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Where is Dz_sirocco meant to be? I didn’t even know the word until the map came out.
And a quick google search showed it to be a phenomenon where warm air from Africa meets
the colder air in Europe. So, in my last video where I talked about this, I circled the biggest
section world I thought I could get away with and moved on to other things.
But was I right? Is Sirocco here? Or is it… here? Sirocco sounds like Morocco,
after all. So maybe it’s the same place! And the architecture’s similar, so that’s
also a strong point.
Or maybe it’s in… India?
That’s not such a silly suggestion, since the pit you see in the map is awfully like
the one in Batman… which was shown in front of Jodhpur, which is in India.
Of course, the reality is that it’s nowhere. It’s a fictional island (probably) and Valve
are free to borrow elements from wherever they please, and they should do, if it makes
for a better map.
All this is just a taste of the stuff I have to think about when producing youtube content.
Although I create videos about games, my journey goes many exciting places. In order to make
the best content I can, I often have to delve into seemingly unrelated topics- many of which
are new to me! By the end of this video, hopefully you’ll understand how complicated creating
a problem-free video is, how mistakes happen, and why -sometimes- I’m okay with them.
The best example of complexity has to be my skin videos. Skin showcases have a reputation
for being low effort content to keep a channel pumping out regular stuff. But I don’t think
mine are. For each and every one, I reach out and contact over a dozen expert skin makers
and carry out a back-and-forth with them over several days. I didn’t know what to expect
when I first starting doing this. I guess I expected to get a good knowledge of skin-making
for Counter-Strike. What I DIDN’T expect was how broad a number of topics I’d end
up covering. They’d swat up on Greek mythology, or a
particular rally car from decades ago. All this, just to make the best skin that they
could! And since I was covering it in my video, I too ended up doing a fair bit of research
into these areas. I was positively surprised by how much there
was to know about skins. To appreciate their design is one thing. Many players will happily
buy and use the skin, unaware of the story behind it. It won’t matter to them. But
knowing about their stories and Easter-eggs gives a whole new layer of depth to them,
and it matters to some people- as well as the skin creator! By showcasing this, I feel
my skin showcases serve a purpose, and I’ve grown increasingly proud of how educational
and informative these videos are.
So yeah, I’ve covered all sorts in my Counter-Strike content. But even the core content spans more
than simply playing the game. Sure, I do play it. But not anywhere near as much as other
Counter-Strike Youtubers do. And probably not as much as many of you do! I spend more
of the time flying about empty maps in noclip mode, or staring at them in the Hammer editor,
naked and fullbright.
And so are the maps.
And even the game itself is a hugely complex, changing beast. Gone are the days where a
game was released and that was that. Counter-Strike is a series that has spanned 20 years! It
isn’t the same now as it was a year ago. Or 5. Or 10. I like to think that my knowledge
of it simply grows over time, but bits get re-written and how I see Counter-Strike in
my head is probably a blend of hundreds of different versions over time. I’m always
horrified to watch an older video of mine and to discover how much I’ve forgotten
about it- as well as how some changes that I thought happened last year actually happened
3 or 4 years ago now. To say my knowledge of the game is incomplete and inaccurate is
an understatement. And there’s always something daunting about that when starting on new content.
Take a recent video of mine: ‘CS:GO’s Late May Update’. It’s not the most important
topic, or the most viewed video I’ve ever made. But it’s still been seen by quarter
of a million people. That’s 15 arenas! Put all the viewings it’s received next to each
other and it’s swallowed up over a year and a half of humanity’s time. When each
of my videos is watched for so long by you guys, I can justify the extra time it takes
to make a good video. What’s a few extra hours of polish in the grand scale of things?
I like for my videos to be correct. I feel a degree of responsibility to ensure I’m
not misleading such a large part of Counter-Strike’s player base! If there’s a single mistake
in that video, it’ll be picked up on by thousands of people, and will corrupt the
knowledge of countless more. But the better a job I do of not making mistakes, the worse
it is when I finally make one. And I do make mistakes!
And even the smaller ones are picked up on when there are so many people watching my
stuff.
