Polygon Exit Interview: Kallie Plagge, Senior Copy Editor

Talking with a person who made almost every single story on Polygon better

Photo: Kallie Plagge

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: Kallie Plagge, who was Polygon’s rock star copy editor. Unlike other publications that operate at the scale Polygon did, the website only had one copy editor – which meant Kallie read (and improved) nearly every single story that ran on the website. She was an essential part of the team whose work wasn’t very visible to the people that read Polygon, so I’m excited to share Kallie’s perspective on her time with the site and the work she did there.

Tell me about your pre-Polygon background.

I have been in games for over 10 years now. I started as a freelancer for IGN. I did reviews back when IGN did a broader range of reviews. I reviewed a lot of anime games early in my career. Then I got a job on the social team, and I continued to do reviews. Pokémon was my main beat, and they covered Pokémon a lot. I went to GameSpot as an editor, and then I became the reviews editor, so I managed the reviews desk there. Then I had a brief stint at Nintendo on a contract doing localization writing, and then I came to Polygon.

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

I joined Polygon in April 2022. I was really excited. Mike Mahardy, who worked at Polygon at the time, had reached out to tell me Polygon was looking for a copy editor, and he knew my contract at Nintendo was coming up and that I wasn't super interested in renewing. I wanted a full-time job, and I couldn't believe it. I didn't think a gaming publication would ever hire a copy editor full-time.

I was overjoyed, I was so excited. I was like, I get to work with Nicole Carpenter and Maddy Myers! I had followed these people for years. Then they bumped it up to a senior role because of my experience in the industry, and I couldn't believe that, either. Then, the week I started, I got COVID, and I had to miss my grandpa's funeral. And I remember Samit [Sarkar, Kallie’s manager] being like, You don't have to be online. We can delay the training. I was like, It's fine. It's not that bad. I was excited to get started, to have something to do and get into it. But it was nice to work somewhere where they were like, How sick are you? Because if you're pretty sick, you can log off.

What did being a senior copy editor at Polygon entail?

A lot of people think of copy editing as being black and white. But I approached it very much as a collaboration, not just I'm going to prescribe the commas that you need and the hyphens that you need. There was a lot of conversation while I edited. I don't want to edit an error into anybody's work – that has happened to me before and it is very frustrating – and so I ask a lot of questions. I'm curious about the work and about the intent behind a sentence that maybe isn't landing for me. There are obviously going to be cases where, objectively, something needs to be capitalized, but a lot of the time it was like, I'm curious about the work, I know you did this with intent, and I don't want to just put words in your mouth. How do we iron this out to make it what we want it to be?

I also did trainings through an internal style newsletter called Style Savvy, which I really liked doing. For example, leading into a holiday, sending out an e-mail that says “Hey, here’s how to style St. Patrick’s Day,” and that we would write it St. Paddy’s Day with Ds and not Ts. You might have to write this phrase, so here’s how to write it. Or, going into Summer Game Fest, reminding people it's not Summer Games Fest.

One that I was really proud of was the ableist language Style Savvy, which you and I worked on together to give more guidance to people who maybe were not as familiar with disability or neurodivergence and didn't know where the lines were, but who wanted to be respectful. But also, coming up with guidelines on working with a writer who is disabled or neurodivergent, and making sure we respect their assertion of their identity.

That had come up with a couple things – I don't want to tell this writer how to write about their life. Also, we had a lot of people on staff who had their own personal experiences with disability. I wanted to empower them to be able to say to an editor No, I feel really strongly about this or No, I know exactly what I'm saying here, and I mean to say it this way.

Another element that always interested me is when you had to make style calls on made-up bullshit, like terms from Star Wars or bizarrely-stylized video game titles. Do you have any favorite examples?

The day before we all lost our jobs at Polygon, I had put together a presentation because I had been talking to [senior entertainment writer] Susana Polo about when to capitalize fictional races. We had an extended conversation about how the idea of fictional race is wrapped up in our real life, complicated idea of what race is. We had a really in-depth conversation about whether we think Vulcan should be capitalized. She was like, Well, I think that if you wouldn't capitalize human in the sentence, you shouldn't capitalize any of the fictional species. And I said, Well, Vulcan is the planet. So it would be like, not capitalizing American to me. And she was like, Well actually, if you go into Star Trek lore, there are the Vulcans from Vulcan, but then there's also Vulcan the culture.

Also, we had a casual, voicey style for a lot of our articles. So I had a lot of fun being like, Do I think badass is one word? One highlight for me was I had to make a call on how to style butt plug. I was like, I'm going to very carefully Google “butt plugs” to see what the listings say. I think I decided on two words because I was like, I can't think about this anymore.

