Building a Better World, For Videogame Journalists and Videogame Journalism

“Top ten greatest photos of oil on breasts that remind us of Street Fighter babes. Page 1 of 10″, “Here’s a photo we found”, “Master Chief will be in the next Call of Duty game?”

Oh come on! Are you serious? Who writes this crap, and who is happy profiting from it? There’s got to be a better way.

So I built Wire.vg.

I’ve spent the past few years working on a several different gaming sites. Some small, some large. Over time I stuffed my Google Reader with so many RSS feeds it eventually became an unmanageable heap. I ended up using Twitter and Reddit Gaming far more frequently than my main news feeds as they provide the much needed filtering. But then another problem started grinding me the wrong way: I seemed to end up on some rubbish small site that just copied the news from the bigger, better site. That’s not what I want.

And as the tale goes, a few months ago I built a super basic RSS reader. Then I started adding features to it. It turns out when I’m both the gate-keeper and the architect, I can make it awesome. I can also make it solve the big problems.

Problem: Thousands of copy/paste/rewrite blogs getting between me and the content I want to read.

Solution: Wire.vg has a list of gaming sites (seen here) and only sources them for information. By taking out one of the strongest pillars most social news sites rely on, user submitted content, you can cut generic Gaming Blog #462 out of the loop.

Problem: There are hundreds of posts published every day, how can you possibly know what the big news is?

Solution: Track every phrase between one and five words long (there’s around 40k of these on any given day) and see which ones are trending right now. Obviously it’s a bit more complex than that, but one of the things I built early on was a Twitter-inspired Trending Topics feature. It’s going to be tweaked from now until forever, and it’ll never be perfect, but it’s surprisingly good at telling me what the talk of the town currently is.

Problem: I still need a way to sort through all the posts, even if I know what topics are hot.

Solution: This one’s easy. Wire.vg has a user-powered voting system (everything has a voting system these days). You can also sort by other criteria, such as how many times a post was viewed (sometimes people look at a post, but don’t want to admit it).

Problem: I have very specific needs.

Solution: I think one of the first features I built was the ability to create your own custom channels. You can define which sites, ordering and time limit are used as well as any search terms you want to limit your results to. Here’s my Scott Pilgrim channel, for example.

Problem: I have an hour to kill and read a lot of videogame websites.

Solution: Play this game I made using the data that Wire.vg collects. You have to guess which site ran which headline. My best score is around 100, playing on Hard.

Problem: As a journalist, I usually know what news I want to cover but have a hard time finding the best source.

Solution: Every article on Wire.vg has a list of similar posts, so if an article by Blog X catches your eye but you’re not a fan of their work, you can click on the post then easily find the same news written up on a site you prefer. Wire.vg also has a rather nice search function, which I’ve found incredibly useful when I’m writing news articles.

Problem: I love wasting my time playing with numbers, but nothing combines this love with videogames short of VGChartz.

Solution: A side effect of the Trending Topics is that I built a bunch of tools to monitor the trends. Adding a bit of Google Charts jiggery-pokery led to Wire Trends. It’s like Google Trends, but specifically for gaming. When I built it I imagined it being a great tool for PR people, but in practice it’s just fun to poke.

And that’s all the big things, I think. I’ve tried not to sound like an annoying advert when writing this article, so sorry if I accidentally have. I just think I’ve built (and am still very much building) an awesome tool. One that’s hopefully as useful to you as it is to me.