Trigger Warning: SUICIDE, RAPE. I talk about a personal experience I have with suicide and link to a video where popular Youtube personality PewDiePie yells rape over some videogames.

Last November, a long time ago, I wrote the first part in this series, and said I’d put up Part Two a few days after. I never did, getting caught up in other things, like being the Chief Marketing Officer of a starving international solar startup. It only got a handful of views, and I sort of lost interest in putting in the time and effort if nobody was really going to bother in taking a critical look at how the games writing racket has changed and shifted over the years, yet remained very strongly white dude dominated.

It’s a sort of brilliant piece of unintentional performance art, in retrospect; abandoning a series of games criticism because there was no money to be had in it to justify the labor, so it was abandoned. I think there was something to be said, a point to be made, but alas, if nobody cares, let it be washed away - the games criticism world has a funny way of dealing with the history of the medium and itself, I guess you could say.

One could even make a point about how narrative heavy “non-games” such as Gone Home with little to no mechanical depth become massively popular over intensive, demanding experiences such as Armed Assault 3 or Dominions 4 due to the low barrier of entry, minimal time investments, and how easier it is to write about them - “I walked to the content, I experienced the content, here is how the content made me feel” - is far easier to write about than a critical understanding of the ambition of Armed Assault and what it does for narrative, from not only the perspective of a writer’s skill, but also optimizing workflow/income to keep the bills paid and what not. Can’t say I blame ‘em.



I will admit, when I was fresh from a corporate sponsorship workshop in London and feeling courageous, I had a bit of a pipe dream going forward as the Chief Marketing Officer of that solar firm - get to Ghana. Lock down partnerships with the Atomic Energy Commission and the Ministry of Transit. Middleman some purchasing deals for solar panels and electric vehicles, lock down some corporate sponsorships for a children’s park and the Cash Cab show. Big shot international marketing exec cashes on some big green energy contracts, takes the profits back to Manhattan and starts a games journalism junket. Mainly video, even ratio of men and women, whiteness kept to a minimum in favor of alternative perspectives. I wanted to cash in and cash out and build the Giant Bomb/Polygon a lot of us wanted to see in the world.



There were some red flags going in. I ignored them. It was the right thing to do, even if our approach wasn’t 100% solid. I was out of options, careerwise, wasting away in the desert in exile, partially to get my head back together after some traumatic medical complications an abusive ex bullied me out of getting treatment for when I had the resources to do so, which led to a moment of weakness, sitting on a lawn in the middle of Milliani, Hawaii, staring at my wrists, wondering if I should rip the veins out of them with my teeth, so that I wouldn’t have to feel the infected nerves inside my skull screaming out in pain as they slowly but surely died. I was literally too terrified of thousands of dollars of debt to drag myself to an emergency room, wasting a day wandering around to clinics begging for a handout. Partially waiting for the call from one last gamble, the final card I had to play in my career.



I stuck it out. Got called up. Spent some time in Atlanta. Had the best blind date of all time with a comics artist who also used to participate in underground fight clubs. The only time in my life where I was so immediately reduced to nothing more than “oh my god you’re so cool” over and over, having completely lost my composure in awe - my suave womanizing armor stripped from me for the first time in years. Returned to NYC for all of 45 minutes to get onto another plane to Ghana. This was really happening.

I spent several months just north of Accra, Ghana in a town called Adenta. Ghana is an interesting place - while I am not going to dare claim myself an expert on anything related to the region, and I am more than happy to be corrected, from my limited perspective it was an interesting concentration of wealth in a very small area, with very steep dropoffs. A great deal of Chinese investment and construction, more than anything else stood out to me.



Ghana has one electric company: ECG. Ghanaians say it’s short for “Easy Come’n’Go,” for how unreliable it is. Kind of hard to do graphic design work when you don’t have a reliable source of electricity. I made it work. Built a great number of branding, mockups, and project proposals. It wasn’t easy, but I did the best I could, becoming a borderline alcoholic binge drinker and chronic smoker in the process. I think my record was 12 ciggarettes in one sitting during a multi-day blackout.



