Embracing the (Video) Faults

I haven’t been capturing gameplay clips on PlayStation 4 and Xbox One games for very long, but I’ve already learned what I think is an important lesson for an amateur game writer such as myself. When I first started recording gameplay, I tried to get footage of me playing the game perfectly. If I screwed up in some way, I would stop recording, reload the last checkpoint, and try again and again until I did everything flawlessly. What I realized is that I was stressing myself out attempting to do something that wasn’t necessary. While I don’t publish clips of me playing a game particularly badly, if the gameplay footage properly showcases what I’m trying to highlight then it doesn’t matter if it also shows me making a mistake or two along the way. For example, in my post on Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare there’s a video showing the singleplayer mission in Lagos, and while nearly all of it is played without a hitch, at one point I’m aiming at snipers on a balcony but for whatever reason I pushed the melee button instead of the fire button, so instead of shooting the enemy you see me punch the air. Yes, it was a mistake, but it didn’t detract from the particular section of the game I was trying to show. If anything, it gave me a chance to make fun of myself, and if you watch the clip carefully you can see an annotation I added in at the moment I push the melee button. I’ve slowly learned to embrace these minor and inconsequential faults, not in the sense that I’m actively seeking to commit mistakes while playing, but in recognizing them for what they are and not making a mountain out of a molehill.