The internet's a scary place. Where does Polygon fit in?

Sometime in May, I noticed that Polygon, the video game and entertainment news website, was running a package of articles under the banner of Cool Sword Day. Polygon launched when I was a first-year in college, and I’ve been reading it ever since. It felt metropolitan and serious, while also being funny and sincere — attributes that really resonated when I was a college student with big, artsy ideas about capital-V capital-G Video Games, and an aspiring journalist to boot.

Since then, I’ve held a job or two in media and watched the internet transform. Polygon underwent major changes too, shedding marquee staff (two of the McElroy brothers, for example, were founding editors at the site) and launching new coverage areas.

As a witness to ~seismic shifts in the world of online publishing~ the idea of a theme week or day flourishing on the SEO-addled internet struck me as a bit quaint. Do people even visit homepages anymore? So I got in touch with Matt Patches, one of the site’s two executive editors and a veteran of Esquire and Thrillist, to ask a few questions about what, exactly, Polygon has been up to.¹

Patches and I talked about carving out a memorable space on the internet, and mulled over the classic zen koan: Are your articles even being read if a deranged weirdo online isn’t screaming about them? (He also revealed that Polygon will “soft relaunch” later this summer with a redesigned website, which I’m putting up here because it is, as far as I can tell, a scooplet 🙂).

The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.²

ReaderGrev: When I looked up your byline, I saw that you write pretty frequently. Editors who write — that’s not a huge novelty in this space. But an executive editor who writes, that feels a bit more strange. What does a standard day look like for you?

Patches: On the topic of writing: I can't quit. That's my problem. I still like to dabble, I still have ideas, and I want to lead by example too, right? I’ll get into this but, you know, we're constantly thinking about how much we can produce in a week — what's reasonable, how do we keep the show going on?

As far as what my day to day ends up looking like, I spend a lot of time talking to people about what they're working on, what we could be working on, what our priorities are right now, what they could be based on something newsy happening or based on some story emerging or based on a game we want to cover or that we maybe didn't think we were going to cover and now we should. It's a lot of priority setting.

I just want to pose those questions you mentioned back to you. What’s reasonable for Polygon? How do you keep the show going?

Patches: Let me think about the best way to to phrase that. Way back when Polygon launched in 2012, I think the pitch was pretty simple: Polygon can be everything for gamers, and just be kind of the best at it. There was a ton of talent. The media landscape was just funneling people toward us. There was a great start-up energy. I don't think it was fundamentally different than a lot of what was happening in games media at the time, and in a way, it’s still not. Like, there are a lot of publications that Polygon would probably get grouped in with that are just constantly pumping out stories. It's a lot of aggregated news. It's a lot of the same milestone moments being written about. And I know that we want to do something quite different, at this point. To be able to do that, I think, meant looking at the ways we were doing things since ten years ago, the traditions of games media — geek media, if you will — and how these kind of blog-ish sites have worked over the years, and to pace ourselves differently.

I think we ask everyone on our staff for regular contribution, and we talk through stories a lot. We're constantly figuring out: what story do we really need to tell this week? And maybe there's nothing. Maybe it's not highly pressurized, and maybe we need to create our own moments. We do a lot of brainstorming around what will entertain our audience.

But if the expectation was we need to hit every single story that we could possibly cover on Polygon, I don't know if we have — if anyone has — enough staff to do that, to really cover how many games are out right now, how many movies, how many television shows. So one thing that we're doing going forward is really narrowing our purview. We cover games. But, you know, when it comes to entertainment, we really want to focus on the sci-fi, fantasy, horror categories. Anime is a big one for us. But we don't have to cover every single thing. We have to cover what is intriguing to us right now, and where we can really say something.

On the subject of making your own moments: I set up this interview because I was curious about theme weeks on Polygon. [Ed. note: the most recent example of this is Spicy Takes Week, which we discuss below]. The animating question for me about theme weeks is that, in some way that I can't articulate super well, they feel a bit anachronistic — like they harken back to a different era of the internet where people regularly visit homepages, where they have a roster of favorite websites that they go to. It doesn't really feel like that internet exists anymore.

Patches: I think there's a few reasons behind that. If we're losing our public square, if the internet we've known for 10 or 20 years is slowly going away, if social is turning off, if we're [facing] the enshittification of web content and search experience and online life on giant platforms, if we're being disrupted by AI — there's just a lot of threats. So if [theme week] seems like an anachronistic notion, it’s only because we've put up with the internet that we've been given for the last 10 or 20 years. And as it's crumbling, it seems more important than ever to have brand integrity, to have a sturdy publication that can glow.

