K, so, I'm Gus Mastrapa. I'm 43. I live in Southern California.
I was a games journalist or freelance journalist for a little longer than 10 years. I kinda started muscling in around 2004. Prior to that I had, you know, blogged kinda early on in the gaming blog space. Like, even in '99 I was writing for this group blog called Robot Street Gang. But I eventually muscled in and was able to kind of make a career out of freelancing game writing.
So, I wound up writing for most major gaming magazines, or many of them. Wired.com, the Wired website. I worked for the Game|Life blog for some time. A.V. Club. Kill Screen. I mean, the list kind of goes on. That's how you make a living in freelance games writing, is, like, you just work for everybody as often as possible.
Yeah. When you were writing about games, were you exclusively writing about games or were you writing about other things as well?
[Laughs.] That's something -- when I look back on it now, I feel like I might've misrepresented myself as somebody making a living as a freelance games writer. I also freelanced forHustler and continued writing porn for them. That was my first editorial job. And to be honest, the amount that I got paid with that little amount of work with Hustler outweighed the work that I did in games writing by a pretty large margin. So, that made the games writing living comfortable, was having this kind of foundation of these monthly magazines that I did for Hustler.
And losing that couple years ago, like, three or four years ago, that job finally went away, definitely pulled into contrast how bad the pay in the games writing world had gotten.
When that was the only income I was getting, I was really like, "Okay, this isn't working."
For people who are not, like us, freelance writers: Why was the pay going down? Because I remember you introduced me to some colleagues of yours who wrote about games in the late '90s and it seems like they've just steadily been going down, those rates. Is that right?
Yeah. I mean, so, I started -- luckily I graduated right at the end of old-school publishing. And so when I worked for Hustler, for LFP, they did things the old way and rates were the old rates, which were, like, if you did a feature story, you could get $3,000 for a feature story in a magazine.
Other than Condé Nast, like Wiredprobably still pays around that. But nobody else does. And gaming, that's ridiculous. You write a feature for gaming and you're lucky to get $800 nowadays.
I was gonna say, like, $200 or $300.
Yeah. Eight-hundred is great. Two-hundred is more, 250, that range is more likely. Same amount of work, same amount of interviews, same amount of effort. But the rate is just terrible. And you know, a lot of that -- I noticed the downswing right after the recession. I mean, it was already trending down because of the internet. But the recession put a huge break on the -- especially the old print people. The print people no longer had the ads, they were all going out of business, and once those jobs went away, the internet jobs were the only ones that were left and they were already lower, but they went even lower it felt like. They just kept dropping and dropping.
For the transcript, I want to help paint you as a more faceted dude than it might seem so far. I don't want it to seem like we're gonna go too navel-gazey talking about only the media.
Yeah, yeah.
[Laughs.] So I want to start off mentioning something else about you that you haven't: I'd be curious to hear you talk about metal versus videogames. In other words, like, as I think you know and what we're starting to see lately is people are realizing videogames have not been in this vacuum by themselves all this time.
Yeah.
Like, they actually do and can have correlates or influences from other parts of the culture.
I know you've paid attention to metal for a long time.
Yeah.
What sort of parallels do you see between metal and videogames?
Well, I think it's interesting. I think there's another genre, too, comic books, which make a lot of sense, too. It's like these sort of male-dominated interests. Kind of like, maybe loner interested, kinda nerdy. Metal is nerdy. It doesn't seem so at first for a lot of people, but I think there's some obvious, like, music nerdy, tech nerdy, gear nerdy, but also being nerdy into the band. The fandom of it can be nerdy.
Well, debating time signatures and stuff, too.
Oh yeah. If you wanna nerd out on metal, there's definitely stuff to nerd out about. So, my interest in metal, like, my research and interest in metal happened kind of concurrently with me getting a little over videogames. I think part of that came from where metal is sort of still a Wild West where games and comics have been pretty tamed as far as, like, being part of the culture. They're getting more mainstreamed.
So, one of the things that really interested me in writing about games was to write about them as culture as opposed to, like, tech or a product. In 1999, that was pretty far-out and rare to find. But as I wrote in that way and many other people started writing in that way, you get to 2010, 2012, and there's a lot of people writing about games in a cool way like that.
So, I don't know. I sort of felt like, "My work here is done." [Laughs.] You know?
[Laughs.] With writing about games?
Yeah. What I needed to say got out and a lot of people were also saying it, too, so I didn't feel like it was that necessary to do.
Yeah. Well, that and the pay, right?
Yeah, and the pay too. But then, you know, the thing about metal, too -- and I don't write about metal. I just like it as an interest, but what I like about metal is it's still way outside. Of course, there's stuff like Sabbath and Iron Maiden and things like that, but largely metal is super-insular and super-underground in a lot of ways. And so -- what I like about that is I can just kind of enjoy that isolation.
Why do you prefer that? Not isolation, but I think you're talking about, like, it hasn't been co-opted yet?
