1620: Community Matters

The Squadron of Shame, the "gaming book club" that was born on the 1up Radio message boards and has subsequently lived in several places across the Internet, has moved house again. We now have our own forum here — though if Squad co-founder "Beige" gets things sorted, we'll have either that forum or a variation thereof on our own domain before long, which will be nice.

Forums aren't all that fashionable these days, though they are still used somewhat, particularly for communities relating to specific software companies or even individual games. I can't say I've used one for a very long time indeed now, but having gotten back into the swing of posting on one thanks to the new Squadron of Shame boards, I can honestly say I've missed them.

The reason? They're completely different to the way modern social media works. While you may think that social media would be the ideal place to begin discussions and have in-depth conversations, in actuality modern social media is not at all well-suited for this task. Whereas many forums have long-life conversational threads that stick around for months or even years, the very nature of social media means that posts are transient — they're there one moment, gone the next, replaced by a cat picture, some vapid meme or One Of Those Clickbait Headlines That Makes Poor Use Of Headline Case And You Just Won't Believe. And while certain social media posts can attract a long string of comments and stick around for a while due to consistent interest — the reason why Facebook steadfastly refuses to organise posts in chronological order is because of this, if you were wondering — they'll still fall away far quicker than an equivalent topic on a forum.

This is fine for the sort of vapid nonsense that people post on Facebook and Twitter on a daily basis, but less ideal for more long-form discussion on more specific topics — such as the sort of thing we like to stroke our collective chins over at the Squadron of Shame. Now I know that many existing, well-established forums in 2014 — long-standing gaming forum NeoGAF is a good example — have proportions of the community that do not like seeing "walls of text" (even when they use paragraphs and punctuation and everything), but the fact is that forums are ideally suited to long-form discussion and thoughtful discourse. They're not instant messages, they're not time-sensitive, they're not places to post "fire and forget" comments that you never look at the responses to — they're places for asynchronous communication between people of similar interests, and an excellent means of having far more detailed discussions than is possible on social media in its current form.

Social media is crowded. Social media is noisy. Social media is like stumbling into the middle of a party, slightly drunk, and shouting whatever you feel like and hoping someone hears it. And, sometimes, that's fine, and can lead to beautiful interactions, friendships and even relationships. (I'm sitting in this house with the person I own it with because of Twitter.)

But a forum is like getting together a group of people with common interests — depending on the number of participants, it can be like a book club, a seminar or a large-scale gathering — and having a civilised, peaceful, thoughtful discussion on a particular topic. (Usually, anyway. This isn't to say forums are drama-free, but there's a lot less of the attention-seeking passive-aggression that's often seen on social media for the most part in my experience.)

As I said above, I'm not sure whether the Squadron of Shame will be staying on that free forum software for now or whether we'll be moving to our own site. But either way, the shift — or should I say shift back, since that's where the group was born — to a forum-based means of discussion has so far proven popular, and I think it will be good for the group in the long term.

If you're interested in joining us to talk about underappreciated and overlooked games, both new and old, drop by our new home and say hello.

1619: Reflections on Working in the Games Press

As I've noted a few times recently, my time with the games press is shortly coming to an end and, short of an amazing offer coming my way that I'd be a complete idiot to turn down, I'm not going to be pursuing further work in that enormously competitive industry. It's fairly unlikely I'll be pitching many freelance pieces, either, although I may find the time to do a few in between other things.

Since this is largely, then, the end of my career in the games press, I feel it's probably an appropriate time to reflect back on my time doing it and what, if anything, I've gained from it.

Let me preface this by saying that working in the games press was something of a lifelong dream for me, ever since I grew up with both my father and brother working for Atari magazines. My brother John, when he left home, began working on various magazines over the years and built a career for himself that eventually culminated in high-profile positions at 1up and Gamespot as well as the launch of his own site, the sadly defunct What They Play. His career was an inspiration to me that I hoped, one day, to be lucky enough to follow in the footsteps of. Because, frankly, there's a significant amount of luck involved in getting anywhere in the games biz… much as there's a significant amount of luck involved in not suddenly finding yourself without a place of work.

I contributed a number of pieces to various publications over the years as I proceeded through school and on to university. I wrote reviews and articles for the same Atari magazine my father and brother did; I wrote reviews and walkthroughs for UK games magazine PC Zone (may it rest in peace); I wrote tips books and guides for The Official UK Nintendo Magazine, in the years before… well, let's just say we don't see eye to eye. But I didn't seriously pursue a full-time career in the business — it didn't seem like something feasible, and in the meantime I was at university studying and trying to work out what I was going to do with my life. (I opted for teaching, which turned out to be a Bad Choice from a mental health perspective.)

