Interviewer’s Introduction
The Unmaking of a Ludic Century
Born in 1981, Leigh Artemise Alexander was raised in a middle-class, biracial household in the Middlesex County region of Massachusetts, about an hour west of Boston.1 She attended Montessori for elementary and middle school, then public high school, and showed an early proclivity for reading and performance—interests that would come to be tilted through the prism of her preternatural access to computers, games, and the internet. It was a generational inheritance of sorts: Her father was a consumer tech journalist for the Boston Globe, leaving the rooms and corners of the Alexander home teeming with the gadgets of a thriving American electronics sector. She remembers the folding door on her father’s closet as a portal to endless worlds, packed tight and choking with press copies of computer games. In the basement, a laundry table held, quite specifically, her Apple IIe, her Commodore 64.2 Alexander’s access to this technology was, in her own words, “unmitigated.” She was on the internet before most of us, trawling through USENET, corresponding with older men, bouncing through web rings and plumbing the depths of domain names in the days when such things still felt like discovery, before Google had eaten the internet and spat out an index. “I grew up on the internet as well,” she reminds me, when I ask a naïve question about comment-section rape jokes in the two-thousand-aughts. “I was on 4chan. […] I was one of those people, and I had been sort of immersed and indoctrinated into a culture where that was normalized.”
Figure 1
Leigh Alexander cuts a certain path through history (see fig. 1). It’s hard to think of someone more iconoclastic among the game-journalism literati of the late aughts and through the mid-2010s, and her ascent is instructive on the myriad forces that propelled game journalism’s turn from print to digital over the early decades of the twenty-first century. She started her game culture blog, sexyvideogameland.blogspot.com, in 2007, where her unusual blend of bratty snark and bright insight, her propulsive writing style, and the sheer intensity of her internet persona (coming from a girl, no less) swiftly raised the value of her online profile. She cut her teeth in the industry at Destructoid (then a brash collective of bloggy writers throat-punching each other in the comments section) and had moved through Gamasutra and Kotaku and back to Gamasutra by 2008. The game journalism space was relatively shallow for a talent like hers; she could type fast, file faster, drink harder. Her extensive collection of bylines across the game-publishing space illustrates both a flair for critical commentary as well as a deep curiosity about the nuts and bolts of industry operations. She enjoyed her proximity to development culture and was propelled by a simple mandate: Games should be better.
And the Western cultural gatekeepers, for their part, were ready to share in this provocation—sort of. The late aughts through the mid-2010s marked a convergence of stakeholders semi-invested in giving games a seat at the table of cultural affairs. The Smithsonian American Art Museum debuted The Art of Video Games in 2012, assembling eighty games across seven eras into a (relatively panned) show.3 The Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) cast its long shadow toward games that same year, hoovering up works as wide ranging as Pac-Man, Myst, and Dwarf Fortress into its esteemed collections.4 Traditional four-year universities dabbled in game-development curriculums, while the emergent humanities field of game studies jerked through a gawky adolescence, as games were pushed through the sieves of literary studies, continental philosophy, art history, and more. Legacy media outlets like The New York Times and Newsweek were lining up game criticism verticals, to say nothing of the work happening at Polygon or Kill Screen.
Such moves were as much about the thrashing of great institutions gambling for relevance as they were real critical accolade, and yet it all pushed against a status quo of who games writing was for and what it could be. If the overzealous generalization was that game-industry coverage had, for decades, largely been conscripted to hype corporate press releases or score games on a scale of Awesomeness, the sense of what the market would tolerate began to expand. There were personal essays and virtual ethnographies, elaborate critical reflections situating Kim Kardashian Hollywood within the racial trajectory of the OJ Simpson trial, everyone “just absolutely slitting our wrists and marketing our personal traumas to talk about motherfucking Tomb Raider,” Alexander recalls (with appropriate chagrin).5 Alexander’s own eclectic contributions to this scene included a ten-part epistolary exchange with Kirk Hamilton about Final Fantasy VII published at Paste, and “This Is Why We Video Gaming,” a Soundcloud-based, beat-poetry-styled two-minute-and-thirty-four-second review of Grand Theft Auto V.6 “You can do. A lot of Things. Not too many things. Just enough things,” Alexander speaks haltingly into the mic, assuredly taking the piss out of Rockstar’s masterpiece. “Most of the things you can do are: Helicopter. Base jump. Shoot. Drive. Run. Shoot. Drive. Run. Swim.”
All this hunger for new kinds of thoughts and words about games was fed by a turn in game development itself, as digital distribution gave rise to the indie games movement: Works like Braid, Journey, and Passage provided a raft of headlines about the unbelievable futures of games, what they could be, whether they could make you cry. Meanwhile, everyone with an iPhone now had a game device in their pocket; the most serious person you knew was playing Temple Run or Fruit Ninja between meetings. Games were everywhere, in forms and styles and aspect ratios no one had ever experienced before. We were living in, as Eric Zimmerman declared it, “The Ludic Century.”7
Until we weren’t. What it’s turned out to be is something else: a century of attention and enshittification; of virtual plunder and misinformation, fake news and dark patterns; of surveillance capitalism. Many of these trends were also crystallizing in the mid-2010s, as the Web 2.0 social media and user-generated-content oligarchs began tinkering with their algorithms, just so, in service of driving engagement. Some ghosts were knocking about in the ventilation as early as 2012, when feminist cultural critic Anita Saarkesian launched a modest Kickstarter hoping to raise $6000 to fund a series of didactic YouTube videos about sexist tropes in video games. What she got for her efforts were hate sites, DDOSing attacks on her website, doxxing of her personal address, handmade drawings of her being raped by Nintendo characters, even an interactive “game” in which the player could beat her in the face.8 The scale and scope of these kinds of harassment campaigns were built-in network effects of sites like 4chan, Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit.9 It was a time of tidal contradictions: the same systems allowing more people than ever to make games and play games and write about games—games of a greater variety and personality than had ever been produced, games that were validating a dramatic upsell in the medium’s cultural reputation—these same systems were also what allowed these harassment campaigns to become so persistent, reach so far beyond their measure, cast such shadows, long and weird. And these were the same systems that fed, just two years later, the titanic cultural embarrassment that was Gamergate—itself a massive online harassment campaign driven by a similar indeterminate, decentralized hive of trolls masquerading under the merkin of a consumer rights movement. Like many others, Alexander’s career would pivot on the axis of these events.
“‘Gamers’ Are Over”
It began late in the summer of 2014, in the stupidest way possible: when twenty-four -year-old Eron Gjoni found out his ex, a minor league indie games darling and game developer named Zoë Quinn, had been cheating on him with then-Kotaku games journalist Nathan Grayson.10 Gjoni publicly exposed the alleged infidelity in a roughly nine-thousand-word screed on WordPress unfolding over six acts, warning the internet “to be cautious of Zoe.” From there a cabal of 4chan Hardy Boys figured out Grayson had given Quinn some friendly coverage of their game Depression Quest prior to their romantic relationship, and the Western games blogosphere went ballistic. Grayson was pilloried, Kotaku was accused of journalistic malfeasance, and Quinn was subject to a phenomenal, degrading outpouring of internet sludge, death threats, and slut shaming.11 If you weren’t in in the Western online game culture scene at the time, it all seemed a bit unhinged, an inscrutable rat’s nest of hyperlinked conspiratorial “evidence,” JPEG shitposts, and lulz-ware.
Surveying that situation from perhaps the highest perch in cultural commentary on games at that moment, Leigh Alexander dropped into a well-practiced offensive stance. Her intent, in her own recollection, was to silence the fury that had erupted toward Quinn. She wanted the internet to move on. “I was kind of like a closing pitcher, discourse-wise,” she tells me. “I would just like wait a couple days and then I’d come in with a column and shut it all down.”
The column, titled “‘Gamers’ Don’t Have to Be Your Audience. ‘Gamers’ Are Over,” ran on August 28, 2014, at Gamasutra, and served as an exhausted, imperious takedown of a gaming community that failed to see their complicity with a system of gendered oppression (see fig. 2).12 Historicizing the gamer as the witless inheritor of capitalism’s golden apple, Alexander laid into these “lonely basement kids [who] had marketers whispering in their ears that they were the most important commercial demographic of all time.” The rage she summoned was pointed not at Gjoni’s post per se, but at all the gamers who’d fallen for the industry’s obvious self-interest in coddling them into a fugue of consumption. The logic was clear: If there was a conspiracy in the air, it was not Grayson putting a screenshot of the free-to-download Depression Quest at the top of a less-than-three-hundred-word Rock Paper Shotgun story about Valve’s Greenlight list. It was how a half-billion-dollar US game industry had convinced every Playstation-owning American male between the ages of sixteen and thirty-five that they should never have to encounter an opinion on the internet about video games that made them uncomfortable. “These obtuse shitslingers, these wailing hyper-consumers, these childish internet-arguers,” Alexander intoned, as if conjuring a plague. “They are not my audience.”
Figure 2
Screenshot of Alexander’s article “‘Gamers’ Don’t Have to Be Your Audience,” published at Gamasutra (now Game Developer ). Screenshot sourced using The Wayback Machine, snapshot dated August 28, 2014, https://web.archive.org/web/20140828174940/http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/224400/Gamers_dont_have_to_be_your_audience_Gamers_are_over.php .
In the realm of human perception, there’s various terms diagnosing the moment when time appears to slow down during a high-stress incident: tachypsychia, chronostasis, time dilation. All are characterized by a sharpening of attention, the compensatory thickening of perceptual detail. Gaming’s cultural momentum seemed to freeze, then tilt, as outlets followed Alexander’s lead. “Death of the Gamer” think pieces poured like molten metal, rescripting the Quinnspiracy as the last gasp of a dying breed. The air was heavy with something; a new world seemed tantalizingly possible. And then time rushed toward us, and the whole situation went nuclear.13
Objects Are Closer Than They Appear
In 2024, “Gamers Are Over” reached its tenth anniversary. I’d been wondering about a retrospective for a year or two, puzzling out how the essay might be best positioned in history’s sideview mirror. And I wondered about an interview with Alexander herself, something sprawling and full-scale; Alexander’s historical function, obviously, went well beyond any individual piece. I’d done dozens of oral histories with figures in the 1980s and ʼ90s computer-game industry, but it would have been my first with a subject whose historical significance hovered so close to contemporary events. Events I’d been present for, even. I wrote to Alexander in July 2024, admitting my tremendous admiration for the essay: “so angry, so furious, so correct,” I typed.
As already suggested, part of the dynamism of Alexander as an interlocuter is the extent to which her personal biography is braided into the trajectory of gaming’s twisting twenty-first-century form. As a child she’d teethed on the earliest offerings of America’s consumer computing industry, only to grow up holding a front-row seat to the most concentrated creative flourishing in the history of the video game medium. And yet, the way Alexander experienced these historical affairs was structured through her own complex positionality. Biracial yet white-passing, queer but not-yet-fully-attune-to-it, loud and femme and at war with her limits, Alexander mapped herself to a culture industry that had never been intended to hold her—but nonetheless positioned its acceptance of her as proof of the industry’s progressive achievements.
