2059: Why I Care, and Why It’s Important to Fight

I grew up with computer and video games journalism all around me.

I mean that literally: while I was growing up, both my father and my brother wrote for a newsstand magazine initially called Page 6, then subsequently New Atari User once it merged with another publication called, unsurprisingly, Atari User. My father regularly wrote about flight simulators and making music with computers and MIDI instruments, and my then-teenage brother had a steady stream of incoming Atari ST games which he would play, explore and then write about in chunks of anywhere between 250 and 1,000 words according to how much discussion the game in question warranted. Pretty much our entire collection of Atari ST games was made up of review copies; I think I remember purchasing a grand total of about four or five games altogether during the 16-bit era.

I was both fascinated by and proud of the work my father and brother did at the time — so much so that, in that way that kids do, I tried to imitate them. I would fire up AtariWriter on the Atari 8-bit — for some reason I always enjoyed using the 8-bit computers just that little bit more than the 16-bit ST — and write my own reviews of things that I’d played, trying my best to imitate the style and structure of my father’s and brother’s work. I would then print them out on our noisy Epson-compatible dot matrix printer and file them away in a blue binder that had come home from my father’s day job at some point — it once housed the IBM “Manager of Managers Programme” material, and I have no idea why I remember that — and pretend that I, too, was a published writer.

Some years later, I had the opportunity to follow in my family’s footsteps and provide my own contributions to New Atari User, and I took to this with great enthusiasm, reviewing games such as Psyclapse’s Defender-alike Anarchy and taking an in-depth look at Atari’s revolutionary but regrettably flawed forays into the handheld and home console markets, the Lynx and Jaguar. Meanwhile, by this point, my brother was getting ready to finish his school career and contemplate his future, whether that be heading off to university or jumping straight into a job.

He chose the latter option, finding himself working for Europress up in Macclesfield on a revolutionary new games magazine called Games-X. Games-X was remarkable for one main reason: rather than being monthly, as most magazines were at the time, it was published weekly. This meant that it had the opportunity to be a whole lot more timely with the things it was writing about, and essentially acted as a precursor to the immediacy of Internet writing we have today. It ran for a decent number of issues before it folded, too, and was a pleasure to read, combining a somewhat irreverent, humorous editorial voice with authoritative, knowledgeable content from staffers who knew their stuff about gaming.

I followed my brother’s career with great interest and pride as it developed through a series of further magazines on which he took increasing levels of responsibility — among them Mega Drive Advanced Gaming (whose speculative feature about what Sonic 2 might be like from well before any details were actually revealed to the world remains one of my favourite video game magazine articles of all time, alongside its Super Mario 5 counterpart in its sister publication Control) and the deliciously classy PC Player — before eventually hitting what can arguably be called “the big time” in the games magazine industry of the late ’90s by landing the role of Editor on PC Zone.

Such was my interest in the games press and pride in my brother’s career that when it came time for my Year 10 Work Experience placement at school, I chose to take the awkward route and refuse any of the convenient positions my school would have been able to arrange for me, instead opting to spend a couple of weeks down in London with my brother helping out in the PC Zone offices. I spent a lot of time making tea and being mothered by art editor Thea, but I also had the opportunity to write a full review of the non-3D accelerated version of Virtua Fighter and write the captions for some screenshots in a number of different articles.

I was sold. This was what I wanted to do, and I was good at it. In the subsequent years, I found myself freelancing both for PC Zone — both during and after the time my brother was in charge, and in all honesty, even when he was editor, he wouldn’t have allowed me to contribute if he didn’t have faith in my abilities, so this certainly wasn’t a nepotism situation — and the Official UK Nintendo Magazine. Most of the time I found myself writing walkthroughs, which were things that no-one else really wanted to do, but which I enjoyed doing because it gave me an excuse to play through some favourite games in great detail while writing about them. (I liked it less when my preview copy of Turok 2 on N64 crashed on the last boss and I had to play the whole thing through again on a retail copy just to get a single screenshot, but thankfully this only happened once.) I even found myself writing a whole book on Carmageddon which was subsequently included in the Virgin Megastores special edition of the game one Christmas, and which can now be found as a .PDF e-book included with GOG.com’s rerelease of the game.

