Let's Play Video Analysis

The study Vicarious play: Engaging the viewer in Let’s Play videos by René Glas is about the recent success of Let’s Play game content on popular websites such as YouTube (2015). Let’s Play videos and their success have caught many in traditional media off guard. Glas dedicates some of the study to explaining how Let’s Play videos work, and how they differ from other styles of video content on the internet. In addition, the study discusses how this success has begun to gain the attention of traditional media outlets. However, from there it, it goes on to describe how content creators gain audience, the preferred genre, and hypothesizing on why viewers watch the content. Glas does not conduct his own study, but instead uses references to older studies on similar concepts, even citing early cinema methods to the success of Let’s Play content. …show more content…
Older studies focused on the engagement of machinima, a portmanteau of machine and cinema, and viewer engagement (Glas, 2015). Glas’s study states that viewers enjoy this form of internet content because they are engaged in the game play vicariously through the creator’s playing style (Glas, 2015). Let’s Play videos also differed from superplay videos, content in which the player shows off their game mastery, because the focus was not to demonstrate player skill (Glas, 2015). The differences between the three styles of content illustrated help build understanding of a newer form of media; also, it builds an understanding of the creator and viewer