A Dialogue with Jacob Geller

This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #187. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.

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The art of games criticism.

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Jacob Geller is a writer, video essayist, podcast host, and – newly – author. It would be impossible to talk about the state of games criticism in this decade without talking about Jacob’s hugely popular video essays, which are now being published in print by Lost in Cult. How a Game Lives will be shipping this month, giving me the excuse I was waiting for to talk to Jacob for this series. The anthology features new essays from a collection of writers within and without games that are each fantastic playful, personal, and critical writing on games. Jacob likes games in a way I have not sustained as a critic and freelancer, and his enthusiasm shows – I had to include two exclamation points in my transcription! We talk about finding an audience, creating tone, and maintaining concision.

Autumn Wright: You write in the intro of How a Game Lives that you started making YouTube videos because you “wanted to go viral.” We often talk about the need for intrinsic motivation in art and craft. Could you explain yourself?

Jacob Geller: Within that quote is the idea that I had been writing about video games for a while on blogs and there was a very limited distance that any written piece could go. Even when I was at Game Informer, I would write something, and maybe 2000 people would read it. My dream of dreams was maybe I could do this as a job, maybe I’ll get paid millions of dollars to talk about video games, but more it was just I want these conversations that I’m having as one side of writing a blog. I did want the ability to engage more people in that. I wanted more feedback at the time – which is not something that I’m craving now, at least from the internet. But I wanted to be professional colleagues with a lot of the writers that I respected, and many of them were on YouTube. And it did just feel like if I get a wider audience, yes, there’s the potential to be more successful, but I could be a part of the conversation more and that’s something that I really craved.

I can relate to that. Part of how I ended up where I am is listening to Waypoint Radio in college.

I am the same way.

And I think you chose the more sustainable route.

In the sense that it’s very sustainable to win the lottery if you win it. Like once I won $200 million from the lottery, I was set for life. But that doesn’t mean that I recommend other people should play the lottery.

I think the bigger thing is – what I couldn’t really see changing so much from back then–there was this brief moment in the 2010’s when nonfiction and theory became entertainment through PBS Idea Channel and the more theatrical videos ContraPoints was starting to do. But now, when I look at video essays as this popular genre of longer form content on the social internet today, it feels like the entertainment has really supplanted theory and analysis.

I think the original video essayists were basically like What if I could make an essay into a video? ContraPoints had a philosophy PhD and a lot of the people who were these early successful essayists were people who had backgrounds in, if not academia, at least writing. They were writers first is how I would assume they pictured themselves, and then they took that writing and they made it into videos. Now I think video essays have been around long enough that people who were fans of the video essay genre say That’s what I want to do, I want to make a video essay, rather than starting with I have a philosophy PhD and I need to figure out what to do with it. And I don’t think that’s necessarily bad, but it does mean that those original people were so strong because they were coming in as writers and ultimately that’s what makes or breaks the video. No matter how good your production is, it doesn’t make up for not being able to write well. And on the other hand, even if you have the jankiest production in the world, if you can write well, I still think that is ultimately where you get the most compelling product from.

That’s interesting because I feel like reading helps me become a better writer, but watching even a good video essay, the writing is just obfuscated enough to where it’s not really helping my craft in the same way.

I agree, and I have long said whenever I’m asked for advice, you just have to read and you have to read things that aren’t about video games. You gotta expose yourself to different stuff. Even though I love podcasts, I love audio books, all kind of audio medium, I think that when the writing is not literally visible, it’s harder to learn from. When someone is speaking and their pace is not determined by your reading speed, it’s much harder to look at a sentence and be like, That’s a really well constructed sentence. Noah Caldwell-Gervais is one of my favorite videogame writers, and he has in each essay many beautifully constructed sentences, but he’s just talking, and he says one and then while I’m trying to think about that he goes on to the next sentence and then I have to keep up with him. You can learn pacing, you can maybe learn flow by watching other videos and seeing how they do it, but literally just being good at writing, it does feel like you kind of have to look at words.

