Polygon Exit Interviews: Ryan Gilliam, Guides Producer

"I always try to find some amount of wholeness in the idea that I’m helping someone enjoying something more"

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 going to talk about how these talented people got to Polygon, what they did in their time there, and what they hope is next. I’m going to be publishing quite a few of these in the next few weeks, which will likely result in a higher-than-usual cadence for this newsletter moving forward.

Next up: Ryan Gilliam, another key cog of Polygon’s guides team. After initially starting out with me at the League of Legends site The Rift Herald, Ryan covered a lot of different games during his time with Polygon, including the Monster Hunter and Diablo franchises, and was the site’s foremost expert on the Destiny games. Along with fellow former guides producer Jeffrey Parkin, Ryan has started a new community-oriented guides publication, BigFriendly.Guide.

[Ed. note: Oops! You got the Weekend Watchlist one day early yesterday. I hope that helped you plan your weekend right!]

Tell me about your pre-Polygon background.

I don’t have a pre-Polygon background, Polygon has been my entire career. I liked video games a lot, and I was at my university at the time as an English creative writing major when I first started writing for The Rift Herald [Polygon’s former League of Legends community site, co-founded by yours truly].

My pre-Polygon experience was wanting to work at Polygon. I remember in high school, being on the phone refreshing Polygon until it launched and being one of the first people to read it and find all the Easter eggs. I remember a documentary series that was introducing all the Polygon people, talking about their journey to building Polygon and what it was becoming. I watched those in my freshman dorm, and I was like You know what? I’m gonna make this my main pursuit. And it genuinely changed the trajectory of my life.

What do you remember about first joining Polygon?

Phil Kollar, who was Polygon’s deputy reviews editor at the time, was tweeting about trying to learn League of Legends. My friend Austen [Goslin, who also worked at Polygon] and I had gotten really into that the year before, so we started responding to him on Twitter. He friended us on League and we played a couple of games with him and a game of Heroes of the Storm with the director of 10 Cloverfield Lane [Dan Trachetenberg], because they were friends.

We didn’t know it at the time, but that eventually spawned into The Rift Herald. The first thing I ever got paid to write was a guide on how to play [League champion] Kled, and then I ended up doing stuff at Polygon through this. The first op-ed I ever wrote was saying Splatoon wasn’t a real esport, which I didn’t really have a very strong opinion on at the time, but I was being paid to write it. It was also the first thing I got a ton of online hate for. Eventually, I was brought on part-time, and later got moved to an internal team at Polygon, and then eventually full-time. I grew up at this website, and I’m very grateful and very sad.

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

I did pretty much everything before landing in guides. I did contract work for The Rift Herald to start with. Then I became a guides contractor, doing some World of Warcraft stuff, some Overwatch, some Persona, some Destiny. I was collecting multiple contracts at once until I heard a rumor that I was going to get a part-time gig. I remember going to see Spirited Away at the Alamo Drafthouse in Kansas City that no longer exists, and not focusing on the movie at all, just anxiously waiting to see if I was going to have a meeting the next day. And I did, I became a part-time news writer.

I was a news writer for five years, and that encompassed like eight different jobs under that one title, because corporate media is going to corporate media. I was on the Destiny Beat for six months, and then the living games team got formed, which pulled people off of the esports sites to try and cover more living games like that. That was my first real big gig at Polygon, and after that got dissolved, I ended up doing more editorial guide stuff. And then in 2022 I was brought onto the guides team. I was apprehensive at first, I wasn’t sure if I wanted to do guides full-time, but I ended up loving it.

What do you like about writing guides?

Well, I have obsessive compulsive disorder. [Laughs]. I have genuinely diagnosed OCD. It’s pretty poorly understood by people, I think partially thanks to Monk, as much as I think that show is great. I have an obsessive need to do everything. To enjoy some games, I would have to turn that off, and I’d find it was a real struggle to turn that off.

Weirdly, I am not someone who likes looking at guides, but I love doing it for other people. I genuinely like helping people enjoy something, and I think something I’ve struggled with – and everybody I know has struggled with it in this industry at some point – when everything around is exploding in the real world, there can be a real difficult moment where you sit down and ask What the fuck am I doing? It can be very difficult to get past that and feel like what you’re doing matters at all. I think Brian Altano from IGN once referred to it as “writing book reports for toys,” and that can feel really stupid. But I always try to find some amount of wholeness in the idea that I’m helping someone enjoying something more. Guides was the most I’ve ever felt that.

At the end of the day, someone is coming home and they need to relax, and they are turning to the thing I do all day to help them enjoy something more, or to get past something that would initially frustrated them, so that they find on the other side that there’s a game thy really love. I like to think someone out there who’s making a big difference, someone out there whose job is very stressful, who’s trying to make the world a better place, is coming home and reading something I wrote to help relax. That helps quiet that voice a little bit.

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

Wariogon [a month of Wario-related stories] is always gonna be something that sticks out to me as a really fun time. I wrote all the social copy for that, and it was so much fun.

