A Dialogue with Austin Walker
This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #195. 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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Wide but shallow.
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Austin Walker is a writer, game developer, and a prolific podcast host. In addition to his actual play podcast Friends at the Table, Star Wars podcast A More Civilized Age, and genre fiction podcast Shelved By Genre, Austin launched the videogames podcast Side Story in 2025. I wanted to talk to Austin now because it’s been hard for me to break this column’s impromptu hiatus and I thought we could both talk about our not writing. Though he has published little written criticism since leaving his position as editor-in-chief of Vice’s gaming vertical, Waypoint, in 2021, Austin’s work has endured. Waypoint is often mentioned as an inspiration for the work of younger critics today, including among previous subjects. I’ll name myself among them. Austin and I talk about what it’s been like to return in part to games criticism and why his work takes the form it currently does.
So, you recorded podcasts about videogames for many years.
Yes.
And then, you famously stopped.
I did famously stop.
Why did you make a videogames podcast in 2025?
A really specific reason, which is last year I started jurying the IGF. I’m on the narrative award. I vote for that, along with some other great people. And it turned out I really missed talking about video games and it really underscored that for me.
It also made me start playing stuff I’d stopped playing. Historically, I played as much as I could, but I was a broke freelancer in college and in grad school and when I was doing freelance writing. And so even back then, a thing that would get me to play a game would be, Can I write about this somewhere? Can I convince Garrett at Paste, now A.V. Club Games (RIP Endless Mode), to pay me 50 bucks if I play this thing? Or, eventually, Can I get Kevin VanOrd at GameSpot to pay me 200 bucks or whatever to review something, even if it’s something that’s way out of my wheelhouse. I’ll go play Project Cars for you and have some thoughts. I’ll put this in conversation with The Crew. Sure, absolutely. And then I started doing The Giant Beastcast and then Waypoint Radio. It was like, What’s out? What can I touch this week? What can I have an interesting conversation about?
And then, when I started doing game dev and I didn’t have that outlet anymore, I found myself regressing – maybe regressing is too strong a word, but regressing in the regression to the mean, not regression as in I’m becoming a lesser person – but moving towards junk food games, stuff where my brain is off because I’ve been working for twelve hours today and now I want to go to all of the points on the open world map, and really leaning into This is to my taste, This is to my predilections. And I stopped playing stuff that I knew I would like if I was playing it so I could go talk about it. I was also playing stuff that was not very mindful in a way that was not very mindful. I was probably still thinking, but in a much different way than the way a conversation or review or an essay structure play for me in a way that’s actually more enjoyable.
And it was a combination of things that made me stop to begin with. I didn’t have the time. I was burnt out from being deeply in the public eye. I think my later days on Waypoint were really caught up with doing my best for an audience that deserved a great deal and falling short. Sometimes in ways that were completely on me and sometimes were about not being engaged with in good faith. And there was a point I was just exhausted. I was just exhausted and burnt out. And I had a huge – and I’m still going through it to some degree – a huge crisis of confidence. I found myself in the later Waypoint days being like, “Am I having genuine reactions to things?” “Where is my taste?” “I need to go rest and find a way to be confident about my own takes again,” instead of knowing what a good take sounds like and trying to arrive there. Which is really troubling as a critic. And I don’t mean good taste/bad taste. I mean you can’t tell what it tastes like on your tongue anymore, you just know what the ingredients are and you know how to talk about the ingredients. And you can make a convincing, clear argument about what’s happening. You can describe something that is happening. And it’s not wrong, but it isn’t driven by the thing that I think marked my criticism in the mid-2010s, which was, first step, How does it hit your tongue? What is it doing to me? How am I engaged in that way? I’d lost a lot of that. So I took that break.
And then, it was late 2024 when we decided to do Side Story, I was like, “Oh, I really miss the me that doing this makes me.” If a system is what it does, then a person is what they do to some degree. And I wanted to be that person again. I missed being that person. Not the person in an entertainment capacity, Side Story doesn’t have a Discord, we don’t have forums, but what I do miss is writing notes about games as I play them and then talking through those notes with friends and asking them questions about their play experiences and coming up with something in the middle.
So why not return to writing? Why do this as a podcast?
I would love to return to it as writing. The dream with Side Story was to also do that; I have not had the time to do it. I’ve spent a lot of time this year struggling to get Realis work done, and recently I finished up the let’s play for A More Civilized Age that we were playing through KOTOR II to talk about it, and to help people who did not have time to play through a big RPG right now, I did an edited Let’s Play of it. And that was taking like a dozen plus hours per episode. Especially for the longer episodes that were eight or ten hours. That was probably a 20 or 30 hour edit. And it turned out a week after I finished that let’s play, the Realis faucet turned back on. And even though I had the time to sit at my computer to try to hammer out Realis, it wasn’t coming. So my hope is once I get past Realis, I’ll have some of that energy again. That’s a big part of it. And then I think the other part of it really is my life has shifted. Again, I said a system is what it does. I’m very process focused and process oriented and I think what I need to do to write is less available to me now because of where I am in my life. I can’t be up until 5 a.m. writing in the wee hours of the night; I’m supposed to be in bed with my partner. How I write requires a certain structure around my life that is harder to achieve with all the other commitments I have right now.
What is that structure?
