Critic, Video Essayist, Developer · Action Button, Insert Credit, Kotaku · Modern / Retrospective · American
A central figure of "New Games Journalism" whose hyper-articulate, deeply personal criticism — culminating in multi-hour video reviews of single games — reinvented what a game review could be.
Tim Rogers is an American games journalist, developer, and video essayist whose work has consistently pushed against the conventions of what game criticism is supposed to look like. He is closely associated with the mid-2000s movement known as New Games Journalism, a style that foregrounds the writer's subjective and personal experience of a game world rather than pretending to detached product evaluation. The Guardian cited his 2005 essay "Dreaming in an Empty Room: A Defense of Metal Gear Solid 2" as a core example of the form — a piece that took a game most players had found alienating and argued for it with autobiographical fervour. In early 2007 Rogers founded ActionButton.net, a reviews site that emerged from the Insert Credit community and its SelectButton forums. Its writing was immediately distinctive: sprawling, digressive, self-consciously performative, and laced with metacommentary about the act of reviewing itself. Simon Carless praised the site at launch for its "great writing" and its signature self-aware style, and Action Button became a touchstone for readers who found conventional review formats — score, pros, cons, verdict — hopelessly inadequate to describe what games actually did to people. Rogers has written for Next Generation, GamesTM, Play, Game Developer, and Kotaku, and between 2017 and 2020 produced more than two hundred videos about games for the latter before resigning to work independently. His subsequent Action Button YouTube channel took his maximalist instincts to their logical conclusion: long-form video reviews of individual games running for hours, most famously a six-hour examination of the Japanese dating sim Tokimeki Memorial, which journalists credited with generating genuine Western interest in a title that had been all but invisible outside Japan. His criticism is deliberately, defiantly the opposite of concise. It is passionate, personal, scholarly, funny, digressive, and frequently absurd, and it treats games as objects worth taking seriously enough to spend six hours discussing. Whatever one makes of the style, its influence has been real: Rogers demonstrated that there was an audience for criticism that refused the constraints of the review format entirely, and in doing so he reinvented what a video game review on the internet could be.