Lots of good feedback and discussion so far. I’m pretty happy with how everything played out. There were only a few hiccups, the showcases were largely good, and views and subs are up from last year. I see this as a win, and we should be proud.
There are 3 main areas I think we as a community should focus on for the event: Operational excellence, awareness, and quality.
I prepared my own post a few weeks ago focused predominantly on the operational aspect of the event, which Cam alluded to in his post.
Awareness is something I’ve been noodling on, but don’t focus on here. This is a separate issue and one that we have less control over. We are getting better organically, but there are other growth drivers we may want to try to adopt for next year.
Quality we can address more organically through strong operations. I also am working on a guide I allude to more below.
I made a few edits based on what I’ve read so far in this thread.
I want to give a big thank you to WarPath for organizing this year. I’d also like to extend special thanks to Cam, Circles, Levin, Mystic, Vesly, and Gamma, who all played a key role in supporting the operations of the event across its different functions.
Organizing a massive event like this is no easy feat, and although I was largely on the sidelines nudging folks and acting as a hype man, it was easy to see that the changes we made from last year made a demonstrable impact. The event was smoother, there was more transparency for volunteers, organizers, and community members, and there were no delays.
For this, I also want to extend a big thank you to everyone on the committees who LPed, edited, made thumbnails, reviewed hours of videos ahead of time, and the other work that you all did to make sure the event happens on time. As far as I can tell, there were very few last minute fire drills to get things done, and almost every video was in when it was supposed to be.
Despite the success of the event on the operational end, there is still a continued debate on the direction we need to take the event. The word “unsustainable” was used in our backroom discourse, and while our current setup works, it unfortunately doesn’t scale as well as I’d hoped when I drafted up documentation last year and laid out the plans to help make FEE3 easier to run in its current form. Cam alluded to this in their post as well regarding organizer burnout and the large burden placed on the volunteers.
To provide additional context around my thoughts, in 2020 there was no documentation or methods around how we organize the event, including coordination, guidelines for what we can/can’t show, and so forth.
I saw the biggest issue to FEE3’s success was operations - making it as easy as possible to make the event less burdensome for the person in charge, and also making sure that knowledge of how to run the event was publicly available so anyone could theoretically run the event as is. Basically, it’s a checklist of things that need to get done for FEE3 to run in the same way it has for most of its life.
In 2021, WarPath put this to the test. While the timeline and checklist worked, I underestimated the level of effort required to make the event function given this structure. Although the “how” for everything was well-documented and we had great committees to support the event well in advance of showtime, the effort required to coordinate and execute all of this falls on the shoulders of the organizer, WarPath.
Basically, the organizer role itself is a bottleneck, and thus draining for the person in charge. WarPath can explain more himself, but it’s a lot of work over a half-year period to set everything up, and given the growing size of the event, it is, as many would say, “unsustainable” without changes. I certainly felt this way too last year when I played a leading role in putting on the event. It takes a lot of time and the operational framework basically puts the organizer in the driver’s seat for every decision and interaction, which doesn’t scale.
Now we get to the great debate. There are a number of ways we could approach making the event more sustainable to organize going forward as the community scales.
There are three paths we could take, each with their own pros and cons. Which you think makes the most sense depends on your goals for the event and the level of effort you’re willing to put into it.
I’ll get more into my own thoughts further down, but here are the three paths I can see us taking going forward.
1) Continue the event as is and get more dedicated organizers.
Details
This option addresses the operational burden by adding resources.
This would be the least significant change. It recognizes that FEE3 is a big event for a group of volunteers to execute, and more streamlined, dedicated leadership. Instead of one head organizer who directs everything, we’d have more formal committee leaders who own execution in each of their areas and alleviate the burden of the head organizer. This is a bit more like a corporate management structure, where the CEO oversees the event, and has directors who manage specific event functions (VP of quality reviews, VP of thumbnails, etc.). We sort of had this, but it was far from formal.
The pro is that we’d continue to foster inclusivity by ensuring all participants are involved and reduce the individual burden on the back-end. It does not address any concerns about viewership or audience, nor does it address complaints around video quality. Additionally, the head organizer would instead need to work through someone to make things happen, which could be detrimental if the committee head slacks off or disappears. We are all doing this on a volunteer basis, after all, and life happens.
