So You Want to Be
a Video Essayist

A Five-Year Journey

The video essay form still escapes definition, and is no longer new or "the next big thing"—but the number and diversity of stakeholders continues to grow: creators, critics, scholars, curators, programmers, fans.

Three Major Ecosystems

Social Media & YouTube — algorithmic reach, volatile income
Academia & Criticism — peer review, slow prestige
Festivals & Galleries — artistic credibility, financial precarity

🎯 Your Goal

Survive five years as a video essayist. Navigate precarious creator economics. Balance audience, finances, reputation, and wellbeing. Most who try this path fail. Will you?

Inspired by the Sight & Sound Video Essay Poll (Anger, Hanáková, Lacurie, and Lee, 2025)

📚 Scholarly Apparatus

Design Framework

This interactive narrative applies the MDA (Mechanics, Dynamics, Aesthetics) framework to model the precarious conditions of creative labor in the contemporary media ecosystem. Each scenario is derived from documented phenomena in platform studies, creator economy research, and firsthand creator accounts.

The game emerged from research conducted for the Sight & Sound Video Essay Poll, which in 2025 surveyed 72 participants across three major ecosystems: academia/criticism, festivals/galleries, and social media/YouTube. As the poll's opening remarks note: "We naturally gravitate towards what is closest: an essay encountered at a workshop, one tied to a project we follow, or one that surfaces in our personalised feeds."

Theoretical Framing

Scenarios draw on four primary bodies of scholarship: Platform Labor Studies (Cunningham & Craig, Duffy, Siciliano), Algorithmic Visibility (Bishop, Bucher), Creative Precarity (Gill, McRobbie, Fure-Slocum & Goldstene), and Videographic Criticism (Keathley, Mittell, Grant).

The game's three paths—YouTube, Academia, and Festival—reflect real structural divisions in the video essay field, where, as the 2025 poll found, "there is little overlap in what each ecosystem mentions, except among contributors working across more than one sphere."

Citation

Lee, Kevin B. So You Want to Be a Video Essayist: An Interactive Narrative. 2026. Digital game. Inspired by the Sight & Sound Video Essay Poll, ed. Jiří Anger, Veronika Hanáková, Occitane Lacurie, and Kevin B. Lee. London: British Film Institute, 2025.

Primary Source

Anger, Jiří, Veronika Hanáková, Occitane Lacurie, and Kevin B. Lee, eds. "Sight & Sound Video Essay Poll 2025: Opening Remarks." Sight & Sound. London: British Film Institute, 2025.

The ninth installment of Sight & Sound's dedicated poll brought a record 72 participants and 255 video essays mentioned, documenting the growing diversity of stakeholders across three major ecosystems.

Platform Labor & Algorithm Studies

Bishop, Sophie. "Anxiety, Panic and Self-Optimization: Inequalities and the YouTube Algorithm." Convergence 24, no. 1 (2018): 69–84.

Foundational study documenting how YouTube's algorithm creates discriminatory visibility hierarchies, favoring content aligned with advertisers' demands.

Duffy, Brooke Erin, Annika Pinch, Shruti Sannon, and Megan Sawey. "The Nested Precarities of Creative Labor on Social Media." Social Media + Society 7, no. 2 (2021).

Presents an ecological model of visibility precarity across three levels: markets, industries, and platform features.

Creator Economy

Cunningham, Stuart, and David Craig. Social Media Entertainment: The New Intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. New York: NYU Press, 2019.
Regner, Tobias. "Crowdfunding a Monthly Income: An Analysis of the Membership Platform Patreon." Journal of Cultural Economics 45 (2021): 227–248.

Videographic Criticism

Keathley, Christian, Jason Mittell, and Catherine Grant. The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy. Scalar, 2019. http://videographicessay.org
Lavik, Erlend. "The Video Essay: The Future of Academic Film and Television Criticism?" Frames Cinema Journal 1, no. 1 (2012).

Early argument for the institutional legitimacy of videographic work, introducing the concept of "material equivalence" between film and criticism.

Scott, Daryl. "The Creative Triad: Toward an Academic Cinema." NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies (2024).

Framework integrating researcher, practitioner, and spectator perspectives in videographic scholarship.

Film Festival Studies & Exhibition

de Valck, Marijke. Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007.

Foundational text on festival circuits as "sites of passage" and the "dogma of discovery" privileging world premieres.

Stringer, Julian. "Global Cities and the International Film Festival Economy." In Cinema and the City, edited by Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice, 134–144. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.

Analysis of festivals' "spatial logics" and how global cities market local difference for symbolic capital.

Casetti, Francesco. "Back to the Motherland: The Film Theatre in the Postmedia Age." Screen 52, no. 1 (2011): 1–12.

Theorizes cinema's "relocation" across platforms while maintaining its essential experiential profile.

