I've been rewatching the Neebs Gaming's #ArkSurvivalEvolved series lately, while trying to fix my game. I've been watching the episodes weekly for a long while now, but watching them in sequence is quite a different experience.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL1Uou2DWH7IGqPVmuAz1nsUl56c8js20p

I'm not using the terms "series" and "episodes" lightly here : over time, what had begun as gameplay videos became more narratively rich episodes, with their structure sometimes even acknowledged during episodes ("this feels like a B story" was distinctly said on Ragnarok).

As someone who plays games but also, of course, loves TV shows, I find this angle particularly fascinating :P And it's 2am so, yeah, I'm gonna make a quick thread about that.

So normally on most YT channel including Ark content (or entirely dedicated to Ark content), videos are just gameplay. It's not like watching a livestream, in that there is almost always some level of editing. And that's what the Neebs gang started doing at first.

The channel, by the way, is called "Neebs Gaming", because one of the guys is called Neebs ; the first Ark videos were indeed only shot from one perspective, usually Neebs' (apparently because he had the most powerful computer of the group, and we know Ark's performance greed).

Occasionally, especially for tests of new content and/or maps, the video would be short from another guy's perspective, Thick44. But those videos were usually much shorter and had the distinctive goal of introducing the rest of the group to something new.

Those videos usually have a commentary (with Thick discussing things and some of the guys responding to it) more than an ingame audio of what is actually happening. As such those videos are also closest to the usual Ark content on YT.

The rest of the guys (Appsro, who famously had the sh*ttiest computer ; and Simon) were never recording from their own perspective in the first Ark videos from the channel. They appeared, but as companions when Neebs would go on adventures, usually, or to comment Thick's videos.

So that was how things were working for a long while, and though the group definitely had a specific dynamic was playing, Neebs Gaming's Ark videos were at first just that : discovering the game, playing it best as they could (which was usually not much), doing normal Ark stuff.

They spent about 15 episodes (each lasting about half an hour) on The Island, the basegame map. They did their fair share of exploring, taming, building, and of course dying. I think they found at least one artifact ? But never pursued endgame content anyway.

So far things had been pretty classic. Outside of the clear camaraderie there was nothing much setting aside those first episodes from other typical Ark content. "People playing a videogame" is not exactly revolutionary.

But the formula seemed to work, and after getting the hang of the game on the most basic map (and at the time, the only one ?), they (mostly) enjoyed Ark enough to decide to travel to a new map, The Center, mostly for exploration purposes.

That's when things started to change slightly. Within that part of the series (I'm tempted to call it a "season" even), there are clear arcs. They spend some times exploring the map, and are delighted to find cool and surprising caves to do just that. They establish a number of -

- bases, this time not just for survival purposes or to have more room (as had been the case on The Island), but just because they like a new area and decide to live there for a while. It's the case in the mountains and it's the case in "Playa Gorda".

Indeed the gang starts giving names to places they build in. Playa Gorda is expressedly designed as a vacation home after they've spent several episodes in the cold. There, they decide to have a contest to build a beach house each.

That's when things get interesting. It's not just about playing and showing game/map/creature features so much anymore. It's just about "living" in the game, and coming up with their own adventures. While on The Center, the Neebs gang still pursues "normal" Ark goals like -

- looking for artefacts or planning for bosses (...poorly, but they're never really expected to get gud, and at least certainly don't set that expectation for themselves), but they also sometimes just spend an entire episode just having fun underwater or whatever.

And because #ArkSurvivalEvolved doesn't have a story proper (it has a LORE, which vaguely guides actions of players who want to take an interest in it, but is only extremely optional to care about), they are free to come with their own stories. Which they do more often.

The Center "season" also includes more recurring jokes (oftentimes at Simon's expense but not exclusively), some serialized storytelling (the appearance of Doraleous as a sleeper for several episodes, who wakes up to join only once they've left), and...

Well The Center cycle is also about DIRECTING the episodes. The channel (through various series, not just Ark's) was growing and they got a sponsorship from Xidax, a gaming computer brand which equiped them with more powerful PCs.

This started meaning that the episodes were not just recorded from one perspective anymore, but several. When they introduce the new Xidax PCs, the Neebs gang actually states very clearly that they think that, when something interesting happens, they'll be able to show it -

- from someone else's perspective and not just Neebs'. For a handful of episodes, this is what happens : Neebs is indeed still the focus, and sometimes you'll see Simon being killed in first person perspective :P But slowly they start playing with that new tool and THAT is -

- when The Center cycle gets interesting. Being able to switch/edit different points of view allows them to tell more complex stories, to create adventures that go way beyond normal gameplay fare.

