LaterKid

Hi Austin, I enjoyed your work on the beastcast and am happy to see your rise to waypoint. Personally, one thing that I admired about you was your academic background. I believe I was introduced to your work as I myself was finishing up my graduate degree. You similarly, were working on your doctorate. You lamented the struggles of finding work in your field (and of the shrinking availability of jobs therein) which mirrored my own experiences and I imagine, many of the experiences of recent graduates. I can’t speak for your grad school experience but many of my classes consisted of roundtable discussions of the week’s academic reading, critiquing and dissecting the works. I went straight from undergrad to graduate whereas many of my peers were adults with jobs and families of their own. A few were foreigners for whom English was their second language. Some, current and former military, both women and men of varying races. They had diverse backgrounds, no two were quite alike. As you would imagine, the perspectives and experiences of these individuals differed greatly which fostered lively but respectful debates.

This gets into the heart of my question and critique. Having listened to you speak a great deal on the beastcast and on your own twitter, it seems obvious that you greatly value diversity and interesting new takes on video game discussion. I’ve seen you tell prospective writers for your site to investigate whether their take has been done to death or not. However, the viewpoints of you, Danielle and Patrick never seem to diverge from each other nor really my expectations of what they will be. Often on the Beastcast on more contentious topics, Vinny would act as the devil’s advocate and even you would sometimes try to present the opposing viewpoint in the best possible light. Since it wasn’t your viewpoint, sometimes you fell short in presenting the position but you made an active effort to recognize that perspectives outside of your own existed.

1)How do you reconcile your desire to foster new discussions and interesting unique viewpoints with the criticism that your staff’s beliefs diverge very little?

2)Your site right now lacks a comment section, when it was Vice Gaming, it had one. At times the comments could be quite negative. Is the lack of comments a response to that? Do you believe that removing the comment section presents the reader with a one-sided viewpoint without risking the author’s perspective being challenged?

Let me be clear this isn’t a call for you to stop writing about the topics that are important to you or your staff. Instead, my appraisal of you is that you’re the type of individual who has given a lot of thought to this dilemma and I’m curious what your thoughts are. Thank you for your time and I hope you have continued success for your site.

Thanks Austin, I appreciate your response. I wish you all the best in helming the site. I can't imagine it could be in better hands.