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10 best youtubers for gaming video essays, according to reddit.

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Although video games can be mindless fun at times, some of the biggest releases of the later half of this year have included The Last of Us: Part 1 and the upcoming God of War: Ragnarök , titles that serve to highlight video games as an art form to rival traditional media. When it comes to what makes games like these work, YouTube has any gaming enthusiast covered.

From essayists who focus on the storytelling element of video games like Jacob Geller to ones that go in-depth to take apart the mechanical side of creating video games like Game Maker's Toolkit or even GDC, these are the channels that Reddit thinks fans should be checking out.

When most people think of video essays, they tend to think of channels where a single person presents their thoughts on a variety of topics but GDC is a little different. The name stands for Game Developers Conference and the YouTube channel presents clips and full talks from professionals.

Redditor rebilax13 comments that you can "never go wrong with GDC" as you get to "hear from the industry themselves." Whilst analysis from an outsider is always interesting, there's something about hearing developers, artists, and producers talk about their own methods of bringing video games to life that's uniquely insightful.

Writing On Games

Focusing on game design and what makes video game narratives so powerful , Writing on Games presents video game essays and reviews in a sharp and engaging style that has won the channel many fans over the years. That includes Redditor Party_McFly710 who rates them as a top channel when it comes to "general story analysis" for video games.

Whilst the channel isn't afraid to criticize games for their shortcomings, a lot of their videos involve going in-depth and taking apart exactly why highly-rated games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild , Elden Ring , and The Last of Us are so effective. Even better, Writing on Games generally draws attention to small details and game elements that most people would never pick up on.

Matthewmatosis

Well-researched, well-edited, and interesting video essays often take a lot of time to put together, which is why they aren't always easy to find. For those who don't mind infrequent uploads, Matthewmatosis provides just that, presenting videos that very obviously have a ton of thought and time put into them.

Redditor GhettoRussianSpy says they "wholeheartedly recommend" the channel and calls it "thought-provoking." Whereas some channels attempt to make videos about the most relevant game to ensure views, it's obvious that Matthewmatosis simply pursues whatever interests him at that time, presenting a fascinating dissection of Death Stranding nearly a year after Hideo Kojima's divisive title was released.

For retrospectives on awesome older video games , there are few channels that do so as effectively and entertainingly as Raycevick. Redditor Malix82 recommends the channel for "lengthy deconstructions" of exactly how and why a game once "made waves" or came to be perceived the way it is.

With his "... x Years Later" series, which includes "Metro Exodus... 3 Years Later" and "Need for Speed: Most Wanted... 13 Years Later," Raycevick uses the advantage of hindsight to look at games from a different perspective to usual and sometimes even challenge people's perceptions. Along with covering a wide range of games from different periods, Raycevick offers something for everyone.

Noah Caldwell-Gervais

There are plenty of channels that offer extremely long-form and comprehensive video essays on games but very few go to the extremes of Noah Caldwell-Gervais whose "Thorough Look" series has episodes that break the 5-hour mark. It's not just quantity he provides though as, according to Redditor Frittenbudenpapst , "His analysis, critique and description of games is just stellar."

"Whilst his almost-exclusive use of gameplay footage might not appeal to those who like more flashy and visually engaging video essays, it helps him to effectively capture the feel of the games he talks about and that's something his fans appreciate. This is especially true as he often talks about games where the atmosphere is one of the most important elements.

Tongue-in-cheek humor and sharp critiques go hand-in-hand in Whitelight's video essays, which often take on critically-lauded or critically-panned games and offer an interesting take. Whilst it's not a channel for fans who like their video essays to be completely serious, there are good reasons why Redditors like BrandalfFTW consider him one of "the best."

For example, despite taking a more humorous approach to the YouTube format , Whitelight's critiques tend to be fairly balanced, taking into account arguments for and against the games he takes on. Whilst no viewer is likely to agree with all of his opinions, that's a part of the charm of Whitelight's channel.

