Enjoyed this pogo documentary
This Youtube video covers the first 20 years of Pogopalooza, a mostly-American pogo-sticking event series which began as a backyard hangout for young teens and ended up as a sponsored competition where those same teens - now much older - broke a bunch of world records every year.
(Warning... there is some footage of pretty grotesque injuries in this documentary, in particular a very shocking couple of minutes around 38 mins in where a guy breaks his arm on camera. It's not bloody but it's alarming as fuck!!)
The doc contains far too much unedited footage of guys bouncing on pogo sticks... like, if you watch it, you're mostly just going to be watching footage of white boys jumping over shit. But it's a super interesting snapshot of a sport going through a period of rapid technical growth because a bunch of people got together every year and specifically challenged one another to develop new tricks and break a series of world records.
I don't give much of a shit about pogo sticking - I am pretty sure I have never pogoed in my life - but I did see a lot that I recognized in this doc. I do feel that indie videogame development went through a similar period of change beginning when I was in college, when indie games started releasing on Steam and "games Twitter" kicked off. I remember seeing the complexity and scale of the scene absolutely skyrocket over a several-year period starting in 2010 or so.
The moment I associate most with this change is when I went from knowing every single "indie" game that released on Steam to seeing dozens of games on the platform every week that I'd never heard of before. The pogo stickers remember a similar moment. Starting around 2010, their event went grew from a few dozen people who all knew each other online into to a scene where it was possible for them to meet a stranger.
I bet that nearly every niche community has a story about that dynamic centered around online communities and social media specifically. It's no coincidence that the pogo sticking meetups grew out of a website community, kicked off in 2005, and suddenly turned a corner to become much more professional and competitive around the exact same time Americans mass-adopted feed-based social media. The pogo documentary made it clear that the events themselves happen thanks to the hard work of a group of real people... but they also talk about the networking they all did online to scout for athletes, contact and persuade their parents into letting them come to competitions, and then drag a competition's worth of boys to multiple events a year in multiple countries. I bet that if you surveyed a bunch of niche communities and sports, you'd find things getting weird and big right around the same time that social media and web video made it easier for these kinds of people to find each other.
People need each other to grow their craft. There's a section in the middle of the doc where one pogo sticker describes a "collective consciousness" that would take over at some of these events, where people who had never tried a dangerous trick before suddenly found themselves not only trying it but succeeding at it at these newly huge and professionalized events. He describes it as not just access to instruction but also the kind of contagious confidence you get from peers egging you on. I've experienced this same thing at game jams. I don't know that you need an audience of deranged rivals egging you on to get better at a craft, but it does seem to be the main way that human beings get good at shit!
Anyway... interesting doc! I think it might be hard for a lot of people to watch, since it is just a fuck ton of pogo footage... but I did enjoy watching it!
Note: obviously, I discovered this doc while researching the Hop Rod, which I posted about a few days ago. Another fruitful internet rabbithole!!