I need longer periods of time to sit with a game. If I’m writing, I’m playing really slow and I’m taking lots of notes. I am normally also doing some secondary research. So when I wrote that Far Cry 5 review, I did a bunch of reading on everything from “cults” and new religious movements to sovereignty movements. And then the actual writing is like I’m going in the box. It’s like I’m just disappearing for six hours. Often I’m doing that sort of writing in cafes, or I’m starting that sort of writing in cafes. I’m doing outlining, I’m doing research, I’m gathering quotes, I’m writing sections. But then when it has to happen, I put my brain off and I go into the box for five hours from 11 p.m. till 4 a.m., which is hard time to get when, one, you’re exhausted if you’ve been doing other work all day. Also I’m 40 now. 10 years ago, it was a lot easier for me. I think that’s a big difference. And I don’t have a daily blogging habit the way I did, so getting the engine on is a little slower than it was once. There was a time when, because I was writing so often, the spinning up was a lot easier. And also it’s not salaried to work. If my day job was to do this again, I would find it and I would structure my days such that I could get in the box at 12 p.m. instead of 12 a.m. and that would be the expectation. But I’ve always been a night owl and that is when I am most locked in, when the world gets quiet. Missing that has made it hard.
And I have to get to the point where I have an interesting enough thing to say. I’m not always confident that I have it right now, until I talk it out a little bit. And even then, I don’t always feel like I’m the best person to make a certain argument or that I’m adding to anything right now. Which is mental health stuff more than it’s state of games blogging or games criticism stuff.
What are the differences that you notice in the critical work you get out of a podcast versus writing?
I find that it’s less honed. Writing requires me to stake a claim. It’s thesis driven, whereas podcasts are topic driven, generally speaking. The roundtable discussion of discursive podcasts are topic driven, they’re not necessarily thesis driven. Someone might show up with a thesis and that might be a subtopic inside of a topic. I’m editing an episode of Side Story where we talk about, No, I’m Not a Human, the horror game about an alien invasion/raw paranoia. And in that, we get to talk about one of the most interesting tensions in that game, which is this is a game that is aesthetically, extremely grotesque and misanthropic. Everything in it is ugly and off-putting and unsympathetic and it feels like a deeply unempathetic game. But procedurally, mechanically, it’s a game that’s really about the solution, that the only way forward is community, is keeping people close to you. And what is really interesting is you have to keep people close to you, but people who are close to you can hurt you. That’s the mechanical thesis of that game and we talk about that. A piece for me would be about that.
Now, I know that that’s not how everybody writes, but it is it is the way I write. It is the way I’ve always written as an adult critic. I don’t need to do all of the work to line all that up in my mind before we start talking about something. I can feel it out along the way or come in with notes and not necessarily have the argument perfected. So I think that’s a big difference for the two things for me.
Also, I’m not very funny in writing. I’m more funny in fiction or on Friends at the Table intros or something. I can be funny there. But my critical writing is rarely funny. Depending on who I’m podcasting with and what they’re up for, it’s easier to follow a comedic trail for me and that scratches a different itch.
And also, we’re talking about my writing, but a thing we’ve not talked about is my editing. I can’t really be a freelance editor. And one of the things I like most in the world is helping someone else shape their feeling or idea about something. And that, I can do on a podcast. I can ask Cameron Kunzelman on Shelved By Genre to go deeper into a position that he has. I can ask Ali Acampora on A More Civilized Age to talk about her experience of interacting with the Mandalorians after years of writing about the Mandalorians and seeing what’s going on here. It’s a much less intimate form of collaboration in terms of helping someone find their ideas, and it’s a much more hands-off version of it, but it does it does scratch a very important itch for me in the critical world.
I miss being an editor big time. I loved editing. As much as I was known as a writer, and I think I had some bangers, but I think I was probably just as, if not more, talented as an editor. I’m sure there are some writers who disagree with that, who came through Waypoint and who thought that I was too critical or too, that I wanted to push things in different directions or made it too demanding, but I know for a fact there were a lot of writers who loved working with me and who I loved working with. In both cases, part of what drives me there is they will get somewhere I will never get. I don’t want to turn a writer into me. I want the writer to make the best version of their own argument and write the best version of their piece. And I want my co-host to say the best version of what they’re saying or to dig a little deeper and make sure the audience understands where they’re going and get to the place that they want to fucking get to. Not me, because I’m not going to get there. They have experiences and a voice that I don’t. And so podcasts allow that for me also.
It is a very formal reason for why I like it. It is emotional, but it’s like, What does the process, what does the product allow for? And blogging by myself doesn’t allow for that. Maybe if I was engaged in a critical blogging community, like in the mid-2010s, where there was a real discursive rhythm to everything, it would draw me back in. It’s not like there isn’t writing happening still, there’s lots of critical writing about games still happening, but I’m not involved in those spaces in the way where like I used to write something and Stephen Beirne would write back and be like, “You’re wrong about this.” And then I’d write back again, and then we would develop a critical camaraderie/rivalry over years that would be really, really rewarding. And I don’t have that right now inside of any sort of writing space.
That’s something I’ve seen people talk about with some nostalgia recently. There was a really good example, Grace Benfell wrote something about Silksong and the state of criticism.