Whizz forward a number of years and I'm in a bad place. My wife has left me and I'm staring down the oblivion of my life as I knew it. But there was a small glimmer of hope — I was writing for a small site named Kombo. Kombo didn't pay particularly well — certainly not enough to live on — but it was something. I was writing professionally, gaining some important and helpful experience and getting great feedback. It was a start.

Eventually, Kombo folded and, through various combinations of circumstances, I found myself working for GamePro, a site and magazine that my brother had been in charge of previously, but had since moved on to pastures new. My work for GamePro was initially sporadic and occasional, but over time it grew to a proper part-time gig and eventually a full-time position on a wage I could actually live on.

I had to make a choice partway through my time with GamePro, though. I had an interview with a software company in London, who actually offered me the job. At the same time, GamePro offered me the full-time position. The wages were similar, but the software company required me to move to London (expensive, plus not exactly friendly to my then-burgeoning relationship with Andie, with whom I now own a house) whereas the GamePro gig allowed me to work from home.

It seemed like a simple choice. I turned down the software company and told GamePro I'd continue working for them full-time. Eventually, I got to a position financially where it was practical for me to leave home again and start living with Andie.

All appeared to be going well for a while, until the collapse of GamePro one December. It was a quiet death; I came down to start work one morning, checked my email and discovered a message thread already in progress with everyone seemingly panicking about what was going on. The site was closing, it seemed, and so was the magazine. Everyone was being laid off. There was nothing we could do.

Thankfully, a former colleague at GamePro was working for a business-facing site that focused on mobile and social games, and she offered me regular work for a very generous pay package indeed. Mobile and social are two of the most objectionable parts of the video games industry for numerous reasons, but work was work and the pay was great for what I had to do, so I sucked it up and continued, happy that I had the opportunity to write and still leave myself time to pursue other interests.

But it didn't last.

I realised something was wrong with the site when all my colleagues suddenly announced their departure within a day or two of one another. The new management who had taken on the site were… not great, to say the least, and it was looking very likely that the generous pay packet I'd become accustomed to every month was soon to shrink to literally less than a tenth of its size.

I jumped ship. Fortunately, around the same time this was all happening, a former colleague from GamePro got in touch about USgamer and, well, you know the rest. Now, almost exactly a year after the site officially launched, I'm staring down unemployment, again through no fault of my own, but due to a shift in the way the site is doing business.

I've worked hard for every outlet I've had the privilege to work for professionally. I've graciously accepted feedback to improve my work — a particular shout-out to Mr Jason Wilson (formerly of GamePro, now of VentureBeat) here, whose copy-editing skills helped me refine my craft in a way no other editor had done in the past — and made an effort to improve and challenge myself as and when I can.

And yet even with a work ethic like that, there's no guarantee of a stable job. Each time a site folded or restructured and left me without a position, I've effectively had to start again from scratch, often with a big gap of unemployment leaving an unsightly hole on my CV in the meantime.

For me, this isn't an acceptable or desirable way to live. I cannot, in good conscience, look for another job in the games press knowing the inherent instability and volatility of the business, particularly now I'm a homeowner and having no money has even more severe consequences than in the past. My dream is crumbling into dust, but it's been crumbling that way for a while now; what I really wanted to do, it turns out, was to write for magazines, but that hasn't been an especially viable option for many years now, thanks to the Internet and the way in which we consume media these days.

More importantly, the way in which outlets make money — you know, with which to pay their staff — has changed. Readers on the Web expect their content for free — attempting to get people to pay money for text is a losing battle. As such, there just isn't the same amount of cashflow coming in as when a magazine is pulling in money from every sale from the newsstands. It also leads to "clickbait" articles, whether these are top 10 lists designed to encourage readers to read, agree and/or disagree, or provocative, inflammatory op-eds about whatever social justice issue is on the Tumblr sociologists' radar this week. Overall quality of content suffers as a result, and good quality writing about specific subjects goes all but ignored, leaving the games press a shadow of what it could be, and all outlets looking like slightly reskinned versions of each other.

And then there's the growth of video to consider, too, but that's probably a matter to discuss another day.

