Insert Credit's Brandon Sheffield first told me about the Insert Credit 2003 Game Journalism Colloquium in January of 2003, when we were on the road for San Jose. It was not cold enough that morning to keep me awake. I was drinking a Dr. Pepper, hanging my head out the window, and I'd just slapped myself in the face.
"So I'm going to get together a bunch of people to write what they think about videogame journalism. We're gonna get that Toastyfrog bastard to write something. Maybe Tycho from Penny Arcade, I don't know. You're gonna write something, too, right?"
My face still ached with slapping pain. I was so dead-tired, my dead-tiredness had died.
"Yeah, I'll write something."
I was too dead-dead-tired to even wonder, "What the hell do I have to give to something like this?" And this wasn't just an inward as-of-yet non-expression of artistic self-criticism -- it was the knowledge of a clinically inexperienced journalist. It was then, when Brandon half-flattered me with his request, that I began to long for experience. Being that I was about to take off for a three-month self-imposed exile of sorts in Japan, I figured now would be the time to become a legitimate "videogame journalist." After I arrived in Japan, I looked for writing opportunities that would earn me some respect. At the time, all I had were qualifications.
In the years that passed between my finding an issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly on the supermarket rack and now, I've obtained several college degrees, one of them being in journalism. That degree certifies, if nothing else, that I've listened to many grown men talk excitedly about methods for stripping personality out of writing, thereby turning it into "objective" writing.
It occurred to me in journalism school that a "journalist" makes the conscious decision to become a journalist after reaching a certain stage of maturity. A novelist tells stories because he has stories within himself that he needs to tell. A journalist tells stories because he likes telling stories. A journalist finds the same friend in objectivity that the novelist finds in creativity. Ability to tell a story is one thing; ability to make a story is another. A journalist's comfort is that, without fail, there will always be other people's stories to tell, whether about a fire killing millions or a delay of a videogame's release date.
Now, this wouldn't be an issue of inspiration vs. uninspiration, or even of maturity vs. immaturity, if large internet-factions weren't, at this very moment, huddled around IRC channels conspiring about how to prove to the world that videogames are art. How these ham-fisted children can manage to type is one question; the destruction they're unknowingly willing to cause the coverage of videogames is visible to few.
The best place to start getting to where I'm going with this is to tell you, with mild halfhearted apologies all around, that I applied to "work" with PlanetGameCube.com back in January of 2003. I did this first out of morbid curiosity, second out of desire to put my name on a large website, and most importantly as a research topic for my entry into the Insert Credit 2003 Game Journalism Colloquium. I chose PlanetGameCube.com first because they are a single-platform site, secondly because they receive 200,000 regular visitors and are often linked by Penny Arcade, and thirdly because their sterile and dry methods of news-reporting struck me as perfect for my project.
My application to be the site's Japanese correspondent went ignored, sending me scrambling for some other kind of half-employment; my other attempts shoot well out of the scope of this essay, which will go on too much longer, anyway. All you need to know is that, irony of ironies, PlanetGameCube.com, in the first of a long sequence of ill timings, emailed me on April 3rd, 2003, while I was sitting at an internet kiosk in Narita Airport, ready to head back to San Jose. The same little man who'd fire me on day one of E3 told me he wanted me on as the Japanese correspondent, and then told me days later, when the news that I was no longer in Japan had been appropriately broken, that he'd like to have me on anyway.
A few weeks saw me oriented into the site. I had received an email account and the locations of the secret meeting chat rooms. I showed up in a few meetings, was lectured by a junior editor for speaking out of line, and generally took good mental notes of how these people go about their practices. Thanks to a document called "The PlanetGameCube Staff Guide," I gained quite brutal, gripping insight. It was, however, one of the conditions of my being hired that I never share the contents of that document with anyone, even if I were to leave the website at some point.
Well, I'm sure they wouldn't mind me saying a few general things.
As a website that receives 200,000 monthly visitors, PlanetGameCube.com is a popular target for game-companies' PR departments. As a member of the site's top-secret staff mailing list, ten to fifteen such press releases clogged my Microsoft Outlook every morning. Accompanying each press release was a reply email from a staff member, usually consisting of no more words than "I'm on it," or "I got this one." Using a PHP script, the staff member would then "post" the press release on the site, under the guise of a "news story."
The PlanetGameCube.com Staff Guide tells how to deal with press releases: basically, affix "[Game Company] announced today that . . ." to the top, delete the "Company Information" from the bottom, and write up a two-sentence "abstract" for the front page. See the site for examples.
