Astrolabe (17): Transmission Received with Patrick Klepek

Patrick Klepek: A mixture of luck and happenstance, really. My early years on the Internet were spent on IRC, an early form of chat rooms. I, unsurprisingly, played a lot of video games as a kid, and when my family gained access to home Internet, I started searching for video games online. That lead me to the IRC chat room for the online website Gaming Age, the original home of the Gaming Age/NeoGAF/ResetEra forums. Some folks who contributed to Gaming Age were foundational to the 90s era of Electronic Gaming Monthly, which means I somehow, by chance, ended up hanging out online with the editors of EGM at the age of 14. I started writing for Gaming Age, and getting paid enough money that my parents were taking the majority of the check away from me.

The next bout of luck? I lived maybe 30 minutes from where EGM was being produced at the time, prior to them moving to California, as the era of 1UP began. They let me hang out at their office, and many of them became lifelong friends of mine. They were an early resource for someone who didn’t yet know they were going to become a writer, and by the time I was heading to college and fumbling my way into a journalism degree, I had a bunch of friends who were the editors of major magazines. They offered me my first paid writing gigs, which helped me pay for rent and beer in college, and when I graduated, the current design lead of Destiny, Luke Smith, was leaving 1UP for Bungie.

1UP offered me the news editor position, and I immediately move to San Francisco.

PK: Being young and naive helped, I think. If I were plopped into the same situation in my 20s, I probably would have been a nervous wreck. Instead, getting to know these people online and then playing early versions of games in the EGM offices while my dad went to lunch just seemed normal to me. 

The part that still throws me, though, is my dad. Can you imagine your kid coming to you and saying “hey, I met a bunch of older dudes online, and I want to go hang out in their office?” It’s absurd. I can’t tell if it being the early days of the Internet makes that story better or worse, but it’s such a testament to my parents’ own mix of trust and naivety that opened this door for me; my entire career is owed this moment. Of course, my dad always met these people before I had an interaction with them, and showing up at a Very Official Looking Office probably helped things. But still, it was weird.

PK: Part of the appeal is that you’re always writing a new piece. I don’t spend much time thinking about something I wrote 10 years ago, despite suspecting I would now think it’s trash. I’ve moved onto the next piece of reporting, the next rabbit hole to go down. It’s something I have trouble comprehending about working on video games, where you toss all this time and energy into an unwieldy project that you barely have any influence over over the course of many years. It’s also why I’ve never written a book, though having kids and losing all my free time has given me a convenient new excuse for that.

It is also true I’m part of the generation that grew up alongside the creation and mainstreaming of the Internet, during the same period when shows like South Park were very popular amongst me and my friends. You can make some pretty accurate guesses at the way I was talking in my formative years as a writer/person. I said a lot of shit when I was younger, when edgelord felt like a radical identity, that I’m not proud. Some immaturity was semi-permanently crystallized online and has become fodder for far right goons who hound me and my work. It used to stress me out, but the people I work with know what my values are, the person I’m always trying to be, and that I emphasize empathy. 

Plus, what I’ve come to realize is that part of living life is, at times, reminding yourself of that person you used to be, because you can’t appreciate how far you’ve come without sitting with the past.

PK: I should be clear, I don’t think my writing was infested with edgelord bullshit. It’s mostly the way I conducted myself online at a young age. A combination of not knowing any better and a limited world view from suburbia proved to be something I’ve had to grow from in the years since. 

What’s different about 2021 is that it’s never been easier to get published, right? There are loads of places publishing material in various forms, whether it’s audio, video, or text. It’s extremely easy to start your own blog, write a clever tweet, and hope that goes viral. In that sense, games writing—criticism, journalism, whatever—is more democratized and accessible than ever. But that’s also a curse, because so many people are in the field, too, and it’s harder to get noticed in the haze.

In the past—and I think this advice still stands—is that writing is the most important part, however it happens. Even if no one reads it. It’s so much easier to sit on a good idea and watch it wither away, than it is to see that piece to completion, even if no one reads it. It’s the only way you get better!