Though Hbomberguy takes on everything from politics and conspiracy theories to TV shows, some of his most popular and most compelling videos are those where he simply discusses video games. Redditor AMtheVile is one fan who says they "really like" his video game content.

Though his approach to video games can be divisive, often taking extreme stances on beloved video game franchises like The Elder Scrolls and the Fallout series and presenting his views in an over-the-top, impassioned way, the level of effort he puts into making his videos well-researched and visually interesting is something anyone can appreciate.

With the description on YouTube reading simply "Insightful gaming videos," Ahoy manages to perfectly capture why fans love the channel's video essays so much. Although not exclusively about video games, with many historical videos as well, their visually striking and perfectly composed video game essays easily rival that of completely game-focused channels.

That's why Redditor GustavGarlicBread calls them "amazing" at what they do, adding that they have "extremely clean editing, and original music to top it all off." Whilst this means uploads are infrequent, each essay has so much originality that they're more than worth the wait.

Game Maker's Toolkit

Presented by British video game journalist and game developer Mark Brown, Game Maker's Toolkit aims to deliver exactly what the channel name promises which is to help with the viewer's understanding of how games are made. Though this technical approach of drawing attention to how games are crafted is great for budding game developers, it's also fascinating as a fan of games too.

One of those fans is Redditor nas1992 who comments that the channel is their "favorite" when it comes to gaming video essays. Rather than focusing on a specific game in each video, Brown nearly always dedicates each one to a particular, and usually small, aspect of game design, providing a much more technical perspective.

Jacob Geller

Though he does consider specific elements of game design in his gaming video essays, the unique appeal of Jacob Geller's YouTube channel is that they often provide deep and interesting reflections on the thematic story elements of great games. For fans of the story-telling side of video game creation, there are few better than Geller.

Redditor Frosch90 recommends the channel for anyone "into a more intellectual and "artsy" approach to games." Taking in a variety of sources that go far beyond what most YouTube video essays consider, Geller's approach is just as thorough as those on the more technical side of video games which helps make each one a treat to watch.

NEXT: 10 Best YouTube Channels For Film Video Essays, According To Reddit

Top Video Essay Channels on YouTube in 2024

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Best Reviewed Video Essay Channels According to Viewers ✍️

Known for their thoughtful commentary and polished production, these video essayists have gained a loyal following. Covering everything from pop culture to history, their work blends research with personal insight. If you appreciate a well-constructed argument and nuanced discussion, these channels are a must-see.

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The Best Video Essay Channels, Ranked

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If you’re a die-hard movie fan, you don’t have to be a hardcore collector to know that you can find a lot of your special features free on YouTube – from movie trailers and top-ten lists to reaction videos and cast-and-crew interviews. But the crème de la crème for any budding cinephile is YouTube ’s subculture of video essayists.

The best of these content creators, particularly those focused on dissecting and analyzing film and television, give viewers a lot of food for thought, making them consider things they hadn’t before, even when it comes to movies they have watched 100 times. There is an embarrassment of content out there, but this article seeks to separate the wheat from the chaff – we are recommending only the channels with the best, most refreshing, and most original analysis. If you're a film lover or budding buff, you owe it to yourself to check out these great video essay channels.

What’s So Great About That?

UK creator and pop-culture academic Grace Lee makes video essays examining themes and form in both horror and animated media; she has an affinity for the deeper, more unexpected thoughts evoked by her favorite genres. Whereas many content creators are quippy or sarcastic, Lee’s voiceover narrative approach is one of measured thoughtfulness.

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While her output as What's So Great About That? is not as large as some other creators on this list, that is far from a bad thing as Lee seems to focus more on quality than quantity. Each video discusses fairly narrow topics within a given property – examples include the “treachery of language” in the work of David Lynch or the concept of the “unnatural” in the original Evil Dead film.

You might mistake Canadian vlogger Sarah Z (pronounced “Zed”) for your best friend. She sits on the couch with a cup of coffee and speaks directly to you, a monologuist spending hours on end about all of her opinions, from toxic fandoms to true-crime documentaries.