In other words, then, a career in the games press is simply not a viable option for me any more. Eternal respect and well-wishes to my peers out there who can make it work — whether on a salaried or freelance basis — but I simply can't do it any more with my current life situation. It's sad, but oddly I'm less cut up about the death of my dream than I thought I would be; it's become increasingly apparent over the course of the last four years that the games press I've been working in is not the same games press that I wanted so desperately to be a part of for so long. That games press is long-dead, replaced by something very different that I'm not entirely sure is sustainable in its current form.

But it's not my problem any more. I wash my hands of it all. I'll continue to write about games on my own time, for the love of it, and if I can make a bit of money off it, so much the better. But career-wise? I'm looking elsewhere. And I'm not looking back.

1602: Search Terms

It's been a long time since I pored over my blog's stats — largely because I don't particularly care about them, since I'm writing more for myself than anyone else — but it's occasionally interesting to take a peek at the search terms that show how people have arrived at this 'ere site.

For the longest time, my blog's most popular post was this one, which features animated GIFs of stickmen doing various offensive things to one another. People would show up at my blog through search terms like "stickman sex gif" and the like — why on Earth were so many people searching for this sort of thing when there is far better porn available on the Internet? — and this, consequently, led to that post being consistently popular. Alongside that, some things I wrote ages ago about classic PC games Divine Divinity and No-One Lives Forever proved consistently popular, as did my guide on how to play Kairosoft's mobile game Pocket Academy.

It's only been fairly recently that those consistently popular posts have finally fallen off my top search terms — although, looking today, Pocket Academy is still there. Instead, we have a few newcomers.

First up was this post, in which I bemoaned the repetitiveness and utter stupidity of "[brand] sponsors [programme] on [channel]" bumpers on commercial TV channels — specifically, the infuriatingly asinine "Alpen Sponsors Characters on Dave" campaign, which features a middle-aged, bearded man speaking with a funny accent and saying painfully unfunny lines clearly written by a bored advertising executive who was apparently once told by someone that they were "really funny" more to shut them up than anything else. Since said advertising campaign is still running on Dave, it seems there's a certain degree of interest in this campaign — search terms include people asking who the guy is (I have no idea) and, so far as I can make out, why the fuck it exists.

It seems I've become a source of information on certain types of games and types of entertainment, too. Someone arrived today looking for a map of the Endless Road dungeon in Demon Gaze (while I am playing Demon Gaze right now, you won't find any maps here, sorry), while another person wanted to find out which of the in-game races had the most HP. (I have no idea there either.)

Alongside that, there are just plain bizarre pairings of search terms, the oddest of which is kiss x sis and doctor who, an unholy fusion of a somewhat ecchi anime and the classic, resurrected BBC sci-fi series from which this blog takes its name, but which I do not.

Then there's the person asking "is bovril good for you" — I have no idea, sorry, though with how salty it tastes, I doubt it — and "waiting for the phone to ring" which, I assume, led them to this post, or possibly this one.

It paints an interesting picture of the people I am somehow attracting to this site — or at least, the type of people that Google feels is appropriate to send over here. Everyone is welcome, one and all; I can't promise you'll find what you're looking for, but hopefully you'll stumble across something fun in the meantime.

1601: On Not Assuming the Worst is the Most Representative

I had an interesting conversation with my friend Calin the other day. Calin is someone I've known for quite a while, have shared lots of interesting and enjoyable gaming stories with over the years — mainly through the Squadron of Shame — and even managed to meet face-to-face on one occasion at PAX East in 2010, an event which, as a whole, I regard as the last great thing in my life before everything came crumbling down shortly afterwards. (I have since largely rebuilt my existence, but there's still some work to do after that chaos.)

Anyway, the point is: Calin is, if you must put a label on such things, a "gamer". And yet he confessed to me that he's not entirely comfortable admitting that any more, for fear of being lumped in with what he regards as "gamers". His definition of gamers, it transpires, are those who are the most vocal on the Internet, and often the worst examples of the gaming community. They who shout loudest get the most attention and all that.

This is, of course, a gross generalisation about the entire community of people who enjoy computer and video games, and I said as much in our conversation. The IGN and Gamespot comments sections are not representative of the entirety of humanity who enjoy computer and video games, in other words; there are plenty of other people out there who don't rage and swear at one another, who don't tell writers to kill themselves over reviews they disagree with, who don't act like spoiled children when things that they, personally, aren't interested in show up.

And yet I can understand Calin's position somewhat. As I noted above, those who shout loudest get the most attention, and it's entirely natural to start believing "gamers" as a whole are the scum of the Earth if the representatives of the community you seem to hear the most from are the ones who are acting like complete tools.