Like clockwork, the editors of PlanetGameCube.com post press releases in a timely manner. The information gets to the mass of 200,000 monthly readers. They find out what the need to know.
It is PlanetGameCube.com's perhaps-admirable devotion to delivering what people need to know that spawns its perhaps-grating lack of artistic entertainment value. Like a local news broadcast, PlanetGameCube.com exists to provide traffic and weather reports; its occasional kitten-in-a-tree editorials jar just as they should. And they should jar, because, in theory, they shouldn't.
This is a confusing, if not-good, journalistic model.
That's not to say that the people who write for PlanetGameCube are, for one reason or another, not good journalists. Well, some of them aren't good spellers, and many of them are far from grammarians -- yet their exuberance and commitment to bringing news to light reminds me of many of the scarily devoted staff members of my college newspaper.
They're certainly as collared and leashed by their senior editor. Witness the "complete difference":
Your position in a sense gives you a sort of "power". Realize, unless you're me, you don't have any real power. Do NOT get a big head, be cocky, act like you're better than someone, or go off on some God-awful power trip. Just because you can lock a thread, or kick someone out of chat room doesn't give you the right to be an asshole. There's a complete difference between acting firm and professional, and acting like Hitler. Don't be Hitler. This behavior is absolutely 100% not tolerated on this site. Act like a piece of shit, and you're gone. [from the PlanetGameCube.com Staff Guide]
If this is not indicative of disciplined journalism, then the following example -- a result of my internet screen name being posted somewhere the site's entire staff could see -- is more-than-adequate evidence of the play-journalistic syndrome I'm going to lay out with regard to PlanetGameCube.com and other websites like it.
Session Start (AIM - tim:excited staff guy): Wed Apr 23 05:29:56 2003
[04:29:56] excited staff guy: oh dear, there's breaking news on the loose
[04:30:02] excited staff guy: if you're around? @_@
[04:30:04] tim: oh yeah?
[04:30:10] tim: i'm around
[04:30:11] excited staff guy: can you get to nintendo.com and eyeball what they have?
[04:30:15] tim: sure, sure
[04:30:15] excited staff guy: it looks like they're putting up e3 stuff
[04:30:18] excited staff guy: i'm on mario kart
[04:30:22] excited staff guy: they got pictures and everything
[04:30:28] tim: oh, wow
[04:30:34] excited staff guy: and just our luck, it looks like we're the only staff around at 4 am lollers
"Lollers," indeed. You know, I wonder if these people say "Lollers" in real life. Something pretty reliable tells me they do. That, however, is not important. What is important is the PlanetGameCube staff's devotion to bringing to light what needs to be known.
The question is: with videogames, what needs to be known?
This is a tough question to answer. I could philosophize-out here, and ask questions like "What, in all of life, ever needs to be said?" I won't. Instead, I'll try to stay to the point.
On the front page of yesterday's Indianapolis Star (for some reason the only issue I have on hand here) is a detailed infographic about a new train system to ferry people from hospital to hospital in the hospital block of downtown Indianapolis. The system will go live on June 28th, 2003. The ride length is five minutes and twenty-three seconds. The track serves five hospitals. The five hospitals are named. The distance between stops is given to the nearest hundredth of a mile. The train is said to be electric. Four pairs of rubber wheels straddle two metal rails. The train travels at an average of twenty-five to thirty miles per hour. Closing out the inverted pyramid of the article is a declaration of how much money this project cost the city of Indianapolis.
In this case, the first question that crosses an editor's mind is "Is this news?" The question as to whether or not it is news is answered in historical context: the first electric train system in the world was built in 1919, in no city other than Indianapolis. The system was dismantled in the 1940s by the General Motors Corporation, part of Indianapolis' evolution into "Motown" before that title was taken by Detroit. This new train in downtown Indianapolis will be the first electric train -- the first reliable form of mass transit, actually -- in the city in six decades.
The gravity of all these facts are taken into consideration and computed by whichever editor is lucky enough to determine where things go in the newspaper. In the case of the above facts, the story is placed (and correctly) on the front page.
For a story about a videogame to receive front-page coverage in a national newspaper would require that videogame to have some sort of deeply rooted significance in society. Have videogames been around as long as electric trains? Is the release of a new hit videogame as important to the citizens of Indianapolis, Indiana, as electric trains' return after sixty years? Hell no.
Now, in the context of a videogame site, is news of the first screenshots of Mario Kart: Double Dash important enough to link at the top of the front page? Well, what if that site also happens to have a punk-rocking interview with a game producer on the same day? Maybe not.
