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
This is all that remains, if you can even get it to load. Mostly it's a cloudflare block page.
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.
Just a +1 to all of the above.
For myself hereā¦ Iāve been writing about games professionally since 2006, and I canāt 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 Iāve put my heart and soul and a lot of years of my life into just super duper doesnāt seem like it will exist professionallyā¦ 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 canāt get a gig to save their life and itās not their fault
The only answers I cling to are āI do hope a better business model exists one day and people can do this work and their labor is valued fairlyā with a healthy side of āwe need social safety nets and protectionsā and I surely donāt hold my breath for either of these in our crumbling society, but Iāll always try to hope for better.
What kills me about all of this is that it's not just being forgotten or erased when sites die, a lot of this stuff was actively destroyed by people who went out of their way to harass people off the internet for the crime of "being a woman and mentioning video games" or just "being a woman" at all. The fucking number of women doing games or media journalism, criticism, dev etc who were making incredible cool shit and had to just throw away careers because shit bag men were allowed to ruin their lives is infuriating, infuriating, and soon enough even their names will be gone, and all the evidence of what was done to them destroyed.
like
as if late stage capitalism wasn't ruining everything fast enough people have to be punished for daring to try
...
I am taking a quick break from screaming to note with pleased surprise that Jenn Frank is writing again after gamer gate drove her away nine years ago, that's a wonderful thing to see. she was always good, it was horrible how she got treated.
