Exit Interview: Chris Plante

Welcome to the fifth edition of Exit Interview — a series in which I talk to people in the video game and esports industries who are experiencing some kind of major career change.

On May 1, when Vox Media announced that it had sold the video game and nerd culture website Polygon to Valnet, Chris Plante suddenly found himself out of work. Plante, who co-founded the site in 2012 and later became its editor in chief, told me he hasn’t paused to process the change.

“I'm sure in like two or three years, I'll just have a total meltdown,” he said.

Instead, Plante sprinted for two months to build Post Games, a weekly scripted podcast that has tackled heady questions such as: “Are video games okay?” and (a personal favorite of mine) “What’s the deal with games and artificial intelligence?”

I, in turn, wanted to ask him some questions about his nearly-two decade career in games journalism. Though Plante politely declined to discuss the sale of Polygon to Valnet¹ , we still managed a wide-ranging conversation touching on popular misconceptions around the business of running a publication, The New York Times’ coverage of artificial intelligence, and Parker Posey’s dog.

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

ReaderGrev: Can you give readers the elevator version of your games journalism career so far?

Chris Plante: Jeez, um, elevator version! How do I even start this? [Laughs] I'll try to make this as short as possible.

In college I freelanced at a place called Game Set Watch that is now defunct, which is a theme about everywhere I wrote. I then ended up getting a job in 2008 after graduating into the recession at a place called UGO, largely because I just needed a job. I ended up getting laid off from UGO like a year and a half or so later — which, again, part of the story — and dove into freelance. I was freelancing for all of the names that are no longer around, places that still technically owe me money, like GamePro. Best Buy had a magazine, I think it was called @GAMER. I also freelanced for a place called The Daily, which is not the New York Times podcast, it is the iPad-only News Corp daily paper. That was a great opportunity in that it paid really well — it paid like a good newspaper — and it gave me reps where I was writing probably 3,000 to 5,000 words a week while also getting pretty decent pay. It allowed me to put together some really strong samples and really cut my teeth on capital-J journalism. And those samples got me the opportunities to get a full-time job again. At the time I was talking with Kotaku, I was talking with The Onion and The A.V. Club. And I was also talking with Vox Media about the thing that would become Polygon. And I ended up deciding on that one.

I think I read in an old interview of yours that you also worked very briefly on a TV show that was canceled. I'm curious if you remember what that show was.

Plante: Oh, absolutely. The Return of Jezebel James — I think that's the name of the show. It was an Amy Sherman-Palladino show. I started out as an intern on it, and then, as you do, because they needed more hands, became a [production assistant]. I cleaned up Parker Posey's dog’s poo for days on end. That was a lot of my job. I also helped build a ping-pong table for her and Lauren Ambrose. It was great.

That was a multi-camera sitcom, so we shot in front of a live studio audience in Astoria, Queens. The job many nights, when there was a shoot, was helping to get people to their seats and basically making sure people can't get up to leave during it. You’re telling people they can't go piss and handing out pizza when you’re going so late that you need to actually start feeding these people.

I don't want to knock this show — that is already down and has been down for over a decade — but could you tell while watching the filming that it was not going to make it?

Plante: No, not at all. There wasn't any reason to think that until the vibes started to shift around the office. I mean, the creator, Amy Sherman-Palladino, I think her previous show was Gilmore Girls. So I thought: Hey, maybe this is a path. Maybe I'm going to be on here, and I'll be an intern, and then I'll be a PA, and I’ll be a writer's PA, and I'll be a writers assistant — and someday I'll be writing TV! A very just-out-of-college way of looking at things.

I want to move now to Polygon. Can you walk me through what the role of editor in chief entailed on a day-to-day basis?

Plante: It's hard to even talk about the day to day because it is so different and crowded every day. In short, it's a lot of meetings and a lot of representing the site on behalf of its countless needs. So internally, that could be: Hey, I am meeting with people who are overseeing our entertainment programming or our guides programming or our games culture programming and helping them develop whatever their editorial agenda is. But then you move up a layer and that is: I'm meeting with our brand licensing people to talk through some arcade cabinet that they would like to have the Polygon logo on as a partnership, and if we could sell that in Target or whatever. There was never that, but that’s an example of things that came across my desk pretty regularly. There would be meetings with book publishers. We published a variety of books during my time there and there were always conversations about doing more. It could be meeting with our sales team and teaching them what a video game is and how it works and how to sell it to people. Meeting with the heads of our analytics and data and research departments to put together a survey on anime, and then to form a partnership with Crunchyroll.

