So Ben Kuchera of Penny Arcade Report just got hired on to do opinions for Polygon, and a good amount of people have bemoaned that he got picked up instead of [insert writer/critic here]. I understand this reaction! I disagree with him consistently (usually publicly on Twitter), and I’ve criticized plenty of the stuff that has shown up on PAR. I think there are plenty of other people Polygon could have picked up to do opinions (Ben does sure has a heck of a lot of them) that would have added more depth to their overall editorial roster.

Mattie Brice wrote a good bit on her blog about some of the backlash to Kuchera’s hiring. I think that she hits the nail on the head when it comes to her analysis of anger and the point at which anger detracts from our ability to have a useful conversation. When I read the part that talked about her career development, it reminded me about a lot of stuff I went through myself when I started getting into writing/editing full-time – so while this post might look like a response to Brice, it’s really more a letter to myself in 2008.

Before I get to the meat of things: Yes, games writing (as with most things in life) is rigged in favor of straight white men, and anyone who edits and/or makes hiring decisions in games writing ought to consider that when figuring out how to make their publication stand out in a market where differentiation is a) key to retaining a loyal readership and b) really really hard. This post isn’t meant to downplay that structural bias, nor is it meant to shift blame onto all the people who could have gotten the job instead for Not Working Hard Enough — it’s meant to make sure that you, as someone who is playing this imbalanced game, can still optimize your individual chances of winning while the rest of the world works on a balance patch.

Dear 2008 Patrick…

There is a disconnect between the games criticism sphere – which ranges from “anyone with a blog” like me to more organized outlets like Critical Distance – and full-time, professional games writing like Polygon. I have a whole bunch of thoughts that go into career development that will probably show up in a later post here, but here’s the short version that I think anyone trying to get paid for writing about video games should read:

If games criticism and games journalism were depicted on a Venn Diagram, the only intersection would be the part that says “writing about video games on the Internet” – and it’d be a very, very small part of the graph.

I started out doing freelance news/reviews as a kid, migrated over to freelance features for a few years during college, and then ended up getting a full-time job for a magazine writing about tech and games. When I went from freelance writing to getting a full-time job, I thought it’d be easy – after all, I had been writing about video games for 9 years at that point, so it should be no problem landing a job that requires 4-5 years of experience, right?

Nope. The only job I could get was a part-time internship with PCWorld Magazine that paid $10/hr – but it taught me a whole lot about how industrial-scale publishing works, and the main thing I took away from that is that when it comes to working in media roles, writing is the easy part.

Feeding the beast

Writing interesting, worth-reading pieces about video games is pretty easy, all things considered; you just have to Be Smart and Write Well, put your blog post in front of someone who can spread it around, and boom – you get all the e-props. It’s what I do on this tumblr for fun, after having worked as a full-time editor for five years now. Some people like to bake really delicious desserts in their free time; I like to write about video games. And to her credit, Brice is better at it than I am; her writing about video games is really insightful and it gets her invited to conferences and published in some really neat publications, and it builds her personal brand.

What I learned in my first week as an intern for a tech publication is that the actual process of writing was probably only 20%, at most, of the overall work. I wrote a whole bunch of stuff for PCWorld while I was there, but that was the rare day I looked forward to every week; the rest of my time was spent brainstorming, researching, finding ways for neat projects to fit our editorial calendar and coverage goals, making sure my freelancers were busy, getting buy-in from my colleagues, helping them out whenever possible, going to meetings, keeping up on what’s new and interesting in the world of tech, putting out fires, and a whole bunch of other stuff that wasn’t writing. All that stuff: That’s the job I was hired to do. Being able to write was nice, but it was by no means the most vital skill for any of us there.

What’s more, the times where I genuinely put what I thought was my best stuff together for PCWorld – thought-provoking, insightful, well-researched work – it invariably wasn’t rewarded by traffic or influence or anything. Not because it wasn’t worthwhile, but because that isn’t what people came to PCWorld for. And it’s not what most people come to mainstream tech/games pubs for in general. My job was to feed the beast – to give the readers who came back every day something new to read about consumer tech, because those eyeballs were what kept us paid. If freelancing for the Escapist was baking a really good batch of chocolate chip cookies in my home kitchen for a dinner party, working full-time for PCW was like landing a gig as a Keebler Elf.

Fact is, the bottom fell out of the market for writers a long time ago. Good writing is freely available, and the best writing – writing that only that particular person could write, due to their insight and experience – is often freely written by people who write about things in their spare time while doing another job to pay the bills. So we compensate people who do good writing with things that are free to give; we tell them they’re great, we share their work with our friends, maybe we ask them to write other free things for us. Lip service is freely given, and you can’t pay rent with it. When they say “We love your work” that just means that they’re glad you’re doing it, not that they think you can offer them any financial benefit to working for them.

Yes, good writing attracts the attention of smart people, and having smart people pay attention to you is useful indeed – but if those smart people are also mostly other writers, they’ll rarely be able to hook you up with more paid work that’s any better than what you’ve already got.