What if that site happens to be entirely about games for Nintendo hardware? Well, certainly. By all means, link to the Mario Kart screenshots. In the context of your site -- by Nintendo gamers for Nintendo gamers -- it makes sense. Now, when the article is written, what gets said? What needs to be said? Most websites have a list of "questions" that need to be answered for each gaming preview written. How many players is the game? Who's the developer? When is it coming out? What system is it for? These are the "needs" in the case of videogame news.
So it goes with news. Now, what about reviews of games? Somewhere along the evolutionary timeline of journalism, it became generally understood that newspapers and other media, in addition to reporting on things that are objectively true and/or required knowledge, can also educate the people on what, of the subjective arts, is good or not good.
Yet, as any good criticism class will tell you, there are specific principles that work. In a film review -- and this has been proven by some people more influential than me, and with jobs, no less -- it helps to summarize a bit of the plot. Make a mention of the length. Drop names of actors and actresses -- and even cinematographers, if you can find a clever reason. If many jokes fall flat in a comedy, offer one of them, explain why it falls flat, and then hint at how many other jokes like it riddle the movie's poor structure. Then advise the dear reader -- dear, for they are paying your salary -- whether or not the movie is worth seeing. Should they see it with someone they love? Is it the feel-good movie of the summer? Should they see it only at matinee prices? Should they wait for the video? Should they bother, even then? Then, of course, give a rating. Make sure it agrees with what you say. In fact, it might be a good idea to have a rating in mind before you begin writing your review. Does the opening sentence of your review read like the opening sentence of a two-star review? Does that tone stay consistent throughout?
This is what we call a review structure. Of course, there are fluctuations of quality between all the reviews that adhere to this structure. The Indianapolis Star's Bonnie Britton -- sorry, Bonnie -- will spend far too much of her reviews summarizing plot, for example; on the other hand, the Chicago Sun-Times' Roger Ebert has taken this form and owned it. And I mean owned, not honed.
The editors of your average videogame fansite are like the kids who end up in journalism school because they want to be journalists. Like the inverse of a religious man who won't listen to a word that criticizes his faith, many of them simply can't grasp the differences in quality between the Indianapolis Star (I'd give them a . . . five out of ten -- maybe a little generous) and the New York Times (a nine, in my book). They don't really have to, though. They have good souls. The souls of people who genuinely want to tell other people's stories.
In the case of the journalism student who obeys a vague notion to "get involved in the media," whether his hobbies are taxidermy or DVD-collecting, he is a blanker slate than the kid who starts a videogame website. He's a guy with a general direction of where his paper is going to go. The kid who starts a videogame website already has a thesis narrowed down. Hell, he's got index cards covered in three-point scrawl -- he's got it researched down to the lowercase letter. And it's precisely because of his fandom-ish, obsessive exuberance that his paper is going to be too long, riddled with errors, and/or thematically unreadable.
The other kid, the blanker slate -- he can be shaped by his professors from a kid with a nice-sized DVD collection and a prom-queen girlfriend into a journalist with a nice-sized DVD collection, a prom-queen girlfriend, and an admirable level of journalistic skill. With four years of practice, he'll be able to whip up a grammatically perfect, error-free 1,000-word feature article in fourteen minutes, and do so with a certain helping of pride. With four years of practice, the senior editor a videogame fansite might end up playing Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow on a hotel television screen, courtesy of the GameBoy Player and GameCube his mass-mailed "E3 Guide" warned the writers for his site to be sure to carry on, for indeed: "You should talk to the guys who lost the laptops out of their luggage last year!"
These are people who probably couldn't care less for the evolution of the game review as a critical form. That's not to say that they live to actively destroy the form, however. When they practice it, they practice it as they need to. They practice it not with the precision of well-education -- they practice it in imitation of other videogame reviews. If all amateur videogame reviews imitate other videogame reviews in some form or another, that means everyone is, in some way or another, imitating the earliest works of Electronic Gaming Monthly and GamePro.
THE GRAPHICS
The maintainers of fansites, from what I've seen in person, are simply excited as hell to be involved in things like the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Their 200,000 visitors, as recorded in a hit log, are bargaining statistics with which to buy bragging rights to say things like, "I talked to Denis Dyack [of Silicon Knights, producers of Eternal Darkness] on the phone yesterday."
b>THE SOUND
The typical little videogame fansite is a confidence-booster for the participant. The typical little videogame fansite's participant is a person who grew up playing games. Maybe they didn't have friends in high school (I didn't), and maybe they didn't have girlfriends in college (I did); maybe they used to draw pictures of Final Fantasy characters in their notebooks (I did), or maybe they still do (I don't).
