A Day in the Life of a Freelance Games Journalist
For those of you wondering why the updates and content has slowly ground to an awkward halt, my finals are next month, and my final essays at the middle and end of this one. At the moment I’ve finished another Plot Wholes and reviewed Stormrise for Ve3tro, both of which you can find on my “Previous Work” page, with a Godfather II review in the works.
However, today I’m visiting some big scary blokes at the UFC gym, and some much more passive people from THQ, up in Birmingham. To give you an idea of the utter chaos that comes with a Londoner trying to venture outside his toxic city of residence, I’ll break it down for you.
7:30 am: After a late night of Viva Pinata and Halo 3 with my missus, it’s up to stumble around for forty five minutes attempting to get ready. Thankfully my missus is selfless enough to help me find bits and bobs, and I get out on time.
8:38 am: I get on the tube after a long walk due to a bus route cut short. The stress of being late starts around here.
8:59 am: Arrive at Euston, and I see there’s a train headed to the station I’m after at a few minutes shy of quarter to ten. Perfect. I sling myself over to the ticket queue, wait fifteen minutes, and find out they don’t take Visa Electron cards. He offers to hold my place, so I glady accept and dash off to grab some cash from an ATM.
I return, and I see he’s now serving a panicky foreign woman who holds me up for lord only knows how long. I grab my ticket, and head out to see how much time I have.
9:33 am: I’ve got ten minutes, so I head over to the toilets only to find out that I have to pay thirty pence to have the privalege of going to the loo. I dump the change, help someone else out with ten pence who seems to be as confused and irate as I am, then head over to Burger King, grabbing some food and getting on the train about a minute shy of it pulling out of the platform.
11:15 am: I get into Birmingham New Street station, on time, because I’m lucky like that. I disembark, and head off to hunt down the THQ reps for the event, the email telling me they’re to be stationed next to Millie’s Cookies.
I find the reps, and we hang around waiting for the last of the Londoners. I spot one of the fellows from Inside Xbox, interesting after seeing his face all over my Dashboard for a year or more. I stand around chatting with Martin from Fighting Spirit, and we discuss the finer points of wrestling and their videogame counterparts, our shiny THQ press passes in hand.
11:45 am: We arrive at the gym and head upstairs, and are presented with an array of fighting demonstrations, hands on time with the game, and various niblets, though I’d anticipated small amounts of lunch and eaten a huge meal earlier, so I survive. It’s interesting to note that all they have is healthy food and Innocent smoothies, which makes for a nice change, though I’m put off by egg mayo hidden cunningly in the deceptively Mexican guise of a tortilla wrap.
1:45 pm: We watch the UFC fighters have a gaming tournament on said UFC game, the pro superstar Michael Bising getting his arse handed to him. All are rewarded with 360s. I can’t help wondering at the irony or rich atheletes being given this stuff in front of a crowd of broke journalists. Ah, well.
3:20 pm: we gather round to interrogate the fighters about their sport. The few gaming journalists in the crowd stay quiet, as this is the first time any of the fighters have even seen the game, and there’s nothing to learn. I record it all anyway, for the sake of having the odd quote for an opening line.
3:45 pm: We find out that the fighters have all decided to head home early, which kills off any idealistic game journalists and their dictaphones, though a few stay to ask questions, though why is beyond anyone else.
4:30 pm: I realise that THQ’s PR dept have both the train tickets, and not just one. As I’m on the damn coach already, this poses something of a dilemma. One frantic call later, I’m told THQ will send me home on their own dime, which is wonderful news to a uni student, especially as the return ticket costs as much as the two I misplaced put together. I jump on a train, and head back into London, ten minutes before the work-end time of 5pm that sane people tend to abide by.
After this, it’s a discussion and a write-up. I’ll post the end results here as they go up.
Sounds like one helluva day. Worth it? Good luck with the finals, man (had mine last May, it was hell).
It was worth it, I met a lot of well-known journalists in my field, and got a lot of solid advice and a pseudo-job offer from another publication.
As for the finals, argh. Eight thousand words this week and next, then three exams on Jungian psychology and ecocriticism in literature, Gothic literature and Shakespeare. Fun? No. But worth it after the sixteen to eighteen grand it cost me to get to this point, I suppose.
What were your finals on?
You just said a few words there that I’ll have to look up in the dictionary later :)
Oh, finals are never fun. Mine were on Mathematical Aspects of Cosmology, Thermal and Kinetic Physics, Condensed Matter, Nuclear Physics and Astrophysics, Statistical Physics, Solid State Physics, Explaining the Universe, and an independent project – all a part of Astrophysics degree. I think it cost me around twenty grand in the end, so I agree it’s worth it (it just has to be after paying all that money), though finding a job has never been harder to be honest.
Ouch, that’s a lot of words I’ll be looking up too. Well, mainly Cosmology, I turned into a physics nerd briefly when I was twelve so I still have most of that vernacular locked down for some reason, which is a pleasant surprise as I can go upstairs to brush my teeth or grab my bag and forget what I’m doing by the time I reach the top step.
Getting a full-time writing job is also a massive chore. The recession has really screwed a lot of journalists, with some sites (like 1UP, not a personal favourite but still a good example of a huge games site) laying off a ton of their staff.
Best of luck with the job though, is there any job you’d ever really be interested in? I’ve spoken to someone undertaking the first stages (first year of an undergraduate degree) of a PhD in Physics, and they said it’d be either teaching or, and this caught me off-guard, stockbroking.
Thanks. Well, right now I’m looking for a library job. Of course it would be amazing to get a writing job, but I have to be realistic – I’m a writer wannabe and my degree has nothing to do with journalism, so I wouldn’t even know where to begin if I were to go into that area, though I think about it sometimes.
Many physics grads go into teaching (which doesn’t appeal to me) and some are able to get into financial markets where mathematical/analytical and programming skills are useful, but with the recession most financial institutions seem to be firing people rather than hiring, so…
Heh, my academic people often tell me journalism isn’t real writing. Nuts to them, I say. If you check out the works of Tim Rogers, Hunter S. Thompson or even Lester Bangs, its clear more effort goes into their prosaic attempts to wax journalistic on music, games and terrorist activities than into most of the trash on the Borders best-seller list each week.
I say write, and keep writing, and always have a go at short story competitions on the internet, as more often than not you’ll find the recognition you’ll get for a good piece of fiction is staggering, and publishers will only be too pleased to accept a novel proposal with a few wins under your belt.
Writing pays shitty money for the most part, but for me it’s the feeling of having someone go “that was great, I agree completely” that makes it worth it, I find.
True. It’s not about money, it’s about getting your work out there, published and read (and hopefully enjoyed) by other people. And of course it’s about being recognised as a writer/author. That would be an achievement.