I’m very proud of our Destiny coverage over 10 years. I genuinely believe Polygon covered Destiny, a complex living game that is always changing, better than most other sites, because I was always playing it, I was always engaged with it and involved in it so I knew what people were talking about. That’s partially to Polygon’s credit, Polygon tried to make sure people were touching what they were interested in. Destiny was something I was passionate about, and I constantly was given chances to cover it. And I’m genuinely very proud of the reputation I was able to build for Polygon as a website Destiny fans could look to.

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

Last year, I went to Bungie for a preview of Destiny, and I went to Blizzard for a preview for a Diablo expansion. And then this April I went to Bungie for a preview of Marathon. I love being able to go and see the process, and watching developers talk about their projects and be excited about them. Every game developer I’ve ever had the pleasure to talk to is so excited about what they’re doing and what they’re making, and it’s infectious. There’s nothing more fun than watching artists talk about the thing they made with deep excitement.

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

There’s so many. The first thing that comes to mind is Pat Gill’s work. There was a string of time, especially around Elden Ring, where I felt like Pat was putting out a video every couple of weeks that felt like he just made it for me. I would watch every Polygon video, but Pat was somebody who I would immediately stop what I was doing, even if I was on deadline, to watch the whole thing.

What do you think is the biggest misconception that people outside the industry have about writing guides?

This is going to sound whiny, so I’ll start by saying I was always very cognizant of the fact that I was in a position a lot of people wanted. Polygon was my dream job, truly, and to lose it is devastating. But the biggest misconception I would get in my personal life is that idea that your job is so fun, what a fun, cool job you have. And it’s like, my job is fun and cool, but also, it is my job. I want you to think about all the stuff you don’t like about your job and be like, now also do that with my job. It’s the same thing. I was in a lot of meetings. Most of my job was writing stuff or attending meetings or dealing with formatting.

The only time I’ve ever been able to actually explain it in a way I think people understand why it sucks to turn your favorite hobby into a job, is when I was assigned to write guides for Starfield. I was really not looking forward to that, because I don’t really like Bethesda RPGs. I knew it was going to be literally six weeks of work, including three weeks of weekend work, which we did not do very often. I was able to effectively explain to someone What do you do when you’re playing a video game and you don’t like it anymore? Can you turn it off and uninstall it from your machine and never think about it again? Because that’s what I do when it’s not for work, but when it’s for work, I spend 40 hours playing it, and then 80 hours writing about it when it’s a thing you hate. As Don Draper says, that’s what the money is for, but it still sucks, and it’s one of the only times I’ve been able to explain how it’s not all sunshine.

It goes both ways. When Persona 5 Royal came out, I spent genuinely six weeks basically doing nothing but playing it every day on my couch. That was pretty cool. But with Starfield, it was awful.

I will never forget the relief of being on parental leave and playing the Dead Space remake. That’s genuinely some of my fondest gaming memories of the past decade, partially because I was holding my new baby while I was playing it, but also because I had a realization halfway through that I had not taken a screenshot in 10 hours.

What’s your wish for the future of the industry?

Can I snap my fingers and get rid of the oligarchy? Is that possible? That sounds nice.

I would say team cohesion is what makes a team. You look at Bioware, and the people who made all the games you like aren’t there anymore. The amount of times that games come out and their entire teams get laid off or obliterated is constant.

You look at Hideo Kojima and his teams, they stay together. Zelda as well. The Final Fantasy Remake team, I think they said the turnover was very, very low from part one to part two. Until games media and games themselves figure that out, we will continue to get things that are big hints and then get exploited until people stop loving it. They’re like, What happened? But you got rid of all the people who made the good stuff.

What’s next for you?

At the end of May, I started an independent guides site with my fellow Polygon co-worker, Jeffrey Parkin. It’s called BigFriendly.Guide and we’re trying to use it to build a community-based guides environment where our readers can vote for what we guide next and communicate with us directly via Discord. This allows us to focus our energy on making what real human beings want, rather than waiting for Google to tell us what the masses want. It’s all human made — no AI! — helpful content that comes from us directly experiencing the game we’re explaining to you. If we can’t get to where you got stuck in a game for some reason, we’d rather recommend another guide than write off of someone else’s experience.

The best way to support Jeff and me is to visit the website, download the TalkThrough podcast on your platform of choice, join our totally free Discord (and use the voting channels to tell us what you’re excited about!), and support us financially on Patreon, if you’re able. We have $5, $10, and $50 a month tiers. The initial tier gets you basically all of the actual content, with the other two focusing more on showing off your support for us (like being thanked at the bottom of a guide or us shouting your name out on our podcast). We believe in what we’re doing and we’re pretty excited about its future!

While we grow, I’ll also be taking on some freelance work to help pay the bills, buy school clothes for my kid, fund visits to the zoo, etc. (You can already find me on PC Gamer!) I’m hoping to start some consulting work as well.

Where can people follow you and your work?

BigFriendly.Guide! I’m also on Bluesky.