If you've ever played around with the idea of starting up a gaming YouTube channel or live stream, you'll likely have been stopped in your tracks when you realize how much "stuff" you need to get started. A camera, a capture card, a microphone, good lighting, an audio interface - there are so many parts to pull together and the fantasy can quickly turn from a fun hobby idea to an impossible budgeting nightmare.
I'm lucky to have gotten to review all sorts of the best streaming gear, and I test a lot of it by making video essays about my favorite games on YouTube. I've tried out different microphones and cameras while making videos, and I've used so many audio mixers while doing live streams that my home is starting to resemble a radio studio. But creating good content is about so much more than just having production value. With so many people now live streaming their gameplay and posting gaming reviews to YouTube, your ideas are really what matters.
What I never expected while testing out various bits of content creation gear was for a paper tablet called the reMarkable 2 to become the thing the rest of my setup often revolves around. You might have heard of the reMarkable, or seen its hypnotic marketing targeted at you on social media.
It is, for all intents and purposes, a digital notepad and not much else. Of anything I've come across, it has the most authentic writing feel of any tablet out there. Amazon's Kindle Scribe might disagree with me there, but the reMarkable 2 is a much more minimalist take on the e-reader. It can read Ebooks and PDFs, and you can even annotate them while reading. But it's not linked up to digital bookstores like Amazon's Kindles, and it's really geared toward those who want an unlimited notepad instead.
What I've found more and more since using the reMarkable is that it hasn't just come in handy for content creation, it's transforming my gaming time too, in ways I never expected.
Ideas first
By this point, I'm sure you're probably wondering how on earth a notepad can possibly be such a revolutionary content creation device - if anything, it likely sounds like a waste of money compared to one of the best microphones that would up your production quality.
Chances are, if you're looking to create content and post it online for the world to see, you're probably a highly creative person. Speaking from experience, the creative parts of my brain are a bit scattered, and organizing ideas for projects while maintaining lists, or just keeping track of script ideas when they come into my brain at inconvenient moments can be tough.
The reMarkable helps me a lot because I can clearly organize folders and notebooks for each project I have in the works. I make a new notebook for every video I'm working on, give it a cover page with the tablet's fancy calligraphy pen setting, and then I have a place to set out my plans for that one project. From there, I can dedicate a page to thumbnail inspiration, a page for each of the main points I want to talk about in the video, I can even drag around things I've written previously if I need more space on the page for a fresh idea.
I can doodle, I can format in any way I want, and unlike with a real notebook, I don't need to worry about my god-awful handwriting making a mess of everything. One tap of the undo button later, or a quick scribble with the eraser end of the reMarkable's pen, and any mistakes are gone.
I used to do a lot of this content organizing on my phone's notes app, but since I was limited to the abilities of a small touch screen, I never felt like I could jot things down in ways that agreed with my dyslexic brain. I didn't have the freedom to scribble an arrow from one thought to another, and since I used my phone for so many other things in life, I would often get distracted, or feel like it wasn't a dedicated place for my ideas. My creativity felt a bit stifled, and the reMarkable's tactile writing experience, in a weird way, makes me feel closer to the ideas I have.
There are so many ways I've used the reMarkable when creating gaming content that I don't think this device's inventors really planned for. When I was video editing a recent project, I had about 20 hours of gameplay footage to cut down. After scrubbing through it all, I noted down timestamps and references for each clip I knew I might want to use in the video. Yes, this took a while, but having a clear list in front of me meant I had less reason to procrastinate while cutting the video together because I knew where to look.
Similarly, when I'm streaming, it can be really easy for me to get overwhelmed by looking at the chat window, focusing on gameplay, and keeping the technical aspects of the best streaming mixers running smoothly, and I can often forget things I wanted to talk about. Writing down some points on my paper tablet and sitting it on my desk is a lovely, helpful way for me to keep my livestream on track.
- Amazon: Check out reMarkable 2 prices
The gaming sidekick I didn't expect
But it's not just content creation the reMarkable 2 is helping me with. I've really been trying to cut back on my phone usage lately to heal my brain from social media doom scrolling. Instead of keeping my phone on my desk for a down moment in a game, I've been leaving it in the other room, and using the reMarkable to keep me occupied when I'm taking a break.
If I'm waiting for matchmaking in Hunt: Showdown 1896, or another online game, I can load up an article I've sent to the tablet for reading later. It might be a game review or a longer-read feature that caught my eye, but I feel like I can truly connect with what I'm reading when I don't have so many distractions buzzing at me for my attention. Whether you save and send over a PDF version of the article, or you send it using reMarkable's handy Chrome extension adverts from articles are either frozen in place or removed entirely. Since there's no backlight beaming into my eyes, it feels like a pure and friendly way to keep up with the news.
If you long for the nostalgic days of having a guidebook, gaming magazine, or list of cheat codes open next to you as you explore a new game, the reMarkable has brought back that experience for me. I'll load up a guide or two of the game I'm playing onto the tablet, and if I need to consult it during my session it's right in front of me, ready to scroll through. I can even write down some notes for my Baldur's Gate 3 playthrough and refer to them later when I forget what one spell does compared to the other. For its minimalist approaches, the reMarkable has a lot of versatile uses for nerdy hobbies. It can make for an incredible way to organize a campaign in D&D.
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