But these monologues are not the boring, meaningless yarns that you might expect. Rather, Sarah’s channel is an ever-deepening trove of incisive and engaging media analysis encased in a shell of light and fluffy entertainment. The whole thing is driven by Sarah’s palpable excitement and enthusiasm for the topics she is covering, and a penchant for long, detailed videos that are extensively researched. Some videos will even stretch far beyond the one-hour mark, including a 90-minute video on geek culture and a full two hours on Dear Evan Hansen .

Another Canadian creator steps up to the plate in the form of Sage Hyden , a fantasy novelist whose essay channel Just Write seems particularly preoccupied with film’s place in the cultural conversation. In particular, Hyden is fascinated with the messages that movies send us, what they are trying to communicate (consciously or subconsciously), and how they shape our perceptions and prejudices.

For topics that can sometimes land on the serious side, Hyden’s tone and writing style are conversational and often funny, and his insights are fairly eye-opening. Topics include Willy Wonka and its relationship to misconceptions about poverty, the importance of the original Mulan film, and the cinematic lineage of the modern murder mystery Knives Out .

If you consider yourself an outsider or find yourself disagreeing with most of your friends on their favorite movies, you might find a mutual kinship with creator Yhara Zayd , whose videos examine film and television through lenses both personal and political. Zayd’s is not the kind of detached analysis you can expect from many YouTubers; rather, though she is very well-researched, she is also full of unapologetic hot takes, and her videos are brimming with the caustic personality of a modern-day Pauline Kael.

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In some ways, Zayd has crafted the perfect synergy between the highly-opinionated critic and the relentless deconstructionist, enthusiastically dissecting and questioning the images and media we regularly consume. She also has a distinct knack for self-awareness, gazing inward as she gazes outward, a quality which separates her content from that of many of her peers. Zayd covers such divergent subjects as the commodification of the great Marilyn Monroe, reflections of housing discrimination in 1980s horror films , and the under-appreciated legacy of Not Another Teen Movie .

For something a little less personal but no less fascinating, it is worth checking out the prolific Susannah McCullough and her channel The Take . McCullough and her extraordinary team make what are probably the best “Explained” videos you’ll be able to find, along with character breakdowns, deconstructions of tropes, and the lessons movies can teach us. They’ve got videos that deconstruct and explain Donnie Darko , The Sopranos , Get Out , and many, many more. They’ve also nerded out with full series on different franchises, including detailed character analyses in shows such as Friends and Breaking Bad .

The writing is smart but accessible, and the arguments are utterly convincing. The videos themselves are breezily edited and full of poppy visuals. The channel also covers many, many genres and types of movies, so you are sure to find something on a movie or TV show you love. The Take offers incisive film analysis in a context that is fun and completely unpretentious.

Maggie Mae Fish

Decadent, performance-driven vlogs like ContraPoints and Philosophy Tube are all the rage these days, and film buffs finally have their own version in the form of Maggie Mae Fish . Ms. Fish is a singular, idiosyncratic voice who pivots wildly from dedicated film scholar to sketch-comedy caricature and back again. She typically sits center-frame in a variety of ornately designed sets, dressed in colorful outfits, while she patiently spoons out detailed, thoughtful analysis over the course of long videos.

For any video-essay enthusiast, Fish is the real deal – wickedly entertaining, subversive, accessible, and always thought-provoking. Her recent two-video series on Twin Peaks is catnip for any fans seeking a new perspective on the show – and an excellent dressing-down of Twin Perfect’s infamous 4.5-hour breakdown. She also deconstructs auteur theory through the works of David Lynch and Stanley Kubrick, and spends two hours discussing Loki ’s debt to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker .

