You’ve got what it takes
but it will take all that you’ve got
YouTube is the second most visited site in the world (just behind fellow Alphabetian Google.com) and every minute roughly 500 hours’ worth of content is uploaded to YouTube. That equates to just over 17 million hours of content uploaded per day which is the equivalent to watching the entire 5-part Twilight Saga (extended editions) 1.6 million times which given the current average life expectancy in the U.S. would require 27 generations to accomplish. Source
The odds that you will ever see any given specific upload are attributed to Youtube’s recommendation system aka the dreaded algorithms which includes their home page algorithm and their suggested video algorithm. While access to their algorithm in its raw form may not be available, there are some things that we do know about their system such as how it quantifies viewer satisfaction in a variety of ways including the likes/dislikes ratio, average view duration, user surveys, viewer engagement, etc. Of course, there are also external factors, such as the popularity of the video’s topic and the channel itself, but for many smaller creators their recommendation system is more of an obstacle than a tool.
I first came across the Nth review in 2020 after stumbling upon their 1 hour and 23-minute critique on Deus Ex titled Deus Ex is Possibly the Greatest Game Ever Made, which as of writing this is their most viewed video sitting at around 34 thousand views. Not recalling the name of the channel, I went back weeks later trying to find this video or the channel and in the see of Deus Ex videos and other game critiques, it was lost. Despite the thousands of hours of user data their system has collected on me, the algorithm had failed me.
Months later I would once again come across his channel, he had uploaded a 5-hour review of Thief and being a sucker for long reviews of old games I strapped in and made my way through it with ease. It was a good video. The amount of time and effort spent creating this video, just like the Deus Ex upload, was evident. These videos were painstakingly edited, well researched, and anything but improvised. I subscribed to the channel and joined the Discord, a server I am still very active on to this day. I was a and still am a fan.
His catalogue of videos includes long pieces of similar quality on the Outer Worlds, the Max Payne trilogy, Human Revolution, and most recently a 2 ½ hour review of the System Shock Series. However, despite no drop in quality and him making further strides in his editing techniques, the average total per Nth review have been around 5 thousand views which speaks more about YouTubes systems than it does about the quality of his work. This is not an uncommon story, I follow several channels who find themselves struggling to experience the same views as others despite the quality of their work. I had a chance to speak with Nick of the Nth review and discuss his channel and his system and here is that conversation.
The Interview Begins
Yahoo: I know that you started this channel several years ago and took a bit of break, what got you into making this kind of content and what brought you back to it?
Nth: So, I technically started the channel in September or October of 2014 and then the first video went up in October of 2014, so my first couple subscribers were friends and family back then. I created the channel a little over a year after the outlet I was working with [FleshEatingZipper] went down. While at FleshEatingZipper I was doing 8 to 15 minute videos that were more cinematic in nature I guess, and I was like I don’t like the state of contemporary professional game reviews where it’s 1,500 words or so and they’re rushing to get a verdict out as the game releases which may not reflect reality and honestly how much can you get out of a game review playing it hardcore for a week and then vomiting out 1500 words.
Yahoo: Because that would cause someone to leave stuff out?
Nth: It’s not just that you’re leaving stuff out, it’s that you don’t have enough time to let it simmer and have that kind of holistic experience. So, when you’re in that like burst-phase of just getting a review out, all you’re really doing is just listing features. You don’t have enough time to philosophize or really get into it or gain some context about why a game works or doesn’t work. That’s not to say that you can’t get 75% of the way there, but it’s kind of disingenuous so I sat down, and I made a review. My first review was like 40 minutes, and back then that was a long time and I’ve been working on them since.
Yahoo: These longer form reviews may be more popular now, but back then they were niche. Were there any channels then that inspired you or that continue to inspire you now?
Nth: When I started [the channel] I didn’t really have any, I watched YouTube, but I didn’t subscribe to many channels, I wasn’t watching a lot of other people’s content, and I think that really kind of hurt me because I wasn’t sure about what everyone was doing. I was just kind of going on this idea that I had been making videos about games independently, I made Infinite Lives: The Road to E3 which was a documentary, and I thought well if I flip this over to game reviews people are going to be lining up to watch and that wound up not being true. But, when I rebooted my channel last year, I decided to do it right, and so I would start getting in and start following other reviewers. Some of my favorites are GrimBeard, Noah Caldwell-Gervais, GmanLives, Action Button, one of my poll stars is Jacob Geller whose almost pure philosophy where he’s creating and replicating this experience at a core level and that’s one of my guiding stars about where I should be going. So, more and more, I focus less on the individual mechanics and more on the holistic capabilities of the game or what they say or what they’re doing etc.