It would be a number of years before I’d have the opportunity to do some more work in the games press. I went to university, I trained as a teacher, I did some teaching work, I had a nervous breakdown, I did some other work. Eventually I found myself working alongside some friends I’d met on 1up.com — a site that my brother had taken charge of, initially as an extension of the magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly, but which subsequently became very much its own thing — on a site called Kombo. Kombo wasn’t a particularly big site, nor did it pay especially well, but during an extremely rough period of my life — shortly after my first wife had left me and I knew that I was going to end up having to move back home — it provided me with a connection to some other human beings as well as a trickle of income and a reason to get up in the morning. I proved myself to be pretty good at the whole news reporting thing, picking out interesting stories and presenting entertaining editorial spins on them where appropriate.

Kombo, unfortunately, folded after a while, and eventually I found myself living back at home again. After a period of unsuccessfully looking for work that I wanted to do, I stumbled into an opportunity to write some freelance articles for GamePro, yet another publication which my brother had worked on but had subsequently moved on from. I wrote the articles, they turned out well, and eventually found myself with a regular position on the site’s staff, covering the news shift on UK time so the site would have plenty of content by the time its native North America woke up. Again, I made a point of picking out interesting stories that other sites weren’t necessarily covering, and this helped to make GamePro a distinctive publication rather than one of the many identikit blogs out there. My contributions were effective, too; on a number of occasions, I was responsible for some significant traffic spikes to the site thanks to the interesting articles I’d written — though ultimately, sadly, it was all for naught as the publication folded, with most of its online content lost and the rest devoured by its sister site PC World.

A few years later, I was contacted by Jaz Rignall, with whom I’d previously worked at GamePro. Jaz was working on a new project that was hush-hush at the time, but he wanted me on board. Said project turned out to be USgamer, a North American counterpart to the popular Eurogamer. My job would be both to cover the news shift on USgamer, much as I had done on GamePro, as well as “localising” Eurogamer articles and republishing them on USgamer to give them a wider audience. Initially, we were given almost total editorial freedom with USgamer, with each of the writers contributing articles in their own particular areas of expertise and interest, and this made for a site with a very distinctive editorial voice that reminded me of 1up.com back in the glory days. Unfortunately, however, this proved too good to be true, and in the interests of that ol’ bugbear of online publications, traffic, we all ended up having to rein it in a bit and taking a more structured approach to “content strategy”.

It was during my GamePro-USgamer years that I first became conscious of something I hadn’t seen before in the games press: an apparently growing level of hostility towards the audience. This was at its clearest when Mass Effect 3 was released and the player base objected to what they felt was a poor ending to the series as well as EA’s increasingly exploitative DLC strategy, which in this case even went as far as to excise a whole playable character from the game if you didn’t purchase a particular edition. Suddenly, the press turned on gamers as a whole, declaring them “entitled” and claiming that they didn’t have a right to complain at BioWare choosing to end their series in that way. There’s an element of truth in there, of course — a work of art is its creator’s responsibility, not its audience’s — but the wilfully aggressive manner in which this argument was presented just didn’t sit right with me at all.

Around the same time, we started to get a lot more in the way of sociopolitical commentary in gaming. My friend Jeff Grubb, with whom I’d previously worked on Kombo, found himself on the receiving end of an Internet dogpile after reporting on some off-colour comments that Twisted Metal and God of War creator David Jaffe had made, but without editorialising on them or condemning them as being “wrong”. Such was the ferocity of attacks he suffered from supposedly respected critics such as Brendan Keogh and Justin McElroy that he had to retreat from Twitter for a while, and I became genuinely concerned for his safety. Thankfully he was all right, and was eventually able to dismiss the whole situation — though when the GamerGate thing broke last year, he once again came under attack for not condemning the people hurling abuse at Zoe Quinn and instead just reporting on the facts.

I was starting to feel a little uncomfortable about this. This was not the games press which I had admired from afar and eventually from within as I was growing up. I wasn’t sure what was happening, but I sure as hell didn’t like it.

Things came to a personal head for me when USgamer published a review of Hatsune Miku Project Diva F for PlayStation 3 in which the reviewer Dustin Quillen repeatedly referred to the game as “creepy” and “voyeuristic” and, in an earlier draft which was thankfully edited out, referred to people who might enjoy the game as “degenerates”. Both I and my colleague Cassandra Khaw took great exception to this, particularly as prior to this, we had both made USgamer a site that was inherently friendly to fans of Japanese games — an aspect of gaming which most modern gaming publications were, by this point, either ignoring completely or devoting a disproportionately small amount of their attention and effort towards. We made our feelings known, and, after a bit of arguing, this situation eventually resulted in the creation of my weekly JPgamer column for USgamer, a feature through which I made a number of very good friends, and which my audience seemed to appreciate very much indeed.

