Those who have been reading for a while will recall that I've been getting back into magazines recently. I ordered a bunch of retro mags (as in, actually old magazines) from eBay a while back, and I also subscribed to the modern Retro Gamer magazine. And you know what, I've been really enjoying reading these magazines — a lot more than reading websites.
As it happens, I don't really read big gaming websites at all any more. Since around 2010 or so, when many of them seemed to establish an actively adversarial relationship with their readership, I just haven't really enjoyed reading many of them; add clickbait into the equation and I have no real desire to support many of them any more. I don't need to go to them for news, reviews are churned out with little real care in order to hit an embargo date, and opinion pieces… well, the less said about those, the better in most cases.
You could level some of those criticisms — or similar ones, anyway — at magazines, of course. Magazines have got things wrong before; magazines on store shelves need to do something to make you read them (though delightfully, Retro Gamer has clean, text-free subscriber-only covers that highlight the gorgeous artwork they use each issue); and sometimes reviewers don't have nearly enough space to talk about something complex.
But there's something different there that I really like; I think it's the distinct separation between the people writing the magazine and the audience. It's an unspoken agreement that the people writing the magazine are the ones "in charge" in this interaction, and the audience, in turn, trusts them to provide accurate and/or entertaining information.
With a magazine, there's no articles that you feel have been written purely to bait people into getting angry in the comments; indeed, there are no comments at all. It sounds like a stupidly obvious thing to say, but the fact that you finish reading a magazine article and then have no opportunity to get tempted into reading what some illiterate, angry teenager has to say about something the writer never actually said in the article… oh, it's bliss, it is, it really is.
Plus the simple fact that the magazine is a tangible, physical object inherently makes me value it — and its contents — a lot more. I've lost count of the number of times I've been distracted by the noise of your average webpage these days — particularly as autoplaying video ads seem to be becoming more and more pervasive on big sites — and I absolutely hate reading things for too long on either a phone or tablet screen.
The one benefit the Internet has is that it brings people together. I wouldn't have met most of you people reading this if the Internet wasn't a thing — indeed, many of you even know me because of my writing for websites; something that I still do to this day. You will probably have noticed if you've been around as long as I have, though, that the vibe I have on the sites that I work on is distinctly magazine-inspired rather than anything else; that is absolutely deliberate due to my own personal preferences, and actually sitting down with some magazines for the first time in years is reminding me exactly why I have those preferences.
That was a ramble with no real point, huh? But anyway. Subscribe to Retro Gamer or something, it's worth it. And they probably have some sort of offer on right now, they usually do.
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