Today I’m going to talk about breaking news from legal documents. This has become a bigger part of the work I do over the past year or so; months before Vox Media laid off the Polygon staff, the company paid for me to receive PACER training from Court Watch’s Seamus Hughes. I’d been using PACER (and breaking news from what I’ve found there) for years prior, but there was a lot I didn’t know. It was actually the Pokémon “Teraleak” that pushed me to seek out training. I knew that Nintendo was going to be going after the person who published the information online, and I wanted to read those documents. (Side note: I did! After months of trawling, Nintendo’s name popped up on a docket for a subpoena to Discord; Nintendo wanted the company to give up information on a user tied to the leaks.)

I think people should have access to publicly available documents — something that’s often hard for people to access given the arcane government systems that document the legal system. That’s my goal with my legal reporting, to provide people access to first-hand access to these documents. Tons of cases get filed daily, and there’s a lot of information to dig through. Not everything you read in a lawsuit is true. But it is news, and I hope my reporting can provide a service to people in that way. It’s also a good place to look for tips — one court document can lead to a bigger story.

The hard part about this sort of reporting is that there’s a direct cost to me. I was reimbursed for money spent on court documents while I was employed at Polygon. Now that I’m not, I pay for these documents myself. PACER court fees are 10 cents per page, capped at $3 per document. It adds up fast, on top of the fee that PACER charges just to search its system, even if no results show up. Some courts use different systems, which can be much pricier. I’ve used systems that cost $20 to search, and $50 to access a single document. Thankfully, when it comes to PACER, the Free Law Project exists to make access more equitable; people accessing court documents through PACER can install a browser extension that automatically uploads documents to a website called Court Listener every time they purchase someone. So, for instance, when I accessed the Nintendo subpoena on PACER, it was automatically uploaded so that anyone can access it for free through Court Listener, because I have the extension installed. Then, whoever comes looking for that document next, if they search Court Listener first, can access it without having to pay. It rules. I pay $10 per month for a membership, which gives me access to a certain number of docket alerts. To give you an estimate for how much I spent, I spent $146 on court documents from PACER over the last quarter. It might not be a significant amount to spend on documents for a larger corporation, but as a freelancer, it’s a real expense.

I spent a lot of time just looking. I search for things, look for new cases, and read old lawsuits. I check dockets for ongoing cases. I have a lot of alerts set up. Oftentimes, this doesn’t lead anywhere. But sometimes it does!

Just this morning, I spent $20 to search for the court documents related to the Krafton and Subnautica 2 case, then $46 more dollars to buy access to a newly unsealed response from Krafton. That’s on top of $20 I spent last week to check the docket for that particular case to see if Krafton had responded; they had, but the document was sealed. That’s why I knew to check in today to see if a public version had been made available.

Let’s talk about how it came together.

Pulling the Subnautica 2 story together

I broke the news of Krafton’s response to the lawsuit filed by the Unknown Worlds executives this morning, shortly before Krafton sent out a press release linking the court documents to journalists. After seeing that Krafton had indeed responded to the complaint last week, I decided to check the docket again today to see if it had been unsealed. It had, so I purchased it right away. That was around 11 a.m. ET. I started writing it up immediately for Aftermath, reaching to Krafton’s public relations team at 12 p.m. ET shortly before publishing the story on Aftermath at 12:18 p.m. ET. Krafton must have sent out its press release to journalists shortly after that, with its own link to documents it had uploaded to Scribd. I got the press release shortly before 1 p.m. ET, about an hour after I’d published the story, but was able to update it with a statement from Krafton.

I like that Krafton did the work of sending out the documents to journalists, especially when its in a court system that’s so costly. Still, I’m glad that I had the foresight to check in on the docket and was able to grab the documents to inform Aftermath’s readers — and everyone else — about the update to the case. (Small thing, but as a freelance journalist, I need these small wins to keep me going!)

Anyway, I write all this because I think the reporting process is really interesting. I wish I could be a fly on the wall for other reporters to see how they pull things together. I think I would learn a lot!

July and August freelancing update

I ended up writing 12 stories in July. Rates ranged from $200 to $1,000. (The average is close to $200.) I did spent a week on “vacation” during this time, but I ended up working from that trip. Not a lot, but, alas.

I’m happy with how the month went, but freelancing is a lot of work. There are a lot of unpaid hours. I’m lucky to be able to be getting this much work at all. But I also feel the constant pressure of knowing that I have a mortgage and bills to pay, and there’s no telling when the freelance work could drop off.

By mid-August, I seem to be on pace to get a similar amount of stories picked up. Right now, I have eight stories in the works or already published. I’ve had five stories published in August so far:

Borderlands defined the looter-shooter genre. Borderlands 4 builds on its legacy for the Epic Games Store’s news section

Cult ‘horse girl’ game Umamusume: Pretty Derby is galloping up the charts for MobileGamer.biz

Krafton responds to Subnautica 2 lawsuit, doubling down on claims that executives ‘abandoned’ developer for Aftermath

Labubu to Lafufu: ‘See you in court’ for Aftermath

I spend a lot of time in my real life trying to find the perfect seat, so why not do it in a game, too for Aftermath

I’ll keep you updated on how the rest of the month goes!

