The nexus between video games and other forms of media is fluid. These platforms, where we create content, discuss, and profit, are specters. Always haunting yet at times invisible in the public consciousness.
Of all the video essayists that I’ve interviewed, Joe’s (Pause & Select) work is the most stimulating. His videos are academic. His fluency in Japanese makes him a rarity, able to engage with the subject directly. Some decry him and his videos as pretentious. Maybe they are. Nevertheless, pretension requires some knowledge. And Joe knows a lot.
Back in 2024, we had a lengthy conversation (the full transcript is over fifty-five pages long) on videogame criticism, language being used for conceptual violence, dirt, and what is content; among other topics of interest to us as writers and researchers. Quite a rollercoaster. Joe, at the time of our interview, was finishing his PhD (which he has since finished and is now living and working in Japan) while also making incredibly intricate video essays on anime and Japanese society.
Joe’s most recent video, Akihabara: Death and Rebirth is on the changes Akiba has experienced since the 1990s. What follows is a heavily edited and condensed version of our conversation.
Aguas’ Points: The channel name is closely associated with controller inputs in games. But the channel’s content is primarily anime. Why anime?
Joe (Pause & Select): Pause & Select actually started off as a gaming channel. I was actually one of those smaller venue gaming journalists who were active during the 2011 to 2014 era of gaming journalism. You know the whole N4G and VentureBeat spaces. Ultimately, it never worked out due to a variety of factors. That’s where the title [came from]. So, if you’re ever curious as to why this anime and manga channel has a gaming style name, that’s the reason why.
It’s interesting that you started in the video game journalism space. How was that experience for you?
It was a grind; definitely kind of a grind. I think the only claim to fame that I had was being cited in Wikipedia as part of the Gamergate controversy. I was in support of women in gaming, and I was defending Anita Sarkeesian and the gaming feminist movement at the time. Back then I guess they needed somebody who had a vague enough language to slap into a defense of the toxicity. But I guess my language was not strong [or direct] enough for them not to shuffle me into a toxic perspective.
I worked for so many small publications and it was kind of like a self-fulfilling cycle of defeat in a weird way because none of them paid. That’s the thing about small gaming journalist publications. The only places that took you didn’t pay.
Games are a different beast because you’re writing about something that costs fifty to sixty bucks. You’re writing about things that cost a lot of money and unfortunately, I could never afford games of that kind. I grew up very poor. I didn’t have money to spend on games. So, the only things I wrote about were free ones that had no audience. My articles had absolutely terrible reader retention. My editors would say “You can’t be talking about some random game that nobody is going play.” I replied “These are the only games I can afford; they’re free.”
It never worked out. I was able to get a few passes to some mobile games because they would give keys out to anybody at that time. This was the time when mobile games were seen as “not real games.” So, I would review those. But again, it was rough not getting paid.
I eventually cycled out. If I had just converted those reviews into YouTube videos covering those random games [I would have] 700K views.
Yeah, if you had done so back then you would be huge! But damn; yeah, it’s a weird industry. I write a lot of criticism and it’s hard. People try to get in, but the space keeps shrinking. A lot of them are going bust.
Why did you do that at the time, if you weren’t making any money? What drove you to write about these games and tolerate editors telling you your metrics were horrible?
I always came into it knowing I’m not going to be able to make a lot of money or even possibly a living wage. But I just wanted to write about games and make enough money where I’m in the black. I really like talking about games.
I came out of the old sort of the vBulletin forum spaces, where analysis was boiled down to long unhinged rants about some particular thing. The thesis was always going to be some variation of “This is why the N64 is going to actually bust.” And “This is going to be the new era of so and so.” Every other paragraph had a slur. I wanted to talk about games in a [different] way. But it just never worked out. I was one of the people that was cast outside of the Mortonian hyperobject [per Timothy Morton’s book Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World “hyperobjects are entities of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a thing is in the first place.”] Everybody talks about the people who made it. Unfortunately, I didn’t.
I know that sounds probably more depressing than I’m intending.
Sounds like realism to me. What are some of your favorite games?
I couldn’t really afford games growing up. I didn’t really have a lot of games. I have a different sort of relationship with games media than a lot of people on YouTube, at least as far as I understand YouTube content about games media. I don’t have the same kind of relationship with Nintendo and all that kind of stuff, because I never really grew up with Nintendo consoles beyond the Super Nintendo, and even that I think I only had like three Super Nintendo games because that’s all I could afford.