In vaguely related news, earlier today I observed a Twitter exchange between the members of Witch Beam, developers of the excellent upcoming arcade-style shoot 'em up for PC, PS4, Vita and Wii U, Assault Android Cactus. They were feeling disheartened by a tweet from a member of the Gamespot community who made some disparaging remarks about Sony "only" having titles like Assault Android Cactus — smaller-scale, lower-budget but no less interesting or enjoyable games — to show at E3, while Microsoft was promising that its Xbox One-centric E3 presentation would focus on games, presumably triple-A by implication. I commented to them that it's not worth worrying about the opinion of people who believe that triple-A is all there is to video games. In a way, those people are also judging something in its entirety by a small subsection of it — in this case, that anything outside the big budget triple-A space is somehow unworthy.

The important thing in all this is to remember that not everyone agrees on everything, and not everyone behaves in the same way. For some people, trash talk and being a jackass online is just part and parcel of the way the modern Internet-connected world works. For others, they prefer to spend their time actually playing games rather than typing comments or tweets to each other online. And for others still, they prefer to engage in intelligent, lengthy discussion about things some people may not have heard of. (I kind of straddle the latter two categories.)

Of those groups, the people acting like jackasses are but a small part of the whole. They're a problem, for sure, and it's difficult to know what — if anything — it's possible to do about their behaviour. (Hint: It's not posting lengthy social justice-themed editorials on the sites they frequent; that just makes them defensive and even more inclined to be obnoxious.) But here's the important thing: they are not everyone. They do not represent an entire medium. They do not represent the entirety of people around the world who are interested in games. Chances are, in my experience, there's a considerable amount of crossover with those people who believe in nothing but triple-A.

Fuck those guys. If you enjoy games — however you enjoy them — enjoy them in your own way, and never, ever feel ashamed of something you enjoy because of the behaviour of people you probably have nothing to do with on a regular basis. In an extreme case, simply think back to how it all was before the Internet came along and ruined rational discourse for a lot of people; everyone could enjoy video games without feeling ashamed, guilty or disgusted then, because you never, ever came into contact with the more objectionable parts of humanity. Simply stay out of comments sections and only talk about games with your friends, just like things used to be. Works out pretty well for me, personally.

And if you're one of the jackasses I've mentioned in this post? If you've ever told a writer to kill themselves over giving a game an 8 when you thought it deserved a 9? (For those who don't frequent gaming sites, this actually happens on occasion, though it's usually over more extreme differences of opinion.) If you believe there is only one "true" way to game, and that everyone else's interests and passions in one of the most diverse creative mediums in the world is somehow invalid? Take a good, long, hard look at yourself and decide whether or not that's the person you really want to be.

1571: Fork in the Road

I'm at one of those points in my life where I feel I've reached a definite "fork in the road" where I need to decide if I'm going to continue on my current path, or branch off in a different direction. Going backwards is not an option, but both paths ahead are fraught with trials and difficulties.

The road to the left is a continuation of the road I've been taking. It's the road that proceeds merrily through the land of Gamindustri, looping and wending its way past anthropomorphised hillocks and clouds before taking occasional detours into explosive-devastated warzones, alien landscapes and racetracks. It's a fun road, but you never know what's coming next; over the next hill could be a pot of gold, or there could be a pit of spikes.

The road on the right I don't know much about. Not long after the fork there's a tunnel, and the lights inside seem to have failed. It's difficult to tell how far the tunnel goes, too; there's no way of seeing the light at the other end of it. But there are people coming and going, and they look if not actually happy then certainly at least vaguely satisfied with what is going on. None of them look as if they're afraid about what's happening either now or in the future, and it's then that I notice that posted along the side of the road are a number of uniformed officers. They're not armed and they carry kindly expressions on their face; I get the impression they're there to keep everyone safe and protect them from the unknown. There is no such detail on the road to the left.

All of this is a rather pretentious way of saying that I think I'm going to have to make a decision soon: whether to continue pursuing life in the games industry, or whether to try and branch off in another direction. As I alluded to above, both roads carry their own fair share of potential pitfalls.

Were I to take the left road, it's doing so on the understanding that I can't relax. Even if I work my hardest, there's no guarantee that I won't simply wake up one day to discover an email politely informing me that I will soon be out of a job through no fault of my own. And when that happens, there's no guarantee of being able to immediately score a new job; more often than not, it means a return to either begging for scraps as a freelancer or, were the unlikely to happen and I find myself with a new position straight away, having to work my way back up from the bottom, effectively starting my career over again. This has happened to me a couple of times now and it is already starting to get a bit old.

