It’s nuts that I’m writing a Game of the Year list. After getting laid off from Fanbyte last year, I kinda thought that I was done with these. Not in a bad way, mind you – but I thought that my window on having a voice about video games was closed.
I worked at Fanbyte for 3.5 years. I miss that website and team every day. I ran our internship program, which produced three incredible alums over the course of its run. A lot of what I tried to do with that program was answer big questions. Why does the industry work the way it does? Who are the people who you can trust? Who are the teams in this business that are doing the work in a way that is sustainable and healthy? There’s no playbook for working in an industry that is as diseased as this one. There isn’t one for working in video games either. To work at the intersection of those two things?
Good fuckin’ luck.
I thought my job *gestures vaguely* here was to create an environment where new folks could learn how to do the work because no j-school in the country is producing anyone who knows how the fuck you operate in this ever-changing, broken landscape. I thought that was going to be my job for a while. I was wrong, obviously. I had and still have a lot to learn. A few months after the layoff, I packed all of my shit into a crate, left Providence, Rhode Island, and moved back in with my parents. I was depressed and stuck.
What does one do when, at the age of 27, your passion and livelihood are both taken away from you by a corporation that doesn’t know you’re alive? I felt like my life was built on the back of answering questions, and all of a sudden I couldn’t answer the only one I had:
What do I do next?
The answer, for me, was to step away from video games. I didn’t play anything that wasn’t called Fortnite for the first six months of the year. (Did you know that Goku is in the game?) I started making stuff with my hands, I really committed to the podcast that I make with my friends (If You’re Driving, Close Your Eyes is available wherever you get your podcasts and we have a Patreon). But most importantly, I did a lot of therapy and fell in love with myself! The distance that I got from this space was one of the best things that could’ve happened to me because it gave me the space to figure out who the fuck I am away from it.
I am so grateful to Grubb, Jan, and Bakalar for thinking to bring me along for this ride right after Summer Game Fest and to the rest of the Giant Bomb team for welcoming me with such open arms. I’m grateful to Shawn for being a perfect social teammate, to Bailey for reminding me that actually, people in this business are fun sometimes, and to Dan for reminding me what it was like to have instant comedic flow with someone. And I’m appreciative of you, the Giant Bomb audience, for either welcoming me with open arms or being wholly nonplussed by this new Black queer on your feeds. It is my pleasure to delight and/or confuse you.
Anyway, here’s my list:
11. Tufting
I made a few rugs this year! Extremely weird of me to do, but I did. I have been on a bit of a craft kick as I try to figure out what my physical art practice looks like. I started with candle-making in 2021. At the beginning of this year, though, after a few too many gin and tonics, a bunch of TikToks, and an intro class (taught by a TikToker), I bought a tufting gun and made a few pieces.
The craft just isn’t for me, though. I love the tactility of it (few things feel as good as stretching the base fabric across the frame and that first puncture through the taught fabric with the gun) but it is time and space intensive in a way that I could not support when I started and have not missed in the months since.
If you’re looking for a shit-ton of yarn and a tufting gun, I know a person!
10. Lethal Company
Good game. When you walk into a room that feels like it sounds like it’s empty and made of metal it sounds like it’s empty and made of metal. It’s got a headcrab in it. You can fall in a hole. There’s a mod to get a million folks in the game at the same time, then you can all fall into various holes. It’s great.
9. Fortnite
I think the fact that there are now three complete games inside of Fortnite that individually have concurrent player counts higher than many games’ all time sales numbers is fucking nuts. I don’t feel like anyone is talking about it. That could be for a lot of reasons including brand fatigue and also the fact that Epic laid off 16% of its staff this year.
Anyway, the team that is still around, though, is consistently churning out some of the best live service stuff on the planet. The Battle Royale team running OG Fortnite back to back with the start of Chapter 5 made it abundantly clear how far they’ve come since the mode came out in 2017 as a hastily stitched together spin on PUBG. You can be Goku in it. The guy I don’t like from TikTok is in there. You can still be John Cena. The Harmonix team just put Rock Band in the game, straight up. The Psyonix team put a pretty good arcade racer in here. There’s a LEGO survival game now that legitimately does feel like a spiritual successor to Minecraft in some ways. It’s nuts.
playing Fortnite pic.twitter.com/049XTTvZNi
— niki grayson (@godsewa) January 26, 2023
I was poor at the age of 12 and getting games was really hard for me and my family. If there were free-to-play games as good as Fortnite is, I don’t know what I’d be doing right now, but I’m happy that people have something as robust and well considered as Fortnite is in 2023.