One lesson from 10 years of writing for Game Developer

On October 14 2014, I filed my first freelance story for what was then called "Gamasutra." 10 years and a changing of the guard later, I'm now a senior editor for Game Developer, which—I'm sorry—is a 10 times better name than a vaguely appropriative sex pun.

Very few game journalists make it to 10 years at all, fewer still to 10 years at one site. Marking the decade left me with complicated emotions. Why am I still here when so many other great folks have lost their jobs, seen outlets close, and struggled to make a living?

Privilege, inevitably, is part of the answer. I'll leave our readers to determine if there's any degree of talent.

I tried writing a "10 lessons from 10 years" and it just wasn't clicking. What exactly do developers need from a look back at the last 10 years? 10 lessons implies I have the perspective to pick the most important insights of an entire decade. I don't! That's okay, that's a lot of pressure for one mild-mannered journalist.

But there is one lesson that stayed with me when I tossed away the other nine. It stared up at me from the screen, and seemed to feel like my past self asking my present "what did you learn?"

"Don't meet your heroes," I almost blurted out.

But that was the frustration talking. I am not a cynical person. Almost everyone I've met who's uttered the phrase has seemed burned by resentment I don't want to echo.

Let me rephrase it. I'd tell my younger self this: "you don't need heroes to be the best you you can be."

I've had a tendency to put people on pedestals

Early in my writing days I was stunned when a developer I looked up to in the industry responded to an email and said "yes," he'd be down to do an interview. I was such a novice I live-transcribed it as we talked.

I was over the moon. I felt acknowledged by an incredibly creative person and that by taking the interview, he'd somehow validated my creativity and hard work. Then came the angry email.

He raged at me after my piece went up because...well, mostly, typos? Maybe I misquoted him or something but I really remember how angry he was about the typos. I was so stunned I called my then-editor in a panic asking what to do. He was just confused. The typos were cleaned and that was that.

I beat myself up for a while (as I'm wont to do still), and assumed I'd done something very bad. I thought this was a normal thing to do, and that I'd harmed this person I looked up to. I was relieved when he didn't even seem to remember it at a meetup at PAX, and he wound up connecting me to people who still shape my career today.

Image via Adobe Stock.

Then later on he was publicly accused of various kinds of verbal and interpersonal abuse, and a whole lot of things fell into place. It turned out my first blush with the game industry put me in contact with its worst instincts.

C'est la vie. I don't even blame him for how I thought it was a normal thing to do. I'd been through some shitty work experiences up to that point where I was taught to normalize way worse behavior.

I assumed being nervous about angering everyone around me was a normal way to live.

Abusers in every industry know how to put on a charming face

I'm lucky. This was my one interaction with a game development "celebrity" that went really sour. In the decade since, plenty of high-profile names rose to prominence as advocates or charismatic creatives, only for accusations (many corroborated) to surface of how they manipulated and abused partners or coworkers.

It's been long enough now that I keep running through a loop with these people. They're often high up on the interview list, either as someone I reach out to for comment or someone PR has offered. It's now a semi-regular habit that when allegations surface I double check our archives and find out I'd had a great interview with that person and really enjoyed their company, perhaps even looked up to them as someone to aspire to.

This really took a turn outside the world of game development, when a celebrity writer I looked up to was finally outed as being extremely abusive in the workplace, and who often took advantage of his subordinates. I'd built a lot of my creativity identity around this person's work, and reading stories about him that people were too afraid to tell for fear of reprisal left me in a rough spot. If he was such an abusive creep—what was I supposed to do with that?

Let's put aside for a moment the conversation of how we treat the work of "cancelled" artists—if only because it's largely unhelpful. The victims of abuse deserve more care than a book or film series.

That much has been obvious to me with each outing. What actually tore at me was how I felt somehow lesser with each revelation. That I was either an idiot for putting my faith in someone just because of how creative they were or worried that my faith in them revealed something dark about myself. Had I picked up whatever it was that made them abusive?

The only way to answer that is to assess if you've behaved like they have. Otherwise, you're just doing their work for them. Many abusers behave the way they do because they think everyone else acts the same way, or that this behavior is acceptable because it drives creativity.

But none of them are that creative, are they? They often get to ride high on the work of other people too exhausted or disinterested to enter the limelight. "Rock stars" often mask the harm they're doing by seeming to overdeliver, and once they're booted out, it's revealed that not much was lost.

It's easy to discard them. But where does that leave the rest of us?

We're all looking for someone who knows what they're doing

Making games is hard. Landing a job in games might be even harder. But once you feel that creative itch, that sense you might have a good game in you, you're scratching at the walls to find a way in.

There is no guaranteed way in. When you can't see the path, and aren't even sure how to make the thing you want to make, you cast out in search of resources. And that is where plenty of abusers lay their traps.

The same goes even when you're in the world of game development. If you have no idea how to start a business or build a kind of game feature, the most confident people with the loudest voices will draw you in.

It's easy to say "don't put anyone on a pedestal," but between LinkedInfluencers, game development conferences, and the video game marketing cycle, pedestal-placing is unfortunately built right into the business.

I was definitely drawn to some accused abusers because I was a person in search of a path. But finding a path wasn't enough, it still felt like giving them rent-free space in my head was allocating space for insights on how to be a creative person. That I needed their ideas and their behavior to be normal if I was going to do anything other than work on a farm.

Luckily that's not how any of this works.

I mentioned up top that the cynical reaction to this is to say "don't meet your heroes." And hey, maybe that's a message lots of folks need. I've met my heroes, and a lot of them sucked.

Not all of them did though. Plenty were kind, gave great feedback, and did everything in their power to not play up their talent or popularity. The ones I've gotten to speak with more extensively have been transparent about their failures and even shared opinions that I staunchly disagreed with. It wore some of the sheen off, sure, but I felt lucky. I got to know the actual person I looked up to, not just the projection on the screen.

Learning how to grapple with grifters and abusers is more relevant now than ever before as the game industry bleeds talent and studios in 2024. Any disaster opens doors for exploitative actors to take root and pitch themselves as the solution to everyone's problems.

So if you cross paths with such a person—if they lure you in and take advantage of you in some way—it's not your fault. Their failures don't mean your spark should be diminished in any way.

Everyone should get to meet their heroes. Everyone should also be ready to chuck their heroes into the bin at a moment's notice the second they let them down. No one needs the power or presence of a celebrity-style figure to validate who they are.

Just do what you do best, Bryant Francis from 2014. Keep writing, keep treating people well, and keep pushing back against bigoted weirdos.

Oh and uh, stop live transcribing your interviews. That's way more work than you need to do.