My First Article

UPDATE (August 2018): Due to circumstances that I recently became aware of I have removed the links to my article on Beyond Gaming and reposted the article here on the blog. The links below will take you take my blog post where the article is hosted. I encourage you to read this post if you'd like to know why.

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This week I hit a pretty big milestone in my quest for legitimacy. An article that I wrote for gaming news site Beyond Gaming went live on Tuesday morning. It was an opinion piece about where single-player games currently fit into the “games as a service” model and why they seem to be declining in favour of multiplayer based games. This is the first time something I've written about games has been published by someone other than me on a platform other than my blog, and while it didn't garner a lot of attention (I'll go over that in a bit) I'm proud of the work that I did. Since I wrote the article for Beyond Gaming I won't be posting the full text on Shock and Pause, but if you'd like to read it (hopefully you do, since you're here) here is the link. Since this is a pretty significant moment in what I hope will turn out to be a successful career I thought it would be a good idea to go over the process in detail.

First, a little background. While I was browsing Reddit about a month ago I saw a post in r/games looking for contributors to a gaming site, which turned out to be Beyond Gaming. I was hesitant at first, since I wasn’t sure exactly what would be involved or if I was ready to write for someone else. I take all of my work seriously but posting on my blog is one thing, whereas writing for someone else with their name and the reputation of their site on the line is somewhat more pressure. I was also a little nervous about the idea of putting my work out there for audiences other than the one I've carefully cultivated (that's you!) to see. Ultimately I decided it was worth a shot. After all, I'm not going to get far if I only post on Shock and Pause. This is part of the process, and one I'm going to have to get used to. I sent a message to the author of the post with a link to my blog, inviting him to look over some of the work I've done and decide for himself whether he thought my writing for him would be suitable. As it turned out he did, which was a flattering validation in itself.

We messaged back and forth a few times over the next few days and hammered out what sort of piece I would be writing. He wanted something topical, and since the sudden closure of Visceral Games and the reassignment of their single-player Star Wars game was hot on everyone's minds at the time, I decided to try to organize my thoughts on where single-player was going in an ever-more multiplayer dominated market. I spent most of the weekend researching and forming my thoughts and findings into rough drafts of the article I wanted to write. Unfortunately, beginning Sunday evening my internet service went down and remained unreliable and slow to the point of being unusable for the next week. Each day I would come home from work, check my connection, find that it was still terrible and spend the next few hours on the phone with customer support troubleshooting the problem. At the end of each call the problem remained unsolved, and my article remained unwritten. Finally, on Friday a service technician came to replace our receiver and the problem seemed to go away, but I had lost a week of progress, during which my topical article had become significantly less topical, since the internet had collectively decided in that time that no, single-player wasn’t dead.

Unwilling to start from scratch, I had to adapt the direction of the article. It didn't prove to be that difficult. After all, I agreed with the stance the internet had taken and had from the beginning, so rather than have “Single player games aren’t dead” as my conclusion, I decided to make it my thesis. I focused on why the perception that single-player is in decline exists, why multiplayer games are more financially successful and how both genres fit into the “games as a service” business model. Finally, late last Thursday evening I finished what would end up being the – mostly – final edit of my article, entitled “Publishers are following the money – but that doesn’t mean single-player is dead”. After a few last minute tweaks I submitted it to the editor at Beyond Gaming the next day, and it went live early Tuesday morning.

As I mentioned at the top of the post, my article didn’t gain much traction. I don't have any information about how many clicks it got on Beyond Gaming but links to the article were posted in r/games on Reddit and on gaming forum N4G, neither of which generated much buzz. The comment section in the article itself remains empty, and the comments in the forums it was posted to either degenerated into people arguing with each other over whether or not it was obvious that single-player wasn’t dead or just voicing their annoyance that anyone was still talking about this. In either case, I got the impression that very few – if any – of those commenting had actually read the article at all, considering the things they were complaining about weren’t really the focus. But that’s mostly my own fault. I chose that title early on and stuck with it even as the content I was writing about evolved because I thought it was eye catching and that it still embodied the overall theme of the article. I still stand by that, but at this point people are tired of hearing about single-player being alive or dead, and I should have recognized that and changed the title to be more descriptive of the article as a whole, rather than what turned out to be only one facet of it. Also, at the time it went up EA was beginning to draw enormous fire from all over the games industry over Star Wars Battlefront 2's microtransaction disaster, which would dominate headlines and forums for the rest of the week (and probably longer). Most of the posts on Reddit that mine was buried under were in relation to this, so ... that didn’t help either.

Even though it failed to generate much interest I'm still happy with the work I did. I put a lot of effort into researching and writing this piece, and I'm proud of it. Unfortunately, because it did fail to generate much meaningful discussion I don't have a lot of feedback to go on to make improvements. The editor at Beyond Gaming liked it, though he thought it was a bit long. I'm inclined to agree with that, and this is an issue I have with a lot of the work I do (as evidenced by the fact that this post was supposed to be about three paragraphs long when I started it), and I feel like – even when taking my internet troubles into account – it took longer than it should have to finish. Overall this was a good experience. I produced an article that I'm proud of and now I have a bit of validation in that someone else thought it was good enough to put on their site. If you happen to give it a read let me know what you think either here or at Beyond Gaming.

As always thanks for reading. Here's that link one more time if you'd like to check out the article I wrote. Next week I'm planning to finally pick up a Playstation 4 on Black Friday, so I'll be writing my thoughts about that in next weeks post. If you'd like to keep up with Shock and Pause you can follow me on twitter or check back on the front page each week.