Polygon Exit Interview: Charlie Hall, Tabletop Editor

“I think that, hopefully, is a lasting part of what the website contributed to the larger discourse — we can all be friends here.”

Photo: Robin Baumgarten

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.

Next up: Charlie Hall, who was Polygon’s tireless tabletop editor. One of the longest-tenured employees at Polygon, Charlie was Polygon’s first dedicated features writer, and in 2021 he became the first tabletop editor at a major entertainment media outlet in the United States. One of the foremost experts on the tabletop games industry, Charlie’s work has been featured on NPR, the BBC, online with Smithsonian Magazine, and in the collection of The Peabody Essex Museum.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Tell me about your pre-Polygon background.

Man, I have a wild coming to Polygon story. I'll fast forward to the last part of it. I was working for a value-added IT reseller here in Northern Illinois, I was part of their program sales division. I was writing phone book-sized acquisition documents for people like the United States Army Special Operations Command, and one of them was for NASA's JPL [Jet Propulsion Laboratory]. I was doing really wild, high-end IT stuff, but in a written sales document, like, Here is 400 pages with our company's solution. Please get back to us in Phase Q of the DoDAF acquisition process Leg G. As you might imagine, I was a little bored.

I started doing freelance games journalism with a website called Gamers with Jobs. It was my community website where I grew up on the internet, and I will forever be indebted to the team over there, because they taught me how to pitch. They taught me how to make what I can do with my brain and my fingers into something that somebody wants to buy. The result of that was this feature that I did for Ars Technica called Paging Dr. Wasteland, where I went into [multiplayer zombie survival game] DayZ, and interviewed one of these combat medics, in-game, in-character, the first of its type that was going into the game, hopping between servers specifically to rescue people. That story got picked up for a nascent journalism award called the Games Journalism Prize, where it was nominated in a category right next to something that a Polygon editor at the time wrote. So here I am working as a freelancer, here's a newly enshrined Polygon editor, and we're both up for the same award. I just kind of pushed all of my chips into the center and ended up getting an opportunity to write with Polygon. I was very lucky. I was very, very blessed to get that.

What do you remember about first joining?

The process leading up to the offer was the most interesting. I was actually competing against another applicant, writing a story that was then going to go through the editorial pipeline, and the person that was the hiring manager at the time was going to make the determination based on the experience. So my first opportunity with Polygon was as a freelancer, even though it was kind of this bloodsport version of freelancing between me and another person.

But eventually I got a phone call, and I excused myself from my cubicle and I went down to the lower level of a parking garage, and on the other end of the phone were Chris Grant and Justin McElroy. Chris Grant was like, All right, we're going to need you to be our representative, be a features writer, and you're going to need to cover the games industry in Chicago. I spent the next three years, whenever I could, exclusively writing about the games industry in Chicago. Based on that hiring conversation, I became fixated on trying to find and make engaging content out of the folks in Chicago. So that's how I came across the folks over at Young Horses doing Octodad and various other small teams. To talk about these indie creators, to embed with them, to get to know them, and to tell their story, that was some of the first work I got to do at Polygon.

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

I literally touched every single aspect of Polygon. The titles are pretty straightforward. I went from features writer to news writer to senior writer to editor to senior editor. So that progression makes sense, but practically speaking, I did games journalism backwards. I started out as a high-end features writer, where literally, people were making my travel schedule for me. They were telling me where to go and how to get there. Just show up at the airport. Here's your ticket. I was going to Ukraine before the revolution and the Maidan to investigate the games industry there. The first time I met my coworkers was at E3.

There was a bit of a crisis three or four years after I started working there, and there was a great flattening at the organization. We formed these little pods. And I remember I was in a pod with Ben Kuchera, we called it Salamander Army, after the Ender's Game group in that book by Orson Scott Card. Salamander Army became this wild little engine of just experiencing games and spitting them back out. That's where I wrote one of my favorite headlines ever, “Hunting raptors on the slope of a goddamn volcano.”

One of the other things I picked up was a knack for podcasting. Very generously, Justin McElroy gave me the review podcast. I started working with Dave Tach on the Minimap news podcast, and I eventually spun up my own podcast called Polygon Backstory, where we did longer in-depth feature stories. It was only like four or five episodes.

I also ended up doing a lot of video work. I was doing video interviews, I was doing live streaming. I took the space reporter from The Verge to Alpha Centauri inside a video game. I was making myself available to do outlandish and interesting things.

