Play It Again

by Aidan Wayne

  Sam liked his Let’s Play YouTube channel. He didn’t have very many followers at all, only about four hundred, but he had conversations with quite a lot of them on a weekly basis when he uploaded his videos. That was one of the reasons he liked doing YouTube, really. It was very difficult for Sam to meet new people; large groups overwhelmed him, and he was too shy to approach individuals. But thanks to YouTube, he was not only able to share his love for a game he really enjoyed, but he was able to talk to others about it. Exchange tips, tricks, and suggestions. That was the part of YouTube he enjoyed most.

  “Oh dear, it looks like one of the big birds doesn’t like the fact that we’ve taken her egg. Let me just skip away from her and move over a couple of screens...” In-game, the bird gave up on chasing Sam’s character and turned around. “What? You’re giving up? Just like that? Oh, that’s disappointing. I’ve taken your young! You’re a bad parent. I’m genuinely disappointed in this bird now.”

  He played through the game, recording for about an hour, like he always did. He talked through the good parts, the hard parts, and added his own little narrative touch. Or tried to. He’d had a few comments saying that they liked his play style, but they really liked what they deemed his “adorable silliness.” Sam wasn’t quite sure what it was about him that was adorable, but then again, it wasn’t as if they were able to see him through the screen. He didn’t use any of those fancy videos. He was just a disembodied voice playing a fun little top-down 2D survival adventure game.

  “Alright,” he said, after he finished up the hour, “that’s it for today, everybody. Thank you so much for listening in, and this was Dire Straits.”

  He cut the recording, watched over the video to make sure there weren’t any audio or video issues, and then it was time to render the footage so he could upload it to YouTube.

  Rendering could take forever, so while he waited he went to make himself a cup of tea, and then brought up the Kindle Unlimited app on his phone to pick a new book to read. He’d finished his last one on his break at work that day. He always read during his lunches. Always read whenever he had the chance, truth be told. Another reason why he didn’t know very many people; he was the type who kept his nose in a book more often than not.

  Books were easier than people.

  Then again, with his job being IT, there were often good reasons he came home having exhausted his social-skill quota for the day and was only up to playing some games or reading a book before crashing. Books and video games also didn’t yell at you, or snidely act as though you were a waste of space.

  Sam sighed. That all came with the job description of dealing with frustrated and angry customers. He didn’t mind doing the actual computer work, but talking on the phone gave him enough anxiety as it was. Never knowing whether a call might turn nasty made him dread it every time he was given a ring.

  But again, YouTube was different. He’d only really just started uploading videos about a year ago, after getting the idea in his head when his brother said something along the lines of “You play that game all the time, why not just do a let’s play for it?” and given him a mic headset. Sam hadn’t done anything about it for ages, but the idea had rattled around until finally he found himself using spare bits of time to research how to record and upload videos.

  Now he played his games like he usually did, but he had a specific “YouTube only” file that he played and recorded every Friday night after he got home from work. He rendered it right after, then set it to upload, and by the time he was ready for bed, the video was live and he could tag it and put it out there in the world.

  The really nice part about it all was that, when he woke up Saturday morning, he usually had at least one comment or two from his followers. That was always such a pleasure to wake up to.

  He always responded too. It was easy, with so few comments. But his small group of followers were loyal. He saw the same usernames in the same comments and conversations. It was a total delight, really.

  He picked his book and settled in to read, but it was only a few minutes later that his phone buzzed with a new comment from YouTube.

  Hey, the person, Rachel R., had written. I was rec’d your channel a couple weeks ago, because I was looking for Dire Straits let’s plays, and I might have binge-watched the entire thing. Just caught up now. Really enjoy what you do. Thanks for putting it out there! Looking forward to the next update.

  Sam grinned and wrote back. Thanks! I’m so glad you are enjoying my videos. If you ever have any other questions or comments, please feel free to let me know. I’m always up for bettering my channel. (And good news I suppose, but I’m uploading another video tonight. It should be up in the next few hours.)

