Vale Kotaku Australia

We lost magazines, and now we are losing the internet, too. Why does it matter?

Yesterday it was announced that as part of a restructure of Nine’s Pedestrian Group, Vice, Refinery29, Gizmodo, Lifehacker and Kotaku will cease publishing their Australian editions.

I want to write something about Kotaku Australia because it is a publication very close to my heart.

Kotaku—for those who read this but don’t know the intricacies of the games press world—is one of the major international game publications and has been since the early 2000s. The American version has been in varying levels of strife of late, but is and for as long as I can remember has been genuinely one of the powerhouses of games culture.

It is big, and brash, and sometimes wrong, and sometimes right, and frequently very worth reading. My good friend Kirk Hamilton, of the podcast Strong Songs, made a very good career out of writing about games for Kotaku, and so did many other writers who I really admire.

The Australian publication was always very different, and I think sometimes got lost in the noise of its American namesake, for better and worse. Where the US edition was loud, the Australian edition was often thoughtful and considered. The US edition sometimes took an adversarial approach to the games industry, which at a time where some of the biggest games publications could be credibly accused of going light on major corporations, felt very necessary.

The Australian Kotaku had a much smaller sector to cover, and it did so often in the spirit of championing the unheard and the unsung. Following my brief career as a journalist, first as a games festival director and then a composer for indie games, I appreciated Kotaku Australia’s nurturing spirit. In a world where a new game is released on Steam every 45 minutes, it can be really hard to get anyone to listen, and Kotaku Australia always found time for small locally-made projects and the people behind them.

When I was making a go of writing about games back in the day, it felt like Kotaku Australia was in a Golden Age, with editors David Wildgoose then Mark Serrels and writers like Tracey Lien. No Kotaku Australia contributor will be offended if I single out Tracey for a moment. It probably didn’t happen like this but in my memory Tracey burst onto the scene by winning the Walkley Foundation’s Student Journalist of the Year Award for ‘The Rise And Fall Of Red Ant’, published in Hyper Magazine (another long-gone Australian publication I once wrote for) and dutifully republished in Kotaku Australia. There it was, proof that a real, genuine, respected journalism institution was aware of and had celebrated journalism about videogames, something that at the time I was hoping against hope would be possible. It remains the only bit of games journalism to win a Walkley of any kind (the closest I ever came was writing for The Walkley Magazine in 2012).

Tracey’s reporting was proper. It was a story about the collapse of a major player in the Australian games scene, complete with serious questions about loans and finances. She continued to balance serious and genuine journalism with fun blogging at Kotaku Australia just long enough to win the biggest and most central category at the Australian IT Journalism Awards before moving to America, where she now writes award-winning international bestselling fiction.

I had the opportunity to write for my friend and Kotaku Australia editor Mark Serrels several times. It was a gift to count Mark as one of the few people who would always listen to a pitch I had, and I know I am not the only Australian games person who would say that.

Kotaku Australia, and Mark as its editor, let me write about things which really shouldn’t have fit with a games website. Nevertheless, I wrote a bit of analysis on how the trailer for the then-highly anticipated The Force Awakens wielded nostalgia (still available here). Then, I wrote about John Williams’ soundtrack after the film was released (here). Both articles did very well in terms of readership, and one thing lead to another and eventually they resulted in my book, Star Wars After Lucas (University of Minnesota Press).

Other bits of mine for Kotaku Australia were on the prevalence of ‘nostalgia piano’ in film trailers, or another on IKEA and game design. I have Mark and Kotaku Australia to thank for the room and the platform to get my ideas out into the world.

Other associations were less joyous. Wild conspiracies remain to this day about my work and others and Kotaku and the events of Gamergate, but I said all I have to say about that in my first book, Game Changers.

I long ago stopped trying to be a games journalist or critic, but I have continued to admire what goes on at Kotaku Australia. With Mark Serrels, then David Smith, and wonderful contributors like Ruby Innes and Emily Spindler, it was always clear that even if the website didn’t have much support from those who drew up its budgets, it was still one of the crucial few places that drew together Australian videogames and those who loved them.

And now that crucial few has become one fewer.

I don’t think this is a surprise to any observer. Regardless of what corporate villainy has lead to this precise moment, there is not much money to be made in writing about videogames, either journalistically or analytically.

We now live in a world where blogging culture is gone, magazines have folded, and even ABC Arts (once my place of publication about games) no longer exists. Mainstream publications in Australia generally do not employ videogame beat journalists.

The internet of RSS feeds and comments and tagging and reading has become the internet of four platforms and an undead AI assistant. I am writing this to you on a free newsletter platform and I am not being paid for my words nor do I expect you to pay for them. Small and enthusiast run websites like WellPlayed, Player2.net, Checkpoint, veteran Vooks.net, the Southern Cross Austereo brand Press Start are all we have left.

GamesHub stands almost entirely alone as the last remaining Australian professional publication covering games in a way that is recognisable both to those who play games as well as those who make them. With the closure of Kotaku Australia, things are existential.

But why does any of this matter, anyway? If it is apparent that writing about games won’t pay the bills for any Australian publication, why not leave it be?

Every corner of the internet and every sector thinks that what they do is important and that their stories need to be told. And maybe they’re right. Everyone does deserve to have their story told. But in a cold hard capitalist realist sense, the argument might go, we need to prioritise those with a ‘sustainable’ readership; that on a certain, very essential level, eyeballs translate to advertising translate to money translate to what stories are told. And it is certainly easier to imagine the end of games journalism than the end of the capitalist system that underpins it.

But games are worth writing about, and thinking about, and engaging with in a deep and sustained way, whether that’s stories about Australian game sector corporate mismanagement, or representation, or working conditions, or triumphs, or creative expression, or anything else.

Laine Nooney writes in ‘The Uncredited’, their magnificent article on the material, laboured, and gendered histories of videogames from 2020 that:

Video games are a condensation of digital media’s most significant cultural and theoretical properties, from labor to materiality, global economics and computational ubiquity, representation and virtual identity, down to design, distribution, the evils of e-waste.

I frequently return to Nooney’s articulation of the significance of understanding games. If more than a decade of Kotaku Australia has shown us anything it is that the octopus tentacles of ‘understanding games’ helps us understand so much more about our world than just videogames.

With the right people in the room, I could explain to you exactly how videogames help us unpick, understand, and criticise the biggest and worst trends in tech over the last few years, from cryptocurrency to metaverse to AI. I could talk to you about gender and digital technology, or race and fandom.

I could talk to you about Yanis Varoufakis, leading European leftist, former Greek Finance Minister, economics, and Valve.

I could talk to you about videogame music and forty years of a material-led rejection and subversion of Western musical form and tradition.

I could talk to you about how games were the first creative form native to the era of computing, or about how many young Australians encounter videogames as their first creatively expressive medium as children, and then grow up in turn to express themselves by making games. About how games do not intrinsically form an industry, but rather are more naturally a venue for amateur creative expression—like music or visual art—which only sometimes congeals into industry. I could talk to you about the relationship between games and Australiana, about games and children’s books, about games and climate change, about games and architecture, about games and silent cinema, about games and landscape art, about games and the future of labour and resistance.

I could talk to you about any of these things. I think you would find them more than simply interesting, too. There is crucial, vital knowledge here.

But with the closure of Kotaku Australia, we are one brick in the wall closer to losing the whole conversation.