Q+A: Bijan Stephen, Reporter at The Verge

Stephen talks about gaming, the difference between journalists and influencers, and whether the Biden administration is good for gamers.

Previously a critic at The Nation, contributor for outlets like Believer Magazine, GQ, The New Yorker, and once upon a time, an unpaid intern, Bijan Stephen currently covers live streaming as a reporter at The Verge. For The Verge, Stephen has written about many facets of the fast-changing industry, including how social platforms handled livestreams of the Capitol riots and to the way video game and general streaming platform Twitch interacts with its streamers as they become mainstream celebrities. Stephen’s participation in the video game community isn’t limited to journalism — he regularly streams himself chatting and playing video games on Twitch, makes YouTube videos, and with the help of friends, uploads his own games to itch, a website for hosting and downloading indie games.  In internet years, Stephen is a games journalism veteran: he began professionally writing about video games in 2012, while a senior at Yale and unpaid intern for Kill Screen magazine. But the writing Stephen does and the content he makes now respond to an interesting time for video games, where the lines between journalist and influencer have blurred. I talked to him about it over the phone from my childhood bedroom on Long Island while his internet was out in Park Slope. It would not be a blogging day, he said, but that was okay. 

Study Hall: How would you describe your relationship to gaming? 

Bijan Stephen: [Laughs.] It’s the longest relationship of my life. I’ve been playing games since I was a kid, my first editorial job was as an unpaid intern at Kill Screen magazine back in 2012. I’ve been writing about games and culture, and games as culture, for a little while. 

SH: Would you consider yourself as part of the gaming community?

BS: Yeah! Yeah, why not. The “gaming community” is a bit of a loaded phrase because we’re firmly post-Gamergate, but I spend a lot of time playing games, and I spend a lot of time talking to people about games professionally and informally. 

SH: How do you approach video game writing differently than other culture writing?

BS: I don’t think there is a difference. There was a really interesting movement a few years ago — it has a Wikipedia page called “New Games Journalism.” Basically, a lot of game writers applied the techniques of New Journalism to video game writing, and it made for a lot of really fascinating writing. One of the canonical examples in that specific genre, and something that I return to often, is Tom Bissell’s piece in The Guardian about doing cocaine and playing Grand Theft Auto. It’s a really fantastic piece of writing. There’s a lot of good game writing, and I think a lot of that is because people have started thinking about games from an analytical perspective. 

SH: Cult of personality is such a huge thing in video games, and I was wondering, since you are making YouTube videos and also streaming on Twitch — do you see those other mediums as extensions of journalism, or is it more like performance? 

BS: That’s a really interesting question that hasn’t been answered yet. YouTubers and streamers are just marketing. That is a big statement and I want to qualify it, but the difference between journalism and influencers on YouTube and Twitch is pretty big. You can’t pay a journalist to review a game — or at least, an ethical journalist. You can sponsor a Twitch streamer or a YouTube video. I even see something like Tim Rogers’ video game review videos on Patreon as fundamentally in a different realm than the game videos he was making for Kotaku. What Tim’s doing now seems much more in the realm of art, and it’s stuff that just couldn’t exist at a publication. 

One of the more interesting things to me about reviewing games online and in these visual mediums as performance — because it is performance — is the rise of the video essay. My friend Jacob Geller makes incredible video essays. Are they journalism? No. Are they entertainment? Yes. Do you learn something from them? Also yes. They exist in this realm that’s more akin to a personal essay than anything else. 

A lot of people in the gaming community like YouTubers and streamers, and they like getting their news from those people, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s news. It also doesn’t invalidate that those things are performances. But journalism can also be performed; that’s just Twitter. The lines aren’t always so clear, and one of the consequences of that is that people don’t make a distinction between “content” and journalism. Yes, blogs are content, and a well-researched, well-reported piece can also be content, but it’s not the same thing as a YouTuber talking about the issues of the day in their own opinion. 

I don’t know if that makes sense. 