I literally looked at that piece before we got on this call because I was thinking about pieces that we could talk about that were recent, and that was one of the pieces that jumped to mind.
No Escape, Kaile Hultner’s blog, responded to it. And then Grace responded back to that. And I was just on the sideline cheering.
Yeah. Yeah, this is the shit. This is why we do this. Yeah, 100%.
But we don’t have a rhythm of that or expectations of that. It reminds me of the ways that a lot of my friends in our 20s are trying to figure out how to hang out with each other without Instagram. We’re trying to reinvent this thing that used to exist.
Yeah, and it wasn’t a big deal that it existed before, but it is. I have to catch myself sometimes thinking about games criticism, not to fall into the trap of people who got under my skin in the late 2000s mid-2010s who talked about how the adventure game had died, where I was like, “No, it didn’t. Sierra is gone and LucasArts doesn’t exist anymore, but the adventure game is still being made by people you don’t care about.” Once Telltale was making stuff again, people were like, “Oh, the adventure game is back!” And I’m like, “Deponia came out last year.” The adventure game was not the AAA tech showcase, “Wow, look at these animations.” It wasn’t coming from well-known public publishers. But it never really, actually vanished. Certainly not with the broad blends of history, where there was four years there wasn’t a showcase adventure game. That’s no amount of time in the history of any art form for there to be a dip in one particular sort of expression. It’s like saying the horror movie went away after the 80s and there are other things happening in the 90s for a few years and then the horror movie was again center stage. These things ebb and flow.
And I say all that as set up to say – I want to be careful not to say, Well, after Waypoint, criticism died. That’s not fucking true.
Now in my view, the way I would tell this story is that in the mid-2000s through late 2000s, the blogosphere blew up. The “brainysphere” existed, and you got some people inside of big name publications like N’Gai Croal at Newsweek or Stephen Totilo and Patrick Klepek at MTV, writing about games in ways that people were not familiar with to broader audiences, and that that brainysphere and blogosphere was self-perpetuating in a way that created new critics for years. What happened in the mid-2010s is that some of those people, including me, got jobs that we did not have access to previously. Part of the vision for something like Waypoint was there is an audience, a wide audience, for games criticism or feature writing that takes games seriously. And we could see a world where there were game critics at every major publication, not just games publication and not just cultural publications, but newspapers, everything, and it felt like we would get to shape that maneuver. And in fact, that maneuver didn’t exist.
I mean, obviously The New York Times has its game stuff. I just had to turn down an interview from someone there because right now fuck the Times, it’s like that for me. But the thing that actually happens is it’s back to being blogs. We were clouded by the vision of, Well, for games criticism to exist, it has to go commercial. It has to go big publication and it has to be Vice, Polygon, GameSpot, IGN. “Wow, IGN has gotten so much better” is a conversation we’ve had. In the late 2010s through the early 2020s, as people changed there, it was like, Whoa, they’re running some interesting stuff over there. I understand that dream. I had that dream for years and years because I want other people who do this work to get paid. I want people to be able to pay their rent the way a well-respected film critic could. And that didn’t happen. And instead, you’ve got to go to Stop Caring now. You have to go to Unwinnable. It still exists, but it didn’t break out. It didn’t break big like I think a few of us thought it was going to.
And so I want to be careful not to be like, “Because our vision of it didn’t happen, it died.” What I do think has happened is there was once an audience that was extremely open to that work, showing up alongside more traditional, aggregate blog stuff or guides, that is now extremely hostile to it. Or just indifferent. Doesn’t know it exists, doesn’t care that it exists, is not interested in reading about games they don’t know about already. There is an audience for it, but it’s much smaller than it was, and that wider audience feels like it’s more hostile to it than it was for this brief window.
I relistened to your last podcast at Waypoint in 2021, and you said –
Back to brunch, baby.
You said, “Don’t go back to fucking brunch.” From my perspective it really seems like we’re back at brunch. Everything is. And you associated that to distance from the Trump administration. Now we’re on Trump 2, things are worse and there’s a cognitive dissonance in every level of the country, including games media.
I’ll say this, though. I think there are more people doing more things on the ground to prevent specific policies. Like the pushback against ICE I couldn’t have dreamed of in Trump 1. Now he’s swinging harder this time, and so I do think that there is a disproportionality between responses, so I want to give credit where credit is due to people who are in our city or in Chicago or in LA who have done a lot, or in small cities, small towns, who are like, “No, you can’t come into my restaurant because I have undocumented workers here who I’m going to try to protect.” I want to shout those people out because I think that that is not back to brunch behavior. That is get the fuck out of my out of my place behavior, and that’s good.
But I do think culturally we are fucking back to brunch. And I think part of it is actually the difficult experience of seeing the limits of what cultural work can do in a direct way. It felt imperative that we were all locked in from 2016 to 2020 on issues of gender and race and politics in our culture. Obviously the biggest visions of this were things Black Lives Matter and MeToo and movement inside of trans acceptance and all sorts of other ongoing, very non-games related, movements. But that stuff trickled into games and we were all focused in on it and we were all like, “This is important.” “Trump is here to take away people’s rights. Trump is bad. Trumpism is bad. We want to reject that.” And so, yeah, it was easy for me in 2017 to run a series of essays about the carceral state and games. It felt to me that there was an audience segment, a fairly large one, that was willing to walk down that path in good faith, or at least to give us the sympathy and empathy for the project that was necessary for it to continue to experiment and try stuff. And I say we, not Waypoint. We game critics collectively. And feature writers. People who are doing stuff like reporting on the relationship between gun companies and Call of Duty or any type of military first person shooter.
