There’s an exercise that I think will help the vast majority of YouTubers, even those with a few million subscribers:
Every video — no matter what niche — should be thought of as making a video game.
Your audience isn’t just passively inhaling your video, like air. In their mind, they are playing with it. Videos aren’t just pieces of art to be observed. They’re fundamentally about interactions with a viewer’s mind, that may or may not be invisible to you as a creator — solely depending on if you’re looking or not.
This is a significant paradigm and mindset shift that immediately makes videos:
- Feel fun to watch
- Automatic better management of cognitive complexity
- Better intuitive feel for developing and understanding payoffs in story
- Better management of tension-reward as a whole
Most importantly: videos are not designed to just be “good videos” (which sometimes results in bad choices in scriptwriting etc.), but when they’re designed to be “good games”, the focus shifts back entirely to the viewer experience.
It forces empathy for the viewer, because now you have to do the correct cognitive step of imagining how a viewer will react to each individual moment.
“More is missed by not looking than by not knowing.” This is an important quote I learnt reading a medical textbook, and a doctor that has been helpful for my medical practice.
But, this statement very much applies to YouTube too. Increasingly, people are better than ever at the theory of making YouTube videos, but then putting it into practice is a completely different story. Many errors in even big productions can be edited in/out with this.
And so, perceiving your video as a video game twists your underlying perspectives in just the right way to breathe new life into your videos. Even if you disagree with the concept, it sheds light on what parts are/aren’t important to you in videos, which improves your video making anyway.
I recommend giving it a shot.
(YouTube Storytelling Course: storytelling.creatorside.io)
Pictured: a random chess game I won.
