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What is Stress Mode?
A YouTube series where I give games new rules to make them more stressful, then play them for the unrehearsed drama.
UPDATE - NOVEMBER 2019: Stress Mode WAS a YouTube series, but due to YouTube's handling of the COPPA situation, I've moved Stress Mode to Dailymotion along with all my other videos. My discussion of YouTube on this page applies only to 2014!
Heads up: Dailymotion's playlist system SUCKS, so I can't embed a full playlist of Stress Mode here on this blog. Click or tap "QueerDweeb" on the video embeds below to visit my Dailymotion page. You'll find all fifteen Stress Mode videos there.
NSFW language warning!
What do you need to know about Stress Mode?
The quickest glance at YouTube will tell you that Let's Plays are, if not the heart and soul of YouTube, the masses of flab. For better or worse, personalities like PewDiePie have proven that there is significant gold (money, not quality) in the Let's Play hills. Stress Mode is my re-working of the standard Let's Play.
When I first started on YouTube, I dismissed Let's Plays as too easy to make and not rewarding enough to watch. I changed my mind after watching Pokémon Nuzlocke videos. I saw the potential of Let's Plays to create legitimate drama and wondered if Nuzlocke-style rules could be applied to non-Pokémon games. This was the basis of Stress Mode.
What made me finally consider starting a Noakes-Channel Let's Play series was when I discovered that YouTube's algorithm for promoting videos and channels worked on a basis of retention time, how many minutes of your channel's videos viewers watched in one sitting, not how high the view count on each video was.
By releasing twenty-minutes of Let's Play footage every other day (which was easy enough to provide), my channel would get more promotion (if people actually watched!) than it would by releasing six-minute Drunk School videos once a week or twenty minutes of Noakes only thirteen times a year. I made good on this knowledge and, through Stress Mode, was able to gain more channel promotion than I could have from just the Noakes videos. This was especially important when I deleted the Air Pig videos and built a new Noakes channel from scratch, the Noakes Network. Stress Mode helped me build a new audience with remarkable efficiency.
What I needed to ensure that my Let's Play videos wouldn't be lost in the shuffle was a unique premise and attitude: which the rules of Stress Mode would handily provide. My goal was to create, in terms of gripping, compelling drama, the Let's Play equivalent of Breaking Bad. Some Nuzlocke sagas have honestly come close to this. I wanted Stress Mode to get closer.
Stress Mode was discontinued when YouTube changed it's algorithms in 2014 (which I will discuss at length in my Short Ass Podcast post). It no longer made sense to develop Stress Mode since it wasn't helping my channel to grow anymore. If the algorithms had not changed, I could very well have built Stress Mode to the point where it would be the flagship series of my channel and the primary source of my viewing figures.
Given the straightforward nature of Let's Play production, I've made more Stress Mode videos than I have videos of any other kind. If fifteen videos still isn't enough for you, please go to patreon.com/lenaray - That's...
...and donate to keep my video work going!
Any questions, confusion or compliments about Stress Mode? Leave a comment below?
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