What follows is a powerfully individualized telling of gaming’s coming-of-age story—its before, its during, and its many persistent afterlives. In Alexander’s recollections, we’re able to surf alongside her a bit in the New York games journalism scene (a community not yet well documented beyond its own publications). The blistering sexism of the industry is relayed to us through Alexander’s sharpness and candor, materialized in unwanted touches, uninvited comments, unendingly aching feet from days spent stalking E3 showroom floors and Moscone concrete in her “high heels”;14 it’s about the ways we consent to something in the moment that doesn’t quite taste like violence, but isn’t the stuff of flourishing either. And we glimpse, acutely, the many double binds constructed by her role: As a highly visible, gainfully employed journalist in a precarious market, Alexander describes walking a narrow ledge across the gratitude expected by her minders and keepers, the accountability to privilege needed by her community, and the assumed (over)familiarity of her online audience. For all the room she had to maneuver, these pressures left her oddly circumscribed. There is grief here, in all the ways she felt she couldn’t win: not with the indies, not with the queer scene, and certainly not with the mainstream industry. Unfolding below is a highly affective and extremely personal interview, shot through with the struggles of substance addiction, emotional self-regulation, and the vagaries of self-perception.
Pragmatics and Details
The interview itself was conducted over three sessions, each scheduled for approximately ninety minutes, held on August 15, August 20, and August 27, 2024. Sessions were conducted in the podcast recording app Riverside; Alexander called in from Brighton, UK, while I spoke to her from my office in New York City. The three sessions were broken up by rough chronology. Our first interview focused on Alexander’s childhood, education, and the economic and social context of her upbringing, followed by a survey of her time in community college, acting school, and her early entry into games journalism. The second interview focused more explicitly on Alexander’s formal rise through games journalism, leading up to and just beyond the time period surrounding Gamergate. And the third interview focused on Alexander’s life and career after leaving game journalism in the late 2010s. In between each of these interviews (on the evening of the day they occurred), Alexander would experience an extended dissociative episode, brought on by the intensity of surfacing the subject matter.
This conversation produced a transcript of approximately 52,000 words, which I have carved down to roughly 29,000. In order to make the transcript more manageable for publication, the interview has been broken into two parts. The first part, published here, begins with Alexander’s arrival to New York City in 2002, shortly before she began writing games criticism, and covers her trajectory up through Gamergate, until just before she leaves journalism. The second part, planned for the July 2026 issue of ROMchip, will cover her subsequent career as a game developer focused on narrative design. The title of this interview, “Actor, Writer, Technology Spirit,” derives from a set of descriptors Alexander uses to explain the various roles game design allows her to embody (she uses these terms in the part of the interview that will be published in July 2026).
A complete transcript of the interview, as well as its video/audio recordings, is intended to be preserved at the Brian Sutton-Smith Archives at the Strong Museum of Play. Future historians are advised to reach out to their staff for complete documentation.
Interview 1: August 15, 2024
Laine Noony: So, you would have graduated from high school in 1999. You go to community college immediately for one semester.
Leigh Alexander: It’s either immediately or a year, I’m not quite sure.
LN: So, you’re about, nineteen, twenty, [community college is] not working. You come home and then you...
LA: Mm-hmm. And then I applied to [acting] school in New York to try to live my dream. I moved to New York City in 2002. I was twenty years old. It was right after 9/11 because there was still a lot of dust. It wasn’t 9/11, but there was still a lot of dust. […]
LN: So you’re twenty years old, you show up in New York City. What is that experience?
LA: Oh my God, it was very, very overwhelming. I’d always wanted to live in New York. I used to tear maps of New York out of National Geographic as a child and tape them up. I was thrilled to be there. There’s a really large Art Deco hotel on 34th Street called the New Yorker Hotel that had been converted, there was a part of the hotel block that was being used as dormitories for us.
So, I was living on 34th and 8th between Penn Station and Times Square and walking every day to this rigorous acting program. I was dancing six or eight hours a week, too, and singing and working out most of the time. I said that I had mental health issues but there’s certain things that happen to girls when they’re under tremendous pressure. And I was very susceptible to those things.
It was also the first time I had been in an environment that was not majority white, as a person who…like, I’m careful about how I identify myself. I don’t want to say that I’m a Black person unless like I’m with a Black person who sees me that way. And I’m very white passing, and I want to be conscious of that, but I’m not white. And it is a frequency that people who aren’t white also pick up on. And so, I had like experiences of people from other races for the first time and, you know, got to see another piece of myself in relation to the world. That was overwhelming at first, too, to go from a rural place to a multicultural place as a person who’s always been so confused about her own cultural background. I went through a lot of confusion there.
LN: You were under enormous pressure.
LA: I put myself under enormous pressure. It was me who was in war with myself. I had very rigorous standards of how I wanted to perform and what I would accept of myself. I had a combination of high standards and low functioning, and those don’t synchronize very well. […]
When we graduated, I lived on Roosevelt Island for a year near the Octagon Park. I used to run my compulsive five miles a day in circles around the Octagon Park, living in my own crazy movie. […]
LN: So where does life take you at that moment? […]
LA: I was just trying to survive. I was living with a partner and we were living paycheck to paycheck, and we’re thinking about food and rent and me trying to work as best as I can. […]
So, what was I doing? I was trying to get jobs. I know it sounds like I shouldn’t have been taking care of children, but I was actually able to, like, get myself—there were these rich Upper East Side moms whose lives who, despite all their money, they were less mentally well than me and their lives were a bigger mess than mine. And at least I could keep their four-year-old from getting diaper rash because she still wears one. So, I took care of other people to take care of myself.
But I kept trying and I started to recover and I left my codependent relationship, which helped. I swapped various addictions for each other for. You know, progress is a spiral and I spiraled upward instead of downward. And I started writing this blog because everyone was starting the blog, and I thought, “Oh, I can do that. Like that’s something I can do.”
LN: Yeah, tell me about your blog.
LA: So, I had actually been auditioning for like anchor-girl jobs on video game channels. I looked the part in my twenties, you know, I was cute and all. I had to maintain the beauty standard for, you know, my career ambitions. So, I would get these on-camera auditions to be a host, but I didn’t know at that time, despite having been to acting school, I didn’t really know what to do. Like I’m a good presenter now for some reason, but at that time I had no idea what I was doing. So, I was like, “What do I have to say?” It sort of provoked me to think about what would I have to say.
And yeah, I’d heard about this whole blogging thing and I started a blog. I called it—it was a time when blogs had, like, cool trendy names. It really reminded me of when I was on the web in the nineties and I admired all the “everything/nothing” sites. Do you remember E/N sites?15 I don’t even remember the names of all of them, but they were web rings of people that just posted nonsense content and shock content. And I just thought they were the coolest people in the world. And I just, like, wanted to have my own, like, dangerous blog about video games. And yes, they all had, like, funny run-on sentence names back then. And I had the idea that I would call mine “sexyvideogameland dot blogspot dot com.”16
And part of the thinking was that it was just catchy, you know, “sexyvideogameland” but also that sexy was a technology term at the time. You know, “How do we take this dorky thing and make it sexy?” So, I was interested in the sexification of video games, not from a sex standpoint, but from, like, as a technologist, as I had felt all my life sort of excluded by games in two ways: that they were sexist and that they were intellectually crude. You know what I mean?
There’s a lot of games that I love that were incredibly broken but incredibly imaginative, and a lot of very successful games that I really found soulless. And basically, as much as I love games, there was nothing in the medium on the frequency that I wanted to listen to. And for me, trying to talk about them, I thought that I could change this environment through criticism. That was a specific mandate of mine. I started writing about games because I had a passion for how I wanted them to be better. […] And I know that makes me sound arrogant, but whatever. I was not satisfied as a consumer by the offerings. They didn’t speak to me. And so, I wanted to write about what was and what would.
LN: I was curious about whether you had a sense as a younger person, maybe a teenager or a young adult, that games were for boys or something? Was that a…
LA: I was more one of those girls who was alienated by girly things. Ehhh…my thing with my gender is complicated. I mostly played with boys and I played games with boys, but maybe that’s because I thought that, you know...games were for boys, and if I wanted to play games, I should play with boys. Because when I think about it, I also played games with girls. I grew up playing games with girls, you know, like my neighbor who played Colossal Cave with me was a girl. My neighbor who played King’s Quest 7 with me and [King’s Quest] 6 with me was a girl. I played computer games with girls all the time, but console games were stuff I did with boys. Yeah, I don’t know, there’s an interesting gender divide in the computing environment, which I’m sure you’re well aware of but [hesitantly] I don’t know if it was so much…it’s hard to describe. Yeah, I just thought they were dumb. [laughter] Yeah, masculine and dumb sometimes. However though, the first time I played God of War, was like, “Oh my God, like I love this.” I would play Soulcalibur with the boob physics and I’d be like, “I love this.”
In fact, one of my earliest professional columns on games was about me loving problematic things. Things that I’m not supposed to like or things that are gratuitously violent or gratuitously sexist or sexual or disgusting content. Like, “Why am I playing this game and why do people enjoy this?” was a huge fascination of mine. I wanted to know, “Why am I this into Silent Hill?” It’s weird. [laughter] So I was really interested, I think, in exploring appetite from an emotional and psychological perspective. […]
And so, when I had this blog, I pretty quickly gathered a small community of a few hundred people. Every day I would check my stat counter and see if some of the IP addresses were from video game companies. And sometimes they were, and I was really excited. […] I was in a web ring, there was a really nice critical blogosphere of people who wanted to look at games in this way and people said we were pretentious and stuff, but it was sort of paralleling what was being done in music criticism, too, which was also trying to become less democratic and institutional at the same time. So, I think, me, myself as well as a few others were following the templates of other critical forums rather than following the templates of game journalism and game reviewing, which are consumer oriented and advertorial oriented. Obviously, as you know, the standard model for game criticism up until the time, the era that I started working in was, you know, telling people to buy it or not. Telling people what was coming up next. […] And I think for me, I was interested in games as culture separately from games as product. And so were the people that I found kinship with around this time. […]
LN: How were you folks finding each other during this kind of extremely embryonic moment?
LA: God, that’s such a good question. I mean, how did people find blogs? They browsed and people linked to each other. And you had a blog roll, it was like a web ring. If you met someone that you liked or you read an article that you liked, you could email the person who wrote it, you could correspond. And if you liked each other’s work, you add each other to your blog roll. And so, it becomes like a recommendation network of navigation. There wasn’t any sort of social media to devalue those kinds of connections. They were very rare and hard won. […]
Eventually a lot of us did end up starting to work for the major publications. Within six months of starting my blog, I was working at Destructoid.17 Which again, that’s more of like a conventional game journalism lens. But at the time that I joined it, they were very radical and experimental, and just like[d] to post whatever weird shit, you know, so it was kind of fun to work there. And then within a few months of working at Destructoid, I was an editor at Gamasutra, working for game developers. I was very driven, I think. […] And I was also very lucky, and there weren’t a lot of girls, so… [laughter]
LN: How did someone circa 2004, 2005 make money as a blogger on Blogspot?
