Will Borger Is Begging You to Believe in Something | Winter Spectacular 2025
“The world is a fine place and worth fighting for.” - Ernest Hemingway
It’s been a bad year for video games. Layoffs speed along because executives are convinced that firing people will make the line go up, and they’re trying to make up for spending money they didn’t have on studios and IP they couldn’t afford because they thought the pandemic boom would continue once folks could safely go outside and be around each other again. Microsoft continues to aid and profit from Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. The Saudi Arabian government bought EVO, the largest, most prestigious fighting game tournament in the world, and is on track to buy Electronic Arts because owning SNK and forcing a rapist into Fatal Fury wasn’t enough, and they see which way the wind is blowing when it comes to the future of oil. The AAA space continues to churn out remakes, remasters, and sequels with an almost single-minded fervor. The Skinner Box reigns. Indies struggle for coverage and profitability. Many of my friends and colleagues have been laid off. Every time I go to an event, there are fewer of us, and I hate running into my friends and feeling obligated to say how sorry I am about what’s just happened to them. But at least the games were good, right?
It feels strange to say that and also admit that this is the most successful I’ve ever been in the space. I taught what I’d almost wager money was my last college class in the spring; AI was everywhere, and it was so demoralizing to read essays you know nobody had bothered to write, that nobody cared about. I didn’t need students to care about my class – my course evaluations have always been good, and I know I’ve made an impact because former students regularly reach out long after their time in my class end; it’s not about me – but it hurts to watch people drive a screwdriver into their grey matter and twist, to sacrifice their ability to learn something new, to connect with the world, to avoid reading and writing. They were only hurting themselves, and many of them couldn’t see it.
There were brilliant students, too; there always are. I tried to hold on to that, but the environment-destroying plagiarism machine hung over everything we did regardless. By the time the semester ended, I was ready to move on. Teaching saved my life. If I hadn’t been hired to teach after several close friends walked out of my life after graduate school, I'm certain I would have killed myself. Teaching gave me purpose. It made me feel like my life mattered, like I could make a difference. I gave myself to it because I didn't want to let my kids down. Walking away feels like closing a book I’m not ready for the end of.
But I did. I started doing mock reviews and consulting, and wouldn’t you know it, I love the damn job. I love working with developers and giving feedback that improves a game, and helping them understand what the reviews they’re going to get mean. I hope I get to keep doing it. I wrote for IGN, and PC Gamer, and Rolling Stone, and half a dozen other places. My wife and I bought a house after two years of searching and eight years after nearly being homeless. If you’d told me that would happen a few years ago, I would have laughed at the idea.
I traveled internationally to cover games, and palled around Japan for a week with a good friend. I’ve written some of my best work this year, and I’m exceptionally thankful to my editors for giving me space to be myself. I co-founded Skybox with Brian Barnett and Lucas White, and I’m extremely proud of the work we’ve published and that I have written for the site. We’ve given people who might not otherwise have a space a home, and I love the small but passionate community we’ve built. Money’s tight, and maybe it always will be, but we’re doing the damn thing, and that ain’t nothin’. Professionally, the future feels… bright? Steady? Maybe hopeful?
But it’s been a messy fucking year personally. I’m in pain every day; that’s not new. The problem is a decade old, but it’s gotten worse. I’m going to try to have surgery to correct it next year. We’ll see what happens. I’m getting older, and that scares the shit out of me because I haven’t accomplished a lot of what I want to yet. I have a half-finished novel I need to sit down and finish. Two screenplays. Endless short stories that I think are ready for publication or close to it. I just have to buckle down. By the time this piece is published, I’ll be 36, hilariously old for games media. At a preview event earlier this year, I was playing a game and told one of the PR folks there that it reminded me of Quake. “What’s Quake?” she asked.
There was a moment, in Super Bowl XLVIII, where Seahawks strong safety Kam Chancellor hit Broncos wide receiver Demaryius Thomas (who died too young at the age of 33 four years ago) so hard that he separated Thomas’ shoulder. A famous photo, taken just after the hit, shows Chancellor celebrating. Thomas is on the ground in the background. Chancellor was known for bone-crushing hits like that. My friends and I used to joke that when he hit someone, he turned them to dust. Some days you’re the bug and some days you’re the windshield, right? She was in her early 20s, that PR rep. And when she dropped ‘What’s Quake?” on me, I felt like I’d dried up, turned to dust, and blown away. Hit by Kam Chancellor.
