Gaming-Based Lament #462

This post was inspired partly by this entry on The RAM Raider's blog.

I can't remember the last time I read a games magazine. Not properly, anyway.

Aside from skimming through one to take the salient points (overall scores) from the couple of reviews I might be interested in that month, and a quick glance at upcoming releases, I'll rarely be found reading one.

This is what I've always done though, with the exception that, in the past, at some point I would return and read the thing properly.

But not now.

It could be that demands on my time are to blame. Or the fact that the internet has brought an immediacy that mags couldn't hope to match. But I believe the truth is that I just don't enjoy reading them like I used to.

Unlike a lot of people, I do like Edge. I trust their opinions, and their depth of knowledge about the world of games and its history is almost scary, but I don't really want to read a sixteen page article about whether games are art or not.

Some people obviously do, and that's fine, but what are the alternatives? Some shitty 'official' rag, that has its reviews faxed to them by a PR person from the games company? Or perhaps arguably the lowest form of games publishing - the 'lifestyle games mag'.

The very notion of such a thing already has the vomit leaving my stomach looking for an exit, but somehow these publications still exist. There is nothing more painful than opening a magazine and seeing an article, ostensibly about 'social gaming', but which features a double-page picture of a bunch of blokes on a sofa with joypads in hand and bottles of beer dotted about the room.

Because check the fuck out of us, we play games AND drink alcohol.

For me, reading mags was at least 50% of what I enjoyed about games. The truth is, there was nothing wrong with magazines that had a more surreal or humourous take on the world of games. Very often, it was the stuff in the mags that had nothing whatsoever to do with games that I enjoyed the most - the fact that the people writing it also liked games too was more of a bonus.

The days of the Your Sinclair staff pretending the magazine was put together in a garden shed are long gone, and the death throes of that particular kind of witty, knowing games writing could not have been demonstrated more clearly by the short life and undignified death of the last attempt of its kind, Arcade magazine.

Those kind of mags didn't die because they were shit, they were forced out of existence by publishers more keen to appeal to people with writing on their t-shirts, seemingly declaring that the days of gaming as a marginalised, clique-y hobby were gone forever.

But what that really means is that most of the people who used to buy games mags probably don't bother any more, which is certainly true for me, and since Digitiser metamorphosed into a humourless hardcore heaven, it's left a gaping hole in my gaming life, one which could be filled easily by producing just one quality games publication that didn't feature interviews with club DJs.