Things proceeded comfortably for some months from here, though I was conscious that the sociopolitical commentary surrounding gaming — particularly with regard to the treatment of women, spurred in part by Anita Sarkeesian’s high-profile Kickstarter campaign, and with regard to representation of people outside the heterosexual cissexual majority — was ramping up. This was particularly apparent on sites like Polygon, which appeared to have interpreted its original mission of “reinventing games journalism” as “posting as much inflammatory nonsense under the pretense of ‘progressiveness’ to blow things out of proportion as possible”, which, to be fair, is something Kotaku had been doing for years and still continues to this day.

Now, I’ve commented a number of times with regard to my feelings about this, but I’ll reiterate them here: I have absolutely no objection with people using theoretical frameworks such as feminism to talk about games — they’re a mature art form and means of creative expression by now, and as such it is absolutely possible to analyse them in these terms. Where the problem comes is when only a single ideology — in this case modern, borderline radical “third wave” feminism — becomes completely dominant to the exclusion of all others, and where any attempt to question, challenge or refute the claims made by this ideology is met by ridicule at best, harassment and abuse at worst.

This problem only gets worse when writers with no background in artistic criticism try to jump on board the feminist bandwagon by throwing in terms like “problematic”, “sexist” and “misogynist” at every opportunity, often without backing up their assertions with evidence or explanations of why they feel [x] is problematic, sexist and/or misogynist. This is high-school English stuff; even at the age of 34, I remember my English teacher Ms Derbyshire encouraging us to “PEE all over our work” by making a Point, giving an Example and Explaining its context and relevance, but this simply doesn’t happen a lot of the time; “sexist” and “misogynist” in particular are used as catch-all terms to look “progressive”, but because of the amount of power these words have managed to attain over the last few years, we’ve reached a situation where mainstream journalists now seemingly feel that they don’t have to back them up with evidence, explanations or theoretical context.

Which — finally — brings us to yesterday’s Senran Kagura 2 article, why it’s unacceptable and why it’s worth criticising rather than ignoring. Diver’s Senran Kagura 2 piece was the perfect example of what I’ve just described: he refers to the game as “unapologetically sexist” without giving any evidence other than the fact that the girls have big breasts and some of the art is sexualised. Pro-tip: “sexualised” or “sexy” is not the same as “sexist”.

The reason Diver doesn’t give any evidence is that, despite appearances, Senran Kagura is not sexist. Senran Kagura as a series features an increasingly large cast of capable female protagonists who don’t need men to help them out, save them or tell them what to do. They’re comfortable with their bodies (for the most part — characters like Mirai are an exception, but this is used as one of the aspects of her overall character development) and many of them take ownership of their sexuality, with characters such as Katsuragi, Ryouna and Haruka being pretty up-front about their tastes and fetishes. Each game passes the Bechdel Test, as flawed and stupid as it is, with flying colours, and the overall story and lore of the Senran Kagura world is fleshed out to a surprisingly comprehensive degree, repeatedly refuting Diver’s shallow assertion that “it’s about breasts”.

Now, the reason why we shouldn’t stand for this, why we should criticise this and why we shouldn’t ignore it should be clear: passivity simply sends the message that it’s okay to carry on like this. Passivity is why things have gotten to the situation they are now; people haven’t been willing enough to stick up for themselves and demand better from the press that is supposed to be representing them. The perpetually offended outrage brigade already have the press on their side, whereas fans of games like Senran Kagura and its ilk only have each other to turn to. The “feminism as default” ideology adopted by most of the mainstream press these days means that there is absolutely no way that games such as Senran Kagura will ever get a fair shot at coverage and criticism because of an overwhelming unwillingness to engage with them on anything more than the most superficial level possible. And that’s unfair both to fans of the games, and to the people who make, publish and localise them for the fans.

Let me close with a few relevant quotes from the SPJ Code of Ethics, and how they relate in particular to the Senran Kagura piece but also to games journalism as a whole.