It’s humbling to think of the cumulative knowledge my audience must have. You may be
gamers, but you’re also mathematicians. Athletes. I’m sure there’s an astronaut
or two among you as well. And you all play your bit in pointing out where my knowledge
might be lacking. I recently referred to the bucket things on
Vertigo as bucket-things. But no! They’re Trash Chutes. 2 builders corrected me there.
Thanks for that.
Luckily for me, most of these mistakes are just superficial things. A while ago I was
talking about a skin and I briefly mentioned Sputnik and how it took the first animal to
space. Almost as an after-thought, I decided to put a picture of Sputnik on the screen.
But I got the wrong 1. It was Sputnik 2 that carried the first animal into space! And when
the video’s watched hundreds of thousands of times, then of course dozens of people
are going to notice, and tell me that I made a mistake. The core message of the video wasn’t
wrong, but understandably it made me look as though I didn’t know what I was talking
about- even though it was only the visual element that was wrong. That’s the problem
when you add more to your videos; there’s more that can go wrong.
I like my videos to be correct. But I accept I’m sometimes going to be 99% correct. That
last 1% can be so difficult to attain- and a lot of the time I don’t even care too
much.
Back to Sirocco. …Or is it ‘Shirocco’?
Pronouncing words is a big part of being a Youtuber. I may be speaking in English, but
many of the words I have to say aren’t. I might not even know they’re not! I’ve
learned the hard way that the car, Lancia isn’t pronounced Lancia. It’s ‘lan-cha’.
Even Jeremy Clarkson got that one wrong. But I feel I have a duty to pronounce things
right! Many of you take what I say as the truth and I feel I’m doing a disservice
to you if I get this sort of thing wrong. I’m fairly confident that ‘Sirocco’
is pronounced ‘Sirocco’, as ‘Shirocco’ appears to be the name of a car. But even
that’s confusing, since some people claim it’s pronounced ‘SEErocco’… and the
name itself is derived from ‘Sirocco’ any way.
So yeah, pronouncing words is always scary for me, especially when I see comments questioning
whether I got them right.
There are these so-called pronunciation guides online that are supposedly there to help pronounce
things. But these are shockingly bad. Some are auto-generated in robot-speak. And I think
others just copy others, or make up their own pronunciations. It annoys me when a site
dedicated to pronunciation doesn’t know the correct pronunciation themselves.
Although I do love this pronunciation of Betelgeuse.
Maybe there are multiple ways of pronouncing things. Krakow, for instance! A city that
can be pronounced AND spelled in different ways! It still won’t stop some people from
saying that their way is right- or worse still, insisting that mine is wrong. Don’t even
get me started on Americans correcting my ‘English’.
Sometimes I’ll change my pronunciation as time goes on. And it might not even be because
I was wrong! VEGA, for instance. That’s a perfectly acceptable way to pronounce it.
But ‘VAY-GA’ has become the popular way to say it when referring to the CS:GO team.
And AMD’s VEGA graphics card. So that’s one case where I’ve changed how I’ve said
it. But there are some cases where I stubbornly
stick to my preferred pronunciation. Even when I know that I’ll be called out on it.
Just wait. It could be YOU.
Booey Knife. GIF.
Quickly moving on, I’m always afraid of saying peoples’ names incorrectly. No number
of pronunciation guides will help me if they were at the back of the queue when picking
their username! But saying it wrong still makes me feel as though I’ve openly disrespected
them, and by doing so in front of a large audience I may have changed how others pronounce
their names from now on! Imagine if Drama Alert couldn’t say my name
correctly. Or if Pewdiepie called me 3000 licks Philip.
Let’s move away from pronunciation. ‘Tis a silly thing.
2kliksphilip makes mistakes as well! His Skyrim one is terrible. He used the word ‘tallest’
instead of ‘highest’. A genuine mistake because he didn’t know, but it was a mistake,
and he was rightly pointed out for making it.