Overall, this option essentially means that the event remains as is and we continue investing more in running it effectively.
2) Create a more rigorous entry process for projects and use gains from recording fewer projects to make higher quality showcases.
Details
This option addresses the operational burden by reducing the number of videos/projects that require support.
This would be the most drastic departure from the current event, as we’d need to pre-screen projects ahead of time, and also invest effort into making a “higher quality” showcase model. By reducing the burden of 80 projects to half of that or less, the additional time can be used to improve each video or create a new model altogether for the event. This would ideally lead to increased viewership due to the us showing off the community’s strongest work, but also investing more in the showcases themselves to make them higher quality and more viewer friendly.
The negative part here is that this takes the burden from putting low effort into many projects, to putting a ton of effort into fewer projects. Additionally, video editing talent is hard to come by and it is time consuming. We would create additional points of failure if an editor is unable to contribute on time. On the front end, we’d also need to worry about choosing which projects get in, which is a process that will likely be rife with bias and debate, causing an increased time investment just around who can even participate.
While I am intrigued with the idea of improving the overall format and quality of the event to reach a broader audience, I’m not convinced the juice is worth the squeeze - the closest proxy we have are the bigger FETubers, many of whom often eschew custom hacks in favor of vanilla because they generate more views.
Sadly, even getting more well-known youtubers to acknowledge or give us a community post shoutout or tweet is a tall task.
Would our fate be different? I don’t have any data indicating it would, but we also won’t know unless we try. However, I don’t think we’d be able to produce something of high enough quality to risk alienating project creators and community members who are used to being in the show and having a full suite of projects to watch. We’d need to spend more time rebranding the event to reflect this change as well.
Overall, it’d be a ton of work and would be hard to execute. We have an issue with organization capacity as is, and this will ultimately add to that burden. While it does reduce the amount of projects and resources needed to make thumbnails and videos, it increases the investment in pre-screening and video development to reach a higher level of perceived quality. It would probably net out to a greater amount of time investment all in all, depending on how many projects get into the show.
Unless someone or a group of highly dedicated individuals want to manage the event and transform it, I don’t think this option is wise. We’d need a strong vision for both the show and the back-end, and I have yet to see a compelling proposal that convinces me that we can execute this type of event.
3) Reduce the amount of organizer-provided support by making the event more self-service.
Details
This option reduces the operational burden by reducing the number of things an organizer needs to worry about.
The head organizer is responsible for managing every aspect of the event. Let’s run down the list: 1) Planning the event timeline and schedule, 2) recruiting, vetting, and bringing in committee members, 3) managing committees and their progress, 4) vetting videos, 5) uploading videos, 6) communicating with participants and the public about the event to remedy issues, 7) support development of art assets like thumbnails, and 8) ensuring everything runs on time.
FEE3 operates today in a “full-service” model. Since about 2018 or so, FEE3 has scaled to a point where the LPers did not want to or could not record every project, so individuals were brought in as volunteer LPers to support. In addition, we asked people to submit their own videos if they were so inclined. As the number of projects increased, so has the total number of LP requests made by would-be participants. Organizers now had to coordinate and assign these videos to different people, ensuring they had what they needed and getting it all together. I don’t have exact data, but roughly half of the videos were handled by the volunteer LP group. The other half were self-organized / submitted by the creator directly.
In addition to video recording, the art committee needed to make a thumbnail template and crank out 80 thumbnails, often with screenshots and images that needed to be massaged a bit to work well. This was another aspect of the event for the organizer to manage.
These items alone can add a ton of time to the organizer’s plate, and require much more coordination up front than what’s needed. This proposal removes this element, and instead provides resources for hack creators to self-serve both video and thumbnail creation.
Organizers would no longer be involved in organizing an LP or a thumbnail for you, but you would instead be given resources and instructions to do it yourself or connect with someone willing to help you outside of the staff. Organizer would still be responsible for planning and scheduling the event, reviewing videos, and uploading them - all of which is a much smaller timeshare than the other parts from the beginning of this section.
By allowing participants to self-organize, we still allow anyone with a project that meets the established requirements to participate, but put the onus on the hack creator to get their materials together to showcase. Instead of FEU putting on the show, we’re providing a platform for you to showcase your own work that we will vet and ensure it’s up to the quality standard for the channel before posting.