  The reply wasn’t immediate, but it did happen, just as Sam finished another page of his book. Awesome, good to know. Do you update regularly?

  Yes, Sam replied. Every Friday night, circumstances allowing.

  And then, Cool! I’ll keep that in mind. You definitely just gained a subscriber.

  Beaming, Sam checked the uploading video, and then returned to his book.

  * * *

  “Hey, Dovid,” Rachel called from her bedroom. “Come here. You’ve got to check this out.”

  “I’m busy,” Dovid called back, before salting the pasta water and dumping the spaghetti into the boiling pot.

  “Dovid, come on!”

  “I am making dinner, woman. Hold on.” He set the timer for seven minutes and, only then, did he say, “Now, what is it?”

  “I found something I think you’ll like.”

  Dovid sighed. He wasn’t going to get more than that until he actually went to Rachel’s room to see what she wanted. He grabbed the timer and shuffled along, maybe taking his time, a little.

  “Dooooviiiiiid.”

  “I’m coming, I’m coming. Geez. Now what do you want?”

  “So, you know how I’m into Dire Straits?”

  “That video game? Yeah.” Rachel had discovered it back in January, playing it at a friend’s house, and immediately fell in love. She refused to buy it, however, because, according to her, it would eat up every single bit of spare time she ever had if she actually owned the game. So instead she lived vicariously through Let’s Players. Or tried to. She hadn’t been having a lot of luck finding someone she wanted to actually listen to and watch play. “What about it?”

  “I finally found someone.”

  “For what?”

  “To watch! His name is Sam, and he’s from Ireland, and he’s got this awesome way of speaking and he plays really well. He’s got like a year in-game where he hasn’t died yet.”

  “That’s great,” Dovid said, trying for encouraging. “Glad you actually managed to find someone you could stand.”

  “You’ve got to listen to him.”

  “What? Why? I don’t care about the game.” He couldn’t play it, couldn’t appreciate it, and thus had little interest in it.

  “No, you’ve got to listen to him. He’s adorable. And his voice is adorable.”

  “Two adorables?”

  Rachel grabbed his hand and pulled him closer. “Shh. Just listen to the first episode.”

  “Rachel, seriously—”

  “Hello, everybody. I’m Sam, and welcome to my very first episode of Let’s Play Dire Straits. I’m going to go right into it but first, for those who don’t know, so Dire Straits is a top-down 2D survival adventure game. You have to gather food and resources and build bases to keep your character fed, healthy, and sane. As I’ve only started out and loaded up a new game with my player character, I’m just skipping about here, collecting grass and twigs and flint—”

  “Just skipping about?” Dovid repeated dumbly.

  “I know, right? And he talks like that all the time. He’s got this utterly adorable way of speaking.”

  “I see.” Rachel had been right. Sam... S
am definitely had a voice Dovid was interested in. Not that he’d tell her. She’d just get all smug about it. “What’s his channel name?”

  “Why do you want to know?” Rachel asked, voice sly. Damn it.

  Dovid shrugged, trying for nonchalant. “If you’re really all up in arms about me listening to this guy, I might as well do it on my own computer out of your way.”

  “Uh-huh.” Rachel sounded like she was grinning, but all she said was, “His name is Playitagainsam.”

  “Right. Well, I guess I’ll look him up. In between making dinner.”

  “It’s just pasta,” Rachel called after him. “It’s not like it’s so hard!”

  “Says the person who managed to burn the pot last time she tried!” There was a reason—aside from the blindness—that Dovid was in charge of food prep and Rachel was in charge of sweeping and vacuuming.

  Dovid went to his room, turned on his monitor and went to YouTube to find Sam’s channel. When he’d found it, he went to the first episode of the Dire Straits series and set it to load while he went back to the kitchen to finish dinner, getting the broccoli he’d already chopped up and throwing it in a pan with salt, butter, and dill.