And sometimes I’ll have how I want something to sound in my head, but there’s no sound grammatical way to translate it into an actual written sentence. And you probably had the reverse challenge when you were publishing these scripts to be read in book form.

It’s something that I really struggled with in the book because I decided early on if I start messing with the scripts, there will be no place that I could stop, there wouldn’t be an appropriate amount of tweaking, and so they are word perfect to their video counterparts. And because of that, sentences do read weirdly. There are occasionally things that are referencing a visual, which is a strange thing to put in a book. Normally, I think my writing voice, even before making video essays, was pretty close to how I spoke and I would hear myself saying the words out loud as I typed them, but writing the new parts of the book, writing the annotations, it is just a different voice and I can be way less loosey goosey with them, because if this is meant to be a sentence that’s read, it needs to be tighter. It needs to be more grammatically sound. You can add extra punctuation with the way you say a sentence, but if your voice is not reading them out loud, then things have to just make more sense as they’re written. And so that is a challenge to having something that will purely be read and not heard.

[Note: This is a challenge of transcribing this paragraph – and all these interviews – as well.]

I often get envious of the control you can have over the tone, mood, pacing, and voice in a video essay, using music, timing, and different narrators feels like it would solve problems I run into. But I’m sure they also present their own challenges when you’re writing a script.

Music is another main reason that I started making video essays. Even with some of my early blogs, I would put a link to a song at the start and be like, this blog will just work a lot better if you’re listening to this song. But it’s also cheating. The music is telling you how to feel. I can get away with a tone in a piece that is purely because of how well-fit the music that I’m using is. If I use the Max Payne 3 angry music, I could say anything and that segment is going to come off in a specific way.

But everything is a level of complexity added. Writing is so beautifully simple. then when you start layering things on top of it, it’s a balancing act. If I want to really take my time with something but video of gameplay has a fast pace being played, then that can distract from the pacing that I want my words to have. Similarly with music, if I want to do a really abrupt tone shift, the music also needs to shift, and that can draw more attention to itself. It’s like stacking plates, where the more things you have, the more possibilities you have to tell a story, but also the more something can mess it up.

The part of my process I’ve heard people go the most “What!” at, I will lay down the entire music track before I’ve done any voice over, and then I’ll read everything while the music is playing in my headphones. Which I think is the most natural thing in the world, but the reactions from other video essayists when I’ve said that has been disbelief. And so, it’s interesting to find out that I came up with something that I assumed was maybe more standard than it is.

That’s so interesting. The Armored Core essay I wrote a few years ago, I wrote that while listening to a Friends at the Table soundtrack, one of their mech seasons [Partizan]. Brutalist synth is the genre I’d describe it as. And there’s this moment, Austin Walker would have an opening monologue and there would be a drop to the “chorus” of the intro song, and I wrote this hearing that and framing a line break around that same thing.

If you ever desired to turn that into a video essay, that would be something that you could do. I love that and the idea that no one else knows that your essay is musical, but secretly it is because that’s how you wrote it.

I will say I think tone is such an important part of your videos, and they contribute something beyond an aesthetic experience to the analysis. I still think about in your 1000xRESIST video, there’s two reflections of you and at one point, only one turns to talk. Something about that feels like it speaks to the aesthetic experience of playing the game itself. It’s mimetic.

It’s an obvious statement, but there are so many storytelling tools that you can use with a visual and auditory medium. I want my videos to work emotionally, which is a weird challenge when not only are they not fictional, but they’re not even strictly telling a story in the traditional sense. There aren’t characters, there’s not someone who moves from A to B. But I want the videos to have some sort of emotional arc, I want the audience to start in one place and end somewhere else. And a lot of my communicating what place we are in that arc comes from how I’m setting the tone with music and with visuals.

In that 1000xRESIST video, I wrote the entire script before figuring out the mirror thing and then later chose specific lines that the right-hand Jacob or left-hand Jacob would say. That wasn’t part of the original plan, but now watching it back, that adds so many layers of what the video is working towards that totally wouldn’t be there if it was only written.

Do you have an editor for your scripts?

