Editor’s Choice: Where’s My God-Damned Chandelier?

Seriously you guys, where is it?

This week was E3. A week in which videogame websites live blog. A week in which videogame websites do recaps of press conferences. A week in which a thousand million pieces of unimportant news are written about and a week in which anyone lucky enough to be at E3 complains about how busy they are. All because that’s the done thing during E3. That’s the rules.

Just like in the men’s bathroom, relationships, queues and TV shows, covering E3 has unwritten rules. If you don’t follow them you’re weird. So, this year, we live blogged, we recapped press conferences and we promoted news.

Well, kinda.

Going into E3 I had a vague idea that instead of doing what I feel is correct for no reason I can validate, we would do what we want. It turns out what we want isn’t a thousand news posts (not that we could write those anyway), but it’s to have a way to Live Blog things (which is fun), have recaps (they’re useful), and just generally have lots of chats about things.

With Brett, and I don’t want to go putting words in his mouth whilst he’s still E3ing it up, but him and I talked a lot about how he’ll be covering the show. We decided that it would be foolish to run around trying to see all the big games, and much better to walk around and see all the games he’s interested in.

I say “foolish” because other, bigger (and sometimes better) sites do that, and those other sites are a google or less away. If we start to do these things, copy things all other websites do “just because” then we’re daft. Other websites do it better, so why on Earth would we try to compete directly? This is the internet.

Well, there’s two reasons we might be tempted (and probably were to some degree. Don’t take this column as me standing on a bridge glaring in the face of the list of Common Best Practices When Writing About A Videogame Event shouting “You shall not pass!”):

1) To provide a service. This is the important one. We want to provide a service for our readers. Or more specifically, we want our readers (you) to use our service, not the service of a competitor’s website. We claim our goal is to get you the very best of everything. We need to get you the very best, not some other floozy website.

2) To say we did it. This is more subtle, and means two different things to me. The first is, as I mentioned above, if we didn’t cover E3 like this people would come to Nukezilla, see we’re not doing it properly, and leave. But they can’t do that now because we can wave a big banner saying how we covered E3. We did that thing that proper websites do!

Though another way I interpret that point is that it can become a fun story. I like fun stories. And I like the fact that in six months time, or next year at E3, we can all talk about the time we sent Brett to E3 and he spent the first day, the day with the huge press-conference line ups, at Disneyland. Or how he Live Blogged the (alleged) fact an industry big-wig didn’t wash his hands after leaving the bathroom. Or how I’m a little disappointed at the lack of sandwich updates.

I was chatting to a housemate about all of this a few days ago whislt I was live blogging the ever-loving crap out of everything ever, and we agreed it’s a very strange system. Everyone says one thing, thinks another thing then does something different.

So next year, Nukezilla is going to be your ONLY home for everything E3. We’re going to have everything every other website said copied really fucking fast, just for YOU. I’m going to Live Blog from behind a giant mahogany desk in my grand drawing room with an open fireplace and a grand chandelier. When big news happens the chandelier will swing across the room Phantom of the Opera style, live-streamed from 17 angles, and smash into our news-monkeys to make sure they can get every single word to you as fast as is humanly possible. We’ll do it properly. JUST PLEASE DON’T LEAVE US. COME BACK! WE NEED YOU! DON’T LOOK AT ME LIKE THAT!

But seriously you guys, where’s my chandelier?