2017-09-17: Big Bad Game-a-thon 2017

I just finished staffing a speedrun marathon all weekend. Big Bad Game-a-thon was a neat idea people in the Kusogrande bad game tournament had to put on a marathon exclusively of speedruns and challenge plays of bad games. It was far more successful than we could have possibly dreamed.

A lot of people submitted runs, even people outside the niche of "Bad game" fans that we expected. We ever had some people who knew so many arguably poor quality games that we had to limit the number of submissions we allowed from one person. We managed to fill a 60 hour schedule with runs and have several backup runs on the side; that alone was a shock. Still as we put the word out we expected maybe 50 viewers at peak, nothing huge. Who wanted to see a marathon that intentionally ran bad games after all?

I'd been saddled with graveyard shift for emceeing. My original workload was supposed to be two four hour shifts of being on mic at about 3am local time. I work my own hours and have sleep issues anyway, so I volunteered for the grunt shifts. As the marathon started, though, we realized this was going to be a bigger deal than we thought. We had 200 viewers right from the word go, with the number steadily increasing as the event went on. Whew!

I ended up doing a little of everything: emceeing, chat modding, supporting runner setup, cutting highlights. Then some technical problems arose and I ended up developing some scripts to circumvent them. On top of all of that, I had one scheduled run in the marathon, and when we got so far ahead of schedule we needed to go to bonus runs, I had a second I was unprepared for put in (but it went fine~). In the end I was emcee, chat mod, highlight cutter, coder, technical support, runner setup, and a little bit of administration as the only awake staff member at 3am.

It was a blast. My first emcee shift, I was tense because the bot we had been using to control the marathon was having technical problems and the only person able to reboot it was asleep, but we were able to isolate the cause of the issue and some Twitch API scripting on my part made sure it never happened again; I'm proud of myself for that one. I'm not going to say I "Saved the marathon" or anything, but I'll take some credit for making things run smoothly. The staff even took time to thank me in the finale for my work, so that felt nice.

Downside: I'm tired as hell. I slept maybe 6 hours all weekend, grabbing a few naps during longer runs I found less interesting. I'm going to sleep like a rock when I finally calm down enough to crash.

tags: personal, big_bad_gameathon