Tuesday, August 26, 2008

What about me?

Writers block is the enemy of every professional tosser with ink in their pen and a blank page on their desk. To update this and make it a 21st century comment perhaps it should be 'Writers block is the enemy of every professional crybaby with a livejournal and their fingers hovering over the keyboard'


Now if I was someone important, i.e. a professional analyst, or a renowned critic on a specific subject, then anything I say would be eaten up for breakfast by the reading public. Alas since I am a nobody writing mostly on what is still deemed a 'niche' subject by the televised media the amount of people who will take my words to heart is minimal at best, and non-existent in reality. I've been bugged by this for several months now, but after being knocked back by my own teacher about not following 'standards' in writing I feel the need to bitch about it discuss the matter.

When starting up with reviews for Economical Gamer, the final review scheme was still undecided and open for discussion. Now it doesn't take a famous analyst to figure out that opinions on the current standards of game reviews point towards the entire system needed an update past the number based metacritic scores. Since the site is based off getting your moneys worth with games it seemed like a great chance to create a unique review system (or completely ripoff Kotaku's new setup ,whichever one is easier). Obviously this didn't happen and the site went with a traditional number rating, but hey who am i to complain? I'm still writing reviews and such so it would seem unfair to say the reviews all suck.

Next complaint stems less from the interwebs and instead from my own classroom. Complaints about my writing course almost completely passing up the subject of online writing/publications now withstanding, after almost a year in the course it feels less like 'developing your own writing' and more like 'learn to please the teacher'. Despite been given the OK to take a fictitious satirical view on space travel for a crummy travel piece (which I have no real passion for trying to publish) I still receive a talk about having to not trying to do anything different when writing for an audience. At least thats what I think teacher was trying to say, all I heard was "crush any unique creativity in your writing and stick to the standards you pretentious douche".

So here I am stuck in mundane writing position with nothing to brag about. But what do I have to do in order to make it 'big'? Obviously its either conform to the point where standard writing is referred to as 'doing a Steven .J' or do something so incredibly original that its concept will be stolen and driven into the ground faster than you can say Bullet Time. As a starting point for the latter, feature writing seemed like an easy way to express some ideas that are not typically expressed in gaming journalism. One heavily required point for most of my features that are still in the 'early planning' phase are interviews and comments from various important peoples/peoplettes. Of course after a couple months trying to get in contact with said people I now know that these features are a lost cause, since none of them care to return emails or messages I'm gonna have to face dropping these features and look at different ideas.

Now there are still ways for me to move my writing forward. Obvious methods would be to move past this small blog and create a whole website dedicated to sticking it to conventions and 'the man'. But since Eegra does that with more proficiency then I could ever hope to display by myself I'll leave that to those magnificent bastards. Then theres a more unique conspiracy to write/design my own video game; guaranteed press from any site claiming to give a damn about the 'indi' crowd and a promotion into the somebody crowd. However then reality slaps me in the face and I realize that I know nothing about coding up my own game, and my ideas would be impossible with a budget of $23 sitting in my bank account.

Guess all I can do is conform to the masses for a while longer while crying over a livejournal, fingers floating just 3mm over the keyboard letters D U M B A S S (yes there are 2 fingers over the letter 'S')

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