Yahoo on LOFOES
An Interview with youtube's
Chris Davis
By Yahoo Silverman
The Time You Enjoy Wasting Is Not Wasted Time
Those of you that are new to the Echo Chamber may have some questions. Why is it called the Echo Chamber? Why doesn’t the comment section work? What are LOFOES? While the first question answers the second, I will answer the third. LOFOES (pronounced lo-fo’s) is a term I coined meaning LOng FOrm ESsays. This term refers to any amateur piece of media of considerable length that dives into any given subject. The most popular of which tend to be video essays on the platform YouTube (and not LOFOES written on niche webpages created by someone who’s name is “literally” based on Whoopi Goldbergs). The Google owned platform hosts a bevy LOFOES from multi-hour pieces on your favorite (or least favorite) YouTubers to long and juicy LOFOES on video games and I had the honor of interviewing one of my favorite long form video game essay creators, the excellent Chris Davis or as he is known on YouTube Chris Davis.
I was first made aware of Mr. Davis’ work a couple of years ago but with the explosion of video game LOFOES I found myself bouncing between his work and the work of other content creators such as White Light and Joseph Anderson and with what amounts to dozens of hours of content between all my favorite creators, many videos will likely slip past my radar. However, I was drawn back to Chris Davis’ channel when I came across his outstanding Splinter Cell Retrospective where in which he reviewed every mainline entry of the series including the elusive Pandora Tomorrow, and as a longtime fan of the series I was hooked. Once I finished the final entry in the series titled Splinter Cell Blacklist – Better Than I Remember | Retrospective (aka In Defense of Blacklist) I was elated to find he was currently covering the Deus Ex series, not to mention a stellar Witcher series playlist that was waiting for me and my bated breath (although that could just be my asthma), both of which I highly recommend.
The Interview Begins
After a brief introduction I wanted to begin the interview by understanding what brought him not only to YouTube, but to making these videos in the first place.
Yahoo: What got you into being a “Youtuber”?
Chris: I didn’t find mainstream game reviews to be particularly useful and hadn’t for some time. You know the sort of five-minute [reviews], they’re a bit better now to be fair, but if you go back ten years, that’s before I started the channel obviously, but there were these five-minute video reviews, and you knew nothing about who was writing them, and they were very positive usually and there wasn’t much depth to them. I don’t want to say they were ever wrong, obviously it’s all opinion based, but I remember some where I’m thinking “did we play the same game?”. Then I started seeing on YouTube, I suppose Joseph Anderson was the main one, I was enjoying his content and being like “Oh, there is another way you can talk about games” basically like a longer form that isn’t quite so reactionary and hype focused. On the release of games there’s always a lot of hype and excitement whereas if you cover the game six months after and if you take like an hour instead of five minutes you sort of get more into the experience of the game. I thought “Okay I want to do something that is a longer form way of looking at games, it seems like there’s an audience for it but also that it’s still kind of niche enough that I might be able to break in”.
Influences
The long form video game video essay scene is still growing, however there are several veterans of the craft on the YouTube platform and after bringing up Joseph Anderson (also known as Joseph Anderson on YouTube) I wondered who else influenced Mr. Davis.
Yahoo: You mentioned Joseph Anderson and I think we are all waiting for that Witcher 3 review, but are there any other YouTubers that influenced you or continue to influence you?
Chris: Definitely someone like Noah Caldwell-Gervais, between him and Joseph Anderson. I try to be a bit between the two. Noah, I don’t think he’d be offended by me saying this, he doesn’t tend to be very into the mechanics necessarily he’s much more about the feelings and emotions that come with a game, and you know, if the mechanics induce those feelings, he talks about them. Whereas Joseph Anderson it may be the other way where he tends to keep it technical and doesn’t talk about his emotional resonance with the game quite as much. There are others, I watch the usuals, like Mandalore Gaming, Raycevick, and Hbomberguy, what I sort of call the “usual crowd” that gets shared a lot, oh Matthewmatosis of course. In terms of influence, it’s probably Joseph Anderson and Noah Caldwell-Gervais because I kind of, without trying necessarily; I don’t think it was a conscious decision, I find myself fitting between the two. I’m not 100% a technical person but I’m also not wearing my heart on my sleeve like Noah is.