LA: Oh, you didn’t. [laughter] The intention was to build a content brand so that I could get hired by...[clarifying] So there were blogs that paid you to blog, and you got picked up by having a blog that was cool. So, if you got a cool, visible blog and you were getting linked to week after week on Metafilter or whatever, someone might pay you for your content and you might get asked to work in magazines. So, for me, blogging was a foothold to a journalism career. […]
I think I reached out on my own initiative to Simon Carless, who was the editor in chief [at Gamasutra] at the time. And I said, “Hey, you, here’s my blog. If you have any journalism work, let me know. I’m in New York.” And he’s like, “Actually, there’s a Games for Change festival in New York this weekend. And if you want to go and cover it, we will pay you.” Basically, he’s like, no one wants to go to Games for Change and listen to them talk, you know? But I wanted to do that stuff. And then Simon was like, “Okay, do you want to write about virtual economies?” And I was like, “Yes! I would love to.” Like, virtual economy is a cornerstone of virtual society! […] I think for a professional woman who was highly tech savvy and driven and forward, and doing outreach to people, and I had my body of work online, I had people to vouch for me—I think there weren’t a lot of people who were as willing as I was to work the way that I did at the time. […]
LN: If we were to take from this moment—when you begin getting your first gigs, suddenly becoming a professional games journalist—I think there’s two ways of telling that story that I would be really interested in hearing you narrate. And one is: “What online game journalism became, or went through, during that time period?” Because you’re there at its, like, weirdest origin point, right? […] And then, there’s what’s going on at the industry scale that you feel like you watched happen? And there’s also, what was your experience within it?
LA: […] God, I could tell you two stories, I felt two ways about it so much of the time. You know, it was really cool for me to be part of this rise—you know, I was there for the rise of indie games and there were some very powerful moments in which I felt that the industry was approaching this creative threshold that I had longed for. And I got to go to the E3s and I got to…in some ways it was like a tremendously spectacular time. I felt like a star. You know, I had fans, you know what I mean? [laughter] I couldn’t go anywhere. I met all my heroes. I met Hideo Kojima. You know what I mean? [laughter] All this stuff happened.
But you know, I was also under an incredible amount of stress that I was coping with through drinking. The toll that being a visible, noncompliant woman in the game industry took on me, that early on, was already significant before we reached that tipping point. Because I was early and I was outspoken and it was fucking worse on me. There were times that I was the only girl anywhere. I had to go to engine demos at strip clubs. It wasn’t so much that anyone did anything awful to me—though there were times that a lot of adults were inappropriate with me. [clarifying] I was twenty-seven, but it felt like that people with unfavorable power dynamics were inappropriate to me.
There was harassment and you couldn’t fuck up. There were the commenters, you know, and then once social media happens, they’re capable of…you know, I had already endured multiple large-scale harassment episodes before Gamergate, and had threats made to my life and comments made on my body. And before we had any kind of dialogue about it in the industry, there was a lot of, “Well she’s just very outspoken,” “She likes attention.” [frustrated] Like…because I was building a content brand for my fucking living, you know what I mean? I was pathologized a lot by people for that. I was not given any kind of, like, softness or support, we didn’t have any kind of, you know “trust and safety team.” That shit did not exist. It was “Suck it the fuck up, girl.” I had to be “professional.” For me to show emotion was unprofessional. And I really struggled with that. So, either I was really hardworking and professional, or I was fricking drunk, and that’s a very difficult way to run your career.
So, it was physically, you know…I would go to GDC [Game Developers Conference] twice a year, because I had two GDCs a year. I would go to E3. I would go to all these conferences in my high heels, because you can’t…in those days, I had to wear makeup. Like I couldn’t show up just looking like a game developer the way that I can now. And so, my feet would be killing me. My hips would be killing me. I’d be drinking to kill the pain. These people would be fucking touching me. These people would be disrespecting me. And it was hard work, it’s just hard work that shredded your nerves. It was hard for anyone. So, it was just fucking…it was grueling and I hated it. And it was so hard to know who to trust. And I was considered some kind of cult of personality to my immediate peers, and to my readers, and people talked about me like they knew me when they didn’t. As I’ve said, I already had a background in being very socially alienated, so that was so hard. [voice cracking] […]
I guess, on an industry level, I guess we could say that it was the indie games movement, [it] was, like, very positive. [sarcastically] We just had a different way to kind of be excited about boy geniuses and their feelings, which were more…I don’t know, I’ll probably be emotional and bitter here, so I’m going to try to stick to facts, which I don’t super remember that much. I really think it was cool when we had like a queer-led interactive fiction movement. That was awesome. [voice cracking] Like…that was awesome. [crying]
LN: [softly] Hey...
LA: I’m sorry.
LN: It’s okay. It’s okay.
LA: [sniffles] I loved that so much. And that made it like...worth it. Even though I was considered, like, “the man” at the time and like part of the machine.
LN: Because you were a journalist?
LA: Yeah, people were very—you know, it was also a time that we were learning our vocabulary around identity. And we were learning our vocabulary around accountability. And how to, let’s say, process abuse allegations. And, as a journalist, I was often caught in the middle of, like, litigating these things among these vulnerable creators. I felt a lot of pressure. You know, like, “Am I platforming an abuser?” or “Am I starving this trans woman by not covering her work?” It was just, it was a lot of difficult decisions to make. So, I couldn’t really even join the queer community the way that I wanted to, because I had spent so long covering my own ass. You know, like I’m trying not to…I really passed [as straight]. I really worked hard to pass. It was already so hard, Laine. It was so hard. Yeah, I’m talking about myself again…
LN: It’s okay. I mean, we experience the violence of these systems through ourselves, right? […]
LA: [murmuring in agreement] Yeah, yes. Yeah, so I loved the work these women were doing, and I felt terrible that I couldn’t protect them from how they were treated. Because they never made it. They were used for this glory story about how great the games industry was and they never saw revenue for these…like, I can’t explain how grateful I am for these certain works. The people are just gonna forget, you know, and that fucking sucks. Like, Nazis always burned queer history first and that’s what they did. […]
LN: I was wondering, as someone who watched it happen, what indie games looked like from inside your perspective? When did you begin to identify that there was this “thing” happening? Like, it’s always been a curiosity of mine [about] when do we turn and even begin to use this language of “the indie” around these particular cultural products. Because that is intended to carry a political and cultural valence or credibility? And I think there’s a normative history we have—which is, it’s Fez and it’s [Super] Meat Boy…
LA: Mmm, yeah. No, I definitely have an alternate history. Because I’ve always experienced games in a way that is not siloed by product culture, I think games have always been indie. Some of my earliest memories are getting a CD-ROM in the mail with ninety-nine free shareware point-and-click world-builder games. And I was playing indie games since I’m a child, you know what I mean? On the web, playing Shockwave and Flash games, you know what I mean?
I understood that indie was sort of this marketing term, [but] what we were actually championing was…at this time, we had, and still do have, this massive cultural insecurity in ourselves as a medium. So, the way games talk about ourselves, and the way we talk to others about ourselves, is led by this plea for legitimacy. We want an article in The New York Times about how we’re not for babies anymore. And this indie game trend, I think, was really useful for that. We had these men now who are artists and who actually make good interviews, and who make good art, any way you slice it. Those games are still good art. I think it was a really good narrative for the insecure mainstream-facing game industry the way that The Last of Us is. Like, oh, “We can make a game that’s just like a television show. And now we’re real Hollywood.” It’s very sad. But at the time, I recall being quite happy with it. I don’t think I had the media literacy at that time to scrutinize it on the level that I’m articulating it now. [laughter] You know what I mean?
LN: It seemed like…there was a sense that, this is the moment in which we get to be taken seriously, and it was understood as a kind of watershed experience.
LA: Yes, it was. And, like, I’m in the credits of Fez. Phil was my friend. It felt like people on my scene that I knew were succeeding. So that was nice. It felt like a win for…there is a lot of insular culture within game development, like the people who chill at GDC every year. There’s a social network of about the same 1,500 people for the last twenty years, where half my work comes from. You know what I mean? And so, I think…in terms of what “we” as, if I can say, if what “we” as a design community were valuing, this was a success of a lot of our principles. I think there’s also a political philosophy to this particular notion of indie. These are games that are made by these introspective men using sort of spiritually inspired puzzle mechanics. I think that’s true of a lot of these. They have a strong visually defined art style and some kind of, like, deeper meaning that the developer thinks about. Sometimes they’re meant to be shocking or jarring. They’re meant to confound your expectations of what a game can be. So, there’s a series of criteria that were—clearly this is not, like, just a revolution for openness. It’s a series of criteria that apply to a particular series of projects.
But I think it tells you, again, that the dominant paradigm, even in the soft part of the game industry, was white and male. And they wanted design and aesthetics that were orderly. And I don’t want to gender game design so easily as that—to say that anyone who makes something that’s sparse and orderly is masculine, that’s not true at all—so let me see if I can say it better. I guess what I understood the platonic ideal of game design to be, as authored by the dominant paradigm, was represented through these projects. This kind of aestheticism and this design purism, I think I would call it. Which I think is kind of the opposite of what happened on the queer scene later, which was a rejection of that kind of hegemonic design purism and that definition of independence. So yeah, we can get to that. But yeah, I think that’s very relevant—that we had a definition of independence that was, while genuinely independent, was driven nonetheless by the design values of the dominant paradigm. There, I’ve said it. [laughter]
LN: […] That’s a beautiful description, a really nice articulation of what you were witnessing. I’m curious about—and if the memory for this isn’t there, that’s cool—but I was wondering about, like, how you thought about your writing practice.
LA: You know, I think I would have to check my timelines. But probably, I started out blogging, and then I tried to be a really professional journalist so that I wouldn’t get attacked. And then I think, alongside the rise of indie speculative games and soft culture, there was an opportunity again to be a little more narrative in my own work, and a little more experiential in my own work. Like, let’s say if you write about Journey, you’re not gonna write a game review, you write about the feelings that Journey conjures. Or I guess at the time it would have been Flow. But so, I think, like, I probably felt permission to...write in a more grand and articulate way, to befit this important movement that we [were] seeing. Similarly, with everyone else, to switch to confessional journalism in the next couple of years, too, which is very personal and very experiential. And that happened alongside the work that I was writing about. So, I think there’s a natural shift in the journalistic environment to be appropriate to the work that’s being done. And yeah, I still felt very much obligated to be professional to these great men of history and take their work very seriously. […]
LN: I was curious about a term I’ve heard you use a couple of times: professional journalist. [laughter both] Or “professional journalism.” Because you go from this kind of, like, ragged blogger space, where you’re trying to do, like, “danger sexy writing” about gaming, to “I’m an editor at Gamasutra, I’m a professional journalist,” and I’m like—what is your set of assumptions about what that means?
LA: You don’t insert your personal bias. So, if you know anything about the audience for games journalism, they’re really passionate about journalism despite knowing nothing about it. [laughter] They’re gonna read a review, which is by definition an opinion, and then get mad that it’s an opinion and it doesn’t contain facts. You know what I mean? So, I was already working for an audience with an imperfect understanding of what professional journalism is.
LN: And that existed…we’re talking 2006, 2007?
LA: It’ll never go away in games. There were some people, for example, like Stephen Totilo or Brian Crecente at Kotaku, who had formal reporting backgrounds and approached the work with a formal reporting background. There were other people like me who were experiential writers first and foremost and who were mostly critics, and who were writing personal opinions for audiences that knew our personality. And those audiences—when I’m writing for my audience and then it bleeds out into the mainstream, then the context changes and the response changes. So that’s something you’re constantly having to deal with.