Journalists should:

– Take responsibility for the accuracy of their work. Verify information before releasing it. Use original sources whenever possible.

– Remember that neither speed nor format excuses inaccuracy.

– Provide context. Take special care not to misrepresent or oversimplify in promoting, previewing or summarizing a story.

– Gather, update and correct information throughout the life of a news story.

Diver’s piece breaks all of these principles. It is inaccurate, it does not verify its information, and it does not provide any sources. It outright boasts about its lack of context, misrepresents and oversimplifies the subject and, following its publication, Diver has proven that he is unwilling to “gather, update and correct information” regarding the game. It may not be a “news story” as such, but it should still be held accountable, and the audience should demand better.

Journalists should:

– Balance the public’s need for information against potential harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance or undue intrusiveness.

– Show compassion for those who may be affected by news coverage. Use heightened sensitivity when dealing with juveniles, victims of sex crimes, and sources or subjects who are inexperienced or unable to give consent. Consider cultural differences in approach and treatment.

[…]

– Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity, even if others do.

[…]

– Consider the long-term implications of the extended reach and permanence of publication. Provide updated and more complete information as appropriate.

Diver’s piece has the potential to cause if not outright harm then certainly discomfort. Consider if someone who knew nothing about Senran Kagura read nothing but Diver’s post, then met another person who told them that they were a huge Senran Kagura fan. What impact would Diver’s piece have on the first person’s perception of the second? I’d like to think that the first person would have enough in the way of critical faculties to realise that the second person probably isn’t a sex offender, but as human beings we are inherently judgemental creatures, and there will be at least a hint of negative prejudice there.

Not only that, but Diver’s piece shows woeful insensitivity towards a variety of people, including victims of sex crimes. He also shows a complete lack of consideration for “cultural differences in approach and treatment” with regard to Japanese games, in the process pandering to “lurid curiosity” by giving woefully ill-informed impressions of a creative work he spent no more than an hour with in total.

And on top of that, there is no consideration for the long-term implications of the extended reach and permanence of publication. Consider an extreme case, if you will: a lonely, depressed individual who finds great comfort in video games and who draws strength and courage from the things they enjoy, particularly if they’re as rich in story and characterisation as Senran Kagura is. Now consider how that lonely, depressed individual might react to reading Diver’s piece, with its dismissal of the thing that is so important to them and its implication that enjoying it makes them a deviant at best and a criminal at worst. The potential consequences aren’t pretty — granted, as previously noted, this is an extreme example, but you need to take these things into account.

The final thing I want to address is why we should give pieces like Diver’s any attention in the first place instead of just ignoring them: the argument runs that giving them attention just “gives them what they want”, and falls into the trap of clicking on clickbait.

Well, aside from the fact that not criticising these severe lapses in judgement sends the implicit message that It’s Okay To Keep Doing That, we live in an age where it is almost painfully easy to completely nullify clickbait through the use of archive sites and adblockers. In doing so, we are able to acknowledge, discuss and criticise bad and potentially harmful examples of writing without providing any benefit to the outlet on which they are published. Some may see that as a low blow, but it’s the Internet equivalent of “voting with your wallet”, and it’s important to do so.

Why? Because as is so often said that it’s become a running joke now, games journalism is broken. Completely broken. Until we get that message across, sites like Vice are going to continue doing a disservice to significant proportions of their audience — and that, to me, is completely unacceptable. So let’s do something about it.

TL;DR: I used to love games journalism, now I hate it, because it hates me for the things I love.

#oneaday Day 541: Kombo Broken

It’s a sad day today as I hear from my good buddy Ryan Olsen that Kombo.com is no more, with the URL now simply redirecting to GameZone.com, who purchased the site a while back.

Kombo.com holds some particular personal significance for me, as it does for many of the great friends I made while working for the site. Compared to many of the grizzled old veterans who had been working on the site since 2005, I was a relative newbie, only joining the team last year.

As most of you probably know by now, last year was Not a Good Year. Having been forced out of a job I genuinely loved by bullying management at the end of the previous year, finding employment in a primary school 40 miles away from where I lived, discovering that yes, Aldershot is indeed a shithole, even when dealing with 8 year olds, I quit my job in March of 2010 to attend PAX East (to this day quite possibly the best few days of my life EVAR) and around a similar time I started contributing to Kombo.com as a news editor. A short while after PAX East, my wife and I separated and I found myself alone in a flat I couldn’t afford with no job and seemingly no prospects of finding one that wasn’t supply teaching — a career path which would have likely ended rather abruptly with me flinging myself off the nearby Itchen Bridge had I pursued it.

