Let's Remake Let's Play! A discussion on Reforming/Remaking the LP Rules

The big thing with all the scattered video threads for me is that a lot of the games that are being video LPed just don't have enough to really talk about. Someone playing through Castlevania or Mega Man (or insert game with no audience participation) is great to watch, but there's nothing really to talk about, aside from maybe different strategies. For those sorts of LPs a megathread would definitely have me take notice and check them out, rather than attempting to look through the scattered threads.

On the other hand you get stuff like Kalir's Bastion LP, which definitely deserves its own thread since there's audience participation, and enough information he's giving out to foster discussion, and for those being confined to a megathread would be a shame.

So basically if you have a game that people will actually have things to talk about and participate in, make a dedicated thread, otherwise I think it should go into a megathread.

pretty much this.

Kalir's Bastion LP also has a fair number of screenshots, and is the closest to a hybrid LP as I've seen here. I'd still call it a video LP, but the forum-side presentation is leaps and bounds over other video LPs here.

There are a lot of video LPs that would suffer from getting stuffed into a megathread. There are a lot that would benefit, and the current micro-LP thread is never used for video LPs.

I just think the best way to handle it it to have the option and let the LPers figure out what works best for them. But I would like to see more stand-alone video LP threads and fewer "here's my youtube page" threads. We could just have a mega thread with a list of LP channels for that sort of thing. (we should probably have that anyhow stickied here like we do for other lists on other boards)

I'm not entirely sure how tossing a link into a massive thread with dozens of other different games makes it easier to take notice then an individual thread. Especially if you come to the party later. But that's a personal preference, I imagine.

What I really wanted to respond with, though, is that I'm not entirely sure ANYONE truly wants to just toss out videos and not have discussion about them. Even the most linear and non-customizable of games can have a healthy discussion about the goings-on, and just having these shoved into a megathread can make that confusing, if not stifled.

Even though I was running G Gen as a mostly linear, persona-choice affair (because not many people wanted to participate...), the best parts of the thread were when there was spontaneous discussion of various Gundam series. They sadly didn't last very long, but I was still happy to get a few pages of not just me posting more screenshots.

Personally, I would continue doing independent threads just in case I can trigger this spontaneity again, with the exception of any one-shot videos I may do, which sure. I'd toss into either a megathread or into the micro thread.

If there's going to be a choice, then that's fine. But there should also not be some emphasis that JUST because it's video, it should be buried in a massive thread with every other one. Currently, if I want to go back and find any non-micro, non-megathread LP, it's pretty easy to find it in the list. It's pretty easy for a new user to look at the completed list to find anything else they may have missed that looks interesting. But it's really hard to do this with the combined threads, because even if the user in question has an index and updates it regularly, you need to even know what that user might be akin to doing, or else you're just looking at multiple locations on a lark.

While I'm not opposed to having a "dump" for random videos, they're certainly not easy to come back to later and find something you might have been interested in, and are only really effective for active following.

Signal-to-noise. This is mostly true with the channel threads. As several others have mentioned, I am more likely to look at The Big Thread of Video LPs than I am to check out every single Bob's Video LPs thread. It would serve the secondary function of acting as an index to TT YT channels.

No one is suggesting, I think, that all or even most video LPs need to be quarantined into their own thread. If it were up to me, I'd say the litmus test is whether you are doing the LP for TT or for YT -- which is completely up to the author. There's a definite difference, though.

Basically this. And I'm not saying or suggesting that it's up to the forum or the falselogic to decide whether an LP is worth its own thread or not, but the author. Like if someone decides to do a straight video LP of Mega Man 2 then it probably doesn't warrant its own thread, but if the LPer decides that he has some creative spin on it (like having the audience give them challenges or something), then they can instead make a dedicated thread for it.

