Starting Monday, February 6, I will be a full-time reporter at the Gawker Media blog Kotaku, where I will be covering stories in gaming news and culture.
This is an extremely exciting opportunity for me. As one of the biggest websites in the industry, with a gigantic, loyal readership that includes just about every gamer on the planet, Kotaku will be a fantastic platform for my work and an excellent place for me to write, learn, and report. In other words, I can’t fucking wait.
Dear Spike VGA Producers,
I get it. You’ve got obligations. You have to appeal to a broad audience. Your references can’t be too niche or obscure. You have to keep people watching. You have to appease advertisers and wrangle exclusive deals out of game publishers. I don’t envy your jobs.
But after watching the 2011 Spike TV Video Game Awards this Saturday night, I can’t help but wish you’d try a little bit harder not to embarrass the people you’re trying to entertain.
vis·cer·al [vis-er-uhl]
adjective
1. of or pertaining to the viscera.
2. affecting the viscera.
3. of the nature of or resembling viscera.
4. characterized by or proceeding from instinct rather than intellect: a visceral reaction.
5. characterized by or dealing with coarse or base emotions; earthy; crude: a visceral literary style.
Though I already showed you how to review games, I didn’t spend a great deal of time talking about the most important part of the process: scoring.
See, sometimes in the drunken stupor of my day-to-day existence, I forget that gamers hate reading just as much as reviewers hate playing games. Every second spent reading a game review is a second they could instead spend doing far more interesting things, like complaining about DLC on message boards.
Enter the review score, that glorious integer that helps prevent nonsense like “critical thinking” and “intelligent discussion.” Thanks to these scores, there’s no need to read reviews — all you have to do is scroll down the page a little bit for an instant evaluation of any game’s content.
So how do we come up with these mystical numbers? Reviewers typically pick one of several possible methods:
I get a lot of emails from aspiring writers. “I want to write videogame reviews,” they say. “Where should I start?”
They usually add long, rambling sentences about their work history or education or some other nonsense that I can’t be bothered to read thanks to my busy schedule of reading websites about fantasy football. Then they ask for tips and tricks, as if I’m some sort of Nintendo Power hotline for game reviewers.
I can’t blame them. You see, writing reviews is awesome. Everybody wants to do it.
So here’s my tip: Don’t play videogames.
8:00am – Wake up. Go for jog.
8:32am – Actually wake up. Promise you’ll go for jog tomorrow.
8:33am – Check email. Browse message boards. Pour very large mug of coffee. Tweet something about how coffee is a writer’s life blood.
8:34am – Check for retweets.
8:37am – Check for retweets.
8:40am – File complaint to Twitter saying your account must be broken, as you assume you must have at least 20 retweets by now but none are showing up.
8:52am – Start working on first writing assignment of day. Brainstorm ways to turn it into list.
It never ends, this shit.
Now I don’t know who @HowardIsANet is, but I love his gumption. A couple of hours ago, he tweeted that the radio station WFAN660 was reporting that free agent cornerback Nnamdi Asomugha was going to the New York Jets’ headquarters.
@HowardIsANet has four followers and about ten tweets. Not a very respectable source, right? Just the type of account that somebody like @NFLDraftInsider might want to ignore after what happened last time.
Update: By request, I’ve added a few more details about how this whole thing originated.
Though we’ve only had it for a few years, it’s already hard to picture a world without Twitter. The simple social network is the Information Age equivalent of crack, allowing us instant access to thoughts and facts from millions of people all across the world. Almost every piece of news breaks on Twitter first. Sometimes, during particularly embarrassing lapses of judgement, news breaks because of Twitter. This one simple website gives us an unprecedented level of access to the world.
There’s just one problem with Twitter: People are stupid.
1. If you Google something in the forest and there’s nobody around to hear it, does Google still sell your search data to advertisers?
2. You meet two men on the road. One says, “I cannot tell a lie.” The other says, “I just texted a picture of my dick to a stranger.” Which one is telling the truth?
3. What goes on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three legs in the evening — and tweets about it the whole fucking time?