It could be so many different things because at that scale of a business, you're not just like: Hey, we publish and then we do Google Ads and we make money. I think there's a lot of assumptions on the internet about how these businesses operate. They're like: Oh, well, guides. Guides is the entire business. You make a lot of traffic and that pays all your bills. That's certainly a piece of it, but there are so many components of how a business works.

Then there’s the entire editorial side, which is, you know, actually helping with stories.³ When a really important or serious story comes up, I'm the person who's gonna have to see it to make sure that we are doing it justice, to make sure that it's gonna go through legal⁴ in a healthy way, to make that we're developing it in a way that doesn't waste the writer's time. It's kind of just a constant running from one thing to the next.

You talked a little about the misconceptions around Polygon's business. I want to offer you an opportunity to correct the record. When you were there, how did Polygon actually run?

Plante: Because it has changed and also because I don't want to go too in the weeds of Vox Media's stuff, I will say this is how all of these sites operate — Polygon, IGN, GameSpot. They're all quite similar and all commonly misunderstood. Which is to say that they are businesses with multiple revenue pathways.

I think there is a tendency for the least generous readings on the internet to say: Oh, a games publication is funded by just direct traffic and whatever ads Google serves. Or to say: It's payola and a games publication is paid by Microsoft and they get an Xbox thing and now they're all Xbots, right? And the reality is there's many [ways the business makes money] and they're constantly changing. Businesses have to evolve and this isn't exclusive to Polygon, it's not exclusive to the media, it's just the nature of how business works.

So again, if you look at a place like IGN as an example — as I clearly and not so subtly shift focus — their business has been, yes, traffic, but it has also been direct sales, it has been sponsorships, it has been events, they have acquired game distribution platforms, they have acquired countless sites over the years to create an ad network effect. There are so many different ways that they are making money at any given time, because one: Any one of them could fall apart at any moment. That's just being safe and practical and realistic. And two: As things get bigger and bigger, you have to find ways to pay those people, right? You want to make sure that if you’re IGN and your game distribution business goes under, there's still going to be another business that's going to help you meet payroll. These things have so many appendages, and to discount all of them in favor of one, I think that's a mistake.

Hiya! I’d like to take a moment here to shout out an interview series I think you might enjoy from Pete Volk, Polygon’s former senior curation editor. Volk has been running an exit interview series focused solely on former Polygon staff, which I would encourage you to check out. I also loved their interview with Jason Mantzoukas regarding his stint on Taskmaster, a British comedy series I adore.

In my head — and maybe this is wrong, so please correct me — there are three big eras of Polygon. In the years after the site launched, Polygon is a major news site trying to compete in some ways with the IGNs of the world. The second era is more personality-driven: A lot of entertainment products coming out of Polygon, be that McElroy stuff or kind of wonky video series — it’s not the only thing Polygon is doing in that moment, but a big part of its presence online is readers connecting with the folks who staff the site. And then the third era to me is the expansion into broader entertainment: Covering comic books, movies, TV, board games, etc. I'm curious, first of all, whether that taxonomy scans for you, but also: How intentional was all of that? Was that planned by the folks leading Polygon or did the site just change organically over time?

Plante: All of the above. I think that's a fair reading of the epochs, but the one tweak I would make is that all of them are happening at the same time. Those are just the things that are dominant at that time. So while we were in the beginning serious journalism phase, we were still making silly-ass videos. In fact, I think we launched with a weird super-cut video that did like a million views or something, which at the time felt impossible. And then we’ve obviously kept doing big, meaty, important journalism through all of that. It just was not our main focus, but we still had Matt Leone [and] Nicole Carpenter. That stuff was still happening.

But yes, you're right, there definitely are these different periods. For each of them, I think it is responding to the moment. When we launched, the goal was to make something that we weren't seeing elsewhere. It was like a video game publication that you could read at work and not just not be ashamed, but that would get past your work's blocked list. I think it's hard for people to remember just how trashy many game websites were at the time. I'm not throwing shade at IGN or the big ones, there was a lot of junk on the internet.

