Today my friend and former colleague Kevin VanOrd announced his upcoming departure from GameSpot.
It’s strange for me now to think that Kevin and I met on the GameSpot message boards, way back in the early 2000s. (He was just fiddlecub to me then, at first.) I don’t know if this is still true, or even if it was entirely true at the time, but my recollection is that back then, it was not difficult to find thoughtful, stimulating, passionate discussion of games on those boards. I won’t say that things were always civil—they weren't—but GameSpot’s volunteer moderators did their best to keep things orderly, and many of the worst offenders were happy to sling crap at each other on the System Wars board and mercifully leave the rest of us out of it. For me, those boards were a lifeline, both because they were a place where I connected with people who cared as much about games as I did, and because they were the first place—online or otherwise—where I introduced myself as, and was thought of as, the woman I am.
Kevin and I were drawn to GameSpot not just because it was a site about games—there were, of course, a number of those—but because the writing on GameSpot was distinctive, smart, and lively. The writers defined GameSpot’s identity back then; people like Greg Kasavin, Jeff Gerstmann, Ryan Davis, Alex Navarro, Brad Shoemaker, and briefly, Carrie Gouskos, among others. As someone who had always loved games and always loved good writing, but had never seen those two things brought together as consistently as GameSpot’s editors managed to do it, for me GameSpot was a revelation. It challenged and elevated the way I thought about games, and it planted a seed in my mind. I’d come out of college not really knowing what I wanted to do with my life. I was teaching English at a Los Angeles high school and knew I didn’t want to stay there forever, at least in part because I wouldn’t have felt comfortable transitioning in that environment. When GameSpot showed me that thoughtful writing about games was possible and was valuable and that there was a place for it, suddenly I saw a path for myself. And in this regard, I sensed in Kevin a kindred spirit. But I wondered if an out gay man and a trans woman really had a shot at writing for a major video game site.
Our shared passions for games, writing, and GameSpot brought us together, and one year, Kevin crashed on my couch as we covered E3 together for a long-defunct, volunteer-staffed site while we tried to do good work and make names for ourselves. In some ways, I felt our fates were bound together, and some part of me honestly believed, longshot that it was, that we would both make it to GameSpot one day.
Of course, when (through hard work and very good fortune) we did both end up there, I could scarcely believe it. By the time I showed up, GameSpot had changed a lot. The writers I mentioned before had all moved on but the people there, people like Tom Mc Shea, Chris Watters, Shaun McInnis, and Justin Calvert, understood how important great writing was to GameSpot’s identity. And for about four years, I was proud to be part of that team, working alongside my friend Kevin and striving to do the kind of work that GameSpot had always represented to me, writing about games thoughtfully and critically and treating them as if they actually mean something. It was quite literally a dream come true, and working with Kevin, I was always in awe of his commitment and his work ethic, and always inspired by the quality of his writing.
But I think it’s been over the course of this past year, when I haven’t even been at GameSpot anymore, that Kevin has impressed me the most. Left in charge of the GameSpot reviews process, he has worked tirelessly to keep the quality of writing in GameSpot’s reviews outstanding, putting together an excellent stable of freelancers and continuing to push himself—rather too hard at times, I might say—to write some of the smartest and loveliest reviews I’ve ever had the pleasure of reading.
It can be frustrating writing about games sometimes, when you know that a considerable portion of your audience is only going to respond to the numeric score you give a game and the bullet points that try to sum up the “good” and “bad” aspects of it. It’s even more frustrating that some of those people, when you try to lift games up by acknowledging that they can actually mean something and by confronting some of those meanings in your work, react instead as if you’re trying to tear games down. But Kevin has never compromised on the belief, instilled in us both all those years ago, that good writing about games has to actually be good writing, that games deserve that and so do readers. After all, good writing was the reason we’d fallen in love with GameSpot in the first place, and the reason why we’d wanted so badly to do what we were doing.
Things are different today than they were in the early 2000s; with some “target demographics,” video is overshadowing the written word, and some great sites have folded. But at the same time, there are more people doing great writing about games than ever before, and there are at least a few sites that anyone who cares about smart games writing can visit to be stimulated and challenged. I find that encouraging.
GameSpot changed our lives, and I will always be so glad and so proud that Kevin and I both made it, and that for a while we were able to be part of it, together. GameSpot will always be a part of us, but it’s time for Kevin to move on. I wish him the best.
Notes
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