I need to get something off my chest, and I apologize in advance for the collateral damage to your recommended feed.

If I hear one more video essayist describe a game as "pillar, or meditation on x or y," I am going to put my head through the friggin' drywall. If another thumbnail lands in my feed with the title "[Classic Game] Is A Masterpiece And Here's Why," accompanied by thirty-eight minutes of someone reading what is clearly a first draft they didn't bother to revise, or worse, a draft they didn't bother to write, I will become the Joker. Not the cool one. The Jared Leto one. That's how dire this is.

The Video Essay Space Has a Platitude Problem.

The Sacred Vocabulary of Saying Absolutely Nothing

You know the words. You've heard them so many times they've lost all meaning, assuming they had any to begin with. Let me save you thirty minutes and give you the entire lexicon of modern video essay filler:

"Pillar." "Testament." "Meditation." "Resonates." "Speaks to the human condition." "What it means to be x" "Holds up a mirror." "At its core." "Fundamentally."

These words are furniture. They exist to fill space in a room. When someone tells you that Silent Hill 2 is "a meditation on grief and guilt," they haven't told you anything. They've arranged words in the shape of insight. They've built a sentence that sounds like it came from somewhere thoughtful, but if you push on it even slightly, there's nothing behind it. It's a load-bearing wall made of tissue paper.

What about grief? What does the game actually do with guilt mechanically, narratively, structurally? How does the fog function as more than atmosphere? What specific design choices force the player into James's headspace rather than just telling them to feel bad? That's analysis. "It's a meditation on grief" is a topic sentence for an essay that never arrives. In my own experience, Silent Hill 2 works phenomenally as a virtual stress ball I affectionately refer to as "Meat Stomp."

The Ghost in the Machine (Learning)

There's a reason so much of this content sounds the same, and it isn't just that creators are borrowing from each other's playbooks. It's that a growing number of them aren't writing their scripts at all.

I've already spoken at length about some of the consequences that Generative A.I. use has borne upon the world (See my previous article/rant/screed here.) I want to be careful here, because I'm not interested in launching a witch hunt. Not every stilted script is AI-generated, and not every creator using AI tools is doing so lazily. But here is the sharpest tell I can give you, the one you can test the moment you close this tab: pay attention to whether every paragraph in a video essay could be rearranged in any order without affecting the argument.

That is the texture of AI-written content, and once you learn to spot it, you cannot unsee it. It's the verbal equivalent of the uncanny valley, where everything is technically correct, nothing is obviously wrong, and yet something feels hollow. The prose is smooth and frictionless. It moves without momentum. It reaches conclusions that feel pre-assembled rather than arrived at.

Critically, it loves those platitudes. "Testament." "Pillar." "Meditation." They're the go-to vocabulary of a language model that has ingested ten thousand video essay scripts and determined that this is what insight looks like without understanding what insight is. And when you feed that output straight into a microphone without revision, without injecting your own perspective, without doing the work of figuring out what you actually think, you get content that sounds authoritative and means nothing.

Notice when the script uses three synonyms where one would do. Notice when the analysis never commits to a position, never risks being wrong, never says anything that could generate genuine disagreement.

Careful? Nope, there's no human there.

Where Did the Hot Takes Go?

I want someone to tell me a beloved game is overrated and mean it. I want a creator to say "this mechanic is bad and the developers should have known better" without immediately hedging into "but of course, game development is incredibly hard, and we should respect the craft." Yes, it's hard, and nobody is disputing that. But criticism is not disrespect, and the pathological need to preemptively apologize for having an opinion is turning the entire space into a padded room where nothing can hurt anyone because nothing is being said.

The same disease has metastasized in games journalism, where reviews routinely arrive before the writer has finished the game, and sometimes before they've started it. The YouTuber version is at least honest about being one person's take. The journalist's version pretends to be an evaluation while functioning as a preview copy.

The best video essays I've ever watched made me angry. Because the creator cared enough to stake a claim. They had a thesis that could be argued with. They said, "Here is what I think, here is my evidence, and I'm willing to be wrong about this in public." That takes guts. That takes sitting with your own thoughts rather than outsourcing the process to a machine.