As time went on and my finances dwindled, writing for Kombo every day — even if it was at US-friendly, UK-antisocial hours — gave me something stable to cling on to. This was something I desperately needed during those difficult months. There were many days when I found it very difficult to function as a normal human being, so badly was I hurting. But when it came to time to sit down and work my shift at the virtual news desk, that all went away for a few hours. It was just me, GamesPress, a lot of Chrome tabs and the Worst CMS In The World.

One of my favourite things about working for Kombo, though, was the people I had the good fortune to meet as a result, all of whom I’m happy to count among my friends today. All of them have gone their separate ways since September of last year, when most of us departed from the site due to its heading in a direction that wasn’t for us (with some of us forming our anarchic rainbow unicorn collective The Big Pixels, still ably maintained by Geoff Calver). But we all still talk to each other daily — through email, through Twitter, through Facebook, through G+. It’s great to see that Kombo, despite being a relatively small site compared to the giants out there, managed to give a lot of people the foot in the door they needed to pursue a career in various parts of the games industry. Some went into PR. Some went into development. Some still write on a hobbyist basis while pursuing other careers, and I write professionally.

It’s also been nice to see that diverse members of my groups of friends online knew the name Kombo — even people that I wouldn’t necessarily have expected to. The site will be missed, and not just by those of us who wrote for it. It’s the end of an era and — sadly — the end of some people’s portfolios (archive.org notwithstanding) as the old content seems to have vanished altogether.

Kombo.com gave me a leg-up into the industry and it’s part of the reason I write about games as my full time job now. I’ll miss it, and I invite you to doff your caps and raise a glass as its flame goes out for the last time.

#oneaday, Day 255: The Big Pixels are Here!

Ladies and gents, it’s my great pleasure to reveal The Big Pixels to you.

You may recall some days ago that I was mourning the loss of Kombo. Kombo’s still not dead yet—feel free to drop by and support the remaining writers—but, to be frank, it’s probably only a matter of time. It’s very sad to see the end of something which has clearly had love, care and attention poured into it over the last few years, and I’m happy that I was part of the experience for a short while.

But this post isn’t about mourning the past; it’s about celebrating the future. And that future begins with today’s launch of The Big Pixels.

The Big Pixels are a group of friends first and foremost, video game writers second, and we decided to band together to produce something that we’d want to read ourselves. Intelligent, thought-provoking games writing. No flamebait. No traffic-whoring. Just the kind of thing that gets people stroking their chin and going “Hmmm”, and hopefully provoking some discussion. Those of you who follow The Squadron of Shame will undoubtedly dig what we’re doing. And those of you who are tired of the same old news stories posted everywhere day after day will surely enjoy our work, too. It’s an N4G commenter-free zone!

We’re there to have fun and build a community, not to chase page hits. So the important thing for you (yes, you!), the reader, is that you enjoy it. Read our work. Tell us what you think in the comments. Feel free to share any pieces you find particularly interesting or entertaining. And help us to build up our own unique little corner of the internet; a home away from home for those who are sick of “Top Ten Tuesdays” featuring boobies, guns or any combination thereof, or people who are sick of seeing the same picture of Michael Pachter on every article where he says something contentious and/or stupid.

Since you’re reading my blog, I’m going to draw particular attention to my own posts, of course. I am nothing if not a whore, after all. So while you’re over there, feel free to check out a “reprint” of my article on game development’s gender divide (featuring much-appreciated assistance from the very lovely Mitu Khandaker and Lauren Wainwright), a companion article to the most recent SquadCast on video game music, and a discussion of adult gaming. I hope you like them; and be sure to check out my buddies’ work while you’re over there. And don’t forget the Looney Bin, receptacle for all manner of game-related crap that we’ve encountered in our journeys around the web.

It’s been an interesting journey over the last few days, and it’s only just beginning, for sure. Stay tuned to The Big Pixels, as we’ll all be pushing out a wide variety of articles on all manner of game-related subjects every week. Follow us on Twitter and/or Facebook for the latest and to make us look popular and awesome.