THE GAMEPLAY
Some editors of fansites graduate from high school or college and find jobs as interns at local newspapers. Some of them graduate from college and end up teaching English in Japan. Some get jobs at PR firms that represent videogame companies; their experience reading press releases has no doubt blessed them with a little ability when it comes to writing them. Some of these editors are hired by videogame magazines or corporate websites to do the "professional" equivalent of the jobs they've been doing as amateurs for so long.
It's this practical food chain of events that leads PSM to produce a "Swimsuit Issue," which they then proceed to hand out at E3. There's a poster inside. The girls have . . . moisture on their faces.
If nothing else, I marvel at people who run some of these fansites. With the power of the internet and the freedom to say whatever the hell they please, as if afraid of being "geeky," unaware that videogames have been written about by fans in a "cool" manner before, they choose to be terse and "journalistic." One could say this is out of a desire to remain objective; a journalistic quest for truth of the videogaming kind. Another way of looking at it is to say that these editors have an eye out for their future careers. Another way is to say that the sterile, bare-bones, creativity-free approach leaves these players-first, journalists-second more time to spend with their hobby.
Faced with all these choices of what to believe, I'd honestly prefer to stay one-hundred-percent, in-the-dark confused.
REPLAY VALUE
I saw plenty of each kind of amateur journalist at the PlanetGameCube.com staff meeting the night before the 2003 E3 Nintendo press conference.
Stereotypes come in all shapes and sizes, and so do stereotypical people. Stereotypes wouldn't exist without some grounds. Old people do sometimes drive large automobiles. White people do often look stupid when they try to dance. Foreign guys do often go to Japan because they have a thing for Japanese girls. And gamers are often, as I believe Ben Affleck once put it (of comic-book readers, no less), "Over or underweight guys who can't get laid."
The PlanetGameCube.com E3 Guide, I kid you not, warns all staff members to wear "extremely comfortable shoes," as you will no doubt be doing
MORE WALKING THAN YOU'VE EVER DONE IN YOUR ENTIRE LIFE
A second into the hotel room, with its big-screen television, millimeter-thin red maroon carpet, and chilly air-conditioning, and I was thinking that drinking four Mountain Dews in the middle of the night instead of three would result in these guys doing more walking than they'd done in their entire lives. I hate to repeat myself (really, really, I do), though I personally was homeless in Tokyo for several weeks this year. You think I got from Ikebukuro to Asakusa on the train? You think I could afford a bike? Being lumped into this group of people was hurting the microscopic pride I've grown up with.
Not a minute after I'd entered the appointed hotel room, I was being told there was someone I had to meet. The person telling me this was, quite frankly, larger than my mother, and male, and with acne that must have been ten years old. The person I had to meet "Totally looks like a manga character or some shit." This person happened to be the very guy who'd told me three days earlier I should have gone easy on my bold type in a review of Splinter Cell. He then added, "Way to give the Console Game of the Year a 7.5." He was a leather-jacketed guy with a waist as wide as my wrist. He gave me his business card. I gave him one of mine. He didn't look like any more of a manga character than I did. Hell, if you know where to look in a Tokyo bookstore's magazine rack, you'll actually find a manga with me in it. You don't hear me bragging about it. I'm kind of ashamed of it, to be honest.
(No, I'm not making that up.)
Before long, the senior editor, the only staff member of normal weight proportions (and therefore the hero), had shown up. He had a few surprises in store -- later a speech, earlier an "untouchable." Untouchables are free games that no one wants to spend time with, much less review. The PlanetGameCube.com Staff Guide is sure to coax the young editors into reviewing these "untouchables" by telling them the games can be sold back to, say, GameStop for store credit. The senior editor was sure to tell us all that on the night before the Nintendo press conference.
The "untouchable" happened to be Gotham Games' Conflict: Desert Storm, a dreadful set-in-Iraq, ripped-from-the-headlines, squad-based first-person shooter that insert credit's Brandon Sheffield had recently used as fuel for a short-subject political documentary. I raised my hand, and without question accepted the game. I had every intention to play it and review it, perhaps even that night. insert credit's very own Vincent Diamante was on hand -- as my "driver" and "friend" -- to observe, and I take it he was at least a little proud of me for accepting the free copy of the game.
