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So You Want To Be A Game Journalist?
simoniker writes "Over at Game Career Guide, they're looking at how to become a video game journalist, and exactly what that 'infamous' job entails. An extract: 'An [apparently simple] task roster belies the complexity of the role of games journalist. For example, playing a game with an eye towards reviewing it differs from playing it purely for fun and, if it happens to be a terrible game (which you will see more than your fair share of in time), it may not be such an enjoyable experience. Dealing with PR people ... can be tiresome to degrees depending on the nature of the PR person (some are more tiresome than others, let's just say).'"
You don't want to be a game journalist. Breaking in is even worse because you're expected to do the same things as a regular game journalist, except not get paid for it. There is very little journalism involved; you're just a glorified PR puppet whose job is to get quotes on the back of a game box to drive traffic to your site.
Beyond that, it will totally ruin your experience of playing video games. It's not about playing the game, but evaluating it, capturing screenshots and videos, and even playing really awful games to completion. You will play many, many games you never had any interest in and that bore you to tears. The choice games (read: any game you've ever heard of) go to the senior guys who have proven they can write good PR fluff.
Oh, and you have a deadline to meet, and if you don't give their games a favorable review, the PR people for that game company will mysteriously stop returning your e-mails and phone calls, so you can forget about getting eval copies of their games for the next 6 months.
Suddenly, playing a video game starts to seem like, well, work. And you'll not want to do what you do for 7 hours a day every day once you get off work.
That's one of the ways to see what a review is worth - check the company's other review for a game you happen to know sucks eggs through a coffee stirrer, and see how they rated it.
I wrote for GameSpy's now-defunct 3DActionPlanet.com a while back. We only did editorials and demo reviews, leaving the finals for GameSpy's parent site. The job did not provide economic security, but it was a lot of fun. That being said, we were shut down because of the lack of direct editorial control and oversight. Now everything is run through GameSpy.com and the reviews are all pretty sensationalist.