Why the New York Times returned to video game coverage and if it will last

An interview with the NYT video game editor

Mar 22, 2024

It's approaching a year since the New York Times cannonballed its way back into video game coverage with a splashy, colorfully interactive love letter to Nintendo's beloved Legend of Zelda franchise.

It was the most popular story created by the culture desk the year it hit.

While it wasn't the first big video game story in the New York Times in recent years, it was a clear sign that video game coverage had returned meaningfully to the paper of record.

How that came to be and whether such full-throated coverage of video games in the New York Times will last remains an open and essential question. So, I reached out to the writer, Zachary Small, and the editor, Jason Bailey, to get a better sense of the paper's current state of video game coverage.

History

The New York Times announced that it was "leveling up" video game coverage this past September in an article by senior staff editor Sarah Bahr. In it, Bahr walked through the recent history of video game coverage at the Times. She noted that Bailey was drawn to championing coverage at the paper after seeing an ad for Red Dead Redemption 2 in the Times but no editorial coverage.

It was a moment of realization for Bailey, one which would drive his push for more robust coverage of video games and the industry that creates them.

But the New York Times has a longer history with game coverage than what you'll find in the past five years or so.

Prior to the recent spate of coverage, the New York Times' interest in video games ebbed and flowed over the decades, seemingly tied to a single editor or writer who took it upon themselves at the time to convince the paper to cover the multi-billion-dollar industry.

That includes Chris Suellentrop, a talented writer who, in the second decade of the 2000s, put together big, meaningful pieces on video games for the Times and New York Times Magazine. He's currently a politics editor at The Washington Post.

Seth Schiesel, who covered video games for the Times in the early 2000s, was legendary for his robust output and meaningful industry coverage. He's now a communications director at Discord.

Between these high points were lulls peppered with the occasional story but seemingly no direction. That changed most recently with Bailey.

Leveling Up

Bailey started with the paper on the Sports Desk as a copy editor; he moved to the Express Desk to help with breaking news for a few years and then onto the National Desk for three more years. Most recently, he joined the Culture Desk.

But it was that 2018 ad for Red Dead Redemption 2 that sparked his interest in the New York Times' minimal gaming coverage. Initially, he said, he pitched some stories, writing a half-dozen stories about significant issues, like loot boxes, for the paper.

"It was probably years late, but I was like, 'Somebody needs to write this in the paper of record,'" he said. “I tried to write about larger trends that were happening in the industry, and one of the things I realized was that video game coverage fell between the cracks because it touches on so many parts of society and so many parts of the newsroom."

Bailey was pitching articles to the business section, the style section, the culture section, and the sports section. Looking back now, with that knowledge, he speculates that when folks like Schiesel and Suellentrop left, no one was around in the culture section interested in video game coverage.

"It fell by the wayside, and nobody felt the pressure to pick it up because it kind of slotted into all these different areas," he said.

So when Bailey joined the Culture Desk in the fall of 2022, he decided to use his "Google Time"—the percentage of time that can be used to work on pet projects—to spend on video games because he thinks it's important and he knows no one else is doing it.

"Video games is not my job," he said. "I'm a news editor on the Culture Desk … I carve out time to do this."

From Zelda to Final Fantasy

Zachary H. Small is a staff reporter at the Culture Desk. He's also the writer behind two of this recent initiatives' biggest successes: stories on The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy VII.

How The Legend of Zelda Changed the Game hit the New York Times on May 4. It was absolutely packed with footnotes that leapt to video clips, video interviews, interactive elements, moving images, and even a reactive scoreboard of sorts at the bottom that noted what percentage of elements from the story the reader had unearthed.

When I chatted with Small—who worked on the piece with a team that included visual editor Rumsey Taylor, Sean Catangui, Tala Safie, and Michael Beswetherick— I called it the Mona Lisa of video game stories.

It was their first video game story for the New York Times, they said, but also the result of years spent covering the convergence of art, money, power, and politics for the paper.

Growing up, Small said, they didn't have access to museums, so their first access point to the world of art was through video games.

"It was always something very personal to me," they said. "It was something I noticed a lack of in the New York Times. There was a period in the 2000s into the early 2010s where we did have consistent video game coverage, but that sort of faltered as people moved on to new jobs and new companies."

Despite that, it seems that the New York Times was generally aware of the existence and importance of video games, so when Bailey opened that floodgate, the result was spectacular.

"There was a lot of goodwill pent up in the newspaper," Small said. "So when we decided to do this, we really wanted to make a splash, especially with this sort of first story to announce that we're covering this industry."

That included being able to tap into the likes of the interactive team's Taylor, whose work includes coverage of the war in Ukraine, the dismantling of Roe v Wade, and being on the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of COVID-19.

Although the team working on the story came from various beats and worked in an environment that included little free time, there was no pushback on the support needed to assemble the Zelda story.

"We're all taxed for time, but this just felt really important and we made time for it," Small said.

Zelda became one of the first major by-products of the Times push back into video game coverage in part because of timing, but also because Small was looking for a subject that they could really dig into.

"My approach was to treat this story seriously, to not dumb it down," they said. "We don't need to mention Pac-Man in the first paragraph. We wanted to get away from the tropes of writing for a general audience and really get people hooked on why gamers like these games. What gets them really hooked on Zelda?

"I wanted to treat this the way I treat exhibitions or an amazing piece of art."

The same approach was used when Small decided to tackle Final Fantasy VII in The Shocking Death That Has Devastated Gamers for Decades on Feb. 20.

The story that examines the franchise and the death of Aerith Gainsborough, included side-by-side visual comparisons to Psycho, an examination of the game's evolution, an audio clip of a melody from the franchise, and touches on Japanese culture and art.

