Joshua Rivera

Joshua Rivera is a columnist at Aftermath whose work treats games and popular entertainment as parts of a single mediascape rather than separate beats. He covers video games, genre films, and streaming series with a critic’s eye for how they shape and reflect contemporary culture, writing for both specialist games outlets and mainstream audiences. His pieces blend close reading of individual works with attention to industry dynamics and the online cultures that grow around them.

Games Criticism For Mainstream Audiences

Rivera describes himself as a critic who writes about games for non‑gaming publications, aiming his work at readers who are not steeped in specialist games writing.

He has worked as an entertainment reporter for Tech Insider at Business Insider, with a primary focus on video games and comic books. His professional bios note work for outlets including Entertainment Weekly, Fast Company, The Daily Beast, Lifehacker, and Kotaku, alongside contributions to GQ, Vulture, and The Week, underscoring a career that moves easily between games and broader entertainment coverage.

At The Week he is described as a freelance entertainment journalist and critic, which reflects how his games writing sits alongside film, television, and pop‑culture commentary rather than in a silo. A piece for The Ringer on the Resident Evil series, titled “Resident Evil Has Always Been Horrifying - and Hilarious,” shows him treating a long‑running game franchise like any other major entertainment property, analyzing both its scares and its humor for a general audience.

Games, The Internet, And Everything That Comes After

Aftermath is described as a worker‑owned, reader‑supported site covering video games, the internet, and the cultures that surround them, and Rivera’s column sits squarely in that space. The masthead lists him as a columnist and notes that subscriber support allowed the site to bring him on as a monthly contributor, positioning his work as part of its core editorial voice.

In that role he writes pieces that use games to talk about broader online and cultural realities, including the way hype, fandom, and platform dynamics reshape how people encounter media. An example highlighted in an interview at Unwinnable is his Aftermath piece on the “damning hype” around Grand Theft Auto VI, which he frames as evidence of how a narrow perspective can transform the mediascape and the industry into something rotten.

That concern with how games sit inside wider media and internet systems runs through his Aftermath work, where he engages with titles, platforms, and audience behavior as linked parts of the same cultural ecosystem.

Interviews And Conversations With Creators

Rivera’s bylines at Aftermath include reported interviews that foreground the voices of creators while still bearing his critical perspective. In “Forbidden Solitaire’s Developers Made The Opposite Of What They Planned: A Hit,” he talks with Grey Alien Games and Night Signal Entertainment about their twist on solitaire and how a modest experiment turned into an unexpected success, focusing on the creative decisions behind the game and the reality of making a hit from something small.

His questions highlight how familiar formats like solitaire can be bent into something new, and how small studios think about genre, mechanics, and audience reception.

Another Aftermath piece, “Twin Peaks And How To Get Back Up When Evil Roams Your Streets,” features Rivera in conversation with Scott Meslow about a Twin Peaks book and tour, asking how open people are about what the series means to them and how meeting audiences changes the understanding of the show. Across these interviews he treats games and television as texts that live in communities, using dialogue with creators to surface what their work means to people beyond simple fandom.

Cross-Beat Entertainment Reporting

Rivera’s entertainment reporting extends beyond games into film and streaming, and he carries that cross‑beat experience back into his games coverage.

At Aftermath, a recent headline - “Hulu’s Queasy Thriller Furious Wants Our Hands At Abusers’ Throats” - shows him writing about a Hulu thriller with the same care he brings to games, focusing on how genre storytelling engages with abuse, revenge, and the discomfort of wanting retribution. His broader professional profiles emphasize that he writes about video games and comic books alongside other entertainment forms, reinforcing that he sees these media as parts of one landscape rather than niche specialties.

A note on his Kotaku author page describes him arriving there because he had figured out a way to do games criticism outside the usual sphere of games journalism, which speaks to a voice shaped by work in general‑interest outlets as much as in the games press. Taken together, his roles at Business Insider, Kotaku, The Week, The Ringer, and Aftermath mark him as a critic who treats games as entertainment, entertainment as culture, and culture as something that must be examined across platforms and mediums at once.