Hiya! It’s me, it’s the end of the year, and it’s time for a look back at this year’s FEE3, to talk about what went right (most things) and what went wrong (almost nothing). If you want your little summary of the post in a nutshell, that’s basically it: this year was incredibly smooth sailing, both behind the scenes and publicly. This isn’t really going to be that in-depth of a post as a result, so instead this is mostly going to be where I share my thoughts as the event organizer on what I’ve observed about the event as potential pain points.
Organizational ease
Running FEE3, at this point, is extremely simple stuff. There’s a small stable of volunteers who are experienced and committed, and several years of FEE3 changes were made with an eye towards lowering overhead from the organizers. The most “difficult” part of the process is mostly time-consuming - that being, QC, with a looot of videos to sift through every year.
Trailers are very easy to QC, being so short and easy to pay full attention to for their full runtime, but longer showcases are much harder to pay full attention to, especially when their runtime stretches towards the hour mark.
There is some potential difficulty in the social aspect of playing organizer - you have to get in contact with people, sometimes to deliver bad news, and be able to delegate and keep the ball rolling in the process - but the volunteers this year were real good at self-organizing whenever I’d fail to check in on them, and I’ve already offered to be previous years’ organizers’ “have tough conversations” girl in the past. I think as long as people are willing to help make up for any areas the organizer isn’t fully comfortable within, FEE3 can continue to run itself very easily and comfortably in its current format.
That being said:
Format issues
FEE3 has three problems I observed while running the event this year. None of them are crippling, and if the event continued to be run exactly as is for the rest of time, nothing bad would happen necessarily. Regardless, I think the event could be improved by addressing these issues.
6 AM
the 6 AM time slot is kind of where showcases go to die. Videos uploaded in this time slot garner basically zero discussion, and oftentimes we failed to even add them to the FEU discord announcement channel because everyone was asleep and nobody was free to post anything until the next video was already up.
Ostensibly, we have such long periods between uploads so people have time to discuss each video. In my experience, however, discussion was much less of a thing this year, and what discussion was to be had often took place regardless of whether or not a new video had been uploaded. I don’t think videos need to be nearly so far apart as to necessitate uploading at 6 AM in the first place.
Showcase length
Longer showcases simply do not garner attention. Now, in previous years, this was the kind of thing I wouldn’t care about, but in the wake of the gradually lessening amount of discussion around each showcase, their purpose becomes far more about advertising, raising awareness about a project’s existence to get some eyes on it that might not otherwise find it.
To this end, I think these larger gameplay showcases shouldn’t be the “main” showcase for any of these projects. They make the QC process more difficult, suffer in view count and viewer retention, encourage less discussion, and just generally do a disservice to any project that chooses to submit in this format. They could still have a place as some kind of secondary showcase, something uploaded alongside a shorter snappier trailer, but I don’t think they should be a substitute. For whatever it’s worth, I think this year’s interview showcases that I ran are in a similar boat. I greatly enjoyed running them and am proud of the final product, but the numbers are the numbers.
Viewer fatigue
In its current form, FEE3 experiences a significant drop off in interest towards the back half of the event. People have, rightfully, begun viewing their showcase being on, like, day 9 as a bad sign, and sure enough most showcases at around this point experience significantly lower views.
There were exceptions to this rule, but almost all of them were crossover appeal hacks, where they were able to tap into multiple algo streams at once to get their video put in front of deltarune fans or pokemon fans or what have you.
I think finding a way to compress the length of FEE3, preferably without sacrificing the number of showcases, would be a major boon for the event going forward.
Shifting priorities
I think FEE3 is due to change some of its purpose. I’ve been a proponent of FEE3’s existing format for like half a decade, owing to a belief that the event’s primary purpose was as a celebration of the community’s efforts over the last year, and a moment for everyone to come together and talk about each other’s projects.
I think the reality is that the hacking scene is more fractured than it used to be, though not in a bad way. People have largely drifted off into various sub-communities, with FEU acting more as a nexus point for the community rather than a hub in its own right. As a result, there’s much less of a sense of people coming together, as what discussion is to be had is typically happening in isolated pockets of the community.
There’s also a lot more projects being made that people have, by and large, not heard of, or else not heard from since previous FEE3. Again, this is due in part to the fracturing of the community: even if a project’s dev is actively posting about their game, there’s a good chance they’re doing it where nobody can even see besides their own particular community.
As a result, I strongly feel that FEE3 should start leaning into its role as a way to get the word out about these projects, and shift its priorities towards acting as, essentially, an advertising venue for the hacking scene. I’ll admit that I miss the days of every FEE3 showcase having a bunch of chatter about it after each upload, but missing those days doesn’t really justify trying to pretend that’s still what the event is good for when it clearly isn’t anymore.
Moderation
This is a minor thing, but one that bothered me as something I didn’t have the tools to do better. The youtube comments this year seemed a little nastier than usual, which is very much just a thing that will happen sometimes and isn’t really a problem one can fix. However, it did necessitate more comment deleting than I’ve heard past organizers had to get up to. I’m not in the habit of removing comments just for being negative, even overtly so, but some comments were just straight up insults to the creator or the community.
The problem with this isn’t anything to do with those comments being made - again, that’ll just happen, and it’d be very silly of me to make a bullet point in the retrospective to finger-wave and chastise people for being mean online. The actual issue is that I was the sole person with keys to the channel during this time, meaning I had to do all the moderation myself. I read every single comment made at this year’s FEE3, just to make sure nothing flew under the radar, but a couple projects in particular had some particularly nasty waves of comments that I didn’t catch until well after those projects’ devs had seen them.
Letting devs’ special moment in the spotlight get spoiled by this kind of stuff is something I think we should try to make sure can be avoided going forward, even if that just means making sure we have volunteers who can watch the comments closely for the first hour or two after a showcase goes up.
Conclusions
I think FEE3 is at a place where adding more organizational overhead isn’t going to be a massive strain, given how smoothly the event can be run at this point. We can put some more effort into the event and find solutions to some of these issues that might not have seemed viable during the period when organizer burnout was a huge issue.
As a result, I think now’s a great time to start thinking about evolving the event going forward, preferably in slow and measured steps. Experimenting with the format in small ways, seeing what works, getting the actual numbers and data to support our hypotheses about what is and isn’t a boon to the event, and then figuring out what to keep and what to ditch, would do us some good.
A part of why I’m comfortable suggesting this is that I fully intend to run the event next year, if Cam will have me, and I can easily see myself doing so again the following year as well. If I’m going to be sticking around for a little while anyway, I don’t mind picking up some extra workload if it means I can help improve this event going forward.
I have a few more specific ideas for format changes I could imagine trying out for the event, but I want to open the floor for viewers, volunteers, and past organizers to give their own thoughts about the event as well. I think this year was one of the chillest we’ve ever had - one of the biggest controversies appeared to be my voice lmfao - and I’m really glad, after some of the turmoil in past FEE3s, that this year was so pleasant and fun. I had an absolute blast running this event, and am pumped to do so again.
I want to give a shoutout also to a specific volunteer this year: Sphealnuke’s contributions behind the scenes were more or less completely private and invisible, but he was invaluable for this year’s events, helping with huge swathes of the scheduling and QC portions of the event. He did a wonderful job, and I really appreciate his help. I also want to thank all the rest of our volunteers for their lovely work, especially when I ended up falling behind on my own share of the workload. You all made this event happen, just as much if not moreso than I did, and I’m really proud of everyone for how the event came together <3