So, I got really into flash games. During the Albino Blacksheep and Newgrounds era I made flash games. I made really crappy flash games. They are really bad.
Probably the most important game to me, however, is Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, the Westwood Studios strategy game. The reason why is because [I played it on] my first custom built computer, and my uncle put a pirated copy of Tiberian Sun on that computer [laughs]. I played Tiberian Sun, and I was like “This game is great! I have no idea what’s going on, but this is great.” Then I found out that there was a whole modding community. My relationship with games is tinkering with them more in terms of software. I have a lot of love for the modding side of games.
I got really into modding Tiberian Sun. It’s also the reason that I really like The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, but only modded Skyrim. Modded Skyrim is a really interesting beast. The different approaches to modding that Korean versus Japanese versus American communities have are very, very goofy. There was a post I read a long time ago that was very descriptive of what was going on. Something like “American Skyrim modders want to create combat like their favorite Japanese games. Every Japanese modder wants to make their favorite anime character look like their favorite Korean idol.” It was interesting.
I also love fighting games. Fighting games were the one other kind of games I really enjoyed. The main one that I really like in terms of raw numbers is BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle. If we are going to go by any objective measure, that’s probably it. I’ve spent way too many hours on that game. That community is dead, so I don’t even know if it was worth it.
Mass Effect is interesting. Part of my PhD thesis is about Mass Effect. I think it’s a really unique game in a lot of weird ways, specifically because it’s a trilogy based entirely around reading and interpreting saved data. It hasn’t been attempted at that scale in any other game. There’s a lot of interesting implications, both theoretically, but also experientially in terms of how [the story] plays out.
So, after gaming journalism did not work out you transitioned to making live reaction videos? How did you get to your current style of video essay?
At first the content I made was primarily focused around reacting and talking about things on narrative or visual levels. I had come out of my MA which was film focused. My audience didn’t like my approach. The main thing they said was “[if] you’re going to talk about something like this then why don’t you just make video essays instead of live reactions?” Live reaction fans want things very differently than orthodox YouTube content. So, I was like, “Okay, I’ll do that.” So, I ended up making anime and manga video essays.
I didn’t come into anime and manga as an expert or anything. I came in as somebody who had an interest in the subject and then slowly [familiarized myself].
What are some of your influences when creating video essays?
My content style is inspired by old video essays. What I mean by that is, I’ve gotten into this stage where I’m realizing that people’s frame of reference of what’s an old video essay is Contra Points and the BreadTube wave. But I’m thinking “wait a minute. No, I was a video essayist during that period of waves.” So now my favorite reference on what is old is completely off skew.
My influences came from folks like [Michael] Cognata, Matt Zoller Seitz, and Kevin B Lee, and the first wave of film video essayists. A lot of my older videos were trying, not very successfully, to capture that energy. Which is why I was very close to the mic and soft-spoken. Honestly, I don’t watch too many video essayists, which might be why this style I’m trying to employ is a little janky.
I actually watch a lot more technical gear videos. I’m really into audio YouTube. My videos always have a little bit of a summary, and they have a thesis. I stole that from Curtis Judd [Learn Light and Sound]. He reviews audio equipment and every single audio review he does [there is] a couple of frames of bullet points he wants to cover. I just try to incorporate those.
In my first ‘career’ I was an audio engineer. I used to work at a radio station. I used to do that about seventeen years ago for about three years. So, when you talk about watching a lot of the audio side of YouTube, I do so as well to keep up with how everything in the field is changing.
On the topic of film video essayists my point of reference for film video essayists are artists like Dziga Vertov, Agnès Varda, and Chris Marker. It upsets me when I watch video essayists on YouTube or listen to others in conversation who refer to video essays and discard the film side of it; what came before YouTube. I also dislike how videos on the platform can have scripts of over a hundred thousand words and are seven hours long and yet they say almost nothing. A viewer can extrapolate, maybe like a paragraph of what was said. This is not the case with your videos, many of which are around twenty minutes. Yes, you use jargon, academic jargon specifically, but it’s used very effectively. You try to expand on concepts and also discuss inherently complex topics. You need to utilize the language – the jargon – that meets the discourse.
