Taking "The Escapist" To A Literal Level

November 7, 2023 8:45 AM

In a move reminiscent of the collapse of Deadspin, gaming website The Escapist has seen a mass departure of the video creation team after the firing of EIC Nick Calandra, including Zero Punctuation host and creator Yahtzee Croshaw.

While the walkout is a hard decision for all involved, it is particularly fraught for Croshaw, as the rights to Zero Punctuation are tied up with The Escapist, meaning his departure also means surrendering the show he built and ran for many years.

posted by NoxAeternum (38 comments total)

I thought The Escapist fell apart ages ago when they lost a lot of their creators over gamergate conflict.
posted by forbiddencabinet at 8:55 AM on November 7, 2023 [7 favorites]

A team of creators rebuilt it, including Croshaw and Calandra. It looks like Calandra is following in the footsteps of Defector and The Autopian and starting a new site out from VC control.
posted by NoxAeternum at 9:08 AM on November 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Coincidentally, a bunch of ex-Kotaku folks just launched Aftermath, a new site for gaming. Those folks have seen some shit.
posted by Nelson at 9:18 AM on November 7, 2023 [14 favorites]

There's an alternate history where I continued pushing into video game narrative design or journalism in the early 2000s after grad school, and it was depressing for me to realize that that would be a darker timeline for me.

The one bright spot is the new worker-owned sites showing up in the video gaming space. Along with whatever Calandra and Croshaw do, Gita Jackson, Luke Plunkett, and other former Kotaku writers just launched The Aftermath today.
posted by sgranade at 9:19 AM on November 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Crowshaw was pretty big on bothsidesing gamergate, not a fan.
posted by StarkRoads at 9:28 AM on November 7, 2023 [17 favorites]

As much as I love the idea of journalists owning their own sites, I still can't get over the hump of paying a subscription for each individual site I visit. Is there a middle ground between having to pay $7 USD a month for Defector or Aftermath and having a clueless VC destroying popular sites from the inside out?
posted by thecjm at 9:29 AM on November 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

I guess a bunch of independent sites could join together, and honor each others' subscriptions.
posted by subdee at 9:38 AM on November 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

Crowshaw was pretty big on bothsidesing gamergate, not a fan.

ZP was funny, when it was funny, because of what a colossal asshole Crowshaw's on-screen persona was, right? When that got less funny in light of *gestures at everything* I drifted away. Sounds like I didn't miss much.
posted by The Bellman at 9:40 AM on November 7, 2023 [19 favorites]

Is there a middle ground between having to pay $7 USD a month for Defector or Aftermath and having a clueless VC destroying popular sites from the inside out?

Nope.
posted by mhoye at 10:25 AM on November 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

As much as I love the idea of journalists owning their own sites, I still can't get over the hump of paying a subscription for each individual site I visit. Is there a middle ground between having to pay $7 USD a month for Defector or Aftermath and having a clueless VC destroying popular sites from the inside out?

The great myth of capitalism is that there is some magical way to make things easier and cheaper for the consumer while still ensuring the people producing things get paid fairly.

The reality is the only way for most people to make a living making things (journalism, music, art, food) is to pay them directly for what they produce, else you end up with a middleman corporation charging fees to create a platform for consumers and squeezing the producers to make it cheaper in the process.

This is happening for a reason across literally every thing people produce for a reason - the middle ground does not exist.
posted by openhearted at 10:34 AM on November 7, 2023 [13 favorites]

ZP was funny, when it was funny, because of what a colossal asshole Crowshaw's on-screen persona was, right?

No moreso than most other critics: For sure he focuses on games where the devs/gameplay/publisher became lazy and uncreative, and/or expected the players to be the same. But I'd say the source of the humor was well-written, highly verbose critiques delivered at a breakneck pace (rewarding the audience for paying attention is an excellent way to get return business) and then pairing it with simple eye-catching animation that also included meta-commentary on the game and the review itself (rewarding the audience x2).
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 10:47 AM on November 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

A team of creators rebuilt it, including Croshaw and Calandra.

i don't know much about calandra, but i remember croshaw as being that exact kind of rank, juvenile misogynist that is common in gaming: he started his review of bayonetta 2 with a a full minute of grossness; here's a bunch of "edgy" "ironic" "well-written humor" of misogyny and homophobia in his review of sims 3. i get that these are years old, and i have no idea how much he's changed in the intervening years, but given how back then he went heavily into the white mansplainy thing about how there weren't any diversity issues in gaming, i basically gave up on him and the escapist.

