s causing this lack of creativity? Is it the massive heaps of unoriginal games or is it the money hungry content creators to blame? People are just having fun, so it doesn’t seem right to judge the people behind it themselves. That’s a cop out in my opinion. I think maybe it’s just the inherent nature of being human. Humans are interesting, but how interesting? Are we interesting enough that we can live within an algorithm? Probably not. At some point you’ve just got numbers feeding numbers.

It’s one reason I’ve been thinking about going in a different direction with my own platform. Maybe the time to keep worrying about what’s going to turn a profit is over. It gets tiring after a while to make things you don’t want to make. I’d like to think this fact is the blessing that eventually forces us to make the things we want to make. Gaming is a real brutal niche for a writer or video maker or what have you. It’s an oversaturated niche. And unfortunately it has become really easy for me and others to fall into the cookie cutter molds of what being a gaming content creator/artist is.

And if we’re not making gaming content or any sort of creative endeavor because we love it then why are we even doing it at all? I don’t know about you, but I would rather create a hundred clunker gaming videos or articles that were pleasant or off topic than ever make a video about something that I didn’t care about. Yet I’ve done it and so have many. I wish I had learned my lesson sooner.

Conclusion

Art is art. If you want to make it, just make it. It really doesn’t matter what other people think, but don’t get caught in the cookie cutter molds. Don’t make it because other people are making it. Be like Yamamoto and just make it because it’s a good idea. You might be glad you did.

Thanks for reading Mr. Dave Pizza! This article was not AI generated, it was a stream of consciousness. I am working on ideas for a new podcast, which may or may not happen, but this is the first in a series of writing for it. I hope you enjoyed it or found it interesting. Feel free to leave a comment and subscribe to my YouTube channel!