ian tries something new
in which a desperate loser who has no idea what he's doing attempts to stay relevant
hey there. you might already know this by now, but my name is ian walker.
i’ve been a freelance games writer for over a decade, but was lucky enough to spend the last two years at kotaku collecting a decent salary and basic health benefits. after leaving kotaku at the beginning of august, however, i dipped my toes back in the freelancing waters and found the experience… well, much more harrowing than i remembered.
that’s where this newsletter comes in. while i’ll still be trying to pitch larger stories at websites that can, you know, pay me, i hope to use ian’s video game cavalcade (name not final) as a way to share off-beat stories that interest me in bite-sized chunks. the kind of stuff websites generally don’t and/or won’t and/or can’t pay independent folks like me to write about for one reason or another.
i’m still gathering stuff for my first legit newsletter, so i figured i’d kick things off by publishing something i wrote in the days leading up to my departure from kotaku. it’s a story about me and also a goodbye post. i thought, perhaps foolishly, i’d be given the chance to post it on kotaku like so many of the writers who left the site before me, but it didn’t go down like that.
oh well! here goes nothing. love you.
After I first started freelancing for Kotaku but before I was hired as full-time writer, former editor-in-chief Stephen Totilo offered to fly me from California to the G/O Media offices in New York City for the Compete launch party. Compete, for those of you who’ve forgotten, was a competitive gaming vertical launched by Kotaku and Deadspin all the way back in February 2017. By the end of June 2018, Compete was dead. Long live Compete; esports didn’t deserve you.
I’d spent almost a decade trying to get my foot in the door writing career-wise, so this was a big deal for me. I worked alongside the Kotaku staff for a couple of days, afraid to say anything to anyone for fear they’d realize I was a fraud and immediately send me back home. I met Maddy Myers and Eric Van Allen, the backbone of Compete and two of my favorite people in games writing to this day. I tried to ignore the nagging voice in my head telling me I wasn’t really part of the team and enjoy myself.
Stephen and Tim Marchman, Deadspin’s editor-in-chief at the time, ended up treating the Compete people to lunch. My whole time in New York City was a blur—I’d only left my small California town previously to attend Evo in Las Vegas, and even then, I stayed preoccupied with work rather than the sights—so I don’t remember where they took us. Some fancy noodle place. As we chatted about esports journalism, I asked the waiter for a water. They asked if I wanted still or sparkling. I said still.
This was apparently the wrong move.
See, when you ask for water where I’m from, you get a glass of water. Sometimes with ice. But in New York City, the question “still or sparkling?” is meant to trick you into buying a huge glass bottle of premium water I can only assume is dredged from Lake Minnetonka itself. When I turned back to the table, I didn’t know why Stephen and Tim were laughing. Apparently, we now had to pay for water when I should have just asked for a free glass of tap. They assured me it was fine, but I was mortified.
In my melodramatic mind, this was a microcosm of my career (such as it was) up to this point. I didn’t belong here, I told myself. I was just some uneducated hick from Nowhere, California, sitting among professionals and play-acting as if I knew what I was doing. Every failure, every rejection up to this point suddenly made sense. I ate my noodles and drank my expensive water and nodded along to the convo at the table, but I was already mentally preparing myself for the next inevitable letdown.
Somehow, it never came. Despite being the kind of person whose frustration at my own circumstances manifested in lashing out at Kotaku for its ostensible faults, Stephen gave me a chance. I started out small, bolstering the site’s fighting game community coverage here and there for a couple of years, before Kotaku hired me in February 2020. I couldn’t believe it. My small orbit of friends and family knew what a big deal this was for me. I was in, and everything from here on out would be simple.
Two and a half years later, I now realize I put so much stock in the status of my career that I ignored the deep-seated issues at the core of my psyche. I was writing professionally, sure, but the same old insecurities and resentments continued to bubble in my gut. It’s sick, really. I was grateful for the level of security I was afforded as the world burned down around me, but I couldn’t help feeling ostracized by an industry that wasn’t at all what it appeared to be from the outside.
I’m leaving Kotaku. It’s not something I expected to do even a couple of weeks ago but those in positions of power are, if nothing else, hilariously fickle and I no longer see in this website a path forward.
While I hope to continue writing (sorry about that), I don’t have any illusions about the current state of games media. More than likely, I’ll end up fading away. And if that means the people who are still super mad about me reviewing the PlayStation 5 in the context of a global pandemic or jokingly calling Jack Garland from Stranger of Paradise a “normie fuckboy” forget I ever existed, that’s even better. I don’t pretend to be perfect, but I also don’t think some snarky reporting should lead to readers calling for me to be imprisoned in a concentration camp or a so-called “progressive” forum digging up old pictures of my sister (seriously, fuck off).
Thank you to my fellow Kotaku writers for being a constant source of commiseration and camaraderie. The thought of working anywhere else creates a cavernous pit in my stomach, and I’m unbelievably sad about leaving you all. Keep fighting.
if you’re still here, thanks for reading. use one or more of these buttons if you feel like it.
💜💜💜