(which, disappointingly, had nothing to do with michael chabon's the amazing adventures of kavalier and clay)

also croshaw was the guy who came up with the whole toxic "pc master race" thing.

so.
posted by i used to be someone else at 10:52 AM on November 7, 2023 [15 favorites]

also croshaw was the guy who came up with the whole toxic "pc master race" thing

That particular line was clearly meant at the expense of PC gaming snobs when he said it. I know they went ahead and appropriated it later but that’s one point where I don’t think he’s especially to blame.
posted by atoxyl at 11:31 AM on November 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

i mean, i get a lot of his stuff was meant to be "edgy", "ironic", and "sarcastic" but like... obviously a good chunk of his audience wasn't read in on that, and a good portion of his non-audience was turned off because it's difficult to tell sometimes.
posted by i used to be someone else at 12:13 PM on November 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

Ah, I had started watching ZP again once in a while, after falling off for different reasons (I am not personally fond of the shtick, with me it's something to wade through in order to get to his point), but wasn't aware of his history with gamergate. It's not easy to keep up with everything happening sometimes. I had linked him a couple of times from our blog recently, but probably won't do that in the future.

Might the new project be good anyway? I'm in favor of creators getting away from VC.
posted by JHarris at 1:25 PM on November 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

I've not visited Escapist in years and, sure, Croshaw is undoubtedly what he is, but... responding to the squeezing to death of Yet Another Thing by capitalism might be worth seeing through a different lens than litigating Zero Punctuation.

Anyone in any creative industry is facing a crushing of the ability to do and make stuff and to live off that; those that value any kind of culture face far worse than Croshaw in the hobbyist, non-professional space where literally anything goes, and the driver is whether you're well off enough to be able to sustain it. I wish them well in their post Escapist endeavour, but can't help but feel it's even more exceptional than ever to survive in this space.
posted by onebuttonmonkey at 1:26 PM on November 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

I used to watch ZP religiously, I discovered it in, I think, its first year of existence, and watched it since, until The Escapist got into the GamerGate stuff, and then I stopped for years, until the people who did that went away, and then I went back, and found the site much better with the new crew.

Yeah, Yahtzee was infantile back in the day, but he was never particularly on board with the GG stuff, and he's distanced himself now, and has talked quite a lot of shit about and mocked the person(s) at The Escapist who pushed that agenda (one of them, apparently, went on to have some sort of media venture with Milo Yiannopoulos.

Anyway, both The Escapist and Yahtzee have changed quite a lot. I didn't use to engage with The Escape beyond Yahtzee before, but after Nick took over and got a few other people in, I've gradually gotten more into the other creators there as well, and they're a pretty diverse bunch, women, queers, PoC (as far as I can tell, pretty much all of them left today and will be going to Second Wind too).

And Yahtzee, well, apart from being an abrasive asshole, at least that being his persona, he was always kind of a leftist, and has become more of one, as I understand it, so I suspect he was maybe kind of on board with the whole gamergate thing when it was (ostensibly) about the relationship between developers and games media, but probably got the fuck out once he realized where it was going politically. He also moved to the US some years ago, which I think has made him more aware of US political realities and dogwhistles he might not have been aware of before. He's certainly spent a fair amount of his livestreams the last few years cursing Trump, the Republicans, SCOTUS (especially after reversing Roe), and so on. He's also mellowed out on the edginess lately.

