"Game journalism": a case study

Or: where have I been?

I recently dreamed that I was explaining to some professional inspirations (I’ll spare myself the mortification of naming them) why I haven’t Done Much lately. Conveniently, I’d already done a thorough postmortem on my career for my therapist, and I thought it might be cathartic to purge it here.

For the unlikely reader who has stumbled across this without prior personal interest, a quick summary of who I used to be: a freelance game journalist for print (the Guardian), radio (the BBC), and television (The Gadget Show), co-author of Ten Things Video Games Can Teach Us, etc.

I’m well aware that my resumé sounds impressive to the people I meet in the real world who ask me what I do—including those with unrelated jobs to offer who wonder aloud why I’d bother to apply—but it’s telling that I’ve shifted to what I did. I mean, I did get to write one review for the Guardian a couple of months ago while they were understaffed. And I am working on a documentary for the BBC, a mere five years since my last. But a handful of projects like that do not provide a living wage – or satisfy a hungry brain!

It’s hard to know who to blame for my apparent belief that past performance should have predicted future results: school? Boomers? Video games like The Sims with their skill trees and career ladders? Realistically, I should have always been able to read the writing on the wall: even when I first started writing about video games, those who’d come before were already laughingly recommending against it.

Back then, I let positive discrimination pave the way into a column at the Observer when they wanted a woman to pair up with the man they already had, and in those pre-sale days that helped me sidestep into freelancing for the Guardian. But the stabler paths my peers had followed were closed to me. A person from my background could not afford to relocate halfway across the country for a job offering a maximum salary of £13,500. A more prestigious magazine that many credited for crucial editorial experience blacklisted me for highlighting its lack of gender representation. A channel that nurtured many of the presenters you know and love judged—I’m told—that I lacked the requisite sex appeal.

Of course, when I did eventually make it onto television screens I received plenty of unsolicited attention that suggested I’d managed to appeal to some, but that was restitution I could have done without. I remember the bemusement of one white-haired male co-host when I mentioned my shelf life, to which I gently pointed out that while the other female presenter and I were in our twenties, the men could be our parents.

In the end, restructuring got me before age could. Those years around 2020 have a lot to answer for, but for me the turmoil highlighted a pre-existing professional fragility I should have acknowledged. After all, what was I to do when Channel 5 reformatted The Gadget Show—find another television show in need of a video game pundit? When the Guardian scrapped our tech podcast, and the games editor stepped down to write bestselling novels and become for his replacement what I had tried to be for him (but with a legitimacy I was never afforded), was I to hop over to the UK’s other left-leaning newspaper with the foresight to take video games and digital culture seriously?

You can tell from the salty quotes I gave in response just how I felt about being named a “rising star” of the UK games industry back in 2018, a “future talent” in a cohort of 100 mostly women and gender minorities. Having just published my first book and started presenting on national television and a newspaper’s podcast, where was I to rise?

For a brief moment back when strangers would stop me on the street or shout “you’re on the television!”, I thought I might try to become famous—“'cause none of us got enough love in our childhoods”, as they say. I spoke to some agents, who asked if I would do sponcon, or said they couldn’t help me do more than I already was, or told me to tweet more. I went to the cinema and saw that celebrities still have to do car adverts, watched colleagues take a selfie a day and be “thrilled to announce” and sell NFTs, and decided it wasn’t for me.

I’m in the incredibly fortunate position of no longer depending on game journalism to cover my outgoings. Those who know me in real life know I’ve been dealing with some Personal Stuff in the last few years (and the ambiguity with which I discuss my private life should demonstrate why I was never going to pivot to baring my soul as a content creator), but I do believe it’s correlation rather than the cause of my absence. There is still interesting (and maybe even, on some level, important?) work I have the drive and capacity to do – but no one really wants to pay me for it.

As I write, friends and strangers on Bluesky are discussing the need for—to quote the Financial Times’ Stephen Bush—“writing about games that is written for an audience of people who don’t play them, but need to understand them”. My old bread and butter, in other words. But the kitchen is closed, only willing or able to feed a few. I’ve been having the same conversations with the same organisations for a decade, but no matter how many producers and commissioners tell me they really must cover more video games alongside all those books and films and opera, the output remains but a trickle.

Mentor types with salaried positions have suggested I start my own thing: a podcast, a YouTube channel, a newsletter. I ask you: with what audience? As specialist publications close or are sold to questionable buyers–and, as ex-Polygon’s Nicole Carpenter told the ex-Waypoint Vice team on the listener-supported podcast Remap Radio, “I don’t even know if there are full-time jobs available”—the best critics these days are crowdfunded. But I have no crowd. I never really was “Jordan from the Guardian”, and those newspaper readers and Channel 5 viewers were hardly going to follow me to another format anyway.

I briefly worked with a startup that wanted to create a new Giant Bomb, and quickly learned that with all the will (and even cash) in the world you can’t just conjure that sort of magic from nowhere. You need the dedicated fanbase of a specialist publication to rally behind you, and even they have their limits; I was recently looking up some work from ex-Giant Bomb’s Abby Russell when I came across a Reddit post announcing her Patreon, dominated by comments from users lamenting the cost of supporting every content creator who finds themselves out of a job.

It looks like Russell now works in marketing, but I doubt my ability to work a 9-to-5. I lack the qualifications, or maybe just the mental and physical capacity. I’ve determined multiple times to give up on game journalism, especially as the video games industry itself is beset by layoffs and harassment and an ill-advised affair with generative AI. But I do agree with Stephen Bush that it’s important to understand their role in modern culture. And there are still plenty of fascinating games that I want to show the world. I nurture passion projects that have spent years in limbo, and genuinely enjoy the few bits of work that do see the light of day.

Perhaps this long whine will impact my employability, but I seem to be pretty unemployable already. Critical voice with more to offer the cultural conversation around video games? Or entitled has-been who should just get a different job? Let me know!!