Since I’m up unusually early this morning with nothing to do, I may as well put this time to use by explaining why this blog is going dark so frequently. You know the outlines of it, of course. I’m busier than ever and am trying to accommodate a new pace of work. However, now that it’s in black and white, I should talk about my new life as a PC Gamer contributor.
When Troy paid the boatman to ferry him over to the PR side of the business, Dan Stapleton asked me if I would take over the strategy column and review work that Troy had been doing, since he already knew me from 3MA. Most of my work has yet to show up in print, because of the way schedules work, but if you hit the newstands now, you’ll find my inaugural column.
Honestly, if you like reading my work, you should really subscribe to PC Gamer, because I am doing an absolute ton of writing for the magazine right now. This week alone has me putting together a wargame review, a guide, a preview, and a column. Although I’m biased, I would also have to say the rest of the magazine is pretty damned good, too. It’s far better than what I remember from when I let my last subscription lapse several years ago. The columnists are great (Andy Mahood remains one of my favorite game writers) and I abs0lutely love how the previews get beyond the sale pitch and raise questions about the games under discussion. My editor didn’t bat an eye when I explained in a preview for the website why The Darkness II was as repulsive as it was enticing.
This is good, because writing for the magazine has me doing the kind of assignments I’d always thought I would prefer to avoid. I don’t know how I’d write a blandly positive preview about something I really didn’t care about, and fortunately I’ve not had to find out. The biggest challenge is writing to the low word-counts of a print magazine. At the start of this week, I had to distill a crummy week with a game to less than 300 words. That’s a totally different experience than the web pieces I’ve done to date.
But it does mean that my time is more limited than ever. Still, enough people have been prodding me about this blog, and in particular some projects I’ve left unfinished, that I will set aside some time to write some long-overdue pieces. In the meantime, however, I strongly suggest checking out the “Work” tab in the upper right of this page for links to my latest pieces, and subscribing to PC Gamer.