There was a lot of, not grace, because I think the project is actually good, but there was like, Ah, this is important. Even if it’s not for me, it’s important that this work is being done right now. You know the Vonnegut quote about Vietnam? “The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high.” I think we lived through that. And my gut feeling is it was exhausting for a lot of people to take us seriously and they were relieved to not have to take us seriously anymore and to get to focus on their favorite franchises again.
You probably got a different reaction when AMCA said that they would observe the BDS boycott.
We got a pretty bad one, it turns out. It’s a bad one for a couple of reasons. I will take primary bad credit, which is, one, I dropped the ball. I’d known about the Snow White stuff and about the Captain America stuff, but I didn’t realize that it expanded to a general Disney+ boycott until literally a week before Andor dropped. And so we were rushing to figure out what our response would be. If I had been more on my shit, I would have noticed that six months prior and we could have been able to talk through options then instead of in the middle of it all when people were super excited. And I think I did a bad job being an advocate for my own position because I was so frustrated with the response immediately and because it was such a tough thing to try to work out and it felt existentially bad for the podcast and because we were good at talking about Andor.
I got laid off a year before when Andor season two was supposed to start, and I spent a year feeling like I’m worthless. Like I’m doing some freelance stuff, but Friends at the Table isn’t hitting. I’m not at my A game there. I’m not giving my A game to Shelved By Genre. AMCA was fine. Realis got a really great response, but I wasn’t sure if I was going to be able to make it across the finish line. And I had been looking forward to doing Andor season two so much because this is a thing we can do well. And realizing it was on the BDS list and then needing to sit down and work through my priorities and be like, Fundamentally, I care more about being in solidarity with people who are making a very particular targeted strategic request. They’re saying, “Hey, can you not do this one thing?” It is so much more valuable for me to do that than it is to like talk into a microphone about the power of radical politics. And that feeling only grew bigger as I realized that we’d spent years talking about the importance of radical politics and now a subsection of our audience was like, “I don’t want to do the radical politics, even when all it is I don’t watch the TV show for six weeks.” Or they go watch it, they just don’t hear us talk about it. I didn’t even say you shouldn’t watch it. I just said, I’m not going to use this platform to do it. Not just me. The podcast made that decision. There’s a subsection of the audience who thinks I forced that down everybody’s throat or something. And no, there were long, hard conversations from everybody on the podcast with different feelings about boycotts and different feelings about BDS. All pretty unified on Palestine but different feelings about BDS, but it was not like I was the BDS guy.
That experience was really back to brunch coded. That experience really was What are the limits of this sort of criticism? What are the limits of this sort of media?
That pushed me to not make the affirmative case for why adhering to be BDS made a lot of sense. And I think the thing that stood out the most to some people – and from my experience, the people who got where I was coming from were experienced as writers or storytellers or critics themselves – I made the case that I don’t think criticism can change the world. I’m not sure a story can change the world. I think that these things do reproductive labor in the Marxist sense of they’re a work that reproduces the self. They bring you back to the self you need to be to go do your work. And ideally for us, that sort of work is the sort of work of political change and mutual aid. And for me, that is, in the cold, dark, night of my soul, that is the best I can be confident that I’m doing.
I do not believe that writing a single good piece of games criticism or a good piece of film criticism or doing a great podcast about the politics of Star Wars is actually moving the needle in any meaningful way. What I heard from people was, “That’s not true. Your podcast changed my life.” Or, “That’s not true. This TV show changed my life.” Or, from other critics or storytellers, “Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I had to come to peace with this a long time ago.” And I think that that divide is pretty indicative that we want so badly for the entertainment in our lives to be capital-I Important in this other way, but I don’t think it is. What I do think is true is that a broader wave of things, an era, a generation, or an entire media channel or an entire media enterprise can, along with other similar things, shift the play space overall. I think we learn what common sense is because partly through a media ecology that we are in. The case I used on Shelved By Genre the other day was, “The Taylor Sheridan-verse of CBS shows like Yellowstone are teaching a lot of people what masculinity is supposed to be.” What’s a man supposed to be? That’s the sort of thing that gets taught to you through a huge array of media and entertainment and books and literature and everything else. Moby Dick has a lot to say about what a man is or isn’t, but it alone doesn’t help determine what the modern man is supposed to look like. It, along with Hemingway and Dickens, got into a lot of guys’ heads together to be like, This is the space of masculinity that is acceptable.
I don’t hold out hope so much as I understand that there is a way to look at the creation of fiction and say Here’s how it interlocks with the production of a self. I think anyone who’s like, “That show made me who I am,” that show might have revealed to you who you were, or that show might have helped clarify something. I don’t doubt that at all. But have some more faith in yourself that you would get to who you were through a mechanism. If Andor didn’t exist, you would have invented it through something else, because what you already were was empathetic and interested in technology and technology’s relationship to power. You were already interested in crime stories. You were already interested in all the stuff that makes that first season of the show so good.
So yeah, that response definitely was a big part of my relationship to cultural criticism this year.