The second era — that's adapting to what you have, right? You see that some things get more attention than others, and you look around and you say: What do we have? Who is already on our staff and what can we do with them? And I would say that Chris Grant, the co-founder and original editor in chief, was smart in that he saw that he had the McElroy brothers — who would go on to become these mega-successful podcasters — and said: Hey, everybody here should just do what they're best at. So that meant the McElroys doing what they were doing on YouTube, and eventually people like Brian David Gilbert doing the same, and our full video team later on. That would also mean, at the time, different people who are on the editorial side doing whatever they were best at. I think maybe the editorial part of that is less visible just because the McElroy star was in complete ascension at the time but I think it was a site-wide thing. The way that we're going to get through this is by all of us doing whatever we do best, even if it is, at times, maybe a little editorially inconsistent.

And then the last period is really just recognizing what our audience was telling us in terms of the expansion into things like comics and anime. What we saw around that time was that readership was just increasing a lot whenever we did those stories and that we were bringing in a new type of reader who then would stick around for games. At the same time, games readership was, I would say, stable at best. It felt like a good way to diversify what we do, to create a business that was going to be able to get us through some tricky times, that was going to get the readers what they were clearly telling us they wanted, and that felt like a natural progression for the publication.

When I got laid off from Launcher, I think I just commuted into work, got canned, went home and played video games for the rest of the day. To the extent that you can tell me, what did your day look like after splitting with Polygon?

Plante: I'll be honest, I don't remember much about that week. This isn't me being cagey or anything. You know what I did? I think on my final day I went to Disneyland. I think that evening — I think that was the same day — there was like a Star Wars night. My buddy Andrew who still works at Vox Media and I had plans to go and I remember it just being a very nice night. I was really glad to have something to do, and really glad to be with somebody who really cared about me and was happy to just load me up with extremely unhealthy Star Wars themed cakes and hot dogs.

I really am bad at processing things — for a long period of time. I've had family members pass away and it will be years before I really start to process it. Probably part of why I launched a new thing immediately and then sprinted and crunched for two months to make it work was that that was an easy way for me to not have to think too much about it. This is not a statement on anybody else's feelings. I think what everybody else who is not with Polygon anymore is doing is very healthy. I think processing is a good idea! But it's just not natural for me, and it's not how I tend to go about things. But I'm sure in like two or three years, I'll just have a total meltdown.

I hope you don't! I hope maybe you have a moment of serenity instead of a meltdown.

Plante: I'll just add, too, I think the other thing there is like — not to undercut all the people who are out of jobs, because that is terrible, that's just so unbelievably hard, and I know everybody is going through it — I also know that there are still people who are creating this thing every day and it's still this publication that I love and there are a lot of people that I love who work there. So I think part of my not processing it is that I want that part to play out. I want everyone else to go get jobs, I want that to play out, and I want the people who are still at Polygon to have a chance to figure out what they're doing.

Can you tell me a little bit about your ambitions for Post Games? What kinds of stories are you trying to tell, and how does that differ from the work you were doing at Polygon?

Plante: My ambitions are small. Like, if you're able to do this when you publish, underline it, like, three times — make it italicized, bold, maybe a block quote. I cannot take off my asshole editor hat, I realize, as I'm telling you how to do your job.

It really is, at least compared to what I was doing. Polygon was a large, large publication and its ambitions were large. And the way that you kept a publication like that alive was by a lot of people seeing it. And at least right now, I do not have that in me. It was a blast, but I'm finding as I'm away from it that I have a lot of stories that I maybe wasn't going to tell because they're just meant for a different audience.

The other thing is just that I'm getting old. I did an interview with MinnMax and was asked to send a photo of myself for the YouTube thing and I took it in my backyard and I looked at myself and I was like, Jesus Christ. I looked like the crypt keeper. And yeah, running a youth publication, you know that you have a shelf life. The thing that I'm doing now, its inspirations are not subtle. It's NPR. It is the BBC’s weekly audio magazines. The age demo for that is significantly older than what Polygon was.

