So about that article ...

Some of you may remember an article that I wrote last year for a website called Beyond Gaming. It was the first (and to date, only) time I had written anything for someone else's platform and at the time it was kind of a big deal for me. You can read about my process and the events surrounding the article in this post I wrote after it went live, but as for the article itself I'd prefer you didn't read it, at least not where it's currently being hosted.

I made a serious error in judgement after that article went live. I never read through it completely on Beyond Gaming. I didn't check to see if changes had been made, I naively assumed I wouldn't need to. Surely the editor would have informed me if there were? I took the fact that there was no discussion or signifigant criticism from the editor to be a good thing, with a naivety that borders on stupidity. I did click the link to make sure it was working, saw my work posted on the site and then ... left. I had just written the article after all and had read through it on my local copy probably five times before and since submitting it. I didn't think I needed to. That was a mistake.

A few weeks ago I was going over some of my old work and decided to read through the article again. Rather than dig through my hard drive to find my local copy I opened up my "Behind the scenes" post and hit the link to Beyond Gaming, and for the first time I saw it as visitors to the site have seen it. To say that it lacks polish would be an understatement. The opening paragraph was posted twice, suggesting to me that it was copied and pasted paragraph-by-paragraph instead of the whole body at once, which is baffling to me. The formatting is a disaster. My own formatting isn't perfect but it was at least readable. In my original copy I separated quotes from the main body by spacing and indentation, like this:

            “Beyond Gaming has disappointed me.”

But in the final posted version the indentation and some of the spacing has been removed, resulting in quotes that seem to begin or end paragraphs where I didn't intend that to happen. Finally, the thing I find most disappointing was that all of the links and sources I included in the article had been removed. Some references to those sources are still there but if people want to see them I guess they'll just have to go look it up themselves. The links that I included were all as close to the original source as I could find, but when I submitted the article I offered to replace them with links to articles on the same subject matter on Beyond Gaming if any applied, assuming that those would correctly credit the original source. Of course, it turns out that this wouldn't have worked since none of the sources I linked in the article were ever covered by Beyond Gaming at any point in time. Sourcing articles on other publications is something I routinely did here and I don't think it's unusual in the industry to link to other sites if that's where you're getting your information from. Is this a policy of Beyond Gaming? I have no idea. The fact that this was never brought up beforehand and that all of my links were removed without discussion kind of sucks. 

The whole thing kind of sucks, to be honest. I can use this as a learning experience for more than just writing and games, and that's the only reason I don't regret associating with this site at all. The site is all but defunct now, with no regular posts and nothing but clickbait articles  - most of which have absolutely nothing to do with gaming - despite the "editor" telling me specifically that he hated that kind of thing. Click the "About" section on the website and you can see that everything they apparently stood for has been thrown into the trash, and what they stood for was in my opinion pretty questionable to begin with. Apparently their facebook page is still very active and where most of their gaming content is focused. I have no interest in going there.

I haven't heard anything from Beyond Gaming or its editor since the day after my article went live. I was told that advertising revenue from the article would be mine but never received any follow up in this regard. I'm not upset by this. I didn't do it for money and I didn't expect that it would generate much - if any. If I really wanted it I would have asked about it, but I don't feel entitled to it anyway. No contract was ever signed, no formal agreement ever made, which is also why I don't feel I owe them anything either and I'll be posting the article that I wrote, the way I wrote it, in its entirety in a separate post here on the blog shortly. This is something that I declined to do previously out of respect for Beyond Gaming - a respect that I no longer have.

It's possible that this was an accident. That something went wrong with the attachment and that the body of the article was messed up when the editor opened it on his end and had to be reassembled manually. That would explain the formatting issues. It might even explain the missing links. But it doesn't explain why the article was allowed to go live in the abysmal state it did or why I was never contacted to help fix those issues. It's embarrassing to think that people may have visited that site and thought that the sloppiness was all me. It's embarrassing that I linked to the article from here and that my readers saw that mess. I know my work isn't perfect and I know that the article wasn't perfect, but I worked hard on it and I deserved better than that. 

I'm not a journalist, but I would never have allowed that article to go live in the sloppy, embarrassing state it did. At least I know what I am and what I'm not, and I don't think the editors at that site can say the same.

UPDATE:  If you would like to read the article as I wrote it I've posted it here on Shock and Pause