Were I to take the right road, I have to deal with the true unknown, and there's no guarantee I'll be able to find my way to safety and security. My particular combination of qualifications and experience opens up a relatively narrow number of potential career paths to me, and looking at job site listings it can be challenging to determine exactly what type of job I should be looking for, or if it's even worth applying to things that sound like they might fit the bill. There's also the feeling that I'm walking away from something that, when it goes well, I do genuinely enjoy doing.

I love writing about games. But I hate — hate — how volatile the games journalism business is. I understand the reasons for it — and it's a risk we all acknowledge when we enter into it — but that doesn't make it suck any less when promising careers are cut short for reasons that aren't any fault of the people in question.

Which is why, to be perfectly frank, I'm leaning towards the right road. I've already put in some applications to jobs that are nothing to do with games, with the intention of, if I successfully secure a position, continuing doing games writing purely for myself and those who wish to follow me through projects such as MoeGamer. Given that Andie and I have recently purchased a house — we get the keys tomorrow, in fact — I am getting to the stage where financial security and not having to continually worry on a week-by-week basis about whether I still have a job is worth far more than being able to say that my hobbies and passions are also my career.

That's a sad and disappointing way of looking at the world, and I'm annoyed that I'm even thinking that way. But unless there's a significant change in the way the games journalism business works, I'm not sure I can take going through this whole process again.

1566: Project MoeGamer

After some umming and ahhing (and not being able to get to sleep again) I decided yesterday to flip the switch on my little side project. I haven't done a huge amount of promotion or anything for it yet — though I guess this post counts — because I knew I was going to be away for the weekend. But I did feel like I wanted to get it out in the wild and ready to start tinkering with over the next few weeks.

If you haven't already seen it, I present to you MoeGamer. It's a site inspired by my love of Japanese games — particularly those towards the more "anime-ish" end of the spectrum — and is intended to be a repository of articles I've written regarding games I've been playing. I've deliberately kept it free of any sort of "structure" for the moment — i.e. it's not intended to be a news, reviews and preview site — to allow for full creative freedom, and so far I've populated it with a selection of articles that have previously been seen on this site (with some minor edits) and one longer original article on the visual novel Kana Little Sister that I haven't published anywhere before.

My intention for the site in the short term is simply to use it as an outlet for writing about Japanese games in as much detail as I enjoy. Realistically, I know that I've been quite lucky to have the freedom I've had at USgamer to post my weekly JPgamer column, and I also know that despite the reputation I've built up as a result of both JPgamer and my reviews of various Japanese games, it will take a fair bit of fighting at any mainstream site to be able to do the same. In other words, as much as it would be an ideal situation for me to be hired by a site to be their resident Japanese games expert, I know that, given these games' distinctly "niche" status (i.e. they're not necessarily huge traffic magnets except when they're embroiled in some sort of controversy) I will almost certainly not be writing about them on a regular basis unless I really fall on my feet.

And so, MoeGamer.

What I do with the site in the long term will depend on response and whether I have the time and inclination to continue working on it. I have several ideas of things I'd like to do — I'd like to experiment with video for one thing, and if I manage to attract a reasonably sized audience I'll look at some form of making money from the blog, be it through ads, crowdfunding or something like Patreon — but whether or not any of these get implemented will depend on how much time I have to spend fiddling with the site going forward. The same is true for whether I spend any money on the site; at present, it's simply a free WordPress blog, but if it proves to be worthwhile I'll happily purchase a domain name and premium services to make it more customisable.

As it happens, in just under two months I'm going to have a whole lot of time to fiddle around with the site, for better or worse. While I'm not exactly relishing the prospect of finding a new job, I am enjoying that early buzz of getting a new website up and running and looking forward to seeing whether or not it's something that is viable to keep doing as a side project on the side. At the very least, I doubt I should have too many problems keeping it open as my go-to place for writing about games and archiving stuff that gets lost in all the OneADay posts here, but part of me is hoping I can grow it into something bigger, too.

We'll see. It's far too early to ponder right now, and I'm not in a position to do much with the site over the next couple of days — I'm in Kent with some friends playing board games and drinking cider. It should hopefully be a nice period of unwinding after a stressful week.

For now, then, there's a selection of articles on MoeGamer for your weekend reading — several of which, as I've said, longtime readers of this site will recognise — and from early next week onwards, you should hopefully see a whole bunch more there.

In the meantime, please take a look, leave a comment, click the Like button on stuff you're interested in and feel free to share anything you enjoy. And I can keep writing about the stuff I love.

