1544: Sick Notes

As I think I’ve mentioned a couple of times in the past, I keep a few copies of defunct UK games magazine PC Zone around as a reminder of some early forays into writing about games professionally. These ’90s issues of the dead magazine feature nothing more exciting than a few walkthroughs by me, but it’s the rest of them I find so fascinating to read with modern eyes.

What particularly caught my attention recently was a section called “Sick Notes”. This was one of the many different things the magazine did with its last page before the back cover — over time, this included a regular column by “Mr Cursor”, a look back on the month’s gaming and what one of the editorial staff had been up to, and numerous other things.

Sick Notes was the brainchild of Charlie Brooker — yes, that Charlie Brooker — and was intended as a complement to the magazine’s other letters pages. PC Zone at this point had several different “reader input” pages, including a traditional “letters to the editor” page, a “Watch Dogs” letters page where readers could write and complain about service they’d received from hardware and software manufacturers, and a “Troubleshooter” letters page where they could ask technical queries about PC problems.

Sick Notes, meanwhile, was marketed as “The Place to Write for Abuse” so you knew what you were getting when you wrote in — and you had to write specifically to Sick Notes. It certainly lived up to its name. Here’s one memorable example that won the monthly £50 “Loser of the Month” prize, with Brooker’s response in bold beneath.

I see that in issue 67 of your “magazine” you asked us to send in a game idea. How’s this then: You start off in a primary school where all goes well and you please the teachers. You then progress to secondary education and achieve above average results and so decide to sit A-levels in your local college and finally, after four years in university, end up with an honours degree in English language and English literature.

AND THEN YOU END UP WRITING YOUR PATHETIC [swearword] PIECE OF [swearword] PAGE-FILLING SO-CALLED COLUMN.

Mark Richardson

There was a boy called Mark Richardson at my school. Everyone called him ‘skids’ because once, in the PE changing rooms, somebody noticed that he had huge brown skidmarks in his underpants. Not that this inability to tackle basic personal hygiene was restricted just to poor wiping skills. He smelled bad pretty much all the time. He was a mess. His face was permanently coated with a faintly shiny film of sweat and grime, his hair so caked in grease it recalled television footage of unfortunate seabirds in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil slick. His clothing was dirty. To use the Whizzer and Chips terminology of the day, it ‘ponged’.

But the worst thing about Skids was the way he picked his nose. He was always at it, plugging a finger in as far as he could, corkscrewing it around inside the nasal cavity, unhooking entire strata of half-dried mucus, drawing out measureless strings of oleaginous grey-green slime. Then he’d take them to his mouth, puckering his lips as if sampling some exotic delicacy. Skids devoured snot. He relished it. Guzzled it. Chewed it up and swallowed it whole, then painted his finger clean with his pink, stubby tongue. Made you sick just to watch him do that.

Anyway, sorry, what were you saying?

This was pretty much par for the course back around the time of PC Zone issue 70 (December 1998) but looking back on it now it’s hard to believe that this existed. And don’t worry, I’m not about to go off on a whole big “This Is Not Okay” social justice rant here; quite the opposite, in fact. I find it a bit sad that people who write for a living — usually for websites rather than magazines these days, though print is still hanging on in there — don’t really have the freedom to express this side of themselves any more; the means for some much-needed stress relief, and for the readers to try their luck against one of the most notoriously acerbic wits in the business.

I mean, sure, these days we have the people who have made a name for themselves with strong opinion pieces — people like Ben Kuchera and Jim Sterling spring to mind immediately, and there are others, too — but it’s not the same thing at all. Brooker didn’t just blindly insult people in Sick Notes — though he always did so with carefully-considered barbs rather than mindless abuse on that page — he also wrote witty, creative, unconventional articles that were entertaining to read far ahead of fulfilling some sort of amorphous “obligation”. And he wasn’t alone, either; the writers of Zone, among them, did all sorts of things with even their most mundane articles, with particularly memorable examples including entire reviews written as movie scripts, a “Franglais” preview of Flashback follow-up Fade to Black written from the perspective of its protagonist Conrad Hart, and countless others I’ve doubtless forgotten.

