Look in the sky! Is it a bird, a plane, superman?! No, it’s just a shredded magazine falling from a twenty-story edifice. A mosaic of word patterns and super imposed images from a publication whose last entry was over ten years prior. The wording long forgotten imaginings in the mind of some hopeful minded gamer. The staff long gone, having been laid off or quitting, moved onto greater things. The messages of a twenty something year old writer, nothing more than seemingly endless chicken scratches on tree pulp from a distance. Some of the neatest and beautiful writing I’ve stumbled across are products on an ongoing, seemingly never ending, article that feels more in line with the time flow of Vietnam, rather than a simple expose` on modern corporate ideocracy. However, peering into the past I’m reminded of how sparse our reporting used to be in this industry. Often, if you did not have a subscription to any given gaming magazine the only way you found out about upcoming events was through strict word of mouth, and most our wording had to engage the imagination as polygons had no way in hell of replicating the box art.
That’s where I want to keep the focus here, on the past. In modern times a game will debut, and within hours the internet will be swamped with dozens if not hundreds of articles pertaining to that same piece of news. Both speculation and regurgitation of the same thing with a different salting of words. This has led, what I feel, to an over saturation of information. It’s allowed sloppy writing to be passed as journalism, and offers grotesque amounts of content for very little sustenance. Now before you get on me for being a crotchety old man at the age of twenty-six and telling me to ‘get over it’, I understand this is the way things are. I’m not demanding that we return to distributing content through two or three areas one month at a time. The march of time flows on, and total amount of disorder is inevitable.
I just find the writing in these prehistoric documents to be filled with fluff, and engaging of the imagination. And part of this, I believe, is due to the limitations of technology presented at the time. You couldn’t show the beautiful forest off in the distance, or the squirrel scampering across the ground. It had to be left to the describer to paint a tapestry of words relating a story to a few pixels and polygons. That’s not to say that all writing used to be so perfect and grand. I mean even Shakespeare wrote poems about poop. And that’s also not to say modern writing doesn’t have the capability to be unique and engaging. I just wish a large bulk of it wasn’t so derivative and linear, but rather encompassed the integral of the English language. While the sheer volume of reporting today ensures that’s nothing more than a pipe dream, having one’s own writing style is a great way to start accumulating a following. Anyways I believe I am beginning to ramble. Might I suggest averting your attention to more of these colorful images?
