Video Makers: Publish Your Dang Transcripts

While I was doing the reading for the spreadsheet moment post, I had some trouble finding the Extra Credits video I wanted to reference. I watched it over eight years ago and I couldn’t remember who had said it or where - I just had this memory of someone drawing a distinction between “calculations” and “incomparables” in game design and claiming it was bad to pass off the former as the latter.

I had the terms and the framing right, and it was still very difficult to search the video up - because there’s no transcript online. Basically I got lucky and someone used the terms in the comments of a tangentally-related blog post and I was able to follow the thread.

THIS IS WHY IT SUCKS HOW MUCH OF GAME ANALYSIS AND CRITICISM HAS MOVED TO VIDEO. Even though I was using exactly the right search terms, I was getting basically nothing.

This is terrible for preservation, terrible for discoverability, terrible for research. This isn’t the only time I’ve failed to find something I’m sure I read some years back - and I’m sure some of those times it was because it was actually in a video and now impossible to find. And how many times have I searched for existing thought on a particular topic and just not found the great videos that exist on it because I’m not already following those creators - when that should have been my introduction to those creators?

I don’t understand this because there’s such an easy fix: just publish your transcript along with your video. You had to write the script anyway; just put it online so people can actually find your work and you can grow your audience and your influence. I do this for my videos - why does almost nobody else do it?