My guest today is a New York Times-bestselling author and journalist. After graduating from NYU with a degree in writing, he worked as a freelance journalist covering video games for Wired magazine, Joystiq, Edge, Paste, and others.

In 2012 he joined the staff of Kotaku, the video game website run, at that time, by Gawker. There he made a name for himself as a tenacious reporter, particularly with his empathetic coverage of crunch culture –– the term given to the egregious overtime working practises that remain prevalent across the games industry. This work led to my guest’s 2017 bestseller, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels, and in 2021 the follow-up, Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry.

For the past three years my guest has continued to cover video games and the people who make them for Bloomberg. “I've always been in favor of drastic transparency,” he once said, “radical transparency.” 

Play the console:

• Final Fantasy VI
• Baldur's Gate II
• Starcraft II
• Return Of The Obra Dinn
• The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom

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