Yeah. Well, there's a fatigue that kind of set in around games for me about -- I don't know. About the sharing of it and how it's gotten so hairy and fraught and political.
I don't know how much attention these days you pay to what people say about videogames anymore, but I feel like you made a good point about how games have been tamed. But the great sleight of hand trick that's been going on is games have been super-tamed but they're still trying to give off the air that they haven't been.
Yeah. Well, okay, so it's a growing period, right?
Yeah.
And I think, like, comics, we're having a long growing period like that, too, where we're right now in this part where people are like, "Oh, comics are okay finally but it's still all superhero stuff." So, it's a maturation, I think. I'm cool with comics being mainstream. I think they're a beautiful medium and they're capable of so much. Right now, we're sort of at the point now where people are, like, totally willing to admit that they like mutants or superheroes or whatever. The whole world is into that stuff. In 20, 30, 40 years, maybe we'll get to a point where people are into Tintin and people are into, like, Love and Rockets and all the other great things that comics have to offer.
So, I think that's what games are going through. Games also have to produce that material.
This is something that I used to enjoy, was talking about games as a medium of creative expression, right? If I got joy from doing that job, that was what I got the joy from, getting to think about games in that way, as a means of expression, as a cultural product, as a mirror of culture. That, to me, is the most interesting thing about writing about games. I'm not super-interested in discovering that the gameplay is not tight or whatever.
[Laughs.] The phrase you just said, I feel like that's something I've read a lot, as well as, like, have you ever seen this phrase pop up in games writing, that something is a "missed opportunity?"
Yeah.
This notion that the writer knows what the game is supposed to be or should be?
I've done that, too, I think. I definitely have done that.
I used to do that, too.
We have this really kind of interesting way things work in games, is that we get to know about a game for several years before it comes out and it captures your imagination.
That's why gamers like reading previews and why they dig previews. You get wrapped up in that world and you almost make the game yourself for the two years before the game comes out. You know what I mean? It's like, what you want.
Movies are a little bit different. We get a trailer, but it's, like, usually just before the movie's gonna come out. Four, five months. We don't think about it that much. But you don't go to the movie theater and go, "This is what this whole, rich world that I wanted this movie to be." I mean, you do sometimes.
I think in movies, though, that tends to be more like, "Structurally speaking, this is what the story should have been." But in games it's often stuff like, "Well, I wanted multiplayer. It should’ve been there."
Yeah. I mean, I think that's a limiting assessment of what people think about when they say a missed opportunity. For me, a lot of times, missed opportunities would be in theme. Where they could have done something interesting with the story or the characters or the world and they played it safe.
How do you feel that journalists and people who write about games lack empathy for the people who make them?
Largely, the people who make games are mostly invisible to us. We see only a small fraction of those people in interviews or vidocs or whatever. So it is way easier to critique them with the gloves off. In some ways that is important, especially if you have some really cutting criticism. But the reality is that there’s nothing really that earth-shattering happening in games. We’re really just critiquing consumer stuff: “They gave me a bad deal. I want my money back.” Stuff like that. I don’t really care about those concerns. It is like being mad at an airline or a phone company. Extremely commonplace and very boring.
Did you burn out on playing games, or did you burn out on writing about games? All of the above? Did becoming a parent factor into any of this? Like, I know we talk about it all sometimes but where are you with it?
I think my main burnout was the game discourse.
Are you talking two years ago or before then?
Even before that. I was always kind of tired of -- when I used to write for A.V. Club, the comments sections would just get on my nerves.
[Laughs.] Yeah.
People would -- when I first started writing for A.V. Club, we had a word count because it was in the print edition. So I would write 150 words sometimes and these guys in the comments would write, like, three 1,000-word essays about what they thought the game should be. I just got exhausted by that.
My read on that was always that I think those people were looking for jobs or the opportunity to do what you and I were doing over there.
Yeah. Very much so, they were frustrated game critics.
[Laughs.]
And I guarantee I did the same thing to other people 15 years ago. I'm sure I did. Oh! You know what? One little anecdote I wanted to talk about, because we were talking about that age difference.
When I was first getting into games and first going to E3, like, in the 2002, 2003, 2004 era, I made friends with Peter Olafson, the writer from The New York Times. He wrote a couple things and let us run 'em at Robot Street Gang. I was a big fan of his style of writing. I felt like it was experiential. And so he kind of became my mentor. I met him at E3 one time and I was bright-eyed, bushy tailed, young guy just so excited about writing about games, so excited about being at E3, just so energized. And he was kind of where I'm at now, where he was just fatigued and had seen it at all and was just, like, kinda done.
And I was like -- I remember back then I looked at him and go, "But Peter, I know how you write and I know how you look at games. How could you not be so excited? Maybe I just need to help you find that excitement again." Because I couldn't get it. I couldn't get how you could possibly tire of writing about games or be tired of talking about games. [Laughs.]
And then after 15 years of it I go, "Oh! I see how you could get tired of this."
