patrick miller writes about videogames

Teased this on Twitter a few weeks ago; I wouldn’t have much to say in a 2013 games of the year list, because I simply didn’t play that many games this year, but I sure as heck read a whole lot of words about ‘em, so I figured I’d write about that instead. If you see a whole bunch of writing folks circlejerking each other more often than usual, you can blame me for instigating it with this bit.

My top five writers of 2013

First off: I’ve previously written of my adoration for Leigh Alexander, Patrick Klepek, and Simon Parkin in a previous post on this blog about futureproofing games journalism or some bullshit like that, so I’ll keep it short. I perk up every time I see a new article from any of these three, not just because I know I’m going to read something good, but because each of them excel at a different aspect of games writing and I hope that with each new thing I read from them, I’ll be able to download just a little bit of their skills into my brain.

I kind of think of Alexander as like, a punk-rock video games version of Kara Swisher. Her holistic understanding of the game industry is so thoroughly developed that she can write on Big Picture Trends one day and do cutting-edge Cool Hunting the next. I don’t think anyone else is as good at parsing the raw output of everything Video Games and turning that into readily-understandable words.

She writes about ideas and people that will leave an indelible impact on the games we play ten years from now; this is exactly what I love to see in professional industry media. (I suspect she actually lives in 2023 and commute back to work in 2013 just for kicks.) Also, she can turn a most excellent phrase; go ahead and give This Is Why We Video Gaming another spin if you haven’t lately.

I don’t know what drew Klepek into the world of video games writing, but if he hadn’t gone down this way, he’d probably be running the best damn local news rag ever. The guy knows how to find a story worth telling and tell a story worth reading – something which is really hard to do in consumer/enthusiast games writing.

I was particularly impressed by the way he wrote on the “collusion” drama in the fighting games community, because he talked to the right people, did his homework, and wrote a story that served all Giant Bomb readers, not just those who followed fighting games. (In other words, he did journalism.) And, speaking of “worth reading,” I always look forward to his Worth Reading end-of-week roundups – would that I had a content-aggregation app that could apply the Klepek Method to subject areas outside of games! 

In my fantasy games newspaper, Alexander is the star op/ed columnist (and culture critic); Klepek is the local reporter (with a little Herb Caen, for flavor) who makes us all miss our local news coverage whenever we leave home and find ourselves leafing through complimentary copies of USA Today; Parkin is the one I’d lean on to do the big think-pieces that build our paper’s cred with New Game City’s intelligentsia.

From my experience, most games writers tend to draw from the same general pool of ideas and angles, and differ in execution, timing, and degree of insight; most, that is, except Parkin. Parkin’s work in the last year makes me feel like we’re all squinting at the same Magic Eye page looking for the fish or whatever to pop out at us, and he’s already like three pages ahead of us. Seriously, each time I read his stuff my ego just says, “Dammit, Patrick, why didn’t you think of that?” (which is probably the nicest thing I can ever say about anyone else’s work because I’m full of myself). He’s good at writing smart things about video games for smart people who don’t necessarily give a shit about video games, and that’s a really hard thing to do.

Now that I’m no longer part of the Gamasutra/GDC machine, I can say nice things about my good friend and Gamasutra editor-in-chief Kris Graft without sounding too biased. Certainly, he’s done a great job holding it down when it comes to keeping Gamasutra at the forefront of game industry coverage, but I’m particularly interested in the way he’s sharpened his own editorial chops over the last year. He’s had a series of great editorials, ranging from his challenge to the Joe Biden meeting to his Top 5 Games of 2013 list and a whole bunch of stuff in between that clearly establish Gamasutra as a place for people who love what video games can be, which I love. What’s more, he actually reads books, and draws inspiration from that to write about games, whether it's Guns, Germs, and Steel or I Am Legend. 

Perhaps what I like most about Graft’s recent work is that it is refreshingly free of bullshit. I tend to locate most of my writing in a discursive sphere I loosely refer to as “public intellectualism”. I’m not much of a reporter, all things considered – I start with potential stories in my head, and then I look around to see if reality fits what I see, and I rely on my colleagues and contemporaries to tell me when I’m stretching it. (Left unchecked, I’d probably turn into the Malcolm Gladwell of video games, which is not a good thing.) Graft is my opposite; he buries himself into the industry’s day-to-day dealings, reads a good book, and comes back the next day with a unique insight into How Things Work. I can’t do that, and I respect the hell out of someone who can do it as well as Graft can.

