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What can you say about a 34-year-old Editor-in-Chief who died? That he was bald. And brilliant. That he loved Prey and Dishonored. And Deathloop. And TheGamer. Kirk McKeand, our soon-to-be former EiC, isn’t actually dead, but he might as well be. He’s leaving us, and even though love means never having to say you’re sorry, I will never forgive him.
Today is Kirk’s final day as TheGamer-in-Chief, and to celebrate we’re going to have a few Kirk-related stories, plus a hidden Kirk in every leading image for today’s features. He’s quite easy to spot in this one - and also quite dead - but stick around all day and see if you can find him in a good old-fashioned game of Where’s Kirkles. There are no prizes, aside from that warm feeling of satisfaction, but then what else do you need? You also get to read all of our interesting opinions, but I guess you get to do that every day anyway.
Fear not, dear gamers. We won’t just drift aimlessly through the discourse forevermore. We’ve already found our new Editor-in-Chief - she’s me. That opening ramble about Kirk being dead but not really? That’s a quote from a ‘70s romance movie. You can expect a lot more bullshit like that now that I’m TheGamer of TheGamer, no spaces.
As many of you know, I’ve already been here for a while. I arrived at TheGamer on February 15, like a stale box of Valentines chocolates, as a features editor. According to our Facebook audience, I’ve garnered quite the reputation. “You can sometimes guess she wrote the article just by looking at the title,” they say, often followed by the cry-laughing emoji. They’re so pleased they get to read my opinions that they’ve got tears streaming down their face. People have even begged for me to be removed as features editor on Facebook - clearly, they’ve known I was due a well-earned promotion for ages. Cheers, fellow gamers, for being my biggest fans.
Or maybe you’re new here. Maybe you just pop in occasionally, and are slowly realising that TheGamer is a damn good website. Maybe you just never read the byline. Hey, ‘By Stacey Henley’ takes three whole seconds to read. I get it. Who has the time? In that case, you should probably have a rundown of the sorts of things I write about.
Sometimes I look at serious topics, like the Activision Blizzard walkout, the shockingly ignorant surprise the industry reacted with, or the exhausting ways we discuss queer characters. Other times, I keep things silly, like explaining why I hope I hate Breath of the Wild 2, complaining about Snorlax’s teeth in New Pokemon Snap, or begging you to let Tali and Garrus romance each other in Mass Effect.
I even write about things that seem silly but are actually serious, like how the Twitch hot tub and fart metas highlighted the streaming industry’s conflicting issues around misogyny and parasocial pseudosexual relationships, or how Far Cry 6’s daft dog undercuts all of the stark political ideas the game hopes to raise. I’ve also spoken to some very cool people while I’ve been here, like Maggie Robertson, the voice and performance capture artist behind Lady Dimitrescu, and Mike Reiss, legendary Simpsons writer and co-creator of Bleeding Gums Murphy.
Of course, it’s not just me. We have lots of phenomenal writers here at TheGamer - every editor-in-chief probably thinks their team is the best, but unfortunately, they are all wrong. Mine is. Cian Maher, our lead features editor, recently wrote an 8,000-word oral history of Dragon Age: Origins crammed with interviews. Jade King, another of our features editors, is on record asking Lost Judgment producer Kazuki Hosokawa whether Kazuma Kiryu could beat up John Wick. She also managed to get Greg Kasavin’s take on whether Zagreus should join Smash - according to Kasavin, he absolutely should.
Andy Kelly, the most recent addition to our features team, wrote an article about No Man’s Sky that was so great he got fan mail thanking him for his honest review, despite the fact that a) it was not a review, and b) Andy’s a massive liar who’s never played a minute of No Man’s Sky in his life.
You also might recall a particularly racist press event going viral, where journalists were invited to shoot Arabic caricatures at an “extreme military counter-terrorism training” course where a ‘Trump 2024: The Revenge Tour’ flag was installed. Eric Switzer, another one of our editors and podcast host extraordinaire, reported on that when no one else would.
We also have interviews on the site with the likes of Roger Clark, Tim Schafer, John Romero, Shohreh Aghdashloo, Suda51, Molly Knox Ostertag, and a recurring interview feature with the most interesting figures in the Final Fantasy 14 community.
Even Kirk, our outgoing EiC, managed to do some decent enough work while he was here. Remember earlier this year when the PS3, PSP, and PS Vita stores were about to shut down? Kirk broke that story. He ran an in-depth expose on the workplace abuse at Techland a few months earlier, too. I’m telling you, if you don’t have us bookmarked, get it done now.
If you’re reading this for a glimpse of my personality, for a sliver of information on where the site might be heading, I don’t think you’ll learn much. The site has been doing pretty damn well recently, and that’s because we have a lot of pretty damn good writers. We’ll keep doing what we’re doing. We’re a five-star site, and we haven’t even begun to peak.
What you might have noticed is that I try not to take things too seriously. I firmly consider games to be toys, and that means it’s my job to write what I think about toys all day. You can’t take that too seriously and retain your self-respect. There’s a balance, of course. Games are also art, and people put their heart and soul into them. Developers are routinely harassed and forced to crunch, too - we can’t just wave away these problems, nor can we ignore the issues pertaining to racism, homophobia, intersectionality, and accessibility with ‘oh look, shiny new toy!’ But if you ever see me caring about whether someone likes, dislikes, or gives a seven out of ten to a certain toy, you will know that the worms have officially taken over my brain.
There’s far too much animosity in gaming. Some of it comes from the leftover stink of GamerGate, but some of it - far more than we perhaps care to admit - comes from us. This isn’t concern trolling or tone policing. I’m happy to take the fight to the worst of our community - I recently wrote an article with the headline ‘Dear Idiots’ all about God of War’s Angrboda. But it seems the rest of us are at each other’s throats far too much. We’re all extremely online, but we should probably remember our job revolves around talking about toys. Not every criticism of us is GamerGate Mk. 2 - sometimes we just get it wrong.
I suppose then that I should be serious for just a moment. TheGamer is here for all your news, views, and reviews, usually with a different angle to a lot of the other stuff you see out there. We have a diverse, inclusive team, and we write for a diverse and inclusive audience. Sometimes we actively write for that audience by calling racists ‘idiots’. It’s not for everyone. It’s also not going to change.
Kirk actually gave me my first commission in the industry, an interview piece on the then-newly announced Tell Me Why. I like to think I did well enough as a freelancer after that - I even went on to win Good Games Writing’s Best Feature award in 2020 for a piece on Cyberpunk 2077’s parasocial marketing. Then Kirk gave me my first editorial job. Now, seven months later, I’m stepping into the role of Editor-in-Chief, following Kirk. He’s a good egg, really. A bald egg, but good. All eggs are bald. Only the rarest eggs are good.
Mostly, I just think it’s fucking rad that a working class trans woman from the North East of England with no connections could force her way into the industry and become Editor-in-Chief of a team this talented. If you think that’s rad too, you should read TheGamer. No spaces.