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

Definitely the disability Style Savvy. I was also very proud of some edits where I had to listen to things in Japanese. There's one edit in particular where it was our best one-season anime list, and one of the anime on the list was Ouran High School Host Club, which I have seen. I was very much aware that people love Ouran, but in the dub, there is a transphobic slur. And I wanted to figure out while editing that story: Is the slur in Japanese? Can we still recommend this and say, Caveat: we recommend you watch the sub to avoid the slur? And so I listened to the scene in question in Japanese. I was able to come back to the writer of the blurb and be like, I think we're good if we want to couch it in, “Please watch the sub. We highly recommend that version.”

That was not really in the scope of what copy editing is. But our audience really cared about this, the team really cared about this, and I wanted to make sure that we can feel good about recommending something that otherwise has some cool gender stuff in it, and is a really popular show. We added that editors’ note to feel good about that recommendation. I was really proud of that.

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 was excited, because I had two stories in the works. I was going to be working on one for you, and one for [TV editor] Zosha [Millman]. But I did get to work with Zosha in the TV section on Severance, and I really, really enjoyed that. I love that show, and I was able to use the same digging-deep instincts I had in copy editing on some lore fan theory stuff and write what I thought was a fun article about the in-universe book in the show. There's a real life version of the book and it doesn't match. And I was like, What is up with that? Why did Apple do this to me?

I didn't get to do a lot of stuff like that. I didn't have a lot of time to write. But when I did get to work on something, the thing that stuck out to me was how encouraging you guys were about my work. That meant a lot to me, as somebody who used to write a lot and who doesn't anymore. It really meant a lot.

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

Before I worked at Polygon, the story that stuck out to me was “No Girls Allowed,” a story by Tracey Lien about video game advertising excluding girls. That article put Polygon on my radar.

Also Nicole Carpenter’s union zine. I had so much respect for Nicole before getting to work with her, and that respect has only grown. The reason I have a physical copy is because she sent me a care package when I broke my ankle, and that was one of the things she passed along. I was so excited to get that.

That’s the thing, though. There were stories like the union zine, and then Petrana writing about Avatar: The Last Airbender ships. The fun that we had with those sorts of articles, the fun I had editing them: The breadth of Polygon was 10,000 words about unions, and on the other end, a really impassioned thing about being bisexual. That was my favorite part of the job.

What do you think is the biggest misconception that people have about working in a place like Polygon, whether it's about digital media as an industry or gaming journalism?

I think that there's a big misconception about how much work goes into what we do. Not just work, but passion. Of the gaming websites, we had a pretty good work life balance generally across the team, but at the same time, your work doesn't end at five. When you log off, you're going to a screening, you're playing a game. And it's very hard to quantify how much of playing a game is work time.

There are times where I've played a game and I'm like, this is 100% work, because I would not be playing this game if I didn't have to review it. And then there are times where I would have been playing the game anyway, and I get an idea out of it. And at what point does my personal time end and work begin again? I think people who haven't done this kind of job don't know exactly what that's like.

There's definitely a misconception, just among the denizens of the internet in general, that the people who do this kind of work aren't very knowledgeable. Anybody could do it. But really, not anybody could do it. It takes a lot of time and commitment and an intersection of skills that not everybody has, and that takes time to develop. I think it's a massive loss to not have this team all together, because we had really, really special working relationships and a really special dynamic. It's a mix of things you can't get just anywhere.

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

I wish more people would consider it important. A lot of us will joke like I have a cousin who's a doctor, and clearly their job is more important than mine. Part of me agrees with that, and part of me is like, well, we can't all be doctors. There are different jobs for different people, and I still think that media criticism and investigative journalism and service journalism provide a reader service. They do matter. Especially when a lot of people get their news, not just entertainment news, from people who are not trained in journalism, who do not have standards of ethics or standards of reporting, or don't know what a leading question is. There's a lot of training that goes into being able to do this, and not everybody we work with has a background in journalism, certainly, but you learn a lot on the job about how to handle it properly and how to do justice to the material. Our skills do matter, and the void that is left with the slow decimation of gaming media does result in a cultural vacuum that is not easily filled. My hope with that would be that, yeah, it's entertainment, it's games, we're not saving lives, but I still think that our skills are valuable. Part of being a human being is engaging with things that are “frivolous,” like art. There's the survive versus thrive sort of mindset – we engage with art because that is a reason to live. So I think that engaging with art responsibly is really important.

What’s next for you?

I have been offered a lateral move to The Verge, so I will be senior copy editor over there, and I'm very lucky that they had a place for me. I wish that more people at Polygon had a similar life raft and were able to land on their feet the way I have. I feel like it was pure timing and luck on my part. But I'm very grateful for that.

Where can people follow you and your work?

I am on Twitter (although I don’t really tweet) and on BlueSky. My handle, pretty much any social media place, is inkydojikko. I will probably be posting about Pokémon.