It's been three months since I made my first post on Shock and Pause. As I expected it's been a slow build, but I'm okay with that. It's given me a chance to hone my writing a bit and narrow down the kinds of features I want to produce here and the format I use to publish them. Unfortunately most of the ideas I've had have yet to make an appearance.
When I started the blog I had a lot of ideas for different features – and still do. My intention was for this blog to be as much about the industry as the games themselves and my “Words to Know” features have allowed me to show that a little, though not as much as I'd like. The features that I really want to produce require more time and research than I'd anticipated. Features like “Know your Dev's” where I can profile individual game developers and showcase their backgrounds and the games they've worked on. And “Studio Spotlight” Where I do the same thing on a broader scale with game development studios. It became clear to me early on that my work and real life schedule wouldn’t always allow me the time I needed to make sure I could produce the features I wanted of a quality I was satisfied with. But I wanted to commit myself to posting at least once a week, and barring the last few weeks during which I was on holiday I've been largely successful in that.
This is why there's been such an
abundance of “Words to Know” features. They are relatively easy
to research and write, provided I have an idea for them ahead of
time. But “Words to Know” was never supposed to be the backbone
of this blog, which unfortunately is what it's become. When I was
outlining the features I wanted to do my intention for “Words to
Know” was to be a platform for me to define gaming terms that I
pick up through osmosis, sort of spontaneous learning. I envisioned
it as something I would post in addition to the weeks main feature,
possibly several times a week or even daily as a sort of word of the
day type thing. At this time and in it's present form that isn’t
feasible. I'm always listening for terms I don't recognize in the
gaming media I consume but I don't always find them, even with of
most of the terms I've defined already I had a rough idea of their
meaning before writing the piece. The simplest solution may be to go
looking for terms that I don't recognize or that I think would make
good content and it may yet come to that, but I feel that would
somewhat dilute the spirit of “Words to Know” as I originally
intended it. It's something to think about.
Another
issue I've been struggling with is the length and quality of these
features.
I use “Words to Know” as my weekly post so often because it's the
easiest thing to do, but even though they are bite sized features it
still usually takes me several hours to research, write and publish
them. I want to do more than just copy and paste the definitions for
these terms from the sites where I learn them. It's important to me
that I understand correctly what I'm writing about and that I'm not
publishing incorrect information. For my “Words to Know” about
Roadie
Running I spent over an hour watching gameplay from Army
of Two, Kaine and Lynch and
Inversion of the player
characters just running around, trying to work out if what they were
doing actually was Roadie Running and if I could draw the connection
to what Gears of War
does and cite those games in my piece. There are a lot of conflicting
opinions in the gaming world and some people use and define things
differently than others so I try to take that into account as well.
Ultimately this level and speed of production isn’t acceptable to
me. Professional games journalists are expected to be able to produce
and publish multiple features a day which are much longer than “Words
to know.” This is something I'll need to work on.
The
other notable feature that I've published are my two “What am I
playing?” pieces on Hitman
and Wolfenstein: The New Order. Though
I tried to model the structure of those pieces after game reviews
that I've read I don't consider them to be reviews in and of
themselves. At the risk of seeming
rhetorical they’re more
like reflections. As I said way back in my inaugural post I don't yet feel that I have the critical skills necessary
to really judge a game based on how
others will think and feel
about it so I focused on how I felt. In
both cases how I felt was very positive. I encountered no technical
issues of any significance and I greatly enjoyed the gameplay of both
games as it was presented to me. However, I played both games long
after they received their final updates and patches from the
developers, and had I played them when they were first released I may
have had a different experience. The “What am I playing?” feature
is how I plan to improve my critical thinking and gain experience
writing reviews - even though that's not how I think of them, the
principal is largely the same. I'm playing a game and writing down my
thoughts. The main difference
is that I try to include both my own personal experiences (or lack
thereof) with the game and the franchises they belong to and some
anecdotes about the development process, which are things that you
don't typically see in actual game reviews. Time will tell whether
this is beneficial to the process or whether it would be best to
focus on learning to write traditional reviews.
The
WAIP features on Wolfenstein and
Hitman were very
different to write. I wanted to keep them in the range of 1000-1500
words and so there were things that I wanted to talk about or talk
about in more detail that I decided to cut short. Another
thing to note is that I wrote the Hitman piece
in about four hours on a Sunday afternoon and I worked on Wolfenstein
for several hours a day over the
course of a week, and ultimately – though I can't put my finger on
why exactly – I feel like the Hitman
piece turned out better. Probably because I went back and forth and
changed a lot of things about the Wolfenstein
piece before posting it, whereas with Hitman
I didn’t second guess myself as much.
So
there are my thoughts on the first three months of Shock and Pause.
It has been a slow build and I don't think it's going to ramp up
dramatically anytime soon but I have a better idea of my capabilities
now than when I started, and a
good idea of what I need to do to take things to the next level. I'm
still committed to weekly posts and I wont make any promises but I'm
going to try and add more variety to them in the future. I know where
I want to take Shock and Pause, and however long it takes I'm going
to do my best to get there.
As
always, thanks for reading.
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