1561: End of Another Era (Or: Please Hire Me)

I was informed today that, owing to various circumstances that I won't go into right now — it would be unprofessional of me to do so, but suffice to say it's not anything to do with something I've done, nor is there any ill will there — my position on Eurogamer's US counterpart USgamer would be coming to an end within 4-8 weeks, depending on how long I want/need to stay on.

To be frank, I haven't quite processed this news yet. I fully expect that when I do I will burst into tears and be a dribbling, horrible mess for at least an hour or so but that hasn't happened just yet. It will come, though. In the meantime, while I'm still feeling reasonably rational, I wanted to compose a post explaining where I'm at in my career and where I'd like to head from here. Hopefully then anyone reading this as part of the traffic spike my blog is currently enjoying will have a better idea of who I am and what I can offer.

The biggest thing that has come out of my announcement that I would be leaving USgamer is the confirmation (via direct messages and mentions) that I have built up a solid reputation as someone who not only knows his stuff about Japanese games, but that I am also someone who treats them with respect. You might not think this is a particularly unusual characteristic for a games critic, given the importance of Japan to console gaming throughout video game history, but in recent years, Japan's turn towards the moe side of gaming has caused many Western commentators to take its output considerably less seriously — even going so far as outright derision at times.

Attitude and tone are, of course, the prerogative of the individual publication or writer in question, but I had been feeling for some time that there was a significant gap in the market for respectful, non-disparaging coverage of niche Japanese games such as RPGs and visual novels, and set out to provide that, first with my experimental columns over on Games Are Evil, where I served as Managing Editor for a short period, and later at USgamer, where I ran a weekly Japanese gaming column called JPgamer. This column attracted a regular audience who were both appreciative and vocal about my support for Japanese gaming, my positive attitude towards it and my willingness to look beyond the most superficial elements — an attitude perhaps best exemplified by my piece on "The Hidden Depths of Otaku Games" and my review of the widely derided Time and Eternity as well as JPgamer at large.

J-gaming isn't the only niche I attempted to fill, though. I'd recently also launched a board game column on USgamer called BOARDgamer, and past coverage of board and card games had proven somewhat successful. Alongside this, I made a point to cover interesting, unusual games rather than the same things other sites were looking at. I'd accept reviews of games that other sites would either ignore or pass off with a cursory quick look — titles like The Witch and the Hundred Knight and Demon Gaze — and I'd treat them with the same amount of respect afforded to the big triple-A titles. I hope I don't sound arrogant when I say I feel I was fulfilling an important role that helped me to stand out somewhat.

Which is why I'm so sad that my time with USgamer has to come to an end. Between us, Jaz Rignall, Jeremy Parish, Mike Williams, Cassandra Khaw and I — plus the various contributors who have come and gone over the months — were building USgamer into something distinctive and interesting; a site that celebrated long-form magazine-style articles as well as the usual daily grind of news. We each had our own interests and specialisms, and we were each afforded the opportunity and a platform to talk about those things as well as the latest hotness in gaming news and reviews. That's an immensely valuable thing not only for readers, but for writers, too. And, yes, I'm sad and upset that I will no longer be part of that once my time on the site comes to an end.

As previously noted, I have between 4 and 8 weeks left on the site depending on how quickly I can find a new position. I am happy to continue doing what I've been doing — writing about games, and hopefully letting some of my passion shine through — but I am also interested in getting involved on the editing side of things. I've been doing this a long time now; it would be nice to move on up and take a little more responsibility if the opportunity is available.

If you happen to hear of anything — or if you're hiring — then please reach out and get in touch. You can send me an email via the About Pete page on this site if you don't know my email address, or just leave a comment. You can also follow me on Twitter if you don't already, and check out my professional history via LinkedIn.

Here's hoping I have some good news to share sooner rather than later; 1) it's my birthday tomorrow and 2) Andie and I are buying a house. Also, you know, 3) I don't like being unemployed.

Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for any help you can offer in the job search.

1548: Sell-Out

This is probably going to sound like a terribly "inside baseball" post, but I feel the need to vent a little, so apologies in advance.

I am absolutely sick of the lack of respect given to my profession — games critic, games journalist, person who writes about games, whatever you want to call it — and I am likewise sick of the daily drama that accompanies it, particularly on the UK/European side of things. It's getting extremely tiresome to put up with the daily snark, outrage and condemnation of this, that or the other, and I really can't help feeling that ultimately all it does is distract from the reasons most of us got into this business in the first place: loving games.