[Laughs.] As I think you know, I have reluctantly and increasingly been poking at you and asking you things about this whole project thing. I don't think it's so much to invigorate your enthusiasm, but it's just a definite thing that happens and it especially does happen a lot when you're a writer or critic around entertainment or what other people typically do for fun, it just changes your relationship with it. But the whole world is so different now from when we first crossed paths. Everyone goes on the internet now and writes about everything that they do for fun.
Yeah.
I don't really know what that means. I know Peter made more -- or I'm speculating -- that he likely made more at New York Times than we typically did freelance.
Yeah.
And this is a very nebulous question, but if games writing paid better, what do you think it would change?
The major thing I think you would see is you wouldn't see this brain drain from games writing into, like, especially game development, right? You would see more people who were dedicated lifelong games journalists. And we have a couple of those who are just fantastic writers and have done great work over their careers. But I think you would definitely see more people that did that.
What that would mean is overall you would have all of this experience at the top level of your magazines and your websites. You'd have more of that. And so I think that would cause a trickle-down effect of better writing and better thoughtfulness. Stuff like that.
Do you think that would bleed elsewhere into the industry?
I mean, that was the weird issue, right? And where a lot of this distrust of games journalism comes from is even the gamers knew at a certain point that they weren't buying magazines, so who was paying these games journalists, right? Like, the advertisements in the magazines were the last place where their money was coming from.
And so I think that is like a little subliminal thing that all gamers know or ought to know, is that if you're not paying for your game journalism, somebody else has to.
Right.
Or, you get what you pay for, which is if it's free, it's gonna be like a free thing. It's gonna be throwaway. It's gonna be pretty cheap.
As far as the games industry goes and the writing, I don't think they're at any loss. The games journalists who go onto work in the game industry, there's plenty of people. It's not like it's a great source of people for them. I mean, they'll find people elsewhere. The only reason that happens is, A, because these people love games and have written about games their whole lives and want to know. I think that's a really healthy impulse, is to love the medium so much that you want to know what it's like to make them and you think that you have a way to express yourself in that way.
Like, a lot of people say, "Well, if you're a journalist covering something, you should always be separate from it and never partake in the creation." I think that's silly to like a medium so much for your whole life and not be curious about what it's like to make them or to try to express yourself in that medium. I would question that more than I would question somebody getting a job in games after writing about them for a long time.
I know we've talked about this a little before, but if I'm remembering correctly, film writing has come from a lot of academic journals, right? And games writing came from consumer magazines.
Yeah.
How do you think those origins and trajectories impacted those ecosystems? Like, what's different as a result?
You know, yeah, that's an interesting point. What you're saying is the birthplace of film criticism was, like, these magazines like Cahiers du Cinéma, who, these were people who were interested in film or were filmmakers who started writing about film. Part of it is we have this history, and that's where we're a lot like comic books where we were considered a child's medium at the beginning, right?
And so all the media and stuff around that is catered to that market. Games magazines initially, a lot of them, other than the old-school PC magazines and stuff like that are targeted to teenagers and pre-teens even, so that is part of our foundation. It's nothing to be totally embarrassed of. But, you know, what you expect is a maturation with the audience. And I think that's kind of what happened. I really do think the writing about games has matured to a great degree in 15 to 20 years. The kinds of writing, the kinds of angles, the fact that we have people that are interested in the politics of gender in games and the politics of race in games and people who write about games from a ludic perspective and people who write about them from a visual arts perspective -- that stuff is all happening now. And that's what we didn't have as much 20 years ago. Twenty years ago there were little hints of that or -- I don't want to erase history, either. Some magazines were doing things and they just kinda disappeared and we don't know about them. Our history of games journalism is limited to, like, people who collect magazines and stuff like that. So, there may be instances of all those things that we just haven't brought with us to the internet.
Yeah. So, I'm 10 years younger than you and I kind of hit sideways into writing about videogames as an editor at The Onion. I went from there to Kill Screen with you and I didn't even realize -- like, I remember reading Nintendo Power and stuff growing up, but I didn't realize that was unusual for the time or at all to not write like that. And you have a couple years on me writing in that style of games as cultural artifacts than only consumer products. What sort of pushback or head-scratching did you get or hear about in the late '90s or early '00s from editors or readers who were like, "Well, why are you writing about these things in that way? They're just videogames."
The main thing I got was -- so, I'll dial it back a bunch. When I first got into journalism right out of grad school, I applied forTips & Tricks Magazine. They had an opening, an editorial opening. So I thought, "Here's a cool place." I had gone to school for film writing and magazine writing, but I was, like, interested in writing about games: "Let me try here." I wound up getting a job at Hustler. It was the same publisher. My interview was for Hustler. They wanted to fill that position more. And so I wound up working for Hustler for a while, but still was interested in games.
I eventually convinced them to run games stuff in Hustler. That was my first instance of, like, trying to make an argument for why games were something other than nerd stuff.