You know, I think my solution to that was always to “be professional,” which means that—I mean, undercutting this is also some sexist ideas of how I had to comport myself. And also, I’m alluding to my alcoholism a little bit. So being professional meant that I don’t do anything to threaten anyone’s expectations of me or to disrespect me as a woman. I have to be intellectual. I have to be objective. I have to be polite. I have to have a formal and business-like demeanor, both in my writing and in the way that I conduct interviews. Any kind of speculation that I do in my work has to be within an acceptable range. If I’m going to use emotional language, I have to be careful where I put it. If I’m going to be quoting a developer, I have to constantly...it was like sitting on the fuse of a bomb all the time, all the time. Because if you pissed off the publisher with what you said, you would lose your access. I desperately needed the respect and the trust of the game-development community to do my job. And given what I was up against, I think it’s a miracle that I have the good, wonderful professional network that I do. I must have done a very good job of being professional at some times, because there are some very admirable people that trust me, and that have let me interview them many times. [laughter] I can’t have been a total fuckup. But really it was this notion of professionalism was, like, to formalize my work in a traditional way to avoid upsetting the mainstream.
LN: Do you have a sense of where you drew that frame of reference for “professionalism”?
LA: For example, one of my earliest jobs, I started working at Kotaku and it was very important to Brian [Crecente] and Stephen [Totilo] that we use appropriate journalistic process—which I think everyone should if they’re gonna be reporting on a company or interviewing a business. Obviously, there’s basic principles of journalism about protecting your sources—I don’t want to come across like, “Ah, well, these formal standards of journalism were entirely oppressive to me.” That’s not true. There are standards of journalism that a professional journalist should have, which I had. An extreme notion of lack of bias and an extreme notion of professionalism was coming from my immature sexist readership who had a consumer-demand relationship to the press. […]
Interview 2: August 20, 2024
[…]
LN: So, I wanted to start by asking what would you like to revisit, if anything, about last week?
LA: I think the only thing that came to mind is I never really talked about games that I liked or reasons why I wanted to do this in the first place. So, I have a tattoo of Metal Gear Solid 3. It’s the pigeon emblem. I think I got it in about 2013, 2014, so we can talk about that.
But I was really interested in games that were doing unusual things with commercial genres. So, Kojima was my favorite director. Even though most video games that chase TV and Hollywood production norms don’t really interest me, he was sort of doing it in this conscientious and worshipful way and was really curious about the coupling of these two media and saying things about war that I, as an ignorant child, didn’t really know. So, Metal Gear really was what I felt passionate about and what I wanted to talk about. And Silent Hill, for example, there was not the analysis out there that I was, like, looking for. So yeah, even during the games-criticism era, a game like Bioshock—now it seems really corny and passe to say that you were into Bioshock, you know to be one of the games critics of the Bioshock movement [laughter] but at the time me who had never played a first-person game, you know, so I really enjoyed it. Mechanically, it felt really good to play, and I appreciated that Ken Levine was trying to say something more with it. […]
But yeah, that was the only thing that really came to mind. Otherwise, I think it was a really great experience for me. It’s just useful to put all these things in order. And to understand that they have a context, and that I’m not crazy. [laughter]
LN: No, you’re definitely not crazy.
LA: You know, that I, like, didn’t imagine it. It’s just nice to get another perspective on the things I thought were happening at the time and that they were real.
LN: You referred to the “games criticism” era. What would you define that as?
LA: [laughter] So I guess, the time we started blogging and there was the brainy blogosphere and you know—this is post-New Games [journalism].18 Like, there’s this New Games journalism thing out of England, but I think kind of what we did was even kind of more mainstream. New Games journalism was about trying to be, like, the most arch-nerd that you could possibly be, and to inject your own experiences into the text. And I think, like, our era was a little different in that we were trying to talk about games in a way that was sophisticated but also outward facing. We were trying to sort of patch work games into the rest of our culture, not just our personal and individual lives, which was the New Games journalism start to that.
So, I think around about 2010, I think those of us who are working in games criticism, in games journalism, really saw it as our mandate to, like, elevate the conversation around video games—as pretentious as that sounds right now. But you know, we had product-driven media culture and then we had sort of, like, niche fandoms, which were, like, very insular. Which you know, that I myself participated in, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But there was this idea that a game like Bioshock, we could explain to normal people why it was valuable culturally.
When games started having these higher production values and these larger critical messages and there was an era of, like, the auteur theory around video games. For better or for worse, at that time, those were the hallmarks of a medium that deserved to be taken seriously by culture. And we as games critics—I know that I felt, and a lot of my peers felt, that we could be in charge of sort of explaining this to the rest of the world, and providing a level of discourse that made other people want to participate in the medium with us.
So, it was a bit up jumped and a bit pretentious and stuff like that. But you know, when I say, like, “the games-criticism era,” I mean—really a lot of people, and myself included at times, really disappeared up our own asses, writing just really grueling personal essays to review a middling console sequel. You know what I mean? [laughter] Like just absolutely slitting our wrists and marketing our personal traumas to talk about motherfucking Tomb Raider. You know what I mean? It was good what we were doing, but you know, like, I feel a bit silly about it. I mean—I don’t feel silly about it. At the time, it was what was being called for and we rose to the occasion.
LN: It was where the moment was. Are there other writers or particular works of criticism that you especially identify with that era of writing?
LA: [joking] No, there was only me. [laughter] You know, like N’Gai Croal was a big guy doing that.19 And Tom Bissell, and Chris Dahlen.20 And Michael [Abbott] from the Brainy Gamer.21 […] And Kirk Hamilton and I did a really long letter series all about Final Fantasy VII.22 [laughter] Where it was just like...fourteen installments of long correspondences between us about us playing Final Fantasy VII together, when I was a super fan and he’d never played it before. But people actually still bring that up to me as, like, a meaningful piece of games criticism that they enjoyed reading. […] There was this era of being very serious critics and I was part of that community, and I was happy and proud to be part of that community.
LN: So, I spent the weekend kind of trawling around the Internet Archive, looking up a bunch of your earliest stuff on Destructoid… […] So, your first Destructoid article drops on June 14th, 2007. […] And it’s that, “I Swear I’m Cool,” that piece, right?23 […] It was a short piece where you’re just introducing yourself to the community. And I scroll down into the comments and I kind of forgot that we had ever talked to each other on the internet this way. It’s pre–content moderation, it’s pre–community management, it’s pre–trigger warning and...two-thirds of the comments are just rape jokes. And I was like, “Oh Jesus,” right?
LA: [laughter] You know, Laine, something that is probably necessary to point out is that I grew up on the internet as well. I was on 4chan. Like, I was a /b/tard, like legitimately a /b/tard weeaboo.24 I was one of those people, and I had been sort of immersed and indoctrinated into a culture where that was normalized and that if I didn’t play along then I wasn’t cool. Like, “It’s free speech. It’s just a joke.” I was in the front of the defense league for misogynist speech because I had been sort of brainwashed that way. So, like, I don’t think—at the time, couldn’t internalize any of these responses as abnormal. I was just like, “Yay, you’re nobody on the internet unless you’re getting rape threats.” [laughter] […] I’m sure I was flattered, like, “Wow, I’m a female internet celebrity.”
LN: And then you publish your first Gamasutra piece pretty simultaneously. And it seems like you write consistently for Destructoid for about three months. Maybe longer—it was very hard to follow the Internet Archive chain. But you started at Kotaku in April 2008.25 […]
LA: Yeah, but I didn’t like it there, I think. So Destructoid, we were only getting paid like ten or twelve dollars per post. Like it was that kind of era. And it was a great opportunity for me. It was a great team and I got to do things with them and it was a great way to get my foot in the door, but it wasn’t, like, a sustainable job. So, when I had the opportunity to start doing stuff for Gamasutra and Kotaku, I did. I was probably freelancing for both of them. And then I got the chance to go full time at Kotaku, which I did.
And then I think after covering E3 with them, I realized I really hated the consumer journalism scene, and I hated E3. And I wanted to be back with the Gamasutra news team doing developer stuff because it was more, you know, it was just better. It felt less childish. […]
LN: And what was _Kotaku…_what was it like as an employee? What was its idea of itself during this time, as much as you might remember?
LA: Well, I remember it kind of being a big deal to be under the Gawker umbrella because it was the rise of this sort of, you know, democratic format journalism that was centered in New York City, where I was also living. And so it was like a big deal that I had a job in the umbrella of one of the biggest media networks in town. So, I felt like I had some credibility. You know, the people that I worked with were very good and very dedicated. And like, you know, very good at video games. [laughter] I did feel like I wasn’t from the right culture, you know what I mean? Like, I can’t play Ikaruga […] I’m not hardcore at all, I never have been. So that was a constant stress because there was certainly an expectation that the audience had of the level of skill that a Kotaku journalist should have with video games. […]
But what I remember most about being at Kotaku is like learning from Brian [Crecente] about journalism. I used to like to sit on the financial calls. I really enjoyed that. Listen to the narratives. I actually enjoyed that. And again, this was me being interested in aspects of the work that nobody else wanted to do. Like, I love to listen to the Take Two financial calls and listen to them blow up their investors about GTA [Grand Theft Auto] because it affects the development cycle. You know what I mean? And so, I found that aspect interesting, like, the figures behind the scenes. I was, like, excited to collect all the major publisher CEO interviews. I liked going to engine demonstrations. I found that really cool. I liked the business. I liked the technology. And so, I really enjoyed the proximity that traditional reporting gave me to those things. And I think for a while, I took pride in being a good reporter and I kind of put my personal voice aside for a while so that I could have a career. It wasn’t a priority. […]
LN: So you’re at Kotaku, you go to E3, and something about E3 I guess is just, like, so…rough that you’re like, “I’m done!”
LA: Yeah, like, I would feel so alienated at those trade shows because I did not have the priorities that other people had. And, like, again, I have to go to strip clubs with the heads of technology companies and get lap dances in front of them. Like, this has happened, you know? And I feel like I’m not cool if I say no, you know? So, there’s like borderline sexual violation in these spaces, so.
LN: You had to accept lap dances?
LA: I didn’t have to, [but] I did.
LN: [clarifying] You felt professionally obligated?
LA: Yeah, like first of all, I’m not heterosexual, so it’s like fine, if we’re all getting lap dances, I’ll get a lap dance. But I’m in a work environment surrounded by men who are twice my age, who I have to interview in a work context, who are all drunk and sweating, you know what I mean? [laughter] And if they’re paying for it—I don’t even remember who paid for it. Maybe I paid for it? But it’s in an environment where I felt pressured to accept and to show that I am a trustworthy female who is one of the dudes and you can talk to me. You know what I mean? If I said, like, “Oh, I’m uncomfortable,” they’re like, [parodying grumpy older man voice] “Whoop, here we got one of them feminists here.” You know, “Can’t trust her.” So, there was a lot of playing along I did to be in a boys’ club. And, you know, I have, like, confusion about my gender expression anyway. [laughter] You know, there were a lot of times that I was like… [with sarcastic uncertainty] “Yeah, why not do this male thing? Why not accept this reality?” [laughter]
So that was very stressful, I think, in a long-term way—the confusion and the sense of violation and loss of personal autonomy that occurred. Essentially being public property in order to do my job. I was pinned between the industry and my audience, and I was never being the right kind of woman for anyone. Yeah, that was really stressful. Definitely. I’m not the only person who will tell you that game journalists had to go to strip clubs. […]
But a lot of times they could do that because there were hardly any women. And a lot of the women that I knew were older than me. They were, like, flannel and glasses women—and I’m not being critical of anyone’s appearance, but I was like twenty-seven and I wore dresses and heels and, you know, it was somehow okay for them to objectify me because I wouldn’t—I think if I had dressed down, I would have been in trouble, and I dressed up because I’m in trouble, you know what I mean? My appearance was constantly under scrutiny or at least I felt that it was.