In short, I think he's essentially a good dude who makes good content and knows a shitload about games, and all the other creators from The Escapist who went with him and Nick today are definitely also good people. I wish them luck, and I'll be subscribing (I unsubscribed and cancelled my Escapist membership immediately when I heard today).
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 3:25 PM on November 7, 2023 [13 favorites]

Fine.
The Escapist hosted articles justifying GG.
The Escapist didn't pay their creatives.
Not a fan.
posted by StarkRoads at 3:26 PM on November 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

StarkRoads: Yeah, The Escapist as a brand was pretty fucked up for a while. But all of the people who did that stuff left, and it was just a shell of a company with just Yahtzee for a while, then it got bought, and a whole new staff came in. I suspect the only reason Yahtzee didn't leave was that, as I understand it, The Escapist owns the ZeroPunctuation brand, and that was at least then his bread and butter. He's diversified a lot now, and although there's talk of them trying to get their hands on the brands they left behind, he's probably able to do without them.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 3:35 PM on November 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

I guess a bunch of independent sites could join together, and honor each others' subscriptions.

The Brick House does this. So it is a model that exists, though it's still rare. It would be great if more publications would do this.
posted by limeonaire at 3:45 PM on November 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

I still can't get over the hump of paying a subscription for each individual site I visit

Back in the [cough] magazine era there were very successful distribution deals, where you'd pay a fee to an intermediary who'd arrange with individual publishers to package sets of magazines and journals to subscribers. That was a good business, especially in Australia where the profit was to be made in getting bulk discounted postage of current magazines from the US/UK/Europe/Japan etc.. I haven't seen anything like it in the internet era but it's an idea whose time has come.
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 3:51 PM on November 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

here's a bunch of "edgy" "ironic" "well-written humor" of misogyny and homophobia in his review of sims 3

i mean, i get a lot of his stuff was meant to be "edgy", "ironic", and "sarcastic" but like... obviously a good chunk of his audience wasn't read in on that, and a good portion of his non-audience was turned off because it's difficult to tell sometimes.

You linked a review that ends "all women are evil, bewitching innocents with their insidious emotions and absorbing our manhoods into their rank bloodstreaked spam sandwiches, who'd need them? incidentally, I'm still not gay". Did you think his audience were taking that unironically?
posted by Slogby at 4:30 PM on November 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

I still can't get over the hump of paying a subscription for each individual site I visit

In 1996, to pick an arbitrary year, my family subscribed to the local paper (25 cents a day, $1 on Sunday, $2 weekly subscription), Time ($3.95 cover price weekly), and Sports Illustrated ($3.50 cover price weekly).

In 2023, subscribing to Aftermath ($7) and Defector ($8) monthly, you'd have at least $10/month left over for other subscriptions. With literally no adjustment for inflation.

Adjusted for inflation, your $25 in 1996 becomes $49 today. That's Aftermath, Defector, New York Times all access (with no discount! plus cooking, games, and the Athletic) and STILL about $10/month left over.
posted by aureliobuendia at 4:57 PM on November 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Are Aftermath, Defector or NYT covering my local issues, like our local paper does? And your example doesn't include the dozen-or-other websites that are all putting up fullscreen blocks on their sites after I scroll down a page unless I pay them for the privilege. Plus, I don't nearly make myself what my dad did back then--and we never subscribed to anything but the local paper. But your example is largely a kind of strawman anyway?

Now of course, situations are different, and there'll always be someone who is not served well by any change to the status quo. And I really want to support Defector and Aftermath and whatever Nick Calandra gets together. A system like The Brick House might help.
posted by JHarris at 5:28 PM on November 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

They are apparently launching a new video channel thing called Second Wind (@SecondWindGroup)

I liked Zero Punctuation way back in the day, forgot it was a thing honestly, so I'll check out what Croshaw gets up to over there.

Any other creators in the exodus well worth a follow?
posted by Baethan at 6:58 PM on November 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

It's a bit of a misread of the times to announce with an Xitter account but not Mastodon, Instagram, Threads or Bluesky. Here's hoping they remedy that soon.
posted by JHarris at 8:14 PM on November 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

They're going to do a stream tomorrow where they talk about their direction tomorrow at noon US Eastern/9 AM Pacific. Here!
posted by JHarris at 8:59 PM on November 7, 2023

Baethan: I mostly watch the livestreams, but Marty Sliva, KC Nwosu, Jesse Galina, Amy Campbell, and relative newcomer and up-and-coming star Frost (Sebastian Ruiz) are all very solid and entertaining creators. JM8 too if you enjoy game design discussions and deep delves.