[Laughs.]
My pitch to Hustler was, "Hey, they're gonzo! You know what I mean? Like, the violence is gonzo, the sexuality is gonzo. It's over the top. That's something our audience, 18-year-old males." Well, for Hustler, it's mostly dudes in jail. [Laughs.]
[Laughs.]
But they wanted it to be 18-year-old males. That's something that they consume and they like it that way.
My editor bought it and I just had to make sure -- I couldn't write about Pikmin in Hustler. That was, like, a no-go, right?
[Laughs.] Yeah.
But back then there was still a lot of, like, BMX XXX. They never were able to sell ads at Hustler. They sold 900-number ads.
Oh really?
Those were just, like, eternal. Those were always refreshed. The back of the magazine was full of them. But what they really wanted to do was get back into selling ads for real products like Playboy. The kind of ads that Playboy got.
And we got an ad. They sold an ad to Tecmo for the Dead or Alive series, you know, the beach volleyball version of it with all the bikinis.
Yeah.
They were psyched. They were like, "Holy shit! We sold an ad. Like, a page ad to someone other than a 900-number. This is rad!"
[Laughs.]
Unfortunately, that was right at the tail end of anybody ever paying for print ads ever again.
Yeah.
So they were never able to sell another videogame ad in the magazine.
Do you, though, have any recollections of people sorta being like, "Huh?" to writing about games as cultural artifacts, be they editors, readers, or other writers?
Honestly there wasn’t much resistance. Firstly because I always tried to cater my writing to the style of the outlet. But secondly because it is a style or writing most editors are used to reading. These are pretty literate people. They read a lot -- especially contemorary journalism. And that perspective is how we treat pretty much every other cultural expression. So I think most editors were happy to lean in that direction and, to be honest, were already pushing their outlets in that direction.
Okay, yeah. But it's funny how much pornography and videogames seem to come up in the same breath. Like, I talked to the Pew Research Center -- are you familiar with them?
Mmhmm.
I talked to them about online harassment, all the other topics that interweave with videogames and the internet. Something they didn't really have much data on in the course of conversation they said was both adult use of pornography and adult use of videogames. I don't know that I really have a question.
[Laughs.]
But it is kind of funny how often those two end up bedfellows. 'Cause, as we're lead to believe, one is supposed to be for adults, and one is supposed to be for children.
Right. But, I think that just kind of highlights the misconception of what games are and who they're for. I've always made this argument that games aren't for adults, they're mostly for juveniles or people who have juvenile impulses. Right?
But I don't know about "juvenile," because I feel like that's got a certain connotation. That's not necessarily a bad thing.
No.
Like, I feel like that's what we see a lot of. There's a difference between the writing you're talking about from 10 years ago to -- I think it's great there's a lot of really analytical writing and thinking being done but I feel like what's missing out of that camp is the concession that, "Oh yeah, games are just kinda stupid and fun."
Yeah.
And that that's a good thing, too.
Oh, 'cause we definitely need more of that. The escape aspect is valid, right?
Yeah.
It's funny because for a long time there was an argument around talking about the game space and how we need to always talk about the political, too. I felt like at a certain point it's just exhausting, the whole fight and the argument, and you need an escape. And that's what people use games for all the time, is that escape from how their work sucks, how their relationship sucks, how they have huge credit card debt, or whatever. You get to go and shoot some aliens for an hour.
That's a nice break. That's something valuable.
Where I used to be a little more impatient with people who were like, "Oh, don't bring politics into this." Now I think I get it a little bit more. If games are your one escape, I can understand how you would fight to keep the things that we think about all the time out of that one place.
Yeah. Are you talking about a certain subset of the gaming audience here or just in general?
I think just in general. I just think in general. Like, for me, right now I just don't want to think about Donald Trump anymore. Like, I really just don't. My only social life is on Facebook where, just, everybody's fucking talking about Donald Trump and it's like -- [Laughs.] I wish they would just let you, by keyword, hide all mentions of Donald Trump on Facebook. I would pay 10 bucks a month for that.
I know you quit Twitter.
I did. Yeah.
I know that you and I have bonded over Gchat just talking about general outrage culture stuff.
[Laughs.] Yes.
For people who don't really know, like, we don't have to talk about Donald Trump, but people arguing about videogames and people arguing about politics -- is there really any difference between, like, going to the message boards on IGN versus going to Politico?
I think the thing with Politico is you know what you're going for, right?
Yeah.
Like, you're going specifically for that purpose of getting embroiled in political thought. I mean -- so what I've done, and I think this is larger than just the politics around games. The way we talk about games, too, has become sort of tiresome to me as well.
So, I'm a big fan of Destiny and I play Destiny a lot, but I'm completely disengaged from the discussion of it. When I accidentally read gaming news or see somebody talking about Reddit, I learn that there's this narrative around that game about how it's this failure and how everybody's mad about it and how there's nothing to do. But when you're not engaged with that narrative, it's this game that you like. You know what I mean?
