This week, YouTuber Jacob Gellerunveiled a new project in collaboration with indie publisher Lost in Cult. Geller is known for thoughtful, visually creative video essays and his gorgeous book, How a Game Lives, will collect some of his best work in written form, now with extensive annotations by Geller. The book has a foreword from National Book Award finalist Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah, and each essay will also have an afterword from a different writer whose work Geller admires. Plus, there’s a ton of cool artwork and, in the deluxe edition, a vinyl album of some of the best original music written for Geller’s channel.
This is really cool news and, as a Geller fan, it’s a must-buy. Geller is one of the bestYouTuberscurrently working, with artful essays that take games seriously as a medium and, equally importantly, are brilliantly produced, with great use of music and terrific editing. He’s one of the only video essayists I’ve seen really manage to capture the mood of a work he’s writing about. Go watch his video, “Control, Anatomy, and the Legacy of the Haunted House,” and I think you’ll see what I mean. It’s one of the only pieces of criticism I’ve encountered that feels as eerie as its subject matter.
Geller has cited Gary Larson’s The PreHistory of The Far Side, which gave insights into the creation of many of Larson’s iconic strips, as a key inspiration for How a Game Lives.
I also hope that this can be an entry point for more gaming YouTube creators to start making physical editions of their work. Mark Brown, the creator of Game Maker’s Toolkit, is another video essayist I love, and his work would map really cleanly to book form. His series Boss Keys, which analyzes the level design of games likeThe Legend of Zeldaseries,Super Metroid, andDark Souls, would be a treat to have in a physical format, one where I could pore over and study the level layouts Brown mocks up, rather than merely observe them briefly as they pass by in a video.
Noah Caldwell-Gervais, also a video essayist and one of the writers contributing to How a Game Lives, would also be a prime candidate for a book like this. Caldwell-Gervais' videos are often long — “A Thorough Look At Fallout [Revised/Expanded/HD]” is nine hours and 25 minutes — and they have far less interplay between the on-screen gameplay and his narration. They’re great essays, though, and would easily make the transition to written form.
Geller says the inherently ephemeral nature of YouTube was one of the reasons he decided to put his work into print. YouTube could just decide to Thanos snap his channel out of existence and he would have little recourse, and that’s doubly true for smaller creators. So, this has me thinking about how cool it would be to have something like How a Game Lives for long-dormant channels. Every Frame A Painting, for example, hasn’t put out a new piece of film criticism since 2016, but those video essays are whip-smart and were a big influence on a generation of YouTube creators. As someone who has seen multiple websites where I did work I was proud of go belly up, I’m all for permanence and physical media, and I’m glad Geller is taking this step.
