@flasaltine: At least the community spotlight is on the front page now and there is a community highlight section on the front page. It would be nice if there was paid freelance work here, but at least there are currently some ways to feature articles.

Though I bet GB could attract some more established people if they offered a standard freelance rate for an article a week or so. I don't see a person making a living off of that kind of spot work, but at least this site would be a bit less insular.

Having more "established people" freelance for them seems like a nice idea but it just doesn't seem like that's what Giant Bomb is all about. GB is personality-driven, having unfamiliar people writing serious articles for the site who have never been on-video or on-podcast doesn't seem to be in the spirit of it. I think Jeff has talked in the past about why he doesn't hire freelance writers and that seems to be his exact excuse. I think it's also why GB has done so well and gotten so popular.

I tend to agree. One of the reasons why this site drew me in was it's fairly small size and that you really feel as if you get to know the names and faces behind it. It's not this giant crew of dozens of people writing click baity articles or trying to turn everything into a super serious, political discussion. Giant Bomb does it's thing very well. Other sites like Kotaku cater moreso to the text based stuff. I am content with sites finding what works for them and sticking with it.

I don't see how you can't do both. Its not like adding some written stuff by other people would remove a video or something. The only written content on the site right now are occasional reviews every few weeks. People on this site already read community blogs and links to articles on other sites are pretty popular in the forums. Bringing some written stuff into the site proper could appeal to different people and satiate some of the people who miss the type of content that Patrick put out every once and a while.

Also GB wouldn't be where it is right now if it didn't reach out to other sites and personalities to supplement the main roster. People like John Drake, Brad Muir, and even Sony's Adam Boyes have made this site a little more vibrant. Heck, Dan Ryckert entered the collective GB consciousness on a multi-person podcast. I don't see how trying out freelancers would hurt the site. You can have freelancers without commissioning multiple articles a week from multiple people. Would one or two really pull attention?

The cult of personality aspect of GB is a great strength, but it is also a huge weakness if any of the main staff decide to leave at any point. Freelancers could be a way of building a bench to fill in on the slow weeks (like during conventions) or fill in if anything disrupts the main staff (like say the GBeast office falling apart).

@excast said:

I don't really understand this mentality because, for me, guests have always been a huge part of the appeal of Giant Bomb. Having a freelance section would just formalise that a bit, and build upon what they're already doing with the guest Game of the Year lists. There are also ways to tie the existing crew into freelance work — for instance, you could have a dumptruck discussion go up with every piece where a staff member like Alex talks about it with the author.

Guests interacting with the staff, sure. Not really guests just doing their own thing.

I can kind of understand why a freelance budget isn't much of a priority. Like I said before, Gamespot's writing staff was completely gutted last year. It might be hard to justify Giant Bomb adding freelancers when their sister site was just laying off many long term employees. Perhaps the addition of a news person in Giant Bomb East will provide the site with a bit of the touch that has been missing ever since Patrick took off for Kotaku. I still don't understand that move and have to assume he was offered a lot more money.

I really wonder how well longer written features do on Giant Bomb.

Best of luck to her, but I'm still waiting for her and Alex to play Alien Isolation together

What do you expect? With the current culture in the industry, which is heavily male-dominated, female writers will feel discouraged.

I guess I am confused by what this means. Trigger warning?

If anything the culture is "Be glad you have a job" oriented. So many sites that were around a few years ago either don't exist or have been heavily gutted. And that really has less to do with gender than it does the nature of content people are interested in consuming nowadays.

Bringing written content on to the site proper could appeal to different people, sure. However, I have a hard time believing any written content will get views and a following unless it's either seriously click-baity or intentionally stirring up political drama (basically yellow journalism). Anything that's not that will have a hard time staying afloat, hence why Cara Ellison can't get a job despite being skilled at what she does.

Dan is pretty much delusional. Someone who works hard and succeeds usually comes to believe they made it because they "tried really hard" or "gave it their all." The reality is that their are 20 other people who did the same thing and didn't get the job. Not everyone gets to do what they *want* to do, even those who legitimately try their best and work really hard, etc. Danny O' Dwyer seems to understand this, and has said on the Danswers podcast that he understands luck is a big part of the equation (so he gives more sensible career advice).

Also, it's possible to be really great at something and for their not to be a market their to sustain your work. If you're great at something but no one wants to pay for it... you're eventually going to have to do something else.

I agree that there's a space for longform articles on the internet. That's because, while video and audio content are much more distracting than written is, they're both far less attractive to people who are at work. I'm willing to bet that most users of fivethirtyeight and Grantland are like me, people who are seeking unobtrusive distractions at work, but who rarely visit those sites at night when there are other options.

