Fran Magazine: Issue #106

videogamedunkey has a cold

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A tale of three write-arounds

I have no recollection of reading “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” when I was in college, but it appears on just about every creative writing syllabus I’ve ever seen. The 1966 Gay Talese write-around profile of Sinatra — write-around meaning that Sinatra would not speak with Talese — is the gold standard for the form. It’s a great profile, made better by the fact that Esquire was able to give Talese all the money he needed in order to write this thing, which involved him following Sinatra around and speaking to anyone and everyone he could get on the record.

I wound up taking the Talese piece off of my own creative writing syllabi — not for lack of quality so much as lack of time and space and energy to discuss a piece so otherwise complex. Teaching profiles (as different from straight-up interviews) proved a challenge unto itself during the creative nonfiction elements of my class, and I opted for a figure slightly more known to my 19 year old (though admittedly New Jersey-based) students. We have famous people “like” Sinatra these days, but I’m not sure if we have anyone who feels as appropriate an analogue in modern times.

I am fascinated by the write-around profile as a form, in part because having access to notable figures grows rarer and rarer over time and as we discussed last week, I am a bit of a formalist, and I like when a piece has an interesting set of rules for itself. Knowing that you can’t talk to the topic of a piece forces some degree of creativity — either in sourcing or tone or research, or some combination of all those things. I’ve written a few smaller-scale profiles — over Zoom, mostly, in which it’s much harder to do a kind of, “so-and-so ordered the cobb salad” nonsense that you otherwise see in a lot of magazine profiles — but never a write-around, in part because I am at a certain tier in the industry where my subjects are typically attainable. No one, say, is asking me to get anywhere near a type of person who’s not doing press — though I’d sure love to try.

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In February, the indisputable best of these new profiles dropped, the previously mentioned New Yorker article by Louisa Thomas titled “How Nikola Jokić Because the World’s Best Basketball player.” Readers of the Fran Magazine Sunday Dispatch will have at least some loose familiarity with my Denver basketball alliances, due in part to “having a boyfriend from Denver.” I’d been previously curious about the NBA, and I would have considered myself a passive fan starting around the 2017-2018 season because my boss at the time had an infectious excitement for the league and it was great to learn by osmosis and have her tell me which players I should be paying attention to. At the time, and basically up until I started dating Phil, I was rooting for the Milwaukee Bucks on account of vague Chicago Bulls fatigue¹ and because Giannis Antetokounmpo is a great player to latch onto. When I hopped time zones over to Denver, I found the Nuggets were a team full of likable guys,² but Jokić is far and away the most notable figure on the team. He is the proper noun, the person of interest. I know this because I can sell him with ease to friends who don’t watch the sport — he is a giant Serbian for whom basketball is a job and horses are a passion — who understand, as I’m such more longer time Denver fans know, that he is something special.

Thomas’s Jokić profile has to cope with the fact that the player mostly doesn’t do American press, or has more or less ceased to do it altogether outside of post-game press conferences and court-side interviews. His English isn’t amazing. (Thomas writes: “When I e-mailed Jokić’s Serbian agent, Miško Ražnatović, a former pro who has helped bring a number of Eastern European players to the N.B.A., and asked about interviewing his client, I got a one-sentence reply: ‘He doesn’t speak with media.’”) What Thomas does, in turn, is essentially the Talese around: she speaks with people near or around him who are willing to talk about him, she delves into his biography a little, she watches him play.

What feels most exciting about the Thomas profile, and why I keep coming back to it as a piece of writing, is that she calls up a multitude of basketball alums and experts, especially those to which Jokić has become compared, and asks them if they feel if that comparison is apt. Just about everyone she speaks to compares him to an even different player, or combination of players, proving that no one can really put their finger on what type of guy he is. Bill Walton compares him to Steve Nash. Larry Brown compares him to Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. Jerry West compares him to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. Lebron James compares him to, well, Lebron James. (Thomas writes: “Jokić is a master of this new geometry. ‘He sees plays before they happen,’ LeBron James said, after the Nuggets swept the Lakers in the Western Conference Finals. (James accurately noted that he does, too.)”).³ Jokić is undeniable, but he is elusive.⁴ Thomas grounds him as best she can by foregrounding the history that came to allow such a player to rise through the ranks, but still: he’s inexplicable. Talking to him directly would prove no differently.

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Of interest to me about a month ago was my former coworker and Gossip Time writer

Allie Jones

’s profile of Tree Paine for the Wall Street Journal. Paine is Taylor Swift’s longtime publicist, and certainly the most known figure in Swift’s business apparatus outside of her immediate family and, like, Jack Antonoff. An example, say, of Paine’s general power can be seen in this otherwise light-hearted video of Swift at the Eras Tour movie.

Paine has worked with Swift for about a decade, and where Jones’s profile really soars is in the rise and fall of Swift’s mid-2010s, and the ways in which that a combination of public retreat and Paine’s expertise were able to carry Swift into a new decade. It’s not that Swift would have never pulled through the Reputation/Kimye feud so much as when she reemerged sometime after Miss Americana (2020) and Midnights (2022), specifically, it felt like a new public-facing Taylor Swift.

