Recently I have been playing a lot of video games. And at least one of them was developed by me, how about that! Yes, it's time to complain about having simultaneously too many and not enough video games to play.
As I think I mentioned in a previous post, right now I need to play about 10 hours a week of various total war games to get enough footage for my current series'. That takes up a pretty decent portion of my evenings and weekends without relent, and it kind of ruins the games as well since they playing them is now work.
At least there was some variety this week with the release of Total War Warhammer 2, aka Total War Warhammer 1.5 - had to jump on that release hype train by getting a campaign commentary going in the new title, and it's done well, plus it was more fun than usual to make thanks to the various minor improvements the new game made seeming novel. Hard to escape from the fact that the game shares many of the downsides of the previous game, but I am apparently in a minority for thinking the previous game had major problems so let's avoid a rant here.
OH WAIT BUT I DO HAVE A RANT, TO BREAK THE FLOW OF THE POST COMPLETELY FOR A WHILE
My first part of the new series got hit by the infamous YouTube demonitization bot! Yes, it found me at long last. I always wondered what would happen when it did. Previously I had been untouched, but by some anecdotal evidence from other creators, it seems the bot finds channels one at a time to add to its hit list. Would it read the auto-generated closed-captions and discover that half my videos were full of the dreaded swearing? Or that some are just entirely swearing with the odd connector or article term thrown in there?!
That wasn't how it turned out. Instead I saw a random selection of videos getting hit this week, including the aforementioned video of Warhammer 2. Only a single Tinny of Truth managed to get hit, yet random episodes of Massalia Tales, TIC videos, Barbarian Masters and really old things from years ago that I'd forgotten about, all fell under the 'unsuitable for advertisers' hammer.
In some cases it seemed that the culprit could have been the presence of words like 'war', 'crime' or 'rage' in the description. But then again, others, like the Warhammer 2 video, had no such trigger words anywhere to be seen, and videos with 'war' and 'crime' in the title got away with it e.g. The Perfect Crime. So clearly the bot has some subtly to it, in a way that doesn't actually work.
Since most of my videos are fine, the flagging of specific ones must be an error. To fix this, I have submit a manual review request, which forces a guy youtube pays $15 an hour to watch the whole video within a week of your request and decide if the hit was a mistake. If it was, then that info is given back to the bot to help refine future targeting.
Several fun catches stand in the way, of course. First, only videos with 1000+ in the last week can be reviewed. For me, that means only the Warhammer 2 thing was eligible, as the rest of the videos have been out for a while and are just gradually accumulating views over the months now. Does this mean that since the flagging went unchallenged, the bot will think that it was right to flag them, and thus in its machine-learning wisdom come back one day to flag more videos that seemed similar? Hopefully not, but YouTube does like to be out of touch, and they sure have gone crazy in the wake of losing all their money to the Adpocolypse, so how knows?
Catch 2 is that maybe the videos REALLY DID break the rules. The rules are rough, grey, and if taken literally are draconian. Swearing is against the rules. Videos on topics like war, politics, and religion are against the rules. Well, that just about covers pretty much every video I've ever made.
Since YouTube hasn't yet imploded under these tight restrictions, we can surmise that the rules are just there to please advertisers, and that YouTube wisely does not plan to enforce them to their maximum degree. Still, this doesn't remove the possibility that submitting one of my videos to review will cause them to notice that technically my whole channel, like most of YouTube, is breaking their rules, and decide to just go wild on me to make some kind of point.
It's all a mystery, first and foremost because in a design twist that perfects the shitstorm of the Adpocoylpse and it's fallout: the demonitization bot does not tell you WHY your video is being flagged. Hell, it doesn't even tell you if it gets flagged at all. Until this week you had to manually look back through your video manager to find flagged videos - now you can filter the manager to show only the flagged ones, so you can do this from time to time to see if any more have been added to the list silently. An email or something would be nice, huh?
Anyway, the 'why' issue is the big one. Again, maybe the video really does break the rules? I don't know why it was flagged, so I don't know if the flagging was legitimate. I mean, Massalia tales episode 5 features bloody, violent depictions of war. So does every other episode, but they were fine. So was it because I said "conquer the western" mid-sentence while talking about attacking some warring celts, and how the bot assumes it's an ISIS recruitment video?! I don't know.
