A Short Letter About GameInformer

To my understanding, a part of growing up is continually seeing the world in a different light. As kids we yearn for the alleged freedom of adulthood, having whatever job we want and assuming that we’d have the means to live our lives freely, because why wouldn’t we? Having a fun job has to be infinitely better than going to school and doing homework all night. And we get paid money to do things! Isn’t that grand?

Once we finally reach adulthood, we realize just how lucky we were as kids and see the cycle repeat itself in the youth, no matter what generation you grew up in. Kids always think life is way more serious than it is at that point and that it sucks. Adults wish they could be kids again because they didn’t know how good they had it until now. Everyone yearns for freedom, but ‘freedom’ is always taxing, and real freedom is always out of reach. Something that persists through both of these parts of life though, is experience. Inspiration. As children we see things, read them, watch them happen right in front of our eyes and it lights something inside us. For me, I wanted to be a film director after seeing George Lucas’s name in the end credits of The Phantom Menace. As I got older, I left that dream behind because I didn’t learn anything about the craft of filmmaking (nor did I really want to outside of Star Wars), but I did pick up a heavy interest in writing when I got to middle school. From then on, my writing would take various shapes: for classes, I would slog through the boring research essays and citations for things that I didn’t care about. I would find my home in poetry and even take a crack at writing a novel on Wattpad that would never see an ending, let alone an actual story. I think I just wanted to write about my friends and go on an adventure. Middle school was a creative three years.

In high school, I would abandon writing after my freshman year. I took a creative writing course, bought a copy of Stephen King’s On Writing because it was in the syllabus, and wrote short stories that were just assignments to turn in. Looking back, I actually enjoy some of the stories I wrote. One time I had pretty bad writer’s block on account of my not wanting to write in the first place, so I ended up writing a story about a character who traveled across the page waiting for the next event to happen, keenly aware of the author’s pen strokes as the story went on. He got anxious, then annoyed at the writer for taking so long to develop the next plot point and started spouting off his own suggestions for things to pass the time and keep the story rolling. I’m not sure where it is now, but I’m confident I can find it if I ever tear through my old high school binders.

This lack of desire to write would eventually go away when I got to junior year and fell in love with American Literature. I had a wonderful teacher, overtly passionate about the subject matter, and it helped that I had a crush on her too. Infatuation aside, she was a genuine gift in my life for doing the work she did and instilling in me what would be a love for the written word. In my sophomore year of college, after the pandemic, I changed my major from Video Game Design and Development to English with my field of study as Creative Writing.

College writing was a series of things that mirrored my development as a writer up until that point. Freshman year was research papers, sophomore year was literary analysis, junior and senior years were a mix of fiction/poetry/more analysis. Interspersed through my breaks from school and in my free time I began writing about video games. I started my Medium blog where I would review whatever I was playing, trying to talk about games in a way where I broke down the elements and dug deep into what made them work and what didn’t. A few years later I joined SUPERJUMP, an online gaming magazine that focuses on appreciating games and touting them as a wonderful medium with incredible depth.

Before I jump too far into the present, I’d like to step back a bit. I write about video games not just because I love them, but because they are my life. I’ve been playing them since before I could read, they mean more to me than some people (which sounds crazy but think about how many people you’ve only met once and how many of them made a bad first impression. See what I mean?), and I write to show my love and admiration for them. I even tried working at GameStop, the store where I was, and still sort of am, a regular. So, imagine my disdain when I realized how shitty of a company GameStop is?

I was never attached to GameInformer the way most people were. I don’t think I even knew that video game magazines were a big thing when I was a kid, but I get their appeal and where they fit into the timeline. Even if GameInformer never inspired me through its content, its mere existence and seeing it on the shelf was enough to spark something in me that made me want to create. I know it inspired the people around me, the people I write alongside, the people who let me write for them, and I know that its sudden departure strikes fear into people like me who want to write about games because we love them. And on top of all that, I can’t imagine what it’s like to get laid off when you’re 70% through your next project, let alone have it be delivered through social media –and what’s crazier is that it’s the second time that’s happened this week!

There isn’t much else to say in this rambling. Gamestop is a shit company. I worked there for a week, and it was enough. The membership isn’t worth anything, and them cutting GameInformer the way they did is absolutely diabolical, especially considering their prior post about physical games. We live in an era where execs keep outing themselves as ignorant of the companies that they run. Nobody cares about long-term results and sustainability. The age of information and the rapid development of technology have made people hungry for immediate gratification. Dopamine floods millions of brains to the point where we can become numb to it. We’re losing our sense of humanity in exchange for some quick fixes and it’s a nightmare. But giving up and letting the world sink further into unsustainability is only going to make things worse.

I’m not sure what the point of this essay is, but please for the love of God never stop creating. Never stop trying to pioneer your next creative endeavor. Take breaks — we all need to rest at some point — but don’t lose momentum. Support your fellow artists in any way you can.