Think, Don't Mash! One Year Later
Think, Don't Mash! One Year Later
It’s been just over a year since I launched Press Button Win in its current form, and I’ve learned a lot. I know a post like this is a niche within a niche, but I thought it’d be fun to look back at Think, Don’t Mash! and then talk a bit about where things are headed.
My plan was always that Think, Don’t Mash! would be a limited length episodic series. I had the first five videos planned out before any real video editing began, and parts six and seven were planned while I began actually putting together the first few videos. At the time, I thought having a series of sequential on the videos made a lot of sense:
Introduce starting with a simple plan
How to add to the plan over time
How to make a plan in the first place
How to execute on the plan
How to apply the concept to other characters
How to apply the concept to other games
Troubleshooting
I still do think following those steps in that general order works. However, I’ve realized that this approach to presenting the ideas has some serious drawbacks as well. There’s a phenomenon in American comic sales where however well issue #1 sells, issue #2 sells around half as many copies, and then it slowly declines from there. This is explained pretty easily- there are a lot of people curious about a new book being launched, so they pick up the first issue, but every subsequent issue becomes a harder sell. Somebody new sees issue #4 on the shelf, and even if they’re interested, they have to get caught up to have any idea what’s going on. The further the series progresses, the greater that barrier to entry becomes.
In retrospect, each video turned out to be mostly a standalone work and only referenced previous videos sparingly. It wouldn’t have been much of a stretch to drop the sequential numbering plan altogether and craft the videos so that each stood alone as an independent tutorial. Going forward, this means sequential numbered episodes are mostly going away. I can preserve an intended viewing order (through making a YouTube playlist) while also making it a lot easier to jump into the series and share the videos with others. I think it will also force me to make sure each video fully explains itself and explores the point I’m trying to make.
Moving to mostly standalone videos is closely related to another (much bigger) challenge I need to work on solving: how to get my videos out there. For content at least tangentially related to fighting games, I think there are three distinct audiences out there:
Existing hardcore fighting game fans
Newcomers to the genre and more casual players
Everybody else
I’m not sure there’s a good axiom or law to describe this, but there’s a kind of paradoxical inverse relationship between audience size and reachability. I ordered the above list from the smallest group to the largest. The first group is small, but they aren’t hard to find. People in this group (myself included) semi-regularly go to some combination of a handful of fighting game websites, fighting game subreddits, and Discord servers.
The second and third groups are much larger. If group one contains people that will watch a weekly like NLBC or something like that, somebody in the second or third group is the sort of person that might just tune in for EVO. While there are way more of these people, there’s no clear path toward reaching them. Why is this a problem worth solving? My answer would be some combination of:
I think fighting games are widely misunderstood. I want more people to know and appreciate the genre.
I think fighting games have the potential to reach a much larger audience but haven’t yet for a variety of reasons. I would like the fighting game genre and community to grow.
I think learning and improving at fighting games teaches meaningful life lessons. They have helped me grow as a person and I think they can help others as well.
These ideas interest me more than teaching someone how to do a specific combo or technique (though I’ve made plenty of videos about things like that).I think the only person currently succeeding in this space is Gerald Lee with his Core-A Gaming videos. That he’s the only game in town is telling- this is very difficult to pull off. I also have to admit that I (selfishly) want to make videos that can stand the test of time and have some relevance even when the current crop fighting games are dead and gone. People will watch Juicebox’s explanation of footsies, read Maj’s Footsies Handbook, etc. as long as there are still fighting games. If I’m going to spend dozens of hours planning and editing a single video, I want it to still have some value years down the road.
I don’t know that I have a good way to wrap this all up. I guess the point is that I will keep making videos and I hope people watch them.