Right. Right.
And you talk to your friends about it and you guys have opinions, but it doesn't have this larger import, like, "This is the state of the gaming industry because of how this game happened." Or every story that you read on Kotaku has this kind of narrative built in that nobody likes Destiny anymore because there's no more content or whatever. I like being disengaged from those narratives and I understand why those narratives are so appealing to writers because when you're writing about a game, it makes it feel like there's a point to all this coverage that you're doing. Like, there's this through line when -- I feel like that through line might be a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think, like, we went through that issue with the story for Mass Effect 3.
Right.
It became almost a real meme. Like, what meme means in the definition, which is a viral thought pattern. And that disappointment with the story became a viral thought pattern in the gaming fandom and media and it sort of became the narrative of that game. Like, when you talk about Mass Effect 3, it's almost like this knee jerk thing, the ending or whatever.
[Laughs.] That's all I know about it.
Yeah. And so I have made a huge effort to disconnect from both the fandom and the gaming press and it's helped me to enjoy games better, I think.
Well, you know, around entertainment and maybe it's just the internet in general, but in games specifically there is such a strong desire to break down everything into spreadsheets and try to figure out what this means and what column that belongs in.
Yeah.
That wasn't really the case when Twin Peaks was on, that feeling to authoritatively tell people what was going on, unlike True Detective.
Yeah.
I think the problem for people like you and me is there's not a lot of websites or places to go with people who want to talk about that stuff, maybe not have that stuff be spoiled, and just quietly appreciate it and discuss.
Yeah. Well, you know, it's interesting because it gets really granular.
Yeah.
And there also are ways that we talk about TV on the internet or games on the internet or movies on the internet that it becomes -- I hate the word "trope" -- but we get these tropes of how we talk about them, which sucks some of the fun out of everything? [Laughs.]
[Laughs.] A little bit.
A little bit.
For some people.
Yeah, for some people. Some people love it and they embrace it and they grew up in it or whatever. But I don't know. Like, so, my fandom started in magazines. 'Cause I was thinking about life was like before the internet and I read magazines voraciously. Like, Film Threat, Premiere, like, all these movie magazines that I could get my hands on. Sight & Sound. Music magazines like RIP and Rolling Stone and Spin. Ray Gun. When I moved to LA, before internet was huge, I had comic-book boxes full of magazines that I loved.
Yeah.
The Comics Journal, who I eventually got to write for, which is just an amazing treat. The Comics Journal, I loved that.
So you would spend a lot of time reading about stuff that you liked back then. And if you were super-lucky, you would meet one person who also cared about those things.
[Laughs.] Yeah.
And so it was different. It was way different. I remember I had this buddy Jesse in Orlando who I met, and we had this shorthand 'cause we had both read the entire issue of Premiere by the time we were hanging out. And we would just kinda go down the line and be like, "That thing, that was cool. That one was good, too. Okay, cool." We talked about all the stuff in Premiere Magazine. [Laughs.] "We're done on that subject. We're all on the same page."
Whereas, I think on the internet it's more like this constant picking apart. It's almost like -- the thing that you're talking about, the movie or the show or the game is this deer that you just shot and it's rotting away and everybody's just picking everything off it until, like, it's just this perfectly polished skeleton with not a single bit of meat left on it.
[Laughs.] Then you have to pulverize the bones and turn it into some sort of medicine.
The internet uses every part of the animal.
[Laughs.] You said you accidentally read some stories about games. Do you pay any attention at all to the games writing space?
I've unfollowed, like, almost every game outlet in all the ways that I could. Because I'm interested in them and 'cause I post about them, the Facebook algorithms still will put news about it there. Or, somebody who I'm still friends with, a journalist or somebody will share one of their stories and if it's somebody I particularly like or something I'm interested in I'll still go read it.
But largely, I go out of my way to avoid games writing, politics.
Can you talk a little bit about your falling out of love reading this stuff, and also a bit about how you stopped writing it as well? Did this coincide?
Yeah. I mean, a little bit. So, what happened, honestly, was I started getting better work writing game trailers and ads and stuff like. So once that started I was like, "Well, I can't review games anymore. I can't position myself as a game journalist if I'm also writing these game trailers and stuff." It was at a good time because it was right at the time I was transitioning in my life and having a kid and lost that freelance Hustler gig and getting a little fatigued with this stuff. So it was nice to just disconnect from it.
And then, secondarily, all of the discord that's occurring in games, it was nice to disconnect from that. Because I felt like -- I mean, I feel for everybody and everybody's struggling and it's hard and I respect what everybody's going for. But I gotta protect my mental health, too. [Laughs.] You know? And so that was my way of kind of healing myself and shielding away from all that stuff.
"How has becoming a father changed your relationship with videogames?