No, it’s just me. I will occasionally reach out to a friend – usually [Unwinnable alum] Blake Hester – and just [ask] “Can you tell me if this is boring? I’m too deep in it, I don’t know if someone else will find this interesting”. But when writing one of my monthly videos, I’m the only person. Which was also a really interesting change when writing a book where I had multiple layers of editors.

Occasionally there’s a Discourse about video essay length and talk about editing down, but your videos do seem to have a certain concision. How do you find the fulcrum of what a video is going to be?

When I’m starting to form the idea for a video I try to start with the smallest possible thing and move out from that. My video “Art in the Pre-Apocalypse,” which is one of the ones in the book, the entire idea from that came from the scene in Final Fantasy XVI where you’re fighting Bahamut, and there’s one second where Bahamut is about to destroy the entire planet. And then you beat Bahamut, and then the game moves on. And no one really talks about that moment.  Bahamut was about to destroy Earth! And couldn’t stop thinking about that one moment could have been the end of everything, and no one really cares anymore. I run across those naturally, that’s just kind of how I interact with media is finding these really interesting core things to hold on to and then thinking about that. Like, Okay, I think the reason that I’m thinking about this so much is because it relates to the end of the world, but in this weird way. Let me find these other things that have been similarly moving to me in one way or another.

I think the benefit of having this small thing that you’re starting from is you can keep looking back at that and then say to yourself, Am I addressing that thing that I found interesting? Is this still thematically related to whatever I started with? And for me, that’s really helped keep scope in check, because it is about this one thing to begin with. But even when I don’t plan to, I’ve just been writing enough of these that I stop at the same point now. It’s something that was maybe intentional at the beginning, and now it’s just like I write what takes thirty minutes to read out loud, and that’s where I have found myself going again and again.

I’ve definitely noticed that with writing about twelve- to sixteen-hundred words for me. When I am given room to go way over, things get weird. But I also get worried that I don’t know if I have thoughts that are that long.

Or you’ve just gotten really good at expressing what you need to in sixteen-hundred words. And then someone tells you to double it, you don’t just want to spend more words expressing the same idea. You think, Well now I should make this more complex, because I know what a concise essay on this topic would be, and it’s this fifteen-hundred-word thing, and so in order for it to justify being three thousand words, it needs to take on more material.

Video essays are very time consuming. They scare me. You do a lot of other things, and on top of that you’re playing quite a few games. You’re clearly reading widely on top of your research. I know you’ve talked before about maintaining an ambient research, but what does your practice and your routines look like?

[Laughs] I have just turned my whole life into this machine, which sounds more dire than it is. I realize how rough that sounds. But really, I have made myself a space where anything that I’m passionate about can potentially be the topic of something that I’m writing. I don’t exclusively have to talk about new releases or speed runs or any other corner that you could paint yourself into. And so, I do allow myself to be like, this seems really interesting. I don’t have an exact place for this yet, but I am just going to trust that either reading this book will spark an idea or I’ll be able to have this in my knowledge base and someways down the road it will come back up, it will become relevant again, and I can remember that book and go back and pull specific references from it. Having that be a continuous cycle where I think I spend probably about half and half of media that I actively know is working towards something that I am doing right now and media that just seems interesting enough that at some point in the future I will be able to use it. And between those two, I have managed to keep new ideas rolling in and maintain it, but it is scary because it’s not an exact process, and I frequently get to the point where I’m like, I don’t know what’s happening next month. And then do you play Clair Obscur, and you’re like, Oh, this game is really cool. Maybe that’s happening next month.

I think I have a similar view of everything I am reading is potentially related, and then I’ll go follow rabbit holes as I’m interested in it. But from my perspective, it seems like you must be like playing a videogame and reading a book every day. What is that part of your life like?