Now, by no means do I want a space where we have AVGN wannabes dogpiling random games; there's absolutely a place for that level of comedy, but real criticality should be the goal. I absolutely adore Kingdom Hearts as a franchise; Kingdom Hearts 2 is my favorite game of all time, but the franchise IS flawed and certainly not everyone's cup of tea. Some folks may be critical; that's their prerogative, as long as they have substance.

I bring this up because of the lead-up to last year's Video Game Awards Ceremony, where a not-insubstantial amount of hatred got poured on Expedition 33, almost entirely from people who hadn't engaged with it on its own terms. Criticism without engagement is just dismissal, and dismissal is what fills the vacuum when actual analysis goes missing. Hot takes, and hot facts, not lukewarm mealy-mouthed A.I. slop.

Navel-Gazing as Content Strategy

There's a specific subgenre of video essay that I've come to dread, and it goes something like this: a creator picks a game that is universally regarded as a classic, Ocarina of Time, Shadow of the Colossus, Chrono Trigger, take your pick, and proceeds to spend forty minutes explaining that it's good. That's it. That's the video. The game is good, and here are some reasons: the reasons are the same reasons everyone has already articulated for the last two decades, but this time they're delivered over lo-fi music with carefully timed pauses for emotional weight.

They're standing in front of a greenscreen, holding a mic and doing nostalgia karaoke.

I'm not saying these games don't deserve discussion, because they absolutely do. But "deserves discussion" and "deserves the same discussion for the fifteenth time" are very different propositions. If your video essay about Shadow of the Colossus doesn't say something that the previous fifty videos about Shadow of the Colossus haven't already said, then what you've really made is a tribute reel with narration. And that's fine as a thing to make, but let's not pretend it's criticism.

The games that actually need essays are the weird ones, flawed ones, and the ones that tried something ambitious and died gloriously on a pyre of broken silicon dreams. The ones that nobody talks about because they didn't sell well or because they're ugly, or because they came out on the wrong console at the wrong time. That's where real analysis lives, in the margins, in the failures, in the games that force you to grapple with why something didn't work, or for the hundredth time, that a masterpiece is in fact a masterpiece.

What I Want (and What I'll Say to Prove It)

I want creators to write their own scripts, or at the very least, to rewrite whatever draft they start with until it sounds like a human being with opinions wrote it. I want arguments that have edges. I want someone to tell me something I disagree with so strongly that I have to pause the video and collect myself. I want essays about games I've never heard of that make me desperate to play them, or essays about games I love that make me see them differently.

Since I'm asking other people to stake claims, I should be willing to stake a few myself, so here are two I'll defend in the comments:

The original Nier from 2010 is a better game than Automata. Automata is louder and got the audience Nier always deserved, but the structural trick everyone credits Automata with inventing? Nier shipped it first, with less hand-holding and a weirder, sadder heart. Automata is getting praise for ideas its predecessor already executed, and the only reason the conversation skews the way it does is that more people played the sequel and worked backward from there.

Persona 4's social commentary is more sophisticated than Persona 5's. I'll die on this hill. Persona 5 swaggers around in its rebellion aesthetic and ends up writing a tourism brochure for shadow-government catharsis, where the bad guys are individual cartoon adults, and the solution is to punch their unconscious into submission. Persona 4 lives inside the actual discomfort of small-town conformity, watches its cast wrestle with parts of themselves they'd rather not look at, and refuses to let the player off the hook. One game is about how it would feel cool to fight evil. The other is about how hard it is to be honest. Guess which one I find more interesting.

I want fewer pillars. Fewer testaments. Fewer meditations.

I want someone to just say something.

The bar is genuinely on the floor, and somehow we're still finding ways to limbo under it. The tools are better than ever. The audience is bigger than ever! The potential for meaningful, original criticism in this space is enormous!! Instead, we're getting a content mill of interchangeable thirty-minute videos that all sound like they were written by the same ghost, and increasingly, they were.

Opposing ideas can reveal nuance in ways you might otherwise miss entirely. I'm not calling for anyone to throw epithets at each other; there's a solid distinction between a disagreement on opinions and attacking someone for who they are. Like many things in life, you can get so caught up in an echo chamber that you just assume everyone is on the same page. Games, like all art, are subjective. If we're all thinking the same thing, then we're not thinking at all.

Stop meditating. Start discussions and start feeling something!