For the first year or so it meant I just barely played them at all. I just didn’t have the time or I was exhausted. Now that my kid is a little older it is my escape, my time to have a social life. Before I had kids I used to be really critical of people who would play World of Warcraft while ignoring their kids. I am that parent now. There’s only so much you can give to a kid. Maybe some people are able to give 100 percent of their undivided attention to their child, but that’s not me. This probably makes me sound like a terrible parent, but its just the truth. Sometimes i just need to set the kid down in front of YouTube and play a game to blow off some steam.
Well, similarly in how you can’t necessarily give something your undivided attention indefinitely -- I don't know if you've observed this, but there does seem to be burnout or a changing of the guard among writers in the space.
Yeah.
I've observed the cycle to be two, maybe three years. You've seen more of those cycles than me, but what have you noticed about that revolving door and the people who come through it?
Yeah, you know, the thing is there's all those exceptions, right? There's people that are making great careers of it. A lot of them work for nice established places. I think that's one of the main things, right? If you're one of the lucky few to get your foot in the door at a really good established place, a place that has fair pay, good working conditions, great editorial staff, and an audience that is big enough and responsive enough that you can make a career out of it, you see more people hanging out there. But even that, I think, there's other contributing factors to people burning out.
I think it's kind of like pro gaming. It might be a young person's game. Like, the obsessive writing about games could be more in the realm of the young because you still have the energy.
When I was getting Nintendo Power and GamePro, I don't remember going off and writing my own game reviews. Maybe I started late, but I started in my early to mid-twenties, and that's crazy if that's late. All I know is E3 last year, someone treated me like I was a village elder at 32. [Laughs.]
[Laughs.] Yeah.
Someone who was 25 was worrying aloud about being "too old." That can't be healthy, right?
Yeah, I mean, you lose -- I've got nothing against young people.
Me neither. But I think that's a little young to be worried about being old.
Oh, no! But I mean, like I said, look at pro gaming. When you're 21, you're over the hill for pro gaming. You know, it's an accumulation of factors, right? The way society works today, when you're in your teens and twenties, you might not be responsible for as much as somebody in their thirties and forties. You don't have debt. You might have a small apartment or no apartment. You might stay at home still. So many people stay home still. So, you can unselfishly do this thing which is not a great financial decision, right? You could say, "Hey, I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna write about games. I'm gonna throw myself in and I'm gonna be this person who just soaks up the industry and all this stuff." And you're just responsible for yourself and it's not a selfish thing to do, but when you have a relationship or a child, I think you have to fight harder to rationalize keeping at it. I don't think people understand how when you're a game journalist, you have to play a lot of games. More than normal gamers or at least keep up with the most hardcore gamers. It's hard to have a life and a career and take care of your kids and play, you know, a lot of games.
I did want to ask what you thought the average person who consumes games media doesn't understand about the work that goes into it. Something I've observed is the misconception that anyone with a byline is basically an editor.
Right.
Or is much more involved in the choices in what happened to their piece before it shows up online. What sort of things have you noticed over the years?
Yeah, I mean, there's just a general misunderstanding of what journalism is across the board in our culture, right? People think a real journalist is, like, you've got Deep Throat telling you about the next administration and you're covering all of the dirt and that's the only thing that is journalism. Everything else, writing about recipes for food or writing about a movie -- all that fluff stuff, that's not real journalism. And I don't believe that. I think there's this great spectrum of things that journalism is for. It's amazing for speaking truth to power and revealing corruption and all these things, but in a lot of cases, there's not a necessity for that and I don't think -- and I know a lot of people think otherwise -- that games and the games industry needs that much serious digging and investigation. It's pretty much all out there. Games take a long time to make. I don't think the subject matter or the fact that a game is coming out -- it’s an industrial secret. It's not something that the public needs to know.
I remember being at The Onion at going to my first E3 and a lot of people there asking what I thought about the term "games journalist."
Yeah.
Which is a very 10 years ago concern that was had. You mentioned Deep Throat and I always felt more comfortable at that time saying that I just write about games.
Yeah.
Like, it's not like all of a sudden you're going to meet a Deep Throat and find a secret piece of marketing.
Right.
There certainly are things, workforce stuff, to be digged at. But I do wonder, in tandem, the burnout rate, the low pay, the handful of places with staff positions, the audience being a factor, the lack of things you can do actual journalism about, what sort of things do you feel like you never see get examined or talked about?
That's a good question. I think the human element is almost always underplayed.
Yeah.
I think that's the largest thing. It's like, the major concern of everybody, including myself when I wrote about games, was the end product. The art, the creation that they were doing.
Yeah.
And I think we always give short shrift to the people who make games, to the people that play games. There's all these lives that intersect with games, and I think that's interesting. When I wrote features, I always tried to be really descriptive of who these people were, what their workplace was like, their mannerisms if I could. Again, that's not journalism either, but I want to paint a picture about this.
It's like features writing.
Yeah.
Just more details.