Whether it's someone using the infuriating scare quotes around the job title "journalist" (as in "so-called games 'journalists'"), the regular (and, to my knowledge, usually unjustified) accusations of bribery, corruption and otherwise unethical behaviour or the current favourite of the social justice crowd, complaining whenever a white man writes something, you sometimes have to wonder why people put up with this shit. And indeed some don't. And I can't say I blame them.

I've been quite fortunate throughout my career in that there's only been one real occasion where I became a little uncomfortable as a result of the behaviour of a reader or community member. That was back on GamePro, when the GamePro Facebook page was frequented by a rather strange individual who didn't believe in debit cards and had some peculiar political ideas. He was harmless for the most part, until I posted a piece about an interesting-sounding game developed by a university that promised to explore matters of sexuality and gender. He exploded in a fit of rage; forced to confront things that clearly didn't fit in with his rather narrow-minded view of the world, he became extremely aggressive and unpleasant, and for the first time I felt a little afraid of the Internet. (The second time I was afraid of the Internet has been well-documented on these pages, but that was nothing to do with work.)

The latest incident in Games Industry Drama involved a recent press event for Ubisoft's upcoming game Watch Dogs in which attendees were reportedly given a free Nexus 7 — a decent Android tablet. Predictably, this quickly descended into people condemning the people who had accepted them and people arguing about "ethics", while at the same time NeoGAF was doing its usual thing of whingeing about how game journalists are all paid off and how no-one writes "objective" reviews. (Hahaha.)

It is exhausting to have to process all this sort of thing on a daily basis. I write about games for one reason and one reason only. (Well, two if you count the paycheque.) I write about games because I love writing about games. No other reason. I'm not trying to change the world. I'm not trying to make people rise up and fight against oppressive powers. I'm not trying to make people confront things they're uncomfortable with. And perhaps I should be doing those things. But I'm not. The reason I write about games is because I love writing about games, and because I love games.

When I come across a brilliant game I love that few people are talking about, the first thing I think about is how I might be able to write about it in a way that gets my passion and enthusiasm across. These are experiences I want to share with people; experiences I want other people to be able to have. And if just one person reads something I've written and thinks "hmm, that sounds interesting; maybe I'll check it out!" then I'm happy.

But if just one person rolls up and calls me a sellout or calls my integrity into question, that sucks. Fortunately I haven't had to deal with that particular issue in my career, but seeing it constantly going on all around me on a seemingly daily basis is just exhausting. Sometimes I wish everyone would just shut the fuck up and just enjoy themselves for once.

And I realise that by writing this I'm simply contributing to the noise. But it needed to get out of my brain and on to the page. And now I'm done. I'm off to go and play either Final Fantasy XIV or Demon Gaze and not look at social media for the rest of the day.

1545: Changing Communication

I'm trying to make a conscious effort to tone down the effect the Internet has had on the way I communicate over time. This may sound like a peculiar thing to say, given that the majority of the communication I engage in on a daily basis is via the Internet, but just recently a number of things have really started to bug me about the way people talk to one another online, and I simply want to make sure that I'm not a part of it and thus, perhaps, inadvertently annoying someone else.

I think the chief thing I want to make sure I avoid is excessive hyperbole. Most people who use social media have been guilty of this at some point — posting a link to a mildly amusing cat video and declaring "Shut the Internet down. We're done." or "This is the best thing ever!" or "There are no words." or… I could go on, but I won't. You get the idea.

Declaring things "the best thing ever" or along those lines is excessive hyperbole. It devalues that phrase "the best thing ever" if everything is the best thing ever, and the other examples are just putting undue pressure on something that was probably designed to be a throwaway joke to perform and be somehow amazing.

Particularly gross examples of excessive hyperbole come in the form of headlines from sites like Buzzfeed, Upworthy and their numerous imitators. Inevitably conversational in tone but capitalised excessively So They Look Like This And You Won't Believe What Happened Next, these headlines, on an almost hourly basis, promise laughter until you evacuate your bowels, crying until your eyes shrivel up and stories so heartwarming you'll cook yourself from the inside. And they're rarely anything special; at best, they're sob stories deliberately designed to emotionally manipulate the reader; at worst, they're pointless nonsense deliberately designed in an attempt to make them "go viral".

