Dungeons & Dragons might be the only TTRPG that YouTube knows about
YouTube’s barely-disguised D&D-mostly video says that content consumption is the newest TTRPG lifestyle brand.
In late January, YouTube released a video titled “Enter the realm of the Tabletop Role Playing Games community,” which showcased luminaries of the YouTube TTRPG scene, from the inescapable actual players of Dimension 20, to folks like Outside Extra – a video game channel that has, occasionally, talked about TTRPGs. Narrated by Dimension 20’s own indie/mainstream darling Aabria Iyengar, the video cleanly goes through many of the exciting creators on YouTube, spanning actual play channels, artists, and musicians. It was one of the most reductive explanations of TTRPG content that I’ve ever watched, as both a critic and an ardent fan of the hobby. The entire video is dedicated to reinforcing the monopoly that Dungeons & Dragons has on the content creation cycle; the sheer inescapability that forces creators to put D&D or Critical Role in every video title lest it get overlooked by the algorithm.
Maybe the reason we got this reductive view of TTRPG content from YouTube is because of the overwhelming SEO soylent (SEOlent? I’ll take it to the workshop) that requires anyone who wants eyeballs on their TTRPG-based work on the site to continue to feed the machine exactly what it wants to eat, only to get the viewers that it already has, to support the game that has continually sucks air out of an expanding ecosystem. The merits of YouTube are vast, and the creators who use it are mostly excellent, but besties, this fucking sucks.