Jones can’t get near Tree Paine in the same sense that no one can really get near Taylor Swift. Though she can provide a rounder sense of where Paine came from and how she came to have a — if not the — singular client, the piece mostly succeeds through tone. Jones knows that the concept of “Tree Paine” — from name to job — is a funny figure in pop culture. This is maybe the one person with more power, so to speak, than Taylor Swift, who is able to manipulate the singer’s lore just as Swift does herself in her songs. That she is ostensibly just “a woman from Nashville” makes the whole thing seem that much more bananas: “The last time she sat for an interview was 2012, when she was a VP at Warner and appeared in Nashville Lifestyles’ “Most Beautiful People” issue; she posed for a photo in front of a shiplap-covered wall wearing a peasant blouse and made the astonishing revelation that she was ‘trying to enjoy life,’” Jones writes. “I cannot report whether that is still true; Paine declined to be interviewed for this story.”

The two most revealing aspects of the story have little to do with Paine’s biography so much as they do points of editorial feedback that Paine gave to other writers. Here’s where I was reminded of Janet Malcolm’s excellent book The Silent Woman, which is a study of Sylvia Plath as told through multiple Plath biographers. Malcolm argues that trying to write a biography of Plath will ruin your life, as evidenced by the fact that the hottest girl she went to University of Michigan with had her life ruined trying to write a biography of Plath. The stakes are not quite so life and death in Jones’s profile but there are two editorial anecdotes of note: 1) that one journalist who wrote about Swift’s stadium tours “had to agree that anything they witnessed or discovered about Swift while spending time with the other artist before a show would be off the record,” and 2) that a quote that Emily Fitzpatrick used from Swift in a profile of Swift friend Suki Waterhouse had to be “included in full.”⁵ No one can control the full force of the media, but what Jones shows in Paine’s attempts is that there is a stalwart effort to do so — lest face consequences (an email).

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The intended topic of today’s magazine is the new video game Animal Well, which I have been playing for approximately two days and am mostly enjoying, or at least enjoying a lot more than I did Celeste, the last significant platform game I played which made me feel so insane and stupid. Animal Well was produced by the video game YouTuber known as “videogamedunkey” or “Dunkey,” who, for my two cents, is probably the funniest person on that site, let alone in video games journalism. That Dunkey spun his success into indie game producing feels like a nice step forward for someone who made a lot of money doing very stupid videos, which resulted, somewhat bafflingly, in a bizarre and empty-worded profile by Zachary Small in The New York Times this past week.

Reporters rarely have control over their headlines but the words “pithy” and “plea” raise a strange alarm: I wouldn’t really consider either of these words when describing the tone of Dunkey’s videos nor his encouragement for people to buy the game. (Referenced in an adjective-less sentence, Small shares the video Dunkey made in which he goes into multiplayer games and forces virtual characters at gunpoint to wishlist his game. It is very stupid — but it is not really a plea.)

Dunkey, whose real name is Jason, is too press-shy to discuss his findings, therefore Small goes instead of his wife, Leah, who is a bit of a spokesperson for her husband, but none of these quotes really lend themselves to providing more detail about either why Dunkey has become such a phenomenon nor why Animal Well feels worth playing. Conversations with Billy Basso, the game’s creator, feel otherwise straight-forward. It’s possible that a piece like this grappled with a type of time crunch, but it paints neither a vivid profile of the game’s producer, creator, nor the game itself. Where I guess I can see myself agreeing with Small is that part of the appeal of Dunkey’s reviews and content in general is that it never feels influenced by outside funding or access to whatever. He has a huge audience because he’s not afraid to feel a little mean about something if that’s how he feels. Outside of that, however, he’s mostly just doing stupid stuff, like the all-time classic “Fortnite Daycare,” in which he finds himself playing Fortnite with a bunch of actual children.

As for Animal Well, like a number of platformers I’ve played, I get very stressed about jumping and how to jump, but I am otherwise having a good, mildly infuriating (on purpose) time. It doesn’t feel half as addictive as Hades, thankfully, which means I can play for an hour here or there and not feeling my whole life is spinning out of control and that I am betraying my friends or family. The art is mystifying and engaging — there is always something on the peripheral that I’m catching the second time I enter a room. On at least two different occasions, I’ve wandered into a room, encountered some kind of giant beast, and then run away. It’s tonally quite different from the type of work that Dunkey puts out — for good reason. To pigeonhole his overall effect as a type of arch commentator removes his love of the game(s). I first got into his videos because he did a reappraisal of Death Stranding — a game I found extremely frustrating, if not fascinating. He too admits he spent a long time very mad at the game, and annoyed with its conceit, before eventually coming around. That type of continued criticism and reevaluation, along with a shifting sense of priorities in gaming, makes his criticism feel necessary, and his foray into production that much more thrilling.

1. When will the Chicago Bulls be good again? Sound off in the comments…

2. My personal favorite being Aaron Gordon… who is probably also the hottest…

3. Five punctuations back-to-back… it literally sickens me to see.

4. It’s giving “Eastern European.”

5. The quote, while indulgent… is very nice: “Suki has always seemed like she stepped out of a time machine. Her music is so raw and hopelessly romantic because that’s how she moves through the world,” Swift says. “When we hang out, I often come away wondering how someone can be simultaneously spontaneous and free—and also preternaturally wise. She is the wildest person I know who I would also trust to keep any secret. You’ll be stressed about something trivial, she’ll just look at you, cigarette in hand, and say ‘Babe, you know none of this actually matters.’ And she’ll be exactly right.” Some significant fraction of Swift’s broader appeal is that she seems like someone who is probably a really good friend.