From its accessibility and low work requisites, you may have come to the assumption that gaming journalism is just a downplayed form of traditional journalism. If everyone's doing it, everyone can do it, right? Indeed, most everyone can do it. But few can do it well. Gaming journalism is not incessantly prattling on about your favorite game. It is not shoving your personal opinion onto a release and calling it fact. You liking something doesn't make it good; the reverse, of course, also holds true. It is not writing sensationalist headlines and intentional misquotes, and it's not empty contrarian proclamations. If anything, that is what "everyone" is doing, and what some people see. To be a games journalist is to have eyes keen enough to quantify and effectively critique a uniquely personal and multi-sense experience not found anywhere but this medium, on this screen. It is to consolidate and relay the crucial information that trickles down from thousands of studios in the form of press releases, fiscal reports, exclusive events, personal statements and more. Games journalism is a profession loaded with the same stringent regulations as mainstream journalism, with plenty more nuances and jargon piled on top. It is a necessary industry that aims to better the medium it so closely follows and to intellectually arm the consumers who hang on its every word. It is home to countless hardworking men and women who can approach an incomparably colorful and dynamic medium as a science. And at its best, it is all of these things but still uncompromisingly fun. Not everyone is doing that, because not everyone can. Do you know what it does and doesn't mean to be a games journalist? Share those misconceptions in the comments below!
A freelance games writer, you say? Typically battling his current RPG addiction and ceaseless perfectionism? A fan of horror but too big a sissy to play for more than a couple of hours? Spends far too much time on JRPGs and gets way too angry with card games?
Well that doesn't sound anything like me.