I have returned several times to a talk you gave in 2018. The way I summarize it, it’s the “Games won’t save us” talk.
Games won’t save us. Yeah, of course.
The thing that I held on to hope for even into this year was that maybe criticism and media that responds to that cultural ecology can save us. And I don’t know how to reconcile that belief with what I’ve seen of games media in the past year willfully ignoring or flat out refusing to consider the BDS call to boycott Xbox.
It’s one of those examples of a thing that I think would have maybe gotten more pickup in 2017, 2018. It’s hard to hold out hope for the entire field of cultural production because the entire field of cultural production is owned and operated by deeply regressive, reactionary right-wing perspectives and people, and it is an industry that is driven by motive that has nothing to do with the dignity of humanity. So, systemic change is not going to naturally occur in the current arrangement of cultural production. Cultural production will have to shift in order for that to happen. Which it can shift in ways that are not just the nationalization of media. It doesn’t have to be revolution to shift. Part of a shift is who holds the camera. We’ve seen that shift happen to some degree. I think that the fact that you and I are even talking about the Microsoft boycott is a shift from where things were a decade ago, or 20 years ago, and I think that’s largely to do with a cultural shift partly driven by shifting who gets to talk about issues like the ongoing occupation and apartheid and genocide in Palestine. And I don’t think that’s nothing.
Games has always been a space that has all of the tensions of California in it – all of the California liberalism and all of the California libertarianism, all of the Great Californian ideology. Great as in it is grand, it is big. The Greater California ideology from the tech industry, from Silicon Valley. And I think that there is a real urge inside of games media, to the degree that games media exists anymore, to let the market sort it out and to not be a thumb on the scale and to shrug their shoulders and say, “It’s really inconvenient for us to do this and it would it would make it impossible for us to do our jobs.” And I don’t think it would. I think now more than ever it’s easier to keep a boycott like this. There’s more stuff to talk about than there’s ever been before. The job for many people is more about them than it is the games at this point.
If I were still in full-time games media, in either of the big shapes I’ve ever been in full-time games media, Waypoint or Giant Bomb, the case I would make internally is, “Our audience is showing up for us. They’re going to show up for us whether we are playing an Xbox game or we are playing a weird indie thing that no one knows about because we’ve developed this audience.” That’s the whole point of the direct-to-subscriber model. This is the whole point of the personality model. We can play weird shit and it’s okay. We can talk about weird shit and it’s okay. Instead of talking about Outer Worlds 2, I could talk about Angeline Era and it would be fine. The audience would not riot because we didn’t talk about the latest Microsoft game. And it’s frustrating because it seems like now more than ever you could make that move. 20 years ago, if I was working on EGM and someone made the case, “People will stop subscribing to us if we stop covering Xbox games,” I’d be like, “Well, that’s probably going to happen.” That is not going to happen now.
We don’t cover Xbox games on Side Story. And Side Story is small. It’s the smallest video game thing I’ve ever done next to my own personal blog. So obviously we’re self-selecting a set of audience members who are cool with that. Maybe if I was running a giant, multimillion dollar, multimillion views per episode thing, that wouldn’t be the case. But you have to have some faith in yourself that you’ve built a model around yourself and that you can bring those people in. So, deeply demoralizing.
It feels like, among my colleagues, that the inertia of Waypoint, culturally, fully faded this year when we decided that this wasn’t important anymore.
Yeah, you know, there were conversations, but – correct me if I’m wrong – I don’t know of an outlet in the model you’re talking about that made the hardline decision, “We’re going to support this boycott.” I don’t know.
And to be frank, we are both very close to the Waypoint vision of things, but there was never a waypoint era. We were such a drop in the bucket in games culture that it’s easy to feel like the project died this year, but it might be more true to say the project never really lived as far as games culture is concerned. How many people watch the TGAs? It’s huge amount of people. Some absurd amount. Millions and millions and millions and millions of people. [Variety has since reported a viewership of 171 million livestreams.] I know the most people who’ve ever read a Waypoint article, and it’s not it’s not even close. And I’m not saying that to diminish what we did, but what I am doing is putting what we did closer in allegiance to the blog era and the stuff that shows up on Critical Distance. Stuff like No Escape, Stop Caring. We may have been closer to that, with the difference being they happened to give four or five people salaries for five years. Which is incredible, but we were never even close to shaping the state of games culture. What we did was shape some conversations among the extremely checked-in, among people who were really big-time On Twitter. But even in a place like ResetEra, we were not a drop. No one gave a fuck. There are fans of us that were on those sites, but that broader perspective I don’t think was ever picked up by the industry. It was allowed. It was accepted. It was not seen as outsider or radical. It was seen as one end of a spectrum of engagement, with the other end, if I’m being very generous, being Digital Foundry. They talk about the technology of games. They talk about whether a game runs smooth or not. Would never go to them to have a political position. And there are a lot of people who are like, That’s what games media is.
It feels to me sometimes like we did not pull the industry or the culture or even the critical culture towards our end of the spectrum, so much as we moved the edge of the spectrum over. We revealed that UV light exists and that ultraviolet is one step over from violet and everyone went, “Oh, there’s more to the spectrum than we thought there was.” But the spectrum never lost the other end of it. We never pulled it that way. If anything, while we were doing that, the spectrum was also opening up in the other direction towards even more reactionary, more regressive, more hostile, more abusive versions of what games criticism and games journalism can be. That, to me, is pretty useful. Thinking about it being there were more perspectives on the table than ever before, not that anyone’s perspectives actually shifted.
