Simon Parkin

Simon Parkin is an English writer. He is a contributing writer for The New Yorker, a critic for The Observer, and the author of two non-fiction books. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Statesman, 1843, and he is a frequent contributor to The Long Read in The Guardian.

Parkin has been the recipient of two awards for "Excellence in Feature Writing" from the Society of Professional Journalists.

Parkin began contributing to The New Yorker, where he often writes about technology, in 2013. In 2016 he became the first video game critic for The Observer, contributing to The New Review, the paper's critics' pages, on the first Sunday of the month. Parkin has also written long-form journalism for Harpers, The New York Times and is a regular contributor to both The Guardian Weekend Magazine and the newspaper's long-form journalism section, The Long Read.

His 2016 Harper's story "So Subtle a Catch", which investigates the widespread theft of carp from British lakes, was included in the 2017 edition of The Best American Nonrequired Reading.

The New York Times has praised Parkin's "literary eye for scenic and investigative detail" and described his criticism on gaming and play as "thoughtful and serious." The Library Journal has described Parkin's journalism as "groundbreaking", claiming that "his reportage leads to brilliant, fresh insights."

Parkin has been both a critic of and advocate for the video game medium. "Tabloids are forever blaming video games for their role in the latest school shooting," he said in a 2016 interview with Salon. "That kind of reporting is increasingly passé, simply because most readers under the age of 45 have grown up with video games in their entertainment diet so the pariah schtick doesn't work on them... That said, game industry leaders have often failed to deal with these scandals in a mature way. It's possible to acknowledge that you’re not part of a problem while simultaneously offering ideas for how you might be part of the solution."

In a separate interview with The Guardian, Parkin argued that "the ability that video games have to allow us to inhabit another person or another position in life, or another race or gender, is hugely powerful, and something that we’ve only just started to explore."

Parkin has been the recipient of two awards for "Excellence in Feature Writing" from the Society of Professional Journalists and was a finalist in the British Foreign Press Awards for his reporting on the thirtieth anniversary of the Chernobyl Nuclear Disaster.

Parkin's first non-fiction book, Death by Video Game is an investigation into a number of deaths at Internet cafes in Taiwan, where the deceased had spent extended periods of time playing online video games immediately prior to their death. It was published in the UK in August 2015 by Serpent's Tail and in the US in July 2016 by Melville House Publishing.

The Library Journal claimed "this work ignites a series of debates crucial to the future of video games", while The Washington Post praised Parkin's "deft sense of the ways that video games appeal to and satiate the longings of the spirit" describing the book as "an excellent sociocultural study of the 21st century's quintessential art form."

The National Post was critical of what the reviewer perceived to be a gender imbalance in the book. "Though the book is packed with insightful interviews, Parkin mentions only four female game designers by name and presents extended interviews with only two of them," the reviewer wrote. "The book's interest in these women...seems to be primarily their experiences of assault and harassment."

Parkin's second book, A Game of Birds and Wolves is a narrative non-fiction history book exploring the contribution of a group of wargaming experts, known as the Western Approaches Tactical Unit, to the Battle of the Atlantic during the Second World War.

A film adaptation of A Game of Birds and Wolves, is in development at Steven Spielberg's production company Amblin Partners and DreamWorks Pictures, with a screenplay by Vicky Jones.