The difference I see between these sites and the games writers we are eulogizing is that they are both riding the analytics trend. Yes, they have pop culture pieces from Wesley Morris and Andy Greenwald, but it sure seems like guys like Bill Barnwell and Zach Lowe are the real bread and butter to me (I haven't read fivethirtyeight enough to have quite as encyclopedic a knowledge of its writers). It's precisely because these sites sustain a higher burden of proof and substantiation to their arguments that they are more interesting to me than (arguably) competitive editorial content from other news and sports sites. Not coincidentally, the presentation of data is better suited to a text medium than the alternatives.

Conversely, even the best games writers are still working with nothing more than their opinions. If there's a writer out there who wants to give me analytics on game design? Sign me up. But aside from there being no one like that that I'm aware of, I'm not even sure the data exists, hidden behind veils of corporate secrecy as it is. Analytics and consumption aren't tied together for games in the way that they are for sports, and politics is public domain.

@g3ese:

She decided to move on from the industry, how was she "chased" out? You people want to turn everything into sexism... Take off your tin foil fedora.

Why do you think she decided to ''move on''? How can a female write in an industry which has seen other females harassed recently? The costs outweighed the benefits, so it's hardly a surprise she decided to leave.

@veektarius: I deffinitely have the same viewership pattern with Grantland and I also love the analytic bend to their sports coverage, its a real differentiator. However, writers like Andy Greenwald and Wesley Morris tend to have really deep arguments, strong prose, and unique perspectives that make me want to read their takes on just about any show or movie that they cover that I have any interest in. I love reading well formed arguments from people smarter than me who put the time and effort into making their work approachable. I think that Grantland succeeds because it is so cross-cultural in its focus, the sports supports the pop culture and vice versa.

Also it helps that Grantland spreads its coverage across podcasts, video, and articles. One strong take is parroted across three formats so that people can absorb the best content regardless of their preferred method of consumption. I think that is really one of the biggest innovations that Grantland has made for its analytic work. They don't change the content of their work to appeal to more people, they spread that content across as many mediums as possible. There are slight changes during each translation, but the central message is translated intact. So an article comes out to give a perspective full focus, a podcast will come out discussing a few columns, and eventually a video might come out with footage to support the discussion edited in. I'm honestly trying to do the same thing with my essays and videos and I think it is working a lot better than when I was just writing (hopefully I'll be able to throw together a podcast in the near future).

There are plenty of women who have found and continue have success.

@excast: Wouldn't be surprised if they fear secretly. Brianna Wu and Anita Sarkeesian have been open about their harassment; which begs to question how many more female voices are targets.

@thatpinguino: It is certainly true that they are both good writers (though their tastes are both far enough off mainstream that I rarely take their recommendations) but there are no shortage of good writers on TV or movies. Go to Rotten Tomatoes for a given flick and you'll find a half dozen other writers who express their opinions as well as Morris does. I think the editorialists benefit far more from being on Grantland than Grantland benefits from having them, though without the site traffic this is all just one man's opinion obviously.

@frozen: Yep, there is a lot of harassment out there. The Internet in general is an ugly place, especially for women who aren't afraid to express their opinions. But I think we need to be careful about acting as if this is an issue confined to video games or that any lack of success women in the industry have when it comes to finding work is based solely on sexism.

Yeah I tend to agree with you. I love Cara's work and think she is great on video, but in most places written content is dead because it doesn't pay bills. All of these great female writers need to learn how to produce video content, they have great viewpoints and opinions and it is a shame they won't change with the times.

That's more on consumers than the industry. Why make content that most people don't bother viewing?

Well that's kind of the point I was touching on earlier in the thread. They do view it.

People actually do read things on the internet, quite a lot. And Cara's work is popular, at least popular enough it's not unreasonable for her to think she should have a salaried position somewhere.

However one of the bigger problems for media right now though, is that the ad markets for video and type are very different. Video pays comparatively very well, the ad model for type model is very broken though. Even the most well read sites on the internet have trouble making a go of it. There's a lot of external factors for that (Ad-Block, search engines indexing, aggregators, competing free amateur content, falling ad rates etc) that don't currently affect video to nearly the same degree.

So for a talented writer like Cara, you could be doing everything right, put out great well received popular work and still no one will want to hire you because they themselves aren't bringing in adequate revenue to hire salaried people.

What I think we'll eventually see is more and more places have to go back to some sort of direct reader financial support. Whether that's subscriptions like GiantBomb, ala carte paywalls, or perhaps some Patreon type thing.

Stop it!

Maybe they can hire Tony Shalhoub. I think he would fit right in.

Man, internet writers/journalists/whateveryouwannacallthem really need to form a union or the pond will keep shrinking like this.

I love Dan and his (D)antics* but when he spoke about hard work etc. I remembered his stories about college and coudn't really reconcile the two things.

* Danscapades, Dirty Deeds Dan Dirt Cheap, Dance Dance Revolutions

@flyingroman: If games writers tried to actually form an association you'd find them quickly out of a job and replaced by scabs who would be more than happy to do the job for dirt cheap. That's the problem. Everybody thinks they can be a writer and thinks it's a dream job.