Cara Ellison rounds out my top five writers from 2013. She wrote about soup and Rhianna Pratchett; she took an offhand hater’s comment and turns it into the Flowers to Womans game jam; she wrote a great Twine game about straight people sex; and apparently she led an intro-to-DotA workshop at some point? It literally seems like every week she pops up on my Twitter feed working on something I think is cool, and because she is involved, it usually is. 

I think the best thing I can say about Cara’s work is that it is decidedly unlike everything else on this list; hers is not as workmanlike in approach as Klepek or Graft, nor as cerebral as Alexander or Parkin. I think it is, above all, personal, and that informs everything she does. She is whimsical and vulnerable and thoughtful and passionate, and her work reflects that – not just in personal blogs and think pieces but in everyday games writing work. (I was particularly impressed when she managed to take a relatively uninspired assignment like a hands-on-preview of a highly-anticipated game and turn it into an opportunity to speak directly, personally, and plainly about why gender and sex deserve thoughtful treatment in video games; simple, I think, but subversive.)

Writers to watch in 2014

I have more nice things to say about people who write about video games, so: Here are the writers that I (selfishly) hope to see more from in 2014.

“I wish Jenn Frank would write more” is a thought that I think pretty much any time she writes something, which, as far as I can tell, is not terribly often these days. It seems to me that every week the broader games community has yet another opportunity to draw battle lines over how seriously we take ourselves and our games, and every time she writes one word to tell us how a video game figured into her life I feel like it outweighs a thousand anti-intellectual, anti-emotional shit comments. She’s also, like, the Mother Teresa of Twitter Drama; just seeing her avatar alone has caused me to withdraw dozens of scathing tweets in shame.

Nathan Grayson is holding it down as Rock Paper Shotgun’s pet American, and doing a darn good job, I think. I have a hard time dispensing praise to people who write about topics that I find personally relevant, often because “Well, that’s not how I would have handled it” is hovering in the background of my brain (remember what I said about being full of myself?). But Grayson has written about martial arts, video games, and his own flirtation with violence; he has written about his own efforts to confront gender bullshit in games; he has written about LoL and eSports from an outsider’s perspective; all topics that hit close to home with me personally, and I’m consistently impressed by how he handles 'em.

Speaking of eSports, CBSi launched a new eSports-focused site called OnGamers, and Rod Breslau (AKA “Slasher”) is bearing their editorial standard. I’m excited to see where they go; they’ve more or less got the top mainstream eSports news coverage by default at the moment, and I hope they use that momentum to build a strong base of experience (and use said base to give Slasher space to flex his muscles a bit). I don’t know where you go to find good eSports reporters, and I hope that OnGamers will be that place (for selfish reasons).

People like to give Kotaku shit, but I’ve been really impressed with how Stephen Totilo has been running things over there; I’ve said before that he seems to be willing to try a whole bunch of different stuff and quickly apologize when they fuck something up, which is I think exactly what I would have trouble doing if I were trying to do his job. I usually find that most of the Kotaku pieces I end up reading were penned by Evan Narcisse, Kirk Hamilton, Patricia Hernandez, and Jason Schreier. Totilo has got a good team going there.

There are two articles from Polygon that have nurtured my hopes for the site (and its writers) for next year. I think it has taken them a little while to find their groove when it comes to the features, but after reading Tracey Lien’s “No Girls Allowed” and Charlie Hall’s "Watch Dogs: Invasion_“ I think they might be on pace to hit a few home runs next year. I harbor a secret fear that Polygon in ten years will basically be an IGN or a GameSpot with nicer layout and a longer word allowance – in other words, that they "pressed reset” on games journalism only to discover that our true limitations as games writers wasn’t in man-hours or funds, but rather our imaginations – and these two were able to allay those fears until next year.

Lastly, another shoutout to Gamasutra folks. Mike Rose did some really neat stuff with the new SimCity, using it to model traffic in his hometown; I am hoping to see more original reporting come from games rather than just about games, as that’s honestly what I think is most interesting about games writing anyway (also see: Anything EVE Online). They’ve also got a new guy, Alex Wawro, who got off to a promising start with a writeup on butt controllers; he’s a buddy of mine and I hope Gamasutra lights a fire under his ass.

–patrick miller