Jack Packard is also fun, but it's not clear to me if he'll be going with the others. He's left The Escapist, where he had only been a full-time employee for some months, after being part-time for a long time, but neither he nor any of the others have said anything about him joining Second Wind, yet. Although he was the brains behind and DM of the quite successful AD&D video series "Aventure Is Nigh", so I would be surprised if he weren't involved in some way or another.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 12:36 AM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

You linked a review that ends "all women are evil, bewitching innocents with their insidious emotions and absorbing our manhoods into their rank bloodstreaked spam sandwiches, who'd need them? incidentally, I'm still not gay". Did you think his audience were taking that unironically?

given how often i read/hear random shit spoken to women and about women like this playing games and watching streams, which maybe has gotten a little better in the past decade mostly because i don't do voice chat with people i don't know in real life anymore and avoid playing with randos when i can and avoid interacting with most gamers (i mean for fucks sake, i hate logging into games with a general chat in the lobby and seeing toxic shit. i'm looking at you, starcraft 2, because even with that turned off every now and then i'll randomly see something that reads like barrens chat with less mankrik)

i don't know, maybe his entire audience was taking that completely ironically, but people repurposed ran with his pc master race shit, he's written multiple times about how diversity isn't that much of an issue in gaming, he bothsidesed the gamergate shit for a while so like...

maybe he's grown. he poisoned the well enough that i don't care to find out and nobody seems to be pointing to anything about that anyway.

but whatever. someone said we shouldn't litigate the dude in this thread, so let's just disagree and say you give people a lot more credit than i do
posted by i used to be someone else at 5:33 AM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

They also don't yet have an official website, they could just set something up quick to fill that gap before someone spoofs them. And it feels like they should get someone handling their social media for them. Of course, it's their first full day in existence, some slack to them could be cut.
posted by JHarris at 4:24 PM on November 8, 2023

In related news, Jezebel has been murdered by the same crew that killed Deadspin. As per Lyz Lenz:

Jezebel was the site that helped launch my career. It was a place where women could unabashedly write about culture, politics, and everything with voice, humor, and the whole range of human emotions. The fact that it was killed by inept men is truly a metaphor.

posted by NoxAeternum at 11:52 AM on November 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

Yeah, the Jezebel thing sucks. I had some hope they'd pull a Deadspin and start their own thing, but I haven't seen any indications so far, does anyone know?
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 9:22 AM on November 10, 2023

Plus, I don't nearly make myself what my dad did back then--and we never subscribed to anything but the local paper

Dude, no one was delivering free articles and magazines from around the world to your dad’s door (except as subscription incentives - paid for with glossy ads because Google hadn’t gutted the advertising market.) When I think what I had to go through to get one sought-after issue of Starlog, man. I can’t afford to subscribe to everything either. But I don’t whine about it as if the writers who want to eat are affronting me.
posted by warriorqueen at 4:57 AM on November 11, 2023

Ah, now I'm whining because I can't afford to subscribe to everything, and say so aloud. Well phooey.

Well. It is the nature of the internet to take any solution to a given problem and push it to such grotesque extremes that any minor flaw shall be magnified, as through a glass, until it becomes a major hassle. It's what happened with web advertising, once regarded as the great hope for paid content online, and it'll eventually happen with paywalls. Just you wait.
posted by JHarris at 6:13 AM on November 11, 2023

Zero Punctuation is dead, long live Fully Ramblomatic.

And now FR Yahtzee looks more like the real thing.
posted by NoxAeternum at 2:51 PM on November 15, 2023 [4 favorites]

The new channel Second Wind is up and running. I was bummed when Bob Chapman left the channel a year or so ago (mostly to go work for himself and Mattpat) but I'm SO glad he left with his back catalogue.
posted by es_de_bah at 4:28 PM on November 18, 2023 [1 favorite]

And Extra Punctuation is replaced with Semi Ramblomatic.
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:20 PM on November 22, 2023

Also, there appears to have been a few Zero Punctuation episodes in the can when the departure happened.

Unsurprisingly, The Escapist has locked comments on them.
posted by NoxAeternum at 5:22 PM on November 22, 2023