[…]
And to be clear, it wasn’t anyone’s fault at Kotaku. This is just the way it was. It wasn’t that that was a bad job. It was a great opportunity. I just didn’t want to be a consumer journalist because I didn’t like the consumer space.
LN: Got it. And so, at Gamasutra, you’re allowed to focus your work on a developer angle. Can you say more about that?
LA: That is what Gamasutra does. It’s like the official partner publication of GDC, and I think that was true at the time. And its purpose was to serve game developers with industry news, technology updates, and design and development interviews. It was a place where developers could read production tips from other developers, or we would report about heat-sink issues in new hardware generations. It was a magazine for the game industry, not for the games consumer—although a lot of consumers did read it, which ended up causing some confusion in later years. Context collapse and things like that. And I was interested in that, I guess. I was curious about the industry. I wanted to talk to the people who made games.
That was more interesting to me. And it was less glamorous, and I was less of a celebrity, but I felt more knowledgeable and that was more valuable to me. That I was very quietly gathering respect from other game developers for my work. People remembered me when I interviewed them. I was welcome at the NYU Game Center to cover the talks. People wanted to be covered by me because they could tell that I cared. And I had the opportunity to interview a lot of my favorite developers, and meet a lot of industry heroes, and see a lot of early-stage technology, and report on a lot of court cases, and listen to a lot of financial calls. It was very, very interesting and very, very educational. It’s still experience that serves me today. I don’t know if I could have made the pivot into game development if I hadn’t spent such time in proximity to game development during my media career, which is unusual for a games critic—because I was also a games critic. But the spine of my work, and the central aorta of it was I was a developer journalist. […]
LN: One of the things I was really left thinking about after our talk last week was the sense I got of […] …how many directions you got pulled in? About your responsibility, your obligations—there was this kind of really rapid-fire kind of series of statements you gave about, okay…you have to be this way in order to build a brand and you’re trying to get taken seriously, but also you have this sense of debt to indie game devs or queer game devs who you could possibly, maybe, bring more attention to and why aren’t you? And it seemed like such an incredible emotional muddle to be living in the middle of.
LA: Yes, in fact I was looking at my Facebook today and I found a message—oh so here, I got a message that I posted in 2010. I don’t know who this is, someone apologizing to me for being pedantic in a comment and he says: August 19th, 2010, “You seem to be this weird lightning rod for people’s projections and expectations.” [laughter] And that’s what it felt like. That because I was a prominent woman in games, I had to be everyone’s expectation of a woman in games and everyone’s bogeyman of a woman in games. And yeah, I just wouldn’t be one kind of thing. And I think that really made people upset. […]
LN: Did you have any affective mechanisms for parsing between those or was everything moving kind of like so fast?
LA: Yeah, I was, like, surfing in white water basically. It was hard to keep my head up. Like I said, I started drinking to cope. I think that really helped with the compartmentalization because that’s what I was doing. And then I had my life outside of games where I was like this really hard partier. Where I was like, I’m gonna leave all the professionalism behind and all the geeky positive, like [mocking nerd voice] “There’s no controllers here,” and there’s no professionalism here, I’m gonna, like, blow rails in Alaska.26 […] I would say, like, I developed substance use disorders to manage the compartmentalization. […] I’m not ashamed of that, it’s not my fault. But yeah, I told you my memory is really not there, and I think that’s because so much of the time I just was trying to get through the present moment. Like I’d go to a place, I’d bang a couple shots [mimics taking a shot], just wearing my high-heel shoes till my feet were screaming, shaking all these hands. And then afterward happened to be like, “What the fuck did I say?” I worked really hard. I cranked out like an obscene amount of content, and I focused on my work, and I numbed myself to the pain of existing in such a public way. And the anxiety and the shame that came with constantly managing and failing to manage these unwinnable expectations.
Yeah, because even my own peers didn’t like me. I wasn’t a good enough feminist or I’m not queer enough or I’m not dark enough. I’m too privileged. There was always somebody [who] had an opinion on me and how they could do my job better or...there was a lot of that. I didn’t really feel like I had a lot of community.
I have readers that have been reading me since Sexy Video Game Land who still talk to me on Twitter now, and I’ve had tremendously supportive colleagues and friends. […] But at the time it was kind of like, “Maybe she should, like, behave? Don’t you think she’s awful? She’s, like, so loud,” …my personality was being legislated by everyone around me in a way that was incredibly painful. […] But how did I manage it? I really didn’t, Laine. That was one of the things I struggled with the most. And that being pulled in so many different directions and being constantly legislated by people, whether they were my enemies or my allies, yeah, led me to have serious declines in my mental health and to develop a substance use disorder. [sad laughter]
LN: That helps, I think, compartmentalize a lot of…not to use that language. [shared laughter] I think that helps kind of put a container around some of the threads I wanted to go a little deeper on in the first interview. […]
I think the way to do this is that I would just like to let you narrate your experience from, like, that—you know, back date to like 2012, 2013 through the Gamergate experience, right?
When I have questions, I’ll raise my hand. But otherwise, what I’m most interested in is understanding how you make sense of that story. And there is no wrong or right way to make sense of that story. There’s just what your memory is. If that feels okay to you.
LA: Yes, I’ll do my best, I’ll do my best. So, I guess up to the time that I’m talking about, you can see I’m kind of already at a low point. You know, I’d already had a great deal of, you know, legislation and abuse and harassment. So, before Zoë [Quinn]’s ex made the post about them, Zoë reached out to me because I was a journalist.27 And Zoë was asking me if I thought that his accusations were gonna go anywhere or if the games press would consider it news. And I said to Zoë, like, “Don’t worry, games press isn’t interested in personal drama. You know, no one that I know would report on this post. Like, let him make his post.” But, you know, what I failed to anticipate was that this would kind of break open all the resentment that everyone had toward this movement that we had been participating in. It was like the straw that broke the watershed of the conservative backlash to all the work that we were doing and covering and participating in. And I was just really fed up at this point. Like, I was really mad. [Laine raises hand] Yes?
LN: Could I ask what is that thing that you felt it was responding to?
LA: Well, the personal games movement. We had started covering independent games, democratic games, and they loved it when it was a story of a white man making money, but they did not like it when it was the story of a trans woman finding her voice. You know what I mean? The tools, it had got democratized too much. Sort of like a post-Obama America, they went, “That’s enough liberalism for us.” […]
So, I published this editorial because I was angry [because] I’d had enough of them and I didn’t fucking like them. And I just said like this is what happens when the old school dies. It’s the dying scream of a market category that is not center anymore. And that is what I asserted. Honestly, looking back, it’s crazy that that was controversial because it’s happening everywhere now. And that’s why I guess I get interviewed in Netflix documentaries, because I was there to see this happen. And so, they brigaded my employer. They brigaded Intel—who withdrew their advertising, and I almost got fired.28 […] Luckily, I had—thanks to my long career of credibility in developer journalism—had contacts inside Intel who were calling me and telling me they were gonna try to make it right. […] So Intel—only three days later—they reinstate the ads. And some anxious PR guy calls me and he’s like, “We’re gonna make this right. We’re gonna do five hundred million dollars for women,” or whatever this money was. I don’t even remember anymore.29 It was millions of dollars for women, and “we’re gonna have an event in California and I guess you can come but we wanna make sure you’re not gonna be angry,” and all this stuff like this. […]
LN: I remember the Intel booth at Indiecade…that must have been 2014? And it was part of this kind of—[sarcastically] the Intel apology tour for women, right?
LA: [loudly] Which I was not fucking involved in at all, which would not have happened if not for fucking me. I did not get one fucking apology from fucking anybody. Millions of dollars for what? And they can’t say sorry to one fucking woman. Are you kidding me? […] So yeah, I was really angry. I published an editorial. I got in a lot of trouble. I became—me and Zoë and [Laine raises hand] Yeah?
LN: Can I ask what did “trouble” look like at Gamasutra? […]
LA: Well, our parent company was the event management firm that owns GDC, so they did not understand what was happening. My boss, Simon Carless, was an English guy who’s getting yelled at by his higher-ups, and he’s just got to kind of manage me. And if my editor, Kris Graft, hadn’t stepped in, I would have been fired. It was like, “She didn’t have to say it like that.” And it was, “She’s biting the hand that feeds her. She’s shitting down the neck of the people who pay her rent.” And it was like, “Okay, Leigh, I know you’re angry, but don’t spit on your audience. Don’t disrespect your peers. Don’t disrespect your industry.” Disrespect, disrespect. And honest to fucking God, until the dust settled, this was the widespread opinion—that I should twist in the wind. And I deserved it because I was disrespectful.
And Kotaku and Stephen Totilo and “Mr. Journalism Hack.”30 They go publishing updates to their review score policy [small, mocking voice] promising that they will disclose from now on if any one of us has a personal relationship with the developer of games. [stridently] Listen, for the past five years our work has depended on developing personal relationships with the developers of games. It’s not fucking Watergate. We are culture journalists; of course we have personal relationships with them. Of course, we have personal feelings about the game. It’s a culture, it’s a community. And now you’re trying to act again like it’s this [mocking stuffy businessman voice] fucking professional business where we have to disclose—like professionalism strikes again.
I was like fuck professionalism, fuck gamers. And the whole fucking world blew up. And yes, I was getting harassed. It was me and Zoë [Quinn] and Anita [Saarkesian]—and Brianna [Wu].31 Brianna was making a name for herself off the back of this. We were being hounded as, like, these forces censoring and destroying video games and wanting to cover up all the boobs and, like, all of these views that I don’t even hold, you know? And yes, I was being harassed and threatened and someone posted that they were gonna come to my house and put a screwdriver in my eye, and that they knew where I lived. […] Like...I was used to people telling me they knew where I lived since 2010.
This wasn’t scary. The thing that was really, really, really, really, really, really, really, really bad was the silence of my friends and the lack of support. It was unfashionable to get my back. They didn’t want to get whatever I had on them. And it was like, “Well, maybe she had this coming. She had this coming because she was always so unprofessional.” Resentment of me from people who wished it was them! Like this sounds terrible but some people wished they were relevant enough on the fucking internet to get harassed, you know? There were people who were social justice clownin’ and cappin’ so that they could build careers out of it, you know? And it was an entertainment for them. And I was an entertainment for them. And there were people who made feminist playing cards with our faces on them without asking me if they could render my image. There was art, they were making insane—I gotta send you. When I was in The Social Network doc, they asked me for some of the crazy stuff that the Gamergaters made about me. Like where I’m like part of a shadowy Jewish cabal. [laughter] I gotta send you those things. So, I was the subject of political cartooning on both sides. Like, it was absolutely freaking insane—over video games! Like, I don’t even know how to describe this to my family. It’s so mental and stupid. Like, that’s the thing, it’s so stupid.
