Video Game Critics on YouTube - Exploring the professionalism of video game reviews on YouTube

Before making a purchase, a considerable number of consumers employ reviews to inform themselves on whether a product is worth purchasing. These reviews can be produced by consumers who have had a good or bad experience with a product or by professional critics who hold certain standards while reviewing cultural goods especially. This distinction between these two types of reviewers might not be as clear on an online video platform like YouTube that has gained significant popularity in the last decade, and for video games which are products that are still evolving in their status of cultural evaluation. However, previous research has not tackled the topic of video reviews enough to have a full understanding of the dynamics that video provides for reviews. Therefore, this thesis investigates the professionalism of video game reviews on YouTube by asking the following question: How do online video game reviews on YouTube fit within the professional critic – consumer review dichotomy? The method by which this question was examined was mainly a quantitative content analysis performed on reviews posted on YouTube for video games from 2016 and 2017. The data that were gathered during this analysis were the types of discourse elements related to high art and popular aesthetics, different kinds of elements regarding video production that were used in the reviews, and various other review and reviewer characteristics. Another important variable in this research was the institutionalisation of the critic producing the review. The main findings of this research were that there is indeed not a clear distinction in how discourse is used by reviewers, although reviewers of video games do generally use a specific type of evaluation that for example includes comparisons with other games, a discussion on the game’s form aspects, and the game’s level of intelligence. It was also found that the more a reviewer was institutionalised the less popular aesthetic discourse was used in the review. However, the institutionalisation of the critic did not impact much of the other review characteristics, which could have been the result of how it was operationalised. From this study, it can be concluded that for video game reviews on YouTube, there are no reviewers that can necessarily be identified as professional critics, at least not in the traditional way. Furthermore, there is no apparent dichotomy between professional critics and consumer reviewers for video game reviews on YouTube, as the results imply it is more a sliding scale between the two extremes.