A quick diagram I whipped up to illustrate the current state of affairs.
Ok that’s to say that MOST game journalists aren’t passionate about games. You do realize that right? This diagram is wrong. Most game journalists are inside the people who are passionate about games area… this is all off.
Sigh. I wish I was still this naive.
This is a little silly, but it does get at a point that’s it easy for those in the games press to become jaded about games because their lives start to revolve around the medium and the industry. Not happened to me, thankfully; I just beat the ass offa Metroid Fusion when I should’ve been writing a column. Go misplaced priorities, bye bye sleep.
A thought: if you were to make a venn diagram of (and I still hate the term) games journalists then it would consist of the blue circle, another circle which I’ll call ‘writers’ i.e. those who can actually write, and the point where the two meet i.e. people who are passionate about games and can write. The major thing, surely, is that the number of those just in the blue circle is too big and the crossover is too small. At least that’s how it seems to me a lot of the time.
And I’ll be the first to hold my hands up and say when I started writing about games I was definitely only in the blue circle and nowhere near the crossover. But I knew that from the off. I wasn’t some kid thinking he could be the next Gerstmann just by sitting at his keyboard and typing out thoughts doolally. So I picked up a style guide, started reading shit up, and taught myself to write, at least to above a my-eyes-are-bleeding-stop-the-words standard.
Maybe I still am nowhere near the crossover, but at least I know that the standard of my writing is just as key as my passion for games, maybe even more so, so I’ve got to keep working to ensure I’m nearing that crossover and not floundering around just in the blue circle. I think that the biggest problem in games journalism, and I reckon this goes right to the top at some fairly big places, is that the people who are just in the blue circle don’t even realize they’re just in the blue circle - or maybe they don’t even care. If this diagram really rang true then I don’t think Ben would have much to write about in his blog each day. Well, except how fucking boring games journalism would be, but the blog isn’t called Games Journalists are Boring Fuckwits.
(Source: gamejournos)
I am not a number. But I am a vowel.