SH: No, it does make sense. It’s complicated — maybe because journalism has a certain clout associated with it, but as influencers become more of a permanent fixture in society, people look to them for information the way that they used to only from journalists. Do you think that video game influencers are good or bad for journalism? 

BS: I think they’re in a totally separate category; their aims are totally different. When you’re a journalist, you don’t get the free stuff, you don’t benefit from your work personally, and that is the main distinction between [journalists and influencers] now. But one of the things that I’ve been thinking about a lot, and that I’m probably going to write about at some point, is how influence gained anywhere online is just influence now. The follow count matters, but where you got it from does not. Especially on Twitter, where as a journalist you can amass a huge following — you can become an influencer even if you decide to leave journalism. 

Taylor Lorenz, who is a good friend of mine, is a good example because she covers internet culture, and her follower count has ballooned because a lot of younger people see her as an influencer. That’s very strange to me, because we came up in similar times in journalism, and being an influencer is not the end goal for her. It’s interesting that the way people think about the internet has shifted so much that, like, she has a Famous Birthdays page — which doesn’t invalidate her work, because her work is incredible. 

When I’m Twitch streaming, I’m making something for myself. It has nothing to do with the work that I do, because I don’t want to scoop myself by talking about stuff on stream. I do, however, find myself rebutting people’s beliefs about what the media does and how it works. I’ve found that a lot of people don’t actually know how the journalism sausage gets made, which is a failing of journalism. We should be able to explain our process to people in a coherent way. A few years ago, I made a game about what it’s like to be a journalist day-to-day. I think it needs to be demystified.

SH: Have you ever had any negative online experiences with your video game articles? 

BS: People get mad about the same stuff online: any time you start talking about equality, any time you start talking about racism or sexism, or transphobia, or any of the -isms. People get mad because they feel like those people shouldn’t exist, and I’ve been writing online long enough where I’m like, “You know, man, I don’t know how to tell you that you should care about other people.” I can’t do it, I can’t make you extend empathy. One of the things I am excited about is that a pal of mine created an app called Block Party, which makes a personal block list and mute list for you on Twitter. So if things get bad, I’m just going to sign up for that. Fuck it! 

SH: It’s probably impossible to talk about gaming without also mentioning any of the -isms. How has your experience on Twitch been? I know that the livechat can get unpleasant. 

BS: I have a team of [moderators] that will nuke the bad stuff before I even see it, and the people that come through are very respectful because it’s a personal space. I talked to [rapper and streamer] Logic about this a while back for The Verge, and he was saying he wanted to make Twitch his main social media because he could control the environment. 

SH: Do you have any opinions on how Twitch deals with harassment?

BS: Paradoxically, I think Twitch could do a lot more. Right now, they’ve put the onus on creators to police and set the tone for their own channels, which is smart, because it means that you don’t have to deal with large-scale moderation problems. But, for example, there was recently a Twitch stream event for creators where chat was incredibly toxic, and none of the people who were featured were looking at the main Twitch chat, just their own channel chats, because the main one is unmoderated. It’s one of those things that really cooks my noodle when I think about it too hard. It remains to be seen if they actually enforce the new content policy [which expanded protected identities and updated banned speech and emotes] and ban a bunch of people from the site. That went up recently, so we shall see. 

SH: What advice would you give to a writer who didn’t know much about games but was interested in video game journalism? 

BS: First step is to follow a bunch of games people on Twitter who you think are interesting. I would follow Anita Sarkeesian, Heather Alexandra, Jacob Geller. Follow people in games media who have different perspectives. The second thing is to find a list of streamers and YouTubers that you like and try to keep up with the news. The third thing is to play a lot of games and have opinions about them. Somewhere within those three things, you will find a story to pitch to an editor. 

SH: Here’s my silly question — is Joe Biden bad for video games? 

BS: So, I talked to Bernie’s people in the primary and they said they stand with gamers. I have not heard such a statement from the Joe Biden team, but I would be willing to hear them out if they wanted to give one. 

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