Alyssa Mercante

Alyssa Mercante is a freelance video game and culture journalist whose work analyzes unique social groups within gaming, highlights diversity, and exposes problematic practices and behaviors. She first began writing about video games in high school, but didn’t officially break into video game journalism until 2018, when she started working for GamesRadar.

In November 2022, she joined Kotaku as its sole Senior Editor, where she was able to do important work like unpacking the Twitch deep-fake porn scandal, highlighting how video game and comic conventions are still unsafe spaces for women and queer folks, debunking a widespread conspiracy theory, and, of course, getting to the bottom of the Witcher 3 vagina controversy.

She’s been playing games since she was a young girl (mostly Spyro and Kingdom Hearts), but really cut her teeth in Halo 3 and Black Ops lobbies, where she learned that being a woman in this space demands poise and persistence. Now, she spends her time one-tricking Cloak and Dagger in Marvel Rivals, trying to get past the purple chip difficulty in Balatro, and streaming on Twitch, where she offers analysis and insight into the latest gaming and tech news.