Today, I’m publishing the full interview I did with New York University Game Center director Naomi Clark for a story that was published on Game File last week. That story, Crackdown on sex video games goes wide, alarming developer and impacting award-winning titles, is an amalgamation of news and interviews that covers a developing story about the role credit card companies sand payment processors have in the censorship of video games.

Last Thursday, indie marketplace Itch.io published a new policy regarding how it approaches NSFW games and other content that’s published on its platform — and that it had de-indexed thousands of games in order to review everything NSFW published on the site to make sure it met those policies. Valve Software did something similar with its Steam platform earlier in July in removing dozens of games that were deemed unacceptable for the platform, largely games that included incest or rape. Both companies did this due to pressure from credit card companies and payment processors, like Mastercard and PayPal, after a group called Collective Shout started a campaign against so-called “violent and unethical” porn games.

It was a big, rapidly developing mess. (And it’s still developing! As of Thursday, Itch.io has started re-indexing free adult NSFW content on the platform.) There were a lot of moving parts, and for Game File, I wanted to pull in interviews so that people involved could speak to the issue.

I reached out to Clark after seeing her post about the censorship on BlueSky. She’s both an expert in the industry as a whole and the developer of Consentacle, which is a two-person card game about learning consent in an alien relationship. She was a great resource in understanding the context around the issue. We ended up speaking on Thursday morning for 30 minutes. With permission from Stephen Totilo, who commissioned and edited the Game File story, I’m publishing the full interview here on Save Spot.

One of the things about journalism is that you’ll have this fantastic, eye-opening interview with a source but you’re often able to only quote a fraction of it in the story. I thought this would be an opportunity to speak to how I pull from interviews to build out a story. But first, the interview.

Naomi Clark on Itch.io’s new NSWF policy

Note: This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.

Nicole Carpenter: Would you start by introducing yourself — both your work at NYU but also your personal stuff, too?

Naomi Clark: My name is Naomi Clark. I have been making games professionally for about 25, 26 years now. I've worked on a lot of games over those years, both digital games for many different platforms, and more recently, designing tabletop games and role-playing games —probably best known at least in recent years for my card game Consentacle, which is a mature-themed game about navigating consent and intimacy with a partner who is from a different planet than you. It's about humans trying to figure out how to have sex with aliens. I'm also the chair and director of the NYU Game Center, which is the game design program at New York University, where we have about 300 students who spend several years learning to make games and launch games.

How does this situation with Itch.io and the censorship of adult games impact the video game industry, including your students at NYU?

Since I started working in games, way back in the late ‘90s, games have really been going through a huge revolution in terms of accessibility of the tools. More different kinds of people than ever before can make games. It's no longer just for people with access to extremely expensive hardware. It’s also a real revolution in the kinds of things that games are about. The old stereotype was like, Oh, you know, games are basically just about fighting things and maybe going on adventures and whatnot, or strategy and puzzle solving. Nowadays, people make games about almost any subject that you can imagine. And that's true across a lot of different fields. There are nonprofit organizations funding and making games about various types of global crises or about serious issues around the world. There have been games written about serious wars and humanitarian crises, and a lot of people are making games about their own experiences autobiographically.

I like to say that what we're very invested here at NYU is looking at games as a form of culture that can be just as meaningful and address the human condition in just as many ways as any other form of culture, like music or or painting or literature or the theater and drama — anything that that you wouldn't be surprised to find in a play or a poem or a novel or a film. You shouldn't be surprised to find these same kinds of subjects in games. However, the rest of the world has not really caught up with this way of thinking about games. More and more people are kind of sitting up and being like, I didn't know there could be games that have this type of feeling, like a peaceful feeling, or feeling wonder, or expressing what it's like to have a newborn child. The list could go on and on forever, but I think that we're still in a phase where people are increasingly figuring out or noticing that games can do that.

There are a lot of people, especially in older generations, who still think of games in an older mode. That they are frivolous entertainments for kids that are sort of mostly for wasting time. They're not something that you would go to for meaningful communication with the creative point of view of an artist or a storyteller. And that games are or may be little suspect because they are violent. I think what we're seeing in this current situation is that people are thinking, Oh, maybe games are pernicious in that they're corrupters of children, or that they trivialize serious or difficult topics, or that they are just being used as erotic titillation devices. I think these are all older and antiquated ways of looking at games, but they still prevail in a lot of circles as a stereotype about games.

Here at NYU, our students are contending with that. They're figuring out ways of expressing all sorts of ideas through games, through the way the games are played, through the stories that are in those games, and doing experiments. Many of them are very personal, or they're about difficult subjects. Sometimes they're about something that happened to them in their own lives, and sometimes those are difficult, or they deal with abusive situations or sexuality or coming out — all sorts of things. I think it's very important to the future of the games industry and the students that I teach are able to explore that full palette. I think what's at stake when people try to restrict the acceptable topics for games is nothing less than the stunting of an entire creative form. I take it pretty seriously.

We do have a lot of students who do games with what I would say is sensitive content right. And it's exactly games with sensitive content that are kind of right in the crosshairs, whether intentionally or not. Because, like yesterday, is when people discovered every game with sensitive content is now suddenly invisible on the single most open platform, with the largest catalog of games that are just made by anybody who tries their hand at making games. And it's not just, it's not just sexual content either, right? All sorts of games have been affected.

