Solidarity Forever
This is a feature story from Unwinnable Monthly #187. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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It feels like every day there’s fewer and fewer people able to find meaningful work writing about videogames. At a time when it’s never been easier to host a blog or create a newsletter or whip up a few videos, it feels like the number of healthy, critical hubs is ever-dwindling. Well, it doesn’t feel that way. That number is dwindling.
This is a time when more and more lights are going out amongst people who genuinely care about communicating the joys and pitfalls of games. This is a world inhabited by survivors. Survivors who can play the macro-game well enough and, as mentioned in Autumn Wright’s piece, be lucky enough. But we are a sick and dying industry being slowly killed off by corporate interests. We’re being choked out. Less opportunity, more of us fighting for an audience increasingly under economic pressure by avaricious and capricious governments and corporations.
To paraphrase Stu, the only way out of this is to untangle the critical interest from the corporate one. That is to say, the things that are good for critics and the things that we provide are largely unprofitable for corporations or profitable in a way they cannot capture and pass on to others. It’s a game, a rigged one. Rigged against the people who most want to play it and in the favor of people who treat them as an extractable resource.
You don’t have to be particularly old to have seen the media landscape contracting exponentially. The print budgets dried up. Consolidation took a reasonably excitable enthusiast market and contracted it. Then we pivoted to video all because one weirdo lied about how much engagement it would generate. And yet, if you’re reading this, you still believe that there’s a good, necessary point to all of this. But the deck seems stacked against us.
I don’t think this is a real conspiracy. Well, except in the way that capitalism is broadly an extractive conspiracy that hurts anyone standing in the way of profit maximization. What I think is that we’re at an inflection point. We’re going to need a new kind of solidarity. One that stands for more than platitudes and posts. One that understands that meaningful change comes with peril.
These contractions are shortening our memories and turning us against each other. I don’t want to entertain the argument that one should take a job because if they do not someone worse will. Taking that job makes you the worst person willing to do it. I want us to entertain the peril of not taking the job, of not appeasing the corporate overlords by doing exactly what they hope our better devils will have us choose.
Each of us has to stay in this long enough to build the future for the writers and producers who will come after us. I am not in this for myself, I’m in it for a writer I’ve not yet met who has a story to tell that I cannot imagine. The longer we focalize this industry in terms of our personal survival the longer we’ll keep fighting over the last table scraps.
We have to build the future together, sustainably, perilously.
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David Shimomura is the editor in chief of Unwinnable. Follow him on Instagram and Bluesky.
