The Ben Kuchera Blues
The veteran video game journalist goes on an epic, incoherent rant against his former employer, Polygon, then deletes all his tweets.
Video game journalist Ben Kuchera has been writing about the video game industry for a very long time. He was already an established voice in the field when I was just starting out. He’s written for the Penny Arcade Report, Ars Technica, and most recently, Polygon.
Kuchera’s last article at Polygon was about Alien: Isolation back in April of 2021 as far as I can tell. But it appears his editorial role at the publication came to an end further back, in August of 2020 when he was replaced with Maddy Meyers. (Or at least his role fielding freelance pitches and editing those pieces).
At the time, a number of game journalists and freelancers came out of the woodwork to state publicly that they previously had bad experiences working with Kuchera as an editor (or had heard from others that he was difficult to work with) which may explain why this personnel change was made.
I mention all of this to give context to yesterday’s Twitter drama, when Kuchera launched a series of accusation-laden tweets against Polygon’s Editor-in-Chief, Chris Plante, as well as Maddy Meyers and the publication as a whole. The tirade seemed totally out of the blue, quite extreme (you might even say “unhinged”) and often contradictory. Then again, since Kuchera has had me blocked on Twitter for nearly a decade, I can’t say I pay much attention to his usual behavior on the social media site.
A warning before we go further: Some of this is disturbing.
What apparently began as a discussion of pay and unionization video game media, quickly devolved into . . . something else entirely.
Basically, from what I could gather from the now-deleted tweets, Kuchera’s children were sexually abused (he does not say that Polygon was responsible for the actual abuse) and this led to his termination. Kuchera alleges that when he took time off work to deal with this terrible situation, he was fired. He says he has court documents to prove all of this and that he is planning to sue Polygon. Vox Media apparently “tried to suppress the sexual abuse” of Kuchera’s children, though he does not explain how or why. He seems very angry and tired and it’s a little difficult to follow.
Also, and I’m just trying to parse all of this so bear with me, apparently Vox Media is anti-vaxx because they wouldn’t give Kuchera time off to get vaccinated or get his kids vaccinated. He goes right from talk of sexual abuse to tweeting, “So it’s rough when my co-workers tell me they’re going to get rid of me for getting vaccinated” which is an odd segue and even weirder claim considering we’re dealing with a very liberal publication that is outwardly pro-vaccine at the very least.
He then jumps into a discussion about how Plante rewrites reviews and there’s nothing anyone can do about it, which is curious given this is pretty much what freelancers were saying about Kuchera in 2020.
In another tweet, which I find a little ironic given my experiences with Kuchera in the past, he writes: “I'm getting so many messages about corruption in games media, and these folks are right. @MIDImyers hides reality because it makes them money, and Chris Plante has told me they won't help. Money is what matters to them, not humans.”
Another: “Was I pressured to change review scores? Yep. Was I told my score didn't match my own words? Yep. Was I told to change my scores to make Chris Plante happy? Yep. I'm done pretending otherwise.”
(You can see an archive of all these tweets here).
So yeah. It’s . . . a lot. Obviously anything that has happened to Kuchera’s children is tragic and awful and I am truly sorry for what his family is going through. That his employers were allegedly shitty about this is also terrible.
Say It To My Face Ben
But my empathy well runs only so deep for Kuchera himself (or for Polygon, for that matter, or game journalism writ large). Here I am freely admitting that I can’t possibly write objectively about this subject. Old grudges make bias impossible to avoid. Don’t think of this, then, as me reporting the news. I am simply writing about what happened through my own biased point of view, bad blood and all.
Back in 2013, when I was fresh on the scene and had spent some time covering the Retake Mass Effect movement, I guess I had made a few enemies among my peers. I called game journalists out for dismissing gamer concerns over the Mass Effect 3 ending and argued that consumers—of games or whatever—had a right to express themselves, to be angry, to band together and demand a better product. (I was obviously vocal about how not to do this as well, encouraging gamers to be civil rather than engage in harassment and so forth).
Of the journalists I called out, only Colin Moriarty ended up really being cool about it and we remain friendly to this day, both having joined the other on our podcasts and gotten one another’s backs on Twitter. Moriarty is also one of the few game journalists I can think of that has really turned his career into a powerhouse (in part because he is talented and hard-working and in part because he is one of the lone conservative voices in games media and there’s a market for that).
In any case, for whatever reason, pretty quickly I became a persona non grata in games media. This would get worse the following year during #GamerGate when I had the audacity to suggest that maybe it was just an outgrowth of the Retake Mass Effect movement and had its roots in consumer-rights concerns and rising anger and alienation (at least at first) and that writing “Gamers Are Dead” articles was only making matters worse.
