Sara Hovda
Sara Hovda covers gaming as a space where performance, identity, and community meet, bringing a poet’s eye and a streamer's fluency to her work at Shacknews. Her published Shacknews work currently centers on Games Done Quick, with a feature on what it takes for speedrunners to reach the event’s stage. That combination of live-event reporting, streaming experience, and literary craft distinguishes her from a generic gaming news reporter.
Games Done Quick and speedrunning stories
At Shacknews, Hovda writes about Games Done Quick through the lens of the people who fight to get onto its stage, rather than treating it as a schedule of runs or announcements. In “Say My Name: What it takes to make it to the Games Done Quick stage,” she frames the event around the effort, skill, and recognition involved in becoming one of the runners showcased there. The title itself signals an interest in how names, personas, and on-stage presence matter as much as game selection or technical execution.
This kind of feature-led approach places individual journeys and community culture at the center of the story, rather than just summarising the event from a distance.
Streaming and online entertainment
Outside Shacknews, Hovda works as an online entertainer and streamer, regularly performing and playing games for a live audience. Her profiles describe her as deeply embedded in gaming, confident in her skills, and comfortable treating games as performance as much as pastime.
On stream, her conversations range across poetry, literary theory, queer theory, and everyday experience, which keeps her close to communities where games intersect with culture and identity. That live experience shows up in her journalism as an understanding of how events like Games Done Quick feel from the perspective of performers and viewers, not just organisers or publishers.
It also means she approaches gaming stories with an awareness of chat dynamics, parasocial relationships, and the way online audiences respond to risk, failure, and success on camera.
Poetry and queer, rural narratives
Hovda is also an award-winning poet whose work appears in contemporary literary journals, with a debut manuscript recognised by a major prize and scheduled for publication. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in magazines including Passages North, South Dakota Review, Permafrost, North American Review, Frontier Poetry, Nimrod, Nashville Review, and Shō Poetry Journal.
In those venues, she writes about queerness, family, rural landscapes, and the places where those things interconnect. That background gives her gaming coverage a strong sense of voice and atmosphere: she pays attention to language, to the emotional stakes of performance, and to the ways marginalised or rural players find a place in online spaces. Compared with a straight news writer on the gaming beat, she is more likely to foreground how events feel, how they shape identities, and how they echo themes familiar from contemporary poetry.
The result is gaming journalism that reads as narrative-driven and character-focused, suited to stories about speedrunning, streaming, and the communities that form around them.
4 more gaming journalists.
Adam Bankhurst
Adam Bankhurst covers the busiest crossroads of gaming and entertainment for IGN, with a focus on breaking news, live event roundups, and franchise guides. He reports on releases, updates, hardware, films, anime, and major fan universes including Disney, Star Wars, Marvel, Lord of the Rings, Nintendo, Final Fantasy, and Mass Effect. He has covered events such as E3 and PAX, and has written The Game Awards 2020: All the Winners and X-Men Movies in Order: The Full Timeline. His work turns announcements, shows, and timelines into clear, digestible stories. He leads with dates, decisions, platforms, prices, and viewing or playing order. He also helps manage IGN’s homepage and contributes news, reviews, previews, features, commerce, and wiki content.
Alejandro Josan
Alejandro Josan specialises in turning complex, high‑information subjects into concise, usable narratives with facts first and minimal opinion. He writes guides, lists, and features for GameTyrant, focusing on step‑by‑step instructions, completion times, and whether in‑game systems are worth a player’s time. His work on titles like Rhapsody in Scarlet, Harvest Moon: Echoes of Teradea, and High on Life 2 explains progression, mechanics, systems, and different completion paths with clear numeric framing. He also breaks down layered systems in games such as Palworld and Infinite Craft into short, direct explanations. Outside GameTyrant, he has an extended track record on live‑service games, especially Destiny 2, covering tier lists, seasonal content, weapon “god rolls,” patch changes, and build optimisation. At Suggest, he is a resident crime expert reporting on breaking crime news and rare medical cases with clear timelines and careful use of official information.
Alex Van Aken
Alex Van Aken is a multimedia video game journalist who specializes in long-form documentaries, developer profiles, and weekly conversation-driven coverage of major releases and industry trends. He is senior video editor at Game Informer, where he leads the video team, travels for cover stories and studio visits, and hosts The Game Informer Show podcast. His reporting centers on cover story features and developer-focused coverage that highlight how games are designed and produced, often anchored to tentpole titles like Assassin’s Creed Mirage, Halo: Campaign Evolved, and World of Warcraft. Van Aken also writes previews, impressions, and reviews across action-adventure franchises, live-service expansions, and racing games. He builds independent game documentaries, appears on major industry platforms, and cites consulting experience on notable series, grounding his work in visual and audio storytelling and direct access to creators.
Alexander Lee
Alexander Lee covers how games, platforms and creators intersect with business. He leads news coverage at GamesBeat across gaming, entertainment, technology, the creator economy and the future of media. His core beat is platform strategy, live services and new game models, with close attention to Roblox, creator tools, monetization, communication features, safety and emerging technology. He also covers esports, content creators, regulation, accessibility and how design choices affect players and developers. Before GamesBeat, he covered gaming, esports and creators through advertising and marketing. His reporting connects product changes and policy decisions to their effects on companies, creators and audiences. He reports from industry events, uses participant voices to show business impact and analyzes longer-term strategy. He also hosts and joins podcast conversations with industry leaders.