The New York Game Awards will be held on 1/23/24 at SVA Theatre in Manhattan. Get your tickets here. Note: we’re sold out of VIP tickets + After Party. We still have a limited about of VIP tickets, though. So get them now.

By Harold Goldberg

The Circle accomplished so much this year. There were more, but here’s a look at 13 of them! Please note that these are in no particular order. All of them are equal in importance to our growth. Happy New Year!

1. The New York Game Awards – We honored Phil Spencer at the 12th New York Game Awards and young intern Makeda Byfield helped Reggie and me co-host. Makeda rocked it.
2. Rockstar Scholarship – We give away a number of scholarships each year to underserved and unhoused students who take our games journalism and writing classes. But our $10,000 scholarship in partnership with Rockstar Games is the most impactful.
3. Interns Had A Lunch Meeting With Phil Spencer – Phil took time to come to New York City to mentor our students – and promised to come back to mentor again.
4. Internships Expanded – We doubled the amount of interns we mentor and edit here at NYGameCritics.com. We now have a masthead that’s bigger than some of the major game publications – and often with better writing.
5. We hired a brilliant Executive Director – To help us grow, we hired Ryan O’Callaghan, our Educator of the Year Award Winner, as our executive director. Ryan has been doing stellar work for us.
6. Partnership with Colin Kaepernick – I met Colin when writing a story about his Wild Card Football game. We talked about our respective nonprofits. Later we struck up a partnership that we hope will continue for years to come.
7. Fair Game Writing Challenge – Our nationwide writing/journalism contest with Games for Change continues
8. New Partnership with the Paley Center for Media – We’ll have more about this next week!
9. Interns In-Person Meetups – Each month, we bring our interns together for a cool event. This month, our holiday hang included our interns meeting up with our professional critic members.
10. Karila-Monique Warner, one of our streamers/writers, wrote movingly and courageously about what it’s like to be unhoused in 2023.
11. Stephen Totilo, then at Axios, took our students to a Nintendo showcase event and gave them tips on how to interview public relations people.
12. Marvel Executive Eric Monacelli spoke to 40 of our Hudde School students in Midwood. He not only talked about how Spider-Man 2 came to be, he also brought Spider-Man 2 keychains for each young person who attended. Jobs and pathways to success in games were also discussed.
13. Four awesome, new Circle members: Brady Langmann from Esquire, Giovanni Colantonio from Digital Trends, Lord Cognito from Iron Lords and Luis Aguasviva from Pop Matters joined the fold.