Not as much as it might seem. I’m really good at learning about things and keeping them in a corner of my brain until they’re relevant. So, I read a lot of books reviews and I listen to gaming podcasts and I read people write about games that I’m not playing. And that is because it’s nice to stay informed, but also it is doing enough that then I can pull something back out of that cubby when it proves to be what I’m working on. And so I put a lot of value in having an ambient knowledge of what’s going on that then I can choose to make more specific if needed for a project. I would say I play, probably, two to three hours of games a day usually. And I don’t revisit things unless I have a specific purpose for them, so I am rolling through a lot of new things. But also, the reason that I talk about a lot of indie games, a lot of short stories, is it’s easy to read and play a lot of those! If a story takes an hour to read or a game takes three hours to play, that’s great. And there are a lot of really long games that I’m sure I would love that I haven’t even started because it’s just so much harder to carve out a chunk of time for them.

When you do start working towards a video, how are you actually writing your ideas and your scripts out?

The hardest part, as I’m sure you know, is just deciding when you’re done doing research. Especially if the topic is more abstract, you can just keep gathering sources and gathering sources until you are completely overwhelmed with interesting little facts that you could put in what you’re writing. I do try to write a general outline of This is going to come first, this second, this third, and in doing that I am really trying to figure out what the emotional arc is, knowing where I’m starting, and specifically I put a lot of weight into conclusions. It’s something that I work really hard on. I never want my conclusion to be just restating all the points in the way that you were taught to do in high school, and so it is figuring out This is the most important thing to begin with, this is the most important thing to end with, here’s how I’m gonna prove those. And because my essays are often on three or four different pieces of media, I’ll shuffle those around in the middle until I’m happy with This naturally leads to that or asks a question that this can answer. And then I just sit down and start typing and hope that it works.

You do your outlining and typing on computer?

Yep. [Holds up keyboard.] My little sixty key keyboard here. The fewer keys, the fewer distractions – that’s not true.

What keeps you at your pace of one video a month?

I have the kind of anxiety that manifests in overwork rather than procrastination. All of our work output is affected by what we feel, and no matter how ahead I am, if I feel like if I haven’t got a lot done in a day, I still think I should be doing work on something. And so, I both value having stuff ready way ahead of time and it makes me really nervous to not have stuff ready way ahead of time. But I will say, on the positive side, one of the reasons that I don’t work with an editor, for example, even though I do think that it would benefit the writing, is having no bottlenecks except for me is something that I really value. I’ve worked in office environments and I’ve worked in plenty of places where you collaborate with people, and you do something and they do something and you’ve got a lot to do and they’ve got a lot to do, and your schedules never perfectly sync up, and so there is time when you’re waiting for something else to happen. I do think that I’ve designed my whole process so I’m basically never waiting for something else. It’s always something I could actively be working on, and because it’s so streamlined, it allows me to work much more quickly than I think I would be able to if I had a bigger team.

How do you think you writing would be different if you were doing this as a writer instead of a video maker?

I really haven’t had any negative editing experiences. The experience of having Blake work on the book or the few times I wrote something for Polygon I thought Hey these are great points that people are making. So, it feels like a possible answer to that question would be Maybe it would feel less like me, but I don’t think that’s true. I do think that it would generally improve my writing. It might sound a little less voicey. I have been writing for my own speech for so long that it’s hard to communicate how I’m going to say something to someone else, and so going through a couple rounds of editing might take out some of the Jacob-isms that I’ve developed. But really, I think the writing would only benefit and it is just something I’ve sacrificed in the name of being able to do it more quickly and being able to do exactly the thing that I want to at any given time without having to wait for someone else.

How would a good Jacob Geller interview end? 

What I love to do with an ending is, you’ve got all the points that I made in the video and it has seemed to be all about answering this question, but at the end I want to reframe it to be Actually it’s kinda of been about this. It’s not that those points I was making don’t matter, but what I was really doing was pushing the conversation in this direction that I only want you to realize now. So, it would be something where I’d be able to turn it on you. The act of interviewing in itself would be part of the process or a place to flesh out ideas. Which I think it is. I love talking to other writers about their process and it’s something that happens so invisibly that we all just sit in our little rooms and we do it and at the end there’s a finished project, but I really value hearing other people talk about their writing and I think it’s something that we should do more.

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Autumn Wright is a critic of all things apocalyptic. Follow them @theautumnwright.bsky.social.