E3 is no more, which is probably not a shock to anyone. I never actually went to it, but it taught me one of the hardest lessons of working as a games journalist: when to care about video games, and when to not.
(CW: animal death. So you can imagine what kind of piece this is.)
I started working at Kotaku in 2016, my first full-time professional games journalism job. As managing editor, I didn’t get to actually go to E3, but was instead responsible for making sure we knew who was available to cover the press conferences, had a good workflow set up to get the news on the page, and knew when stories from the field were coming and how to parse them out. As a first-timer, it was a lot of stress, but it was also exciting to feel like such a vital part of a fast-moving machine.
For me, that machine quickly broke down. Before the convention began, the Pulse nightclub shooting happened, which as a queer person was, let’s say, pretty intense. A few days into the events, my cat got sick, and I had to rush him to the emergency vet and ultimately put him down. It was a rough string of days, full of fear and grief, but through it all, I had to keep paying attention to press conferences and editing stories. Looking back, I can see that I probably could have asked for more support, and I distinctly remember a very kind conversation with our EIC Stephen about the shooting where I kept explaining how not fine I was and then insisting I was fine. I was so new to my role, and I defined myself so much as someone who could get everything done, that I didn’t know how to do anything besides plunge ferociously ahead. I felt so worried about letting my team down, and the pace and pomp of E3 felt so important, that I didn’t know how to make myself step back.
It wasn’t the best introduction to the “covering events” part of my professional life, nor my best real introduction to one of gaming’s busiest weeks. But it introduced me to a feeling that would come to pervade my life in games journalism: this sense that video games exist in a world slightly out of step with the “real” world, that what they most offer is escapism, whether or not that’s what you’ve come to them looking for. Over the years, I’d have so many more moments when a story would have to be held because there had been a mass shooting that made writing about a video game full of guns feel in bad taste, or an insurrection that made it feel weird to write about the joys of trespassing in Hitman, or an entire global pandemic in which I’d have to rally my staff to talk about games when we’d all rather be curled up in anxious balls on our couches. There would be celebrity deaths or trial verdicts or all kinds of things that felt so much bigger than video games, and in each one I’d feel torn between holding space for my staff and myself to experience the stuff of the world, and the pressures to keep covering the little corner of that world that we were responsible for, one that could so often feel frivolous. In my hardest moments I’d wonder if I’d devoted my professional life to a medium that simply could not keep pace with the world outside of it. There are stereotypes about gamers that we’re hyper-focused and superior about our hobbies and fandoms, and in some of these moments I’d worry that I was contributing to that, or that it was true.
This is, of course, not the fault of E3. But I can never hear the name of the convention without remembering how much of myself I put aside for the sake of work. It’s a habit I had before entering games journalism, and one I still struggle with. The adage of “your job doesn’t define you” is a hard one to follow as a journalist, and also when I’ve taken some of the things that most fundamentally define me as a person–creativity, play, commitment to a team–and slapped a price tag on them by making them a job. It’s something I’ve been intensely aware of in starting the site you’re reading right now, where I can see myself going down old pathways that I know just leave me overwhelmed and burnt out. Games and work can both be welcome distractions from the ugly stuff of your life, but they can also be negative coping strategies that ultimately leave you worse off.
So RIP, E3. You taught me a bad lesson I struggle every day to leave behind. Maybe your ending can be another step in the games industry’s evolution toward healthier practices, and a step in my own as well.