**
I have a confession: I’ve never felt welcome in games media. I’m not a journalist by trade; I’m a fiction writer. I have no formal journalism training of any kind. Everything I know about journalism I learned by reading or from some truly exceptional mentors. Mostly, I feel ignored or grudgingly accepted. I am not invited to parties or to contribute year-end lists at major websites or really even spoken to outside of events, save by a few people (if you’re reading this, you know who you are, and, I hope, how much I appreciate you). Often, I'm outright ignored. Mostly, I feel like folks just wish I’d go away. Part of the reason I work so hard is to try to earn a place here. I don’t know if any of this is real or just in my head. I don’t tell you any of this because I’m feeling sorry for myself or because I want pity. I’m telling you this because this piece is about this past year, and I can’t talk about that without talking about how I felt.
I worked hard this year. I wrote about 30 reviews spread across several websites, a bunch of features, and dozens of previews. I interviewed several developers and was trusted with things I still can’t talk about. I recorded a ton of podcasts, ran the game press’s premiere fighting game Discord, helped run a Madden league that’s so old that it originally operated by email, and started a website. Part of the reason I do this is the money. I like being able to live. But with no work to do besides write the piece you’re reading, I’m spending a lot of time inside my head. And I don’t always like what’s in here.
I’m aware of my flaws. I lose my cool more than I’d like. I hold grudges. I’ve talked to several people this year in ways I wish I could take back, and if that’s you, I’m sorry. Truly. I work myself ragged, so I don’t have to look at myself and sit with what I see. The work takes precedence. The work is more important. I have a job to do, and I don’t want to let anyone else down. Maybe if I do something right, it makes up for everything else. Cleans the slate. Just a little. This is what I tell myself.
I’ve never met a writer who likes themselves all that much, if they’re really honest about it. Well-adjusted people don’t get into this business. I am the result of all my damage, just like anyone else. And nothing makes for good writing quite like damage. “Writing is easy,” Hemingway once said. “All you have to do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” That means being vulnerable. It means framing a review around the two years you spent contemplating suicide. It means talking about how angry watching SNK put a rapist into a fighting game because he was boys with the Saudi crown prince made you, and how dirty it made you feel playing it when few people did. It means writing about how playing makes you feel old, and trying to come to terms with how you’ve spent a lot of your life so far. It means writing something like this, and hoping the person on the other end of the screen will save some grace for you. Sometimes, folks ask me how I write some of the stuff I’ve written. The honest-to-God truth is I don’t know how to do this any other way. There’s a reason for all this. I promise. You’ve made it this far. Trust me a little longer.
“I would like to learn, or remember, how to live,” Annie Dillard wrote in “Living Like Weasels.” I didn’t understand what she meant the first time I read it. I think I do now.
**
2025 was hard. Facism is ascendant. I went from working full-time in an industry being eaten alive by AI to another one that’s busy eating itself. But what bothers me is how little so many folks seem to care about what’s happening in the world around them. I’ve seen so many people talk about the horrors of what’s going on in Gaza and then turn around and say, “I’m buying the new Doom, though.” They keep playing World of WarCraft. They preview the next Halo. And listen, I get it. Sometimes you need money. I covered Call of Duty for IGN this year because I had bills I needed to pay. I’m not innocent, and I’m not better than anyone else. I can’t and don't blame anyone who needs the money for doing the work. Capitalism makes monsters out of all of us, and it’s better that folks are able to eat.
Aside from Call of Duty, I’ve abstained from covering or posting about Microsoft products. I don’t give them my money. Skybox doesn’t cover them. We have a list of all the stuff we'd like to write about. Everything Microsoft owns is highlighted in red. It’s made things harder for me. Cost me opportunities. Affected me in ways I probably don’t even realize. But it’s the right thing to do.
