Beacons in the Dark

Media layoffs are nothing new anymore. Surprise and anger has been replaced with this kind of exhausted resignation (no pun intended), this beleaguered acceptance that “this is just the way things are.” The games media industry is certainly no stranger to cuts and closings. Fanbyte gutted, Launcher gone… every other site shedding handfuls of talented people seemingly by the day. It paints a bleak picture. Even before today, the accepted wisdom has already changed to “don’t try to get a job as a critic or a journalist in this industry, at least not right now,” because there are just very few safe, stable options.

Vice shuttering Waypoint, though, is a total unmooring gut-punch.

What does Waypoint mean to games media? I mean, just ask around. Folks all over what’s left of social media have been talking about the often profound effect Waypoint‘s mere existence has had on them, either as freelancers trying to make a name for themselves in a cutthroat industry or simply because of the content the site published. Some of the keywords people have used to describe the criticism and journalism put out by Waypoint: humane. Holistic. Comprehensive. Thoughtful. Life-changing.

I think a lot about this speech from Brassed Off, where Pete Postlethwaite’s character Danny Ormondroyd refuses to accept the award for a national brass band competition after his band, the Grimley Brass Band, wins for their rendition of the William Tell Overture. “This band behind me’ll tell you that that trophy means more to me than aught else in the whole world. But they’d be wrong,” he says. “The truth is, I thought it mattered. I thought that music mattered. But it doesn’t bollocks. Not compared to how people matter.” Waypoint understood this. It was a site that specialized in games criticism that focused on the people who made and played them. Losing it feels like losing a piece of one’s soul. It isn’t like death, per se, but a comprehensive diminishing, a removal of life’s color in a meaningful sense.

Maybe I’m being too hyperbolic here. It’s happened before; I get too emotional about these layoffs. But I can also say (and have said, at this point too often) that I wouldn’t be here, writing this, if Waypoint hadn’t existed in the first place. I started writing about video games in part because Waypoint Radio inspired me to do so. It’s why I spent a year doing work for New Normative. Waypoint was a major reference point for me in the first year of this blog’s existence. My interest in game studies stems from Waypoint and its many academic game studies contributors. I’ve made good friends specifically because of that website. So yeah, maybe I’m overstating its importance a bit. It feels extremely important to me, anyway.

Former Waypoint Editor-in-Chief Austin Walker reposted the site’s mission statement in response to the news today. I’ve spent the afternoon slowly reading through it and digesting it. In the post, Walker talks about how terrifying nights in Dragon’s Dogma are (can confirm, holy shit) and how, in order to complete some of the game’s more involved quests, he would have to plan extensively in advance; and prior to departure, he would set a titular waypoint to guide him.

Waypoints in the context of games, Walker continues, are “the first (and brightest) illustration of a player’s intention.” They are ways of orienting ourselves to our goal in inherently unfamiliar environments combined with statements of purpose: we are going to the place to do a thing, and in so doing we will have Played The Game. “Before we assault the fortress, before we start the race, before we leap from one star system to another, we set a waypoint,” he wrote. “They are the marks we leave on the map, the beacons we place in the dark that declare, yes, we will walk into the night.”

I didn’t get too terribly far through Death Stranding, but waypoints were one of the basic mechanics I loved—and grew to rely on—in my short play sessions. There are different kinds of waypoint markers in Death Stranding, including purely social ones, just little digital pips that let you know someone else had been there before, or liked a bridge you made, or warned of BTs in the area before your baby in a jar could wake up to tell you. These signs of life – also seen in games like Dark Souls and Elden Ring – made the empty world feel less barren. It helped make me as the player feel less alone.

Losing Waypoint feels scary. As others have commented, it feels like the end of a specific era of game criticism, one where thoughtful, considered writing about games and the culture around them had an institutional home, is officially over. But like the little thumbs-up or emoji strewn across the alien America of Death Stranding, I don’t think Waypoint – what it as an institution stood for, what its people represented, what its body of work entails – needs to go away entirely. We can carry its mission forward. We can set new waypoints. We can continue to walk into the night.

Waypoint‘s raison d’être is as follows:

• be a guide to games culture
• investigate how and why people play games
• make readers think, laugh, and ask new questions about games and the world around them

Games will not save us. But we cannot escape them. They are reflections of the way we interact with work, with household chores, with our friends, family and neighbors, with the world itself. For as long as video games exist, for as long as there is a digital culture to speak of, we can continue to light beacons in the night for ourselves and whoever else might come this way.