What’s my point? I’m not quite sure, really, but I think it’s that people who wrote about games used to seem like they were having more fun with it. This isn’t to say that there aren’t great, entertaining writers out there whose work is a pleasure to read, but rather there seems to be something of an unspoken rule that things need to be taken very seriously these days. You’ve got to get that SEO; you’ve got to get those clicks; you’ve got to capitalise on the popular things of the time; you’ve got to be seen to be criticising the things other people are criticising.

Cynical? Perhaps, but it’s why things like Goat Simulator feel so obnoxiously forced; what should be a silly little game that people stumble across organically and then tell their friends about has become something heavily promoted and treated with, in a number of cases, considerably more respect than I think even its creators intended. Fair play to them for successfully capturing the imagination of the press and the public, I guess, but it’s just not the same as the magic I feel reading an old PC Zone and comparing it to its rivals PC Format and PC Gamer as well as multiformat magazines, each of which had their own distinctive tone about them.

We can’t go back now, though; the world expects daily updates as things happen these days, rather than a monthly digest of things the editorial team thought were interesting, intriguing or just amusing. And the world certainly doesn’t expect a member of a site’s staff to hurl such an amazing torrent of intelligent abuse at them as Brooker did to Mark Richardson above; these days, treating your readership with such contempt is probably a firing offence.

Which is kind of weird, when you think about it; websites deal with reader numbers that magazines, even in their heyday, could only dream of, while for a magazine like PC Zone, every reader counted and thus you’d think posting something like Brooker’s response would be taking something of a big risk.

Maybe it was too much of a risk. Maybe that’s why PC Zone doesn’t exist any more. But I’ll be honest with you; I miss those days. I’d much rather be working on a monthly magazine than a constantly-updated website, but this is 2014; that’s the way things are, so I must, as the saying goes, “deal with it”.

1102: The Golden Age of Magazines

I really love re-reading old games and tech magazines, particularly those from the ’80s and ’90s. There’s a rather wonderful sense of innocence about the monsters that video games and Internet culture would become, and an even more pleasant feeling of knowing that an article was written to be a lot more “permanent” than the somewhat disposable writing for websites we have today. I’m not saying that writing is inherently worse today, of course — on the whole I think it’s a lot better for the most part — but that the sheer volume of it these days makes it more and more difficult to build up a portfolio of specific pieces you’re really proud of rather than stuff that’s just been churned out for the daily grind.

Taking video games magazines specifically, I particularly enjoy the completely different approach to games criticism seen in the mid- to late ’90s. Because reviews came out on a magazine’s street date rather than under the carefully-timed embargo of a PR department, you could generally feel pretty secure that the writers in question had spent a healthy proportion of the preceding month with the game, and that you knew they would have explored it inside out in most cases rather than rushing through. Consequently, we got a lot of reviews that were more like multi-page features, filled with big images, annotated screenshots, quotes from the developer and all manner of other things. Sometimes you even got reviews in a completely different format — PC Zone magazine, which I was loyal to initially because I liked it and later because my brother became the big boss man over there (also I wrote a number of articles for it), liked to experiment with short-form quick reviews for budget or crap games, and also held regular “Supertests”, in which they took a variety of different games in the same genre (often flight sims of various descriptions) and compared them directly to each other to determine which one was “best”.

You know what the absolute best thing was, though? No comments sections. I must confess that when reading a 1998 copy of PC Zone on the toilet the other day, I instinctively found myself glancing at the end of a somewhat contentious article (written by none other than Charlie Brooker, who used to be a regular for Zone, believe it or not) to see the ranty comments. I had already flipped the pages to the end of the piece before I realised I was holding a magazine in my hands, and that its content was static and non-interactive. It was probably for the best; Brooker’s article was a candid exploration of “why girls don’t like games” which was very, very amusing, very, very irreverent and would not have got within a mile of today’s Misogyny Police before being torn to shreds — despite the fact that it had a wealth of valid points and was clearly intended to take the piss out of anyone who believed that games were solely “boys’ toys”. But I digress. The point was, there was no opportunity to respond immediately to an article and belch forth the first opinionated effluvia that came into your head; if you wanted to respond, you had to damn well write a letter (or, later — much later — an email) and hope it got published in the following issue. PC Zone engaged in what is surely one of the first acts of trolling their comments sections on a number of occasions, tasking Brooker with responding to the most offensive, rude and generally disrespectful messages on a special “Sick Notes” page. Hilarity inevitably ensued, usually at the expense of the person who had written in.

