The Gamespot Failroad Train Chugs On

Though Gamespot is making a half-hearted attempt to clean up the sad bits of shattered faith that still litter the website after the Jeff Gerstmann firing, their writers are still slipping out into the night. The latest to go is longtime employee Ryan Davis, who’s bidding a semi-fond farewell to his old stomping grounds this Valentine’s Day.

“While I’m confident in the Internet’s ability to distill this into screaming hyperbole about ‘moneyhats’, I assure you that my departure is a little more complicated than that,” Davis writes in his blog. “I will say that Jeff’s termination was certainly a catalyst. It shook my faith in the people running GameSpot, something I haven’t recovered from.”

Though I truly hope the exodus of Gamespot’s most prolific writers will bring justice and balance back into the world, it makes me sad to realise that’s probably not going to be the case. The video game industry started with a bunch of youngsters smoking pot and working out of their garage; I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that’s how the games writing industry started, too. The former became a seething corporate hydra years ago, and I guess it’s inevitable that the same happen to the latter.

In other words, the people whose decisions actually matter in this situation are currently scratching their ass, shrugging and making a mental note to hire the seventeen-year-old working at Foot Locker who’d kill his grandmother for a chance to “get paid for playing games.” Games writing is not the newspaper industry, where veteran writers are revered.

I don’t know what the likes of Gerstmann and company have planned for the future, but hopefully it involves significant use of superpowers.