I'm trying to make those choices as much as I can. I have never and will never use AI. I don’t plan on going to EVO anymore, now that it's owned by Saudi Arabia, unless I have to for work and I desperately need the money. I've stopped shopping at Amazon and Target and started buying locally, even if it means paying more for what I want. I'm trying to give my money, and energy, and time to good causes. I'm trying to be kind. I'm failing more than I'd like to. But I think about that stuff every day. I'm trying. I don’t want the world to be worse because of me. I want to be able to say that I've done as much as I could. That I didn’t sign my name to something awful when I knew I didn't have to.
What bothers me is that a lot of people know better, could do better, and have simply chosen not to. And I’m not just talking about Microsoft and the games press or the industry itself. I’m talking about everything.
I came home for the holidays to find my father's desktop full of AI images. He was using them for a screensaver. I don’t think he understands why I'm so angry about it, even after explaining how that tech is built on theft and actively putting people out of work. How it's destroying the environment. How the data centers that power it are poisoning the folks who live close to them. How its existence risks my livelihood, not because AI can do my job – it could never write what you’re reading right now– but because a bunch of rich assholes think it could, and they don't have to pay a machine.
“I'd never use it like that,” my dad said to me. “I'd never do that to you.”
And I know he wouldn't. Not intentionally. But the fact that he knows it's wrong, that it might have that effect anyway, doesn't seem like it's enough to make him stop. He can't draw, after all. And he wants those images. Isn't it our right to always get what we want more important than everything else?
**
I’m tired of living in a world that says it values one thing and rewards another. That will tell you to support indie game and never buy them, that condemns genocide but lines up to give Microsoft good press and review their games and buy their products, that doesn’t give a shit that AI is destroying the planet if it’s used to make something people like, that will attend EVO even though it’s owned by the government that chopped Jamal Khashoggi into pieces and stuffed him into a briefcase and continues to murder LGBTQ folks and dissidents. When that same government wants to buy EA, it is greeted by a games press that thinks maybe that's a good thing.
I’m tired of content creators who rejoice when journalists lose their jobs, who harass women and queer folks and people of color for views and clout and money and fame. I'm tired of racists and shitheads running things. I'm tired of the way we treat the poor and the downtrodden and the oppressed. I am tired of people who don't care about anyone but themselves. I am tired of waking up angry every single day. I am tired of living in a world that doesn’t believe in anything but its own comfort, its own pleasure, its own endless, suffocating want.
It doesn’t have to be this way. But things won't change unless we force them to.
**
When I taught writing at a college in New York, I’d have my students write persuasively about a way of life, a belief, something they did that they felt might help other people. It was their first major essay. The assignment isn’t mine; it belonged to my friend and mentor Chris, who taught me most of what I know about teaching and died unexpectedly in his mid-50s a few years ago. I was one of the people who found his body. I’m grateful that moment isn’t how I remember him.
Chris was a deeply decent man, a remarkable teacher, and one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. I’ll never understand why he put up with me. But he did, and I would give almost everything I have to go to a bar with him one more time. My syllabus was always based on his, and we shared readings and assignment ideas, and over time, it became hard to tell where one began and the other ended. He inspired me to try to be a better person. After his death, I didn’t know if I could teach anymore. My syllabus was too close to his. Each day was like seeing his ghost. Always rounding a corner ahead of me, his voice just out of earshot. No matter how fast I ran, I couldn’t catch up to him. But I kept trying. I'm still trying.
My students used that prompt to write some excellent papers. One wrote about how skateboarding helped him build a community; another about how learning to stop and appreciate the small moments improved the way she sees the world; another wrote about music, and how it taught him to be himself, not the person people wanted him, expected him, to be; another about the power of forgiveness. There have been so many, and many of my students have gotten revised versions of those essays published. I’m very proud of them. But one of the ones that stuck with me was about recycling. The writer believed everyone should recycle and how much effort she’d spent encouraging other folks in her community (and outside of it) to do so. She’d put a lot of time into it, and had made a real change in her town.
At first, I thought it was a bit silly, even though the essay itself was good. But it’s the only essay I can recall that wasn’t about the student writing it. It wasn’t about how an experience she’d had had changed her life, and how she thought that might help other people. It was about her belief that the world could be a better place, and how she could do something, even something small, to help. I think about that essay a lot. Especially now.
