I am a follower of Yahtzee and found your video series because he mentioned his interview with you in his blog. I greatly enjoyed the whole episode and may watch the next ones. It is unfortunate that you do not provide direct links to the content, blogs, or websites mentioned — I would love to see some of the other artists’ work, but I must resort to googling.

Yahtzee’s journey was a long and slow one to fame, producing humor works and free adventure games at no gain as he slowly built his following, then suddenly had it explode when he posted a game review to Youtube. That explosion was perhaps partially due to his pre-existing following voting for, ranking, and recommending his videos so highly.

I’m afraid I do not live in Australia and found it difficult to obtain this episode, but there is a torrent for it in the forums of Yahtzee’s personal site which may be useful to anyone in a similar situation.

http://lucazoid.com/media/video/notquiteart_2008_ep01.wmv

marcus, i trust you will let me know if you get in trouble for this blatant breach of copyright law.

but i also know that given the content of this particular episode, it would seem churlish for the ABC to not want the show to be distributed far and wide on the interwebs!

Will there be an opportunity for those of us outside Australia to watch the second one? (Personally I live in Norway, if matters.) Just having “copyright reason” as an explanation is rather vague, highly unsatisfying and not to mention a little annoying.
Hopefully something might be done. Or at least explained.

I was looking forward to watching this series, but I’ve found I can’t watch it because I live in Japan. And due to ‘copyright reasons’ I can’t download it. I wonder what can be done about this..?

What we do know is that getting your work out there helps, and keeping it in obscurity doesn’t. There are many writers who put all their work on the web as free downloads, as well as publishing it in books. Now you may think that would never work financially, but google Cory Doctorow and you will find that he has made the New York Times bestseller list doing exactly that. He pimps his stuff in other ways too, but it only helps his income if people just take his online books.

We also know that conventional business models can come to grief on the web, witness the crisis of the music industry. Musicians are developing new web business models for themselves, and independence from the labels. Again, getting some stuff out there for free helps. (The big labels are starting to understand.)

However freebies aren’t all there is to it, and developing your network is the main thing that creates value, whether that is a niche or something wider – and where to do that will vary according to what you are doing. These new business models are a work in progress, changing as the web changes. But it is great that a program like this is showing what Australian artists are accomplishing online. (Funding implications of this kind of documentation, anyone?)

And of course the business side of it isn’t everything, the chooky dancers being a case in point. And that is something wonderful about the web – the cost of cultural exchange like that is now insignificant.

Pam (grad student, Internet Studies)

Benecee – believe me, Yahtzee does make money out of these things. Apart from anything The Escapist might pay him, his popularity has catapulted him into other jobs, like advising game design companies and some hush-hush (game design) project he’s apparently not allowed to talk about.

I think also the point of the episode (or at least, what I got from it) was that it’s really the technologies like the internet that means all these otherwise disparate people to come together to form one huge audience. So if Yahtzee wrote for The Age, I doubt he’d be as popular simply because (somewhat obviously) your average Age reader isn’t going to understand what on earth he’s talking about. But, put him on the internet with millions of other gamers looking for humour and bingo, you’ve got a massive audience that’s spread all over the world rather than being isolated in one spot. It works conversely as well – put Jim Schembri on the internet and you get very boring results (check out his Cinetopia blog) yet in print he works well for the local audience.