I will say, Spicy Takes Week is a helpful way to break into the conversation, and that's part of what we want to do too. We know that the audience is probably getting a lot of their news and a lot of their content from Reddit or Discord — you know, straight from the sources where they can engage immediately — and we want to create that conversation for them, throw that chum in the water and be there to spark it, but also to give them a place where that can happen. We're going to soft relaunch the site toward the end of the summer, with a great new redesign³ that is optimized for perusing and discovery and engagement, and hopefully it’ll feel more like a page that people on the internet are spending their time on right now.

I think it's worth a theme week or a special issue, or creating tentpole moments that have nothing to do with the release calendar. That's all important to creating a brand that people actually want to come to and know is created by people. We have to act like a magazine of yore, whether our audience knows what a magazine is.

What has the reaction to Spicy Takes Week been like?

Patches: Well, thankfully it's been very positive! We're in a moment now where there could not be more trepidation in writing opinion on the internet. And I don't mean that from Polygon staff; I just mean in general, I think people are wary of engaging with the gamer audience, which is volatile. And with social platforms pulling back on moderation or fumbling moderation, we're worried about harassment, we're worried about people putting themselves out there. And again, by we, I mean the whole landscape, everybody involved in talking about stuff online.

One thing we did years ago was get rid of our scores on our reviews — and this was a big deal. I think we've carried that torch for years and years now. Just like, can we please think about the stuff we're playing? Can we disagree and still be able to be interested by those disagreements?

So yeah, the idea [has been], let's put really thorough opinion out on the internet. Let's do case building. Let's not do hot take tweets where you are the main character for the day. Let's go and try to revert back to when we could let our opinions loose and make a case with them and see if other people join in, and try to build structure around these pieces that says ‘please engage in good faith,’ because we are doing that and we intend to do that on Polygon all the time.

We have a great comments section 95% of the time, and the comments on these Spicy Take Week pieces have been really encouraging: exactly what you'd want from a Reddit thread, except it's happening here on on Polygon. We’re really trying to bring that internet experience, that more good faith internet experience that I think does exist in pockets of the internet still, but maybe not on social media platforms, we’re trying to bring it all to Polygon.

We’re talking because I was lamenting that the kind of games community that would have discussed Spicy Takes Week on Twitter five years ago, or ten years ago, no longer exists. But also, it seems as though the people who are mad at Polygon, or have an ax to grind, they do not seem to be… flourishing.⁴ That may not be the right word. I found a couple of videos of people reacting very negatively to some of the Spicy Takes Week pieces…

Patches: Ooh, which ones? The “Watching a video game is basically playing it” one?

Yeah, yeah! And those videos were really not getting much traction. I think if you told a games journalist five or 10 years ago that they could put out a hot take and people on YouTube were not going to get traction being mad about it, they would have been very happy about that. It’s a weird trade-off, I suppose?

Patches: Do you think that the lack of engagement is a worrisome sign that people aren't engaging, or that they aren't engaging like they used to? If people aren't mad about it, then the stories don't seem to be reaching people in the same way?

I mean, maybe! I used to work at a media consultancy, and we had this graph that we would show clients, and it was just an exponential curve showing, here's how much content is going out online year by year. So four years ago, you could have imagined that whatever you put on the internet was competing with less stuff. But anything you put out some years in the future would compete against an unbelievably larger amount of content, which necessarily means that one essay about watching games versus playing them is going to get a more muted reaction in 2024 than it might have in 2020. And I don't know how to feel about that. On the one hand, media thrives when people see and engage with the work. But we've also obviously seen the negative side of that with Gamergate a decade ago, and now the second coming of Gamergate, so to speak.⁵

Patches: At the end of last year, Polygon exited Twitter. We decided not to fuel that ecosystem with our content. We didn't need it. It was not a reliable source of traffic by any means, or engagement. It was just people being really upset, and visibly so, on the regular.

None of our stories are going on Twitter from our account with a million people on it. They’re not being engaged with as an act of trolling because people just see a headline and people just see a tweet. We are so accustomed, over the last 15 years of being on Twitter and being on these social platforms, where it’s like direct engagement, main characters, things going viral, blowing up — like, no one is yelling about [our content] in the high speed, relentless social media feed way.

