Writer and Critic.

Co-host of Safe Room, a survival horror game club podcast, and @TIEReview, a journal of independent games criticism.


MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE

i think the difference between a casual blogger and a journalist is that journalists confirm sources and check basic information by asking people who would know, before writing an article

with apologies to most of modern game journalism for saying so


MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE

It's depressing honestly, i used to be the biggest advocate in the world to other devs that game journalism was doing important work and critical analysis mattered but now we're at a point where polygon is crossposting low quality tiktok explainers to their front page and it's like. idk. What I loved is gone. It left. It was destroyed.


itsnatclayton
@itsnatclayton

The thing that depresses me as someone who came out of a five year career in games press is that people want to do this work. People don't get into journalism to write Top 10 Black Friday SSD Deals posts. But before too long you realise the demands of playing to ad rev and SEO have destroyed the ability to put time into good critique and journalism, or that the long term institutional knowledge at these outlets simply doesn't exist to train new writers.


lmichet
@lmichet
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grace-machine
@grace-machine

I've written news on and off for GameSpot for three years. The rate used to be $25 for 200 words, it's now $30. This is unbearable, but it's actually pretty high for a games site. I used to edit for a Gamurs website that paid half as much per news story and once tried to raise the minimum requirement per story to 300 words without a pay increase. There are way more of those tiny SEO farms than there are GameSpots and IGNs.

All this is to say.


if you are writing for $30 (or less) you are motivated to work fast and loose, even to pick up stories that won't require much effort or research because you are not going to be compensated enough for any work you do beyond the minimum. I don't think I'm a bad news writer by any means, but I feel the limitations of payment on what I can do for basically every article I write. Even editors can also be swamped editing dozens of individual stories a day. GameSpot has some amount of guaranteed traffic, as it's a big name. But smaller sites have to scramble for every crumb (also I'm sure their advertisers pay even less). Which means both a shotgun strategy and speed. The only way you can get higher SEO than a bigger site is to either publish things faster than they can or make a bite-sized guide or news tidbit that is less useful, but more likely to get picked up on a google search.

Doing this, a freelancer can make enough money to scratch out something like a living, but they have to work fast and be incredibly efficient (which as you can imagine shunts off people with mental illness or disabilities who can do fantastic work but just need more time or support). Full-time jobs also get dangled like carrots, but these too are more likely given to white men, there aren't very many of them, and there is a strong likelihood you will just be laid off. One freelance writer I worked with at Gamurs was hired and then laid off before his health insurance card arrived in the mail.

These are all just compounding issues that are discussed above (many of which are the real sources of these dynamic, why hire a team of staff writers when you can use the same amount of money to pay more freelancers less). But I do think staffers tend to have the largest voices, while the people often most negatively and materially affected by the current form of games journalism are freelancers.

PS I'm in the National Writer's Union/Freelance Solidarity Project and I'm actively involved with trying to kick up efforts around these issues. If you are freelancer who works in games or otherwise maybe reach out!


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in reply to @MOOMANiBE's post:

It's interesting - they had some guys who really actually knew how to do video, and I think they had a pre-existing video content strategy before "pivot to video" became the hot site-obliterating buzzword. I think that pre-existing experience with it allowed them to avoid getting suckered in too bad; I recall Justin & Griffin experimenting with the "Just Like Art" Monster Factories on Facebook, which I think allowed them to compare the views they were getting there to their regular YouTube stuff and conclude that there wasn't much "there" there.

I think Polygon's real video-based petard that they got hoisted by was that once Justin and Griffin and BDG left to have their own (much more lucrative) independent careers, Polygon was left with this McElroy/BDG-shaped video content hole that nobody left was really equipped to fill. And they couldn't NOT keep producing videos, so, like, they kind of just had whoever was there push out of bunch of painfully underperforming stuff featuring people who really weren't great on-camera or on-mic but who had to make videos because Polygon needs videos!

I mean, they still have Patrick Gill there and he's done some incredibly funny and unhinged stuff at Polygon (Video Game Theater Theatre, Please Retweet, his interviews with Ben Schwartz), but whatever reason, now he's making generic video essay / explainer-type videos that don't play to his strengths at all instead of the weird hilarious shit he used to do. I went back and watched some of his old stuff and it still had me cackling but I couldn't make it through 5 minutes of any of his most recent videos at Polygon.

Arguably you could trace the problem all the way back to the rise of podcasts, when having a clearly marketable personality for visitors to relate to became a much higher priority for sites. I don't know that I would, though - that wouldn't really explain the growth period in the mid-late 2010s - and personally, I'd say the much surer sign of game writing's decline was when everyone started accepting game guides as a genre of publication writing. And on that note: god, I've always hated the space capitalist realism carved out for itself in game writing.

even during my time regularly doing shift work for RPS (2018-2020) there was a real sense that it was losing its voice; that even as the old guard had mostly moved on, all the younger, queerer writers it was hiring couldn't find a sustainable future there. ReedPop barely knew what to do with the site, and I have almost no hope IGN does either.

(Especially now that even Alice O has left, maybe the last remaining flagbearer for "the RPS voice")

The moment i realised it's more "entertainment" than "journalism" was when my fave reviewers were repeatedly mixing up terms "copyright", "trademark" and "patent" during podcasts (when topic of patented game mechanics came up).
It doesn't require going to law school to understand the difference. And i thought it'd be a bit more common knowledge among people who make a living by talking about games and the environment they're made in (IP ownership, patents etc.)

man I’m still not over Polygon running a whole article initially claiming that Toby Fox purposefully used a motif from his ancient intentionally-incendiary preteen mpreg musical in his Pokémon Sword/Shield Battle Tower theme, based entirely on twitter hearsay. I had to literally get the article amended with a strongly worded message because it was just severely untrue, and they published this mere MINUTES after I’d just finished a huge public rant about WHY IT WAS UNTRUE, which now remains cited at the bottom of the article (though they’ve since amended it further to remove even the traces of them having ever made the claim that it was Definitely True, leaving only citation of my claim that he was never fully banned from the MSPA forums for making it….)

anyway. ugh.

August 2014 is when the whole enthusiast writing industry around gaming just up and died for me, and I decided "yeah, I'm done". I don't think I've intentionally read anything on a gaming site since, and stopped writing about games in 2015 after 11 years of doing nothing but that.