What Are We Even Doing Here
The question always on my mind.
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[Something that inspired me to write this was all the amazing work I see being done in games media by a whole bunch of writers doing what they can with a bad situation. This whole thing you’re about to read is my rant and ramblings about how things suck, but there are so many writers out there I look up to because they make this media landscape suck a lot less. Because I don’t want those names I’m trying to highlight behind a paywall, here they are. This list is in no particular order and I encourage you to look up all of these writers and check out their work. It’s not all encompassing, I’ll definitely be missing a few people, but the extent of this list and the fact that there are more shows just how many people there are still doing great work:
Rebekah Valentine
Kat Bailey
Brendan Sinclair
Levi Winslow
Alice Bell
Alyssa Mercante
Ethan Gach
Jason Schreier
Kirk Mckeand
Jordan Middler
Andy Robinson
Chris Scullion
Tom Ivan
James Batchelor
Chris Dring
Veerender Singh Jubbal
Nick Calandra
Carolyn Petit
Ashley Schofield
Brad Shankar
Jon Lamont
Jonathan Ore
Steve Vegvari
Steve Saylor
Lex Luddy
Sam Cormie
Echo Apsey
Aaron Bayne
Gene Park
Rob Zacny
Patrick Klepek
Janet Garcia
Luke Plunkett
Nathan Grayson
Chris Person
Gita Jackson
Riley MacLeod
Megan Farokhmanesh
Tom Warren
Ash Parrish
Stephen Totilo
Shannon Liao
Austin Walker
Reid McCarter
Yussef Cole
Sophie McEvoy
Cecilia D’Anastasio
Chris Kerr
Kenneth Shepard
Zack Zwiezen
Willa Rowe
Moises Taveras
Matt Kim
Michael Higham
Khee Hoon Chan
Josh Broadwell
Stacey Henley
Jade King
Hayes Madsen
Isaiah D. Colbert
I don’t know about the rest of you on this writing-focused platform, but I wanted to be a writer when I was younger. I thought that would be a pretty cool way to make money. I also wanted to be an actor. I still want to be an actor, though now I don’t picture it the same way. Like a lot of creatively inclined people, I think it would be cool to try and express that creativity in a lot of different ways. We can all have our favourites, but the more you branch out the more you’re forced to think in different ways, and through this diversification you become a better creative. You get so many more experiences you can pull from going into your next big project.
I think having a career where you’re able to try so many things is the ideal life for a lot of creative people. I sort of see it as my ideal, but in a very focused way. I love writing, it’s my medium of choice, and the one where I feel most free and comfortable. My actual ideal would be to just write, all the time. Writing across different forms of art and being able to support my family. What a life that would be, is what I used to think. Still do, though every day lately it feels like more and more of a distant dream. To be clear, I currently make my living writing. I write for a small video games focused outlet that’s been around for a long time now, still trying to make its way in this SEO-hellscape. I also write articles that’ll be in-print every once in a while also about video games, and I do this, of course, which will be more than just games. Though in the case of Substack, at least for now I can’t exactly call a couple family and friends tossing me $5 a serious income. This feels like a natural point to put a subscribe button.
I know I’m lucky to have a job writing and working in games media, but therein lies the problem. I started doing this work in earnest while stuck at home in 2020. I’d always looked to a career in games media with childish bright-eyes, and thought this would be the time to try, if ever there was one. Now I’m here, I’ve been with the same site in a full-time capacity for 3 years this June, and in that time I’ve loved this job. I’ve also never understood why this industry feels like it’s dying little by little almost every day. In the last three years like many of my colleagues I’ve watched sites get shut down, people laid off, and walkouts over a managing company both not understanding the reality of running a games website and seemingly refusing to even try. The Herbs are out to kill us and replace us with robots who’ve branded speed as intelligence. What the Herbs don’t realize is that the robots won’t really be coming for my job, it’ll be coming for theirs - but that’s not happening right away, and in the meantime it’s worth asking the question: what are we even doing here anymore?
It’s the Best of Times and the Worst of Times
It’s the one I have on my mind daily. What are we doing today? Well today we’re making quippy comments about the most basic parts of the job, like how each review will of course include the unique and subjective views of the reviewer. Tomorrow we’ll return to the playing field that is whether or not games should be written about as if they are works of art and culture, or products that need to show value for each dollar spent on them by consumers. The day after that it’ll be the continuation of the campaign between journalists and influencers, and who the average joe can actually trust. One side gets paid by an external party to write and report on games, the other gets paid by the people making and marketing the games to further market the games in a transaction that is made clear to the audience from the get-go.
