Video essays are inevitably entwined with today’s content industry, which relies on engagement metrics, personal branding, and like-and-subscribe platforms to generate revenue and increase time-on-device. Perhaps for this reason, they are frequently associated with advertising or edutainment and rarely appear in journals and other scholarly venues.

This issue of The Digital Review aims to correct that association by showcasing the critical potential of video essays and their capacity to draw creatively from descriptive, expository, analytical, and narrative essay conventions. Across these conventions, the video-essay format implies a process of conducting research and gathering evidence to not only compose but also perform a mostly scripted argument through text, audio, and moving images, often with face-cam or voice-over recordings. We find this blend of techniques and media to be both timely and promising, and thus the video essay’s current popularity intrigues us less than what it can do for writing, criticism, and culture.

We are especially interested in video essays that experiment with critical approaches to video games, gaming communities, or the games industry. How do video essays about video games articulate play with critique? Expression with analysis? Preservation with commentary? Narrative with counter-narrative? Feeling with design? Conjecture with proof? Reflection with immediacy?

Since we hope to demonstrate the range of the video-essay format, we also welcome a range of critical approaches to games, including but not limited to:

• affect theory
• African studies
• Asian and Pacific studies
• Black and Africana studies
• Caribbean studies
• climate studies and ecocriticism
• critical race theory and anti-racist methodologies
• cultural studies
• design studies, including content and systems design
• diaspora, migration, and transnational studies
• disability studies
• European studies
• fan studies, including fandom and autoethnography
• game history and preservation
• genre studies
• Global South studies
• horror and monstrosity studies
• Indigenous, decolonial, and anti-colonial studies
• intersectional feminism
• language, localization, and translation studies
• Latin American studies
• literary studies, including poetics
• narratology, including ludonarratology and narrative design
• necropolitics and studies of death and dying
• performance studies, including role-play
• political economy, platform studies, and leisure and labor studies
• queer, trans*, 2SLGBTQIA+, gender, and sexuality studies
• religion and religious studies
• rhetoric, including procedural rhetoric
• Transatlantic and Transpacific studies

We actively encourage submissions from members of historically and systemically marginalized groups, including Indigenous people, people of color, women, disabled people, gender-non-binary people, and 2SLGBTQIA+ persons.

We will engage external reviewers in cases where the editorial team, our reviewers, and The Digital Review lack sufficient expertise.

Collaborative submissions are welcome, as are submissions from students, post-docs, professors, artists, critics, essayists, designers, developers, preservationists, and allied occupations.

Please submit abstracts (~300 words) for video essays to Jentery Sayers (Director of the Praxis Studio) at jentery@uvic.ca by Monday, October 6, 2025. Feel free to include a video preview or link to work online. We will respond by Monday, October 20, 2025, and the due date for video essays will be Monday, February 9, 2026. We expect to publish Issue 05 of The Digital Review in 2026.

The video essays published in this issue should contain gameplay footage and be at least 12 minutes long, captioned, and accompanied by a script or transcript. The use of first-, second-, and/or third-person language alongside face-cam and voice-over recordings is welcome.

We will work with each author to ensure that proper safeguards against online harassment are in place prior to publication. We will also discuss metadata and video hosting options.

More at https://thedigitalreview.com/submissions.html. 

UVic’s Praxis Studio acknowledges and respects the Lək̓ʷəŋən (Songhees and Xʷsepsəm/Esquimalt) Peoples on whose territory the university stands, and the Lək̓ʷəŋən and W̱SÁNEĆ Peoples whose historical relationships with the land continue to this day.