Polygon Exit Interview: Cass Marshall, Games Writer

Chatting with one of the funniest people I know (and the author of my favorite Polygon article ever written) about their time at the site and what's next

portrait of Cass Marshall by quibbs

Welcome to Polygon Exit Interviews, a series of chats with my excellent former Polygon employees who were laid off (along with me) when Valnet purchased the website from Vox Media May 1. We’re talking about how these talented people got to Polygon, what they did in their time there, and what they hope is next. I’ll publish most of these in the next few weeks, which will likely result in a higher-than-usual cadence for this newsletter this month.

First up: Cass Marshall, one of the funniest people I know and the author of my favorite Polygon article ever written. Cass and I go way back, having met on the esports circuit before we started working together, and I’m happy to share that they are just as funny in real life as they are in writing. At Polygon, Cass specialized in telling human stories from online games, exploring online communities in World of Warcraft, the Fallout franchise, Red Dead Online, and much more to find the heart of why people spend so much time in these virtual worlds.

Tell me about your pre-Polygon background.

I started going to school for professional writing. I looked at technical writing, and I eventually got a job in digital media marketing. And so I dropped out, because I had gone to school to get a job, and I had a job now. I worked in SEO, digital marketing, copywriting, very boring stuff, until I could parlay my interest in esports into freelance gigs. I freelanced for Red Bull esports, PC Gamer, and a couple of other outlets, and I was lucky enough that when esports was at its peak, Vox Media decided to invest in esports verticals. I headed up Heroes Never Die, which was an Overwatch site. And while that didn't work out, I was able to transfer to Polygon, as I had that background in various other popular games, and it was a pretty seamless transition.

When did you first join Polygon, and what do you remember about joining?

I joined Heroes Never Die in 2017, I want to say. And then I believe I switched to Polygon.com around 2018 because Overwatch, unfortunately, did not have as much juice as everybody hoped.

I definitely felt like I was in over my head. I was very intimidated. I had, and still have, a case of imposter syndrome regarding it. Because, even though I had worked in the industry very long, I had grown up reading all these sites and so Maddy Myers, Ben Kuchera, you know, basically everyone at these sites, I had read and enjoyed their work and admired them as professionals. Being there and seeing my work next to theirs was massive for me, and it took a few months just for that to wear off, just the feeling that like, Oh my God, I am incredibly lucky just to be here and to have these people say, ‘Yes, your work is interesting and has value to our readers.’

Can you run me through your history at Polygon – what roles you had, and what each entailed?

First, I was a site lead at Heroes Never Die. Basically, I would do five to seven posts a week about various Overwatch news, lore, fan, projects, culture, just anything I could come up with. I think that became more interesting as the Overwatch League progressed, because that was not a super smooth operation that rolled out seamlessly. I found the flawed bits to be some of the most interesting parts – the struggles to tame players and get them to adhere to advertiser-friendly guidelines, the amateur press that sprung up around the game and their, you know, perhaps less-than-stellar coverage. It was a very interesting scene to cover, but as mentioned, Overwatch kind of tapered off in popularity, and esports did not have as much interest to a general audience as folks had hoped.

So I switched over to being a news writer, and that was my title for quite some time. Eventually it got changed to games writer, which was a more general thing, and I worked across a few desks. I worked on the games desk and the culture desk, where I covered streamers and online game communities. By the end, I was doing a little bit of everything – a little bit of news, features, reviews, impressions. I was wearing more than a few different hats by the end.

There are a bunch of online communities around games that are just notoriously difficult to follow: League of Legends, World of Warcraft, Warhammer 40k, No Man's Sky, Fallout 76, Warframe, I'm sure there's a million more. But I was the person where, if someone was like, Hey, has anyone been playing this moderately popular online game? I would be like, Yeah, I'm pretty familiar with it, because I'm lucky enough where not only could I play games during the day for work for coverage, but I had a group of pals where, during the evening, we would end up playing together as well. So I had a pretty good grasp on almost anything you can play with your buddies, because we had at one point likely given it a spin.

Of the online communities that you covered and enmeshed yourself in, did you have a favorite child?