That's the quickest way to ensure this kind of writing would go completely extinct.

Collective bargaining only works if the employees in question are vital enough to the business that the employer is forced to acquiesce to their demands. It may be unfortunate, but Cara's kind of writing is certainly not "vital" to a business' success.

Unions can be great for people doing certain kinds of work. Abstract autobiographical games criticism is not one of those.

I think we need more patreons focused on the moving the medium of videogame-coverage coverage forward.

Preferably with stretch goals intrinsic to the socio-racial context created by hegemonic pressure that "games" exert on podcastsphere.

Honestly, this is so, so sad. Years ago, Chuck Klosterman suggested part of the reasons games weren't considered art was because few if any critics approached them as such. I thought deeper critique of the medium was pretty much impossible until I discovered Cara's writing. Her "Gaming Made Me" piece about playing Tomb Raider as a young girl and all her S.Exe stuff completely reshaped how I thought people could write about games. I don't believe she and Leigh Alexander knew each other personally but their respective work was so fantastic you'd think they were trying to outdo the other.

Regardless, it's obvious that Embed With, GamerGate and her recent hand injury took a great toll on her (she actually almost lost her hand). I hope she gets some much-needed rest and finds something new and fulfilling.

@slag: Obviously any discussion on Cara's readership numbers is pure speculation, but I feel like it's worth pointing out that, while you're right that the ad market for writing is super rough in comparison to video work, it's not like ad-block isn't a huge thorn in the side of video ads just as well, and there are still plenty of salaried writers in this space. They can find work, it's not impossible. You just have to be doing something that people want to read and pull in decent numbers. I think it's telling that Cara's work was never picked up in any greater capacity. Her writing is very unusual in this space, and whenever I heard about her it wasn't from individuals who were spreading good word of mouth about this amazing stream of consciousness piece about pea soup and video games, it was from other critics, instead. Her writing appeals to a very specific kind of person and a very specific set of tastes.

At a certain point, it's understandable that someone who writes the way she does, in a way that is often only tangentially related to video games, or at times not at all, wouldn't find runaway success among the common folk, you know? There's a lot of haranguing in this thread about the "old guard" that won't make room for the up and comers, about this no-good very-bad industry that refuses to pay her, about the masses that clearly just aren't mature enough to handle what she writes, but people can't help that they like what they like. It's not that people refuse to give up their seat that Cara never got regular work. It's debatable whether or not writing ever was profitable in this space in the first place, and whether or not that was just a limitation of technology and the internet at the time.

I think some in this thread are having difficulty accepting just how niche Cara's writing really was. You can't really be surprised that no publication decided to subsidize that work.

@davidmerrick: I didn't realize the injury was so bad it put her in danger of actually losing it. What the hell happened?

Hope the Embed With book still happens... last I heard it had been sent to editing, so it's probably still a thing?

Most reasoned voice I've heard in this thread. Its quite frustrating that people complain about this as if they understand the state of writing in this industry. The fact is that whatever you observe is insufficient for any worthwhile conclusion, there are probably thousands of failed writers in every industry, and you will never hear or read about any of them. This logic of "I see a couple of journalists who have quit and they are female, therefore sexism" is completely ridiculous and I cannot help but feel sorry for anyone thinking this way.

I'd need to see actual numbers before I'd fall one way or the other on the first point, and the many of the external factors listed certainly impact video content creators as well.

It's definitely a very lazy broad brush of a response to an issue that is far more complex. There is a reason why Giant Bomb, a smaller personality drive site based around video content, has thrived. There is also a reason why other sites based around text have struggled or no longer exist. It isn't some massive conspiracy. It's just the nature of progress.

Why the fuck did I decide to become a film critic? God, I'm an idiot!

Not to be that asshole, but the gaming media covers the industry they aren't apart of it. It is sad though, she wrote some great articles.

@sammo21: I guess it says something about how far out of the loop I am that I didn't realize "Trigger Warning" was even a term. Many threads contain topics that people are passionate about in one way or the other. That is what makes for a good discussion.

@excast: its all over the internet and its spreading into real life now, sadly; its a big big deal on college campuses now where people are using triggers as justification for why certain people (which they disagree with) shouldn't be able to come to their campus and speak; its just another way to limit free speech (http://reason.com/archives/2014/05/27/trigger-warnings-on-campus-arent-just-fu).

@l4wd0g Funny thing is how many people try to become writers to get into the games industry. I remember that was the running joke about people trying to get work at 1UP/EGM because of how that place was a revolving door.

@sammo21: Its completely batshit crazy but on this occasion looking at the posters account they are clearly just trolling.

A lot of the really talented writers are moving on. Cara was great, Carolyn Petite over at Gamespot was great (although that was more of a bullshit downsizing). Guess things are just moving more towards video. There are few people writing about games anymore that are great writers. At least we've still got Alex.