I was just looking at the NSFW tag, and there are two games that show up, when there were thousands before.

Yeah, many thousands. Maybe tens of thousands. Itch has grown so much in recent years because it’s open to anybody. There’s no price of entry. I would say every single one of our students here will publish a game on Itch at some point during their college career. I think it’s true of most programs where students are making games as part of their coursework. That’s precisely because you do not have to pay to publish a game via Itch. It’s an open platform where anybody can put something up. Think of it as a cross between a slam poetry night that anyone can come and do a performance at and a big public square where anyone can put up public art.

I think it's both exceedingly difficult to manage for the small team that's running it, and very fragile. Fragile and vulnerable, I think, is what's really coming out at this moment. They do sustain that site and that incredible openness, which is free for all these students and for a ton of other up and coming creators, because there's some games sold. And a lot of the games that we're talking about that are being affected by this are entirely free games. But they're still not available, even though they have nothing to do with payment processors. But, yeah, because it has to support itself, and because people are selling games on there to support themselves themselves too, they're vulnerable to this type of censorship from payment processors deciding that some kinds of content is unacceptable, and payment processors that, frankly, you don't know anything about games right, may have outdated ideas about games, and probably don't care.

This is something that sex workers have had to deal with for a while now, right? Why has it expanded to the active censorship of games on places like Itch.io and Steam now?

It was in 2021, I believe, that there was a very successful campaign that just started with a few people to go after PornHub, right? There was like one director of a nonprofit that was advocating against trafficking people. And then I think there was a hedge fund manager, Bill Ackman, who took this up as a cause as well, and texted the CEO of Mastercard and said, Hey, you should stop doing business with Pornhub. And then there was a lawsuit that was of women who had videos of themselves on PornHub against their will from when they were minors. Of course, like, that's absolutely terrible, right? And it's good that they were able to pursue a lawsuit and get those taken down, but along the way, over the course of a few years, they chose to also attack the problem through payment processors. It goes back from before 2021 as well. I think that the most recent wave, and the way it’s really focusing on sex workers, and now expanding into any kind of adult content, or even sensitive content really stems from that era. For a hedge fund manager like Bill Ackman, he could just call up a CEO and Mastercard to change their course. It becomes a very, very easy pressure point for anyone with access to power, to just be like, you know, I'm going to just get one guy to change their mind. And, you know, in activism, that's often what you're looking for. You're looking for very key, influential people who are going to set policy. But in this case, the activists are, I'd say, anti-sex work, feminists and the anti-pornography feminist movement, which is, of course, like not in agreement with whole other wings of the feminist movement that are in solidarity with sex workers who want to do sex work and the idea that sex work is work, and with LGBTQ communities as well.

Being able to see stories about love and intimacy and sexuality is pretty critical for people who are figuring out their own sexualities against the headwinds of a heteronormative society. Being able to actually see and understand that and come to terms with their own feelings is part of what allows LGBTQ people to exist.

I think it may be important to make the point that this is what the problem here is. Not that people are taking down CSAM or abusive content sexualizing children and minors, or even the types of stuff that was removed from Steam — incest and sexual violence games. The problem is that the penumbra of those types of problematic content can expand, and indeed already has expanded, because of the uncertainty and confusion about what’s allowed. Because of a lack of transparency, because these sort of orders are being handed down more or less secretly, from a CEO or from a legal department, and it's not even clear, for instance, for developers on Steam or Itch what kinds of content would or wouldn't be allowed, because we're no longer talking about content that's illegal according to laws against child pornography. That is a line that's, I think, been held very successfully by many platforms over years, because it's against the law. But now we're in a territory where it's not. It's not about being against the law. It's about whether an activist group can successfully convince a bank or a payment processor. The payment processor sometimes blames banks also for this, applying pressure that they should ban certain types of content from being accessible by anybody and make that decision for all of us.

It's terrible for the industry as a whole, and people are kind of uncertain and confused and scared and it has spread beyond what those organizations, like Collective Shout, were intending to target almost immediately.

What would you say to a game developer who’s like, Well, I don’t make those types of games. This doesn’t apply to me. Why should I care?

I would say, Look, we have to be able to explore all kinds of topics if we want games, as a creative form, to develop and evolve and really explore their full potential. I think if you look at games now compared to 10 years ago or 20 years ago, they are so much more rich as a medium, and that's in part because we went and explored all of this territory. And if we allow people who do not understand games, who are not invested in that, who think of games as only being childish, meaningless entertainment that are only about violence and titillation, then, yeah, they don’t care.

You don't want them to be the ones to decide, here's what you can and can't play, here's what you can and can't make a game about because they have no idea what they're talking about. They're not even in the position of a platform holder like Steam or Itch, who are curators of games, who are thinking about what kind of games they do and don't want to be selling. We're talking about people who have nothing to do with this industry or this creative form calling shots in a way where they're having their ear bent, being pressured. Collective Shout had some pretty rude words about what they perceived as the opposition in games as being perverted fetishists or whatever. But clearly don't care about what was potentially being lost here.

