Sarthak Khurana - Trigger Two Entertainment Serves As the Launchpad of the Next Generation of Gaming Journalists (Founder and Director, Trigger Two Entertainment, A Part of Storyteller Labs)

The most conception about video game journalists is that they play games and get paid. In fact, I was under the very misconception until I started working as a gaming journalist. The truth is, we’re paid to create content and coverage around video games. So while playing video games is an essential part of our jobs and we can do it at work clock, we never get paid to simply free games.

1. What role did your formative years play in making you who you are today?

My formative years as a gaming journalist started out as an intern at Gaming Central. Believe it or not, I became a gaming journalist just to get free games. However, that took me down a rabbit hole that I’m still falling through.

I learned two extremely important lessons back then that still serve as the basis of my operations.

Find your audience and serve them: No matter what kind of content you’re producing in the gaming niche, there ought to be an audience, all you need to do is look hard enough. Once you find them, serve them to the best of your abilities. It doesn’t matter if you’ve got an audience of 100 or 1,000,000, always give your best.
Don’t forget to play: As you read on, you’ll realize that while playing games is an important aspect of being a gaming journalist, it’s usually not a part of your job. However, it’s important to keep playing not just for the sake of being in the loop, but just for the love of gaming.

2. What is your earliest gaming memory? What attracted you to gaming in the first place?

The earliest gaming memory that I can remember is playing GTA Vice City on our first family computer. Back then, I must’ve been 7-8 (a highly inappropriate age to play GTA), but all I did was control the ‘ASWD’ keys to drive fancy cars while my brothers did everything on the mouse.

However, what really attracted me to gaming in the first place was its ability to ‘let you do what you can’t do in real life.’ This is the very reason that video games became a part of mainstream media and still propels the industry to a greater height every day.

I mean, where else can I climb up the Big Ben, drive a Lamborghini in Dubai, assassinate a drug lord in Mexico and fly past the Statue of Liberty all in the same day? Essentially, video games allow you to do what you can’t do, and often shouldn’t do, in real life.

3. Who are your role models in life and why?

I have multiple role models for different aspects of my life. I adore Hideo Kojima, the legendary video game designer, for being a visionary and thinking outside the box. I look up to Mr. Ratan Tata and Bill Gates for their open hearts and the ability to ‘give’.

One of my favorite Youtuber, Gehab, is the personification of ‘Find your audience and serve them well.’ Though he hasn’t been regular lately, I’ve been watching him since he had some few thousand subs. I also had the opportunity to talk to him at a previous job.

Then there are people around me. My family and a few of my friends have a great influence over my work, life, and investment ethics which have led me to where I am today.

4. What is the story behind T2 Entertainment?

Gaming journalism is a very elusive field of work, who wouldn’t want to be paid to play video games? However, unlike traditional journalism, there isn’t a stone-carved path to gaming journalism. In fact, it was not more than mere luck that brought me into this industry.

I want to change that, I want to help others become gaming journalists. Trigger Two Entertainment serves as the launchpad of the next generation of gaming journalists. No college out there offers any course to be a gaming journalist, and any indie course on the subject is quite shady, if not shady.

One can’t become a gaming journalist even if they know all the theoretical knowledge of the subject. It takes practice and a mentor to guide you through your journey. Furthermore, if you want to make a living in the field, then you need a few articles with your byline in a few reputed publications.

Trigger Two’s course on gaming and eSports journalism solves all those problems. We offer that most comprehensive course on gaming journalism, but that alone isn’t worth much. What matters is our workshop where our students practice their hands at gaming journalism under international editors with a combined experience of over three decades. All the articles written by the trainees are published under their byline on our highly reputed site.

While that’s the core of our company, we also like to have fun. The public side of Trigger Two is dedicated to promoting a healthy and inclusive gaming environment, but instead of doing it with boring guides and useless petitions, we take a hands-on approach with our talk show, Git Gud with Knighton. The first season of the show is going in full force while the second season already has a green light with even bigger guests on board.

