Magic

In the game of podcasting, timing can be everything. Opportunities not acted upon can slip by as quickly as they present themselves, sometimes so quickly that they’re gone before you even know they are there. Other times, priorities take over and you have to let something go just because the timing doesn’t work out. And then sometimes, when all the stars align just right, months of hard work pay off with a series of successes clustered together.

This was one of those weekends.

Everybody at RCM had something going on. On Tap opened the weekend interviewing a really cool RivalFriend (Hi Petra!) whom we’d been trying to schedule for some time and ended up having one of the best shows we’ve ever done. Baron immediately followed up with one of the highest live viewer streams RCM has done since moving to Twitch last January, doing an overnight Until Dawn marathon play through from start to finish (and managing to save Wolfie in the process. Which was a good thing, since Wolfie was hanging out in our house at the time and keeping an eye on things). Next came the guys’ long-awaited Diablo cannonball run, the ladies’ long-awaited Sim murder (Vampy and Dove are now friends with Death), and Highlander keeping us up all night with the most interesting puzzle game I’ve seen in a very long time (Her Story). Even the web ninja got involved, making a game for an impromptu On Tap attempt that, while not turning out quite the way we’d hoped, set the groundwork for something interesting just around the corner. But as awesome as all of those things are, what made the weekend special was the joy that came out of each of us doing something that we loved among the people with whom we enjoy spending time.

This is where the magic starts.

One of the things Petra talked about that really resonated with me was when she talked about her community, and how even as she enjoys growing and meeting new people, it was important to remember and nurture your relationships with the ones who were there with you from the very beginning. The ones who supported you through both your triumphs and missteps. The ones who took the time to watch through those (really rough) early episodes and give you feedback to make things better. The ones who come back week after week to share in your passions, because they’re their passions too. I completely got what she meant when she talked about enjoying her community activities so much that she couldn’t picture not doing it, because that’s how I feel when I’m working on RCM projects.

The other thing I stumbled upon this weekend was completely by accident. It started with Bio and Hax planting the song “The Cheat Is Not Dead” in my brain just before I (finally) went to sleep this morning, which resulted in some odd dreams with the song playing in the background the whole time (“JUST DE CLAPS! Just de claps…”). My first thought upon waking, then, was “huh, I should try tracking down the Brothers Chaps and ask them for an interview on our podcast.” This started researching, which led to a number of interviews the brothers did over the years.

One in particular that caught my eye was conducted by Ben Goldstein for Giant Magazine in 2005, the height of the homestarrunner.com popularity. In it, they’re talking about how many people visit the site each month, and Mike Chapman makes the comment that he hadn’t looked at the numbers for two years. When asked why, Chapman replied, “We’ve never really cared. This has all been by accident, you know? We just did it out of fun, and we sort of got to a point where we found ourselves caring too much about the numbers. We didn’t want to have our work affected by the number of people coming. You hope that the audience is there, but if it goes a little bit, we don’t want to be like, ‘Oh, we need to put something with Trogdor in there to get the fans to come back.'” This resonated because it went back to our conversation with Petra Friday night, and to sidebar conversations I’ve had with all of the RCM staffers at various points over the past year: we all got into this as a hobby. And while we’re all interested in growth and expanding to try new ideas, at the heart, we do this for the sheer love of being a part of the creative process and being able to share those creations with the world. None of us get paid for this. RCM has always been a labor of love, and it shows in the content we produce.

Still, it would be nice to eventually get to a point where making shows and videos and stories is what we do full-time. And though it might take a while, when I sit in our staff meetings each Thursday night and look around the names in the room and see the people who put so much of themselves into their projects and community every week, I know we can get there. But by the same token, I don’t ever want to become so obsessed with numbers that creative quality takes a back seat in favor of trying to convince someone to like us. Screw that. As I’ve mentioned before, I’d rather work my ass off for moderate success with the audience I’m meant for, success that can be sustained over the long haul, than sell my soul out for a quick win that dissipates as rapidly as it arrives. I refuse to degrade myself or my team to the realm of one-hit wonders when we’re meant for so much more than that. To achieve the success we want, it’s all about keeping that balance between putting ourselves out there, pushing forward, and remembering that sustainability means following our hearts and building the right community.

As this weekend showed, we’ve still got a lot to learn, but we’re on the right track.