There are two reasons for not telling the user why they got flagged, and both are likely to be at play in my estimation. number one is the that system is being used in an unfinished state. This would explain most of its flaws, of course, and is likely to be the case due to the panicked reaction to corporate pressure back at the start of the Adpocoylpse. The system was rapidly pushed out of the silent beta is has been in for the last few years (back when it was literally impossible to know if you'd been demonitized because it all happened in secret). The speed caused usability features like telling anyone anything about what's going on to be overlooked.
The second reason to keep it all hidden is that if the bot actually revealed why it was flagging things, this would provide substantial evidence that it doesn't work. While the reasons are kept a mystery, and while the rules are technically super strict, there is always reason to believe the bot was right in many cases. But then if it was revealed that the problem was some phrase, word or tag found in the metadata that is completely harmless given the context, the bot's weakness would be laid bare and all youtubers would be tearing it apart even more than they already are.
The secret third reason is that the bot is out of control and YouTube staff has no access to data on why it flags thing, thus stopping them presenting it to users even if they wanted to. Remarks made in the PR about the thing hint at this being the case, and it's certainly plausible, but I'm going to be nice and presume that at the very least the bot logs a reason for the flagging somewhere in the database, it just can't be released for the aforementioned 2 reasons.
So with all this, I'm making ever-so-slightly less money than before, but since it only hit like 20 of my 1000 or so videos, the only really loss was the Warhammer 2 one. But, it's only been on me for a week as far as I know, so we'll wait to see what else gets hit.
NOW BACK TO THE PREVIOUSLY SCHEDULED COMPLAINING ABOUT VIDEO GAMES
What was I even talking about? Look, basically I wanted to complain that I don't have any time to play games for fun any more. Nor do I have any money to acquire said games anyway. I literally begged CA to give me Warhammer 2 for free. This impacts not only my supposed hobby of playing games for entertainment purposes, but the TIC series as well. I'm fresh outta games that would be suitable for my TIC style, so the series may be coming to an end in a month or so as a result.
I've tried to start lots of new TIC series recently but I always just stopped filming after half an hour or so when I realised it wasn't going to work. There aren't any games I actually enjoy playing that I could use, and making TIC when the game isn't actually fun to play is really, really hard. That's where the much anticipated Crusader Kings II TIC series fell at the first production hurdle. I also tried looking for free games on emulators or itch.io, but nothing suitable has been found so far.
Warhammer 2 has brought me a chance to make one more big series, and I've half a series in Mount and Blade to release - that one was tragically cancelled mid way because the game just corrupted and crashed all the time, despite lots of time trying to fix it. Will this be the end of TIC?! It'll get the point of running for a least a year since the beginning, I think, so that's something.
Now, let's clear out this complaining with some good news! Thanks to a boost in patreon support over the last month, and good views on the new Barbarian masters and abridged commentary campaign series, I'm getting quite close to breaking even monetarily. Ooooo! By goal at the end of last year was to get 15000 subs and break even by the end of 2017. Both are actually going to be possible thanks to the comeback made in the last couple of months. The breakeven won't be lasting, since the ad market always crashes at the start of a new year thanks to the distorting effect of Christmas, but maybe next year we'll have more than 1 breakeven month, at some point.
I've also made some extra money going commissioned voiceover for a channel called 'Kings and Generals', a military history documentary channel with great animations. They seem to work with an animator to achieve this, who they say they don't pay, which sucks because I think he does a lot more work on the videos than I do. But the channel has exploded with growth recently (which I can only POSSIBLY put down to them using my beautiful voice), meaning they should be on track for a proper budget. Pay that animator dammit!
I've written enough now, so maybe I'll talk more about that gig in a future post. Let's keep on trucking, and double-time work on a shrine to the demonitization bot to sit beside the shrine to the Great Algorithm. See you on the tubes, fellow kids.
OH YEAH I WAS ORIGINALLY GOING TO MAKE THIS WHOLE POST ABOUT ICE EMBLEM BECAUSE ITS READY TO BE RELEASED AS A DEMO NOW BUT MAYBE NEXT TIME LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL.