In terms of getting the attention of editors and trying to make this your profession, I’m such a bad person to ask advice on that because everyone already knows me. I’m in an extremely privileged position that I do not have to wonder if a gaming editor knows who I am—I know that they do! And so how can I reasonably give advice to people when I haven’t had to climb the modern latter myself?

The one thing I’ll say is that I do read a lot of pitches for freelance material, and the art of the pitch is really difficult. It’s the part most people don’t think about. It’s the equivalent of a cover letter to a resume. Nobody wants to write a cover letter, and nobody wants to write a pitch. But you can’t get an editor to sign off on a piece without a good pitch, and a good pitch is all the more important if your name isn’t well-known, and an editor is deciding whether to take a chance on you. Spend more time working on your pitches, even if that means having people edit your pitches. It’s that important.

PK: Being concise, clear, and specific about the piece is critical. I also notice that younger writers really inflate how many words it’ll take for the story. The moment I see a writer saying it’ll take 2,000 or 3,000 words to fully write whatever they’re pitching, my eyes roll into the back of my head. You need to be a pretty established writer to pull something like that off, because in most cases, you can do a lot more with a lot less. That many words is just a way for a young writer to get into a lot of trouble, and for an editor who’s taking a risk to realize they may not want to work with that writer next time.

PK: It has a much sharper edge than it ever did, and it’s for the better. And that sharp edge is being pointed in the right direction (most of the time), which definitely wasn’t always the case in the past.

People are smarter, and there’s a wider group of voices contributing to that shared base of knowledge, criticism, and reporting. Most people used to look exactly like me, and while that’s still mostly true, it’s also changing rapidly. (I wish that audiences were less hostile about it, because I think we keep losing potentially transformative writers who, understandably, do not want to be harassed!) It’s been encouraging. One way to view that change is to be afraid of it and become defensive. Another way to view that is as a challenge to stay interesting, relevant, and introspective.

As games writers have diversified, I’ve been kept on my toes! I have to find a reason to keep sticking around, and it’s made all of my work better as a result. I’m grateful for their presence.

This also tracks alongside the rise of video and podcasts, neither of which were part of my skill set until I landed in jobs where, suddenly, I was being asked to do both. I still consider writing and reporting to be where I do my best work, but it’s basically impossible to get a job these days without having the chops to show up on a podcast or be part of a video, and so a lot of work has gone into figuring out, “OK, how do I fit in here? What am I good at, what am I bad at?” It’s scary and exciting.

PK: This is an overly simplistic reduction, but 1UP.com accidentally stumbled into the notion of turning previously anonymous games writers into bonafide personalities. Bylines mattered, because you aligned your taste and preferences with them. You knew people’s names. Giant Bomb took what 1UP.com stumbled into and turned it into a business model. Giant Bomb wasn’t just a website to a lot of people, it was a family. It’s part of the reason some elements of the audience were hostile to me being the first person hired over there; I wasn’t “part” of the family. That welcoming atmosphere was genuine, and helped break down the barriers between fans, commentators, and developers. 

But all things come to an end. Giant Bomb only happened because Jeff Gerstmann was fired from GameSpot. Austin Walker was only hired by Giant Bomb because I decided to leave for Kotaku. A door closes, a door opens. That’s what’s happening here, too. I’m not sure it tells you much about the future of games journalism yet because it matters what happens next. Too often, we lose veteran voices, people who have seen decades of the industry with their own eyes, to roles behind the scenes at game developers for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that it pays way better.

If this trio leaves to work on games, it’ll be a boon to those developers but a loss to games criticism. If they decide to stick around and try something new, maybe it’s the new Giant Bomb? Maybe it’s something else entirely? Who knows. But all of us feel the pull to try new things. Giant Bomb was, at one point, a new thing. Now, it’s an institution and it’s a lot different to work for an institution, even if you helped build it.

PK: Appreciate you having me! Most of my work pops up at Waypoint, and every once and a while my wife and I find time to sit down and record a podcast about horror movies under Til’ Death Do us Part. People can pitch Waypoint at [email protected], and your best bet for trying to get something past us is looking beyond the 24-hour news cycle. What are the things that keep cropping up in the discourse, and what’s it say about gaming culture? We don’t run a lot of “news” at Waypoint, but we’re always looking for takes on broader trends. Surprise us!