About 30 episodes are spent on The Center, which is really a good starting point for experimenting. Then they move to Scorched Earth, the first official paid DLC of Ark (...while the game was still in early access), and more of a themed map since it's set in a desert.

The Scorched Earth season is a perfect mix of what happened during the two previous ones. There's some exploring/surviving (which rarely ends up positively for the group since they still suck at it :P ), and there's a lot of arcs beyond that.

One of those arcs is spent trying to recreate an equivalent to Playa Gorda near an oasis, called Gorda Lagoon. Each of the guys has his own home, painted after his own colors, they tame more "personal" animals that they show affection towards.
Like Lifeguard Steve :

Later they decide to build a giant barn in the desert (because why not) even though they already have everything they need on Gorda Lagoon. Just for fun, like the real PvE players they are. There are sub-arcs during that time in the barn, for instance around having babies.

Now the gang had tried to make babies before (...usually said babies had a very short life :P ), but this time some of them actually develop an affinity for it. Appsro dedicates a whole corner of the barn to breeding jerboas, for instance.

And that breeding is done only for the sheer pleasure of having a lot of jerboas, by the way : the Neebs gang (in part because they don't care, in part because they don't do much research) doesn't breed creatures for stats or even for color mutations. They just breed to breed.

A few episodes also chronicle how the guys try to steal a wyvern egg and then follow the (very lengthy) growth of said baby wyvern.

At that point (much more than on The Center), the tamed creatures are showed affection, given various attributes, and considered as companions (when they're alone with a dino, they'll talk to them). The show expands its cast of characters to pixel creatures, some of them -

- being extremely invested in for gameplay as much as for storytelling, like Cooter the argentavis.

At this point the episodes almost always have A & B storylines, with the added bonus of characters pretending not knowing what happens in the other storyline (a narrative pretense since they all game in the same office )

So there's a whole thing about two of them getting a lymantria killed, then trying to tame another one to replace it without the other guys knowing, for instance, that completely relies on suspension of disbelief. At this point it's not really gaming anymore.

On Scorched Earth there is a recurring joke that Doraelous has not joined the group and doesn't know to play the game ; when he finally logs in, he's left outside of the barn without any help to learn the game, and come back once he's level 30. He ends up finding someone else -

- on the server who gifts him powerful creatures (a wyvern and an argentavis named... Wyvern and Shirley XD ). He then comes back to taunt the group since they don't have a wyvern yet and he does, though he didn't earn it. Such storylines are clearly funny and entertaining -

- but have nothing to do with gameplay videos. They're acted like actual comedy skits, and also edited as such. There's also an increased use of sound effects in post, and a now systematic use of exposition shots regularly during episodes.

They still play the game, but it's not the core feature of the series anymore. What matters is how they lived in this world for several weeks. The last episode of the Scorched Earth season is centered around a bossfight...

...but the episode (and with it, the season) only ends after they've said their goodbyes to every spot of the map they've known, and even some creatures they're leaving behind :

(notice how every place now has a name)

You'd think by then the Neebs' Ark series had pretty much found its footing. Well I'm in the middle of the Ragnarok season right now, and things have evolved even more.

There are now actual CONFLICTS in the episodes. Not just some friendly bickering over the best way to do something, or just banter, but actual tensions that drive the story. The most important one is of course the obsession of Thick for wyverns.

As he himself points out during one Ragnarok episode, they're his poison (not just because the poison wyverns can kill them, but because he is fascinated with getting one). He spends a lot of time trying to steal an egg from wyvern nests, which is obviously dangerous.

His obsession drives him to use Cooter (the ONLY creature that followed once they moved from Scorched Earth to Ragnarok, "if we were gonna bring ONE") in the northern wyvern trench... and gets Cooter killed.

The episode is, of course, called "Cooter is dead", and the death happens very early in the episode The other guys learn this through the ingame notification system while Thick doesn't immediately break the news to them, which only enrages them more.

As they deal with Cooter's death (...a creature made of pixels, to be clear), a montage retraces their relationship to Cooter, concluded by a symbolic ascension of Cooter to heaven.

(similar things had briefly happened before, including a dead jerboa who ended up in jerboa heaven with dozens of his peers for eternity, but it was in part played for laughs)

The rest of the episode is entirely dedicated to Thick trying to find a way to redeem himself (...by taming an otter noone asked for) and Neebs, Appsro, Simon and Doraleous discussing how to best punish Thick for getting Cooter killed. He ends up banned from the tribe.

The next episodes show how Thick now survives alone, then tries to make peace offers (that get another argentavis killed :P ), sometimes works with the team but is still very much a pariah, and eventually joins the tribe again.

At this point Ark is not the point of those episodes. The Ragnarok series uses Ark to tell stories, which is entirely different.

