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Penny Arcade to cover the game industry with help from veteran game journo Ben Kuchera
We're just gonna go ahead and call 2012 "the year that a million new game sites launched," as this morning Penny Arcade announced its intentions to get into the world of video game news delivery. Hiring on at least one seasoned vet in Ars Technica's Ben Kuchera (whose position of "senior gaming editor" at Ars will be taken over by notorious freelancer and ex-Joystiqer Kyle Orland), the site will deliver game industry coverage. If Kuchera's past work at Ars Technica's Opposable Thumbs blog is any indication, he'll be producing a variety of news, previews, features and reviews with plenty of the flair we've come to expect from him. The site will be "starting in the next few weeks," and we'll likely hear more details as today progresses. Update: Kuchera has taken to Penny Arcade's forums to answer some questions about his coverage. "To start you can expect great, in-depth stories every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. After that we'll think about what else we can do while keeping the standards high," he said. Additionally, it looks like it'll just be him working on coverage, at least for a bit, as was the case with Ars. "For now it will just be me. I think it's going to stay that way for a good while until we get a better idea of how we want things to work. I did the majority of gaming writing at Ars by myself, so it won't be a huge change for me. Expect fewer, longer stories," he added. [Image credit: Penny Arcade]
Meet the Team: Kyle Orland
In the world of professional game blogging, the people are represented by two separate, yet equally important groups: the bloggers who investigate the stories and readers who make silly comments. These are the first group's stories. Name: Kyle Orland Job Position: Contributing Editor; nega-reviewer Past Experience/Education: Bachelors degrees in computer science and journalism from the University of Maryland, College Park (Go Terps!). I've written (and write) about games for a variety of other outlets, as detailed on my personal site Life Outside of the 'Stiq: Fan of good TV (and some bad TV). Budding political junkie. Married. Juggler. Why I'm blogging: As a fun excuse to keep up with gaming news; as an outlet for regular, creative writing; to make a little dough. First Game Experience: A kid on my block got an NES and Super Mario Bros. when I was six. I went to his house practically every day even though I wasn't a big fan of the guy. On my seventh birthday I got an NES of my own and the rest is history. Favorite Games: Super Mario 64, Metal Gear Solid, Super Mario Kart, Dance Dance Revolution, Subspace/Continuum, Yoshi's Island Who's your favorite Planeteer? Wheeler. There's more to come every Tuesday and Thursday.
VGMWatch tackles the "what's a blogger" question
We often get caught in the debate over bloggers versus journalists. For starters, I think we have to be clear that the definition of journalist is a rather broad one so, depending on which definition you subscribe to, bloggers either are or aren't journalists. When we post a (rather awesome) picture of a Zelda tattoo, there are no cries that such a thing isn't newsworthy (often the contrary), while a 4 hour-old press release is met with cries of "OLD" echoing acoss the comment forms. Clearly the metric for calibrating such a distinction is loose at best. So it is in this mess that Kyle Orland, of Video Game Media Watch, finds himself while answering a reader's question: "I understand that bloggers don't really see themselves as journalists per se, but what, exactly, is their role?"Orland frames his response with two examples: one from this very blog and a series of posts (1, 2) concerning the backwards compatibility of our much-beloved Psychonauts; the other concerns the slap-fight between gaming-blog Kotaku and gaming-megasite IGN. In all, Orland presents some interesting commentary on where blogs fit into the larger gaming media and offers this rather potent distillation of our role:If journalism is the first draft of history, blogs are the first draft of journalism. You can look into the sausage factory and see all the swirling rumors, competing theories, and developing bits of conventional wisdom that go into making a delicious story, in close to real time. This is one main reason why they've beome so popular so quickly - people love taking a peek behind the curtain to see the emperor, um, making sausage.Orland's example illustrates both the advantages (delicious sausage) and shortcomings (what's in it?) of the format. As the most popular gaming blog on the internet, we work hard to maintain our credibility through discriminating story selection, proper sourcing, timely and transparent updates, and accountability via our open comment system. And, while we strive to keep errors to a minimum, if something is erroneous or misleading, we can count on you guys to let us know. And if it's old, we're sure you'll let us know that too.