And at one point in the same video, he even reads ‘732’ as ‘723’, proving once
and for all that 3kliksphilip is the best. 2kliksphilip’s 98% right at most. But was
2kliksphilip punished for making such a mistake?! No! At least, not at first. Because no one
noticed for several months! But the moment one person did, suddenly EVERYBODY DID! Of
course, what I think happened is that they saw the first comment, checked it for themselves
and then decided to comment it as well. 2kliksphilip cowardly removed a load of these comments
at the time to try and bring the chat back to positive things again. But in this case,
I think it’s good to correct 2kliksphilip. I’ll do it as well.
But this can lead to a problem for the youtuber because any hope of a varied and interesting
comments section is ruined the moment one of these correction spams begins! And it makes
the youtuber ask: what if? That Youtuber might have spent 40 hours on that video, but because
of a split-second mistake, it ruins any hope of an interesting or constructive comments
section. And instead of being a video about the topic in question, it instead becomes
‘that video where the youtuber made that silly mistake’. If only he hadn’t made
that mistake. What if. Recently I made a video covering how long
CS:GO games can last, and it got not one but TWO correction spams in the comments… and
they weren’t even mistakes! I said that the longest game would need the
bomb to be planted on all 30 rounds, and hundreds of you pointed out that if the bomb was planted
every round, it would end at 16 since the terrorists would score 16 wins. But that’s
not true, since the teams are swapped after 15.
And the second correction was in this bit, where I said that 2 90 second freeze times
would add 2 and a half minutes onto the length of the game. You were all quick to tell me
that 2 x 90 seconds is 3 minutes. But since freeze times are 15 seconds long already,
you have to deduct those 30 seconds from that figure… so me saying 2 and a half minutes
was correct. But you know what? I’m partly to blame for
these! Because I assumed something was commonly known about the game that clearly wasn’t.
These comment spams highlighted 2 parts of the video that I didn’t explain adequately-
which I’d try to fix if I made the video again.
Sometimes I make mistakes but think it’s unfair to criticise me for them. I hand-type
captions for each of my videos to help the deaf or those who don’t natively speak English.
I don’t mind mistakes in these being pointed out, but please don’t insult me for it.
Because it’s only there in the first place for a good cause!
Source’s unit measurements always stir up controversy. If a person’s stood in a doorway,
either they’re too short, or the door’s too tall. They can’t both be correct! I
typically say that the doors are too tall, but I guess it’s equally correct to say
that the people are too short. Even though that would result in a bizarre reality where
the counter-terrorists and terrorists are all 4-foot tall.
Funnily enough, the opposite happened in 2kliksphilip’s Skyrim video! He calculated that people in
that game are well over 6 feet tall, and joked that it’s because they’re Scandinavian.
But in the comments section he was told by somebody from a Scandinavian country that
people there are actually shorter than average. What should 2kliksphilip do? Should he argue
with them? Should he travel to a Scandinavian country and check for himself? No, that would
make him CRAZY.
Sometimes, I think a video that’s 99% correct can teach people more.
I use simple words in my videos. I’m also aware that a lot of the people watching my
videos don’t have English as a first language. And if given the choice between a cralamandistic
word and an easy one, I’d rather choose the easy one. There is no need for thesaurus
abuse here! Apparently, this script can be understood by a 12-year-old. And I’m proud
of that. If you’re a teacher, you’re not trying
to show the class how much you know. You’re trying to teach them. This sounds simple,
but you’d be surprised by how many videos on Youtube forget this. Sometimes, a simple
summary is better! Even if it misses certain points. And I think teaching is as much about
what you don’t mention, as much as what you do. And it’s difficult. You already
know that you’ll be called out for it. But you’ve got to ask yourself: will the people
who call you out on it even need the video in the first place? And are they calling you
out to teach you, or just to show how much they know?
I’m a 99% correct Youtuber. And that last 1% is the most interesting one. It’s the
one I can learn the most from. It’s the price I pay for covering so many topics and
for having a large and diverse audience. And of course, I do mess up and make genuine mistakes
from time to time- please do point these out! But genuine mistakes aside, the gap between
my videos and perfection, is what makes my videos mine.