You are one of the best when it comes to that. And that’s not even talking about your technique, I love your editing style. The conversations you have with yourself, like what you do in the post edit scenes. I enjoy your quirky and self-described ‘janky’ style. It injects humor into your heady analysis and adds levity to serious topics.
During my time making videos on YouTube [eight years at the time of our discussion], I’ve seen my fair share of people call me pretentious. I just got a comment twenty minutes ago on Twitter right before this conversation. I get my fair share of “the language is pretentious! This is too jargony! People are not going to understand this!” and whatnot.
I use the language I do because of a few factors. The first one, English is not my first language. It’s not even my second or third. It’s technically my fourth. I grew up in a really strict ESL [English as a second or foreign language] environment. Growing up, I remember one of my ESL teachers telling me in the third or fourth grade “you’re never going to learn to be good at English.” I remember being very off-put by that. It’s made me a little bit paranoid with the language. I feel a lot of people have this idea that when I use a big word it’s because I want to try to sound smart or something. That’s not my goal. I don’t see myself as a smart person. I use specific words because a lot of times when you’re navigating really tough concepts, sometimes these words are the best [descriptors].
Sometimes if you’re dealing with the word that I use in the Persona 4 video, interpellation; when using that particular word, there’s a whole ecosystem of other associated concepts that you want to imply and bring in and whatnot. There’s not a better word for interpellation than literally interpellation. It’s a whole process of things. The problem of course is that when you use a word like that, people scream “Pretentious! Overthinky jargon.”
I’m trying to use simpler language, but it’s tricky. I’m never confident that I know enough about a topic to sort of sit down and say, “Okay, this is the moment where a simpler word can be used.” I fall back on the word that I think is most appropriate.
Each individual word has its own meaning. The more complicated the word the more specific what it’s trying to address. Typically, within academic writing, we need to get to the point of hyper-specificity. Writing becomes a microscope. At some point you must zoom into something to look beyond the cell structure, so to speak.
In the description of your channel, you have a phrase “Looking at the mud on a conceptual basis.” What’s the mud?
The mud is an offhand reference from Mary Douglas’ book Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Douglas was a cultural anthropologist. She talks about how in a lot of cultures there is this concept that is used quite frequently, which is dirt.
Dirt is an interesting concept because it’s functionally a sort of cultural marker to point at and say, “We have to rid ourselves of this dirt.” Being dirty is a stand-in for unwanted elements, unwanted opponents, unwanted parts of us. It’s truly of us because we are a post-agricultural industrial culture. We need dirt. Dirt is fundamentally the bedrock upon which our society functions.
Douglas observes that we have this special relationship with dirt, both physically and conceptually. It’s something we don’t want on us, but we can’t live without it. Douglas frames it in contradistinction to concepts like water and sky. Pure things. Unbroken Things. Things that we want to be around or in or have. Like clean water. Clear skies. Compared to dirt, we don’t want dirt.
Speaking of dirt, let’s talk about the dirty word of the moment, content. I’ve become obsessed with the use of the term in general. By your definition and how you understand it, what is content?
I think the definition that makes the most sense to me and this is one that I’m echoing from Mark Steinberg is the smallest transmissible unit of culture, especially ones generated by a platform. It’s kind of a mouthy definition, but it makes the most sense to me because obviously there’s this difficulty with content being weirdly an old but also new word. This definition makes the most sense.
The part of this definition involving a platform is critical. A core issue I have with people describing themselves as content creators is that they use content as a catchall. They remove themselves, consciously or subconsciously, from the platform where their work lives. It’s used so much that to an extent it loses all meaning.
It’s like, why is this word here? It’s not wrong to use it. It’s just that the sense of self-awareness of where the term comes from is missing. I do agree with you; content is generated from a platform. I mean, let me stretch it. If we were working in the old Hollywood studio system that would be one platform. But that’s obviously not as neat as the example of a capital “P” platform like YouTube, right? That’s nowhere near as neat.
Yeah, that’s always been an interest of mine. I think people [need to] think of platforms less as distinctly social media platforms. This is something Steinberg really stresses. Platforms are not just social media platforms. Platforms are very much a whole bunch of things. They could also be hardware or payment platforms. They’re essentially simply just like mechanical digital substrates that generate things. The one I think a lot of people experience every day, but don’t really talk about too much, is smartphones. Smartphones are a platform and so there are ways in which the example of Korean webtoons, a scrolling webtoon, takes advantage of a platform. The smartphone is a particular way to tell a story in a certain kind of format. So, there’s that sort of push and pull that nevertheless, I think makes something more like content and that’s specifically because of how it relates to a platform. At least that’s my thoughts.