Also, our review scoring system has a rainbow unicorn pixel in it. And there is absolutely no way you can say that isn’t the most amazing thing you’ve ever seen. Unless Maru is your cat.

#oneaday, Day 249: Remember Reach… Uh, Kombo

The death of a website is a curious thing. In practical terms, it’s no different to deleting a file, switching something off, throwing out a piece of technology that is no longer used. But it’s more than that. A dying website normally knows it is dying before the plug is finally pulled. And, these days in particular, it’s not just a website that dies. It’s the community that the site built. The readers who came back every day, whether they were vocal ones who commented on everything or people who just diligently read every article because they’d chosen that particular site to be their “home”.

I’ve witnessed the death of several websites I’ve been involved with either as an employee or an active community member of in my time, and it’s never pleasant. 1up.com isn’t dead, of course, but when The Great Exodus occurred some time back, the Squadron of Shame and I left the site behind and never looked back. The site still maintains an active blogging community, but it’s a shadow of its former self when I think back to the glory days of the 1up Radio boards.

Then came B4HD, a relatively short-lived retro games project that I was involved with. We had a team of dedicated writers who loved games of the past with a passion and loved writing about them. But for various reasons documented in the site’s final post, it had to close and those involve seek other outlets for their work.

Most recently, of course, is Kombo. Kombo is still there, of course, for now. But the staff aren’t. Sure, there are some who are still there diligently posting articles on the site and holding things together as the site’s last few commitments are fulfilled. But some time soon, that site and everything attached with it—the content, the artwork, the community, the recognisable writers—will cease to be.

What happens at that point? Where do all these lost souls go? Sometimes they have nowhere to go straight away, and simply have to pick another place to call home and latch on to it. Sometimes they have to start from scratch again, building a reputation from the ground up like they once did. Sometimes they float aimlessly for a while. And sometimes they immediately land on their feet and produce something awesome.

It’s perhaps premature to be holding a “wake” for a site like Kombo when it hasn’t even died yet. Rest assured that the talented crowd from Kombo are not going anywhere. That dedicated team who knew and loved their audience (even Wiiboy) and what they wanted to hear are alive, well and waiting.

“Waiting for what?” you may ask. That’s not for me to say… yet. But let’s just say that those of you who enjoyed the writing of myself, Jeff, Brad, Joey, Eric, Keri, Ryan, Mike, Matt, Joel, Dan, Ryan and Geoff won’t have to wait too long to see what we’re up to. It’s going to be great, and we hope you like it a lot.

A love of the cloak and dagger prevents me from saying anything else right now. For those of you who care, though, we’re fine. And I know that I for one am hugely happy to have met such an awesome crowd of writers, and even happier that we’re sticking together for new and exciting projects.

Watch this space for the latest.

￭

#oneaday, Day 248: All Change! Again

It’s been a curious few days for some people and things that are very dear to me. First up, you may have read my impassioned mourning of the apparent loss of Good Old Games the other day. Turns out that, as some suspected all along, the site was simply coming out of beta and relaunching. Not only that, but awesome WRPG Baldur’s Gate is coming to the site, with more to follow. This, hopefully, means that Planescape: Torment can’t be far behind. Because the one loaning incident I regret more than anything else is loaning that game to someone and never getting it back. I’m not even sure I know who borrowed it. So if you have my copy of Planescape: Torment, please return it to me. Or at least buy me a copy on GOG if/when it appears.

So that was sad and became happy, although some are still ranting and raving about GOG’s handling of the situation. Okay, it perhaps wasn’t the best PR stunt ever (some blaming that famous Polish sense of humour) but it got people talking about GOG, and it turns out that what they were planning was actually awesome. This isn’t the place for that debate, though.

The really bad news, though, is that the gaming site I’ve written daily news for and called home since March of this year, Kombo.com, is folding. This is terribly sad news as the team at Kombo are some truly talented people who worked their hardest to provide awesome content every day, whether it was opinionated twists on news coverage or original content.

Former Assistant Director of Reviews Matt Green sums the situation up over at his blog, so pay it a visit and feel free to offer commiserations either there or indeed here. I sincerely hope that everyone who was involved with Kombo lands on their feet and gets the awesome writing gig (with appropriately awesome pay) that they deserve. Note: This includes me. So if you know anywhere who needs an awesome writer who is also British (which apparently adds +1000 awesome points) then let me know. You can feel free to point them to this site—I have links to samples of my work on the menu bar above—or to http://pjedi.co.uk/links, which also has said links.

