Editor-in-Chief at GameDeveloper.com, Berklee College of Music game design lecturer, BJJ Purple Belt 🤼‍♀️, hobbyist game dev, beginner pixel artist, sometimes screenwriter, fitness dork, volunteer EMT. She/her.


Gwen
@Gwen

The recent discourse about games journalism and its current sorry state on here made me want to go back and check out some critics whose work I liked or was aware of but didn't read enough of. This led to me checking out some old Waypoint articles, which led to me trying to find Lana Polansky/Mechapoetic's website, sufficientlyhuman.com

Lana Polansky's website stolen and parked by a thai slot website

This is all that remains, if you can even get it to load. Mostly it's a cloudflare block page.

Lana Polansky's website via the wayback machine, shortly before it was stolen

This is what it looked like before it was squatted on by the slot site.

From a cursory search, it looks like her twitter, like many accounts since the Muskening, was suspended at some point, so the only still existing work online is her work that's still hosted on Critical Distance, Waypoint work hosted on what's left of Vice, some podcasts she did over the last few years and what was archived of by archive.org, and lately even archive.org looks like it's not going to last the next decade..

I go through this with a different writer once every few months when I get the same itch to try to go back and read things I half-remember or find new-to-me work. This is a recurring pattern with many critics and sites.

The balkanization of everything online means that the oughtteen's games-crit renaissance isn't just dead but seems to slowly be being completely erased. You might be able to find archived essays and sites here and there, but for the most part the last 15 years of games culture is a black hole. If you weren't there, it might as well not have happened, and if you were there you're probably burned out and tired and just trying to get through the day at this point.

It's long been the adage that The Internet Is Forever but more than ever before it feels like the internet is more ephemeral than real life. The last 15 years of culture feels like it's almost been memory holed; the bulk of folks in both art production and crit spaces in a bunch of fields have been systematically forced out. All our cultural knowledge and discussion is fragmented and more full of holes than it is preserved.

I'm sure someone smarter than me will come along and point me to places this stuff might still exist or tell me I'm being pessimistic and doomer, but I can't help but feel this way. It feels like we're all having the same arguments and discussions we've had time and time again and we all vaguely remember what was said last time but nobody remembers it well enough to not have the same arguments.

We live in a state of cultural dementia.


danielleri
@danielleri

Just a +1 to all of the above.

For myself here… I’ve been writing about games professionally since 2006, and I can’t even begin to estimate how many hours of my own work are just totally lost. Thousands of hours? Hundreds of pieces, certainly. Enshittification, surely. A completely devalued part of culture, definitely. Utterly depressing either way.

Related, in therapy, a very common refrain from me is that the career field I’ve put my heart and soul and a lot of years of my life into just super duper doesn’t seem like it will exist professionally… for much longer.

The bigger problem, of course, is that journalism is straight up dying in America because the business model is completely busted, and we need journalism for anything resembling a democracy (not that we have one! Just, we need it!). I am personally big sad for everyone I know who is extremely, extremely good at this, has done it at the highest levels for years and can’t get a gig to save their life and it’s not their fault

The only answers I cling to are “I do hope a better business model exists one day and people can do this work and their labor is valued fairly” with a healthy side of “we need social safety nets and protections” and I surely don’t hold my breath for either of these in our crumbling society, but I’ll always try to hope for better.


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in reply to @Gwen's post:

I'm sure someone smarter than me will come along and point me to places this stuff might still exist or tell me I'm being pessimistic and doomer

I realized I may be the smarter person over the course of writing this. The recommendations I mustered up:

  • Bullet Points (although it's hard to follow them when they got rid of their RSS years ago).
  • The Imaginary Engine Review (very early, but also very promising).
  • VGBees (ibid).
  • canon fire (doesn't post too often, but when they do it's solid work).
  • CD-ROM Journal (you probably already know about this one).
  • After Journey's End? Does that count? That feels too situational to count.
  • Deep Hell, Kritiqal, and No Escape.

On a related note, the perennial worry about the lack of institutional memory reminded me of Critical Distance's work combating that, and the vague sense of disappointment I slowly developed toward it in the very early 2020s. One part that lack of memory persisting in spite of their efforts, one part the effort itself feeling directionless in light of their desire to celebrate game writing as an end in itself.

At least some of Polansky's essays (which I often feel a powerful need to revisit) are in the wayback machine, though even there they're mangled - e.g. black text on a black background. The only one I have an actual link saved to is this one, but I'm sure there are others

this is why my Twitter archive gets released at the one year mark of me never logging into Google (since at that point I'll have either disabled it, or am more likely, dead) since it has the "dead man's switch" / "in the event of my capture, release my 'insurance policy' of whatever I probably got put there for with my journalism"

and will probably release it eventually if twitter dies, but not while even more stalkers abound

(along with the rest of my archives, but ygwim)

in reply to @danielleri's post:

☹☹☹
I feel like it's only been 10 or 15 years since the world started taking games writing seriously, too. It really bites that there was such a short window of time before criticism at large was deemed unprofitable by the power that be....