The Content
Despite having a popular 14-part series titled A History of Isometric CRPGs spanning from the original Fallout to Pillars of Eternity, there is no one genre Chris Davis focuses on. Upon visiting his channel, you will find everything from a 12-minute Deathloop video to a 42-minute Alpha Protocol piece and as you continue to scroll down the page, you’ll find longer critiques on Mass Effect Andromeda and Horizon Zero Dawn, both of which are roughly two and half hours each and have nearly three million views combined. This begs the question of how Mr. Davis decides on what he will be covering next.
Yahoo: How do you decide what you will cover next? Is it influenced by your Patrons? Is it something you played [recently]?
Chris: It’s not influenced by Patrons or YouTube comments. Very early on I was influenced by, I can’t even remember what [game] it was now, but a lot of people were saying a certain game in the comments, and I thought “Oh, okay. This could be really popular”, and then I did It and it was like a really low viewed video, and I was like it clearly doesn’t work just taking advice or whatever, and generally I just try not to do that because you might end up covering something you don’t want to cover or whatever so I kind of go with, I’ve got lists, [long, long] lists of games I want to play and series I want to play, and I’ll take something from that and be like “Okay, it’s about time I got around to the Deus Ex games” or whatever so I started doing them and that kind of thing. I’ve just got lists of things, usually it’s a series I’ve already played or am familiar with and want to talk about, you know like Splinter Cell or Deus Ex, et cetera. Sometimes there are series where I haven’t played them or I’ve got a lot of missing entries, I’m about to cover the Dishonored games but I’ve only played the first one, and I didn’t really play it that much to be honest. So it’s games that just interest me generally, sometimes when I’m playing a new game I will be like “Oh Christ, actually I really want to talk about this one I better start recording my footage”. An example of that is probably Outer Wilds. I didn’t necessarily play Outer Wilds thinking I’d do a video on it, but when I was playing it, I was like “I need to do a video on this one”. Deathloop was kind of similar, that’s why that video was kind of short, right at the end I was like “ah, I should do something for it” so I did. Usually, I just got this list of games that I’d quite like to talk about and I just sort of pick from them, occasionally something else takes my fancy, but usually I’m working through my list like the old isometric CRPG’s. It’s like, they’re all there, I’m going in chronological order of release. So next time I do one of them it’s like okay, what’s the next game that came out? Cover that one, kind of thing.
Yahoo: That was a good series [referring to the History of Isometric CRPGs], I really enjoyed that one.
Chris: Thanks, and you know, when you make a decision like with the isometric CRPG series or something like Deus Ex or Splinter Cell, once I made the decision to play and do a video on that first game then of course I need to do videos on all the rest so that kind of decision is made for itself. It’s actually not that common where I’m like “I need to decide on a new game to cover”. Usually it’s like, I’ve got this series on the go, I’ve got that series on the go, so it’s actually only a couple of times a year where I’m like “okay well…”, it’s more of a case of “which series do I start next?”, that kind of thing. I don’t have to decide that often, the decision is kind of made for me.
Yahoo: It’s probably easier to make a video that you care about as opposed to “alright, well, the comments want me to make a video on Minecraft, even though I don't wanna".
Chris: [slightly audible chuckle] Yeah.
The Process
Yahoo: Is it just you? Are you doing the whole process?
Chris: Oh yeah.
Yahoo: You have some videos that are 3 hours, I think the Deathloop video was probably like 15 to 30 minutes if I remember correctly?
Chris: Yeah, it was really short. Like 20 minutes probably.
Yahoo: They vary in length, but if you’re putting together an hour-long video, between playing the game obviously, writing, and editing, roughly how long does that take you? I know your Patreon goal is to release a video every month, is the process something that takes you weeks to do or is this something you buckle down and grind out in a week?
Chris: Yeah, it’s pretty lengthy. At one point I was actually timing myself on how long I spent, I didn’t do it for that many projects. The game hour’s part, obviously that varies ridiculously depending on the game, although the length of the video doesn’t necessarily correlate to the length of the game, but yeah, you can probably figure out from the game how long it took me to play it, I usually mention somewhere in the video roughly how long it was. It does take a long time because a lot of those like Pillars of Eternity or something, it’s a good 50 or 60 hours and that’s at least a work week if not more. It can be pretty long but other times there are games like Dead Space, that’s about a 12-hour game or whatever, and so actually if it’s something like Dead Space I can at least power through the video game playing part of it within a couple of days, maybe 3 or 4 if I’m going to do 2 play throughs. That bit can obviously really vary from a couple of days versus potentially 2 weeks, like playing the Witcher 3, it was at least 100 hours just to play the game again. I don’t play you know, 10 hours a day or whatever, or try not to anyway. As for the actual work part, I guess I don’t really know exactly what it is per hour of video, but it is pretty substantial. For example, for the first Dead Space video, apparently it took me a good 40 hours to make that, I think it’s an hour-long video, but that’s on the high end because I also read a bunch of books and stuff, there were a bunch of Dead Space novels I talk about in the video, and I wanted to read them for completeness.
