Talking About Genre Conventions..

March 20th, 2009

My pesky category selection finally drove me to the point of some moderate restructuring, and now I’m finally happy about it. Here’s what I did:

Critique -> Game Discussion

I did this because firstly, classifying my writing on the textual analysis of games as solely begin critique is too limiting. I consider what I write about games as being more of “this is something interesting that maybe others haven’t talked about, let’s poke at that a little”. I guess it’s sometimes more like criticism of one aspect of a game, or comparatively tying a game to something external, like culture. In this regard, discussion is a better choice of words, anyways, using the noun critique to classify my writing contains a certain degree of bigotry in this current climate, so I think I’ll only use it as a verb occasionally.

Industry Issues -> Editorial

Editorial = one dude giving his opinions, industry issues is strictly industry related. It was recommended to me maybe a year ago to remove the word ‘editorial’ from the site slogan because it denotes seriousness and perhaps boredom. It’s good advice, but truth is, I write a whole bunch of this stuff, and if anyone finds the commentaries boring then they’ll likely find the rest of the site boring too. So rack off!

The other categories more or less explain themselves. Although I want to note that analysis does not involve games themselves (that’s game discussion!) rather issues, videos and so forth. Phew, all of that is sorted out.

I’ve also added a few more links to the blogroll over the past few weeks. I may as well point them out here: The Artful Gamer, Game Critics, Eurogamer, Crispy Gamer, 1UP’s RPG Blog (The Grind) and 1UP’s Retro Gaming Blog (Retronauts blog). These are all some of my favourite sites, whose linkage is well overdue. So check them out. I’ve also been back using delicious for random bookmarks, some that I share here in Link Out, some not. So if you’re interested in better things to read, try there. And that’s another shallow site update.