I kind of feel like there was a lot more character about the old magazines in general. I read PC Zone primarily because I enjoyed the writers’ work and knew their tastes and senses of humour; I knew that David McCandless was obsessed with Doom and Quake (particularly multiplayer); I knew that Chris Anderson loved X-Com; I knew that you could count on Brooker for an irreverent, hilarious article — his Fade to Black preview written entirely as a short story about “Monsieur Conrad ‘Art” in Franglais was a particularly memorable example.

Different magazines had their own distinctive personalities, too — I contributed walkthroughs and tips books to the Official UK Nintendo Magazine for a while and was obliged to write using a particularly loathsome house style that effectively required me to write like a chav. Lots of “ya”s and “yer”s, and Mario was perpetually referred to as “Mazza”. It was a magazine primarily aimed at children, of course, so this style was understandable, of course — looking back on it, though, it’s more than a little cringeworthy.

I sort of miss magazines, then — I know they’re still around and all that, but the magic just isn’t there any more when you can get access to high-quality writing for free at your fingertips thanks to the Internet. That’s sort of sad, really; while you can take an iPad into the toilet with you and browse your favourite sites, it’s still not quite the same as having a proper magazine to leaf through at your leisure.

One A Day, Day 2: More Bollocks

Here we are again. Good evening. What to talk about today?

I was all set to do an immensely amusing post where I wrote down all those stupid random thoughts that come into your head and you really want to say out loud but then don’t because they’d make you look like an imbecile. But I forgot to write anything down, apart from the one I had in the shower last night which, for the record, was “Don’t you hate it when you’re in the shower and close your eyes to stop the soap going in, but nearly fall asleep?” – because I’d closed my eyes to stop the soap going in and had nearly fallen asleep. That’s what I get for showering at midnight after taking an actually-not-that-ill-advised run at a late hour in the evening while our podcast uploaded.

So I have to think of something else to write about. Having been at work all day and not listened to the news I can’t even comment on that… or can I?

*checks BBC News*

Oh, right. Cadbury got taken over by Kraft or something. I did know that, probably thanks to Twitter. Job cuts bad. Cheesy chocolate bad. Boo hiss, and so on.

Okay, that’s the news covered, what did I get up to today? Well, I applied for another job. Most of you know how much I bitch and moan about how much I hate my job, so I applied for another one that I thought I’d like. I enjoy the writing, as should hopefully be apparent from this site (and also this one – the new home of my games-related ramblings), so a writing-based position sounds right up my alley. At this point, I’m not even too bothered if it means a pay cut, as the employer in question (whom I won’t reveal for the moment so as not to jinx things) is pretty high-profile and has a lot of potential for building a future career.

Ugh. Hate phrases like that. So management-speaky. Sometimes you have to use it, and it sucks. One thing I want to make sure I never do is become one of those tossers who sits in their office in a patronising manner, talking to employees about “going forward” and saying that “as a manager…” blah blah blah whilst simultaneously crippling said employees’ self-esteem and sense of independence. Yes, I do have some specific examples in mind but it would be unprofessional and unkind of me to mention them by name.

It’s Charlie Brooker’s Newswipe tonight, a fact which the BBC have inexplicably left off their own site. Charlie Brooker’s work is always a laugh and a half, so I’m looking forward to this new series. Plus I might actually have something to say about the news after watching it. You never know.

Well, that’s today’s brain-dump done and dusted. Two-day combo! I might make it to the end of the year yet.