Eventually, I ended up in a news writer role under Michael McWhertor. I probably learned the most at Polygon from him. He really helped me refine that inverted pyramid, work on my news gathering capabilities, work on getting the story right and getting it out on time. From there, Chris Plante was able to find space at the organization for me to take on tabletop, essentially full-time. I have been going to Gen Con for something like 20 years now. I’d always been writing about Dungeons and Dragons, about interesting and notable board games, because I have the knowledge and opportunity to do that. In 2020 or 2021, Plante comes to me and says We want to build out a tabletop desk and bang, zoom, it took off from there. I was able to grow that desk to over a million monthly viewers on a regular basis, and frankly, a lot of interest from advertisers as well. It was really a very lucrative space for us to work in, and it's in that role that I really got to work with younger writers in earnest for the first time. So if you go and you look at the staff of Rascal for instance, I have worked with pretty much everybody on the staff at some point in their careers to help them get paid, number one, because getting paid to write about tabletop is a challenge, but also to work on their craft. And from this mountain peak that I'm kind of on right now, to see Rascal kind of rising out of the mist, I'm so proud and so grateful to see the incredible work that they're doing over there, and the small role that I played in getting some of them their start is really gratifying.

Could you put into context how rare it was for a publication like Polygon to have a full-time tabletop editor?

Well, I get to say that I am so far the first and only tabletop editor at a major media publication in the United States. There is an enormous global pool of enthusiasts who are creating content about tabletop games, and that takes many forms. There’s a lot of TikTok creators, there’s a lot of Instagram creators, and many, many YouTube creators. But I am not a person that shows up as a talking head with a bookshelf full of board games behind me. That is not my gig. I’m trying to put it into words that can be read and are entertaining to read. That was a skill set that was very difficult to find in 2021 when we were spinning things up. I was able to identify some writers that were already doing it, to write about games in a way that speaks to wide-ranging audiences and find a home for it in a video game website. As we grew that at Polygon, I started to see those green shots at other publications, like what’s left of Kotaku, at IGN. Wargamer.com is another excellent and up-and-coming website that’s doing similar work. But before Polygon did it, it was a very rare and odd thing to see a gaming website write about a board game. But by the time I left, we were doing it two, three times a day, and it felt natural and it was valuable.

What in your background do you think helped make you such a dogged reporter?

I have been kind of a news hound my whole life. I grew up in the western suburbs of Chicago, and my passion growing up was AM radio. I listened to WGN 720 throughout the 80s and 90s, all throughout the midday into the evening, into the overnight. So when I was going to bed, I would have headphones on, and I would be listening to a show called Extension 720 with Dr. Milton Rosenberg. Dr. Rosenberg was a professor at the University of Chicago, and he was a polymath. He was interested in everything. He would bring experts onto the air and just talk to them about what they did.

And I tried to do that at Polygon. I tried to find people who were making unique things. Someone made a logistics game that covered the Eastern Front of World War Two? Let's talk to that guy. Oh, He also invented the algorithm that Napster runs on? That's not a story that you would expect to hear. Let's talk to the folks in Poland who are resurrecting old video games. Let's find stories that they found inside the code of that video game, that anecdote that they tell at a cocktail party. Now let's turn that into a story your average person on the street can read about. From there, though, again, I will talk about Michael McWhertor a lot. His ethic in creating journalism is, frankly, something I aspired to, and he helped me lock down the best practices in the space, reaching out to people early, making sure that they're able to comment, getting the facts straight, putting it into a defensible structure, and then getting it out there as soon as possible. And I think without his work, kind of banging me into shape, I'd still be out there writing sing-song little features about somebody that nobody's ever heard of. But today I can really feel like I have a multi-disciplinary writing capability. I can do a feature, I can pick up the phone and I can find out answers and write the news in 300 words, too, and I can do everything in between.

Brag about yourself: what’s one thing you’re proud of from your time at Polygon?

https://www.polygon.com/2014/2/23/5439456/ukrainian-game-devs-in-the-thick-of-violent-protests

This one comes from very early in my time at polygon. It’s 2013, and I am laying in bed with the flu. I am so sick that I cannot really roll over in bed. And my editor at the time sends me a text message and says, Charlie, I need you to go to Ukraine. When is the soonest you can leave? I said, Well, after I'm done vomiting. I'm sick as a dog, and I end up going to Ukraine, and travel through Lviv in the west and Kyiv in the east, and I come home and I've got all these people that I met through my tour there. Fast forward a better part of a year later. It's the winter of 2014, and now Ukraine is in the middle of a revolution. There are people with guns outside of the hotel where I was staying eight months earlier covering video games, trying to take back their country. And so I was able to leverage all those contacts I had, through Skype, through Facebook, through e-mail. Suddenly, now I was one of the few Western journalists with an on-the-ground network of individuals who were participating in fomenting unrest to try and bring democracy back to their country. And so for a period of six, eight months there I was doing little dispatches from the front lines inside Ukraine, telling the story about, okay, they broke into the police department. They took the weapons they gave them from this group to this group. Why did that happen? Also, tell me about your next game. It was a very strange period of time, but I was able to cover that because of the connections that I made, and tell the stories of those people across years of their experience. And there's still some folks from those trips more than 10 years ago that I still stay in touch with.

