Draft:Noah Caldwell-Gervais

Noah Caldwell-Gervais is an American video game critic and journalist, best known for his eponymous YouTube channel. He he has also written reviews for gaming website Polygon.

Early Life
After graduating high school, Caldwell-Gervais worked several food-service jobs up until his YouTube career took off.

Career
Caldwell-Gervais was working as a line cook at a pizzeria in Seattle when he uploaded his first critique on YouTube, a 50-minute analysis on the Fallout franchise, in 2013. In an Interview with Critical Distance, he said he grew frustrated with the discourse around the games and needed an outlet. He spent the next years dissecting videogame franchises such as Mass Effect, Red Dead and Call of Duty. In 2015, he and his wife took a documented eight-month road trip across the US in a VW Bus they bought two years earlier.

In 2019, he took to the road and documented his travels to the real-world locations that inspired the original Fallout, Fallout 2 and Fallout: New Vegas.

Style
Caldwell-Gervais named travel authors Bill Bryson and William Least Heat-Moon, as well as film critic Roger Ebert, as direct influences on his writing style.

Caldwell-Gervais justifies the format of his criticism being video in that he can truly show what the game is like while talking about it, which wouldn't be possible in print using only screenshots. Additionally, in an interview with David Bowman for Super Magfest he recounted his experience trying to have a conversation about Fallout in an online forum and eventually settling on the "YouTube format" to express himself.

Caldwell-Gervais' video essays are usually longer than an hour and frequently reach lengths of multiple hours, taking their time to place the subject of analysis into a wider historical, cultural and personal context. His revised and expanded "A Thorough Look at Fallout" released in 2023 is his longest to date, clocking in at almost nine and a half hours.

His videos usually feature an intro sequence and hand-drawn titlecard at the start. Caldwell-Gervais shared in a podcast interview that they also fulfill the function to "get everyone on the same page [...] that this is going to be a lofi production".

His passion for travelling is "a recurring motif" in Caldwell-Gervais' videos.

Reception
Nolan Good, writing for the Willamette Week, likened Caldwell-Gervais to Roger Ebert and wrote: "Noah Caldwell-Gervais is playing a role in both legitimizing [video games] and demonstrating what [they] can accomplish."