Video essays are inevitably entwined with today’s content industry, which relies on personal branding, engagement metrics, algorithmic recommendations, and like-and-subscribe platforms to generate revenue and increase time-on-device. It should come as no surprise, then, that they are often associated with clickbait and formulaic structures.
This issue corrects that association by showcasing the critical and creative capacity of video essays to synthesize descriptive, expository, analytical, and narrative essay conventions. The essays perform mostly scripted arguments through text, audio, moving images, and voice-over recordings, and each of those arguments is about video games.
The theme of 'Video Essays about Video Games' establishes a context for the authors to demonstrate how their work articulates play with critique. Along the way, they also combine feeling with inquiry, conjecture with proof, story with design, and reflection with immediacy by blending game studies and cultural criticism with media praxis. We're thrilled they pressed record.
— Jentery Sayers with Annie Beingessner, Callum Carroll-Ireton, Maya Wei Yan Linsley, and April Rogers
Rediscoveries of electronic literature are no different than rediscoveries of print literature. Without structured acts of rediscovery, the works that shape a given era can easily be lost - and this is even more the case for a digital canon whose platforms are changing all the time. The editors of The Digital Review nod to David Madden and Peggy Bach, who asked important writers of the 1970s and 1980s to select, and write about their favorite works of neglected fiction. The Digital Review and the Electronic Literature Lab will be doing the same, over the current decade, for at least a few (of the thousands?) of forgotten digital works.
Of net art works that emerged with the mainstreaming of the Web browser in the late 1990s, Talan Memmott’s Lexia to Perplexia has become one of the most extensively discussed among early Web-based literary net art. Starting in 2001 with Rita Raley’s essay for Postmodern Culture, “Reveal Codes: Hypertext and Performance,” to more recently Roswitha Skare’s “The Paratext of Digital Documents” in Journal of Documentation in 2021, this specific work by Memmott has endured for over two decades as an important topic of discussion about hypertext, language, code, and multimedia aesthetics, among other areas of interest. Its ongoing critical attention helps to explain why there is concern that it is no longer fully accessible on the Web today.
Three copies of the work are held at The NEXT: one each in Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1, The Iowa Review Web, and Riding the Meridian. That said, visitors will find that in all cases the work is only “Partially Available” or “Unavailable due to Deprecation” and that Lexia to Perplexia “does not currently function but visitors may access the landing page and any information there.”
The work is no longer accessible not because Memmott used proprietary software like Flash or Director to produce Lexia to Perplexia, so often the case with the loss of net art. In fact, of the 22 works showcased in the exhibition at The NEXT, “Talan Memmott: Works on Screen, 1998-2016,” only one was produced with Flash and two others have Flash components. The reason why Lexia to Perplexia has not survived intact today is that it was created using DHTML, a late-1990s approach that combined HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and browser-specific implementations of the Document Object Model (DOM) to manipulate elements dynamically after a Web page had loaded. Although these underlying Web technologies persist, contemporary browsers no longer support some of the particular implementations upon which Lexia to Perplexia depends.
To make Lexia to Perplexia accessible to the public, the Electronic Literature Lab held a formal Traversal with Memmott performing the work via Zoom as we accessed it on a Power Mac G4 Tower running MacOS X10.4.6 supporting Internet Explorer 4.5. This detailed video documentation, recorded in the summer 2025, makes it possible for scholars to get a sense of the work and gain an understanding of why Lexia to Perplexia inspired such a body of scholarship over the years.
The sobering truth we are left with is that a canonical born-Web work built with technologies that still constitute the Web can nevertheless become technologically obsolete.
Lexia to Perplexia is a work of codework and digital poetry built with Dynamic HTML. Memmott uses shifting text, coined language, and a responsive interface to explore how the self becomes entangled with the network.