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

I enjoyed so much the coverage I was able to do of the survival and battle royale genres. One of the first things that I ever wrote that got recognition was about DayZ, I was one of the first people in the world to interview Dean Hall and help tell his story and how that game was created out of a special operations training mission he ran with the Singaporean military, and how he became so ill that he came to connect with other soldiers in his unit and from the Singaporean unit to really help save his life when this training mission went bad. That's where DayZ came from. Nobody knew that until I wrote that story. So carry that forward to H1Z1, and people were asking me well, Charlie, what's this crazy zombie thing? I got to cover that, and its weird evolution into whatever it is today.

I got to cover Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds before it was Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds, it was just an Arma 2 mod. So PUBG becomes this thing, I start covering PUBG, then here comes Fortnite. Fortnite turns on a dime. If you go back and read my review of Fortnite, it's the single player version of Fortnite that gave me a repetitive stress injury. That's what I reviewed. Then it turned into something else completely. And I was there to cover that as well.

But the storyline I really enjoyed covering the most was Ark: Survival Evolved, because no one expected Ark: Survival Evolved. It just showed up, this fully-formed survival game with an implicit mystery. Why is this jewel embedded in your arm? Why are there dinosaurs here at all? Why can I throw my poop? Why is that a feature? And they gave me access to that game early, and so I was able to explore that game live in a YouTube stream with our audience for the first time. Sadly, that's one of the videos that was lost in a number of different transitions that our video team did. But before it went, it was at close to 2 million views of people just marveling at Ark: Survival Evolved along with me. It was just a really fun experience, totally outside of my day- to-day, totally outside of my normal responsibilities, to just go and be there with folks nipping at my heels behind me, sharing in that joy.

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

I gotta go back to Simone and Clayton's incredible work on that documentary, The Great Game: The Making of Spycraft. I got called in very late to help with that project. It was a near final edit with an early voiceover, and just to look through that, it is exactly what I expected Polygon to be doing 10 years later when I started back in 2013. When you go back and you watch that Press Reset series of videos that got my attention, they said We're hiring folks that know a lot of stuff. We're hiring folks that know nothing. We're going to get them together. We're going to try and make something unique here. And I fully bought into that, and that's what I showed up to do. I had the privilege of doing that work exclusively for the better part of three, four years before changes necessarily had to be made. But to see that throughline from those early stories all the way to that award-winning feature length documentary that my colleagues got to put together, I'm so proud to have worked at an organization that can produce that kind of valuable work.

The last thing about Polygon that I want to make sure that we get out though, is something that actually found in my old cover letter. When I first applied, Polygon was a place of peace. In my cover letter, I wrote I wanted to stop simmering the poisonous stews that had kept games journalists busy for so many years. This internal console war: The Xbox people and the PlayStation, the Nintendo people and the PC people. It was always the messaging when we were creating our work at Polygon, that there is no fractiousness between these different communities. They are all one community. They're all the same community, and we will not be promoting the console war dialogue at Polygon. I think that, hopefully, is a lasting part of what the website contributed to the larger discourse, we can all be friends here.

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

The thing that hurts the most is just the spitefulness a lot of folks seem to have when they talk about journalism generally. A lot of the interactions that I have and have had with folks is just working on the assumption that I am being paid by the people that I am writing about. That's not how this works. Literally, part of our ethics code is that I can't trade stocks in the companies and things that I am writing about. That's something our Supreme Court justices can do, but it's not something that I, as a journalist working previously at Vox media, could do. So I really do think that the ethical bar is a lot higher than just about anyone assumes it to be. But it's a very easy way to unbalance the conversation for the speaker, right? If you're going to speak with or about a journalist, you might as well put them down to start. And that's an easy way to do it. It just doesn't hold water. It bears absolutely no semblance to how things actually work. The amount of work I have done to stay on the right side of my responsibilities as I see them, I think would go quite a long way. A lot of folks would be very surprised to know about all of that.

What’s your wish for the future of tabletop/games journalism or digital media?

They would all be unionized. Every person writing about games right now, whether they're an influencer or a streamer, they would all have the strong foundation of a union organization to work from. Because if I did not have the support of the Writers Guild of America East, and of the Vox Media Union right now, I don't know where I would be. I certainly wouldn't have still been working for Vox Media. I don't think that I would have lasted that long without the respect and the quality of work environment that the union allowed me to experience.

What’s next for you?

There's some patchy grass in the front lawn. There's nice stuff at ACE. It's got the fertilizer built right in. The trouble is, you got to keep it wet, and I get a lot of sun in the front yard, so I'm out three times a day right now with a watering can making sure that that grass grows. We've got some boxwood bushes. We're going to put it in the corner right in the front, just try and embellish a boring corner of the lot. And then later this week, I'm going to get my oil changed. I'm about 1000 miles over. I want a nice, full synthetic, because we got a road trip with the family this summer. We're going up to Michigan.

Where can people follow you and your work?

BlueSky is the best place to be for me right now. My website is charliehallwriter.com, my e-mail is charleshall14@gmail.com. I am looking to entertain wild opportunities right now. The sky is the limit, the world is my oyster. I’ve done crazy shit in the past, I want to do crazy shit in the future. Get at me, world.