So, with that said, I think it’s time for a little light relief. The Internet provides many means of light relief, not all of which are appropriate for public consumption. (Hey, what you look at in your own time is your business. You pervert.)

By far my favourite means of light relief that the Internet provides is cat, monkey and/or dog videos, however, so I shall now share a few of my favourites. Thanks in part to Alex Connolly and Chris Person for having a link war on my Facebook profile earlier.

May I firstly present to you, courtesy of Dave Gorman on Twitter, an elephant playing darts:

Followed by the charmingly literal “A Monkey Washing A Cat.”

And then… er… this.

How about THIS?!

Andross’s enemy is my enemy!

And finishing with indisputably the best cat video on the Internet.

I thank you. For those who have had a nightmarish, difficult or stressful few days, I sincerely hope the sight of the above has cheered you, if only slightly. May tomorrow be a better day.

#oneaday, Day 225: This Post is Controversial

Want to get your voice heard on the Internet? Then you’d better have something contentious to say, or at the very least something to say about something contentious.

I’ve seen it myself on this blog. The day I wrote about Kevin Smith’s experiences with Southwest Airlines (day 28, if you’re keeping score) was one of the highest-traffic days that I’ve ever seen. Granted, this being a personal blog which not that many people know about, that still wasn’t very many people. But it was enough to make a noticeable spike on that handy little pageviews graph that WordPress helpfully provides you with.

And today. I happened to tweet earlier that Xbox LIVE’s prices were going up by $10 a year. Thinking nothing of it at the time, I returned about an hour later to discover that this tweet, out of the other 16,740 that there are (I know, I know) was retweeted by something in the region of three billion people. All right, that’s an exaggeration. But you get my point.

And then, an article published by a colleague over on Kombo has seen one of our highest ever “temperature” ratings on gaming news aggregator N4G. The subject of the article? “Top Ten Most Overrated Games”. Compare this to an article I wrote on the subject of women in the games industry, which attracted ill-informed, stupid comments from people who obviously had read nothing more than the title, and you’ll see that at times, the Internet is not the place for reasoned discourse. Incidentally, this isn’t a slight against Lucas’ great article, which actually makes some fair points.

A friend and colleague described services such as Digg and N4G as “places where lazy people go to yell at each other over stories they didn’t read concerning topics they don’t understand”. It’s sad, but it’s true. It’s also an awesome quote. Thank you, Brad.

So it seems that in order to get people interested and reading what you have to say, it either has to be a contentious opinion, or an opinion on a contentious topic. It’s possibly a side-effect of the celebrity culture I discussed the other day, where apparently our own lives aren’t interesting enough and therefore we must go look for scandal, opportunities to accuse “the system” of screwing us and chances to argue and flame at every opportunity. Are our own lives really that boring, though? Do people really have that little to say about themselves? Should I turn this into a blog about what the latest celebrity idiots have been getting up to recently?

No. Because if everyone goes about doing that, it just makes the situation worse. I’m writing here for me. I write about what I want to write about, when I want to write about it… so long as it’s still one thing a day. The fact that other people read and enjoy it is a happy bonus. And it gives me some faith that the Internet isn’t solely populated by dribbling spastics.

Just mostly.

#oneaday, Day 206: Hello.

First up, please excuse me for just one moment.

AAAARRRRGHH!!
AAAAAGGGHHHH!!!
GRRRAAAARRR!!!
RAWWWRRR!!!

Thanks for bearing with that for a moment. It was deeply and completely necessary. Also, I had to reformat it so it didn’t mess up the formatting of the page. Rawr.

Right. So, this post then. I thought I’d introduce myself. Why? Because my first ever post on this blog was a long time ago, and many things have changed since then. Also, due to various things that I’m not going to go into and rant about right now, I am still looking for work.

Particularly writing work.