I’ve spent a lot of this year afraid. Afraid that I’m not good enough, that I’m unwanted, that I missed my shot, that I’m too old, that I don’t deserve to be here, that I am not a good person who deserves to be happy, that I break everything I touch, that I’ll never do the things I desperately want to, that the next time I sit down to write, the words just won’t come, that the fascists are going to win and if they don’t then climate change will. And some days, I can barely get out of bed. It is easy to despair. When I’m not afraid, I’m angry. I’m not sure which is worse.
And then I recall Hemingway again, this time from A Moveable Feast. "The writer's job is to tell the truth,” he said once. When he was in Paris, he suffered from writer’s block, and he worried it would be the end of him. What good was a writer who couldn’t write? Who couldn’t tell the truth?
What I remember isn’t the writer’s block, his overwhelming fear that whatever gift he had had deserted him. I remember what happened next: "I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’ So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say."
I remember the end of Tennyson’s "Ulysses”:
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
In my darkest moments, locked in the prison that capitalism has built for all of us, I fear that I have forgotten these things, that my personal failings and my fear and my anger have banished them to some shadowy place where I will never find them again. Then I try to write, and write honestly, and no matter how far away those things are, they come back. Battered, maybe. A little of the shine rusted off. But there nonetheless. In a year that I've spent feeling lost, they've pulled me back from the brink.
**
I would like to learn, or remember, how to live. The only way I can is to hold onto what I believe, to remind myself that it matters even when the world wants so badly to convince me otherwise. We are who we choose to be. It’s that easy and that hard. The beautiful thing is that we get to make that choice every single day. Nothing is set in stone. Our lives are ours to shape however we want; we just have to be brave enough to try.
When I think of this year, what makes me proudest isn’t the house or the bylines or the consulting or the professional success. It’s Skybox. I helped build a place where writers could do good work. It exists, in part, because of me, because my co-founders and I had an idea, and because we worked tirelessly to make it real. Because I spent several thousand dollars of my own money to ensure people were paid fairly. Because we made a place where people wanted to be, where they felt their work was valued. Because we believed in something.
**
I’m begging you to believe in something. I know it’s easier not to; it’s certainly more lucrative. I’d make a lot more money if I were a worse person. It’s easy to sink into comfort, to convince yourself that your impact is so small that it doesn’t matter, that while your little treats might be bad, they’re worth the cost. But the truth is, we never act in a vacuum. We are never alone, no matter how much we convince ourselves we are, or how much we fear we don’t belong. When we die, and they put us in the ground, we cease to be people and become our choices. And even the small ones matter.
I don’t know what you’re going through; I can’t. I’ve told you about my damage in the hope that it will make you feel less alone. But I do know what is in front of us, and that the choices we make can move the needle, even if we don’t see it.
Don’t buy Microsoft products. Don’t go to EVO. Support your peers. Love people who are different from you. Forgive those who wrong you, if not for their sake then for your own. Donate to Palestinian relief. Clean up a beach. Volunteer with a political campaign you believe in. Register people to vote. Go to a protest. Work at a soup kitchen, an animal shelter. Buy locally instead of ordering from Amazon, or Target, or Walmart. Fight back against generative AI, especially when it’s in something you love. Try to convince other people to recycle. Write the truest sentence that you know. And keep doing it. It isn’t just one action that breaks a system; it’s a thousand. Eventually, what’s entrenched is fighting resistance so strong that it can no longer hold.
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings,” said Ursula K. Le Guin. No system is so powerful that it can’t be broken. No cause is lost as long as there are people willing to fight for it.
Nobody is coming to save the day. It’s just us. And at some point, you have to decide what you believe, and how hard you believe it. Games have trained us to think we can save the world, that we’ll know the response to our choices immediately, that other people will just tell us how they feel. That by finding the right answer, we can get whatever we want.
It isn’t true. Most of the time, we’re stumbling in the dark, doing the best we can and praying that's enough. But sometimes the right answer is clear. It may cost us, and we may never see the result of that choice. But that doesn’t mean there wasn’t one. It doesn’t mean that making it didn't matter.
2026 is going to be scary. The world is on fire. It’s easy to feel like nothing you do will change anything. But our fight is not hopeless. Every action, no matter how small, makes a difference. You are not helpless. You are not powerless. And you are not alone. If you know nothing else, know that, and let it sustain you when nothing else will.
Believe in something, even when all seems lost. Do the right thing, even if it costs you. Try.
