How do you sum up a decade of gaming?  Lists of the “10 Best” (fill in the blank)?  A long, elaborate write-up of the greatest thing you played?  Wistfully recalling how it felt to unbox your favorite piece of tech?

I suppose those are all viable.  But when I look back at the past decade, I’m mostly reminded of hot-takes and forum flame-wars, intolerable fandoms and clickbait.  None of this was completely native to the 2010s, true, but from a Nintendo fan’s perspective, you can trace a lot of the poison to one article – a laughable screed that divided a forum, pretty much ended “journalistic authority” for the parent site, and showed that everyday fans were mostly smarter than those condescending to them from on high.  It might be the worst gaming article of all time.

And hell, it didn’t even technically make it into the 2010s – it was posted December 11, 2009.  It just happened to lead us right into the ensuing decade, represented the worst excesses of what was to come, and was a perfect example of why the DIY age of gaming commentary is upon us.

I’m talking, of course, about Matt Casamassina’s “Nintendo is Lazy and You Don’t Care.”

Ah, just breathe it in.  The shaming, sneering, sniveling headline just begs you to click. Here is an authority, who knows better than you since he covered Nintendo from the N64 days onward.  And the point he ambles to in roughly 1,700 words was completely destroyed in under 150 words on the IGN forums on the very first reply to the article’s posting.  Ah, Indy83, how I’ve missed you.

You can see plenty of “you’re so right!“-responses for quite a few pages, too, of course.  Fanboy console wars were at their boil at this point.  But knee-jerk “NSMB really is lazy!” replies haven’t aged very well – certainly not now that we’re firmly in the age of  lazy up-res “remasters” and endless re-releases and ports perpetually dotting release schedules (while the innovation of F2P comes in the form of loot boxes, wrapped up in a graphical sheen of “just get it over with and make it look like Fortnite”).  The worm turns on that chorus within 10 pages, and further extends for another 60.  I won’t rehash the pushback much further than that; suffice to say it was a clarifying moment for all of us regulars who called the IGN forums home.  When an editorial chief of a site trolls its readers and self immolates in such spectacular fashion, the only place to look is at those you trust – your fellow forum partners, in this case.  A few embers of crackling trust may have flickered here and there, but from that point on, I can’t recall anyone looking at IGN-proper as a trusted source for Nintendo commentary.  No, the forum simply looked inward.

And where the employed writers kvetched and moaned like whinging children, the forum members actually got shit done.  About a year-and-a-half after “You Don’t Care,” Operation Rainfall emerged on IGN’s forums, requesting the localization of the very sort of ambitious adventure games that Nintendo supposedly didn’t make anymore.  The fan campaign worked.  And don’t let anyone tell you it didn’t matter: notice how there was never any real doubt that both Xenoblade sequels would have Western releases?  Morever, Nintendo learned a valuable lesson that its core strength, its Japanese game-development ethos and pedigree, was what people always wanted.

Casamassina, of course, wasn’t in a position to write about ambitious games like Xenoblade.  He had taken a position as an editorial manager at…the iOS App Store.  Because when we all think of boundary-pushing, graphical powerhouse, AAA-budget, ambitious game design, we think of…free downloads on the App Store.

This isn’t a hit piece on a writer’s old work, though (dunking on “You Don’t Care” is like shooting fish in a barrel with a chain gun).  It’s just proof that most of the people talking about games on forums at that point seemed to care more about the topic than the writers.  Notice how there’s a zillion gaming sites out there now?  Hell, I used to write with Menashe Kestenbaum, who left IGN to found Enthusiast Gaming, which now owns Destructoid and The Escapist.  Fans have literally taken over.  The “gaming journalists” of the past cared so little about their beat that fans have fundamentally altered the calculus.  There is now so much content from passionate fans that there isn’t a lot of room for industry authority to exist for paid journalists.  The days of reading a liveblog about an E3 presentation from your favorite site are dead and buried.  Now we all watch the presentations together and create the conventional wisdom as we go.

So where does that leave a gaming site, circa 2020?  Hell if I know.

To be honest, this whole idea might be antiquated.  Across-the-board media balkanization is the new normal, and if we can’t even agree on trustworthy hard news sources reporting about important world events at this point, it makes the concept of a videogame web site seem hopelessly old and small.

But y’know what?  I like a quaint restaurant.  I like old, broken things, like a clock that runs a bit fast, but has still ticked and tocked more history than I’ve witnessed myself.  I like a complex whisky.  And I like how videogames still transport us, fans across the board, into new worlds.  Perhaps we can all write about them with more light and less heat in the 20s.

This doesn’t necessarily mean we all turn down our snark (it wouldn’t be the internet without it).  I certainly don’t plan to.  Commentary without spice is boring, limp, forgettable.  And silly takes from The Smart Gatekeepers Who Are Paid To Write Things (™) will continue to be a source of easy amusement, and even easier ripostes.  But the era of that authority defining our discourse has long since past.  Maybe we can all be a little smarter about this whole thing.

Maybe we should at least try.