By Nick Capozzoli, NYVGCC Journalism Chair
The Knickerbocker Award for Best Games Journalism is given to journalists or critics for distinguished contributions to the field during the voting year. The selected journalist will have best demonstrated traditional journalistic values, including–but not limited to–work that illuminates, contextualizes, entertains, exhibits lucid writing, sound reasoning, wit, integrity, et alia.
The 2025 Short List
Lewis Gordon
Gordon’s writing seems to benefit from his own prolificness, which seems counterintuitive. His criticism cites apt quotes like a report does, his reports turn on the lush details of a feature, his features brim with the insights of a critic.
See: When Microsoft Flight Simulator Goes Wrong
Video Games and “Cathedrals of Fire”: the Eye-Widening Wonder of Sword of the Sea
With a Tea-Making Fantasy Game, Davey Wreden Gets Real
Why Can’t Sony Make More Multiplayer Hits?
People Make Games
Perhaps more than any previous year, the team at People Make Games have truly advanced their eponymous mantra. Whether returning to earlier reporting with earnestness and humility, or turning in desperately needed coverage from the picket lines, they’ve foregrounded people.
See: The Disco Elyisum Saga Isn’t Done Yet
100 Slaps: The Breaking News the Games Industry Ignored in 2024
The Rockstar Workers Fired Before They Could Finish GTA 6
Duncan Fyfe
“Words are published and people die, but that is not the end of the journey.” It’s a precious skill, to be able to complicate an idea while remaining eminently readable. Fyfe demonstrates his flair for it with two features that complicate art and legacy.
See: A World of Lost Souls: Roger Ebert, Cosmology of Kyoto, and Gaming’s Hollow Victory
The Curse of ‘Disco Elysium’, the Greatest RPG Ever Made
Jackson Tyler
So many words have been spent lamenting the scourge of the video game microtransaction; you could hardly imagine invoking theory would enliven the subject. But with deft turns of bathetic anticlimax and an eye for the absurd, Tyler’s disassembly of the “rent-seeking catastrophe” within a basketball game is as lively and skillful as it gets.
See: Commodity Fetishism is Law in NBA 2K26
Joseph Earl Thomas
There’s a heady recursion of persons in Thomas’ “Portrait of the Parent as an NPC.” There’s the 2nd person of its tense, which reaches out from the text and grips You, the reader, from the first word and never lets go. And the 2nd person of the shared online space—both ourselves, and not.
See: The Fantasy of Playing Final Fantasy
Nicanor Gordon
Gordon’s confident, naturalistic prose wends through its subjects with the ease of a force majeur, even when those subjects are pillars: like Final Fantasy or Football.
See: Hurricanes and Boss Fights
Despelote Review: An Ode to a Dream
Felipe Pepe
Pepe’s assertions, on the transgressive works that are “the core purpose of any art medium,” and the wholesale histories written-off by a United States’ media hegemony, are a powerful yawp against more reductive narratives.
See: Super Columbine Massacre RPG!—20 Years Later, are the Limits Still Winning?
