Alice0 is evolving! Please congratulate her on her ascent to Associate Editor

Exciting news today, folks. Our esteemed Alice0 is stepping into a brand-new role at the RPS Treehouse, morphing from News Editor into our very first Associate Editor. Alice0 has done an incredible job leading the news desk since she joined the site all the way back in 2014, but this new role will give her the space and freedom to step back from the daily news cycle and focus on writing the things she does best : the What’s Betters of this world, elegies to exploding mouse mats, intriguing mod scene and esports stuff, and posts about more bikes in video games please. Come and congratulate her in the comments below.

To explain some of the thinking behind this change, let me do a little scene setting. If you could peer into our RPS Slack channel, you’d see a chat awash with links to incredible looking indie games, strange Itch projects and loads of neat demos. Most of them come from Alice0. It’s one of her greatest strengths, and her ability to constantly root out all these amazing new games is something I’ve always admired about her. Trouble is, the news cycle being what it is, there was never enough time to write about all of them. The same goes for some of Alice0’s more esoteric PC gaming posts, too, like her What’s Better series. One way or another, there was always something else that needed writing instead – which is a shame, because these are exactly the sorts of games and posts RPS has championed in the past, and exactly what I’d like to continue doing on the site going forward.

So we decided to mix things up a bit. When Graham (RPS in peace) and I first spoke to Alice0 about this new role, this was our pitch: to lead the charge on growing the Indiescovery section of the site, and writing more blog-style posts about games that go beyond the traditional news cycle, highlighting games from Itch, Steam, Game Pass and beyond. And the answer was an instant yes.

It’s taken us a while to enact this change – it took us a bit longer than we expected to find our new news reporter to take over the bulk of our news writing (hello CJ!) – but hopefully you’ll have already seen some of the fruits of this shift over the last week and a bit: things like the revival of Screenshot Saturday Mondays and What’s Better, and a bunch of demo impressions from games all around the internet.

You can expect lots more of these types of posts going forward, too. Alice0 has a bunch of exciting ideas on what she wants to do with this new role, and I’m super excited about seeing them take shape on the site. I don’t want to spoil everything she’s got in store, but here’s a small taste of what’s to come: in addition to everything mentioned above, you can expect more mods, more impressions of big trending games shooting up the Steam charts, and maybe even some classic Old News for you as well.

As for how this will affect our more traditional news coverage, that’s where our new reporter CJ comes in. He’ll be on hand to continue writing about all the same big topics we’ve written about in the past, as well as doing more interviews, community reporting and all the good stuff you’re used to. Very soon, we’ll also have our new section editor in place to assist in writing our daily news posts, editing those posts and working together with Alice Bee and myself to set the general news agenda. I’m excited! And I hope you are too.

For now, though, please join me in congratulating Alice0 on her new role in the comments below.