But in any case, in 2013 my then three-year-old son came down with pneumonia and had to be hospitalized. Around the same time, I wrote an article about a video game called Nightmare Busters that had never been released that was finally coming out—but only on Super Nintendo cartridges. I thought it was kind of a cool idea to take an old game like that and release it for old systems, but I was surprised that it would cost $60. I noted that this game had been available for many, many years via emulators on PC and I linked to one such emulator. In fact, until now it was the only way to play Nightmare Busters. (And since most people don’t have a Super Nintendo, it would remain the only way to play the game).
Oh the horrors.
Little did I know, this was tantamount to encouraging theft. Linking to an emulator for a game that had never been released from many years ago was basically like saying “Pirate all video games!” or something. I was pretty green, it must be noted, and didn’t realize that linking to emulators was verboten in the first place, but the reaction to this post was insane by any metric. I wasn’t linking to a new release or something you could buy and saying “Here is where you can illegally play this game” I was linking to a game that for all intents and purposes didn’t exist anywhere else.
And I was doing it just to illustrate my point, which was pretty obvious to anyone with half a brain.
But if you like having enemies, and you want to hurt those enemies, you’ll leap at any chance. A shocking amount of my “colleagues” did just his, despite not knowing me, having never met me, and despite not asking me about it first. You know, asking me if I meant to promote theft or if it was just an honest mistake.
I quickly updated my post and took the link. I made it very clear that I was not advocating piracy. Later, despite at first reacting harshly to me, the company releasing Nightmare Busters—Super Fight Team—agreed to an interview, which I published soon after.
I mention all of this because Ben Kuchera was one of the chief journos going after me at the time, which I took rather badly since I’d read and enjoyed his work previously. Honestly, I was sitting in the hospital with my young child experiencing my first real dogpiling on Twitter, and it was both new and horrible at the time (I’m a seasoned veteran of being dogpiled on Twitter now, but back then it was kind of shocking).
So Kuchera went after me and I replied with what is probably still my most infamous tweet:
Because look, it’s easy to talk shit on Twitter. It’s easy to say horrible things about people you don’t know. It’s easy to join a group of bullies and go after someone you despise. But trust me, you’re going to have a much harder time saying it to my face. I’m a very peaceful guy, but I’m also really big. I’m a damn Viking, after all. And I believe that if you’re going to talk mad shit on Twitter, you ought to be able to hold your own in person, where things could get ugly in a much more up-close-and-personal kind of way.
Let’s face it, the kind of chicken-shit assholes who spend most of their time ganging up on people on social media or trying to attack or cancel people online over dumb crap are not the kind of people you’d be afraid of in real life. They’re just mean-spirited cowards.
So, years later, when I think back to how when my kid was really sick and I was really stressed out about him being okay and I was just minding my own business, Kuchera and his cronies attacked me and tried to get me fired over just linking to an emulator of an unreleased game, well it rubs me a little wrong. I mean, I think it’s funny in a way, too, but what absolute hypocrites.
Then there were the cherries on top. Kuchera literally advocated for piracy on numerous occasions after this, including linking to a fan-edit of The Hobbit and also to the (absolutely marvelous) fan-edit of the original Star Wars trilogy that presents those movies in HD without Lucas’s meddling BS. I highly recommend you check these out, by the way, but then I’m not one to try to get someone fired for this kind of stuff. Read about Harmy’s Despecialized Star Wars Trilogy here.
What’s my point with all of this? Maybe it’s just interesting to me how these types seem to always end up eating their own. I do feel terrible for Kuchera’s children and, if I’m being honest, I feel bad for whatever mental health issues he’s experiencing right now, too, and hope he gets the help he needs. I can empathize—truly, deeply empathize—with that struggle. My family has also been through a lot over the past couple years, though I have not spoken about it publicly. The pandemic and its myriad ripple effects has been extremely tough on a lot of people. A little compassion goes a long ways.
For his part, Kuchera deleted all the tweets and said he’d had a sustained panic attack, which doesn’t sound fun at all. He also says he’s taking a Twitter break which seems like a good call.
Anyways, while I may still have lingering bitterness and resentment toward Kuchera and all those who dogpiled me back then (and over the years) and who put me on a blacklist for having opinions they didn’t like, or who attacked Totalbiscuit on his deathbed, or all the other crappy shit this clique engages in (that I’ve often covered here on diabolical!) I still wish no ill on any of them, especially when it comes to their kids and families. I won’t even say “Do better.”
In the end, we can only really change ourselves. And that’s hard enough in the best of times.
As always, my droogies, be excellent to each other. And party on.
Reminder that Ben Kuchera was at the forefront of trying to sabotage the incredibly talented indie developer Tim Soret, when Soret was showcasing his beautiful game at E3. All for the clique.
I have no idea what's going on in regards to Kuchera's kids and what Vox Media did.
Damn. Ben really did you dirty and Karma paid him back in SPADES. Only ones I feel bad about are his kids. They don't deserve that shit.