Being a writer in any reliably compensated position is rare and getting rarer. Reporting and media criticism is rarer still, and the number of people who get paid to write about video games specifically for more than poverty wages is so vanishingly small that I’m guessing you could fit us all in a single building. “Thank your lucky stars” is often the refrain, and I thank them quite often. But work is still work, and that includes anything you play for work. But when you manage to sneak in some personal gaming time, that feeling is heavenly.
There are, of course, obvious benefits to being a games writer. You get games early and often free via code supplied by the publisher for coverage. Depending on the publisher, they’ll sometimes send a few for more than one person to play. You also get to play games early under embargo, giving you time to write your review or impressions or capture whatever assets are needed for your publication.
The process of being under embargo is multifaceted. On the one hand, there is a slight glee to seeing a game before the public does. At its worst, there can be a churlish “kid whose uncle works at Nintendo” smarminess that I have seen mediocre or deeply immature games writers engage in. In ideal circumstances, however, this gives you a more neutral slate to assess the work, before broader consensus sets in about the quality of the game.
But even when it’s all working, “The Embargo Zone” is an alien landscape. You could be given anywhere from several weeks to about a day to power through a game. Any game with a deadline puts the work in a different light.
There’s also certain games where the hyperbolic time chamber of an embargo is not a fair place to assess the totality of the work. I have written about this before when it comes to FromSoft games, which only develop their true flavor and notes-based metatext when exposed to the constant, creative prodding of the public. A similar phenomenon happened to me when I covered Death Stranding for Kotaku: The only thing weirder than not being able to talk about what the hell that game was to anyone but my coworkers was seeing it barren, only to have its roads and structures built exclusively by people I’ve seen at Nintendo events.
The Embargo Zone can get fraught quickly if you are either a video producer or, god help you, a service journalist. People who do guides work hold up half of the sky; they’re like gaming’s first responders. It can be irritating enough to be a writer and have to take notes, constantly interrogating how you feel about a game. It’s entirely another thing to painfully document every single key, item drop rate, boss moveset and puzzle solution, often taking multiple screenshots and formatting that into something readable.
Capturing video of your gameplay and formatting it into something coherent under deadline also generally sucks, and as someone who is a video editor first I’m glad I am my own boss and I mostly don’t have to do that shit any more. Oftentimes, due to how little money is allotted to pay people in this industry, a single employee (although often a freelancer) is given the task of being not just a writer, video person or guides person, but one or more of those roles at the same time. Nothing can make an activity as supposedly fun as playing a video game miserable as fast as having to wear all three of those hats at the same time.
And even if you don’t “have” to play a game because you are assigned to do so, your game time is often commodified by the need to have something to talk or write about. If you’re on a podcast you know what I am talking about, and I think this is a feeling that Twitch streamers, YouTubers, and even just people who feel obligated to post about games know about all too well. Keeping up with the Joneses becomes a job unto itself, and the need to sculpt everything into that wretched word “content” taints your time, making it just a little more crass and performative than it normally would be.
I am not complaining: all of this is just the compromise I made with myself and this job. A huge portion of the people reading this have likely experienced some version of it in their field. But when I finally do get to just play a game for myself, assuming I am not burned out, the experience can be liberating.
Just playing a game when you game for work feels like a secret you keep from the boss in your brain, the voice you cobbled together from various editors and authority figures to push your career forward in an ever dwindling field. You’re not strip mining this for its constituent parts. You’re not optimizing your run, taking notes and screenshots to share later. You’re simply gaming for the sake of it, the way you did when you were a kid. You’re experiencing a thing that cannot be sold, that same transcendent sensation that made you want to write on a forum or blog so many decades ago.
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