I never got a chance to review it. It sits on my bedroom floor even now. A post-staff-meeting trip to Del Taco for shakes and burritos imbued the game with a packet of Del Scorcho hot sauce, and even that wasn't enough to make insert credit's Chris Woodard accept the game as his reward for being named insert credit writer of the month.
Just two days later, I would be fired from PlanetGameCube.com, and that's a real shame. I never intended to be fired. I intended to quit. I intended to go to their staff meeting the night before E3, where I would receive my free PlanetGameCube.com T-shirt -- then I was going to quit. It was during the staff meeting the night before the press conference, however, that I started to detect this horrible villainy within me. The holier-than-j0 tendencies with which a baseball player and all-around popular kid had brained me in the back of the head with a thrown apple jumped into me, and came to life, as I stood against the wall with crossed arms during the PlanetGameCube.com. And when I say it came to life, I say it made itself known to me, and I didn't like it.
Without doing so actively, without saying a thing against them, without raising a finger in protest, I had been mocking PlanetGameCube.com. I had been mocking them with my frivolous curiosity. I had been mocking them with my "investigation." I had been mocking them simply by standing among them.
STREAMING VIDEO FOOTAGE
They hired me, perhaps, because they thought I had something to offer them. A degree in journalism -- which many of them are working toward -- experience living in Japan -- which many of them plan to accrue at some point or another -- several published online articles of some . . . length . . . well, I looked good in words. It was when I stood among them that, maybe, I started to not look so good. Here, these guys who used their staff message boards to arrange a list of people wanting to see The Matrix Reloaded in Hollywood the day after E3 ended, were getting down to business. They were digging in their heels and listening to their fearless leader give a speech that began with "E3 is a very important . . ." before explaining how things were going to go down at the press conference. And they were so damned utterly serious about it.
For those of you on a narrowband connection, allow me to explain the above video: one minute and eight seconds of a PlanetGameCube.com press conference, in which Senior Editor X details Q&A session etiquette: let the senior editors ask the questions, don't speak Japanese -- even if you're Tim (har har) -- and, if you have a good question, write it down on an index card, and if it's really good, maybe we'll let you ask it. And anyone who wears a hockey jersey is a dead man.
There was a point when this editor told his henchman to "Show respect when Shiggy's talking." I wish I'd caught that one on video. I'd show it to Chris Kohler, who says that one of the chief indicators you're a bad game journalist is that you call Shigeru Miyamoto, father of Super Mario and Zelda, anything other than "Shigeru Miyamoto." I would have liked to show Chris Kohler the video of that editor, and point to how naturally he said "Shiggy." The conviction -- it takes guts to walk down the street, to eat your breakfast, with that kind of conviction. I'm not saying it doesn't grate on me, and I'm not saying I don't find it ridiculously lame. It's just -- that conviction! Tha conviction with which said senior editor once emailed me, concerning insert credit: "I don't have any problem with you working there, as long as you don't cover anything strictly GameCube." Conviction!
I myself have never been able to use pet names with any level of conviction.
I began to hold a silent envy for these people, and their convictions that differed from my own convictions. Like when you see Jack Nicholson's obsessive-compulsive character in As Good as it Gets throw away three bars of amber-colored Neutrogena soap after using each one for just half a second: for a moment, you pity him, with a little anger, for being so wasteful. Then, after a moment's thought, you start to think, well, hell, it takes guts -- and money -- to be that way. More power to him.
That's about how the PlanetGameCube.com staff meeting made me feel.
It wasn't until Vince and I were on our way out the door that I decided to quit their organization one day ahead of time, and that my former investigative animosity toward them turned to a silent, healthy, I-don't-give-a-shit-anymore loathing.
OVERALL SCORE
I suppose I'd planted the seeds for that loathing eight months before, when I emailed their site a link to my Animal Crossing feature. I'd followed the site for a while, and a few times, I'd noted that they ran news stories concerning new record times set in old games (a recent story tells of one crazed player beating Metroid Prime in one hour and forty-six minutes!), so I figured they'd be up for a miscellaneous submission such as my Animal Crossing article, which, at the time, I'd believed to be quite impressive. I was never emailed back about my article; our fine website had unexplainably died two days after I sent the email.
So when an "editorial" entitled "The Capitalist Manifesto" appeared on PlanetGameCube.com several months after I'd sent my email, I figured it had no connection to my story. Someone had pointed me to it, suspecting that PlanetGameCube had "stolen" my Animal Crossing diary-style article, and "Sucked all the soul and fun out of it."
