A satirical look at a world we don’t live in(thankfully)
“Why games journalism?” I get asked this question a lot. Largely by the elderly, my parents and the string of careers advisors I’ve seen but I dismiss them all as being too old, too concerned or frankly too unqualified to judge. About the 50th time I was asked this however it became clear that their question wasn’t really “why games journalism” but more “why games journalism”. Its perfectly acceptable for us it seems to want to spend the rest of our lives(or the more youthful parts of it at least) chasing so called “celebs” around with a camera and writing dreary and uninteresting articles about whose marriage is in trouble or who’s been seen buying what and where. Tabloid journalism. A hot bed of talentless charlatans, unscrupulous scaremongers and intrusive hate-spreaders. To quote Sir Alec Guinness “You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy”. So my question is why not games journalism? Because games journalism is such a relatively new form of journalism it doesn’t get the respect it deserves from those outside the industry. I would argue however that its journalism at its purest. Games journos are only interested in the facts, not how they can spin them. To illustrate the point, when was the last time you picked up a copy of OXM to find the headline “Cliff Blezinski in Nazi themed orgy” or “Shigeru Miyamoto adopts small African boy” spattered across the front page. It just doesn’t happen. Far from stalking devs to find out what kind of toothpaste they use, games journos simply care about the product. This does mean however that with the exception of certain so called “rockstar developers” like Sir Cliffington Blezingblazer, formerly known as Dude Huge, formerly formerly known as Cliffy B we don’t really know an awful lot about the men behind the games. Still this is a preferable alternative to opening X360 mag and finding images of Sid Meir and his team stumbling drunk from a club. There are those however who enjoy tabloid journalism, as is evident from the tremendous sales of glossy rags in this country and therefore may be disagreeing with me. Well for their benefit and to serve as a warning to the rest of us I took the liberty of throwing together some examples of what a tabloid games paper would look like. Children under 5 and adults with a weak constitution should avoid reading on.

Terrifying isn’t it? I think we should take a moment to be thankful that we don’t live in this world, to pray to what ever deity we believe in that we never do and to pray that we never have to live through the unimaginable horror of a crotch shot of Peter Molyneux leaving a car… eww.