To be fair, the difference, as I see it, is basically this:

Let's say for the sake of argument that I want to see if someone has LPed Mega Man 2 on Talking Time, because I'm interested in doing something interesting with that/am really a big fan of Mega Man 2 and want to watch LPs of it all day/I never played it, and am interested in seeing how it looks/whatever other reason. The easiest way to find this out is to look at the queue thread, since it lists every LP that has run in it's own thread. If I don't see it there, then I would have to guess and dig through the megathreads, which I am unlikely to do; I would just assume we've never had one.

You can say that the video one will be maintained, or the current individual ones will be, but I'll just point out that the microgames megathread hasn't been updated since 2011. Considering that's a thread that only allows one microgame at a time, as opposed to this theoretical video megathread which is proposed to be a dumping ground for all videos, I'm not super confident about that...!

In other words, the difference is that having one thread for all updates may theoretically be easier in order to follow a currently running one, but they are far less useful for archival purposes. On top of the difficulty of starting and maintaining conversation about the game in question.

[EDIT:] Oh, also. If one is worried about the signal-to-noise ratio, then a megathread is kind of worse at that then individual threads. Afterall, you need to wade through every post in order to find the updates you are interested in, as opposed to only looking at the thread titles you are interested in.

I think what it comes down to is you often get what you put into a thread. If you only want to use TT as a place to dump links to new updates then I wouldn't be surprised when you end up getting very little feedback. There just isn't the audience here to really drive many LP on more than passion; in their absence you need to make the thread - not just the videos - provocative if you want comments. This is true for any LP, but I think even more-so for video ones.

The reason I don't like these personal "YouTube" threads is because I feel they try and avoid the problem of having an audience by putting the focus on the YouTube channels rather than the forum. I don't mean this to be a shot at YouTube LPs (or the people who have created these threads), but I feel that isn't the best use of anyone's resources. You get less readers, the TT LP readers might miss your work, and everyone else doing single-thread LPs is having their LPs bumped down by threads which are poor at drawing new readers into the forum. Again, I don't want to make it seem like it's killing the forum or anything (realtalk: it's not), but that doesn't mean we can't do better.

The idea of creating a YT Megathread is not meant to be THE solution, it's meant to be a compromise between those who don't want to create new threads for their videos and those would (like me) feel like a bunch of disparate threads is not the best way to present LPs to the TT audience.

If people are worried about the moderation in the YT thread, I would personally promise to keep it updated. I feel that strongly about this.

I think It's more important to have LPs be readable as they are happening than having an archive for later. And if we have an updated OP there's no reason an LP would be "lost"

To be clear, I am not opposed to the megathread. I don't know if I would use it, other then if I have some one-shot that I don't want to make a thread for, but that's not to say that it doesn't have it's place.

And if there's going to be only one megathread, then at least that's only 2 places that someone needs to look at if they're searching the archives. It's still less efficient then one, but it's better then the way things are currently.

A theoretical "front page" for TTLP could combine the two archives (three if you include Micro) automagically. That would put a little more work on Matchstick, but it would solve that problem.

Alternatively, make False update the main Archive thread to include the contents of the other archives.

A lot of these problems would be alleviated if we could get the archives organized in a place that wasn't so beholden to forum structure.

Maybe Umbaglo will remember this. A few years ago a buddy of ours was tasked with solving some community issues at RMN. At the time he basically had "the main page", which basically nobody used, and "the forum", which is where everything notable in the community happened. All the hot stuff was happening on the forum (new games, conversations about old ones, sharing art and assets, reviews, etc.), but then once it wasn't hot anymore it was filed away in the archives (the main page) which was dreary and not maintained very well. A newcomer to the community had no real way to find anything interesting, and had to dive into the messy culture of the forums if they wanted to get started.

The changes he made involved integrating comments and blog posts directly into individual game pages on the main site, having a weekly "what's new?" column above the fold on the index, a button for "show me a random game!" people could use if they were just poking around, and extremely robust search parameters to find just about anything. Say what you will about RMN, but the main site is pretty goddamn sexy now. If you have something specific in mind it takes less than two seconds to find it, and if you don't it still only takes two seconds to find something interesting. And you can do it without ever going to the forums or even knowing that the forums exist.

