I'm doing what I love, but do I love what I'm doing?

I was reading some stuff that Ben 'Yahtzee' Croshaw wrote about his life with Zero Punctuation and I saw this:


"I guess the disadvantage of playing games as your job is that that's exactly what it starts to feel like, a job."


After reading that I raised my eyebrows and started nodding.  I couldn't agree more, and that idea is something that haunted my thoughts when I considered doing Stretch Reviews. 

Playing a video game for fun is enjoyable because you're seeing everything at face value and you're simply taking what's it's trying to give you.  But when you begin reviewing them and analysing them critically, the curtain comes down.  It's like seeing your school teacher at the shops.  Once the mask comes off and you see the mechanics of the machine, all of the magic goes away and you soon realise that you're dealing with another product, just like everything else ever made.

There was a time, around when I began editing my Heroes of Might and Magic II video, when this feeling felt its strongest.  This has happened before and I eventually got over it by forcing myself to childishly forget about it, but it still lingers in my mind.  I guess it's just one of the detriments of being a determinist and an Atheist.

The fact that I'm doing this on the internet doesn't help.  Although I am using the internet to show the things I make I honestly do despise most of what the internet is; obnoxious, annoying, random for the sake of random, easily made, un-creative 'noise'.  I try to distance myself from that as much as I possibly can.  Although I do rely heavily on noise, colour and visual effects I always intend to make it a remark on whatever I'm reviewing and not just a random joke.

Lastly, alongside 'Seeing the mechanics of the machine' and 'Trying not to be CRAP', one realisation remains; I'm discussing video games made by other people.  My own attention depends on the attention the product itself gets and on a crude level, I'm talking about creative things that I haven't made.  I'm barely contributing to anything, if at all.  When I take that into consideration I can't help but feel rather meaningless.

That's all I've got to say for now.  I've got to keep my momentum up to stop myself from making Vlogs about movies constantly so I'm going to film my next review this week.  I use a rope...

The first picture I took after my Titan Quest review