But being a great writer says nothing about your sense of responsibility, or your capacity to manage projects and juggle deadlines, or your capability to work with/inspire/lead a team, or any of the other cat-herding you have to do when working with an editorial team full-time. That is the work that major pubs are usually looking to pay for before writing talent.

If you can do that and write well-informed criticism that attracts an audience, well, you’ll beat me out for any job we both apply for. Your organization-wrangling experience will encourage people to give you more responsibility; more responsibility will open doors for you that put you into close contact with other talented, smart people responsible for important things; those open doors will give you more insight into how the industry works, which will give you even more material to write intelligent, informed criticism.

Hypothetically hiring Ben Kuchera

Hypothetically, if I were hiring Ben Kuchera for an editorial job writing opinion pieces, I think it would ultimately boil down to this:

Pros:

-Grew games coverage at Ars Technica and Penny-Arcade with a very small staff

Cons:

-Consistently made an ass of himself on Twitter and in some dumb opinion pieces, and got pretty defensive about it when confronted

Your initial reaction is probably to ask, “Patrick, why the heck would you consider hiring someone to write opinions when you’ve disagreed with pretty much every opinion the guy has ever published?”

In my experience, making changes to someone’s writing is much easier than teaching someone all the skills required to succeed in a modern editorial workflow. Changing someone’s writing is even easier when you have an office full of professional writers and editors to draw upon to offer feedback. And writers themselves will change according to the context: You can find my writing on PCWorld, Gamasutra, Shoryuken.com, Insert Credit, this blog, and a whole bunch of other places, and they’re all pretty different.

So, despite the fact that there is a large vocal contingent of people who have found Kuchera’s prior work offensive – myself included – I could easily see why that’s actually not a tremendous liability when it comes to making hiring decisions.

An embarrassing story about me

About a year and a half after starting at PCWorld, I got drunk at the company holiday party and told our CEO that if he could just give us a chance, we could be The Atlantic of tech journalism. (Pretty much everyone around me cringed; I kept going, because yolo amirite?)

What I meant was that our editorial staff was much smarter than the work we did, 95% of which I found boring and pedestrian and not really worth anyone’s time. (Most of my time was spent commissioning SEO-friendly how-to articles at $35 a pop, so.) PCWorld was basically only relevant to people over 50 (some of whom didn’t actually own computers); I thought for sure that the key to our success would be to write Smarter Stuff That Proved We Knew A Lot About Technology.

If there’s anything I’ve learned since then, it’s that you’re always smarter than the publication you work for (your boss can’t handle the truth!) – it’s just that the hard part about working in the tech/games press isn’t writing smart things, it’s getting people to pay for them, either with dollars or eyeballs. “The Atlantic of tech journalism” isn’t just “write really well-informed, insightful, useful analysis”, it’s “write all of that stuff and build a functioning business model around it so that we can grow a valuable brand and pay our smart writers enough to stick around in an age where writing is basically free”.

Hell, I’ve had the rare experience of running a publication where I practically didn’t have to answer to anyone, and I still found myself including work I thought was trite or uninteresting because I knew that it still served readers something they wanted – even though it wasn’t something I wanted them to want.

The alternative

If there is a light at the end of this tunnel, it’s that games critics – including Brice – are connecting directly to their audience for funding via Kickstarter, Patreon, IndieGoGo, etc. Which is great! If you’re unwilling to play ball with industrial content production (like I was, pre-PCWorld), start out at the bottom, and learn how to wrangle an editorial team and so on, then hitting up your most appreciative readers for change is a great idea. I’m convinced that big winners in this next generation of internet content publishing are going to be the ones who figured out how to build an audience that will pay for them directly. After all, each time someone reads your stuff on Polygon, they’re probably only worth a fraction of a cent (depending on CPM rates, I guess); if someone pays you 25 cents a month to read your stuff, that’s probably actually more than they would have paid you via advertising!

And it’s not just crowdfunding, either: People are starting to pay money for eBooks; pay-what-you-want and bundles make it easier to get people to pay for niche work they want to support; subscriptions and members-only publishing make it easier to sell someone once on a relationship that consistently funds your work. Some folks are even using their writing as the entry point to sell people on their game dev consulting services, which I think could be promising.

Instead of working in the Keebler mines of games journalism, you’re starting your own games journalism small business, or producing for a games journalism CSA, or finding games journalism patrons, or whatever. You have the tools available to carve out an economic niche that doesn’t rely on major media companies, or the whims of the public. You never have to feed The Beast, just yourself. And you’d never have to compromise a single word you write if you could afford that.

The tradeoff is that you have to spend time hustling – marketing, outreach, maintenance, small business accounting, etc. – all time that isn’t spent writing. And you have to pay for health insurance, which blows. But if you want to write about games for a living and can’t do it in academia or industry, there’s more space to do it independently and get paid than there has been in a long time.

–patrick miller