But what I find encouraging is that we can put these stories out, they do go on Reddit, they do seem to go into people's smaller internet spaces. They get picked up on Pocket. They get picked up on link aggregators. I will hoot and holler whenever I see Fark.com pick up a Polygon story! I'm here for that. Like, I want real people and blogs picking up our stories and talking about them with their communities. That's much more encouraging to me than having 100K retweets because people are upset, and now they’re going to make YouTube content out of that. I find that to be the content machine at work, the economy of content trying to turn everything into outrage and fighting the YouTube algorithm. Like, I'm glad that that stuff is not immediately propagating on YouTube because I don't think it's really legitimate engagement. And I think we're getting more legitimate engagement today than we were when we were on Twitter kind of battling that stuff.

Has that changed how you and the staff engage with work?

Patches: I think it has. We used to have a news desk, and now it's more people working for vertical teams. Structurally, we've kind of responded to what we want to be doing, which is not just regurgitating or copying every single thing that everyone else is doing in this space. I think of us as more of like a news magazine in that grand tradition, where we want to be additive, where you can come to Polygon and get perspective, where we have people whose historical knowledge goes so far back that when a bit of news comes up, we can connect the dots and say something brand new to a young audience that would never have seen that connection before. We need to do much more work than just writing up press releases the way so many legitimately huge sites do.

We are in a tough spot, where there are giant sites that are more like networks, that are kind of like the trade magazines of games, and they just pump everything out, and whether it's news or PR it's hard to tell. And those are machines; they pump that stuff straight into all the areas of conversation, Reddit, Discord, blah, blah. And then we have the kind of… you know, it's almost like sweatshops, like sweatshop labor pumping out slop. And that's really hard to compete with, too.

We had to think of ourselves in competition for attention. And in doing that, we came out the other end being like, we need Cool Sword Day. We just need to say that there's a Tuesday in May that's now Cool Sword Day. And some people are going to notice that and they're going to be like, ‘Is it Cool Sword Day?’ And that is a weird moment that I think you can only do at a magazine. You have to be declarative. You have to make things up. You have to use reporting and criticism to do extremely searing work about timely issues. You also have to use journalism to ask silly questions and amuse your readers and be memorable. And I think the internet is becoming less and less memorable.

You've talked about how Polygon has changed in the time that you've been there. I'm curious how much of that change has been willful, and how much of it has been in response to changes in the world of publishing, Google updating its algorithm, the internet devolving in one way or another.

Patches: I don't want to sound too big headed, but I think it's 100% our decision. It's willful. We're obviously aware of how Google changes and how distribution seismically shifts, but I don't think we're ever saying, write these types of stories to fill this bucket. In fact, we're getting more away from that. We're getting more away from the lessons that people have learned over the last ten years in media, the assumptions they've made about like, isn't this how we write this type of story? 

We get a lot of freelancers who've come from places that have just asked them to crunch and asked them to write SEO optimized content. We have to spend time deprogramming them to be more Polygon, to be more magazine-y and professional on some level. It's been an interesting problem to have, to try to get people to elevate their work and divorce themselves from the machine. So oddly enough, in thinking about our redesign plans and thinking about our new editorial focuses, our brainstorm initiatives, we are so rarely thinking about the strange place we are in media and being forced to do things. We're really trying to stay ahead by being a really sturdy, interesting publication.

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If you have a tip, I can be reached on Twitter at @LeaderGrev, or via email at mikhail (at) readergrev (dot) com.

1. Patches actually offered a kind of hyper-literal answer to this question early in our conversation that might be useful to readers in editorial/managerial positions who care about how websites are organized: “We have a few different, I guess I'd call them verticals at this point, at Polygon,” he told me. “Games is a core vertical. We have an entertainment section that does expanded coverage of movies and television. We love books. We have a culture vertical, and that's kind of spanning desks and looking at games and entertainment and internet culture as a valuable source of storytelling. And we have a curation desk, another cross vertical desk that is really trying to cut through the chaff and recommend both things that are new and things that are old.”

2. For transparency’s sake, this means I’ve cleaned up the “ums,” “likes” and “ahs,” whittled down my questions to let you get to the answers faster, and cut certain parts of the answers (or entire exchanges) here and there that are redundant or irrelevant or which make sense over audio but not over text. Some of the questions and answers have also been reordered slightly to make more sense in sequence.

3. Not sure if anyone would even think this, but I want to clarify that the image at the top of this article is not a preview of the redesign. It’s just me mucking around in Photoshop.

4. I’m speaking pretty specifically about Polygon here, because it’s obvious that a lot of bad faith reactionary content absolutely is flourishing. I’ve written about some of that here.

5. This exchange makes me a bit nervous to publish because I was speaking extemporaneously and reading it back, I realize the way I describe this dynamic might come off as blithe, but in the spirit of building a structure that says ‘please engage in good faith’ I’m going to leave it in.