The story was sent out as an alert to subscribers of the New York Times and drew both praise and condemnation. The latter mostly tied to what some viewed as a now decades-old-spoiler for the game. (Small points out that when people discuss other forms of classic art, like Great Gatsby, most wouldn't concern themselves with spoilers.)

With both the Zelda and Final Fantasy stories, Small said they were hoping to provide some insight into a cultural phenomenon for people who may not be aware of it and then to provide important context.

"That's why in the Final Fantasy story, I think about the historical context of artworks and artists that I cover," they said. "I wanted to do that with the video game, so I did some research into Japanese history in the 1990s and tried to bring that forward as well.

"When I approach these articles, I ask, 'What is the New York Times adding here?'"

Editorial Direction

"I waited a few months until I learned the ways of the desk and then asked if I could start to do some of this coverage," Bailey said. "I think we've seen that it's been successful and well received, so I've been allowed to continue doing it."

It's a stark reminder that while video games have inexorably become a part of modern culture, there is still no sense of obligation within newspapers that they need to be covered like books, movies, technology, and art.

The coverage you find inside a newspaper is almost always the result of a single voice or a few voices pushing for coverage of a topic they see as essential.

So Bailey uses his ten percent and works with other reporters who somehow find time in their day, week, or month to cover video games. While Small has written multiple big pieces on gaming, their main focus is on fine art: the world of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney, and all of the topics that touch on those institutions and the works they exhibit. Kellen Browning is a tech reporter on the Business desk who covers the gig economy and video games.

Everyone, it seems, working on video game coverage at the Times is doing it out of a personal belief that video games deserve this level of coverage. At the center of it is Bailey's view of video game coverage, which isn't something that needs to earn a place at the table; it's deserved.

"I'm treating it exactly the same way I would assign or edit an article about a movie or a book or a play," he said. "I think (justifying why we're writing about video games) holds us back, so I'm just trying to blow right through that.

"It's a relatively young art form, but I think it's pretty clear at this point that it's every much an art form as television is."

Champions

Clearly, Bailey is the video games champion at the New York Times, but he doesn't want to be or put another way, he doesn't want video game coverage at the paper to need a champion.

Last month, the New York Times held its annual enterprise meeting for video games. It's the sort of meeting that a paper, especially the Times, holds to discuss the upcoming year's coverage. At the Times, they're traditionally held for all of the disciplines, for instance, dance, theater, movies, and—this year— video games.

"It was the first time in a long time, maybe the first time forever," Bailey said. "And in it I made it very clear that this can't be about me. If I take another position on the desk. If I take another position at the paper and video game coverage went away, that would be a lost opportunity.

"I'm trying to make that clear to the people who have hiring power and budgetary power and can make decisions at a higher level than I can. At the moment I am the champion, but I hope that is not the case moving forward, that there's more structural support.

"The idea of video game coverage vanishing or being greatly diminished from a newspaper isn't that far-fetched. The Washington Post made a splash in 2019 when it rolled out Launcher, a hub for video game coverage at the post. Last year, Launcher was shut down, leaving a single reporter, the talented Gene Park, to cover the beat solo.

"I was extremely excited to see that project launch and extremely sad when it went away," Bailey said. "I'm glad that Gene is still there doing good work, but obviously it's harder to be one person covering the whole industry."

The sudden closure of Launcher—something seen at other publications over the years as well—is a reflection of the struggle video games have long had to receive meaningful, on-going mainstream coverage.

Bailey thinks that's because of a confluence of things.

In part, he believes, the leadership at newspapers simply didn't grow up playing video games; it wasn't a part of their formative years. That's something he hopes will change over the next decade or so.

"They're not experiencing it as consumers, or players, or as engaged citizens the same way that they go to the Met to watch the opera or go to the Momo to see the newest exhibit or go watch the Oscar-nominated movie. They're not necessarily playing Grand Theft Auto 6 themselves."

While leadership at papers may not be gamers, Bailey said that he's had plenty of rank-and-file employees thank him for the video game coverage.

"It's not people you would expect. It's people covering different fields that go home, and part of their entertainment life is playing Tears of the Kingdom or any other number of games," he said. "That's been encouraging."

Small said they also have been hearing from unexpected places about the Times' video game coverage. At a recent meeting a museum director approached them about a story they wrote on LGBTQ gamers and the director's son.

"We were able to have a real conversation about what representation in games means," Small said. "This opened up this conversation with their family member."

Onward

For now, Bailey has a pretty specific approach to the New York Times coverage of video games in mind: to focus on the sort of coverage that can serve a broad audience and not get too granular.

"I just want to make sure we're covering the biggest releases of the year," he said. "It would look ridiculous if the New York Times did not cover Barbie or not cover Oppenheimer. And to me, it would have looked just as ridiculous if we didn't cover Diablo IV, Tears of the Kingdom, Starfield, Baldur's Gate 3, and all the great games that came out last year.

"That was what I was trying to accomplish, and I think we did a pretty good job at it."

This year, his plan is to try to slowly expand that to include things like reviews—the first of which in years started hitting last month—and, of course, more deep dives into games.

"I have twenty articles assigned right now through the first half of the year," he said. "They're in various stages of being assigned or being written or being edited and I'm excited about what's actually going to happen in the second-half of the year.

"We're working from the ground up, so the sky's the limit."

And, of course, Bailey remains mindful of what the New York Times can do that few other publications can.

"We can get access to the actual people making the games and talk to them and find out why they made decisions one way or another and hold their feet to the fire when they need to be. That is what I'm trying to leverage more so at the Times."