Brendan Caldwell is a writer for Rock, Paper, Shotgun. I looked at a few of his articles recently. I think anyone writing about games is adding to the canon, even if their thoughts consists of “y sucks, x was so much better” and the following year, “z sucks, y was the best thing ever made, and x was such a disappointment” in the way we’ve seen tons of “games journalists” do.
Caldwell isn’t like that. I got the sense that he honestly knows what he’s talking about with his articles, and he looks into things like the power of nostalgia as to why old franchises are coming back and developer reasons for it, and what people want. He cites plenty of sources and doesn’t make his research feel pulled out of thin air. Additionally, I feel like he plays the the games he talks about, and that he speaks with a measure of authority and experience.
Keeping an audience engaged is one of the best things a gaming journalist can do. Many times, so called “games journalists” are published on sites that signal boost their criticisms of an industry they do not understand and proselytizing viewpoints that are at odds with that of anyone who actually played the game in subject. Caldwell’s criticisms when they come seem to be from an honest perspective, and from a place of love for games, and what they could be. His articles are gaming articles, not political articles using games to rally people against the “evil gamers” because the people writing them couldn’t get a job at their political news outlet of choice.
The circles I run in are a snarky bunch, but we also don’t appreciate being jossed around with a lack of information that makes someone’s point, and Caldwell absolutely fits that bill. When we want to read gaming articles, we want to be informed, entertained, and talking about the topic at hand: gaming. For all three of those things, Caldwell fits the bill without a doubt.
Ark of the Lost Angels 
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