Take isekai (“other world” stories) as another example. Most of them come from the same fundamental core platform, which is becoming a novelist. And becoming a novelist has a series of both generative, and also in ways repressive digital mechanisms that force these stories to come out. In a lot of senses, there’s a really interesting challenge that comes about, because when some of these stories get adapted into anime and manga and light novels people see it as “not content,” [yet if you look closely] the trace of that platform still lingers. And so, you have these discussions that are all very samey. They always do these very specific things that are presented in one particular way or the other, and that tension also shows up.
What do you think of academic language as it is used and adopted by Youtubers? You know the examples. You sometimes do live streams on Twitch, which are still up, where people send you videos and you watch them until you have a comment. There is one where you watch a guy talking about fanservice.
I’ve noticed that a lot of people make analytical video essays [and they] are not trained on how to do, digest, and reinterpret research.
A lot of people still use the Wikipedia springboard method where they read the article in Wikipedia and then scroll down to the sources and cite these sources. That’s the method a lot of them use. It’s a little bit tricky because it’s one of those things where there’s issues on both sides. The first one here is that there are very, very few academics who will dip their toes into video essays, especially in their own fields. You and I understand why. They’re busy and most of them don’t know how to edit videos and whatnot. It’s a completely different skill set. On the other hand, there is often times this desire to oversimplify a particular thing to the point where it literally does conceptual violence. I see it a lot where if you push something a little bit too simply, people will just say “oh, how is that different than any other particular thing.” [My answer] “Well, it’s different. But you know, you don’t realistically want me to explain why it’s different. You just want it to be digestible in a way that makes sense to you.”
It’s such a difficult thing to figure out. I haven’t come across too many video essays who use complex language that are not culty pseudo-scientists. Most of the ones I see who use complex language are using it for obfuscating reasons. They are talking about some particular way in which forms form forms or something. “That’s why feminism is bad” or something like that is usually where I see complex language thrown out on YouTube.
[I also see] violent oversimplification where they’re talking about Derrida’s Archive [a concept taken from the book Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression by Jacques Derrida]. They say “Oh, Derrida’s Archive simply means that something being preserved is an act of power.” This is a little too simple because that then becomes a situation where everybody who watches all of a sudden thinks “Okay, well, I understand this thing now. I understand this concept beautifully. I don’t need to read this hundred and something page book about this concept. This YouTube video summarized it for me in two minutes. I got it.”
Yet, they don’t.
From my experience [the use of academic] language has usually been more negative than positive. People tell me “You don’t have to say it like that” and then [unprompted] give me alternative ways of saying it. And it’s usually something completely different from what I intended to say.
Let’s switch gears to something less serious but equally ridiculous. If you have to describe the Pause and Select media mix, what would it be like?
The closest thing would probably be my PhD [since it’s a] video game, and that video game is built upon a world that I’ve seated around an online publication like Royal Road. My game has a bunch of really poorly written stories that are online. I think this is the closest that I have to a media mix.
I don’t think I’m ever going to come to anything as clever as Ōtsuka Eiji and his MPD-Psycho series. It’s wild and kind of crazy that he was able to get a publisher to publish his fake biography about a fake rock star so that it makes his serial killer manga seem more realistic.
Joe, it’s been a pleasure talking to you. Before we call this to a close, what are you currently working on?
I’m working on two videos, one the Persona 5, and one with Stevie Suan who wrote Anime’s Identity: Performativity and Form beyond Japan. One of the things that’s really fascinating that Suan talks about is the idea of Butlerian performativity but in the context of formal analysis. This ties back to how we think of anime, because anime has always been this incredibly slippery, elusive term. You know, oftentimes people are like ‘oh, it’s cartoons from Japan.’ But then there’s a lot of issues with that definition. It’s one of those terms where every definition has its own set of problems. Suan actually has a really good way, for lack of a better term, to sidestep a lot of those issues by applying Butler’s concept of performativity to forms. Usually, we think about Butlerian performativity in the context of bodies, subjectivities, and identities. But if you apply it to forms it actually works out really well.
Joe’s new video Akihabara: Death and Rebirth is out now. To view Joe’s interview with Steven Suan, support him on Patreon.
Aguas' Points 