Alright, I had a bit of inspiration strike today and I want to run it by people (tl;dr at the bottom). I want to stream again, but I need to stream something I enjoy doing because if it's work I won't do it. I realized I really like learning and explaining game systems to people and I was wondering if there's interest in something like that. The way I'm thinking of doing it is something like this for each game:
Stream 1: Introduction to the gameI'll play through a bit of the game in question. Probably 3-5 hours of just normal gameplay, explaining on a fairly surface level how things work while just having fun playing the game.
Stream 2: Diving in to game mechanicsPlaying the game, but doing so in a way that exposes the core mechanics as much as possible, while explaining the guts in more depth. This will look different for each game and will tie directly in to the third stream.
Stream 3: Competitive community involvementHere's where you guys would join in. Using what I've shown and explained in the first two streams, you guys would do a little work on your own then we would have community competitive play either as a tournament or in whatever format works best for the game in question. The goal here is friendly competition, because it's unlikely that more than one or two people will be experts at any given game.
The list of games I brainstormed is fairly small, but it's games I already know a fair amount about, so it would mean less work for me behind the scenes. So far it's:
Pokemon - the competitive part would likely be a series of 1v1 battles, but we could have some fun with alternative battles too
Final Fantasy Tactics - AI arena battle teams - a bit of a special case, but still fun
Magic the Gathering - might be hard because of the sheer number of possibilities, but could be fun for an on-going thing
Age of Mythology - I've already streamed this a bit and there were people who showed interest in multiplayer
Path of Exile - the competitive part would likely be races for those who know a bit about the game
Starcraft - either 1 or 2, the main issue here is probably getting a hold of people who have the game
Dominions 3 - a whole game would take way too long, maybe just 1v1s on small maps
Minecraft - there's potentially less strategy here, but maybe not, especially with some of the competitive maps out there.
Yu-Gi-Oh! The Duelists of the Roses - I just really like this old PS2 game - I really don't know if multiplayer would work, I haven't tried it at all
The main issues I see are:
1) Stream 2 might be boring for a lot of people, but it's kind of important for getting enough people to make stream 3 work.
2) Stream 3 for each game relies on getting people to participate. Starting with a relatively easy, low stakes, low investment game will help with this, though.
3) Scheduling. Getting streams 1 and 2 to people is easy enough if I record them, but making sure people are able to participate in stream 3 might be tough.
4) Motivation/time required for me to essentially do curriculum development and lesson plans for these things.
On the other hand, I want to teach professionally, so this will be good practice teaching (in addition to the actual training I already have) and I'll be showing you guys things I'm interested in, which is always good.
Anyway, any feedback you guys have would be appreciated. Let me know if you think this would be something you're interested in, what issues you think there might be, game suggestions that you think might work (don't worry if the "competitive" part requires some creative thinking, that can be a bit abstract if we need), or anything else. I'll be tying in to the B12 community who are interested in each individual game, too, so we should have some rotating experts in each game in addition to the research I'll be doing myself.
tl;dr: I want to do a series of streams focusing on a variety of games, teaching the games to you guys then pitting us all against each other in competitive fun with the knowledge you hopefully absorb from the preliminary streams.