To all the l33test h4xx0rz among you: find the article, and read it. Then read mine, and compare. As the author of one of the two pieces in question, though I can see one specific incidence of what seems to be off-ripping, I am obligated not to comment specifically.
It doesn't matter either way. My issue is not with the alleged off-ripping, nor is it with the practice of off-ripping (sometimes called, and dirtily, "plagiarism") -- it is with the attitude with which my attitude toward the whole proceeding was snapped in half like a Tokyo cafe sugar stick.
The senior editor, in his khaki shorts and polo shirt and socks and leather sandals, made a comment to me as Vince and I stood in the hotel room doorway.
"Did you ever read our Animal Crossing article?"
(The bold text in the above passage is justified; it indicates emphasis -- "our" opposed to "your")
"No, I don't think I did," I lied.
The editor chortled.
"It's funny stuff. [Writer's Name] told me about how he once purposely miscalibrated his stick. It was priceless."
"Did you ever read mine?" I asked him.
"Forever ago. Well, just the first two parts."
"Oh yeah? It was pretty long."
"Too long," the guy said with a second chortle. It was his second chortle that struck me as more lowly and despicable than his first. His first chortle had been self-promoting. His second was deadly serious. "I couldn't read it all." His deadly serious chortle had forecasted the absolute honesty of the sentence that followed the chortle. He really, honestly, couldn't read it all. And what he had read hadn't sunk in -- why, I'd mentioned purposely miscalibrating Wavebirds in the first page of my article.
I was reminded of the time one of my ninja-fans linked me to a forum post in which the senior editor of a less-than-average website that spiritually succeeds a great website dissed my Kingdom Hearts article, saying he'd read it if "the writer learned to write full paragraphs." This was a guy who had once, in his guest-hosting of a letters column, said that the "most fun" a person can "possibly have" with a videogame controller in hand occurred with Street Fighter Alpha 3 and lots of beer. Before that, he'd posted on that site's forum, asking what it took to be an editor. A week later, he was hired.
I suddenly came to imagine that he looked very much like the guy before me.
(For one thing, journalism -- which a site adhering to AP STYLE probably likes to think it produces -- teaches that one paragraph is one idea, and that large ideas are made up of many small ones, and that most ideas have two or three sides, each of which is to be given a sentence: meaning, short paragraphs.)
I quickly dismissed myself without looking like an asshole. Busy with his reflexive chortling, the editor-turned-guy-I-don't-like-one-bit hardly noticed my leaving.
Why I took the Conflict: Desert Storm case into Del Taco, I don't know. Vince and I shared a macho fries and drank our own Dr. Peppers. Between bites and drinks, we tried to start up a discussion of what we'd seen.
"So, what'd you think?"
"What'd you think?"
"I don't know, man."
I couldn't let out my guilt, or my animosity. I couldn't communicate what needed to be communicated: that these people I had planned on insulting in some small, objective, explicative form, had one-upped me, and insulted me first. My negative pride grew with the walls of my burrito-filling stomach.
The only thing that saved me from becoming a rage-carrying flesh-vessel for the duration of E3 was my spontaneous decision to try to close the Conflict: Desert Storm game case with a packet of Del Scorcho Hot Sauce tucked into the memory card holder. It closed perfectly. It was a fit made in heaven. I grinned a sick grin.
It was then that Vince and I concocted the line you can find above, about "More walking than you've ever done in your entire life," and "four Mountain Dews." Like the kid who owns only a Nintendo Entertainment System picks on the flimsiness of a Sega Genesis' volume control, I had found my one small justice, and God forbid anyone swoop down and take it from me.
That objective analysis I'd been looking for all along; I decided to throw it away with my Del Taco trash. I got into the trade of writing about videogames not because it was my hobby, nor because it would have gotten me into E3. I leapt into it when I had a story to tell about something that made me swell with a great love for games as a form of entertainment. I jumped into this wanting to tell people stories about games. I got involved with insert credit because they gave me an outlet to tell the first of my stories. I got involved with PlanetGameCube because of a journalistic endeavor, out of hope to gain insight that might help me turn what I do into a career. June 24th, 2003 will mark my first anniversary writing published material about videogames. In one year, I've honed a style, yet learned nearly nothing about how to make this palatable to the mainstream.
Which is to say: if the countless fan emails telling me my Metal Gear Solid 2 article is the "best piece of videogame-related writing ever" are true, videogame journalism has a long way to go.
Generally, I mean. It generally has a long way to go. And it has many paths to choose from.
[Next: so is the life of a reviewer]
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