It starts with, with child porn, and then now the pressure is to expand it to legal forms of content that people find unsavory or harmful or don't want kids to see. Because they're rallying cry, that we have to protect the children from seeing this upsetting stuff. If you start seeing that kind of rhetoric, and if you get into it, there are some games which are no longer searchable on Itch, which are about the autobiographical experiences of people who have survived abuse, like Nina Freeman's game Last Call. Or my student Jennifer Jiao Hsia’s game Consume Me is about eating disorders and growing up as a teenager and navigating feelings about her body. [Note: Both developers have since posted publicly that their stories had been delisted for different reasons.] She had it labeled with a sensitive content tag, because there's some upsetting stuff in there, but it's actually exactly the kind of story and experience that would be appropriate for teenage girls to play and see, like, oh, this is about someone like me. It's an autobiographical story about dealing with that. Are we willing to lose that kind of story? Look, in the 1980s maybe somebody would read a Judy Blume book, right? But in the 2020s, an adolescent, a teenager going through a lot of stuff in life, is going to play a game. That's what we're trying to do here is explore that territory, and I think that we're endangering that. Who's going to be the arbiter of what should kids be exposed to? Is it all sensitive content? Who's actually going to decide, and if it's not based on the law, if it's based on the whim of a banker or a CEO? I think we're in really big trouble as a medium, and every, every single game developer should care about that.

Do you see queer developers being impacted disproportionately here?

I think there are a lot of queer developers who are making adult games. Obviously, it's not exclusively queer developers making those games. There are plenty of games on Steam and Itch where the audience and developers are not queer, but it is, I would say, a very large niche of queer people making games for other queer people. It's important because, I would say, it's less about trying to make money and striking it rich in those communities. It's more people making games for each other to say, look, this is how I express the joy of my life, and figuring out who I am and who I love and my sexuality, and making games that are semi autobiographical or sort of fantastical in a way that's autobiographical, and getting to connect with other people, have other people play those games. In some ways, it's a type of community service or community building to make games that have adult content, or that are about intimacy or romance or relationship in ways that might be more or less explicit. So I think, you know,

I would say probably queer creators are disproportionately impacted for that reason, and also are disproportionately disturbed and alarmed by what's going on because there's just a very long history, even before the current federal administration of the United States, of LGBTQ creators being demonetized from platforms like YouTube or being reported as inappropriate content. That's because some political opponents are like, I don't, I don't think kids should be exposed to two boys kissing or something. That's been weaponized again and again, over and over again. Or, you know, oh no, somebody said the word transgender. And so now it has to be, has to be forbidden, or it's too controversial. LGBTQ creators have seen that happen over and over again, and players as well, there's a significant alarm that if they are going after this, even content that's not illegal, but that's taboo, or that's upsetting, or that you wouldn't want a child to see. What's going to be next? Is someone going to try and report or turn a payment processor against a wider swath of people, like any mention of transgender people? Since we are in a federal administration now that has passed executive orders saying, like, no federal funds of any kind may be used to say or do anything related to, quote, transgender ideology, which just means trans people. So trans people are already basically banned from any kind of federally funded activity, but not everybody's complying with that. And so what's next is a climate in which it's not impossible to imagine a bank president or a payment processor saying, well, yeah, maybe it's too risky for us to have anything to do with selling anything that has to do with trans people. Target has pulled a lot of pride and LGBTQ stuff off its shelves, and they're like, yeah, we don't want the trouble. If it's not just a department store, but then a bank or payment processor saying, yeah, we don't have anything to do with that, then just a huge win on censorship that will destroy communities.

What’s the way forward? How do people push back against something like this?

It's very difficult. I think it's going to be terrifying, even for large companies like Valve, to [go against] some of the biggest financial titans in the world that do trillions of dollars in revenue. Even Steam, the largest PC game platform in the world, is only, like a 10th of 1% of the revenues of payment processors. To sort of have that be threatening is apocalyptic. A lot of people are upset with those platforms and saying, Well, we have to convince the platforms to do better. It's my hope that the platforms, like Steam and Itch, can use some of the outcry and honestly the reporting on this issue to help negotiate something that is less dangerous, less potentially metastasizing than censoring all sorts of content.

Who knows? That's all very closed door meetings. Nobody will know whether they're successful in that. But we have to hope that that's the first line of like, can they? Can they work out a deal? The community has to rely on stores like Steam and Itch and even Epic Games Store, who hasn't really been affected in this probably because they only sell larger games. They have had to kind of rely on those stores to actually advocate for games, to be the ones who are like, hey, you know, some games are about difficult topics, and that has to be okay.

Second, you know, I think it's actually kind of unfair that a small development team like the one behind Itch.io has to bear all the weight of figuring out how to cope with these trillion dollar companies coming down on them. I think part of the problem is that the ecosystem has gotten — there are only a few platforms And that's just a general trend in the digital economy over many, many years, consolidation and approaching something that looks like a monopoly. There have been a lot of calls within the last 24 hours for alternative storefronts. But really, it’s not easy to run this type of business, right? And it's not very glamorous, either, and it's just full of people complaining. And before Steam, Valve was a game developer. Now, almost all their business is just running a storefront. It can be all consuming. And they do it, of course, because it's incredibly lucrative, and I'm sure that to a lesser degree, that's true for Itch as well. But there aren't that many people that want to do this that have the interests of the game industry at heart.

