Kenneth Shepard – Hello, I’m Kotaku’s New Staff Writer

Oh, hi. I didn’t see you there. I’m Kenneth Shepard, Kotaku’s new staff writer.

If you don’t know me, I spent the last three years writing about the video game industry over at Fanbyte as a staff writer, and I did so through the lens of queerness, community, and introspection. I’ve also written about those things in places like Polygon, IGN, Paste Magazine, Gayming Magazine, and plenty of other places I won’t list here. But if you were kind enough to read my words over there, you’ll find all of that over here at Kotaku, as well. But on top of this, I’m here to help out in our Tips & Guides section, where we talk about the hows and whys of how we play video games.

I got my start as a reporter working in local news. What began with writing for my college’s newspaper eventually turned into running it, then working at my local newspaper for a stint. The end goal was always to get a job writing about games, but I think writing about people on the ground level informed a lot of how I think and talk about the industry. Where once I was interested in watching giant corporations duke it out in the name of conquering the market, I now care more about what games mean to us as a culture of players and creators. I tell people the best question I asked in interviews when working for the paper was, “What does this mean to you?” and I would watch someone light up as they answered. I like to keep that same mindset when I write about video games and what they mean to people who aren’t sitting on a board and bragging about record profits while laying off half their workforce.

Outside of writing about video games, I also talk about them on Normandy FM, a biweekly retrospective podcast I co-host alongside Destructoid’s Eric Van Allen. If the name didn’t clue you in, we started out as a Mass Effect podcast that went through the entirety of BioWare’s science fiction saga, with episodes going beat by beat through each game alongside incredible guests from around the industry. Doing that show has been wildly influential to my critical voice, as it shifted so much of my thinking about games, narrative, and player expression to really dissecting a particular moment, rather than trying to encapsulate things in reductive broad strokes.

In the years since, the show has become just a general video game retrospective show. We went on to cover Dragon Age, Jade Empire, The Last of Us, and Final Fantasy X, and are currently a couple episodes away from wrapping up our look back at Cyberpunk 2077. In the new year, we’ll start playing through the Nier series, which is exciting, because it’s the first time I’ve not played a game on the show before we cover it.

Gosh, what else is there to tell about me? Pokémon is my vice in life and I have a particular set of six Pokémon I consider my core party (Raichu, Palkia, Latias, Beautifly, Torterra, and Houndoom). Pre-pandemic, I lived in movie theaters and you’d catch me seeing everything that was showing, good or bad. I’m still trying to get back in the habit of seeing movies again, but that transition back as theaters have reopened has been an ongoing process. Prior…