If I went out into an empty field in the middle of the desert. If I looked up at the sky and screamed as loud as it felt like I fucking could – more people would hear my pained scream than would read what I have to say about Mass Effect. This is doubly so if what I have to say is about a game like Pink River or Witchball. These are isolated experiences. Please do not pay attention to how loud any of us have to scream.

I know someone who – scratch that (i’m not a psychopath) – Someone on Twitter says all of this yelling is like an avant gard art circle. Maybe this is true. I don’t even know if all of the fucking constant screaming and flag waving about whatever we decide to call indie games this week is worth it.
Maybe it’s not.
All I know is that this week, a huge Triple A triple Threat release is going to make a million dollars. No matter what any of us write, No matter how good the think pieces are. No matter what color the skin of the writers are – I huge publication is going to say something like it’s “technically competent, if underwhelming.” and get paid real cash money to post that online.
Somewhere, a writer of color can’t pay their rent.

Today it feels like writing about videogames isn’t even worth the paper we print these words on. Well – we print these words on the internet of all things, so it’s probably worth a great deal less than that. Nobody is paying their bills to be able to read Re Bind. IO . No one is paying their bills to read Critical-Distance. If I find out someone is, well, I’d worry more about their priorities. I guess there’s nothing that you can do.

Every time someone at Deep Hell Dot Com sits down infront of a computer, a singular problem rears its head. What the hell do we do? There’s not a single person that cares if they should buy Mass Effect 2 in 2020. Maybe you can pick it up during a Steam Summer Sale for 5$. This is less money than anyone would pay for something at Taco Bell. The real radical praxis is buying it during the aforementioned Steam Summer Sale if you want to pay it. That amount of money has to go to everyone but the developer.

I’m not mathematician, but every time the discourse goes towards Big Outlets Aren’t Reviewing Indie Games – well. My brain does this thing where it looks up Noah Caldwell-Gervais. He’s a Youtuber mostly known for softly spoken video game critic. Gervais’ latest video has a huge ratio if likes somewhere in the mid three thousands. This means that dear old Gervais’ almost two hour youtube video is getting numbers most critics I know won’t ever see.

Videogame Professional Tim Rogers’ latest video is somewhere around six thousand likes. That’s just the Pure Number of people not too lazy to Slam That Like Button. I bet at least twice that amount of people watched his video when they weren’t even logged in to Youtube to dislike it. This video is the work of a true videogame freak – and again, I bet some of the extremely talented writers I know will never see numbers like that.
Did the internet leave us behind? Probably not.

The Samurai Game releases this week. Already, I bet people in numbers five or six times larger than those aforementioned youtube videos are gonna buy it. Hell, I’ll even make a bet: I Bet The American Samurai Videogame sells a million copies in the first 24 hours. That’s lowballing what an already assuredly “critically acclaimed” (funny how that always ends up on the box) game ends up with. While we’re all stumbling over ourselves trying to say “no, we shouldn’t write about The American Samurai Game” a horde of red-faced game players is lining up On Line to download/buy/ship this game.

Our real audience as critics is those people. While we’re all content to make sure only the smartest boys and girls read our articles – those people are out there slavishly devoting themselves to a youtuber in a PC gaming chair or Kotaku or Wherever. I increasingly ask myself where all of this excellent writing is going. Who’s the audience? It seems like only other videogame critics really care about this shit. You won’t see Into the Spine or Critical Distance pop up on Metacritic. In Youtube comments I see “Thanks for not telling me how this game made you feel in your review.”

Sometimes I talk about the office. For me, the office is videogames. I’m not one of those critics that’s gonna say “please don’t make me talk about the office again”. I love talking about videogames, and every time I do with one of my Capital G Gamer friends, they don’t give a shit about a mechanical, emotional or else wise analysis. Our vocabulary of criticism sure makes it to other critics, but is anyone outside of us reading it?
What does it mean to be a Videogame Critic in 2020? Who’s our real audience, and who are we trying to talk to?

I don’t want to be only read by other critics. To me, being a “Writer’s Writer” means I might as well as be the best looking corpse in a graveyard. No matter how handsome I was in life, we’re still all dead here. Some people say we have to work on getting our work out to the bigger outlets. Kotaku? Polygon – maybe it’s time we start trying to make sure they can’t exist in a year. Maybe there doesn’t need to be more silly Youtube videos. Maybe if we’re gonna be alt critics we try to break out into the public psyche like other critics have in the past. Someone is reaching this people – why aren’t we?

There’s a monthly almost string of complaints. All of them are still about how Most Game Journalism functions as an extended wing of the AAA game industry. All of the time and resources go there, there’s no question about it. The answer to why there’s no indie coverage? because everyone wants to be the first one with real clicks about The American Samurai Game. Every month these publications fail to measure up to what we ask of them, and every month someone goes if only there was writing like this.

Here’s the writing like this, what are we going to do about it?