But surely Joe Blow YouTuber known for his channel BlowJoeGames wouldn’t lie, they’re on camera, and everyone knows it’s impossible to lie when you’re filming it. All this happens and repeats itself on the ‘online town hall’ we all hate but can’t leave and in the meantime when we’re not spending energy writing hit tweets we’re writing service posts that exist only because the phrase “I don’t know, just Google it” exists and once upon a time an ad-based website was a fine way to run a business. Chasing after SEO trends to write about topics that we can’t believe enough people have Googled to make it a trend at all. Then when you learn how to chase the trends and even predict them, you’ll still be laid off because your trend-chasing was unfortunately not growing profits fast enough, according to someone who believed running a games website would make them as rich as the biggest game studios. (“We cover Call Of Duty, why aren’t we making as much money as Activision?” - some media executive, surely, somewhere).
It detracts, all of it detracts from the work we should be doing, the work that plenty of really excellent journalists are doing every day. I’m not about to stand on a pedestal and say that covering video games is really important work or something. We’re not doctors here. But it’s important to report on people and their art. We need the context entertainment journalism provides for our present and our future. I know that’s important, and I feel lucky that I love and understand an area of that entertainment industry enough to write about it. I feel even luckier to be working in this industry at the same time as some of the best writers to do this work. In the middle of all this despair there is a brigade of journalists across outlets big and small. I’m consistently impressed and honoured to call any of these people peers. And yet much of what I’ve seen has also been a media industry collapsing little by little. Closing in on itself, being consumed by one giant leader (who arguably was always going to go this route) until it all operates like a well-oiled and shallow SEO-focused machine where guides and service posts are the only things that exist.
It is a disappointing and ridiculous reality I live in. I wanted to be a games journalist when I was a kid. Here I am. I have that job - that exact job. Who can say that? That they have one of the many ‘dream’ jobs they picked out for themselves as a child. I’ve always liked video games, I’ve always liked writing. I’ve always liked thinking and talking far more deeply about video games than it’s sometimes worth, and I play games pretty much every day. The games industry, - of which I see myself as press for and in my own view not wholly a part of it but still tied to it - has been going through an awful time these last two years, and yet video games remain the biggest entertainment industry in the world.
Games continue to show up in mediums outside its own and in aspects of art and culture in bigger and more impactful ways, and the c-suite response has been a lack of foresight mixed with a wallop of executive greed. Uncaring for the humans bearing a punishment they didn’t deserve given to them so a few individuals could keep some extra millions in their own coffers, and the company can have better quarterly numbers. A growing cabal of players led by grifters manipulating whoever they can to keep the schtick going is once again leading to actual harassment and abuse of developers and journalists. In spite of all that there are still plenty of really excellent journalists doing their best to keep some semblance of games journalism alive - and even they aren’t safe, something that was proven again with Ziff Davis’ acquisition of the Gamer Network.
Q’s Without A’s
I don’t pretend to be an amazing journalist, I’m just always trying to be a good one. It’s not what I went to school for. I’m a theatre kid who always liked writing and made it their pandemic project to change career paths, and now I’m here. In an industry I nerd-out about and think is not just cool but also important for anyone who will want to understand modern culture today and in the future. Like the rest of us in this space I see how important it is that we have people who are really good at their jobs writing honest and thoughtful journalism about video games now and in the future, so when is everyone else going to see it? When will there be entry-level positions that pay more than $5 for 350 word news posts? When are we going to reach the conclusion that it’s actually not good to overwork writers until they burnout, leaving the industry all together so those bright-eyed uninitiated can repeat that history?
Will we eventually have enough people who’ve been doing this long enough that they can pass down their institutional knowledge to the next generation? Why does every media company seem to be filled with brainless executives who claim to have good “business sense” but run all these websites and companies into the ground? Can an executive answer me on this: Do you call it a ‘win’ when you burn through your company’s funds giving yourself too big a paycheck, lay everyone off and sell for peanuts? What about if you somehow don’t sell for peanuts, is the rest of it still a win? Why does the ‘nature of business’ have to include budget space for you, who can’t make or do anything and thinks leading a team is yelling at people, even though it was your decisions that cost the company money?
I’m just speculating on how it seems these things go every time. ‘These things’ being practically every layoff story across games media and the games industry proper. We rarely get real details about what happened, and I don’t give anyone who might bear the word ‘executive’ in their job title any credit - but show me one deserving of credit and I’ll grant it. And if your response, fictional executive reading this typing out a reply, is anything along the lines of, “well it’s a win if you make money,” kindly shove the keyboard at your fingertips up your asshole. If you tie your intelligence and success in life to making money then you’re probably already too far gone down the rabbit hole that leads to believing you’re some kind of prophetic messiah meant to be rich and lead the unfortunate peoples of the Earth.
