Anyone who plays video games knows that gaming isn’t just informed by pop culture – it is pop culture. From console games to PC to mobile, billions of people play games daily, but its reach expands far beyond just the players. Video game adaptations have finally broken through to mainstream audiences with massive shows like Fallout, The Last of Us, and Knuckles. Conversely, a generation of viewers have come of age in a new-media world, and exclusively get their content from gaming-centric platforms like YouTube and Twitch. Music and gaming have also always flirted, but now have reached a symbiosis where artists aren’t just appearing in games, they’re defining them as their digital presence evolves alongside the insatiable parasocial obsessions of fandom.
That’s important to Rolling Stone, and it’s important to me as our new Senior Gaming Editor. I’ve been gaming for a long time. My first console was a hand-me-down Nintendo Entertainment System with a busted Zapper gun. I was there in the Call of Duty lobbies (and the Counter-Strike 1.6 clan meets before them). I owned a Wii U.
To me, gaming has always been less of an escape and more of a conduit that connects people to worlds and to each other.
And that’s what we’re looking to explore at Rolling Stone, by taking a serious (or deeply unserious) journalistic approach to telling the story of games through the people around them. It’s about community, from the modders keeping beloved games alive after corporations pull the plug to the cosplayers doing themed karaoke after a mobile game meetup.
And this isn’t entirely new, Rolling Stone has been covering games for years. But with the launch of our new section, RS Gaming, we’re committing to meeting the community at its own wavelength to tell stories that matter, even if you don’t consider yourself a gamer.
We’ll, of course, go hands-on to preview and review the latest games with the same level of analysis brought to music and entertainment. We’ll also go behind-the-scenes with developers, big and small, to understand how today’s games are being created for a new generation of players. We’ll be following and breaking down the latest trends across the industry, from content-creator beef to major shake ups in the world and culture of gaming. But most importantly, we’ll be telling “stories from the edge,” which is Rolling Stone-speak for unearthing things and people of surprising interest in unexpected places.
Welcome to RS Gaming.
Griffin Lotz for Rolling Stone