But maybe we will see some alternatives cropping up. Maybe there will be some alternatives to using traditional payment processors. A similar thing has happened in Japan, I think, with all sorts of mature content being successfully pressured out of online marketplaces by banks and payment processors, and they've been able to set up alternative economies that use other forms of payments — direct bank transfer or mobile payments or cryptocurrency, things like that. You know, like none of those things are problem free, but I feel like there's going to be more investigation into that kind of thing. And I sense even from it is announcements that what Itch is trying to do is set up a system in which people have to certify whether their games only have content that that meets a list of criteria demanded by the payment processor, and if they don't, then maybe there will be some alternative payment processors, but you know that those games will no longer be able to accept Visa and Mastercard credit card payments. For a certain slice of the market, there are people who really want to play games that deal with serious topics, or that are erotic games of a certain kind, they'll still probably find a way to pay for them, but it is going to take a lot of diversification of this bottleneck of reliance on this small number of huge companies that can be manipulated.

The process

The interview with Clark was about 30 minutes long, which ends up being roughly 3,000 words — 1,000 words longer than the piece that was published on Game File. As you can see form the interview, there were a ton of topics Clark and I touched on during the interview that I didn’t have space to include. That happens a lot with interviews, unfortunately, and it’s the job of the journalist to distill the conversation down to its most salient parts to accurately reflect what the expert source has said to tell an interesting, true story.

I decided, after speaking with Clark, that her input would be best used to reflect the broader context of the situation. The facts of what’s happened are the facts, and I could use other reporting to go through that. Clark has a unique perspective as both an educator and a game developer, so I wanted to highlight that — how Clark felt the influence of payment processors and credit card companies could impact the the adult game community and the wider industry.

I record most interviews (with explicit permission from the person I’m speaking with) but also take notes while we’re talking. I make notes and write down timestamps of stuff that I know I’ll use in a story, something my future self always thanks me for. So, for instance, when Clark said that the censorship we’re seeing is “nothing less than the stunting of an entire creative form,” I made a note of it on paper. That’s a really impactful quote that nails down exactly what she’s saying without mincing words. Another part of the interview that I knew instantly I’d wanted to pull out was the bit about the spectrum of games that Clark’s students make — and why it’s important that they’re able to play around with lots of different ideas, even ones that might make some people uncomfortable.

Clark’s interview is what drives the section of the story under the “broader impact” header, and started with the quote I made note of above, about the “stunting of an entire creative form.” The rest of the section uses the interview to show how Clark backed up that statement, pulling directly from what Clark said about her experience as an educator, game maker, and researcher.

Other times, I’ll re-read the interview in full and highlight or pull out quotes into a new document — stuff that is of high news value, showcases the energy of the interviewee, or succinctly demonstrates the core thrust of what they’re saying. I review these quotes as I’m writing in pull them into the story as needed.

What’s next?

I’ll be back this week with an issue about legal reporting — how and why I trawl court systems to keep on top of lawsuits and other documents. But also breaking down the financial details of it all; I spend hundreds of dollars on legal documents that are “public information” but locked behind government paywalls. I think people should be able to read these, so I make them available in full in the stories I write about them. It’s something that I was often reimbursed for when I was at Vox Media, but now it’s a cost to me as a freelance journalist. I wrote a little about it on BlueSky:

But I’m going to write up a full post covering everything legal and court reporting for next week.

The shock of being laid off is starting to wear off, and I’m started to find a rhythm again with freelancing. Things are different this time around, though. Major is gone, and I no longer go to the dog park. But I’m still finding ways to leave behind my computer during the middle of the day — dodging the heat during public skate at the ice rink; walking around the neighborhood, coffee in hand, with my husband and our new pup; having lunch with my newly retired mother and my one-year-old nephew; or re-learning how to swim in a friend’s pool.

Unfortunately, I’m on a break from hockey for the next month or so. I dislocated my shoulder during a game — fighting for a puck up against the boards — and it tore my labrum and created an impaction fracture on my humeral head. Instead of playing hockey during the day, I’m now doing physical therapy to get better.

All of this is to say that I’ve been really busy over the past few weeks, and not only with writing. Working as a freelance journalist is very hard. But I’m trying to appreciate, every day, the flexibility it’s allowing me.

What I wrote this week, and how I pitched it

Because I missed last week, this is actually what I published this week and last week — and how I pitched those stories. I thought this would be a fun way to dive into the details of freelancing. My former co-worker and always friend Nicole Clark and I made a presentation for our former Polygon coworkers a few weeks ago, where we shared everything we’ve learned about freelancing and pitching stories. It’s been on my mind. I’m hoping this section will be helpful as a way to not only explain how to pitch, but to show what’s worked for me.

How one tiny gaming controller became an essential studying tool

Garrett Martin, who runs Paste Magazine’s new games website Endless Mode, reached out to me in May to ask if I wanted to contribute to the new website. Endless Mode covers all different sorts of kinds of play, which is why I decided to pitch this specific story to Garrett. It’s not totally games focused, but about how a game peripheral transcended game culture — it fit here because Endless Mode is not purely focused on video games, in my opinion. That sort of thing is something you’ll want to consider when you’re pitching. Make sure you’re pitching to both the right outlet and the right editor. Do research so you know what sort of stuff the outlet and section you’re pitching publishes. You don’t have to match the tone exactly, but pitch something that fits with what’s already there. Think of it this way: A business-focused publication isn’t going to pick up a story that’s player-focused, and an enthusiast site isn’t going to want something that’s so into the details of business deals.