None of that is to say this year has not been frustrating and tough and disappointing. But the thing to me that makes it tough and disappointing is Oh, right. This is how it always was. No one was actually a fellow traveler. Everyone was happy to have us along, but no one was doing the project with us. And to be clear, I’m not saying Waypoint was the only one. The “us” there is games critics broadly and journalists broadly who are part of this movement, who are also doing independent blogs, writing for Paste – I really want to be clear that I don’t think Waypoint is the only people ever to care about games and politics.
I am somewhat extrinsically driven by the idea I’m having my work in conversation, which demands that there are readers. How do we move forward from this year and do the work? What is an idea of game criticism that rises to the moment of the world that is the resurgent fascism and the genocide and the imperial boomerang?
It is easy for me to do this, but I would retreat to that same talk that you were just talking about, the 2018 “Games won’t save us” talk. I thought a lot about that talk in the wake of the AMCA BDS decision because it was the most Why are you mad at me? Not only am I right, but I’ve been saying the same thing for seven years. The games aren’t going to save us. Star Wars isn’t going to save us. The thing that is so much more important in the world than watching the space rebels is to go to a march against ICE or to go push ICE out of your city, literally. That is the real work. But the point I ended up making in that 2018 talk was criticism is going to happen no matter what. Game development is going to continue happening no matter what. It isn’t an option of Do we move forward or do we not? The option is What mode do we move forward in?
And I’ve always adhered to this notion radical possibility. Last night on the Nextlander podcast that I was guesting on, Jeff Bakalar was briefly falling into a pit of despair over the Fermi Paradox, over the idea that maybe no one from beyond is ever going to come to save us – or kill us. If there was an alien culture out there that had already overcome the filters that seem to stop us or could potentially stop any society from becoming space aliens that travel around, those filters being things like not blowing each other up or achieving mastery over science and such that fuel is available for interstellar travel, all those things, if anyone ever did survive those, why would they ever do good by us? And I said, “Damn, bro. You bench 400 pounds. She let me hit cuz I’m goofy.” I think it’s possible for us to keep our minds open to the fact that the world is not rational and that sometimes things happen for goofy-ass reasons. I want us to be prepared for the opportunity to take action when the opportunity emerges, and I don’t think that we stay prepared by stopping doing the work, even when the audience checks out. And so in those moments, I want to talk to other people who are doing the work. I want to talk to developers who are doing the work in their own way.
One of the most rewarding things in my three or four year life of being a game dev was talking to people who had quietly been reading along, who had been paying attention, who had read reviews that I’d written or seen interviews I’d done about their games or with their coworkers or with their bosses and been like, “We all read that. We all passed that around. We know the version of the game that you saw at E3 that had this great ambitious social simulation wasn’t the game that we shipped, and we know why it happened and it was so rewarding to see that you picked up on that. And we got to point at that and go back to our bosses and say, ‘Hey, this is the project we should have made instead of the one we did make.’”
One of the things that I hear the most, mostly through AMCA, actually, is people being like, “Well, did Dave Filoni or George Lucas really mean this angle to be in the movie or in the show? Or are you just reading into it?” What I have learned is while any one individual critical take might not be the thing that was intended, there is intention behind everything that gets made. And that means that there is often a quiet audience who is not posting, reading about whether or not their intentions came through in the work. In the same way that you or I might publish a piece and then look at the comments to see, Did this hit? Did people get what I was going for here? That’s happening all the time in game dev. And so I do think that it’s worth remembering that there is a potential audience out there for stuff who is, frankly, name searching, who are people who are like, “Ooh, did anybody write about my little game? Or my big game? “And often it’s designers, and designers have so much to do with the way new games are shaped. So I think that’s one thing is there’s an audience out there who is not always discursive and is just a readership audience.
And then two, I think if we’re going to do this work, and if you want to be part of it and if I want to be part of it, it is to do the thing that we saw a few months ago with Grace and Kaile, that we go back to a discursive mode. And I say that because I think that’s what keeps us prepped for the next opportunity. When people come back and they say, “I don’t know what caused this, none of us could possibly know,” the aliens come tomorrow, 9/11 Two could happen tomorrow, Trump could declare war tomorrow, and it could very quickly lead us to another vibe shift, and I don’t think we want to be caught with our blades dull. I think we want to be caught ready to continue a conversation.
It’s almost like we’re holding onto a bar that’s on a seesaw, and right now we’re really close to the center, so we don’t have a lot of leverage. But the way history works is sometimes you slide to the edge of the bar and you get a lot more leverage. And it’s a little leverage because we’re writing about video games to fairly small audiences, but there are moments when that stuff changes. The only reason that things went the way they went in 2016, 2017, 2018, in the Trump era, was that we happened to have had a pretty mature critical faculty. We had built websites for this stuff already. Waypoint launched before Trump won the election, and if that hadn’t happened, none of the stuff we ran for those years would have run. And again, that stuff didn’t change the world, but I do think that it was part of a project around engaging with those ideas. And I think we lost that. I don’t think we won that conflict of ideas, but I know we would have lost it more if we weren’t there trying to have it. We would have had greater losses to people who were not just doing the work of cultural criticism, but were doing the work of propaganda.