Just be Good at Everything, but Especially Not Dying
I have…a lot of frustrations about this job towards the people who all seem to be making the worst decisions. I have a lot of frustrations towards our audience, most of whom aren’t bothered to read what’s actually written but instead spout whatever sludge they perceive as if it’s gospel. I can’t do a lot about that. I can’t really do a lot about dumb executives either, except keep hoping one day we’ll age out the stupid ones (because surely none of my own generation will be dumb like that, right?). What can I do to make my situation in this job, in an industry that is slowly becoming no more than one or two major places to try and be hired at for any chance at a stable career? Can I “write my way out” as Lin-Manuel Miranda once sang six shows a week? I can try - I am trying, right now, with this.
I can also podcast. Or I can pick up video creation or editing. Or I can go hard on creating a social media persona to draw a community in, create a character and play them like a method actor, breaking for nothing in the hopes of keeping it up long enough that I’ll crack the algorithm to go viral. Paid sponsorships and collaborations with BlowJoeGames putting food on my table, on top of individual monthly donations from people who enjoy my “content” and want me to keep existing. Or I could take the para-social relationship between myself and my audience further, convince them that they need to be giving me as much of their money as they can because if I can’t exist, then they’ve lost a general in the army against wokeness or whatever the fuck those people talk about. Barring that last one, is there anything really “wrong” with the rest of those options? Not really - it’s all become part of how things are.
Podcasting is a talent and I enjoy listening to podcasts when they’re executed well. I watch YouTube videos more than I watch anything else. I tried streaming and quickly found how exhausting it is mentally, and recognized quickly that the mental and emotional drain post-stream was not for me. I don’t think content creators taking sponsorships is inherently bad. I just don’t know why a pressure exists that we all have to be good at all of it, each new role requiring more layers of specialized skills. I like podcasting, and I’ll continue to do it where I can because I like it.
But I didn’t get into a writing-focused job because I liked doing a whole bunch of stuff around writing and then also maybe writing. I like writing. I want to write. Just let me write, dammit! (He says, as he’s typing this on a platform letting him write whatever he wants). Another layer to this I’m also keenly aware of is that there are people out there establishing new pillars of games journalism. Aftermath.site, Second Wind Group, Remap Radio are all independent outlets doing excellent work run by industry veterans who know sustainability is more important than growth. But they’ve also just begun their journeys, and it’s their reputations alongside their work that drives readers and listeners to them.
For all the games journalists like me then who are still building those reputations, trying to be writers without doing a million other things and want this to be a viable career but are struggling through it, are we meant to wait around until these places can hire us? Not that I presume I’d personally be hired, my point is more how can we expect any newcomers to the field to stick around when all the established big-name places have fewer and fewer spots to fill, each one with varying understandings of what constitutes a ‘proper salary’ for the work, and all the places who know how things ought to be run can’t hire anyone because they can only support their small group of maybe 5 people? Is it our lot to support these small startups we want to work for one day while we struggle to stick around long enough that maybe we can get hired by them?
Maybe that’s just what it is, and a better games media landscape will be born out of that cycle. Right now however, it means we lose more and more talented people who don’t return to this job because it’s no longer worth it to them. They’ve burned out and can’t take it anymore, and I don’t blame them. I don’t wish to deny anyone their happiness, but that doesn’t change the fact that games media will be worse off without them.
This piece wasn’t intended to be a rant though that’s definitely where it ended up. My intention was to highlight the major issues I see in games media while showing that there are still really awesome writers out there doing great work. Journalists and creators that really care about their work. So getting back to those intentions, I’m going to list all of the writers I see doing great work in spite of all the shit currently surrounding them.
This list is in no particular order and I encourage you to look up all of these writers and check out their work. It’s not all encompassing, I’ll definitely be missing a few people, but the extent of this list and the fact that there are more shows just how many people there are still doing great work.
Rebekah Valentine
Kat Bailey
Brendan Sinclair
Levi Winslow
Alice Bell
Alyssa Mercante
Ethan Gach
Jason Schreier
Kirk Mckeand
Jordan Middler
Andy Robinson
Chris Scullion
Tom Ivan
James Batchelor
Chris Dring
Veerender Singh Jubbal
Nick Calandra
Carolyn Petit
Ashley Schofield
Brad Shankar
Jon Lamont
Jonathan Ore
Steve Vegvari
Steve Saylor
Lex Luddy
Sam Cormie
Echo Apsey
Aaron Bayne
Gene Park
Rob Zacny
Patrick Klepek
Janet Garcia
Luke Plunkett
Nathan Grayson
Chris Person
Gita Jackson
Riley MacLeod
Megan Farokhmanesh
Tom Warren
Ash Parrish
Stephen Totilo
Shannon Liao
Austin Walker
Reid McCarter
Yussef Cole
Sophie McEvoy
Cecilia D’Anastasio
Chris Kerr
Kenneth Shepard
Zack Zwiezen
Willa Rowe
Moises Taveras
Matt Kim
Michael Higham
Khee Hoon Chan
Josh Broadwell
Stacey Henley
Jade King
Hayes Madsen
Isaiah D. Colbert