Changing culture, one gamerscore at a time.

"...and once you're done, turn it into paper and give me two hundred words on Midway Entertainment."

My apologies for the lack of a Friday post, I was working and gaming like crazy to finish a Halo Wars review, which you can now find your way to over in the “Previous Work” section of this blog site. I’ve also just finished working on a three-day diary, also over on GamerNode with the review, focusing on my experiences with the new Mythic Map Pack for Halo 3.

Writing is tiring. Especially writing about videogames. The thing with film criticism that makes me envy it so much, nowadays, is the fact that you can watch a film and review it in the space of a few hours. Hell, if you’ve got a week to do the review you could watch it more than twice. Do you think you get that kind of luxury with titles like Mass Effect? That’s a fifty-hour game if you’re only aiming to hit top level and unlock all the content, let alone get every achievement, weapon, character and plotline explored, completed, listened to and exhausted.

Exhausted is a good word. Last weekend, it was Halo Wars. I sat from around six in the evening to five in the morning exhausting every possible aspect of the campaign, then sat down on Saturday and played for another load of hours, before writing and uploading that night. It’s a knock-out, this job. You lose a lot of sleep, and keeping up with every single little development in the industry becomes a bit of a nightmare sometimes.

The problem with being a freelance games journalist is you very rarely have a chance to get review code. You’re usually not in possession of any debug consoles whatsoever, so any reviews you do are going up on release day or later, by which time the majority of people aren’t too interested. I traded in six titles for Halo Wars,  and having that and the Mythic Map Pack to write about was worth the sacrifice of shoddy games like Army of Two and Sonic Unleashed.

Finding a full time staff writing job is another task I would imagine not many people envy. It’s the worst time in the last five to ten years to want to be anything bar a programmer or designer in this industry. All the publications are not only cutting back on full-time staff, but part-time and freelance staff as well. Getting work is hard if you’re not willing to volunteer all the time. Then again, I write for GamerNode several times a week for the grand total of nothing, and I actually think it would be less rewarding if I was paid.

The thing with sites as wonderfully open-minded and courageous as GamerNode, is that you can write about whatever you want, and people will read it. These are people just like you, who want to write and read new, fresh things about the gaming industry, who want to see their review scores go up on MetaCritic, and who absolutely adore the feeling of watching their content go live. I am one of those people, and paid or unpaid, a CV containing hundreds of written articles in the space of a year is impressive. I wrote a grand total of around ten articles in 2008. Ten.

Yet, in 2009, I’m on eighteen and counting and it’s only March. I’ve also written somewhere in the region of forty blog posts, at a total of around thirty thousand words so far. It’s great training, and it means I’m now not only able to knock up paid articles in the space of an hour without even thinking, it means I can tackle my academic work with that little bit more confidence than I usually would, and that fact alone rocks my socks. Even though my degree has naff-all impact on my chances of getting a job, experience does, and this is what it all comes down to; writing to the point where even people who barely know of your work can see a portfolio tens of thousands of words long and think “hmm, they’re definitely working hard”.

Fingers crossed, really. Best of luck to anyone else stuck in the same grind. It ‘aint pretty, but it’s worth it.