Some of the Post Games episodes you’ve done feel like they’re answering naive questions about games that, if you're steeped in the scene, you don't even think to answer. Why couldn’t these stories have been Polygon stories?

Plante: I think the reality is they were Polygon stories, just with slightly different packaging. The difference is just the slightest tweak in framing, and how much I assume of the listener on Post Games. When we get into lewd games on Post Games, I'm probably spending a little more time explaining how Steam works, how its history of monetization and NSFW games works — assuming that the listener probably knows next to nothing about it. At Polygon, there was a pretty safe assumption that they knew the foundation of the story before they started reading it.

Can I ask a bit about how you arrived at that view of the Post Games audience? My assumption was that many of the people who come through the door at Post Games are there because they are familiar with Chris Plante, former editor in chief of Polygon.

Plante: I would say that that's probably wrong. [Laughs] I think that is a very small portion of it. I think most of the people who are coming into Post Games are Besties podcast listeners. That audience is older, they have often been with us for a long time and even if they haven't, they are often either new to games or have a kind of, I don't know, average relationship with them. They are not fanatical. Maybe they listen to our show because that is how they experience games; they don't play many of them but they really like the idea of games.

When I set out to make Post Games, on a pretty reasonable business level, I thought: Who are my early adopters? Who are the people that are going to be my core audience? And I assumed it would be people who are already showing that they're willing to subscribe to The Besties on Patreon. So I really tried to keep that group front of mind when designing the show.

You mentioned earlier that producing Post Games has been a sprint. Can you tell me a little bit about the logistics of that sprint? What does it take to spin up a podcast like this — that to me feels pretty meticulously produced?

Plante: I'm glad to hear that it comes across that way, because behind the scenes, it is me just completely exhausted. That Peanuts character that's just surrounded by a cloud of dust — I feel like that is me.

There's so much you have to do, whether that is small things like making sure my business has its bank account set up right and that the taxes are going to be okay and I'm not gonna be surprised at the end of the year. Learning how to edit. I had never edited a podcast before doing this. I'd never edited audio in any form. There are just so many little things that need to be done. Finding a podcast hosting provider and getting all of that kind of busy work out of the way while also deciding what the structure of the show is and getting it booked and produced. It's just so much stuff.

The first month of ramping up Post Games, it feels sort of like after I had my son, where like, you just don't remember that period. It is forever lost. You have vaguely positive memories of it, when in reality you know that it was probably extremely difficult and tiring and exhausting.

In one episode of Post Games, you kind of disparage your own voice a little bit. I think it's done as a joke. But I'm curious: How do you feel about your voice?

Plante: Horrible! I am very self-conscious of my voice. I was born with a cleft lip and a cleft palate so that meant a lot of speech therapy as a kid. I have, I think, a slight lisp. For most of my life I had a hole in my palate that meant my mouth and my nasal cavity were… there was no hard palate there. So it was especially nasally. I had a very, very, very severe underbite until my jaw was broken. So I was just very aware of how I sounded.

At the same time, I did theater all through high school. I performed Richard III as Richard III. So I'm not unfamiliar with being on stage or talking in front of people. You work with the instrument that you're given. So I can both think the instrument I play sounds really funny and also be perfectly okay with what I have.

I wanted to ask about two episodes you put out about AI. There's a lot of hostility toward AI in the game space, and it doesn't seem like you feel that same level of hostility. There's a little bit of hedging in those episodes, like you’re working out the correct way to talk about AI. So I'm curious what your opinion on the tech is.

Plante: I think my thoughts change on a day to day basis, or an hour to hour basis. I am deeply skeptical and often afraid of it — and more importantly, the people who create it and fund it and power it and the people in our government who choose not to regulate it. But I also just recognize how technology works and how people work, and that just because you don't like something, it won't cease to exist. And very clearly a lot of people do like using this stuff. I think that's undeniable when you see the numbers and when you actually talk to people in the world. And I want to know why — in the same way that I want to know why and how people in our country vote for Donald Trump. Is that the only part of the story I want to know? No, not at all. But I think it's neglectful to not understand how a thing works.

