#oneaday Day 476: Always Questionable

I find it fascinating to look back over old games magazines and even websites. In the former case, it's largely a nostalgia thing; it reminds me of the good old days when you'd go out and buy the latest issue of your favourite magazine each month, keen to devour it in detail (inevitably on the bog in my case) and explore the cover-mounted floppy disk or CD.

What I've become a bit more keenly aware of recently, though, is that particularly back in the early days, writing about games was… an inexact science. A lot of people — professionals, even — really weren't actually very good at it at all. It wasn't at all unusual to read an article in something like, say, ST Action (which is probably the worst offender from my recent revisits of such publications) and discover that the entire review was largely paraphrased stuff from the manual, or what keys did what, with maybe a paragraph in a boxout reserved for the reviewer's actual opinion.

There are exceptions, of course. Atari User featured strong content for those interested in doing more with their microcomputer than "just" gaming — a common desire back in the 8-bit days in particular. And Page 6 magazine, which my brother, father and I all wrote for at various times, excelled at long-form reviews and features — particularly on specialised subjects. I understand now why my father was so exacting about immaculate standards of spelling, punctuation, grammar, phrasing and solid arguments before even thinking about submitting a final piece. The bar may have been set pretty low by some publications, but that didn't mean it wasn't worth clearing it by a significant margin!

But when it was bad… man, it was really bad. At least part of it was undoubtedly down to cramming things in to fit a word count and page layout, but I've seen a lot of articles that really aren't terribly helpful or even interesting from back in the day. And this actually extended into at least part of the Web era, too; just recently, I've been looking back at reviews of the Atelier Iris games from when it originally came out, and been surprised to see some pretty dodgy articles that, in a lot of cases, get fundamental facts wrong; I saw more than one claiming it was a Nippon Ichi game, for example.

It's easy to look back on this stuff with the benefit of hindsight, though. The world of video games is one where the craft of writing about it has had to develop at the same breakneck pace as the technology itself, and people haven't always been able to keep up. Unfortunately, the direction a lot of mainstream coverage has gone these days — while often technically proficient — isn't necessarily super-helpful either, albeit in an entirely different way.

Oh, and just to make sure: I'm not saying the way I choose to do things is the "right" or "best" way by any means, nor that I'm in any way superior to those who have done this for a living at various points in the medium's history. I just find it fascinating to look back and see how far we've come… and, well, how far we still have to go. Perhaps in a slightly different direction!