For my favorite community, World of Warcraft would always be near the top, simply because I think there are a lot of people who grew up playing World of Warcraft, or played for a stint and they fell off. They just stopped playing for whatever reason – it's probably healthy and good and natural – but these people were still interested. What's happening in World of Warcraft is also interesting, because expansions have come out very regularly, and Blizzard has kind of figured out how to write longform storylines in a trial-by-fire way where they have made some really unpopular or controversial story decisions. Covering those from the perspective of someone who's like, I know why people are upset, and I know what happened in-game to inspire that, and I can break it down – it was just a really interesting intellectual exercise.

What’s one thing you’re proud of from your time at Polygon?

Something I really tried to stick to throughout my time there is that I like to like things. I think there is such an endless, ceaseless flood of negativity, dunking on things, complaining about “woke,” whatever, right? If you just like something and you want to be like, Hey, I like this game. This character is really cool, it can be hard to find a space for that, because so many communities are … you know, Reddit and Discord conversations don't last very long. They tend to disappear into the noise very quickly, and people complaining ends up drowning out a lot of the positive relationships.

I think people who complain are also very passionate. They're very invested. The people who complain, at their core, like the thing enough that they want it to improve. If you are day in, day out, complaining about a game, you are just as invested in it as someone who's playing it and having a great time every day. So just being able to be like, I like things, I respect the work that goes into them. I understand the developers have had difficulties, but I like to like things and to give them that shot. That really, I think, covered every aspect of my work. I would try to make what people were talking about very accessible and understandable, and give credit to people with legitimate complaints without just giving into the negativity of ‘dead game.’

But also, I was able to cover a lot of smaller games. Look Outside was one I did recently. Helldivers 2 is a community where there's a lot of cool stuff happening, but if you go into fan communities, you’ll see people being like, I don't like the balance on this weapon. I think it's just really hard to find people enthusing and enjoying things. And that's a shame, because I like games. I like to like games. Obviously, there's always room for critique and constructive criticism. And I'm not saying it should just be lavishly heaping praise on properties, right? But I think positivity is just really needed in these conversations.

I think the Helldivers example is a really instructive one. I always loved your coverage of the macro-level events that were going on, and the human decisions that had to go into them, both on the developer side and on the player side. And if so much of the online conversation gets bogged down into balance and meta and stuff like that, which they all inevitably do, then you're missing the bigger picture, the bigger story of what's going on in this game.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think on the flip side, sometimes you will find outlets, or you will find content creators who are very positive, but they're also incredibly deep in the weeds. And that's not an insult, because they're doing great work, but it's less accessible. Like, World of Warcraft, Wowhead will ask in a developer interview things like, The rogue changes for Mythic+ really disrupted the competitive meta. How do you intend to get other classes up to the same level? That's obviously a hypothetical. But if I'm someone who just wants to talk about World of Warcraft after playing for a few hours after work, I would probably be like, that doesn't mean anything, that has nothing to do with me. I just think coverage that outsiders or new players or casual players can meet and understand is really lacking, and being able to do that was a huge priority for me.

Do you think your esports background helped with you with that? Because a similar pattern plays out in a lot of competitive gaming communities.

I think so, yes. Also, I had worked for an esports organization for a time, with Immortals. Getting to see how the sausage was made was supremely helpful. If you just watched the promo material, you just watched the games, I think it's very easy to be like, Oh, this is very high level. This is very much like a traditional sport. Which is what it very much sold itself as, when really there was always this very strong human element to it, like each player's personality, and this is true with regular sports as well. There's always been the human stories of the players. That, to me, was always what was more interesting, over competitive results or the meta game.

Everyone pitched in across sections at Polygon. What’s a time where you did something outside of your core job responsibilities that you enjoyed?

Polygonathon [an annual charity event streamed on Twitch]. And I helped with video coverage, not substantially, but I would appear to play a game, especially during the height of COVID, and that was a lot of fun. I have never had much of an on-camera presence. But being able to do that, especially alongside our incredible video team, was just really fun. It was delightful, and it was a challenge, because I had to make sure that I was being advertiser-friendly, and sometimes I have struggled with that in my own gaming life. Like there was one time we were on and Pat was just making conversation while we waited for our guest. He's like, Hey, Cass, what's something you love about Canada you just can't find in America? And my brain just said, Don't say health care. Don’t say health care. But yeah, just being on camera, being a personality, was very much outside of my comfort zone, but it was something I came to really enjoy.

Do you have a favorite Polygon story or video by someone else?

