In my modern life, it feels weird to slow down and relax. There is a strong emphasis on always grinding to reach your goals and on doing something bigger and better all the time. But I don’t think that should always be the point.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m as much a victim of the “grindset” as many other people are. If I don’t accomplish a certain arbitrary number of things in a given day, I go to bed feeling like I wasted my precious time.
One of my go-to comforts in times of stress and personal disappointments is YouTube. Yeah, yeah, I was an iPad kid, so what? I like my YouTube and everyone just has to deal with that.
In particular, I essentially grew up on Let’s Plays. This is a video format where the content creator plays a video game and talks to the camera about their experience, what is happening, their life in general or whatever they feel like talking about.
Most of the time, these are long-form videos with few edits; the viewer is just watching someone else play through a game with commentary throughout. On paper, this doesn’t seem like an interesting way to consume content, and yet I’m entertained nonetheless. I, for instance, sometimes watch people play games I’ve already played. That doesn’t make sense at all.
Some of my childhood favorites include Markiplier, Jacksepticeye and Stampylonghead. Their typical content all fell into the Let’s Play format, meaning this was the majority of the content I would consume from ages 10 to 15. Eventually, I got into tv shows, but YouTube is still a staple in my life.
To my chagrin, this content is becoming increasingly sparse. Stampy, for instance, no longer creates content on YouTube in any consistent manner and officially ended his “Stampy’s Lovely World” series of Minecraft videos — which he produced for 823 episodes — each about 20 minutes long.
Markiplier and Jacksepticeye have both scaled back their video output, moving from daily or multiweekly uploads to an inconsistent schedule of a few per month. They are both pursuing major projects, such as Markiplier’s recent film release, “Iron Lung,” and Jacksepticeye’s upcoming movie, “Godmother.”
While it is exciting to see my childhood idols achieve impressive things, it is also sad to see my favorite forms of content slip away as I grow older. And it isn’t just from my favorite creators — the Let’s Play genre as a whole has been declining on YouTube in recent years.
A lot of this stems from shortened attention spans. I, for one, can’t seem to focus on anything now for more than 20 minutes at a time, and that’s if I’m really trying hard to get it done. And this flies directly in the face of the Let’s Play formula of long videos focused solely on one game, free from other distractions (I’m looking at you, Subway Surfers).
One trend I dislike is the move to bigger production videos, like MrBeast. I have nothing against him or his content specifically; however, he started the trend of doing massive videos with huge prizes, mainly because catchy titles and thumbnails attract a lot of views.
It makes me miss the simple days when YouTubers could just make content they truly enjoyed, rather than high-production videos focused solely on getting views and beating their previous videos. It’s all a competition now, and I think it makes for less interesting content.
This is not entirely surprising, as YouTube itself has shifted to a much more business-oriented platform than a creator-based platform. I miss the simple days of it, but there’s nothing to be done about it now, and it certainly won’t be going back to what it was.
Not when so much money can be made through relentless ads and creator sponsorships.
DeGear can be reached at [email protected].