But the pipe dreams were never feasible: the talent wasn’t there in the company, we didn’t have anything tangible to offer and the leadership (much to my protest, mind you) didn’t realize that might actually be necessary to get anything done. This bull in a china shop optimism chasing after the success of Google and the rest of Silicon Valley that I heard time and time again was getting nowhere, and as my visa ran out, my heart sunk. This was going nowhere. The dream was dead.



On the plus side, I got to buy my first suits, and my graphic design portfolio looks ah-mazing, however. I’ve never felt more confident in my abilities to make pretty pictures on the computer for a living!



There’s a solar facility at the University of Ghana, the Naguchi facility. A Japanese organization some time ago dropped some panels as part of a grant. They work for two hours and stop for an hour. The Japanese didn’t include maintenance fees as a part of the grant to the University. They’re essentially useless; a show of how generous the Japanese organization is. Some great PR, a tribute in architecture to some historical figure.



Eurogamer’s Editor in Chief, Tom Bramwell, recently put out a piece admitting his own sexism, and the culture of games that is overwhelmingly infected by it. Tom declares his own sexism, which is, frankly, a pointless, masturbatory gesture. A lot of men (and some women) gave him praise for it, and I’m sure he means to do well by it. However what’s telling is the admitting of hiring his editorial team of almost entirely white men, and ending with two whole paragraphs of essentially “me, me, me” with no mention or due credit given to women.



It’s that classic scene in Point Break all over again, with Keeanu pointlessly shooting his gun off into the sky, too chickenshit to shoot Patrick Swayze.



All that’s there to see in Bramwell’s piece is wasted potential and attention to give that space for a woman to write about games. That would have actually helped fight sexism, as the editor in chief of a popular online publication, yet it’s far easier to preform a meaningless, masturbatory gesture, rake in the praise, and move on as if everything was fine and dandy now that Tom’s confessed his sexism.



This world is full of a seemingly infinite stream of masturbatory profiteering, if my running around the world as an international businessman has anything to say on the matter. These sorts of gestures are easy, you can look great doing so, and you can continue profiteering off of injustice for a long time following.



Magazines were easy enough to justify back in the day - getting subscriptions, selling ad space, getting placed in grocery stores, and so on - yet now we’re in an almost entirely web dominated economy of time and viral potential. Buzzfeed’s throne with their lists and Koch money are testament to this. There’s even an animal themed knockoff called The Dodo, which is gaining rapid momentum and popularity as if you really needed a one-stop shop for pictures and facts about cute animals.



Selling ad space has been the key to keeping a website alive nowadays. Of course, it’s hard to do so as a games journalism racket, with conflicts of interest from your usual AAA games publishers killing off reader bases, and well, what do gamers even buy anyways? Cars? Cleaning accessories? Sex toys?



Of course, why read when I can watch? It’s called “video” games for a reason, right? Don’t we live in an era of high speed internet where the best in television is pirated more than it’s actually watched on broadcast?



Video has, for better or for worse, become the center of the games journalism. From Polygon to Giant Bomb to Kotaku, there isn’t really a lot of room for written games journalism anymore, much less substantial games criticism.



Those limited slots have been filled by a vast majority of the same sort of person - the straight white dude, which, as one, well, we have a pretty limited perspective on the world. Which is probably not the best, well, perspective to oversaturate coverage of the most exciting artistic medium of this generation with. Or anything else, like, ever. But hey, I’m just a straight white dude, what do I know?



It’s just, shameful, that paid games writing is more than willing to make room for shitstains like Ben Kuchera and his love for comparing videogame controllers to mammary glands, and, well, how many crowdfunding Patreons for minority writers are going around nowadays?