It would be a lot of work, sure -- this isn't a weekend coding project here -- but it is the correct solution. We've gotten as big as we can as a corner of Parish's forum.

So who's in charge of making ttlparchive.org?

(I'm mostly joking, but if someone provided the hosting, I'd totally do the code)

We have the hosting already, so you should talk to FLogic about access if you want to volunteer to organizing this beast.

Actually, I've never been given any of the keys I'd need to work on the actual telebunny.net website. So, we'd have to talk to Paps and I'm sure that's going to lead to Parish and then... I don't know.

Agreed. The way RMN itself works now is excellent as a showcase of hobbyist game development, regardless of your feelings for the community around it. It's for sure very involved from a coding and database stance, though.

I kind of doubt they'd want me sticking code on their server anyway.

I don't think my password on the wiki works anymore - I tried it just now and it's acting like it isn't registered. That said, Parish can create a new account and password for anyone that wants to contribute so... yeah. All roads lead to him.

As for the images - I know no one's asked this yet, but it doesn't hurt to mention it - I FTP'd every single last .zip file to Parish back in mid-2011 so they should be on the server already. If not, I have them all on my harddrive still so either way no work will have to be redone. I'll try and post a list of everything done so far by later today.

Oh, someone had been archiving the images? Unless you want this to be a massive undertaking, you're probably better off just writing a scraper.

I appreciate the sentiment, but I'm not even one person.

Oh fuck, I think I left all of the archived images on my external hard drive. Which is... over 3,000 km away right now. Fuck fuck fuuuuck.

I guess Parish might still have them all? Hopefully?

I remember grabbing all of the images just by saving all of them on a given page by dimension, since the largest size the forum software uses would be 100x100 pixels. A scraper would be more convenient though.

For me, the big challenge in archiving a Let's Play was changing all of the [IMG], [URL], [B] and [I] tags into ones that work with PmWiki. Even with Find and Replace, it would take upwards of three or four hours to finish a Let's Play because sometimes the code wouldn't work for whatever reason and I'd have to go in and fix it manually. Having something that could automate that process would help immensely.

EDIT: Going forward if we could add a way to tag posts (rather than threads) so you could tag the actual LP posts (and possibly a separate tag for supplemental ones) to the forums I bet we could put together some decent automated tools.

This is one of the reasons I am hesitant for doing an LP for TT. The claiming / queuing structure that is in place here seem archaic and equivocal. I am already building an audience on YT and there is a fair bit of work involved in doing that. Existing on a forum would be growing a second audience that doesn't necessarily overlap with the first one.

Despite the extra work it would be something I would be interested in doing, but not if I am required to hop-scotch through flaming rings to get it done.

I think Brickroad is right about needed a new interface for the site. I've always been notoriously bad at forums, as such I am always hesitant to just dive in and start posting. I've had many bad experiences that way, and you never really know where to start.

Granted it's not as difficult to get rolling here as it is on say 4chan or Something Awful, but there do seem to be several different cliques of peeps around here and not all of them seem to mesh well. Just 2 cents from a fairly new person to TT.

As a note: YouTube videos can now be directly linked embedded in threads.

Thanks Papps! And thank you too SilentSnake!

We can embed videos now.

So, how does that affect things?

...I can't actually see what you're embedding there, but what I meant was... (never mind, this is fixed)

With this new feature, how does that effect Video LPs here? I want my LPs to be fun for TT and if they start some discussion, then I'm definitely happy.

Yeah, apparently you don't use the full URL when using the youtube code, oops. It's there now.

Anyhow, I am even more in favor now of doing video LPs like regular LPs and having a different post for different games. But I'm still in favor of it being optional and not a mandate because someone might not give a shit about having comment and interaction for their videos on here, which is fine. I think we should have a TT Youtube LPs mega thread where we can post a list of channels, too.

Well, it becomes super easy to do a video series based on audience participation from the forum. I see a lot of pokeymans in our future...