Here’s exactly what I pitched to Garrett:

How one tiny controller became a studying icon: 8BitDo is known for its quality third-party peripherals, but one of its devices has made a big impact in an unlikely place — with students. Anki is a studying method that’s popular in med school and elsewhere. Basically it’s a fancy flashcard program. I’d like to map out the story of how an unlikely device (the super small Zero 2 or Micro controllers) became the hero of this super specific, but very large, studying community. I think it’s an interesting story of an unmet need (an easy way to control the Anki programs) and how the community tinkered to meet it.

The caveat here is that this pitch is a little more casual than I’d go on a cold email. I’d worked with Paste Magazine before, so Garrett is familiar with my work. But it has the general structure of how I’d approach a cold email pitch. This is how I might change it, if it was a “normal” cold pitch email:

Hi there,

My name is Nicole Carpenter and I’m a reporter covering the video game industry. I’m writing to you with a pitch I think would be a great fit for Endless Mode: “How one tiny controller became a studying icon.” It’s a story about an unlikely hero for aspiring doctors — 8BitDo’s micro controllers.

8BitDo is known for its quality third-party peripherals, but one of its devices has made a big impact in an unlikely place — with medical school students. Anki is a studying method that’s popular among students. Basically, it’s a fancy flashcard program. For Endless Mode, I’d like to map out the story of how an unlikely device (the super small Zero 2 or Micro controllers) became the hero of this super specific, but very large, studying community. I think it’s an interesting, untold story of an unmet need (an easy way to control the Anki programs) and how the community tinkered to make the perfect tool.

For the story, I’ll interview Anki users who use 8BitDo controllers to study. Through these interviews, and pulling in other research, I’ll explain what Anki is and why students love it — and why/how the 8BitDo controller rose to such prominence. I’ll also reach out to both 8BitDo and the creator of Anki for their perspective.

From here, I’d end on some links to stories that demonstrate that I can deliver on the promises I’ve made in the pitch. This is a really important step: Make sure you’re including one to three clips that demonstrate your ability. If you’re pitching a reported story, include reported clips. If you’re pitching criticism, show you can do criticism.

Star Wars Battlefront 2 is more popular than ever thanks to a dedicated fan community

I write roughly two stories a week for Aftermath, so pitching happens more casually in Slack. Instead of talking about what, exactly, I wrote to pitch this story, I’ll walk through my thinking. I came to this story a little late in the news cycle; other reporters had already covered the massive player increase in Star Wars Battlefront 2. I knew I was late coming into it, so I knew I had to move the story forward in some way. I reached out to Electronic Arts to ask about the resurgence, but they didn’t get back to me. I also reached out to Kyber, the mod and server community that was supporting the game, and they wanted to chat. It was enough of a hook — the new details from the interview — to make it worth writing about even after the news cycle had seemingly moved on. It was no longer a story just about a resurgence in the game’s player numbers, but about how and why.

With Anthem’s impending server shutdown, I’m trying it for the first time

Again for Aftermath, and again I was approaching a story that I was somewhat late to. The server shutdown was announced last week, and I pitched this story on Monday. It went up on Wednesday. Again, I didn’t want to just write about the news that the servers are shutting down. Everyone had already written that. One thing I kept seeing around the headlines was people surprised that Anthem’s servers weren’t already shut down. So, I decided to see if I could speak to players who have been there all along. I did — but also found people who decided quite recently to give it a try for the first time. I decided to do that, too. It’s a slight perspective shift — focusing on what it’s like to play the game in its dying days — that makes this story interesting.

Trump funding cuts ‘devastate’ video game research and development

This is the first of a twice monthly column I’ll be writing at Game Developer. I’m excited! There were lots of times at Polygon where I pitched stories that got turned down for being too business-y. (And that makes sense! Polygon is player focused.) It’s cool to be able to really lean into that side of things with this column. This is another story where I pitched more casually, on a call with Chris Kerr, who edited the piece. I had seen that Game Developer that the Strong Museum had a grant cut by the federal government and had been thinking they must not be alone there. Unfortunately, that instinct was right. I found a bunch of other researchers and institutions that had their grants cut. (I found them by looking at databases of grants that were cut and reached out to a lot of people.)

Cozy video games are on an unstoppable rise

This story is about the rise of cozy games, a genre that keeps getting bigger and bigger. I pitched this to Keza MacDonald at The Guardian with a much smaller scope, actually — about a trend I’d noticed among games that could be considered somewhat cozy. But Keza came back to me with a different, but related idea: The Guardian hadn’t yet covered the proliferation of cozy games as a genre, and its readers could benefit from a piece that covers how and why cozy games are so popular. This is a good example of making sure pitches fit the outlet; what I pitched was a little niche for The Guardian, which has a readership that’s quite different from a place like IGN or GameSpot — people who are very dialed into games and trends. I’m grateful that Keza was willing to tweak the pitch with me to make it fit for a more general readership.

Plushie maker suing over ‘emotional support chicken nuggets’

I love a silly lawsuit. I found this new filing this morning and wrote about it for Aftermath. I just think emotional support chicken nuggets heading to court is funny — similarly amusing as the legal battle between Squishmallow maker Kelly Toys and Build-A-Bear. I mentioned this earlier, but because I write weekly for Aftermath, I pitch a lot more casually. This one I pitched as a scoop about the lawsuit, but a story that hinged on explaining the context and popularity about these sorts of plush toys.

