i really thought i could do well as a polygon personality.
i was willing to upend my life and move if that's what it took. games criticism felt like it was a field crying out for more engaging delivery without compromising the output, something more nuanced than a vertical 60 second video but not an hours-long essay
see, i didn't realize how horribly misplaced my feelings were. it wasn't that the field was lacking people who could create that output, rather there wasn't any financial incentive to create medium-length, long production-time material as opposed to cheap 60 second outputs or hours of unbroken podcasts
in an attempt to apply to and get hired at polygon, i started making videos that hewed more towards their pandemic era style, shorter, snappier, faster edits, while keeping the actual research level i had come to expect from videos from people like BDG and simone and pat gill.
in doing this, i learned that the green-screen editing format is uniquely bad for conveying information to people. at least, maybe when i do it.
but it's pretty hard to look at a person's face and gauge information from it when half of their eyes go missing every couple seconds because they're wearing glasses. there isn't time to do a better key, there are instead tools which automatically do a Good Enough key. so the fact that the edit is a bit sloppy becomes itself part of the joke
a person going flying all over the screen might get attention, but it doesn't necessarily make you an engaging speaker. it feels, to me, as though the silly atmosphere of the chaotic millenial-to-early-genZ youtube editing style (eddy burback kinda editing) was only ever going to wind up as shorts. or, if you're hbomberguy, several hour long creedos
if the topic isn't itself already absurdist enough to be engaging ala Unraveled, if the topic is instead actual critical discussion of a game, community, etc... who would click on a long poorly edited video that sarcastically explains a serious concept to them? they might engage with a 60 second one to get the info while rolling their eyes at the jokes
i dont hate the style, but it doesn't do well with genuine criticism. it has the same layer of semi-irony which is used as a shield for the very people in the industry we're often trying to criticize.
as for writing, i already was formatting my videos as articles first in the edit. the video script had to be readable and engaging enough to me to even gather the willpower to actually hit record, so i wound up getting good at writing in my own voice in complete sentences. it's how i wound up with my current article style
but anything which takes weeks to months to create but only lasts a few minutes is fewer ad reads, its less content to fill out a subscription's worth. so, cheap thoughts faster or slow thoughts longer became the two formats of choice and augh.
i'm not a fan of 8-hour videos, nor of 30 second videos. words that take too long to read lose people who could otherwise learn from them, but too short and won't actually engage anybody critically. the entire field i was trying to enter was splintered and now gone. crisse.