There are also entirely EXPERIMENTAL episodes that are clearly standalones.

My favorite is the one in which some of the gang is away, so the remaining tribemembers end up consuming narcoberries and tripping balls. They hallucinate unicorns for the rest of the night :

To fully appreciate the dedication that goes behind this, you have to know the game a bit. For instance those unicorns didn't come out of nowhere : they had to be spawned, since Ragnarok never has more than one in the wild at a time, and even then they're hard to find.

Also unicorns don't fly, so clearly cheats had to be used for that dream sequence to happen. It is very much planned and SCRIPTED is my point.

But even the directing (the unicorns are lit and shot in a specific way) and the editing/post (the music is, as far as I can tell, only used in this episode, contrarily to some background music that is usually recurring) are carefully designed.

Later the group gets to go full RP with the arrival of a strange man in the Ragnarok desert, which kidnaps several of them.
(that arc is not PG13 btw :P )

The slow evolution of the series into what Ragnarok ended up providing can be traced through individual earlier episodes, where some of those things were not possible (or not easily possible) but still attempted. But mostly the Ragnarok season is an experiment itself.

I think it's part of why the Aberration season failed so hard (and to some extent, the Extinction one too). On Aberration they had to start everything from scratch from a gameplay standpoint, and in short, exploration doesn't match that type of storytelling as much.

(also the map sucks, which everyone was made aware of very early since the Aberration season starts with an episode supposed to be the first AND the last... there were more, each of them designed to be the last on Aberration)

Some attempts were made to recreate the magic on Extinction, with very few effects. Extinction brought no fresh idea to the mix, and ended up being very much gameplay oriented for that reason, though the season does have arcs (because of the different biomes).

The current season, set on Valguero, is recapturing that Ragnarok sparkle. It started as a high concept premise : when transfering to Valguero, some of the guys (Neebs, Appsro & Thick) were sent by accident to Pixark (an Ark voxel spin-off), while two others landed in -

- Valguero proper (Simon & Dora). Again, suspension of disbelief is required as both groups are unaware of what happened or how they got separated. After a few episodes spent exploring Pixark, the rest of the group joins Valguero, but the tribe doesn't reunite and instead splits-

- intro three subgroups, resulting almost always in an A/B/C story structure : Thick alone (again obsessed with the idea of getting wyverns as soon as possible), Neebs & Appsro together, and Simon & Dora who keep trying to make do.

From day 1 it has been clear that Simon can't play Ark to save his life (literally), he even had times he absolutely hated the game and threatened to quit (during the Center season), and is the member of the group who has shown the least interest in getting emotionally -

- invested in places or creatures (though he occasionally finds some deaths sad, he rarely if ever tries to have HIS own creature, something all of the others have done at least once). Dora being the most recent player, he's also famously incapable of doing most things.

The Valguero season, because it has stranded Simon & Doraleaous alone on the map while the others are stuck by accident on Pixark, forces the two worst players to work together (it does not go without saying !), survive and eventually thrive.

It is the whole arc of the season so far, and it turns out that the both of them, who usually are the grumpiest of the lot, enjoy themselves a lot. Through trial & errors, they end up taming their fair share of dinos, and even... go full RP with them.

Earlier this month, these two actually decided to set up a SURPRISE PARTY for their T-rex (because he reached level 200, which in RP is usually interpreted as 200 years) !
It's both lovely and hilarious, look at that cake :

I should also mention the recent experimental episodes, like the Neebs & Appsro sitcom :
(complete with "live in front of a studio audience" laugh track)

At this point I don't watch the Neebs Gaming Ark series for Ark,. It of course helps that I know and understand the gameplay aspect but they care so little about that anyway. The whole point is to have, every Saturday, a new episode of an actual show.
So I wanted to share that.

:)

\\o/ They're back ! https://twitter.com/NeebsOfficial/status/1229908692776181760

*_*
I think I'm gonna like the latest Neebs podcast.

Isn't Neebs' #ArkSurvivalEvolved video early this week ? Not complaining, of course.

Last week the @NeebsOfficial gang ended the Valguero "season".

I'll be honest, I thought it lacked a spark overall. There were good episodes for sure, but the few last episodes dragged on towards a bossfight that had actually little stakes.
I was glad to watch that season but I'm also glad it ended.

Overall Valguero felt like they were playing it safe, "narratively" (though I'm aware they're not trying to be a fiction, this thread demonstrates that they once attempted things that were, in fact, close to storytelling) and gameplay wise.

And the fact that it was so long didn't help, that's for sure.

Most of the interesting things happened during about the first half of the season, particularly with Simon & Dora improving at the game. Dora blossomed into a strong breeder, and Simon seemed more assertive (despite what the later episodes depicted).