The Sunday Papers is our weekly roundup of great writing about (mostly) videogames from across the web.
What pressure! As I mentioned last week, this is my last ever Sunday Papers as I’m leaving Rock Paper Shotgun (and Gamer Network) this coming Wednesday. I’m not sure how to meaningfully summarise twelve years on this site or twenty years in the field, but after several aborted essays I rediscovered the columnist’s crutch: bullet points.
You’ll have to forgive the indulgence, because I present here just some of the values – and the personal taste, clearly – that I’ve tried to express through the site during my time here. Many of the values were instilled in me by my excellent colleagues (particularly the unimpeachable Alice O), and I only hope I lived by them more often than not.
Previews are almost always a waste of time thanks to every journalist getting the same limited access. You can occasionally make them worthwhile through wit and personal insight, but don’t fool yourself: more often than not you’ll be made the stenographer of a marketing campaign.
A game you can play now is worth a thousand games you’ll be able to play in the future. It’s a real problem that we spend more time writing about the trailers at GeoffFest than we do the demos at Steam Next Fest. Free 3 was one attempt to correct for this and, in a way, Wishlisted is another. Still we ought to spend more of our time on games that are out than those that aren’t.
Games are not exceptional. They are one artform among many and one small element of a full life, and they can be better understood and championed when placed in that wider context by people with full lives of their own.
All games are equal regardless of their ambition, team size, cost or marketing budget. You can put an 800-person blockbuster alongside a one-person free game and treat both the same and that’s fine. I’m proud of RPS’s writing about free games over the years, particularly where a single writer was able to paint a picture of the state of the art over months, and in particularly Porpentine’s Live Free Play Hard, Brendan’s Free Loaders and Kat Brewster’s Priceless Play. (Read also: Brendan’s Punk’s Not Dead.)
You don’t need to write about that yearly franchise forever just because it continues to be commercially successful. Let games enter their Vegas residencies and let critics move on.
“Indie” is mostly useless as a term and today serves mostly to marginalise certain work. (“AAA” is likewise useless for being vague.)
Game discovery is less important than game persuasion. A lot of your audience have already “discovered” more games than they can play in a lifetime and have them on their wishlist or in their Steam library, untouched. The critic’s job is to not simply help the reader discover yet more games, but to persuade them to play those games and help them to understand those games better.
Don’t promote pre-ordering. That digital store isn’t going to run out of copies and pre-ordering is an attempt to get people to spend money before they know whether a game is worth that money. Helping people decide whether a game is worth their money is one of our jobs, so why would you encourage pre-ordering?
You owe it to the reader to be honest about your feelings, not to hedge based on how you think the reader will feel. This sounds obvious, but I still see writers do it all the time. If you’re playing a game that seems great or that you think other people will like, but you are finding it a boring dirge, write about why you’re finding it a boring dirge, even if the answer lies in you and not the game. Trust readers to find the writers that align with their tastes, rather than sacrificing your own taste in favour of the imagined reader’s or a false objectivity. Trust that clear expression of your honest feelings is the most valuable thing you have to offer as a critic.
When appropriate, write about what makes a game interesting and remember that whether a game is good or bad is often the least interesting thing about it. Trust the reader to draw their own conclusions. These last two ideas may seem to be in conflict, but try to hold both ideals at the same time, loosely.
Videogames are better than ever and there are more videogames being made than ever. This also means your readers’ time is more valuable than ever and you should therefore raise your standards.
Never be cruel. Never make it personal. Never call a developer lazy.
Whatever impact your writing has on a developer’s business, positive or negative, is none of your business.
Who cares how much a videogame sells or how many people are playing it? Shareholders and developers, probably. We as critics and reporters should not care (unless you’re a B2B website which RPS is not).
Videogames are hard to make and you can help players to understand that better. The Mechanic was our most explicit attempt to make that case, in which Alex Wiltshire talked to developers about the challenges they faced in designing a specific element of their game. Many other series less directly served the same function, such as Pip’s The Great Outdoors.
The people who play a particular videogame are not a “community”. Games have players, who are individuals, and if those players congregate, it’s typically in small groups. Attempts to define a playerbase as a single coherent community is normally either a function of the marketing department or of a tiny minority of players claiming they speak on behalf of the whole. Be wary of stories about what eg. “the Apex Legends community” thinks, therefore.
What players do in and with games is often more interesting than the games themselves. We represented this constantly via reporting, diary series, and never better than in Brendan’s Ridealong column.
There are infinite ways to play a game and none of them are wrong. There are infinite ways to write about a game and some of them are wrong, but you have to decide what those are for yourself.
It’s in the strapline of every one of these columns: read more! I’ve curated The Sunday Papers in part to spread writing I think is worthwhile, but I’ve also handed the reigns of the column to the newest writer on the team several times over simply to give them an excuse to read more during work hours. The field of games journalism has a cultural memory of about six weeks in part because even the practitioners of it don’t read enough games journalism – but also, you should read voraciously outside of videogame journalism, too.
No word in an article is less important than any other word in an article. The strapline, the slug, the captions, the tags: treat these not as afterthoughts (or as SEO fodder) but as opportunities for entertaining the reader and the reader will love you for it. Marsh Davies hid entire secondary articles in his Premature Evaluation alt texts, and that’s just one of the reasons why Marsh is among the best to ever do it.
Avoid using patronising or gatekeeping terms (“asset flip”, “casual”, “git gud”, “hardcore”, “pretentious”, “shovelware”, etc.), even ironically. I personally also avoid “gamer”.
Don’t write about the gamers being angry. The gamers are always angry.
As William Goldman once wrote about Hollywood: nobody knows anything. This is equally true in videogames and important to remember when market analysts come looking for free press.
Some games are weird. Try to make them feel normal to the readers.
Some games are normal. Try to make them feel weird to the readers.
Pissing people off is fine – essential, even – but piss off the right people.
Videogame is one word.
I could ask ten people to describe RPS and get ten different answers. I could speak to ten people who miss some previous era of RPS and find they all miss a different previous era. Coherent branding, consistent voice, a house style; these things are valid aspirations, but overrated. Better to be like Frasier Crane, who explained his style of decorating to his father thus: “It’s called eclectic. The theory behind it is that if you’ve got really fine pieces of furniture, it doesn’t matter if they match. They will go together.” Hire really fine writers, give them the platform to do what they want, and they will go together. (And argue among yourselves over who is Martin Crane’s ragged yet comfortable armchair.)
This final bullet point matters the most. This post is otherwise not intended as a cage for whoever succeeds me, who I’d prefer ran this site their own way, unburdened by ghosts of gaming past. That’s what I always did and hopefully what I enabled Katharine to do. The remainder of the team here is also great and can be trusted to steer RPS true, as they have been for several months already.
As for me, my new day job is outside of games media (and in gamedev, instead), but I will undoubtedly do games media things on the side because I can’t help myself. If you’d like to see whatever I do after RPS, you can follow me on Bluesky or via my never-updated blog. Thank you for reading and supporting me all these years. You are the best commenters in games media (except for the hundreds of you I personally banned, you guys were the worst).
I tried to resist it, but music this week is ’93 til Infinity, because I do indeed be chilling. All my music picks from this era of Sunday Papers shall remain available in a YouTube playlist.