I am a writer. That’s what I do. First and foremost. More than anything. It is what I spend the vast majority of my days doing. I write this blog every day. I write news for the very awesome Kombo, staffed by some of the finest people I’ve ever had the good fortune to work with but not meet in many cases. I’ve written two articles for IGN. I’ve scribed a number of articles for utterly wonderful DRM-free digital-distribution site Good Old Games. I’ve submitted a bunch of stuff to BitMob, most of which was promoted to the front page as a “featured article”. I’ve covered a variety of things for parental gaming advice site WhatTheyPlay. And I edit and produce the podcast for the Squadron of Shame, which will shortly be relaunching in a triumphant new format. I also set up the Squad’s community site, the Squadron of Shame Squawkbox, which you’re welcome to join. In fact, there’s a big-ass list of most of the things I’ve done right here.

I have been semi-to-moderately prolific. And I love it. There’s more stuff in the pipeline, too. Find out more as it happens.

So, using the power of Web 2.0, I’d like to ask a favour of anyone reading this.

Pimp me out. Share my stuff. Tell people how awesome I am. Point them at this blog, and the #oneaday project. Tell them about my stupid stickmen drawings. Show them my in-depth, opinionated news articles on Kombo which actually provoke discussion when I dare to mention Phantasy Star in anything less than positive terms. Dazzle them with my mad interviewing skills on my IGN articles about Crackdown 2, the first time I’d ever visited a developer.

‘Cause I’d very much like this all to work out. Writing is awesome, and through it I’ve learned a lot about myself, met some fantastic and awesome people and joined a community of people who are as passionate about the things we love as I am. It may not always pay well (or indeed at all in many cases), but it’s what I love to do. So if you can help me gain any exposure using your undoubtedly fabulous amounts of influence that you hold on the web—that’s a really nice shirt, by the way—then I’d of course be eternally grateful and will buy you a bag of chocolate raisins or something.

In the meantime, a good friend (and Captain #oneaday), Mr Chris Schilling, has convinced me I should be pitching stuff around the place. So if you’re a writer or involved in the publishing industry yourself and have any contacts you’d be willing and able to introduce me to, I’d very much appreciate that, too.

Shameless, I know. But whadyagunnado?

#oneaday, Day 148: We Live In The Future

Screw this motion control crap – I just watched a press conference on the other side of the world while lying in bed with my phone.

That was a tweet from Alex Martin that I received a few minutes ago. And when I think about what I’ve done today, it’s pretty clear that we are most definitely living in the future.

I started my day feeling a bit lonely as I hadn’t seen any actual real people for a little while. So I went out to the coffee shop and took my netbook with me. While I was there, I gratuitously solicited questions for my Formspring account (which people were more than happy to furnish me with) and also dropped in on the freshly-created Squadron of Shame Squawkbox.

I ended up sitting in that coffee shop for about four hours, discussing things with people from all over the world – some deep and profound, other things less so. Then it was time to come home, because as part of my job as a News Editor for Kombo.com I was on the “home team” for the E3 coverage.

I’m gutted that I’m not actually at E3. But the experience I’ve had throughout the course of this evening is the next best thing. I’ve had IM windows open with people frantically telling me to cover stories. I’ve had the Squawkbox open to see the Squad’s reactions. And I’ve had Twitter open to see everyone else’s reactions. As sad as it sounds, despite sitting on my own in my study in front of the computer, I’ve not been alone tonight. There have been many people with me, all following the same things, watching the live streams on their computers. It’s as if we were all in the audience together, making sly comments to one another.

Whenever Microsoft showed off the ability to watch, say, Netflix movies as an Xbox party, I always thought it seemed a bit pointless. But after sitting watching the E3 conferences with a group of friends who aren’t even on the same continent let alone in the same room as me, I think I’ve reconsidered a little bit.

Obviously there’s no substitute for real human interaction. But when the real thing isn’t possible, the fact that we live in the future makes a very adequate substitute. So big love, kudos and respect to everyone who’s helped make today a huge amount of fun, and I look forward to doing it all again very soon.

I have plenty of thoughts about what’s been shown at E3 so far but I’ve been posting news articles all day and frankly I’m completely burnt out. So I’ll save further thoughts until I’m a bit more awake.

Job interview tomorrow. Quite looking forward to it. It may not be the ideal job for my current situation, but it’s a foot back on the ladder and has the potential to lead onto better things. So right now I’ll take what I can get.

One thing’s clear to me right now as it approaches 3AM where I’m sitting: I’m certainly feeling a lot more positive than I did when I woke up this morning. And it’s thanks to you, Internet. Big love to you all.