However, you know, this was the blueprint that the right wing would then use. […] You know how we have conservative public actors now? We had some of those same people—your Steve Bannonites, your Yiannopolises—sniffing around the scene […] And so, all of a sudden, adults, like grown fucking men and women who’d never played a video game in their life, were now based because they were involved in Gamergate. And they were validating these right-wingers’ rage with political attention. And I think that’s where they learned to do the Trump thing. […]
Yeah, so Gamergate happened and Intel withdrew the ads […] And it was very uncool to support me, and other feminists were also mad at me because I was the wrong kind of feminist or I wasn’t queer-literate enough or I wasn’t race-literate enough or you know. Ah! And then I started Offworld. […]
So, my colleague Laura Hudson and I, who is another critic—Laura had published a lot of my work at Wired and we were very good friends. So, Boing Boing offered me the opportunity to start a games vertical there. And so, I invited Laura to be my partner on that. And we published what I think is the fucking best collection of games criticism [laughter]. […] And it’s really disappointing that Offworld was lost in the noise of this time. We had a policy where we were only publishing women, queers, and people of color, that’s it. And articles on disability. We were covering only small independent games from a personal lens and publishing diverse writers. We fundraised for a hardcover collection of criticism successfully that a lot of people really treasure.
But people were rooting for Offworld to fail because it was my venture and it was me having to put my money where my mouth was in terms of the kind of games that people were interested in. And my own peers didn’t even really want to support it, I don’t think. I think they thought I had gotten too fat for myself or something, too fat-headed, too big for my boots. […]
LN: One of the things we talked about last time was how much of this happened in this—there was this glittering…2013 moment where it seemed like everything could have changed, right? […]
When I was going back through [your] filing list of stuff from that period—whether it’s stuff you wrote or stuff your name appears in—There’s One Reason to Be, there’s Brenda Romero saying, can we stop fucking having, you know, strippers at industry parties?32 […] I mean, GDC becomes so strange during this time. Because I remember—it might’ve been the first time I was ever there, and I was like, “What is going on in an industry event where you can have AAA executives and anna anthropy, like, sitting in the same space?”33
LA: [laughter] Yeah, I think it was weird for anna too. […]
I think it’s because we’re trying to be a catch-all as well. People don’t need to explain that there’s different budgets and audiences for movies, and different production methods for movies. But somehow all games are for gamers and gaming? We can’t just admit that there’s a wide range of things that games can mean. We have to have this catch-all attitude about what the industry is because we’ve been culturally assailed and we don’t feel safe fragmented. It’s bullshit. My game industry is not the same as someone else’s. […]
LN: I wanted to talk a little about the piece itself [“‘Gamers’ Don’t Have to Be Your Audience. ‘Gamers’ Are Over]. You know, there is a just kind of, like,”let it rip” quality to it…
LA: It was not just anger on Zoë’s behalf, it was the anger of years.
LN: I just reread it and it’s still a banger, you know? […]
LA: I think it could have used an editor, it’s a bit long. [laughter] But I mean, yeah, when I read it, I’m like, yeah.
LN: Well, I’m curious about…like, here’s the deal, whether you like it or not, that piece is now a historical artifact.
LA: [laughter] What writer wouldn’t like it? In fact, I was like, “Fuck this.” I wanted to take heat off Zoë. I was like, “Come at me. I’ve been fighting you for a long time.” […] I gave the hornet’s nest a big kick. I knew what I was doing. I did not expect how extreme and crazy it would get and how political it would get. But in terms of just the volume and the intensity toward myself personally, I was used to that.
The hard part was the way reality [became] unmoored after, and how crazy everybody got. And the conspiracies and the prevarication and the justification and the blame and the noise. That was crazy. The environment got crazy. But the harassment, everyone thinks like, “Oh, was it so bad getting harassed at volume?” I’m like, “No, that was my whole career.” […]
LN: Was there anything particular around the writing process for that?
LA: No, I probably just pounded a couple shots and banged it out. [laughter] Like I didn’t have a process. Again, I cannot overstate the degree to which I was in reactive survival fight-or-flight mode for the entirety of my career. And that is where my ideas came from. And that is where my prolific output came from, because I was fighting for my life every fucking day.
So yeah, like, I’m sure I was just in a fucking mood and I was like, “This is bullshit!” Here I come, batter up. Here comes Leigh with another one. Because I was kind of known for that. Like, you know, I was kind of like a closing pitcher, discourse-wise. […] If there was a discourse going on, I would just, like, wait a couple days and then I’d come in with a column and shut it all down. And so, this is just kind of what I was doing. I went up to the mound. That’s what I do when there’s a cultural issue. Um, so no, there wasn’t a process. […]
LN: And it really came out of a place of wanting to protect, respond to, and get heat off of Zoë?
LA: Yes, yes, yes. I didn’t even ask them if I should do it. I was just like, fuck this, you know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. [pause] Yeah, I just actively thought that what was happening to Zoë was an obvious symptom of a disease that nobody would fucking disagree with and that it was the time to push back. And I thought that that was pretty fucking straightforward, but I guess it was not.
LN: This is kind of an odd question, but I think if you were to…I’m curious if you had any interactions during this time with Anita Sarkeesian. I think that to a general outsider’s perspective, there’s a certain “crew” of women who get all kind of like lumped together during this moment.
LA: Yeah, yeah, but none of us are friends. We were pushed together by necessity, even though, for example, Anita and I are not very politically similar. We disagree about a lot of things. I like and respect Anita, and I have a lot of sympathy for the extreme and obscene way that Anita, even larger than myself or Zoë, became a lightning rod for these things. And all Anita was trying to do was start a basic 101 feminist concept introduction to an industry that badly needed it. Like, that’s all Anita was trying to do. And again, it shouldn’t have been so freaking controversial or straightforward.
See, I know Anita, but, like, she and me were both just like generals in a war who didn’t know each other and you know we were often in the same spaces. I think, like, we did have a lot of emotional talks and, like, there was a lot of times that these women that you name, like, cried together. But it was very much like an enforced solidarity, a required solidarity. […]
LN: I still remember—the bomb threat she got.34 I was like, “I think this is the first time games has ever been on the front page of The New York Times.” This was the thing that was making games mainstream [news].
LA: And isn’t that what I put in my article?35 This is what the world knows about your industry. They read that you can’t fucking behave. And they fucking fulfilled the prophecy. Like, straight-faced, fulfilled the prophecy and behaved in exactly the way that I said that they behaved. […]
But yeah, I got threats as well. I was speaking at a school in Malta, and they had to get security because someone called in a threat. A 4channer came to my…people came to my talks to, like, ask me confronting questions on “ethics and video games.” I couldn’t go anywhere for a while. It did really suck. I didn’t actually feel like my person was unsafe because again—I grew up on 4chan. I grew up being one of those internet, like, chaos agents. I know it’s […] it’s not real. I don’t want to say that people who are afraid were wrong to be afraid. And I don’t want to ever say that people shouldn’t take precautions for their security online or that it’s not a threat, like, I’m not saying that. But for me, I was not really scared of the people or of the threats. It was just, like, how ugly this general environment was that this had to be a consideration.
LN: So how would you narrate your, sort of, exit out of games journalism?
LA: I don’t remember. I don’t remember. The last thing I remember is that Laura and I did a Kickstarter for the Offworld collection.36 I went to Bali. I got married. And then I started, I took some time off and I started consulting and doing game development. Yeah. But I don’t remember my exit. I think I just stopped.
LN: And so, Offworld got shut down, somehow you’re disentangled.
LA: Yeah, yeah, like we weren’t making numbers or something. No one was at that time. Like lots of blogs were shutting down.
LN: Yeah. And it was, I mean…Trump had just been elected, right? The media space was totally [fucked up]. And so, is it after this that you moved to England?
LA: Yeah, I think I started... I was living in England. So, I met Quinns in 2013 and I started going back and forth between London and New York because you can stay for six months at a time on a tourist visa, and I was traveling so often to conferences in Europe.37 So, I was basically—I had an apartment at home, and I had Quinn’s place, but I was kind of like always moving so it wasn’t a visa issue and I wasn’t, you know, employed internationally. So, I traveled around a lot until I kind of settled in London. And when I got a marriage visa [in 2016] that was how I got on the naturalization path and was able to stay in the country full-time. So as far as the home office is concerned, I started living in England in 2016, but I had really been spending most of my time here starting in about 2013. […]
You know, I haven’t talked about—I was participating in the alt-literature movement at Thought Catalog prior to this. I think I was involved in alt-lit a lot.38 […] I was writing at Thought Catalog, which was part of the alt-lit movement in New York. And the writer Tao Lin was the one who recommended me there. There was a style, a particular style of writing that a community of writers that I knew were using, that I got really interested in because it was from outside of games. Alt-lit was kind of a response to the bite-sized content economy and trying to sort of find meaning in small and undecorated statements, I guess. It’s sort of like—people have analogized it to, like, the mumblecore movement in films, where it’s, like, lo-fi, low overhead, but manages to say a lot in kind of a raw and simple way.
And so, I was really, really influenced by that. And that catalyzed—like, that’s where Breathing Machine came from was, like, my dabbling around with alt-lit a bit, even though, like, I wouldn’t say that Breathing Machine itself is in the alt-lit style. But I had a column at Thought Catalog. I was doing other things like television journalism, and music journalism. Definitely I started writing fiction as well. I did my short story about the Atari dig, probably that was…2015?39 I think, in writing my short story about the Atari dig, I was trying to be more honest about my industry grief and alienation and stuff like that.
So, I think I would have to look—2014, 2015, 2016—I would have to, like, look at my bylines during that time. But I think I was probably trying to write non-games things. I think I started writing like futurism and technology journalism. Oh, I was hosting the technology podcast at the Guardian. Oh, that was probably later. That was later. Yeah, so I was starting to spread my bets outside of games into fiction and other types of feature writing, because I wanted to grow as a writer and I wanted to grow as a journalist and I didn’t think the games were rewarding my attempts to grow. [ironic laughter] So yeah, I was doing other things as well. I wanted to find a way out of games, you know. That’s when I started getting into, like, futurism and AI horror and stuff like that. So...
LN: Did these other journalistic spaces carry the same…did they even have the same kind of assumptions about who you were or how you wrote or what your deal was?
LA: No. So, during Gamergate—like, when I was almost getting fired at Gamasutra—I was actually called into the newsroom at the Guardian’s headquarters in London because they wanted to talk to me about how to protect their journalists in this new audience milieu. Because they said to me, like, you know, “We’ve been encouraging our writers to, like, chop it up in the comments and engage with the community and you’re an example of how this can be dangerous and we want to know what we can learn from you.” And Jemima Kiss, who was the technology editor of the paper at the time, wrote an article about me and how brave I was for standing up to sexism. And like—while my own little podunk, unprofessional industry was throwing me under the bus, that major outlets like the Guardian were offering me work and offering me protection. And it was like, “Well, you’re under our masthead, let us know what you need.” I started publishing work in mainstream outlets because I think mainstream outlets were able to respect why my existence was journalistic in a way that my community did not. […]
Acknowledgments
My deepest respect, gratitude, and admiration to Leigh Alexander, for trusting me with this conversation. Many thanks as well, to the ROMchip Editorial Group, for their considerate feedback and problem solving. And thank you to John Sharp for last minute insight and assurance.