Yeah. What I wanted -- in 1999 and 2000, when I was writing for Robot Street Gang and doing the blog, still working at Hustler, what I wanted out of games writing was I wanted more writing about games like the writing in the magazines that I read, like, in the New Yorker and in Premiere and Film Threat. I wanted more games writing like that. Peter wrote it New York Times, but that was a column that was short-lived. Not many other people were writing about games like that. And so that was my main motivation to write about games. I was like, "I wanna try to do that."
Now, I think, you know, you've got Simon Parkin in New Yorker doing amazing work writing exactly what I thought games deserved. That's really what it was. I thought games were this rich medium. People that played games were this interesting group of people. The people who made them were fascinating. I thought that they deserved equal reflection in media. And I don't think I lived up to that all the time. I strove for it when I wrote. I think I nailed it 10 percent of the time, maybe. But I was trying and a lot of other people started to, too. And I think that there was just this kind of upswing of people that kind of felt the same way all coming into it and contributing. And it brought us to where we are now, where I feel like there's a lot of that. You just have to go out and find it. Just the fact that -- and again, Simon Parkin, his stuff being in the New Yorker every issue or so is just light years different than the way it was 15 years ago.
I think this is another thing the audience for games doesn't necessarily understand is -- I see so many people say, "Oh, well, the impetus is on writers to get those places to write about these things." But a lot of those places, they don't want to or to get that stuff to go ahead, they have to admit they haven't been paying attention for a long time.
Yeah.
People tend not to want to do that.
So, my writing -- when I first started writing about games and getting it in print in Hustler and other men's magazines, stuff like that, part of what I was doing was making this argument in everything I wrote that, "Hey, these things? These games intersect with all the other things that you do in your life, all the other kinds of books that you read and movies that you watch. There's intersections and I'm gonna explain to you why you should care about them."
And I feel like -- we did that at Paste the most. That was under Chris Dahlen and Jason Killingsworth. Both of them were the editors at Paste that I worked with. And because of the magazine Pastewas, kind of, like, a rock magazine sort of. Not hippie-dippie, but definitely into a certain kind of rock and a certain level of interest which might not intersect with the interest in games. A lot of what we were doing was trying to sell games to them, to those people, those literate people. Maybe that's a little self-conscious, us trying to explain to people why we like games. I think there's a little bit of that where you're maybe a little bit embarrassed of being an adult who's talking about games. But I found that exercise interesting and the exercise of trying to explain to people who don't "get" games why they should and why they're interesting, it forces you to look at whyyou like games and why you think they're interesting and examine that. Right? It becomes, like, this internal exploration as well.
One of the Achilles heel I've had is I find there's not a lot of places you can go to write about the things that I'm interested in taking and writing about.
Yeah.
Like, why is it we more often see conspiracy theories about Hideo Kojima in enthusiast publications but rarely do you see quality digging into structural systemic problems that are just as convoluted? Then you look at mainstream publications that do traditionally cover these kinds of things but they're also not interested. So I don't know if I'm griping to you or --
It's a very narrow subset of people who understand that this is a problem and care that this is a problem.
What's the problem?
Well, yeah.
[Laughs.] Because I know we've talked about this before, but how do you even label what that problem is?
I think overall it's a problem of wanting to think about games. I think that's a big one. I think that's a big part of it. And honestly, like, I get now why people don't want to think about games. [Laughs.]
Like, I frequently don't want to think about them. I just want to have them here when I need to vent and to move on with my life.
Right. Yeah.
But this is a problem that we have everywhere. Like, people don't really think about much. It's mostly they react to stuff. They get mad about the thing. They let you know that they're mad about the thing.
They tell you how to feel about the thing.
Yeah! Oh my God, I saw an article. It was, "How Should People Feel about this Thing?" It was in The New York Times and I was like, "Fuck me!"
[Laughs.]
They should feel how they feel. Like, we don't need an article about that!
What do you feel is getting in the way of games evolving? Or maybe you don't think they're stuck in any sort of creative or cultural way?
I'll talk about Firewatch, 'cause Firewatch came out and a bunch of my friends played it.
Yeah.
A friend of mine who doesn't interact with games media or look at websites a lot, we're talking about Firewatch and he goes, "I don't think that was a game." [Pause.] [Laughs.] And I was like, "I don't want to talk about this, at all. Good for you for discovering this thought." But that is one of the things that I think is in the way of games: There's a pretty rigid view of what they're supposed to do.
And that was what hurt comic books, too, and that's hurt comic books for a long time. There was this rigid conception that the job of a comic book was to tell the story of a guy in tights who could fly and punch people. But, we all know that comic books can tell the story of the Buddha, it can tell the story of being a Jew in Nazi Germany during World War II, it could do so many so many things. And that is true for games as well. Games can do so many so many things, and they do already, but not a lot of people know that.
What do you think videogames could learn from metal? We were talking about that before. Well, I brought it up and asked you to talk about it.
The thing with metal is that it got huge, like games did, and then it went away.
Yeah.
Games got huge and I don't think they're going away. I think they're gonna keep evolving to VR and all this stuff. It's just gonna be this ubiquitous thing.