Freelancing in June and looking forward to July

Monthly, I’ll do a quick rundown of the numbers for the prior month. I wrote about this in my first issue, but in May, I had 16 pitches picked up. All of them have been published so far, except for two, which should be published soon. In June, I had 18 pitches accepted, and two have yet to be published. One is still in edits. Though I had two more pitches picked up, I made $1,500 less than May. That’s just how it ends up working out, I suppose.

My highest paying gig in June will earn me $700, for a story that hasn’t been published yet. It’s a reported story with multiple interviews and will be around 2,500+ words. My lowest paying job was a blurb, about 150 words, for $50. I haven’t done the math, but the average I was paid per story in June seems to be around $200.

Looking forward to July, I’ve got nine stories on the books so far. Three have already been published. I’m planning on taking an entire week off in July, so I’m not sure that I’ll be pitching much more than what I’ve already got on the books, aside from stories at Aftermath, where I write weekly.

I’ll give you all an update next week on how things are looking mid-July. And, as always, if there’s a freelancing topic you’d like me to cover, please let me know!

Thank you all for the support in subscribing to Save Spot. I’m excited that so many of you are excited to keep up with me while I continue to freelance. It’s been a challenging week personally — got some bad news about my shoulder — but an exciting week professionally. I published five stories total, and that includes one new byline, on The Guardian. It’s one of those places I’ve been reading for quite some time; what Keza MacDonald has done with the games section is incredible. Always a must read for me.

It’s been busy, so I’m going to keep this one short. But I expect to start writing more in-depth about writing about the video game industry — specifically as a freelance journalist — next week.

Here’s what I’ve published this week:

Video game developers are being accused of using AI – even when they aren’t

Generative AI is creating a new, unusual problem for game developers. Some of them are being accused of using it, even they say they’re not. A lot of players are concerned about the ethical implications of AI; they don’t want to play video games that are using it. That’s fine: It’s good to be skeptical and make sure the media you consume aligns with your vales. But the creative well has been poisoned by generative AI, and it’s hurting everyone. Trust between creatives and players is more important than ever.

Aspiring game developers in Fortnite and Roblox keep suing each other

For Game File, I wrote legal disputes between Fortnite creators. The big story here is about the red vs. blue genre on Fortnite. It’s a common genre, but the top red vs. blue developer has filed two separate copyright lawsuits trying to get two games taken down.

Roblox accused of allowing sexual exploitation in four separate lawsuits

I’ve been following a series of lawsuits filed against Roblox for its alleged role in sexual exploitation of children for some time. This story for Aftermath pulled together all four of those lawsuits, plus details from other criminal complaints. These sorts of things are never fun to report out, but they’re important stories. Roblox is so interesting to cover for me, because I see the value of it for both its players and creatives. But, at the same time, you can’t ignore the very real safety issues.

This game sure looks a lot like Venba

I saw a post from developer Visai Games the other day, calling out a copycat game that totally whitewashes its BAFTA-winning game Venba. Like, it copies the cooking mechanic and uses it to make stuff like peanut butter and jelly.

"I wouldn't have thought [Venba] was an easy game to clone. If I had to guess, I think the art style and low-stakes gameplay must have made [Global Advertising Network] think there's a market for a cozy, frictionless cooking sim with warm and approachable colours,” Visai Games founder Abhi Swaminathan told me. “For us, the art style and design are meant to contrast with the heavier themes of the story, so it's really interesting to see someone just take one part of that and run with it.”

Bucking the industry trend of post-launch layoffs, Lies of P devs received $7,500 bonuses, Switch 2s

There’s so much bad news in the video game industry, so it was surprising and exciting to hear that Lies of P developer Round8 Studio was celebrating the game’s release and DLC by giving its employees an early bonus. Round8 Studio head Jason Park told me that was just a portion of the overall bonuses employees will get early next year.

Hi, folks.

Welcome to Save Spot. I’m Nicole Carpenter. I’m a reporter who has covered the video game industry for 10 years. The last six of those years I’ve spent at Vox Media’s Polygon, a leading video game and entertainment publication. I specialize in reported work, investigative features, legal write-ups, and culture stories that break down the intersection between video games and the world around us. The stories I like to tell most are the ones centered on people — the people who make games, the people who play games, and the people impacted by the culture even if they don’t realize it.

I was awarded the New York Videogame Critic’s circles Knickerbocker Award for Best Games Journalism in 2024, for a story about Barbie Fashion Designer, after being nominated several other years prior.

I started this newsletter hastily as a way to bring together all the work I’ve published in the month+ since Vox Media sold Polygon to Valnet, which then laid off everyone who wrote for the site. It’s been a real bummer, to say the least. It feels like a cruel joke to have laid the entire Polygon union off on May Day. I’m still processing it.