5. What are the common misconceptions related to your profession and how do you combat them?

Honestly speaking, 14-year-old Sarthak at his first gaming journalism was very disappointed to find out this ‘ugly’ fact. However, the fact that I don’t have to pay for video games anymore, since they are provided to us by the publishers, helped me combat this misconception.

6. Gaming journalism is still a growing industry in India. How do you think the target group of people consuming gaming-related content will change in the coming years.

Not just gaming journalism, but gaming as a hobby and an industry is still in its formative years in India. The gaming boom in India can be easily accredited to three factors:

Accessible Hardware thanks to affordable smartphones
Cheap and reliable internet connectivity
Dedicated mobile titles such as PUBG

The gaming scene in India is mostly restricted to mobiles, AAA games have a negligible presence in India at the moment. However, while mobile games are here to stay, I strongly believe that India is looking forward to PC and console gaming.

The craze for PC building and the fact that the next-gen consoles blew off the shelves within a matter of minutes is the fact that Indian gamers want to experience AAA gaming, we’re just waiting for PC and consoles to be as or nearly as much accessibility as mobiles.

The rise to AAA gaming will give rise to local publications. Most of the gaming-related content is opinionated, save hard news, and hence bigger publications are inherently flawed. Let’s take reviews for example. Reviews are very subjective, so ideally I’d want to hear a review from someone who has the same taste in gaming as me before I make a purchase.

However, the problem with big publications is that they feature dozens of reviewers with varying views, yet the review goes out under the publication’s name, not to say anything about sugar coating. IGN’s North American, South American, and European sites often feature contradicting reviews, yet they’re all valued as the same. This problem was also acknowledged by Allanah Pearce, a veteran gaming journalist who formerly worked at IGN.

As AAA gaming finds a bigger presence in not just Tier 1, but Tier 2 and 3 cities as well, the audience for gaming journalism will expand rapidly. The future is the emergence of local gaming journalists who are serving a specific group who thinks just like them. Local content creators don’t need to be defined by geographic locality, but rather the locality of thought. A part of Trigger Two gaming and eSports journalism course is dedicated to raising local gaming journalists.

7. Finally, what’s your all-time favorite game?

The crown of my ‘favorite’ game is claimed by a new title every other month, but if we’re talking about ‘THE ALL-TIME FAVOURITE’ game, then I’ll have to go with Fable 3 from now-shut Lionhead Studios. It was probably the first game I played on my first console, Xbox 360, and instantly fell in love with the RPG elements of the game.

It was so immersive with the best economic systems in a video game. You could chop down the wood or play the lyre to earn some coins, invest them to buy properties, and rake off the interest. Fable 3, or rather the whole Fable series, also had the best NPC interaction mechanics out of any video game. I kid you not, you could tell fart jokes to an NPC till she fell in love with you. Sometimes I wish such mechanics worked in real life as well.

Sure, Fable 3 is not the best RPG ever. Heck, it’s not even the best Fable either, but it’s my all-time favorite because it opened a new world of video games for me, a world that took me to where I am today.

Giveaway: To celebrate the first season of Git Gud with Knighton and extend the experience of ‘Gitting Gud’, Trigger Two is also hosting an international Razer Death Adder gaming mouse giveaway. All you need to do to enter the giveaway is subscribe to their Youtube channel and leave your Instagram handle in the comments section of Git Gud with Knighton’s trailer.

About me:

Sarthak Khurana, better known by his Xbox gamer tag ‘Knighton’, is a 19-year-old gaming journalist and the host of Git Gud with Knighton. Although he didn’t go to college after high school, his CV says he’s got ‘Fancy Titles at Trigger Two Entertainment’, a déroutant way to say he’s the founder and director of the company. He’s been in the gaming media scene since he was 14, starting as an intern contributor at Gaming Central. He’s passionate about promoting positive and inclusive and non-toxic gaming.

Sarthak "Knighton" Khurana,

Founder and Director, Trigger Two Entertainment, a Part of Storyteller Labs

Interviewed By: Nishad Kinhikar