  Once the timer beeped for the pasta, he drained it then got out the cheese, marinara sauce, and spices and stirred everything together, adding the spices to taste. He’d been making this particular dish for ages; it had been one of the first things Dovid had learned how to really cook. He and Rachel had dubbed the Dovid original “yummy pasta” back when they were kids.

  He set the table and, by the time he was done, his fork easily went through the broccoli, indicating that it was ready. He brought all the food to the table, grabbed the pitcher of water from the fridge, and then went to get Rachel.

  Over dinner they talked about the next video project. On top of sporadic videos whenever they felt like it, their channel released two videos regularly, Monday and Thursday. Usually one was a review of something and the other was some type of vlog. Over the years they’d both gotten a little looser in what they chose to release. They did “Day in the Life” videos, apartment tours (for their own place, as well as some other accessible apartments in the area), food reviews, and fan mail openings. Dovid got a lot of fan mail, mostly food, because he often said that he’d try anything once. People all over the world sent him stuff to try. He’d unbox something, Rachel would tell him what the package said it was, and then Dovid would try it.

  Hands down the worst thing he’d ever eaten, on or off camera, was some salmiakki a fan from the Netherlands had sent. Dovid was pretty sure it had been sent with good intentions but it was still essentially punishment candy.

  “I think we should just have another fan unboxing, or a question-answering session,” Rachel said. “Easy, the fans like it, and not too hard to edit.”

  “We did just get in a lot of new fan mail,” Dovid said. “Want to arrange for a livestream? We could do it Wednesday, and then upload it as our Thursday video.”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “So how did you find this latest Let’s Player?”

  “Sam?”

  “No, the other one you made me listen to.”

  Rachel snorted. “On a forum actually. I got sort of desperate looking around all of YouTube trying to trawl for someone I liked, so I turned to forums. I found this one obscure little thing that had a guy who recommended him. Tried it on a whim. I’m caught up to his videos now, which sucks a little bit, because it means I’ve got to wait for him to upload new ones. On the plus side, he does update regularly. That’s every Friday night. Well, for him. It’s Friday afternoon for us, with the time difference.”

  “Wait a second,” Dovid said. “What do you mean you’re caught up? He’s got like fifty videos up, and you’ve only been into the game for like a month. And I know for a fact that you hadn’t heard of this guy two weeks ago, because you were still looking for someone to watch.”

  There was a pause that went on a little too long, accompanied by a slight squeaking that told Dovid Rachel was probably shifting in her seat. “Wait,” he said grinning. “Don’t tell me you binge-watched his whole series.”

  “Okay, I won’t tell you.”

  “He’s that good, huh?”

  “I just like how he plays the game, okay?”

  “Right. Well, clearly he’s this YouTube wonder. I really will have to give him a listen. Is he a top Let’s Player or something?”

  “Not even close,” Rachel said. “He’s got under a thousand followers. But he’s super personable. I wrote him to thank him for the videos and he wrote back, like, instantly.”

  “Huh.” So, he sounded like a genuinely nice guy too. Dovid sort of wondered why he didn’t have that big a following then. He asked Rachel.

  “Probably because Dire Straits is an Indie game, and it’s pretty new. It’s only been out a couple years. I don’t know how big a following it has. Which sucks, because it’s a damn good game.”

  “And you just burned through the videos of the one Let’s Player of it you really liked.”

  “Oh, shut up.”

  * * *

  After dinner, Dovid went to his room, grabbed his little “don’t bother me!” sign from the inside of his doorknob and put it outside before closing the door. It was a system they’d developed for ease of communication. If the sign was up, the only reason the other person got disturbed was if the apartment was on fire. Not up and, well, usually they both left their doors open in their rooms anyway. But it was a just in case. Sometimes Dovid listened to stuff with his good headphones, which meant he couldn’t hear knocking on his door. That often meant Rachel had to burst in to get him. Once he’d been listening to a horror podcast and she’d tapped him on the shoulder to get his attention. He’d stood up from the desk so fast he’d knocked her over.

