Ever since graduating from university, I’ve found myself less motivated to create – whether it be fictional stories, nonfictional blog posts, or other means of creativity I’ve often enjoyed such as making videos on Youtube. I could never quite put my finger on what killed my motivation, and I’m still not entirely too sure what happened now, but in the last few months I’ve been stoking the fires of my creativity once more, and while I’ve not exactly been writing short stories or plotting a novel, I have been busy nonetheless.
World of Warcraft Character Backstories
Inspired after reading through all three volumes of World of Warcraft: Chronicle, a book series documenting the lore of the popular MMO’s expansive world, I took a look at my own growing roster of characters within the game and decided to document their own stories. For some of them, these are stories that I’ve had in my mind from the second I created them; for others, I had to consider them as an individual within the world for the very first time. I set myself some rules: I wouldn’t interfere with the game’s pre-existing characters or plots, and I wouldn’t make any of my characters out to be more important than any other “adventurer” within the game’s lore. These were the stories of characters who had been influenced by the world, rather than influencing it themselves.
Both volumes can be found on my gaming blog, and I’m not far from completing my third, with a fourth to come after that. Alternatively, you can just follow the links below:
Volume 1: The Night Elf Brothers
Volume 2: Sisters of Light and Shadow
Livestreaming
Surprise! I have an entire online persona that you’ve possibly never heard of.
When I created this blog, I did so with the knowledge that I’d be linking it to my Facebook and sharing my writing processes. I was using my name in the title of the blog. Therefore, I sought to remove it – as I did my Facebook – from the rest of my online profiles, although when I made my gaming blog you could probably follow the links from here to there. I essentially tried to segment my personality into two halves: Kristian, the aspiring author with an arts degree who’s contemplative of life, and Kritigri, a gaming enthusiast who uploads his gameplay with comedic commentary. In recent times, however, I’ve learned that without both halves to balance the other out, the first becomes pretentious whilst the second is somewhat hollow.
My livestreaming, then, is a fairly new project that I’ve very recently doubled down on. I’ve decided that I need to choose a game to be my main streaming subject, and as you could probably tell from earlier in this blog post, World of Warcraft is a game that I know almost as well as my own life. I do stream other games occassionally, too, but I’ve recently begun a WoW livestream playthrough which I’ve called “Story Mode”, in which I level a character from scratch and pay attention to the stories of each zone, discussing the lore as I go.
I still don’t have a streaming schedule that’s set in stone, but I try to stream at least once a week (typically more so), and if you’re interested you can follow my channel and recieve notifications when I go live. If you miss a stream, the project below has you covered. I have a decent microphone (but no webcam) and try to stream for no less than an hour each time, and have Twitch chat on my phone so I can monitor any messages I get.
Here is my Livestreaming channel.
Youtube Videos
I’ve been making videos on Youtube for about a decade now, with various gaps of disinterest along the way. At my peak, I reached a whopping 600 subscribers. It’s safe to say that I do it for fun.
My channel consists of three parts: It’s one part Twitch VODS (archives of my livestreams), one part gaming videos and one part vlogs.
As far as gameplay capture goes, I run a series called The Daily Rogue, in which I play a roguelike (that is, a game genre where you typically have one life to delve as far into a dungeon as you can) until I die, and I can’t start over for the rest of the day – hence, ‘Daily’. In these videos I normally ramble about whatever is on my mind at the time. I’ve also started a series called The Weekly Deathmatch, which is weekly in the more traditional sense of coming out once a week, every week. In these videos, I record the commentary after I’ve recorded the video, so that I can actually focus on not dying every 5 seconds and losing my train of thought. These videos are also a backdrop for various ramblings, though these ramblings are typically more focused on a particular subject that I’ve decided on before the video begins.
My Bitesize Vlogs are short (5-10 mins), edited videos that document a day or particular outing in my life. This is obviously more of a personality-based genre of content, and is focused on my interactions with life as opposed to videogames, so this may be of interest to you if the rest is not. These vlogs began when I got my Google Pixel 2, and realised that I couldn’t waste such a good camera by not using it. I’ve also experimented with vlogs in my teens, so you’ll find I’m not entirely inexperienced with making them.
The Weekly Deathmatch Playlist
Gameplay DVR Archive
Within the last few years, the ability to capture the last X seconds of gameplay in video form became possible, and I love it. I retrofitted my original Youtube channel (the one that hit 600 subs) as an archive for my gameplay clips, and I upload them in bulk. I schedule them to go public three days a week – Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays, though I currently have an extra one releasing on Mondays. This channel mostly exists as an archive for my own amusement, but one day I decided to organise the channel a bit and make playlists for each game. I also curated a ‘Best Of’ playlist, so you can get the gist of what to expect if you wish to subscribe to the channel.
Currently I have videos scheduled up to September, so if I die suddenly in a horrific walking accident, you’ll be hearing from me posthumously for a few months to come. Isn’t that a lovely thought?
And That’s That
Please bear in mind that I’m juggling all this between two jobs and leisure time™, so a few things are bound to drop or change over the coming months. I just felt like writing this blog post to update everyone on what I’ve been up to!
I’ll get around to writing that book eventually.
One day.
Perpetually Perturbed 