Footnotes
1. ^ Alexander’s father is Black; her mother, a bookkeeper, is Jewish.
2. ^ Alexander’s childhood is extensively covered in her 2013 memoir Breathing Machine: A Memoir of Computers, publishing by Thought Catalog. The work can be found for free at https://archive.org/details/BreathingMachine.
3. ^ Harold Goldberg, “How the Smithsonian Screwed Up Its Video Game Exhibition,” NPR, March 26, 2012, https://www.npr.org/2012/03/26/149394361/how-the-smithsonian-screwed-up-its-video-game-exhibition; Chris Kohler, “Videogames Politely Invade Smithsonian Art Museum,” Wired, March 30, 2012, https://www.wired.com/2012/03/art-of-video-games-smithsonian; and Seth Schiesel, “An Exhibition in Easy Mode,” New York Times, March 15, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/16/arts/video-games/an-exhibition-in-easy-mode.html.
4. ^ Paola Antonelli and Paul Galloway, “When Video Games Came to the Museum,” MOMA Magazine, November 3, 2022, https://www.moma.org/magazine/articles/798; Adrienne LaFrance, “MoMA Gives Video Games Their Due Time,” Medium, March 1, 2013, https://medium.com/@adriennelaf/moma-gives-video-games-their-due-time-a15e9b115c5c; and Olivia Solon, “MoMA to Exhibit Videogames, from Pong to Minecraft,” Wired, November 29, 2012, https://www.wired.com/2012/11/moma-videogames.
5. ^ Rachel Syme, “Notes on ‘Kim,’” Matter (blog), December 19, 2014, https://medium.com/matter/kim-kardashian-hollywood-was-the-most-important-video-game-of-2014-cab6ec581df1.
6. ^ For the beginning of the Final Fantasy series, see Leigh Alexander and Kirk Hamilton, “The Final Fantasy VII Letters, Part I,” Paste, March 15, 2011, https://www.pastemagazine.com/article/the-final-fantasy-vii-letters-part-1-welcome-to-mi. For the GTAV review, see leighalexander1, “Review of GTA V: This Is Why We Video Gaming,” Soundcloud, 2013, https://soundcloud.com/leighalexander1/review-of-gta-v-this-is-why-we. Jonathan Mann later set Alexander’s monologue to one of his song-a-day works; see Jonathan Mann, “GTA: This Is Why We Video Gaming (Song A Day #1718),” YouTube, September 18, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HZ21Lsw5WE.
7. ^ Eric Zimmerman, “Manifesto for a Ludic Century,” Kotaku (blog), September 9, 2013, https://kotaku.com/manifesto-the-21st-century-will-be-defined-by-games-1275355204.
8. ^ For contemporaneous reporting, see Helen Lewis, “This Is What Online Harassment Looks Like,” New Statesman, July 6, 2012, https://www.newstatesman.com/science-tech/2012/07/what-online-harassment-looks/. DDOSing refers to “Distributed Denial-of-Service” attacks, which are coordinated efforts to flood a website with fake internet traffic in order to crash the site.
9. ^ For further reading on this subject, see Whitney Phillips, This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things: Mapping the Relationship Between Online Trolling and Mainstream Culture (MIT Press, 2015).
10. ^ The post in question is known as “The Zoe Post,” published August 16, 2014, at https://thezoepost.wordpress.com/. The site is a lengthy and highly personal series of posts featuring screenshots of text messages and chat logs between Gjoni and Quinn. Gjoni later admitted he had “no evidence” of any professional misconduct, but by then the narrative had been seized upon by self-styled “ethics in games journalism” advocates who claimed that game journalism failed to present and review games objectively, and that journalists were not disclosing their personal relationships with game developers.
11. ^ Kotaku editor Stephen Totilo responded to these complaints in an untitled post from August 20, 2014, arguing that the outlet found no evidence of misconduct: https://kotaku.com/in-recent-days-ive-been-asked-several-times-about-a-pos-1624707346. For evidence of online harassment of Quinn, see sources in note 13.
12. ^ Leigh Alexander, “‘Gamers’ Don’t Have to Be Your Audience. ‘Gamers’ Are Over,” Game Developer, August 28, 2014, https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/-gamers-don-t-have-to-be-your-audience-gamers-are-over. (Gamasutra was rebranded Game Developer in 2021.)
13. ^ The situation quickly spiraled, as complaints about the lack of so-called ethics in games journalism were also leveraged against writers and cultural critics who critiqued games on the basis of sexist or racist representation (naming such figures as “social justice warriors,” or SJWs). As discussed later on in the interview, advertisers were pressured to drop their business with outlets such as Kotaku and Gamasutra, while developers and critics such as Quinn, Sarkeesian, Alexander, Brianna Wu, and others were singled out for extreme, targeted harassment. For further academic and journalistic reading on Gamergate and its outcomes, see Kristin. M. S. Bezio, “Ctrl-Alt-Del: GamerGate as a Precursor to the Rise of the Alt-Right,” Leadership 14, no. 5 (2018): 556–66, https://doi.org/10.1177/1742715018793744; Caitlin Dewey, “The Only Guide to Gamergate You Will Ever Need to Read,” Washington Post, October 14, 2014, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2014/10/14/the-only-guide-to-gamergate-you-will-ever-need-to-read; Christopher J. Ferguson and Benjamin Glasgow, “Who Are GamerGate? A Descriptive Study of Individuals Involved in the GamerGate Controversy,” Psychology of Popular Media 10, no. 2 (2021): 243–47, https://doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000280; Jennifer Jenson and Suzanne de Castell, “Gamer-Hate and the ‘Problem’ of Women,” in Diversifying Barbie and Mortal Kombat: Intersectional Perspectives and Inclusive Designs in Gaming, ed. Yasmin B. Kafai, Gabriela T. Richard, and Brendesha M. Tynes (ETC Press, 2016), 186–99; Torill Elvira Mortensen, “Anger, Fear, and Games: The Long Event of #GamerGate,” Games and Culture 13, no. 8 (2018): 787–806, https://doi.org/10.1177/1555412016640408; and Simon Parkin, “Gamergate: A Scandal Erupts in the Video-Game Community,” New Yorker, October 17, 2014, https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/gamergate-scandal-erupts-video-game-community.
14. ^ E3 was Electronic Entertainment Expo, an annual trade event in the game industry that ran from 1995 to 2021. Moscone refers to the Moscone Center, the annual site for GDC since 2005.
15. ^ E/N (Everything/Nothing) sites were a genre of personal and community-driven websites popular in the late 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s. These sites featured a mix of rants, personal updates, internet culture commentary, and random humor, typically with no specific focus. Emerging prior to the formalization of blogs, E/N sites thrived on platforms like GeoCities and early web forums. One reminiscing user describes their content as “weird, funny, and degenerate shit (sometimes porn),” while another user (referencing a thread on Hacker News) explains, “The content means everything to the publisher, but it could mean nothing to the rest of the world.” AnandTech Forums, “Late 90s/Early 00s Everything/Nothing Site Nostalgia Thread,” posted January 11, 2015, accessed April 1, 2025, https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/late-90s-early-00s-everything-nothing-site-nostalgia-thread.2416212; and SAWV, “Everything/Nothing,” accessed April 1, 2025, http://sawv.org/en.html.
16. ^ According to Alexander’s recollection, www.sexyvideogameland.blogspot.com most likely began sometime in 2007. Alexander made its final post April 24, 2013, redirecting visitors to her personal website, www.leighalexander.net. While the original Blogspot site cannot be viewed directly, it can be explored piecemeal via the Wayback Machine.
17. ^ Alexander’s first post at Destructoid was June 14, 2007, and her last was December 7, 2007. Most of her work at Destructoid can still be viewed under her author profile on the site at https://www.destructoid.com/author/leigh-alexander. However, the online listings only date back to June 20, 2007—making the first two weeks of her writing inaccessible on the present-day site.
18. ^ “The brainy blogosphere” refers to the broader constellation of late aughts/early 2010s games critics and games criticism that circled around the work of Michael Abbott, creator of the Brainy Gamer blog and podcast at https://www.brainygamer.com (site discontinued). Figures in this community included Alexander herself, Eric Swain, Kris Ligman, Chris Dahlen, and Mitch Krpata, among others; contemporaneous games and culture outlets included Critical Distance (https://www.critical-distance.com) and Kill Screen (https://www.killscreen.com).
19. ^ At the time, Croal was a technology journalist at Newsweek and blogger at the Newsweek games blog Level Up. He left the journalism business in 2009 to become a consultant and currently works as the editorial director of Microsoft Game Dev.
20. ^ Tom Bissell is an American journalist and author, author of the 2010 book Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, published by Pantheon. His work as a games writer and story consultant grew dramatically in the mid- to late 2010s, producing scripts for popular franchises such as Uncharted and Gears of War as well as What Remains of Edith Finch. In the early twenty-first century, Chris Dahlen worked as a freelance writer and editor focusing on range of popular culture, including books, music and video games. He published work in Edge, Variety, and The Onion AV Club. In 2009, he and Jamin Warren cofounded Kill Screen, where Dahlen also served as editor in chief. In the mid-2010s, Dahlen pivoted into full-time software engineering.
21. ^ See note 11.
22. ^ See Alexander and Hamilton, “The Final Fantasy VII Letters.”
23. ^ “Leigh Alexander,”I Promise I’m Cool,” Destructoid (blog), June 14, 2007, https://web.archive.org/web/20070713071744/https://www.destructoid.com/blogs/LeighAlexander/i-promise-i-m-cool-33012.phtml. While Destructoid still exists, Alexander’s complete blog history is not available. The site’s search engine only goes back to Alexander’s “‘Special Lessons’ with Mitsurugi,” posted June 20, 2007, which appears to be her first content piece, or perhaps her first official piece as an associate editor.
24. ^ The term /b/tard is internet slang for a habitual user of the /b/ - Random imageboard on 4chan. According to Wiktionary, the term “combines a humorously censored version of bastard with /b/, while rhyming with retard.” While sometimes used jokingly or self-referentially (as Alexander is doing), it has strong associations with internet trolling culture, anonymity, and transgressive behavior common to 4chan’s early 2000s era. Wiktionary, “/b/tard,” last modified January 4, 2025, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki//b/tard. Weeaboo is also a term strongly associated with 4chan internet culture, referring to (Wiktionary again): “A non-Japanese person, stereotypically an unsociable white male, who is overly infatuated with Japanese culture; a loser Japanophile.” Wiktionary, “weeaboo,” last modified May 6, 2025, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/weeaboo.
25. ^ Alexander has two author profiles on Kotaku: https://kotaku.com/author/leigh-alexander-old (discontinued), which catalogs her work during the time period under discussion in 2008, and https://kotaku.com/author/leighalexander1, which directs to three posts she filed in 2013. Work published between 2008 and 2013 is not locatable via either author profile.
