Critic / Writer · PC Gamer UK / Rock Paper Shotgun · 1999–2009 · British
Kieron Gillen invented New Games Journalism in a 2004 manifesto that redirected critical writing about games from consumer guidance toward personal, literary, first-person experience — the most influential critical theory the medium has produced.
Kieron Gillen began writing for PC Gamer UK in the late 1990s and quickly became the magazine's most distinctive voice, applying the sensibility of rock music criticism — personal, contextual, argumentative — to game coverage at a time when most reviews were still structured as consumer reports. In 2004 he published "The New Games Journalism," a manifesto on his personal website proposing that the most honest and useful way to write about games was through subjective personal narrative: not "what is this game" but "what happened to me while I was playing it." The essay directly influenced a generation of critics including writers at Eurogamer, Rock Paper Shotgun (which Gillen co-founded in 2007), and Waypoint. Gillen left games journalism for comics in 2010, writing Phonogram, Journey into Mystery, and Uncanny X-Men for Marvel, but his critical framework remains the dominant model for literary games writing.