Lindsay Ellis

When it comes to distinct personalities, no vlogger quite matches the likes of the controversial but brilliant Lindsay Ellis . She is a brand unto herself, with an over-the-top, self-deprecating style that can only be described as a hopped-up, sleep-deprived, but no less informed, Adam Curtis. She is often seen drinking wine in her videos, breaking down popular media like Disney movies, musical adaptations, and The Lord of the Rings franchise.

Ellis is one of the originals of the medium, and her work is so singular that her influence has likely extended to all the other creators who occupy this list. Some of her most brilliant work includes “The Whole Plate,” a nine-video series that completely deconstructs the first Transformers film through the lenses of gender, sexuality, and film studies. Her most iconic work includes 40-minute videos ranting about the film adaptations of Rent and The Phantom of the Opera . Due to recent Internet events, she has stopped making videos on YouTube, but her existing videos are still there for all to see and are absolutely worth checking out.

Every Frame A Painting

Sometimes the most obvious answer is still the best one. Taylor Ramos and Tony Zhou’s gorgeous video series Every Frame A Painting is still the benchmark against which all other video essayists are judged. You’ve probably seen their video on Edgar Wright and visual comedy, or the one on silence in the films of Martin Scorsese. The channel has been defunct for several years now, but the content still feels as fresh and original as it did when it was first published.

The topics covered are narrow and unexpected, but they all work extraordinarily well. The writing is tight and evocative, and Zhou’s voice is unforgettably soothing and inviting. The editing is also crisp and beautiful. Ramos and Zhou have become so renowned for their work that they were even invited to contribute to David Fincher’s Voir , a video essay project for Netflix.

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The best video essays of 2022

10 videos that will entertain you and make you feel smarter. What’s not to like?

by Daniel Schindel

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An educational and argumentative style has exploded in popularity across video platforms over the past few years, part of the broader wave of explainer-based content in social media. It’s gotten to the point where the form now constitutes an extremely wide tent covering an incredibly deep well of works — or, in the parlance of one subgenre, a gargantuan iceberg . We now see everything from wordless editing experiments to vlogs with occasional image wallpapering called “video essays.” (It’s gotten to the point where one of my favorite videos released last year waded into these definitional weeds, to thought-provoking results.)

This growth makes rounding up a mere 10 exemplary videos a bigger challenge each year. My guiding principles when formulating this list were not just depth of insight, originality, and diversity of subject matter and creators, but also trying to find video essays that truly make the most of both parts of that name — which demand visual attention and engagement. The essays are listed in order of release date.

Climate Fictions, Dystopias and Human Futures by Julia Leyda and Kathleen Loock

As the prognosis around global warming gets more urgent, pop culture has been taking notice, and “cli-fi” has emerged as its own storytelling genre. Leyd and Loock use the recent Don’t Look Up as a starting point, questioning what role — if any — films like these can hope to have in affecting actual activism and reform on climate change. How strong is the connection between art’s power to move us and tangible action?

Captain Ahab: The Story of Dave Stieb by Secret Base

No one is making documentary content quite like Jon Bois, Alex Rubenstein, and the rest of the crew at Dorktown. Bois is an artist who paints with data points and historical detritus, editing all this material together in a way that feels more forward-thinking than almost anyone else making films today — whether for the internet, television, or theaters. An epic four-part series on Dave Stieb, an also-also-also-ran of baseball history, sounds ridiculous. And yet Dorktown turns him into one of the most compelling characters of the year.

[ Ed. note: Secret Base is part of SB Nation, which along with Polygon is part of Vox Media. This played no part in including the video.]

Deconstructing the Bridge by Total Refusal

This is perhaps the least “essay-like” video on this list. It’s more of a university-level lecture, but set in the least academic forum imaginable: a session of Battlefield 5. Such unusual ventures are the modus operandi of Total Refusal , a “pseudo-Marxist media guerrilla” which has used The Division to explain urban design , Red Dead Redemption 2 to explain class , and much more. Within the Battlefield 5 map is a re-creation of Dutch city of Nijmegen, the site of a decisive battle during World War II. Total Refusal takes viewers on a survey of the area in a virtual form, and in the process they delve not just into the history involved but also the entire concept of war tourism and re-creations, questioning how culture remembers these events.