Complete Bibliography (Chicago Style)

Anger, Jiří, Veronika Hanáková, Occitane Lacurie, and Kevin B. Lee, eds. "Sight & Sound Video Essay Poll 2025: Opening Remarks." Sight & Sound. London: British Film Institute, 2025.
Bishop, Sophie. "Algorithmic Experts: Selling Algorithmic Lore on YouTube." Social Media + Society 6, no. 1 (2020).
Bishop, Sophie. "Anxiety, Panic and Self-Optimization: Inequalities and the YouTube Algorithm." Convergence 24, no. 1 (2018): 69–84.
Bishop, Sophie. "Managing Visibility on YouTube through Algorithmic Gossip." New Media & Society 21, no. 11-12 (2019): 2589–2606.
Bucher, Taina. "The Algorithmic Imaginary: Exploring the Ordinary Affects of Facebook Algorithms." Information, Communication & Society 20, no. 1 (2017): 30–44.
Cunningham, Stuart, and David Craig. Social Media Entertainment: The New Intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. New York: NYU Press, 2019.
Cunningham, Stuart, and David Craig, eds. Creator Culture: An Introduction to Global Social Media Entertainment. New York: NYU Press, 2021.
Duffy, Brooke Erin. (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.
Duffy, Brooke Erin, and Colten Meisner. "Platform Governance at the Margins: Social Media Creators' Experiences with Algorithmic (In)visibility." New Media & Society (2023).
Duffy, Brooke Erin, Annika Pinch, Shruti Sannon, and Megan Sawey. "The Nested Precarities of Creative Labor on Social Media." Social Media + Society 7, no. 2 (2021).
Fure-Slocum, Eric, and Claire Goldstene, eds. Contingent Faculty and the Remaking of Higher Education: A Labor History. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2024.
Grant, Catherine. "The Shudder of a Cinephiliac Idea? Videographic Film Studies Practice as Material Thinking." ANIKI: Portuguese Journal of the Moving Image 1, no. 1 (2014).
Hunicke, Robin, Marc LeBlanc, and Robert Zubek. "MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research." Proceedings of the AAAI Workshop on Challenges in Game AI, 2004.
Keathley, Christian, Jason Mittell, and Catherine Grant. The Videographic Essay: Practice and Pedagogy. Scalar, 2019. http://videographicessay.org
Lorenz, Taylor. Extremely Online: The Untold Story of Fame, Influence, and Power on the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023.
Mittell, Jason. "Videographic Criticism as a Digital Humanities Method." In Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019, edited by Matthew Gold and Lauren Klein, 224–242. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019.
Regner, Tobias. "Crowdfunding a Monthly Income: An Analysis of the Membership Platform Patreon." Journal of Cultural Economics 45 (2021): 227–248.
Siciliano, Michael L. "Intermediaries in the Age of Platformized Gatekeeping: The Case of YouTube 'Creators' and MCNs in the U.S." Poetics (2022).
Abidin, Crystal. "Communicative Intimacies: Influencers and Perceived Interconnectedness." Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 8 (2015).
Aufderheide, Patricia, and Peter Jaszi. Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.
Berg, Maggie, and Barbara K. Seeber. The Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016.
Clark, Meredith D. "DRAG THEM: A Brief Etymology of So-Called Cancel Culture." Communication and the Public 5, no. 3-4 (2020): 88–92.
Gillespie, Tarleton. Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018.
Hearn, Alison. "Structuring Feeling: Web 2.0, Online Ranking and Rating, and the Digital 'Reputation' Economy." Ephemera 10, no. 3/4 (2010): 421–438.
Nieborg, David B., and Thomas Poell. "The Platformization of Cultural Production: Theorizing the Contingent Cultural Commodity." New Media & Society 20, no. 11 (2018): 4275–4292.
Rauch, Jennifer. Slow Media: Why Slow is Satisfying, Sustainable, and Smart. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018.
Tokumitsu, Miya. Do What You Love: And Other Lies About Success and Happiness. New York: Regan Arts, 2015.
Wu, Tim. The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. New York: Knopf, 2016.
Balsom, Erika. Exhibiting Cinema in Contemporary Art. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013.
de Valck, Marijke. Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to Global Cinephilia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2007.
Faden, Eric. "Manifesto for Critical Media." Mediascape (2008).
Keating, Patrick. "The Video Essay as Cumulative and Recursive Scholarship." [In]Transition (2020).
O'Leary, Alan, and Kevin B. Lee. "Deformative Criticism." The Cine-Files 14 (2021).
Steyerl, Hito. "In Defense of the Poor Image." e-flux journal 10 (2009).
Casetti, Francesco. "Back to the Motherland: The Film Theatre in the Postmedia Age." Screen 52, no. 1 (2011): 1–12.
Grizzaffi, Chiara. "The TV Dictionary: A Videographic Exercise." [In]Transition.
Lavik, Erlend. "The Video Essay: The Future of Academic Film and Television Criticism?" Frames Cinema Journal 1, no. 1 (2012).
Lee, Grace. What's So Great About That? YouTube channel, 2018–present.
Scott, Daryl. "The Creative Triad: Toward an Academic Cinema." NECSUS: European Journal of Media Studies (2024).
Stringer, Julian. "Global Cities and the International Film Festival Economy." In Cinema and the City: Film and Urban Societies in a Global Context, edited by Mark Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice, 134–144. Oxford: Blackwell, 2001.
Audience
0
of 100K goal
Savings
$5,000
fail at -$8K
Reputation
10
0-100 scale
Wellbeing
70
fail at ≤10
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Year 1 of 5