The Unique Creative Potential of Let’s Plays
Shain Slepian (video essay)
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After strife, sadness, ennui, and mild temporary insanity, my new video is up. I’m proud of this, not gonna lie. It’s got my signature coating of rough editing and barely acceptable definition, but what do you need to see my chicken pox scars for anyway?
To be honest, I am more proud of this piece than anything else I have ever made. I am far from a perfectionist: it’s always been a big problem for me, sticking through with something until I thought it was everything it truly could be. I love art for the way it feels to bring something into reality, and reality is necessarily imperfect. So when I feel my passion for a project waning, the time to get out was yesterday.
My new video is about the theatrical potential of let’s plays… and why I think it isn’t being realized yet.
But for this video, at least for the script, I feel like I was as close to perfectionist as I have ever been. I didn’t really give up until I thought I had made the points I wanted to make. I’ve never made a video like this before. I was literally fantasizing about being the kind of person who could make a project like this, before realizing I actually could make it.
Anyway, just a little rambling to blunt your appetite for content. Here’s the intro for my new video, “The Unique Creative Potential of Let’s Plays”:
I have had this one video essay germinating in my head for months and months now, and it’s ultimately the inspiration for this video. It’s called “In Defense of Nicolas Cage” by YouTuber In Praise of Shadows. In it, the essayist demonstrates how Cage’s non-naturalistic style of acting is not only a valid way to be an actor, but is actually a particularly effective way of creating catharsis in the viewer. Nick Cage doesn’t act the way a person in cinematic situations would act, because real people obfuscate emotions, or they feel conflicting emotions, or they have long and winding paths behind them that affect the most minute ways in…