Yahoo Right, there’s a ton of extracurricular stuff with that series.
Chris: Yeah, then other times like Deus Ex Invisible War, that was only 30 hours apparently. Looking at it, 40 hours, just from the information I got here, seems like a good ball park for an hour long video. I will say its one of those things where if the video is 3 hours long it doesn’t necessarily take me 3 times as long, and conversely if the video is only 30 minutes or 40 minutes it doesn’t take me half the time. There’s definitely a sweet spot there, certain activities don’t take longer. Planning the video, when I say “planning” I mean outlining and doing research and stuff like that, doesn’t necessarily take longer for a 3-hour video than it does for a 30 minute one. Obviously, some parts do, like writing the script, recording the audio is longer but not necessarily that much longer, editing the video is a lot longer. So, it sort of is a bit all over the place, but it does seem like I’ve spent about 40 hours doing videos that are 40 minutes to an hour long.
Yahoo: For someone doing the whole process on their own, that’s not bad. I have a friend who also does long form videos and I have a whole lot of respect for you guys because when it comes to editing… I just can’t do the tedious editing.
Chris: It’s always incredibly tedious, I’m trying to find ways to make it a bit easier like looking at all the footage and pulling out the clips I want to use first, but there’s no way I’ve found in doing it that is in any way fun it’s just incredibly, incredibly tedious. I’ve done some tedious stuff, you know like legal work is often pretty tedious, but I’d rather sit there and agonize over wording in a memo or even doing legal citations or formatting and stuff like that than editing videos, I find it incredibly boring. It probably doesn’t help that I don’t do anything fancy in the videos, I’m sure if you use fancy video editing techniques it’s a bit more fun.
The Current State of RPG's
Yahoo: How do you feel about the current direction of RPG’s? Are they going in a direction that you’re enjoying, or is the modern-day kind of influence of your Mass Effects and Fallout 4’s something you’re not into?
Chris Yeah, I mean, I think it’s both better and worse. I think mainstream RPG’s are probably getting worse, at least like, they’re barely even RPG’s anymore and then of course you have to get into the debate about what is an RPG and stuff like that. These open world games, like the Assassins Creed games, have merged with RPG’s. Ten years ago, an RPG was nothing like Assassins Creed for example. Big RPG’s, they’re becoming very expensive, these mainstream RPG’s like the Mass Effects and what have you, and to be that expensive you also have to have a big audience and so you have to go down more of the mainstream routes. I don’t really like that direction, or at least I don’t always, I mean some of them are alright. I mean, they can be good games but they’re not necessarily capturing what I loved about RPG’s. But, that said, at the same time you’ve also got this resurgence of the isometric CRPG’s and those games and they’re better than ever. Frankly, there are probably more of the isometric CRPG’s than there ever were of the old ones. A lot of those new games seem really good, from the ones I’ve played, and I hope to play more.
Yahoo: Like Disco Elysium?
Chris Yeah, Disco Elysium in particular, and they’re [modern CRPG’s] really offering what people loved about RPG’s back in the day. So, indie developers or smaller developers have kind of stepped up to the plate in that regard.
Yahoo They’re filling a void.
Chris: Yeah, I certainly appreciate them. I do miss the fact that, lets face it, the Fallout games are probably not for me anymore, the Elder Scrolls games are probably not for me anymore, I didn’t really like Skyrim that much because I found it so bloated and just open.
Yahoo: Same.