  Rachel was also free to wake Dovid up if the sign wasn’t on his door, and vice versa. It just added a layer of privacy, which was especially important if Dovid brought someone home.

  Right now though, it was mostly a means to actually watch Sam’s videos to see what all the fuss was about, while also not letting Rachel know what he was doing. Just in case she felt like being smug.

  He put on his headphones and settled down to listen. Each video was about an hour; quite long for a YouTube video. But it also meant that Rachel had burned through nearly fifty hours’ worth of video in the last two weeks. In her free time. That was honestly hilarious, and Dovid planned on razzing her about it, now that he’d learned that new bit of information.

  But he had to admit, Sam did have a great voice. He was very easy to listen to. And it helped that what he was saying was interesting. Dovid hadn’t had a lot of interest in Dire Straits, but Sam clearly and genuinely loved the game so much, it was infectious.

  “...now the funny thing about this biome is that the trees aren’t exactly your ordinary trees, now are you? I’ll show you. Watch, I’ll try to chop it down, just get myself a little bit of firewood, and oop—there it goes! A painpine. These things can be nasty. Slow, but they’re a sanity drain for as long as they’re around you, and their hits really hurt. I’m going to just do a bit of dodging for now. One of the ways you can get them to de-agro is to plant pinecones. That’ll appease them, I suppose because you’re planting more of their brethren? In any case—”

  Before Dovid knew it, it had been an hour. And Rachel had been right, Sam was kind of adorable. It wasn’t that late yet, and he had nothing else to do today. So, he set the next video to play.

  “Hello, everybody. I’m Sam, and welcome to another episode of Let’s Play Dire Straits. Last time we played, there was a bit of nasty business with the warthog village and I ended up having to kill quite a lot of them. Which, as you recall, was terribly sad on my part for a number of reasons...”

  Dovid snickered. Sam had been brokenhearted that the warthog village had turned ag
ainst him during the full moon. In part because he “hated the slaughter” and partly because the warthogs were useful non-player characters and killing them all meant he’d have to wait a few days for a respawn.

  “—Ahah, bird! Look at that. You had no business eating those seeds, as they were clearly my seeds, and now you’re dead. That’s a pity. Although, you know, it’s funny, I’m so abominably bloodthirsty in this game when it comes to farming for meat and butter and all that, but in reality I’m a vegetarian. I don’t mind if other people aren’t of course, it’s not my job to regulate, but it’s my own difference I’m making, yeah? I’m a gentle soul, really. I can’t even squash bugs; I try to catch them and take them outside. No reason to harm a spider if there isn’t need, after all. And they’re such good bugs, spiders are. I mean arachnids. And sorry, there I seem to have gone off on a tangent. Back to the game—”

  That had Dovid smiling. It sort of figured. The way Sam talked and described things—he even spoke softly—Dovid wasn’t really surprised to hear that he was a vegetarian. Dovid wasn’t one, though he did do his best to make sure he was eating as humanely as possible. He sort of hoped that might be something Sam would appreciate.

  Not that that mattered in the slightest, of course.

  A couple episodes later, and Sam was talking about how Dire Straits had “Really gotten me out of the depths of despair, a little bit. Not the Princess Bride kind, but the regular kind. The doldrums, you know—” And Sam totally got points for referencing The Princess Bride.

  Sam cleared his throat. “I might have mentioned before that I work in IT. And it’s an alright job, pays the bills, there’re much worse things out there to do, and I’m very fortunate that I get to sit in a cubicle in a climate-controlled building. But it’s still taxing work, you know? Or maybe you don’t. But people call in and you need to help them out and often they’re cross because something isn’t working right, and I have to ask questions that sometimes make them even more cross and, well, it makes me tired. Emotionally, I mean. It can be draining. And me, I’m not all that social at the best of times, so it zaps my energy, you know? But playing this game gave me something to play with. And experiment on and figure out, and it was something new and fun and exciting to look forward to. And so now I get to share that with you all as well. I really like that. I’m grateful I get to do this, you know?” A laugh. “For all of you who might be watching today.”