Charlie was a gamer who decided he would write
(not fair: Charlie was a writer who chose games for his insight)
Calloused thumbs
Filled with twitch
Muscle memory
Now to earn a living from his (2nd) favourite teenage hobby.
A critic,
A reviewer
This is how he’d spend his days;
Ten hours, then a judgment, then the promo to ebay.
First came his blog,
Then their website,
Then his words in national print.
Then reactions, reader comments
Critic critics?! Narcissist.

Charlie was quite brilliant
His prose tight and rare
His words perspicacious
His final judgments fair.

But Charlie was a drop in a tidal wave of choices
His commentary discarded
For more forgiving voices.
Still, he reasoned in his head, with marked maturity:
“I’ll reduce game writing’s volume but raise its fidelity”

He learned the PR names and faces
And they flew him to exotic places
And when it came to score their games
He softened words and heightened praise
(Not beyond reasonability,
And not so much to kill integrity
But just enough to keep them sweet
And secure the next first class Boeing seat).

- For by this time Charlie knew
The scores were mostly useless
And the readers mostly clueless
Drunk
On the half-truths of marketing
Whose debunking
They absolutely didn’t want to read.
For games are dreams of better places
(Doubly so when they’ve familiar faces)
And expectations must be met:
To play the game, game writers learn
The scores are quite preset.

For a while
It worked out
Till he married and chose to breed:
Ten pence a word a family will not feed.

So he worked
Ten times harder,
So he aged
Ten times faster
And sooner or later the games bored him:
Ten a week, not one would floor or awe him

Every one seemed quite the same
Shades of principles arcane:

For every one that mattered some
A hundred thousand mattered none

And Charlie learned the final lesson
In his hackery descension
The more you cover and the less you play,
The more you earn and the less you pay

So it was that Charlie joined
Ever growing company;
Those whose seeds of talent and ability
Were choked by cloying weeds
Of grim,
Necessity.

This column first appeared here over at Game Set Watch, Gamasutra’s sister site where I write a regular column named after this blog.

…………………………………………………….

My second column for GSW and I thought I’d try something a bit different already: a cynical poem about how freelance games writing is a way of life that’s almost impossible to maintain as you grow older, marry and try to support a family. Unless, that is, you’re willing to compromise your integrity in one way or another. All done in the style of Joseph Moncure March poem…

John Walker chided me last night for ‘suggesting that we’re all corrupt, or on the path to corruption’ and being generally ‘hopeless’.

But, well, I do think it’s almost hopeless. I managed to just about exist for three years solely as a games freelancer but nowadays, with a wife, family and mortgage, there’s no way I could make it work – and bear in mind that I’m more active and committed in games writing now than I’ve ever been and, as far as I can tell, I do just about as much weekly freelance games writing as anyone else I know in the UK.

This isn’t a situation common to all writing jobs either. Most writing careers based on reviewing are much better paid for the amount of hours you have to put in to review the subject. Time playing games is time unpaid and games take a really long time to play. When publishers are still paying the same rates they have for nearly ten years, the raw economics of the job become near unworkable for anyone outside of their early twenties.

I want to do right by the developers whose games I cover (often moreso than the readers whose expectations are, as the poem said, already preset) and I’ll certainly try to finish each game I’m given, but sometimes, in real life, that just doesn’t work out.

Discussion of the poem spilled onto Tom Chick‘s Quarter to Three forum (a haunt of many US games writers) where I was so bold as to ask what proportion of Tom’s income comes from games writing.

He (quite rightly) opted not to get into that on the internet but did admit that: ‘if the question is whether I could support myself solely as a freelance games writer, the answer is ‘no’.’

This is no industry for old men.

I noticed this thing the other day on Digg.com, the site that aggregates interesting news and pages on the Internet and lets the wisdom of crowds push the best ones to the front of the site. All news ever, like, everything that comes into Digg, is classified into eight categories. One of thee categories is, extraordinarily, videogames.

Can you imagine that happening in the real world? In Internet world games are one of the eight core categories of all important news and information. In this climate (to a young western audience at least) being a games writer is like pretty much the best job there is, a totally aspirational vocation.

But even those who make manage to fill those few jobs there are in the field find it near impossible to scratch a living from it. As I said to John yesterday, I’m not sure what my point is here, but I’m definitely pregnant with a point…