I think that’s the other thing that gets brought up around criticism a lot, is how can you say that criticism isn’t important if you see that figures on the right have so badly changed how people see the world? And well it’s because they’re doing propaganda, they’re not doing cultural criticism. With no respect to Asmongold and Andrew Tate, all these motherfuckers, they are not doing criticism. They are playing in a different space. Criticism has to work way harder and get way luckier to make that generational shift of what is acceptable personhood or whatever. I think if we can potentially be prepared for a moment like that to happen, that’s the best thing we can do. Which, again, is just an echo of that 2018 thing. People are going to keep talking about games and making games anyway, what if we did it in ways that prepared us for the opportunities and engaged with the wholeness of who we are? I know that that retreats down into a You do it for the love of the game, which is not ideal, but I do fear that it’s our reality right now.
In your first response, you said something that I have been thinking about a lot this week. Podcasting, streaming, we recognize those as performances, and there’s this ever growing cognizance that people are inauthentic when they’re being recorded. But writing is a way of displaying your thinking, and so I started to wonder if my trouble of drafting comes from a need to perform a way of being Autumn Wright, Writer
Right, yeah.
So I was going to ask if you ever worry about this, but it sounds like you went through this experience of your thoughts becoming alienated.
Oh, 100%. Yeah, I think it’s tough. I think this is the postmodern position. It’s one of the things I’ve actually struggled to get through in my fiction that I’m really fascinated by and interested in, which is: I understand the self to be grounded by practice and experience, but kind of built on top of an abyss. This is very freeing.
Have you watched the movie Penda’s Fen?
No.
You should watch Penda’s Fen as soon as we’re off this call. We talked about it on Shelved By Genre recently, so I watched it for the first time and it blew me away. It ends up in this place that’s like, Ambiguity is really productive because it means if you don’t know where you came from, if you don’t know who your parents are, you could have any parents you want and you can disavow the idea of parentage as being important to who you are. And so I think the postmodern condition is a little bit recognizing it’s all built on emptiness. It’s all built on connections and ambiguity. And at any moment, any of us could be anything. And there’s something really rewarding about that because it means I’m not held back by my history. I’m able to even overcome my history and become whoever I want to be and to have any position I want as long as it’s interesting to me. And then you get the second wave of that, and it’s, Oh, but what’s actually interesting to me? In the world where I can be anyone, who do I want to be?
And that can also infect critical thought. Last night, I watched Kiss Me Deadly, the excellent film noir that ends up intersecting with a lot of 1950s postwar anxieties, and I could write a piece for you about how it is a 1950s movie about resisting those anxieties and the ways that those anxieties would drive a wedge in between interpersonal connections. Or I could write a piece for you about how it is that paranoia is the correct position to hold because history has turned us all into each other’s enemies. And I think part of the difficulty of living in post-modernity or with an extreme knowledge of our own capacities as writers and the techniques that we can use is that we could that we could deploy them as philistines. I’m kind of quoting Bernard Stiegler here, French philosopher. We could deploy them without any sort of personal attachment. We deploy them with the sort of detachment of the philosopher, the detachment of, “Ah, yes, you could make this case.” And in some ways, this is different than simply performativity or it leads you maybe to a certain sort of performativity, because then you’re not even deciding what you think about the thing, you’re deciding, Which critic do I want to be today? Which critic feels like the right critic? Do I want to make the cynical read on this? Or do I want to make the rehabilitative read?
Maybe most writers don’t go through this and stay with love in their hearts. I know what I like, that’s all there is to it. But for me, experience of the craft pushed me to a place where I could just see all of the possible pieces you could write about something. And then it felt more like picking which one I wanted to write. And that’s genuinely one of the hardest places to be creatively. In a weird way, this is part of the other thing that podcasts can get me out of. I am more likely to answer off the cuff when someone asks me what I thought about in the episode of TV we just watched than I am if I sit and worry about what it is I’m about to write. And so part of the project of both Side Story and AMCA and Shelved By Genre has been working those muscles to rebuild a critical and creative confidence so that I do go back to the gut feeling.
There’s this meme format of inexperienced person, middle experienced person, expert. I really think like, inexperienced person, I know what I like and I say it; experienced person, No one likes anything, everyone is pretending; experienced person, I know what I like and I just say it, but I say it better and I go through the process of argument and of research. And in a really weird way, part of what I’ve been trying to do in 2025 is get back to being that person. If you are on that journey, truly my heart goes out to you, it is hard. It’s hard to rebuild that capacity. It is one of the hardest things that I’ve had to do as a writer. It is a hard thing to do as a person, to look the abyss of, Is there a self under there? Or is there only knowledge? Is there no, is there no passion? And to try to rebuild that passion.
I don’t have a quick, easy answer for it. I think, as always, the answer is lots of practice. It’s lots of lifting little weights. So maybe I’ll do more writing next year. My dream is always to become the sort of writer who can write 500 words instead of 2,000 words. And maybe that’s what I’ll try to continue to repair this part of my, my being. We’ll see. Hopefully that’s useful.
I feel like, uh, my crisis is not nearly as bad.