26. ^ Alaska refers to the now-shuttered Brooklyn dive bar on 35 Ingraham Street in Bushwick, which was in business from 2012 to 2016 (currently occupied by the Bushwick Ice House). Brooklyn Magazine published a eulogy on the closing of Alaska: Juliann DiNicola, “RIP Alaska Bar: A Look Back at the Wild, Dirty Place We Loved,” Brooklyn Magazine, August 1, 2016, https://www.bkmag.com/2016/08/01/rip-alaska-wild-dirty-bar-look-back.
27. ^ See Eron Gjoni, The Zoe Post, August 16, 2014, https://thezoepost.wordpress.com. Broader context for Gamergate is presented in the interview introduction.
28. ^ For media coverage from the time, see Eric Johnson, “Under Pressure from Gamers, Intel Pulls Advertising from Gamasutra,” Vox, October 1, 2014, https://www.vox.com/2014/10/1/11631508/under-pressure-from-gamers-intel-pulls-advertising-from-gamasutra; and Steve Mullis, “After Pulling Ads, Intel Tries to Stay Out of #Gamergate Debate,” NPR, October 4, 2014, https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2014/10/04/353702104/intel-pulls-ads-from-gaming-site-amid-gamergate-debate.
29. ^ The reported total was three hundred million dollars, with the aim of increasing women and minorities in its workforce by 14 percent. See Lauren Goode, “CES Snapshot: After Gamergate, Intel to Invest $300 Million in Diversity,” Vox, January 6, 2015, https://www.vox.com/2015/1/6/11557548/ces-snapshot-after-gamergate-intel-to-invest-300-million-in-workplace; and Michael McWhertor, “Intel Pledges $300M to Bolster Women, Minority Workforce in Wake of GamerGate,” Polygon, January 6, 2015, https://www.polygon.com/2015/1/6/7506021/intel-300m-diversity-investment-support-women-minorities-gamergate.
30. ^ Asked during editing who “Mr. Journalism Hack” is, Alexander replied, “Perhaps I was referring to a bogeyman figure, a Mr. Journalism Man who thinks he’s all Journalistic but is actually hack-handed and struggling to pull his big boy pants up.” Alexander, email to author, March 24, 2025.
31. ^ Anita Saarkesian is a Canadian American feminist media critic. She is best known as the founder of the nonprofit and website Feminist Frequency (2009–23), which aimed to make feminist media criticism widely accessible through both jargon-free presentation and free distribution on YouTube. Saarkesian’s most notable video series was Tropes vs. Women in Video Games, which launched in 2013. These efforts made Saarkesian a target for extreme misogynist harassment, including rape and death threats, doxxing, and bomb threats credible enough to cancel public appearances. For more on Saarkesian, see Justin Carter, “Anita Saarkesian’s Advocacy Organization Feminist Frequency Is Shutting Down,” Game Developer (blog), August 1, 2023, https://www.gamedeveloper.com/game-platforms/anita-sarkeesian-s-feminist-frequency-is-shutting-down; and Jordan Erica Webber, “Anita Sarkeesian: ‘It’s Frustrating to Be Known as the Woman Who Survived #Gamergate,’” Guardian, October 16, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/oct/16/anita-sarkeesian-its-frustrating-to-be-known-as-the-woman-who-survived-gamergate. Brianna Wu is an American trans game developer, public commentator, and former congressional candidate. She cofounded the independent development studio Giant Spacekat in 2010, best known for the game Revolution 60 (2014). During Gamergate, she became a target for harassment after publicly defending the role of women in tech; see Nina Bahadur, “One Woman’s Amazing Response to Sexism in the Tech Industry,” HuffPost, August 28, 2014, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/sexism-in-tech-response_n_5730008. Wu received death threats, images of animal abuse, and was doxed; Wu was routinely in contact with law enforcement, and by 2015 began traveling to events only with a security detail. See Caroline Anders, “GamerGaters Inundated Her with Death Threats. Now Some Are Apologizing—and She Forgives Them,” Washington Post, August 5, 2021, https://web.archive.org/web/20220427164410/https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/08/05/gamergate-threats-brianna-wu/; Jim Edwards, “FBI’s ‘Gamergate’ File Says Prosecutors Didn’t Charge Men Who Sent Death Threats to Female Video Game Fans—Even When Suspects Confessed,” Business Insider, February 16, 2017, https://www.businessinsider.com/gamergate-fbi-file-2017-2; and Sara Ashley O’Brien, “One Tweet Ruined Her Life,” CNN, March 16, 2016, https://web.archive.org/web/20160320015836/https://money.cnn.com/2016/03/16/technology/syfy-the-internet-ruined-my-life-gamergate-brianna-wu. Wu’s post-Gamergate political identity has been controversial within progressive game circles, particularly her critique of trans rights rhetoric; for an example of how she articulates her politics, in her own words, see her conversation with Bari Weiss, “Brianna Wu Says She Didn’t Change. The Progressive Movement Did,” Free Press, October 18, 2024, https://www.thefp.com/p/brianna-wu-bari-weiss-gamergate-progressive-antisemitism-honestly.
32. ^ “One Reason to Be” refers to a movement within the game industry to center the experiences and struggles of women in the game industry. The term was based on the hashtags #1reasontobe and #1reasonwhy, which first circulated on the platform formerly known as Twitter in November 2012. This was followed by a panel at the GDC in March 2013. For reporting from the period, see Megan Farokhmanesh, “Women in the Gaming Industry Share Their Reason to Be in the Business,” Polygon, March 28, 2013, https://www.polygon.com/2013/3/28/4155650/women-in-the-gaming-industry-share-their-number-one-reason-to-be-in. A recording of the panel itself is available at the GDC Vault at https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1018080/. The reference to Brenda Romero refers to her 2013 resignation from the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), after the organization held a party at GDC featuring scantily clad female dancers (on the very evening of the #1reasontobe panel). Developer Darius Kazemi also resigned following the incident. For reporting from the period, see Jeffrey Grubb, “Game Designer Brenda Romero Quits IGDA Following Party with Hired Female Dancers,” VentureBeat, March 28, 2013, https://venturebeat.com/games/game-designer-brenda-romero-quits-igda-following-party-with-hired-female-dancers; Griffin McElroy, “IGDA Draws Backlash, Member Resignations over Female Dancers at GDC Party (Update: IGDA Responds),” Polygon, March 28, 2013, https://www.polygon.com/2013/3/28/4157266/igda-gdc-party-brenda-romero-resignation.
33. ^ anna anthropy is a notable trans indie game developer. Her earliest works, especially the autobiographical dys4ia, are considered foundational within what was then an emergent queer indie games movement. anthropy authored Rise of the Videogame Zinesters in 2012, making a case for how and why anyone could make games using free, open-source tools like Twine. As an industry figure, anthropy expresses an anti-institutional, anticapitalist ethos grounded in queer, DIY, and outsider-art practices. For more information on anthropy and her work, see anna anthropy, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters: How Freaks, Normals, Amateurs, Artists, Dreamers, Drop-Outs, Queers, Housewives, and People Like You Are Taking Back an Art Form (Seven Stories Press, 2012); and Jesper Juul, “Interview with Anna Anthropy,” Handmade Pixels, July 30, 2018, https://www.jesperjuul.net/handmadepixels/interviews/anthropy.html. For interviews with a range of other queer game developers active during this time, see Bo Ruberg, The Queer Games Avant-Garde: How LGBTQ Game Makers Are Reimagining the Medium of Video Games (Duke University Press, 2020).
34. ^ The event referenced by the interviewer pertained to the threat of a mass shooting, not a bomb threat. The threat of the “deadliest school shooting in American history” was made to Utah State University, which was set to host a talk by Saarkesian in October 2014; Saarkesian canceled the appearance after she was informed that, under Utah law, campus security could not prevent individuals from entering the talk venue with firearms. Coverage of this event appeared below the fold in the print edition of The New York Times. For the Times article, see Nick Wingfield, “Feminist Critics of Video Games Facing Threats in ‘Gamergate’ Campaign,” New York Times, October 15, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/16/technology/gamergate-women-video-game-threats-anita-sarkeesian.html. For surrounding coverage, see Emily Grae, “Attack on Feminist Game Critics Hits Front Page of New York Times,” Polygon, October 16, 2014, https://www.polygon.com/2014/10/16/6987175/gamergate-new-york-times-esa.
35. ^ Alexander is referring to “‘Gamers’ Don’t Have to Be Your Audience.”
36. ^ “The Offworld Collection,” Kickstarter, last updated February 5, 2017, https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1315256652/the-offworld-collection/description. The Kickstarter campaign was successful, reaching its funding goal of $30,000 on February 5, 2016, forty-eight hours after launching; it ultimately raised just over $66,000.
37. ^ Quintin Smith, better known as Quinns, is a British games journalist and critic. Smith was an early writer at Rock Paper Shotgun and is perhaps best known in the 2020s for his work with the investigative video game reporting YouTube channel People Make Games. See People Make Games, YouTube, accessed June 16, 2025, https://www.youtube.com/c/PeopleMakeGames; and “Quintin Smith,” Rock Paper Shotgun, accessed June 16, 2025, https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/authors/quintin-smith. He also co-runs the board game review website and YouTube channel Shut Up & Sit Down at https://www.shutupandsitdown.com/. In 2024, he launched Quinn’s Quest, a tabletop roleplaying game (TTRPG) review YouTube channel set in the late 1980s, at https://www.youtube.com/@Quinns_Quest. For more formal reporting on People Make Games, see Nathan Grayson, “Meet the YouTubers Exposing the Dark Side of Making Video Games,” Washington Post, June 7, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/video-games/2022/06/07/people-make-games-roblox-indie-devs
38. ^ Thought Catalog was original described as a “website known for its hyperpersonal and often controversial essays,” governed by a style of “memoir-like voyeurism.” See Matthew Newton, “Thought Catalog and the New Age of Confessional Media,” Forbes, February 8, 2012, https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewnewton/2012/02/08/thought-catalog-and-the-new-age-of-confessional-media. In the early 2010s, there was significant stylistic overlap between Thought Catalog and the alternative literature (alt-lit) movement, which prioritized experimental style, online publishing, self-publishing, and social media engagement. Both were typified by an internet-culture linguistic sensibility and prevalent oversharing that emerged from the blog and Tumblr era of Western online millennial discourse. Tao Lin, who is considered a key figure in alt-lit, was an early contributor at Thought Catalog. Thought Catalog began publishing ebooks in 2015; Alexander’s work Breathing Machine was released by Thought Catalog in 2018. While Thought Catalog still exists, its content has transitioned more to lifestyle and inspirational articles, mostly composed in listicle format. See www.thoughtcatalog.com.
39. ^ The piece, The Unearthing, was written in 2014 and published on Medium in 2017. Leigh Alexander, The Unearthing, Medium, September 8, 2017, https://medium.com/@leighalexander/the-unearthing-5c21999543dc.
Headshot of Leigh Alexander in her late 20s, estimated to be from 2009. Image from Wikipedia, originally posted to Boing Boing, https://boingboing.net/about .