The negative side is that it puts more work on participants to communicate and find their own LPer or make their own video/thumbnails. The assumption here is that people will volunteer to LP independently, and that it will allow creators to be more selective of who they work with and how they show off their work.
We’ve received some feedback and requests around volunteer LPers from creators and vice versa, and it may be better to allow creators and volunteers to self-organize in order to reduce any tension or misunderstandings that are caused by using FEU organizers as the middleman here.
The biggest downside to this is that it may make the event less inclusive if fewer people are involved, but at least it is the participant’s choice vs. the staff’s choice (ie I didn’t record my project because I can’t vs. FEU mods said my project wasn’t good enough for the show).
Ideally, we’d be able to set up mechanisms for creators to connect with people who can help w/ video editing, as well as channels to acquire help/support, without requiring an FEU staff member to coordinate on their behalf, then any creator should be empowered to participate.
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My preference is towards the third option, as I think it will achieve FEE3’s mission statement better than the other two.
Below is the mission statement as written in the documentation thread:
To showcase ROM hacks, fan games, technical tools for hacking, animations, and other related materials to Fire Emblem fangame creation to an audience of like-minded creators with the goal of building awareness for and recognizing our work.
In short, this is a celebration of our efforts as a hacking community, and the primary audience is each other. We, the hacking community are both the performer and the main audience, and we should do our best to be inclusive of each other.
I believe in order to keep the event moving efficiently as we scale, we will need to put more on participants to show off their work, while using the FEU channel as an annual gathering place for these showcases.
I’m confident that between now and next year, we can build comprehensive guides and resources to help people create their own videos and thumbnails using a standard template. I think this will also make organizing the event much less of a burden. I could see a small group of organizers and mods informally splitting up review duties and communicating with individual participants as needed, while also creating channels on FEU for FEE3 support, discussion, and finding an LPer/thumbnail creator if you are unable to.
For option 1, based on the commitment level of some committee members, I don’t think we have enough dedicated folks to ensure the event would run on time - more people with decisioning power likely won’t make a huge impact based on my observation this year. There was still a bit of chasing we had to do to get things moving and some people who expressed interest were nowhere to be found when there was work to be done.
Option 2, while noble in its ambitions, is less inclusive and doesn’t provide a clear path for the event to launch. We would create more points of failure by relying on theoretical video editors to make trailers or beautify showcases, while also limiting who can be involved, which may cause participants to be disengaged.
That said, I think the only way to continue ensuring as many people can be involved while reducing the overhead for organizers is to make the event entirely self-serve, with FEU staff and organizers providing materials and resources for people to do it themselves, not too dissimilar from using a tutorial to learn how to use a hacking tool. While a similar proposal was discussed last year and I was against it, seeing how this year ran, I am willing to potentially sacrifice some level of inclusivity to reduce the workload of the organizer in hopes of reducing burnout.
I think it’s fair to ask hack creators to put more into getting their work shown without creating an arbitrary quality bar. If you can work to get your own video and thumbnail, you should be able to participate.
If FEU provides resources for you to build a thumbnail using a template and connect with someone who can help you record, putting the onus on the creator to figure it out is a necessity to ensuring we can run the event at this scale while helping as many people as possible participate. For half of the projects this year, it won’t be notably different since they did it themselves anyway.
I’m curious to gauge everyone’s thoughts on this. I don’t know if WarPath plans to return as organizer or not, but regardless, it’s become clear that FEE3’s ability to scale is hampered by its current operating model.
Regardless of what we decide to do next year, I will make a self-service guide. We’ve learned a lot about what makes a showcase good, and putting together a comprehensive resource to help individuals make better videos will be needed to support creators and volunteers.
I’ve been slowly working on this and will aim to have a first draft posted before FEE3 starts next year. I may reach out to some folks who did trailers and made thumbnails to help put together tips and best practices for showcases to help fill in gaps.
Overall, I am confident that by sharing comprehensive resources and creating a place for creators to connect w/ others, we can elevate overall showcase quality while both ensuring we can all participate and that organizers don’t get burnt out trying to facilitate the event.
Keen to get thoughts and feedback. Thanks for reading.