And now I’m back to freelancing. I started quickly, maybe as a way from keeping myself from thinking too much about the future. I’ve published a bunch of stories I’m really proud of, largely on publications that are independent, worker-owned businesses. That’s the good to come from all of this. I’ll get you up to speed about what I’ve been up to since May 1. I’ve published 18 stories — one at 404 Media, three at Stephen Totilo’s Game File, three at Rascal, 10 at Aftermath, one at The Verge, and one at Skybox. I have 14 more that I’ve filed for edits or am currently reporting and writing. I appeared on a few podcasts, and I’ve got one bigger reporting project — one that’s pushing me to learn a new format! — that I’m helping with on a month-by-month basis.

I plan on publishing this newsletter weekly, to talk through what I’ve published in the time since the last issue. I want to use this as a space to be transparent about freelancing as a journalist, too — what rates are like, how pitching works, and what stories get rejected and why. If you have questions, ask them! Before I worked for Polygon, I freelanced full-time for a while. The landscape for freelance journalism has changed a ton, but I still have knowledge and experience I can share. Learn what’s changed along with me.

What I’ve published

I won’t bore you with every thing I’ve published over the past month. Instead, for this first newsletter, I’ll share one story from each new publication I’ve written for — one each from 404 Media, Game File, Aftermath, Rascal, The Verge, and Skybox. I’ve got five stories that I’ve submitted and are in line for publishing, one that’s currently in active edits, and seven stories that I’m reporting out and have successfully pitched to outlets. (Many of these are slated for the coming months, so not actively working on everything all at once.)

How video game sex scenes are made

One of the first stories I published — maybe the first? — after getting laid off from Polygon is one I’m really proud of. I reached out to an editor at 404 Media immediately to pitch the story. For it, I interviewed developers, voice actors, and intimacy coordinators to get a sense for how video game sex scenes are made. I learned a lot: about safety on set, Cyberpunk 2077’s tank scene, Velcro mishaps, and how juicy oranges can make better sex sounds.

A new Roblox gardening game is hotter than anything on Steam

This was my second piece for Game File, former Kotaku editor-in-chief Stephen Totilo’s newsletter. Shortly after Polygon laid everyone off, Stephen announced that he was trying something new with Game File: Hiring freelance reporters using a flat rate bolstered by bonuses from subscriptions. I think it’s a really cool way to approach things; both sides benefit from a story blowing up. I’m really proud of this Grow A Garden piece because Game File was one of the first outlets to cover the success of the game. Stephen sent me a press release from Roblox and asked if I was interested; I scheduled an interview with the developer immediately, then got to work.

Tabletop makers push back against tariffs with honest and direct political action

Are you noticing a trend? So many of the pieces I’ve published since getting laid off are from independent, worker-owned outlets. I’m so proud of that, and so thankful for the opportunity to publish with these sites. My first post for Rascal was about how the tariff situation impacted tabletop game makers, a topic Rascal had been covering so intently. Chase Carter, a co-founder at Rascal, suggested I reach out to Ray Chou of Mythworks, then the story grew from there, thanks to fantastic edits from Chase. What we ended up with was an in-depth look at the material impact of the tariffs, and how developers were fighting back.

The Making of ‘Excuuuse me, Princess!’: An oral history of the Legend of Zelda cartoon

Skybox launched the day Polygon laid us all off, and co-founder Will Borger reached out quickly to ask if I wanted to write a story about a story. I loved that idea, and immediately got to work on one of my favorite pieces, an oral history of the wacky 1980s The Legend of Zelda cartoon. It was really nice to revisit this piece; I also listened back to some of the old recordings so I could include some new details in there.

Sour Patch Kids, ranked

Aftermath brought me on as a regular contributor, a gig that I’m so thankful for. I’ve read the work of everyone at the site for so, so long — and it’s a dream to be able to work alongside side them weekly. My first story was about Infinity Nikki, but my second post was a hard pivot to another passion of mine: Sour Patch Kids. When I pitched this in a meeting, I was like, they’re going to either love this or think I’m an idiot. Thankfully, they loved it.

You’ll find my work on Aftermath about two times per week.

The Nintendo Switch was an indie game haven, until it was overrun with slop

Back on Vox Media with this story in The Verge. Weird! The Verge ran a series of stories about the Nintendo Switch and its past and future in the lead-up to the Nintendo Switch 2. I pitched a story to games editor Andrew Webster (who rules!) about the golden age of indie games on the Nintendo Switch, when it first launched, and how things evolved from there. The story was also a look forward to the new console, and how Nintendo could support indies on there, with a bunch of interviews with indie developers.

On freelancing

It truly, truly sucks to be laid off. But I’m also doing fine. I’ve jumped head first into the freelance pool and I’ve had success landing pitches and finding stable work. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about the future; I hope I can sustain the sort of consistency that I landed on in May and June for the rest of my freelancing career. And that’s because I do hope that I’m able to make enough money to freelance full-time for the near future. I don’t want to jump into any full-time job out of panic and fear. There aren’t that many jobs, for one, but I want to take the time to try this career path and be able to pursue stories on my own terms. If I do transition back into a normal, full-time position, I want it to be something that’s a perfect fit — or as close to a perfect fit as I can get. Though freelancing is scary, it does allow me the time, space, and creativity to do my best work. But I also need to be able to make enough money to support myself and my family. So, uh, if you’re an editor reading this, I’d love to pitch you! I have lots of ideas, time to work and report, and the ability to make things happen.

Anyway, that’s all for this newsletter. (I have no idea how to transition out of this!) What can I answer for you in the next issue?