Doom & Gloom

To its harshest critics, the Sunday Papers on hip PC games blog Rock Paper Shotgun is just a clique-ish list of articles from the pens of Kieron Gillen's mates. I reckon that sort of criticism is pretty unfair and untrue, and I suspect those who suggest such things are mostly just envious of Gillen's massive influence over the nature and direction of videogame debate. (But y'know, OBVIOUSLY now that I've defended him on these trend-making pages, I'll be pretty outraged if he doesn't link to something of mine in the next couple of weeks.)

Ahem.

Doom

I'm in a funny mood. As anyone who read my painfully self-conscious previous blog post might have noticed, I was unusually pleased with the last couple of "proper" articles I wrote- one on Arkham Asylum and the other on Mass Effect 2. Yet now a few days have passed and my poor fragile ego has taken a battering from the ZERO total comments posted on them both. Every article I've ever written for A. N. Other game site has, until this point, ALWAYS received at least one comment. Even this dull review of an even duller game I did ages ago. Then I go write a couple of the best pieces I've ever written and no-one seems to give a damn.

What's that about?

Gloom

Answers [CHOOSE ONE]:

a. The author is completely incapable of judging the quality of his own work.
b. The author completely misjudged the audience of the sites he was writing for.
c. These things happen. Number of comments ≠ quality of article. The author should get over it.
d. The entire world probably hates the author.


Please don't leave your answers in a comment box.

ANYWAY, enough of the self-pitying tangents. The thing tying all of this together is Michael Walbridge's post (linked to on RPS this morning) about giving up games journalism. It makes for pretty bleak reading, but funnily enough I feel more inspired than discouraged by it. The notion that "videogame journalism is full" is obviously a nonsense, my guess is that it just feels that way if you're desperate to land a permanant salaried position somewhere and are not quite capable of showing you're 1.4 times as good as the next applicant. (While, to be fair, also having more than your fair share of bad luck and getting a bit messed around.)

From my position of relative ignorance, it seems that there are probably 101 ways to attempt to find some room on the videogame journalism raft. And what's exciting is that there are 1,001 different ways the raft might go. Most importantly of all, games-writing offers massive scope to be a bit creative, and at its best, can be more fun than the game-playing itself.

So yeah, whatever, despite the reasons for doom and gloom- I reckon I'll probably keep writing about videogames for a little while yet.