On Greg Kasavin and the Start of Giant Bomb’s Guest Contributors Series

Today, Giant Bomb launched its Guest Contributors series. As Austin Walker says in his post introducing the presence of guest voices, “This writing will come both from old friends of the site and from a collection of impressive new voices in the fields of games journalism and criticism.” And I’m very much looking forward to seeing a diverse assortment of voices and perspectives appear on Giant Bomb. But I was also very pleased to see that the inaugural post in the series is from former GameSpot Editor-In-Chief and current Supergiant Games Creative Director Greg Kasavin. 

It’s no exaggeration to say that Greg is one of the reasons I started writing about games. Many years ago, I was in a state of post-collegiate confusion. I knew I had a set of skills and a set of interests and felt I had things to say that were worth hearing, but I didn’t see any way of combining these things into something that I could somehow actually do as a job or career of some kind. Becoming a GameSpot reader in the very early 2000s changed all that; it revealed to me that rich, stimulating, substantial writing about games was not only possible but was happening and that there was a place for it, and while I enjoyed many of the voices on the site, Greg’s was the one that most often challenged my own perspective and, in so doing, contributed the most to deepening my appreciation for games as a medium. 

You can read his post for yourself. I just wanted to highlight one part of it in particular. His piece ends with, 

“Whether I’m writing about games or writing about myself, it isn’t any different.” 

And I don’t mean to imbue this insightful comment with all sorts of lofty, far-reaching, politically charged meanings that the person who wrote it may not have intended. But I do believe that all of us inevitably and invariably experience media through the lens of our own experiences and that there is no neutral or “objective” perspective. I also believe that if anyone’s perspective is going to be seen as approaching objectivity, it’s most often that of a cisgender straight white man. They sometimes have the luxury of having a perspective that has the veneer of objectivity, largely because cis and straight and white and male are perceived as the standard, the default settings, as if they are neutral, while other perspectives–trans or queer or PoC or female–are sometimes seen as being skewed or biased away from the neutral, default norm. 

I think when we acknowledge that we all bring assumptions and perspectives of our own, which are inevitably influenced to some degree by our identity and our position within culture, to our experiences with art and media, it only enriches the discussion. After all, isn’t part of the reason games matter because they can reveal us to ourselves in new ways?

And so I think that for this first post in the Guest Contributors series, which happens to be written by such an important industry veteran, one who happens to be a straight white male and who happens to be associated with GameSpot, an outlet that I think it’s fair to say at one point strove for the appearance of objectivity in its reviews, to end by acknowledging that when we talk about games, we talk about ourselves, is beautiful. It’s a great note on which to start this series, and I’m excited to see where it’s going.