Yeah? Good.
My problem is more producing the thoughts. It is not –
You should have a lot of confidence. Your work is really strong. And I have always felt that you are the you who is writing. I’ve never felt you put a mask on while writing. So maybe you’re just being very good at picking a mask. If what you’re struggling with right now is getting a first draft out, my real advice to you is to stop trying to write drafts and try to write more notes. Write a paragraph at a time. Don’t write it towards an end. Just write a thought and write a bunch of them, and the ones you don’t use put in a document. Including for a single piece. I don’t know what your note-taking process is like, but presumably you’re taking some notes while you’re doing this stuff. Pull on a few of them, turn them from one line into a paragraph or two. Do not try to knit them together yet, just do that work, and hopefully one of them will hit you as being strong enough to be a piece. And then follow that one and put the rest aside. But I say that because when I read your work, I’m like, Yeah, this is you.
Well, thank you. I really appreciate that advice. I will try that. Writing is doing the thinking and the work. Whereas the draft is almost a performance.
Yeah, totally.
Something that you didn’t say for yourself is your experience in stepping away and having life experiences. I think that’s what my favorite writers are doing. They are not nearly as theory brained as I am. They just have a lot of lived experience that they can, not just tap into, but bring forward in ways that are compelling. They have that there at the foundation. I don’t know if I have similar things to tap into in that same way. I don’t think knowledge production is quite the same as experience.
Yeah, I have this feeling big time. I have a lot of anxiety over not having the life experience of some of my peers. I know that’s an insane thing to say at 40. I’ve clearly lived a very full and good life, but, I’ve lived in North America only and only the United States and Canada. I spent a little bit of time in Australia once and otherwise I’ve never really been off the continent. I’ve never been to Asia. I’ve never been to Africa. I’ve never been to Europe. I’ve never been to South America. There’s so many things that my peers have done with their lives in this chasing an experience way. My partner did the Trans-Siberian railroad. That’s incredible. I’ve never done anything like that. And it can be really tough to see people draw on their experience in ways that are so productive for them and then to not have that experience and to feel like I lost the chances to have that experience because now I don’t have it in me. I don’t think I could do that railroad. I mean, I could if it was life or death, but it is hard for me to imagine doing the sorts of life experiences I feel like I should have done when I was 25, because instead I was like going to grad school and struggling to figure out how to write well. And at the same time, I’m able to write the stuff I’m able to write that I think nobody else is able to write because of those things that you and I wouldn’t necessarily call life experiences, but are the theoretical understanding. It is being part of the discursive spaces that we are part of. And frankly, it is playing a lot of fucking video games and having an intuitive sense that came from years of experience engaging with these things mechanically and theoretically in a way that a lot of our peers have not done. I wouldn’t discount that stuff. At the same time, if what you were feeling is “I should go get on a train,” or “I should do a bunch of drugs,” or “I should join a band,” you should do one of those things.
I have come to terms with the path I took. I don’t think it’s the only path someone should take. But the life experience can be so many different things. Truly, if what you want to do is to try to add a texture to your work that’s engaged with visual composition and shot composition, just start watching more films. Go watch some films live, go see some people talk about filmmaking. If you want to start talking about the social in games, yeah, maybe you should go to some more parties. Maybe you should go to the bar more. But I don’t think that that there’s a quicker, easy way to go live a whole life overnight, because the other thing can happen too, where you’re like, This is going to give me an angle on something, and you go do it and it doesn’t fucking happen. But if you have an impulse, chase the impulse, truly.
Yeah, that’s good. I think a lot of people will appreciate that advice.
I hope it helps. I think a lot of us are in it right now. We’ve seen a market for what we do collapse. It was very briefly possible to imagine a world where we got to do this so good that we got to have a house one day. And I don’t know, some people got houses off of it. I didn’t. But more importantly, the model that we were hoping to come into being collapsed and either you are very lucky to have a salaried position but it feels precarious or you are living on freelance checks or Patreon support and all that feels just as precarious, if not more precarious. And we have seen hostility to our work, both individual and systemic from game culture, but also from tech, from private equity, from AI, et cetera. It is a hard time to be doing it, and like I said, it’s hard to retreat to do it for the love of the game because that’s not enough. But maybe that’s the other thing that I would say. As someone who is not writing about games anymore right now full-time, it is okay to not do it. This is not so important that it should be the only thing in your life or the thing that you shape your life around, unless it is that important. You have to be the judge of that, but you’re not failing anyone by deciding to stop blogging. Especially if the result is someone who can put more time to the things that actually make them happy, or find stability that you sorely need.
It’s hard to be like, I’m giving you all permission to not write about video games, but after I gave that talk in 2018, maybe even during the talk, Frank Lantz was like, “You’re the champion video games needs! We need you to go on the today show!” And I was like, “Frank, I just gave a talk about how video games aren’t going to save us. I’m not that person.” Fundamentally, I am someone who believes that the stuff that we do is a reward for having a world and a life where we can do it. It is part of keeping ourselves fulfilled, but it is not holy work. I think it’s hard to have seen what could have been and to now be in this vision of it, and it’s easy to feel like you’re not allowed to give up on the thing. Maybe that’s less positive to end on, but that is also true.
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Autumn Wright is a critic. Find all their links at autumn-wright.com.
