Dealing with Lateness and Self Justification

February 22nd, 2009

I occasionally fall into the trap of beginning articles with a short sub-story justifying why I’m playing whatever game at such a late time. It’s a terrible habit and I really out to kick it already because as you know I’m rarely ever up with “what’s now” in video games.

I write about whatever because I play whatever. Sure I lose my ticket to discussion on the super-fun ferris wheel ride of popular games blogging – that is popular within the niche – but I’d rather discuss the merits of some random game from the past 20 years than limit myself to a 3-5 game quota of popular hits. It doesn’t really work out favourably in my case – I guess my popularity can vouch for that, but isn’t this what we need?

I love the line which loosely goes: “In 20 years time people aren’t going to care what percentage X publication gave X game, what will really matter is the content which extends our understanding of X game”. I honestly couldn’t agree more, which is why I try to serve up content which does just that, well if I can help it.

There’s also the fact that such content is very, very hard to find. I mean honestly with a few exceptions who looks at old games from a design/culture/critique perspective, let alone talk about these games out of a “reviewing” standard? I don’t intend to talk myself up as the God of some super-niche (because if so, I’m a lousy God) but I honestly struggle to find this sort of stuff myself on the net, even within the blogosphere.

On one hand I love writing about what I do, and slowly improving on what I’m doing. Having made some category edits to older articles the other day, I realized how embarrassing some my previous stuff was. But the loneliness of writing in such a way can also feel like a bit of a burden, which is why I appreciate so many of your comments. I don’t know what I hoped to achieve with this article, just wanted to dispel a few thoughts and justify my standing on some issues, some of which I touched upon back here.

Ah, that’s it! I forgot to say, I changed the permalink structure of article so they now look like this:

Yakuza 2: The Cultural Dynamite

and not this:

https://danielprimed.com/gaming/culture/yakuza-2-the-cultural-dynamite/

Since I thought it worked better if I ever had to change categories. What I learnt though was that WordPress automatically redirects to the respective article on URL changes so really it doesn’t matter. I guess that’s what I wanted to say.