Yahoo: Your videos have a professional quality to them, is that something you went to school for or is it something you’ve taught yourself along the way?
Nth: So, I went to school originally right out of high school for an animation degree, I wanted to be an animator. My dad, we would go to Blockbuster, and they would have a bunch of computer animated shorts on VHS, this was from the early days of computer animation when it was hard to do, and you needed a lot of resources to do it. So, I wanted to make computer animated movies and so I went to school and one of the first courses was an introduction to video production, but I didn’t learn any editing. The only thing I learned how to do was I recorded my friend and I doing voice over for an animation I did back in the day, and I unlinked the audio from the video and put that in a flash movie, so that was the first time I edited anything. So, I left school, I couldn’t stay, and I still wanted to make movies, so I started learning to write scripts, like actual screenplays. I don’t think anyone remembers it these days, but there was this story about Eve Online, this guy wanted to be rich so he built up friends specifically to do this heist and he basically just let me have it [the story]. I didn’t develop it but there were legal things, he said he wouldn’t sue me or anything, but I didn’t want to develop something I didn’t have a release for. At one point my credit score was good enough and I went out and bought a camera and audio equipment and all kinds of stuff and I would bring over my friend Kelly and we would shoot short films and I started really getting into the video side which became the documentary.
En sortant dans l’escalier
Je ne prends pas l’ascenseur
Yahoo: So, what is your process like now?
Nth: I take all that knowledge and I convert that into what I do now. When the process starts, I play the game, it will take how ever many hours that takes. So, right now I’m playing Grand Theft Auto V and building an outline, which right now is up to 6 pages. I’ll start filling in details, I’ll start mapping in what the review looks like broadly, every review has base concepts essentially. So, I will fill in things and build out these concepts as chapters, and after a couple weeks of this I’m eventually just writing outlines of the script into the outline. When I’ve got a full outline where I’ve logged all the footage, however many dozens of hours that is, I will go through and make sure everything is in the outline that I want to address and then I’ll start writing the script and those scripts vary between 25 thousand to 35 thousand words which is like half a novella. I’ll take that and spend another week or so editing that into a second draft because the script is the most important component of everything, it’s like the hinge which the entire review relies on because it’s the product of all the gameplaying, all the note taking, and it’s also where my personality shines through. [writing the script] is like rendering a video but in my brain, then it kind of gets easier from there because all I have to do is record it and edit the recording, snip out all the pauses and weird stuff, then I do all the graphics, the title cards, the chapter cards.
Yahoo: What can people expect when they watch your videos?
Nth: What I like to think is that I make reviews that the professional gaming outlets couldn’t do, and as more and more outlets are not doing reviews anymore it’s becoming clear that model is kind of outmoded, so I guess I would also say that I’m kind of in between there. I’m trying to push away from just listing off features and whether I like this and that or this level and that level . . . I’m trying to break away from just describing the game as a series of features and more towards that philosophical end without having to dive into Socrates or Philosophy Tube, you know, the Western European schools of thought without getting too weird and abstract. Nth Reviews isn’t about the “what” of a game, it’s about the “why” of a game. So “why is this game? Why does a game work, or why does it not work? Why does a game do exactly what it does?”. To get into that stage you can take the “what’s” all you want, like this game has “these” graphics with “this” thing, it has “this” plot and “these” features that are very similar to something I also played, and I can draw comparisons, but then I go 1, 2, 3, or 4 steps further and tie those together into the “why did they make these decisions?”. What I will do then is kind of a history, kind of a dive into “well, what did they say their rationale was behind it, what did they say they were going to do with this game?”, because that will inform different parts, but probably won’t inform the entire game, so there is a lot of conjecture in my reviews. I hope that it’s more educated than most, but it is essentially “this is the product that you delivered, why is it this way?”. If you can tell me bits of why, that helps, but I will try to figure it out on my own. As I’ve gotten into that headier space, the reviews have gotten longer. The more that I’m able to process these things and get into that big head space, it gets longer, I have to cover more ground to set up my points, so the Nth review is not the “what” it’s the “why”.
What did we learn here?
If you are a fan of deep dives into games, something I have deemed LOFOES (Long Form Essays, I’m still trying to make that happen) I highly encourage you to check out Nth Reviews. Just like good content creators, fans of good content cannot solely rely on YouTubes recommendation system. Good content, like good video games, is always being made. Sometimes it requires a bit of footwork to find, at least until it gets its chance to shine. Oh, and check out the Nth review.
I know this guy. Also, look…the comment section is working