Ana Diaz did a lot of really great work. She is really good at covering culture stories that I was less familiar with. She did some great stories about manga in Barnes and Noble, Twitch streaming, there's so much. Obviously, the video team has done incredible work. Unraveled was fantastic. But also Jenna Stoeber, while she was still at Polygon, did really insightful essays. Clayton Ashley and Pat Gill both have a gift for just finding something that I would never have thought of in a game, and breaking down what makes it work so well. Nicole Carpenter has done some incredible reporting, and I am in awe of the work she has done with unions, workplace reporting and ethics. There's a million more. I was so glad I got to show up with our phenomenal co-workers who were just doing incredible work that deserved more and deserved better.

What do you think is the biggest misconception that people outside the industry have about gaming journalism?

I think there are a lot of them. I think the biggest one off the top of my head is that outlets are a monolith. That there was, like, a Polygon line. That we were all presumably brought into a meeting, and we were told, Listen, when we're covering this, this is our outlet’s point of view. In reality, we would disagree with each other, not in like, aggressive or hateful ways, but definitely we had some disagreements in terms of, like, what games work and what games don't, what genres would take off, etc. We would put up two pieces about the same game from two different authors that had totally different points of view.

And to me, that's normal, that's healthy, that's great. You don't want an outlet to be in lockstep, because, to me, a lot of games journalism and criticism as a field is you should be able to find someone and be like, okay, this person has similar tastes to me. There are critics where I read their work and clearly I agree with their points. They're very well thought out. But at the end of the day, I know my tastes do not align with theirs, so I'm not going to rush out to watch this thing that they recommended. That's the thing, it's not about pushing certain titles or pushing certain opinions, because we didn't even have a solid unified opinion. It was just people talking about what they were passionate about.

What’s your wish for the future of gaming journalism?

First of all, I want to see more emphasis on weird projects. Obviously, GTA VI is going to be what everyone is talking about forever and like, understandably so. But I just love all of the weird, smaller projects that are coming out: One-man games or small teams or passion projects created over years that don't have a massive pedigree or advertising budget, but are just inventive and interesting and curious and weird. I'm worried that as outlets fade away, those are the games that are going to get lost in the shuffle. For instance, with the horror genre, there are YouTubers like Alpha Beta Gamer or ManlyBadassHero, and they'll play through things and do a good job. Obviously, they do good work, I'm not trying to disparage them at all. But also, when you watch their videos, they're just playing through the game. So I don't really think it encourages people so much to dig out the game for themselves and give it a shot. So I think being able to discover smaller projects is going to become just infinitely more difficult now, and that sucks.

I think right now, one of the leading sources of conversations about games is YouTubers who – and I'm not saying all YouTubers – just turn on a camera and talk into it for half an hour with no fact checking or research or contemplation, and then the next day, they do another half hour and just say whatever comes to mind about a subject. I really worry that will become the baseline. Covering Fallout 76, I would get into arguments with people who'd be like, That game is terrible. And that game certainly had problems. But I'd be like, What's your problem with it?, and they would repeat something that a YouTuber had said that was either no longer true, or hadn't been true, or was misunderstood. It's just really, really unfortunate, because I think there needs to be space for us to have these proper conversations without just having a few big voices who aren't invested in the community or interested in reviewing what they say or following up on it, right? I just really hope that doesn't become the standard.

What’s next for you?

I have decided that regardless of what I end up doing for a full-time paycheck, I want to keep doing what I do to some degree. And I have a couple of projects in mind. I think the first thing I intend to do is a video essay about the Ctrl+Alt+Del web comic, which I have followed for far too long. I have some deep thoughts to share. And there's a show, it's called The Rookie, and it is some of the most astonishing copaganda I have ever seen. I kind of want to just take some time and talk about these things I'm interested in. God knows if that'll take off, maybe they'll falter with 100 views each. But it'll be something to do while I figure out the big picture. Because when it comes to what I want to do for a career, I would have stayed at Polygon for as long as they would have had me. That was my career, my career dream. So right now, I don't know what's next, but I do know I want to keep creating and I want to keep having these conversations about things that I don't think anyone else has started yet. Because, you know, if not me, then who?

Where can people follow you and your work as you embark on these projects?

I am currently on BlueSky @CassMarshall.bsky.social. Everything I post will be there. I do not have a portfolio site as of yet. That is something I will be working on in the coming days and weeks. But once it is up, you will be able to find it on my BlueSky.