I have to write. Even when I’m not typing the words on a screen or putting them to paper I am writing articles in my fat head. Occasionally, one of them grows wild, daring, demanding to be set free lest it set my gray matter aflame.

Last summer came a deluge of articles covering the Rosalind Wiseman/Ashly Burch survey, a biased, poorly designed and implemented survey which ridiculously concluded that teenage boys do not want to see sexy women in video games. Dozens of articles pushed the ill-gotten conclusions of this abomination of a survey without so much as a sentence of critical analysis.

As a former researcher, this subject was right in my wheelhouse. A flame was lit, an article born and there would not even be an attempt at keeping it sequestered in my cavernous dome.

But who would host it? I had no doubt that sites like Time.com and The Mary Sue and Destructoid would not be interested in a piece that called out their own uncritical, shoddy articles. Because the subject dealt with gender politics in video games, the article was tangentially related to GamerGate, making it even more difficult to find a host.

The only choice available to me, as a local journalist who hadn’t published on a national level before, was GamePolitics.

There was no site out there like GamePolitics. They often hosted intelligent content from user submissions; content that was not the typical money-making press release regurgitation of the common press.

On July 23 of 2015, I sent a too-long pitch for my nearly finished article to James Fudge, managing editor of GamePolitics, The next day the article was edited and hosted.

A week later I decided I would try applying my research background to do what most journalists had until then refused to do: talk to GamerGate. Many people called them (and still do) a hate group. Joss Whedon likened them to the KKK. Others compared them to ISIS. And I was going to give them a collective voice.

It wasn’t easy.

“Ben. Don’t take this the wrong way,” James Fudge wrote to me in an email, “but I’m putting my editor hat on and it’s time for some tough talk.” My first draft was thrown out. On top of that he called me Ben and not Brad.

It took a lot of work for me to write that article, and it took a hell of a lot of work for both James Fudge and Andrew Eisen to edit it. In the end, it proved that a journalist could give voice to an anonymous, amorphous collective of people on the internet. It proved a lot of journalists wrong. James also remembered my name after that.

There is no place on the web other than GamePolitics that would have taken a chance on that article.

GamePolitics worked on and hosted that article, along with a couple other GamerGate-related pieces I wrote after that, despite James Fudge coming under attack by some of its supporters for his involvement with the GameJournoPros group.

It should also be mentioned that no money was involved. GamePolitics always served a niche within a niche market, and James Fudge, Andrew Eisen, and EZ Knight — the three guys who ran the site — weren’t raking in the dough. GamePolitics was a labor of love. That’s what made the site so great. That’s why it couldn’t last.

It is with my eternal gratitude that I bid farewell to one of gaming culture’s under-appreciated treasures. I would like to thank James Fudge in particular for his editing. He helped me release these wild, daring, freedom-seeking articles in my head and made them glow brighter.

Congratulations to the GamePolitics crew on running such an excellent site, and best of luck in the future!

(As an aside, to clear things up for some people: I am a freelance writer and GamePolitics shutting down does not really change things for me. I’m still working on my book and before it’s published I will likely create my own blogging website, where I host op-eds such as this while continuing to pursue writing for other sites.)