I think especially if you're somebody who is really against AI, being able to explain what it's doing and where it's failing and being able to show people where their actions with AI are not helping them is really important. If I were to go to my parents and they were using AI — they don't; they don t give a shit about AI; this is a fictional scenario — I don’t think it would be helpful for me to tell them: You shouldn’t use it because it’s evil.

I'm curious if you had any thoughts at all before those episodes came out about what the reaction to them might be like — which I ask because Casey Newton was on episode zero of Post Games, and very close to the launch of those episodes, Newton and Kevin Roose of The New York Times published a conversation about AI that was received very poorly by a lot of people in the games space, people who I would consider to be your peers, journalistically. Did you have any thoughts while producing those episodes about how your listeners might react to them?

Plante: I did, in the sense that just talking about AI makes people depressed, and I got that feedback from some people. I assumed I would lose some listeners, but I also believed that it was a story worth telling and that I thought most people would understand that and would go on that trip with me — and that ended up being the case. I also have very different opinions than Casey and Kevin, and I think that’s pretty clear.

I hope that we are at a point where it's useful for people to see the conversation that they had, because that story is valuable. It is reflective of a conversation that is happening in Silicon Valley, that is happening amongst the people who are deciding how these tools operate. And I would rather see it than not see it. I think there's a tricky part with The New York Times where everything can feel like the opinion board. Retweets are not endorsements in the same way that everything that they cover is not what the publication itself believes — but that's hard, because it's so powerful. And this is, I think, the downside of the sheer scale of The New York Times. It makes it so that whenever it says anything, it needs to be everything to everyone. Because if it's not, you worry: Oh, what if this is the one thing that somebody from the outside who doesn't care much about AI sees about AI, and now their opinion is shaped by this? And that's a pretty reasonable fear to have. But I think that has a lot more to do with the ecosystem than it does with, like, should any one story exist?

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1  I’ve registered my thoughts about that sale here. Spoiler alert: I think it sucks! That said, one thing I haven’t articulated anywhere else is that I feel quite badly for the folks who have remained at the site and tried to chart a sensible course forward. There are people I know and care about (not at Polygon, or even in games journalism) who have at times been made miserable by mismanagement, but who have chosen to white knuckle it and keep trying to do good work. There are all sorts of practical reasons someone might opt to do this. I have also seen people in those positions taking additional psychic damage from ostensible allies shit-talking too cavalierly. Not to literally do the meme, but: The Valnet freaks will never see your posts. But the folks still at Polygon whose work you liked four months ago may, in fact, see your posts about how the site is total shit now and everyone who works there must be a sickly little gremlin. (That said, I’m not convinced that the right course of action is for other talented workers to happily enlist into that compromised situation, nor do I think we should dismiss bad things happening at the outlet because ostensibly “good” workers are being made to do it. But that’s a little outside the scope of this footnote.)

2  Editing an interview always feels a little weird, but for transparency’s sake, my changes are largely focused on cleaning up “ums,” “likes” and “ahs,” whittling down questions to let you get to the answers faster, and cutting certain parts of answers (or entire exchanges) that are redundant or irrelevant or which make sense over audio but not over text. My goal is never to change the meaning of what’s been said to me.

3  I cut this for flow but I’m restoring it here: I asked Plante about the balance between editorial and business, and he told me that it was close to 50:50, which he viewed as a good thing. “That was really intentional, honestly, because we'd become a pretty grown-up publication,” he said. “By that I mean we actually had a senior editorial layer, which is really uncommon in the games space. … It just takes a long time for a publication to mature in a way that you can have that. … Once I knew that that was covered, that freed me up to start thinking of ways to make a financially healthy publication.”

4  I asked Plante later about what a legal team does for a publication. “It's not an unusual thing for a media publication to get sued,” he said. “You want to make sure that [sources who are putting themselves at potential risk when agreeing to work with you] are as protected as humanly possible. That's what you have a legal team for. There's a lot of discussion right now about the value of independent journalism — and independent journalism is fantastic — but it does overlook some of the things that a traditional newsroom has and needs to allow for the boldness of top tier reporting to be possible. For example, Jason Schreier is doing amazing work at Bloomberg. Could Jason Schreier leave Bloomberg and then go create a Substack and be able to do that without like that legal apparatus to protect him? I mean, I would let him give that answer, but I can say if I were him I would not want to do that because people will come after you.”