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I wrote about my Valorant obsession for Chisel
Addiction, compulsion, tomato, potato
Mikhail Klimentov
August 11, 2026
Study for Obsession by Auguste Rodin, courtesy of The Met
Hi! I’m Mikhail Klimentov. You may recognize me from my past video game coverage at The Washington Post, like my investigation into the “culture of fear” at TSM. Or maybe you’ve read my essay about sales figures and Steam chart watching: Kill the CEO in your head.
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In September, I received a pitch email from Ryan Rigney, the games media impresario who writes the fantastic Push to Talk newsletter. Rigney was launching a culture journal, Chisel. He wanted to know if I might be open to contributing. I certainly was.
Chisel’s core themes are “Obsession, Beauty, and Play” (you can read more about the magazine’s founding ethos here). Did I have any stories in mind, Rigney asked, that might even distantly connect to those themes?
I’d been batting around this idea for a while — it was crystal in my head but tough to explain, the sort of thing that I felt would only make sense when it appeared, fully formed, on the page. Here was my pitch:
One thing I've really been jonesing to write for about a year now is a wide-ranging essay — inspired by this old piece by Jay Caspian Kang on gambling — about my compulsion toward gaming, and the unusual friend group (slightly younger men who were my first clue that the r-word was coming back in a big way1 ) that I've picked up playing Valorant. I have a pretty clear picture in my head of what this might look like (though I'm having a bit of trouble condensing into a pitch). I think it will be a somewhat uncomfortable but funny read; form-wise, I'd like for it to read like fiction in places.
The journalists reading this will understand that this is a terrible pitch. Nevertheless, Ryan and the team at Chisel took a chance on it. Now, after a few months of writing and wrangling and smoking Marlboro Reds, 🔗 my essay is now live! 🔗
I hope you give it a look!
Here’s a short snippet.
I have died over 100,000 times in Valorant, but the most important death was a slow one. In my first year or two playing, I was relentlessly positive, faithful to the idea that any situation and any game was winnable. I hadn’t played a first-person shooter in at least a decade, and I extended to other players the same grace I expected in return: We were all happy climbers, slowly but predictably improving. There was a time, in other words, when I would not have dreamed of joking that I was going to kill myself over the results of a match or round or duel.
Those reservations feel quaint now. Once I’d attained what could be considered a “good” rank in Valorant, a sort of status anxiety set in. Every victory was richly deserved. Losses, however, were personally wounding – a literal but also metaphorical stripping of rank that felt wildly unjust, a conspiracy by people dumber and less agentic than me meant to drag me down to their level. If only my teammates had listened. If only they had gotten more kills. If only they had played in a way that enabled me to get more kills. If only this or that teammate hadn’t made some snide, shitty remark, tilting me off the face of the earth. This map sucks. My teammates are all morons. This meta is horrible. The developers are braindead. The other team is playing so weird. Have I really played three-thousand-some-odd hours and somewhere along the way gotten worse?
The essay is weird and maybe too personal. It’s also quite a bit different from anything I’d written before. If you’ve got feedback, I’d love to hear it. And if you like the piece, I hope you’ll share it with others who might also appreciate it.
Cheers!
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1 A few months after sending this pitch the president used the r-word to describe Tim Walz. If only I’d had the foresight to bet on it.
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