Metal's going through these growing pains now as it's slowly getting more popular. It's going through the growing pains that games are with inclusivity and subject matter and all that stuff. Part of what I like about metal is that you can say some fucked up shit in metal and there's so few people listening to it and so few people judging it that it goes by the wayside and people just go, "Well, that guy's an idiot!" And then it's just done, right?
[Laughs.]
The bigger you get, the less you can do that and the more it becomes life or death for some people and rightfully so, because so many people are having such a hard time with their lives and fitting in or whatever. So, I don't know. I don't know if games can learn from metal so much. I think a medium might be an idiot trying to take anything from metal and model themselves after that way because metal is doing it wrong, obviously.
I feel like that was something people used to say, "Games are bigger than Hollywood."
Yeah.
I think it thinks they are, and it thinks it tries to copy them, but I don't really get the sense it really is.
They used to say that about porn, too. You know, every year somebody would say, "Oh, porn makes more money than the entertainment industry."
[Laughs.]
And the figures were fudged.
I think, you know, the way that they say games are bigger than Hollywood is because sometimes a game sells more than movies do, like Grand Theft Auto V definitely generated more money than most movies do. But also, they count hardware and all these other things that you buy.
Correct.
So it's not a fair comparison. Porn isn't bigger than Hollywood, either, even though Spanktravision generates tons of revenue, hotels are used to -- they're phasing that out.
I look at porn -- it's probably hard to make a living making porn on the internet now. I think of it as just another content provider who's had their whole earning potential be disrupted by the internet. They're the same as us.
I can't imagine what it's like. I know that it was a tough time when I was in porn in the '90s. It was already changing so much.
And the people who starred in pornography did not make a lot of money. I mean, it's pretty clear. Yeah, they're making a thousand bucks a scene sometimes. Which seems like a lot to a lot of people, but it's not when you consider what that scene is.
Right. That's a lot of articles about videogames.
It is a lot of articles about videogames. [Laughs.] Though, I wonder if they make a thousand bucks a scene anymore. I think they might not.
I think, just like every industry, we're seeing homegrown stuff. You know, a husband and a wife who can shoot a porn scene in their room and put it on the internet and make a little bit of money off it. It's just the same as people writing about games. It's like -- you're doing it at home, you got small expenses, and you can support yourself on it but you can't support a small business on it. Like, it gets harder and harder. If you were trying to start up a website, say, and pay people $50 an article, where are you gonna get that $50 from? Convince people to buy ads, I guess?
Or crowdfunding?
Crowdfunding, yeah. And that's what people are doing, really. But that's about all you can get, is that $50 per story, right? That's about all you can get people to pay for.
As long as we're gonna drag out the dusty old chestnuts of, "Are games art?" and "Games are bigger than Hollywood," I think people -- someone, I think it was Chuck Klosterman who was like, "Where is the Lester Bangs of videogames?"
I feel like what people don't really discuss -- I think they know there isn't money in the media anymore, but I don't think people really discuss the fact that no one really values it anymore? So, if we're talking about, like, where is the next Roger Ebert supposed to come from or whatever -- I don't think you can really get a job as a film critic anymore.
No. Even the guys that write for rogerebert.com are bloggers at home. Like, literally, the people who are taking over Roger Ebert's website are homegrown freelancers hustling it like all the rest of the writers on the internet. [Laughs.] You're not gonna go into an office anymore. Like, literally, when I went to work for Hustler, I walked in there and I had an office with a door. I had a desk. I had a Rolodex. And this was for writing pornography.
[Laughs.]
You used to freelance from work as well, right? Like, in your downtime?
Yeah. Yeah. My editor was super-cool. This guy, Alan MacDonell, great writer and great guy to work for. He taught me so much. But he was very open: He let us freelance as long as we got our work done. We did what they called internal freelance. We wrote the box covers for the pornos that they put out and wrote for other magazines. But I could also freelance from there, too, which made it a great gig.
I don't know if non-writers will understand that, but that's a way to have a balanced life and be maximizing your earning potential.
Yeah. I just see how the good jobs now -- you work for Kotaku, I know a lot of people that still work over there, and it's just a different environment. You're sharing the space with everybody, so everything you do is public. I guess that's how they keep you from freelancing and keep you from doing other stuff. You're basically working for them all the time, which you know, Kotaku pays well apparently. They negotiated a pretty fair salary. So that's one of the rare circumstances, I think, where everything works out. Well, they're still in New York. I don't know how you can afford living in New York and that salary.
No, I've seen those articles about New York where even married couples are taking in roommates.
Yeah. I mean, that happened to us. After the recession, I was freelancing, living off freelance budget. We got back to LA and I had freelanced in LA before and could make a living. When I got back, just that change of the recession and the way things had gotten more expensive, it just wasn't gonna work anymore.
Did you ever get the sense from people in games who complain about how insular it is that maybe they seem to enjoy it because it gives them