Questening Ground Rules

*pedantic quasi-academic mode activated*

In this post I herewith include the ground rules—or rules that might get ground up when they become inconvenient—for my Vinesauce Questening for the First Ever Vinny Video I Ever Watched.

To make this venture more manageable, I’ll filter my choices based on these factors that I suspect to be true:

  • It was probably a Nintendo, Plug & Plague, or indie game.
  • It very likely wasn’t from a franchise or series such as Pokemon, Animal Crossing, Bayonetta, Mario Maker, or other titles that don’t really interest me.

So that narrows it down to, oh, just a few thousand videos.

But I have a way of determining the time range for rewatches, and it’s all thanks to a journal entry I made in 2018. I started this journal during the bullet journal craze of 2017-2018. While it became useless in terms of keeping track of projects and habits—there are a lot of tragically unused pages—it did become helpful in recording my daily doings. (On a personal note, it’s heartening to see that I grew from a depressed soul with no hope in the world to someone who’s finally becoming more comfortable with herself and is letting go of old dreams that no longer suit her.)

I didn’t list every YouTube video I watched—I’m not that obsessive—but I did come across a note from September 19, 2018 that will help me in this Questening:

Earlier, I watched a video I had in my YouTube watch list. Someone had attempted to find a player from a video Vinny Vinesauce had made years ago.

Using this bit of information, I know that I had been watching him for a vague stretch of time. For the sake of having margins of error, I’m setting the absolute latest at August 2018. Going through the channel of the late Vappyvap88, who had the terrific notion of recording Vinny’s streams for posterity, I see that the earliest known recording was around early May 2014.

So, to sum up:

  • The earliest I might have started watching was in early May 2014.
  • The lastest I might have started watching was in August 2018.
  • It was likely a Nintendo, Plug & Plague, or indie game.
  • It very likely wasn’t from a franchise or series such as Pokemon, Animal Crossing, Bayonetta, Mario Maker, or other titles that don’t really interest me.
  • It was probably on Vappyvap’s channel or the Vinesauce: The Full Sauce channel, but not the Vinesauce highlights channel.
  • For playthroughs that have more than one video, only the first one will be watched. For YouTube series that are clearly numbered, I always watch the first video of any series. (I don’t have this rule for TV shows, movies, or books. I know, it’s strange.)

“But, Ellie,” asks the hypothetical reader, “why don’t you just see your YouTube history?”

Well, you clever little dickens, I’ve had the history function turned off since 2018-2019. I did turn it back on today, just to see what would happen, and I got this:

A screenshot featuring YouTube watch history. The only video is Vinny's video of Super Metroid - Part 1. The rest of the screen is vast, empty blackness with the menu buttons at the far bottom.

The process is restarted. I’m sure that any previous history would require a suspicious extension from a foreign country that hasn’t been updated in over two years, or trying to bribe a Google engineer. Neither option is worth the headache.

Why did I turn it off in the first place? To give myself a more peaceful YouTube experience. During that 2018-2019 period, when a content creator suffered some malicious hashtag campaign from a bitter, less successful gnat and her swarm, a slew of videos popped up in my recommendations based on my watch history, ranging from gossipy bullshit to “analyses” from the YouTube version of ambulance chasers. 

Ever since the history was turned off, I get a random assortment of relevant and obnoxious recommendations instead of a random assortment of rage-inducing recommendations. It’s far more tolerable. I haven’t missed the history function and I don’t need it.

But all these rules are a bit stifling, aren’t they? In the tradition of open-world adventuring, I’ll be including side quests in the form of revisiting favorite videos and watching those made by other Vinesauce members. And, of course, these rules are subject to change depending on new information coming to light, or outright disposal in the case of aforementioned inconvenience or suffocating ennui.

So what is my first video to rewatch? You saw it in the screenshot above. We’re doing Super Metroid – Part 1 from 2016, folks. It’ll be a blast! Or a… Metroid-related pun blast… cripes, I guess I should research the game as well.