What guided you to topics when you were writing crit? Did you always have interests in topics like labor, or did you develop those interests after some time spent writing crit?
I think my arc goes:
Had a cool uncle who was a Philosophy PhD (he’s a bartender now) -> majored in Philosophy in undergrad in a program largely focused on analytic thinkers, but got a little taste of continental theory -> got into CUNY’s MA Philosophy program with intention to focus on ethics -> felt like/was an imposter and dropped out -> worked a bunch of shitty jobs while continuing to dip my toes in continental philosophy for fun -> EGM and 1UP close down, I realize I’ll never get to write for either -> I quit my dayjob and become a freelance reviewer and copywriter and begin to build early ties in the emerging NYC games scene and some, like N’Gai Croal and Evan Narcisse, give me encouragement and mentorship -> economy falls apart, I move back in with my parents and then take out loans to get me into a master’s program at Calarts -> while doing my MA, I slowly zero into what I’m interested in and what I’m good at. I TA a course on Marxisms and Anarchisms. I serve as research associate for a project about post-modern fiction and the biopolitics of care in the contemporary novel. I write about games a little and realize that I’m actually better at that than anything else. I decide to follow that thread -> I go to the University of Western Ontario’s Media Studies PhD explicitly to work with faculty who can support my dive into the intersection between play and labor. I complete my coursework and my comps. I start my dissertation but am running out of funding. -> I start to blog about games, and the topics I know and am still, then, confident I have something interesting to say something about. Cameron Kunzelman gets Paste to hire me to co-write a piece with him. Garrett at Paste likes my work enough to keep me in the freelancer pool. -> Gamergate happens. Mike Brown is killed. I am able to respond to these things with words I don’t think I could find these days, and to an audience that I think was more generous and interested than the one that exists now. -> Also: I’m being evicted because my apartment’s owner has decided to sell the property. Kevin VanOrd, then at Gamespot, sees me talk about needing more freelance work and hires me to write reviews for him. He doesn’t cut my bigger ideas, he lets “the review” be a more malleable, less “product decision” focused thing. -> hey, wouldn’t you know it, this begins happening across the industry. What smaller sites had been doing for years becomes increasingly fashionable and this new wave of editors of major publications give my cohort of critics a lot of leeway to run with our hearts. -> somewhere in here, I start streaming games with Streamfriends and we start Friends at the Table -> I run out of funding, but have become an associate at the Digital Labour Group, and between that and freelancing, I’m making my rent, barely -> I send Alex Navarro a DM: are y’all still looking for a News Editor? -> while at a labor conference in NYC, I manage to convince CBS Interactive HR to get me face to face with Alex and Vinny -> Giant Bomb -> Waypoint -> sort of quit Waypoint -> now.
