Noah Caldwell-Gervais has been called “the Closest Thing Video Games Have to Roger Ebert,” but I don’t get the sense that he’d be entirely comfortable with that comparison. Despite seven years of experience making longform video essays, he doesn’t view himself as an authority of any kind.
He’s best known for doing long videos covering entire franchises. His video “The Complete Call of Duty Single Player Campaign Critique (For PC),” for example, is just over two hours long. These long, holistic essays allow him the chance to contextualize whole series in a way that just wouldn’t be possible in a short-form video, and it gives him plenty of space to show off the distinct voice he’s developed.
Critical Distance interviewed Noah about his process a few years ago and rather than repeat their discussion — which I recommend checking out — we jumped around. Below you’ll find some excerpts from our conversation, edited for length and clarity below.
A couple of years ago you did an interview with Critical Distance, and I don't want to rehash all that because you went into a lot of your "nuts-and-bolts" writing process. But I do want to ask if you could briefly describe your writing process.
Haphazard. Generally, I don't try to start with a thesis. I try to start with a series of games that I'm interested in. And generally, a thesis will sort of develop as I'm playing the games and trying to connect them together -- and connect my experience to them. And sometimes if I'm really struggling, I won't really understand the throughline of the essay I'm going to be writing until after I've done the research part -- like reading developer interviews or trying to read something that breaks it down a little better than I was able to understand it.
I played Kentucky Route Zero in February, but I had no idea how to talk about it for months and months. So I just put it on the backburner. That's a very very difficult game to sort of parse a through line of a thesis for. I think it's actually written to be resistant to that kind of academic analysis. It takes the academic analysis and just throws it in with all the other stuff that it's churning around thematically.
One of the videos everyone gets irritated with me about is the Postal one. A large amount of people think that I started out trying to talk shit about those games, but I didn't. I actually tackled the Postal series because when Hatred came out, I was like, "This game looks dumb, but it doesn't look dumb in a novel way. I feel like we went through this back with the original Postal."
I didn't start out trying to do that. I didn't have my thesis in mind before I started writing. The whole thing came out after I played the games and labeled the footage. And then I always do physical outlines just to keep it organized. If you get the bare bones of the essay, the flesh of it comes together a little more naturally, I think.
A friend of mine said to me the other day, "What is the point of all this cultural criticism?" And that has stuck with me. What is the point of criticizing things?
For me it’s just about having the big conversation about the thing because when you sit down and you talk to another person face to face about a game, there's a certain casual level it always sits at. There's a lot of fun about going into the deep details of a game that way that isn't conversationally natural or would be awkward in a setting besides a nonfiction essay.
The length and the style of academic nonfiction lets you have a different conversation about the game. I don't necessarily think that it’s about critique or proving anything or higher values than that. I think it really is conversational. I think people enjoy the long videos because they want to talk about them that way, but it's hard to talk about games at that level in person just off the top of your head.
So if you have this YouTube person, even though it's a one sided conversation, you're still having the other part of the conversation in your brain. You're either agreeing or disagreeing with the person -- seeing the point that they made -- and that's the cool thing about the long form essayists on YouTube. Everyone has their different style, and everyone has their different opinion.
How up to date do you keep on game news?
I don't consume hot takes when they're hot. I generally get everybody's hot takes as leftovers three-and-a-half, four weeks later.
I keep up with game news in sort of the same way that I keep up with regular news. I generally start out my day with like an hour, hour-and-a-half of just like, newsin'.
But I don't really really heavily keep up with what's going on. Every season I'll check up on Kotaku's like "What's coming out in October" sort of thing. The thing is that the projects that I do are extremely time-consuming and difficult to get finished. One of the biggest struggles that I have as far as giving people their value for what they donate to me is that I'll open up too many projects at once. Like, I'll have too many things that I'm trying to do at once and nothing will get done.
There's a danger in being really connected of being really distractible, and so, for my own health and for actually getting something out the door and finished and to people, I really have to just focus on really a maximum of three things at once.
I have a list of about at least 20 projects that I'm working on. Some of them are broad life goals, but some of them are specific things that I've been working on for a year.
Oh yeah. Me too, man. It's frustrating. I've learned to try to not talk about publicly all the projects that I don't finish because then you get people popping up in Reddit threads and being like, "He said on Twitter five weeks ago that he was going to do this, and now he hasn't done shit."
There's a tendency I have to start so many projects, but I think I've learned over time to sort of spot the ones that will pan out and the ones that won't.
How do you keep research creep from happening?
Just personal taste. I think ideally the goal for a creator -- for their editing pass -- should be to have created something that they'd want to consume, right? So when I'm doing my essay, and like, if I bore myself or if I feel like I'm getting off topic, then I certainly am.
I guess I just trust my own instinct on it. There are definitely times where I've cut things. For Kentucky Route Zero I had about 10 or 12 other blockquotes that I could have used -- kind of wanted to use -- but like the utility of each of those quotes is only within the structure of the thing. I'm only going to have one time where I'm going to need the wistful Americana from this particular play, but I've got three little monologues sitting there and I have to figure out which one is going to be the one.
So I feel like it’s less about keeping your research from creeping -- because your research can creep as big as it wants to, right? That doesn't matter. What matters is controlling the slots in the structure of your essay where you slip those quotations in. You just have to make sure you're not overslotting -- overscheduling -- your quotations.
When you started making videos — I believe the quote from your interview with Willamette Week is something like "I needed something in my life besides pizza” — what did you expect to happen after the fact?
It was a sense of just wanting to have participated in a way that was more comprehensive than a forum post.
I found it really frustrating to have conversations about Fallout within the forum context. I felt like I was being misunderstood. I felt like other people were being super pedantic. It was so frustrating to try to express how I felt in a soup of frothing opinions like that.
I had this long argument that I wanted to make, which was basically a unified theory of Fallout -- which is if you look at them all in context, none of them make zero sense. The sort of bile and vitriol between the Fallout 3 people and the Fallout: New Vegas people, like, there's a way to split that difference by being a little kinder in how you're looking at the games and understanding their different creative priorities.
With the YouTube format it seemed to me like an opportunity to be able to say my piece concretely and literally illustrate the piece with the video component, and then have my opinion be conveyed exactly the way I wanted it to be. With my voice I can use the intonations I wanted.
You can keep the tone conversational so that people don't pop off like they do in forum arguments. It seemed like a way for me to participate in the conversation in a way that I had felt ... unable to do.
You've been doing this for seven years?
Yeah.
What do you expect from it going forward?
I don't know. I'm actually a little nervous about that. There are ethical questions too. Like, how long can you expect other people to support you? I worry about, particularly with how things are becoming much more dire economically, is it ethically appropriate to continue making the sort of money that I'm making doing this going forward into a declining world?
I don't know.
I honestly don't know what a long term anything about anything is going to look like anymore. I used to feel more concrete about that sort of thing, but I honestly don't know what the next few years are going to look like. Supposing that things are fine and the basic status quo that lets me keep doing what I'm doing continues, then I think what would be next for me would be to creatively branch out a little bit more.
--
Noah Caldwell-Gervais is a generous conversationalist, so if you are able, I highly recommend listening to our full discussion. His essays often make me appreciate games in new ways, and in this conversation he reminded me just how much I enjoy games in general.
Disclaimer: Audio interview contains occasional foul language.
David Bowman writes about games, music, and literature at dwbowman.com. His work has appeared in DomiCile and Thrice Fiction. He's @DavidWBowman on Twitter.