Tom Chick

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Tom Chick, Sept. 2006

Tom W. Chick (birthday August 14, 1966) is an American television and movie actor, and games journalist. Among fans, his best known TV roles are as Oscar's lover Gil in the US version of The Office and the hard-hitting reporter Gordon in The West Wing. As a writer, his most notable columns are the "Shoot Club" series hosted on his own website, and game reviews in magazines such as Computer Gaming World.

1 Biography
2 Writing career
3 Acting career
4 Selected filmography
5 References
6 External links

[edit] Biography

Chick keeps his personal life relatively private, and so not much is known about his early life. It is known that he attended Harvard Divinity School and received a Masters of Theological Studies^[1] with a focus on the Old Testament. Deciding not to pursue the ministry, he later moved to Hollywood, California where he currently resides and pursues a career in writing about video games and occasionally acting for television roles. He is also the co-founder and administrator of a popular web-based forum for games discussion, Quarter To Three.

[edit] Writing career

Chick is an independent journalist whose columns on video games have appeared in a wide variety of media. As an independent columnist, he has been able to write for a number of sites, including Firing Squad^[2] Yahoo Games^[3], Gamespy^[4], Xtreme Gamer^[5], 1Up^[6], Rotten Tomatoes^[7] and others. His articles have also shown up in magazines such as the "Tom vs. Bruce" series in Computer Gaming World, and he was listed as "one of the field's rare American practitioners" in an article on "New Games Journalism" in the New York Times^[8].

Chick's reviews are no stranger to controversy as he has been an outspoken critic of what he calls the "7-9 rating scale" at some game review sites^[9], and due to occasional game reviews which were widely considered to be different from the main, such as his harshly critical review of Deus Ex of which he said "I'd say it's only 90% bad." in a June 2000 review^[10].

He has also collaborated on other games journalism projects, such as a podcast with independent games developer Brad Wardell hosted at PowerUser.TV.

[edit] Acting career

Tom Chick as Gordon in The West Wing

While not aggressively pursuing acting roles, Chick does still perform minor television roles from time to time. In the last few years, he has played the recurring reporter Gordon in The West Wing, Oscar's homosexual lover Gil in The Office, and Mario in The Nine.