Video essays are one of the few places you can go on YouTube to get substantial, well-researched commentary on a subject, as opposed to sensationalized yelling with a thumbnail where somebody looks like they just saw the face of God. But those video lengths sure do tend to balloon, don’t they? What’s going on there? One might be tempted to chalk it up to the YouTube algorithm, but this week’s Aftermath Hours guest, video essayist Jacob Geller, has a different take.
Geller joins us ahead of his 24-hour stream to raise money for the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, which you can tune into here. We discuss video game criticism in the age of drive-by culture wars on social media and conclude that – despite how bleak things might seem – there’s a growing hunger for meaningful criticism. We also learn about the ins and outs of creating heady essays on YouTube, specifically: Why do they keep getting longer? How do you write for a specific audience without becoming somebody who pre-reacts to every bad faith YouTube comment?
Then we move on to this week’s big news: Ubisoft is delaying the new Assassin’s Creed following weaker-than-expected sales of its Star Wars game. Amid all that, as well as an ongoing campaign against Assassin’s Creed for featuring a Black samurai, Ubisoft also decided to issue a statement about how its goal is “not to push any specific agenda.” Grimacing emoji. Lastly, Christmas comes early for me and me alone, because the mailbag is chock full of questions about Goku and karaoke.
You can find this week's episode below and on Spotify, Apple, or wherever else you prefer to listen to podcasts. If you like what you hear, make sure to leave a review so that we can make the longest video essay yet: one that never truly ends.
Here’s an excerpt from our conversation:
Jacob: I think if you go back and watch my early videos, the sound quality sucks and the editing is worse, but they’re not very different from what I’m doing now. They’re pretty close. Something that seems to happen to every video essayist is, videos just get longer. It’s something I keep thinking about, because anyone who’s been doing this for a long time, if you look at the trajectory of their videos, they get longer. And I don’t think it is simply to do with YouTube rewarding longer videos. I think that is the case, and people have seen Tim Rogers’ six-hour [Boku no Natsuyasumi] video getting a million views and have thought “I can do that.”
But I have never tried to do that. I have never thought “This video isn’t long enough for the algorithm; it needs to be longer.” And yet, the average span of my videos just has crept upwards over the years. And I think part of it is, at least for me, [that] having a larger audience makes me feel more on the hook for “I need to do due diligence about this.” I now read, in general, multiple books per essay. And the more you take in, the more you have to say on any subject.
I read – I have here – this book called Torture and Democracy by Darius Rejali. The worst month of my partner’s life was when I was reading this torture book and was like “Guess what I just read about!” She’d be like “Please don’t tell me.”
Gita: David Grossman, my beautiful husband that I love so much, he has this really interesting biography of Hitler that’s that size. He was reading it around when the war [in Gaza] started, and he put it on our coffee table. And every time we had people over, I’d be like “Baby, you’ve gotta move the giant Hitler book with Hitler’s face on it.”
Jacob: Shaking his head the whole time…
Gita: So people know he doesn’t approve of the ideas.
Nathan: He’s like “OK, what you’re saying is, I can’t have it on the coffee table, so I should take it on the subway and shake my head the whole time.”
Jacob: My guess is that if he was writing an essay about Hitler before he read the book versus after, the after would be way longer because he would be like “Even if I’m still condensing down information, I still have a thousand more pages to condense down.”
Nathan: Yeah, you have that urge to be comprehensive. I struggle with this sometimes too, when I’ve reported out a big story and talked to a lot of people. When you become really intimately familiar with a subject, then it can feel, if you really condense it down – or if you omit a lot of information – like you’re somehow failing the people who are consuming your work and yourself and, if you talked to people, the people that you spoke to. How do you balance that with “There’s got to be a cutoff point to this. I can’t just put everything in here.” Where do you draw the line?
Jacob: I think it’s easier with art than with journalism. I have talked to classes before and people who write about video games, and my advice is always: Do not tell me about a whole game – especially if your job is not just writing a review. Pick one interesting thing about a game and see how far you can go with that one interesting thing. Make it as small as you possibly can; get specific and dig in. That is such a better way of finding what a game is doing than being like “The graphics are good, and then the audio I don’t like as much. And then the gameplay,” etc. It’s too much.
One of the reasons that my video on capital punishment is specifically on execution methods and my video on torture is specifically about Call of Duty torture scenes is an attempt to narrow the scope of those things. To be like “Can I make the framing of this small enough that then there are specific things I can talk about, but people will know this is not the definitive take on torture?” It’s just everything you could say about Call of Duty torture. Well, not everything – not even. A tenth of the things you could say about Call of Duty torture.
I think it’s really kind of being rigorous with yourself about “The thesis of this video cannot be ‘Everything you need to know about torture.’” What are the things you’re using to support it, and thus, what are your pieces of evidence that are most relevant to those things – and not just everything that could possibly be interesting about this?
Gita: That’s very, very real. Scope is the most important thing about criticism, I think, because you cannot possibly answer everyone’s question in the entire world. You just can’t. You only have your perspective that you can rely on. You can only speak from yourself. If you remember that, then it becomes easier to pare something down to the most essential parts, because you understand your own fallibility. We are all influenced by the things that have come before us and the society in which we live.
Nathan: Coconut, coconut, coconut!
Gita: It’s a fucking coconut meme, right? But it’s true! I would not be the writer I am if my dad’s favorite class in college was not Anarchist Thought. There is a certain culture I was born into that shows me what my limitations are, what perspectives are native to me. It is difficult for me to think outside of that. So once you accept that you can’t please everyone, you can write something that is actually useful.
Jacob: It is the YouTuber brain disease – and you can just see it happen in real time – of people forcing themselves to write into their scripts the objections that they can see coming from reading thousands and thousands of comments. And I can’t fault anyone for doing that because the human mind is not meant to read YouTube comments. If you’re going to read everyone take every sentence of what you’ve written in the worst-faith way possible, then you are consciously or not going to start adjusting your writing style to please the worst-faith readings of your work.
It just makes the writing broken, because for every claim you’re making, you have to say three things that are not the claim you’re making, and you have to make clear that you’re not saying those things. It really breaks up the flow of an argument. But I understand why people do it! I have that impulse too. I think “If I say this, people are going to think I’m saying that, so I have to make clear that I’m not.”
