The literary tradition of let's play

How do you write one of these. What are the genre’s conventions? I’ve only watched let’s plays on youtube, Im baby.

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like this!

please come back @cypsiman2 i need to know what happens

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miss paladins quest guy so much honestly. I read that thread on my break at work so many times

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oh wow I’ll give this a read. seems like a pretty fun writing project tbh!

i keep meaning to start an SMT1 let’s play but i can never decide on what to name the characters so i give up

Easily solved with a forum poll.

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Man I did one of these on this very site for DROD with no prior experience and by the end of it I still had no idea what I was doing. I suggest just including a lot of screenshots. Gifs are like text LP’s CGI so if you can manage those then the flash will hopefully blind the suckers reading to how thin everything else is.

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Oh geez, I’ve been so busy with things, I’ve completely let the Paladin’s Quest LP slip by! Well, its too late for me to do a post today, but I will resume it tomorrow!

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thank you!!!

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This is the most exciting videogame news anyone has posted in a while!!!

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I found this cool website. I think at the start of next year I’ll probably go through a bunch of these and try to study them. https://lparchive.org/

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It’s really one of the great public-service websites. I’ve read a lot there, but this one of Riviera: The Promised Land also stands out for me as both a crunchy account of the game and a good piece of fiction writing.

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thank you!! I love a recommendation because the most daunting thing about starting to read these is finding out where to start.

It really depends what you want to do with an LP.

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This is great, was thinking I’d need to figure out, like, different genres or reasons that people write these things.

I gotta check out the RE4 LP on the archive and see if it’s the one I’m thinking of, it’s pretty bananas

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Starting to read a couple of these. Greatly enjoying this Blade Runner let’s play by Scorchy. And I am also reading through Permanent Death, the compiled PDF version of the permanent death playthrough of FarCry 2 that Ben Abraham did. These are both super fun reads and really interesting games. Having a ton of fun. I am hoping to do a term paper on this kind of writing, relating it to autobiography. Not sure yet!

Would love to do one of these for Pathologic 2 in the next year or so. The logistics of it make my head hurt, taking screenshots and remembering what they’re for. But the writing and narrating sounds fun, especially if there can be collaboration involved with other posters.

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I used to read a ton of screenshot LPs back in the day, when the genre writing convention was to assign as many Something Awful emotes as you could to every character in the game to make 4th wall jokes about whatever was going on. Weird time, but I do miss reading them. I was really excited to see the torch of the screenshot LP carried on in this forum, and it’s made me want to start my own (by the time I got out of my lurking phase the screenshot LP was an “outdated” format and I didn’t see much point in doing one myself).

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Screenshots are alive and well, though now someone is recording video and extracting frames from it to construct their narrative. It’s more useful for top-down and/or slower paced gameplay; looking at SomethingAwful the first page of LPs are roughly split 50/50. And it does allow for spontaneous collaboration, whether through asking the viewer to choose a direction or more naturally from the author/viewers themselves (as seen in the Lobotomy Corporation LP).

Every so often I am tempted to do a sequel to the DROD LP I randomly did on here some years back, but the two games in the series I still have to play are supposed to be absurd-level difficult and I fear it’d just be a chronicle of my slow descent into madness.

…That and it’d be a lot of work and listing random game names is so much less effort >_>

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