Chris: As good as Divinity Original Sin is or whatever, it is nice to play the big 3D games where you can actually wonder around towns in first person and stuff like that. I wish I liked Skyrim as much as a lot of other people do. I wish I enjoyed Fallout 4 as much as some people do, I haven’t even played Fallout 76 because it just doesn’t appeal to me at all, I mean I will at some point for the sake of it. I wish I could enjoy these big worlds that some people get a lot out of but yeah, I do find them way too bloated and way too shallow, content mills and that kind of thing. So, I don’t love that in terms of RPG’s, but there are still a lot of good RPG’s out there and because so many people are making games now there are actually more good RPG’s now than there were 20 years ago. The quality is spread thinner, it’s more of a needle in a haystack to find the good ones whereas 20 years ago or 25 years ago the overall quality of RPG’s was pretty high, to be fair there were quite a bit of bad ones we just tend to forget about them, even so there were quite a few good ones but actually there weren’t really that many. There weren’t as many games being made then, we tend to focus on the classics and forget that there was only sort of 1 good RPG coming out a year and now there are so many games coming out that I struggle to imagine that someone would struggle to fine games that they would like so it’s better and worse, I guess.
Dead Space & Splinter Cell Remakes
Yahoo: Now, I’m a fan of your series on Dead Space and your series on Splinter Cell, which as I mentioned to you before the interview is one of my favorite series that you’ve done so far, and their intellectual property holders have, lets call them “reputations”, but they both have remakes announced for their original entries. These are both series that you obviously care about, do you have any hopes or expectations?
Chris: Weirdly, I’m like really apathetic towards it all because like there’s not that much to be excited about but I’m also not necessarily that worried because there’s not that much risk either. With Dead Space in particular we know they’re just rebooting the first game essentially, so there’s not really much to be excited about because I’ve already played the first game. They’re going to change some things, clearly, but they’re not going to progress the story anyway. It’s almost like when you look at a TV adaptation of a book, it’s like, well I hope it’s good but if it’s not the book is still there and there’s actually 3 or 4 more books after that I can keep reading and I’m more interested in those anyway. So, if the adaption isn’t good then no harm done, I guess the only harm is it’s time that could have been spent doing Dead Space 4 instead and that’s kind of how I feel about Splinter Cell to a certain extent. I’m not exactly sure what it is they said they’re going to do; they sort of said they’re doing the first game but inspired by modern games and I don’t even know what that means. The thing with the first game is there’s not a ton of story there, I don’t think many people care that passionately about the story of the first Splinter Cell. So, when they said they’re redoing the first game, what are they going to change the level design and mission design for modern audiences? I don’t really even get what they’re going to keep from the first game. I don’t know what the first game is, other than an introduction to Sam Fisher.
Yahoo: I don’t think the story ever really mattered.
Chris: Yeah, I don’t really know what that game is going to be. I mean, it could keep some of the same locations, and maybe a couple of the more memorable moments, but you know I don’t really know what to think with that one. Again, I’m not worried about it because the worst that happens is they waste a lot of effort on something that isn’t going to be very good. I don’t think it’s going to tarnish the brand reputation; I mean those games have been all over the place already, anyone who likes them already knows that it’s an up and down series. It feels like a bit of a waste to say they’re redoing the first game, unlike Dead Space, I don’t necessarily need to see a Splinter Cell 7, I just want to play more stealth games as Sam Fisher, so it’s not quite the same situation. Obviously, I hope it’s good, I don’t have any expectations, my suspicion is it will be more like Hitman just not as silly. I think it will be these little, not open worlds as such, but hub worlds or whatever you want to call them, and you’ll have a lot of freedom in those levels.
Yahoo: I think that could work.
Chris: It certainly could if done well, that’s the thing and I’ve always been annoyed that they haven’t made those games. There can definitely be stealth games these days, it’s not an impossible genre to make. I’m probably more excited about that Splinter Cell game than Dead Space because yeah, I just want to play more Splinter Cell and it’s going to play differently enough that I won’t feel like I’ve already played it, whereas with Dead Space they said they’re going to change story things and I’m sure they’ll use voice acting this time for Isaac, but I’ve got a feeling where I’ve already played that game. I’ve seen screen shots and stuff where it’s the same game, it just looks nicer, so I just don’t feel like I need to play that in the same way that I haven’t gone back and replayed Mass Effect 1 remastered because I’ve already played that game, I don’t need a new coat of paint on it. So, even though I think, I mean they’re both EA and Ubisoft… they’re probably as bad as each other, I don’t really have any trust in either of them. I guess I’m sort of slightly more looking forward to the Splinter Cell one, but I find it hard to get excited about either project really.
Thank you!
Thank you so much to Chris Davis for agreeing to do this interview, please stop what you’re doing and let’s get a round of applause… put your phone on the ground or your lap if you need to. I’ve linked to a couple of his series throughout the interview but here is a link to his channels landing page. If you have not checked out his work, I highly encourage you to do so, like right now.
