Editor’s Choice: A Column in 700 Words

It’s coming up on midnight and I have a column due in a few hours, my first for Nukezilla in a while. I need at least 700 words in by the end of this evening or I’ll miss my deadline. The idea of my column is great: As the site’s Editor in Chief I write an article about something topical each week. Easy right?

Ha!

So I have two ideas for what to write about. I could talk about how Kinect, which should be an embarrassing blemish on the face of gaming, is going to sell like sliced bacon. Or I could rip on Patrick Garratt’s 4,800-word OpEd on VG247 about… something.

Kinect is too easy a target. I also wouldn’t be writing about anything I’ve not written or said before. The launch line-up is awful, there’s no actual games planned for it, it’s glitchy and just generally rubbish in most of the ways you could define something as being “rubbish”. But as with most of the crap Microsoft push out it’ll sell well in the US, probably because the middle classes haven’t yet realised they’ve run out of money and can’t just buy what Oprah gives her audience.

In the UK it won’t sell as well, partly because in the UK we are intrinsically more cynical — or fearful — about new or foreign things. Much to our advantage usually; see Gavin for a good example. Mums in the UK don’t care about the carefully targeted Avatars, built to attract them and their seven-year-old daughters. And most teenage boys, the kids who actually own the consoles, are too busy playing the new FIFA to give a shit.

Kinect is crap and everyone who reads this damn column knows it. As such, it’s a terrible idea for a topic. So how about this VG247 article? It looks exciting. Some good old fashioned “games journalism needs to grow up” fun there right? Wrong.

I spent an hour boiling the hard-to-follow epic down to work out what the point of it was, and it turns out there wasn’t really one. It was just one big, rambling reaction to a couple of people who felt they had been mistreated by the gaming press, with the conclusion that they should shut up.

Like a doctor pulling shards of glass out of an inner thigh, it took a lot of patience and what I was left with didn’t really look like anything I’d want to keep.

Ted Price triggered this opus by claiming he had been the victim of misquotation this week. He became the latest, but far from first, person to decry the state of games journalism for this reason. In the article, both Price’s recent troubles and Cliff Bleszinski’s almost regular complaints of a similar nature were aired.

Garratt’s argument is that Price wasn’t misquoted and Bleszinski was misquoted, and due to three vague yet important reasons, the pair need to shut up. The Modern Games Press — a newly coined phrase roughly translating to “shitty tabloid fake-press” and shortened by the cool kids to MGP — just isn’t understood by them.

The “delusion” that page views equal money is one of the most common explanations as to why some sites run stupid quotes and gossip-mag style headlines all day. According to Garratt the traffic a website gets is absolutely disconnected from the money a site makes. With this now explained those motives become unfounded, much to Bleszinski and his ilk’s assumed disappointment. (Sadly, I am one of the few who still has this delusion. Apparently Nukezilla’s ad company does too, but nobody needs to tell them, right?)

Garratt also explains what news is: “News is conflict, and everything is news”. That’s everything, excluding the current battle in the US Supreme Court which probably shouldn’t be reported on (as Price suggests).

This news of boring law discussions isn’t to do with consumers and is only relevant to trade people, so the consumer side of the press shouldn’t waste any money on covering it. It just doesn’t make sense from a business perspective. Not that covering something readers aren’t interested in is bad for business because traffic has no connection to income, remember?

News is things like war, famine, financial disasters and blurry photos of post-rehab celebrities topless and on holiday. These things are all “conflict” of some kind (just like exciting quotes in the MGP), and the BBC covers war, thus tabloid quality MGP articles are fine. So the logic goes.

The article concludes, several thousand words later, that the pair only complained because the press they are getting now, these fabled “misquotes”, is affecting them negatively. Because they didn’t complain when they had nothing to complain about, they’re hypercritical, egotistical and should be ignored.

We, the press, decide what’s what around these parts. Or as Garratt writes: “We have the right to report on you as we see fit. That’s our business.”

Sorry in advance if I’ve misquoted anything there.

Oh what do you know, 700 words has been passed. This column writing business is easy.