Excessive hyperbole can spill over into discourse, too, and it frequently does. I've lost count of the number of times things have been described as "toxic" over the last year or two, when in fact this is, in many cases, an exaggeration. (Well, of course it is; if it was literally toxic then it would kill anyone involved.) And once you jump onto your high horse and brand something as "toxic" there's really nowhere to go from there; the people who disagree will disagree forcefully because you were forceful in the first place, while the people who agree will look like wet lettuces if they decide to come in with a "Well, I wouldn't say toxic, but…". Thus online discourse frequently descends into who can be the most hyperbolic the loudest or the most often, and the quality of discussion suffers enormously as a result.

Last time I wrote about this sort of thing I attracted commenters accusing me of something called "tone policing", which is where you distract attention away from the core argument that someone is trying to make by focusing on the way they are making it rather than the content. And that, perhaps, is something that people including myself do do, but if it's becoming an issue then perhaps the people who are getting "tone policed" should consider the way they are making those arguments in the first place. With less hyperbole, less use of strong, emotive language such as "toxic" and more in the way of constructive, descriptive comments, we can all get to know the way we feel about things a lot more easily, and we can move forward in debates and discussions.

As it stands, however, the second someone jumps onto their high horse with a disproportionately passionate reaction to something that is, in many cases, very simple, I simply cannot take them seriously. And I doubt that's the effect they want to have with their arguments.

I certainly don't. Which is why I'm making an effort to tone down my own hyperbole and try to speak like a normal human being when communicating on the Internet as much as possible. With a text-based medium of communication like the Internet, you have a moment to pause before you respond to or broadcast something to look back on what you've written, reflect and decide whether that's really what you wanted to say. Things said in the heat of the moment are often regretted with hindsight; those regrets can be easily avoided with a little less hastiness and a little more consideration, both for yourself and for others.

This was a Public Service Announcement on behalf of the National Hyperbole Authority, the best thing to happen to language in three thousand years.

1541: Reclaiming the Inbox

Oh my goodness, email. What a massive pain in the arse you are. And yet you shouldn't be; you should be a convenient, quick means of asynchronous communication, and instead you're a cluttered, nigh-useless mess.

At least my personal account is. So I'm trying to do something about it. When unnecessary mailing list entries that I never read show up, I unsubscribe with due haste. When my inbox starts to fill up with useless crap, I highlight it all and archive it — if I haven't read it immediately, it almost certainly isn't important to go back to in a few days' time.

With a little coercion, I'm confident that I can start getting my inbox back under control. The trouble I'm having is largely due to the period of time where my personal email was also my professional email — while I was working on GamePro I didn't have my own address — and consequently got signed up to about a bajillion PR lists. Subsequently, when I worked for Inside Network, I then got signed up for a bajillion more PR lists for mobile games and apps — and there are a fuckload more mobile games and apps released every week than there are on computers and consoles. (And approximately 2 or 3 at most worth caring about, if that.)

The reason I'm doing this is because I actually want to start using email again. When I think back to the early days of having an email address, receiving new messages was exciting. Spam was rare, and it always felt like an "event" to see Outlook Express pop up its progress bar and indicate that yes, messages were incoming via the magic of dial-up Internet. (Random, no-longer-existent free ISPs for the win. I was a "Hot Toast" man, myself.) This was because it was an event to receive a message — someone had taken the time to actually write to you.

These days, the former function of email is largely covered by social media — to a point, anyway. But it's not quite the same, particularly with how much both Facebook and Twitter have wandered off from their original incarnations when they were first introduced. Facebook these days — even with my recently pruned feed — is nothing but links with people going "OMG SO AMAZING" or some other such hyperbole, while Twitter is inherently limited thanks to its character counts, and is becoming increasingly intolerable anyway thanks to the increasing regularity with which the social justice crowd continue to peddle their opinions and refuse to listen to anyone else.

Then there's longer-form writing such as this blog, but that's a broadcast rather than a personal message. Sure, I could write private password-protected posts and send them to individuals or small groups of people, but if I'm going to do that, I may as well just send them an email in the first place. It feels impersonal.

Which leaves email, as one of the most long-standing means of digital communication out there, as arguably the most practical means of actually getting in touch with other people — so long as you take control of it, that is. Going forward, my "good intention" is to try and use email a lot more than I have done in the past, perhaps to keep in touch with people I don't speak to enough on a daily basis or even to get to know people I want to know a bit better… a bit better.

This is a bold plan, I know, and I wonder if it will prove to be a fruitless endeavour if everyone else has the same saturated inbox problem as me, but it's worth a try. Email is a brilliantly simple but amazing technology that brings people closer together, and it's wasted by most of us on a daily basis as we take it for granted. So I'm going to try and stop doing that. Maybe. We'll see.

No you can't have my email address. Unless you ask really nicely.