Why Panzer Dragoon Saga Is the Greatest RPG Nobody Played by Michael Saba

If this doesn’t send the 1998 Sega Saturn game Panzer Dragoon Saga to the top of your must-play list, then I don’t know what to tell you. More than an intriguing look at a game that was incredibly ahead of its time and took years to find its audience, this video is a treatise on a pressing issue within gaming. See, if you want to play Panzer Dragoon Saga , you will almost certainly have to pirate it, which might stir ethical qualms in some. Saba mounts an impassioned defense of piracy as a form of archival practice and game preservation. Even if you disagree with such a conclusion, the problems he highlights within the industry cannot be denied.

Nice White Teachers, Bad Brown Schools: Hollywood’s Pedagogy on Urban Education by Yhara Zayd

Yhara Zayd makes her third consecutive appearance on our annual video essay list, and for good reason. Not content to retread ground covered by other pop culture video creators, she finds both novel subjects and interesting lenses on them. Here she scrutinizes the “inspirational” story trope of well-intentioned white teachers making a difference in urban environments, seen in the likes of Dangerous Minds and The Ron Clark Story . Most incisively, she contrasts the conventions of this genre with the stark realities and lived history of actual outsider intervention in nonwhite education.

Intimate Thresholds by Desiree Garcia

Less than four minutes long, this essay is nonetheless entrancing, thanks to Garcia’s continually inventive editing. Instead of a drawn-out exploration of the theme of female artistic competition in film, she contrasts two examples through visceral juxtaposition: 1940’s Dance, Girl, Dance and 2010’s Black Swan. With split screens, hazy picture-in-picture, precise cuts, and some remarkable use of captions, the essay makes its ideas intuitively felt rather than explaining itself through lecture.

Instagram Hates Its Users by Jarvis Johnson

The long story made short is that Instagram has continually sabotaged any actual enjoyment of using its app through trying to imitate whatever new trend has come down the cultural pipeline. But the long story, as relayed by Johnson, is so much more entertaining. We often forget the direct relationship between interface design and user experience, but this is a terrific deep dive into how that process works, pinned to an easy-to-grasp timeline of Instagram’s calamitous history.

Fixing My Brain With Automated Therapy by Jacob Geller

Jacob Geller is exceptionally good at drawing in a web of disparate sources to discuss ideas you might not have even thought about before. Here, the story of “ the first chat bot ,” the 2019 visual novel Eliza, and the app-based 2021 game UnearthU are used to explore the use of artificial intelligence in modern therapy. But as the title suggests, Geller goes one step further, testing out several different therapy apps that purport to help you improve your mental health without the need of any human therapists. His results, and what they suggest about the true intention behind these apps and the way therapy is incorporated into contemporary society, are… well, disquieting.

Parking lots are everywhere and nowhere by What’s So Great About That?

The concept of “liminal space” is currently popular in online culture discourse. But Grace Lee seldom tackles a topic from the same angle as everyone else. With reference points as wide-ranging as Seinfeld, Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi,” and the work of artist Guillaume Lachapelle, she discusses how parking lots appear in media, and in a wider view how they and similar urban-industrial spaces figure into our everyday lives. Lee’s essays demand your attention like few others; look away and you’re liable to miss a great little visual gag. Because of this, despite her videos seldom going longer than 15-20 minutes, they often pack in much, much more information than you’ll expect.

How Degrowth Can Save the World by Andrewism

Andrew Sage describes himself not just as an anarchist but as “solarpunk” — focused on solutions for a sustainable future for humanity. In this video he elucidates one of the key features of the destructive capitalist status quo: the idea of unlimited economic and industrial growth. Insistence of “degrowth” practices can often elicit fears of some vague loss in one’s standard of living. But Sage debunks this and many other arguments against degrowth, while building a more inspiring and hopeful vision for an environmentally sound, egalitarian existence.

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