Our industry, that is, the industry of writing about videogames, whether it be in news or a more critical standpoint, is sick. Rotten, even. A state of flailing about trying to figure out how to adapt into a new, sustainable model, or fizzling out and losing the will to continue writing with no personal gain.



The Internet has become a depressing, life draining vacuum of apathy, as far as writing about games is concerned. Let us compare two stories from the month of June, 2014. This month, this year. Compare this:



“…has made his name—and a [multi-million dollar] fortune—posting videos of himself playing video games. In one November video, for instance, he plays the Xbox Indie game ‘Techno Kitten Adventure,’ helping a feline avatar navigate dangerous terrain filled with unicorns and narwhals, and shrieking in frustration each time his cat crashes into an obstacle.

‘What am I supposed to do?’ he wails shortly before his grey kitten with a jetpack dies. ‘It doesn’t get more hardcore than this.’”

Versus the likes of this:

“I started running out of money after GDC. I couldn’t find a job. Freelancing was too hard for me to hack. Working from home is just terrible, especially for someone with depression and anxiety like me. I worked for Paste part-time (still do) and, back then, I did different contract jobs part-time in addition to that. Every day felt overwhelming, almost impossible. I was working so much, and making so, so little. If only I could just work for Paste full-time, I thought. But I couldn’t. If only I could just focus on one thing and get really good at it. But that’s not in the cards. I had to juggle everything, somehow.”

Shrieking rape over videogames is someway, somehow more profitable and sustainable than writing critical, necessary, stimulating, and important words about one of the most exciting artistic mediums of our generation. How much more dystopian can you even get? How proud can we honestly be, as journalists, as critics, as people who enjoy games as an artistic medium, to exist in a space where this is the reality?



I can’t say I have the solutions to these problems - I’m working set design in the fashion industry for the summer, after that I have no idea honestly. Is crowdfunding really that sustainable? Who knows. I hope it works out, but a lot of people have fears of the bottom falling out under it. I can’t say I have an educated enough perspective to judge one way or another.



I’ve tossed around the ideal of assembling my years of critical games writing into an ebook, full of illustration by me, editorial notes, and so on, then selling that to maybe justify the time I’ve dumped into this endeavor over the years. What more is there for me to say? Shit is fucked, there’s marginalized voices that need to be boosted and supported, and games like ARMA3, Crusader Kings 2 and hell, even MDickie’s Wrestling Revolution are valuable and important. Just imagine a little buzzing voice going “shooters & sims are cool and you should engage with them beyond a surface, corporatized level” buzzing in and out of your peripheral vision at random intervals. That’s all I’ve ever really wanted to say and cover, honestly.



Austin Walker is the underdog hero of cyberpunk. He has consoled me when I have needed it the most, he has been selfless in selfish times, to quote Paul Heyman. I trust his perspective more than my own. Anything he says about games is certainly worth listening to.



Soha is, well, writes about the issues in a way far better than I ever could. I unfollowed her once on Twitter because I couldn’t handle all the cat tweets. Sorry. That same ex from earlier bullied me out of liking cats, so it’s more jealously than anything else. We’re still internet friends, and she’s still the best.



There’s many more, but those are the two I believe in the strongest.



What are we even doing anymore with this videogame nonsense. I dunno. I just can’t look at the headlines of the past month - the past year, even, and think that the respective, overlapping spheres of games criticism and journalism are at all in feasible, sustainable places. Being a full-time games writer is a nigh-impossible goal reserved for a select few. Video has overpowered and stolen away the attention spans of solid, sustainable games writing outside of a niche circle, and doing video well requires such an overwhelming amount of resources not many of us have - I’ve been gaming on an old-ass Macbook Pro for the better part of 3 years, with occasional access to consoles or a decent gaming PC here and there.



I sincerely hope this shitshow gets better. I just don’t have the resources, nor the skill to honestly contribute anymore, as little as I have over the years.



It’s been weird.