On Tuesday, widespread reports all but confirmed the impending closure of 11-year-old gaming site Joystiq. Our leading gaming contributors wanted to take an opportunity to talk about why its closure should not be taken lightly.
Kyle Orland, Senior Gaming Editor: Something new and exciting
Just about eight-and-a-half years ago now, Joystiq helped give me my start as a full-time game journalist. Back then, I never thought my career in this business would outlast the site that started it, but reports that AOL is planning to close Joystiq down seem to indicate that I was wrong.
In 2006, I was struggling to get attention as a part-time freelancer during my hours away from a day job cranking out HTML for NPR's internal website. I was a recent J-school grad with a huge chip on my shoulder about the lack of quality writing about games at the time, a chip which I shared via the humbly named Video Game Ombudsman blog.
That blog somehow impressed Joystiq's then-editor-in-chief Chris Grant, who saw fit to offer me a news writer position at the princely rate of $10 per post. Over the next two years, I'd dive head first into the daily grind of video game news and cranked out over 1,000 stories for Joystiq, ranging from 200-word news blurbs to 1,000-word previews.
It was still an early era for gaming blogs back then—and for the idea of professional blogging in general. The industry largely (and rightly) saw us as upstarts disrupting a world still largely dominated by laudatory, multi-page preview features in glossy monthly magazines. It was often a struggle just to get the attention of the people or access to the games we wanted to cover; there were more than a few times Joystiq was mistaken for a French site, thanks to the brand's interesting spelling.
But we made our mark by developing our own style, adding humor and wry commentary to the day's news and pointing readers only to the stories we felt were reliable and worthwhile. Having less access to the big publishers meant we were also less interested in keeping them happy, and we were often merciless in criticizing the state of the industry. Joystiq was also much faster than those legacy magazines it outlasted, and even outdid a lot of the more established web sites of the time as far as sheer speed and quantity of reporting.
It was an exciting time to be in covering the gaming space. I got to cover Microsoft's X06 fan event in Barcelona, where I was one of the first people to play Gears of War. I got to stay up all weekend putting the Wii and PS3 through their paces before their official release, then trudged out to interview local gamers waiting in line to pick up their pre-ordered consoles. I got to destroy a Blu-ray disc in a video that somehow became a minor viral hit, nearing half-a-million views so far.
I got to cover the birth of the still nascent indie gaming scene, previewing Braid before it became a central totem of the scene. I liveblogged everything from ridiculously bad E3 press conferences to a Guitar-Hero-themed episode of South Park, of all things. I got to lead our blanket Gerstmann-gate coverage that led to mass departures from Gamespot and the creation of competitor Giant Bomb.
Through it all, I felt like I was part of a team that was doing something new and exciting in game journalism, learning from and arguing with peers that cared as much as or more than me about covering the space seriously, but irreverently. That tradition has only gotten stronger since I went from a Joystiq editor to a Joystiq reader years ago. While the individual voices at Joystiq will no doubt continue to share themselves with the world, it's sad to see the end of such a strong collection of quality writing about games.
Sam Machkovech, Culture Reporter: Pulled me back in
By the end of 2004, my video game playing days were pretty far behind me. I’d gone cold-turkey after a five-year stint as a game critic for a daily newspaper—a tenure that lasted through my high school and college years. At the time, I felt like that old, fuddy-duddy prediction that I’d “grow out of games” was coming true.
So what exactly “pulled me back in?” Honestly, it was a new wave of gaming blogs, and Joystiq came out of the gate as an important one—a knowledgable aggregator of an endless web of changing, growing video game coverage. People were starting to talk about video games in different, important ways in the mid-‘00s, just as Joystiq launched in the middle of 2004.
I had personally been dissatisfied with what appeared to be bought-and-paid-for coverage at bigger, preview-obsessed outlets—one reason I’d gotten tired of writing about games—and I was too out of the gaming loop to do my own digging for so many previews, reviews, columns, news bits, and more. I was particularly interested in the reports and stories that went beyond the low-hanging, triple-A fruit and reached out directly to developers and smaller-fry design teams, well before downloadable shops and social media let them reach out so much more easily to fans.
Joystiq, and its network of obsessive “fanboy” sites, laid the groundwork for the way I continue to believe games criticism and journalism can work—which is to say, quantity and diversity of content doesn't require any sacrifices to quality. Above all other sites of its time, it also maintained the most respectable policy of keeping any “reported elsewhere” briefs short, with obvious attribution, so that I could leapfrog around the Internet and see the best in a new, growing gaming-journalism world. That, plus plenty of internally reported news and reviews, made me excited about gaming again—about the possibilities of the format, about how many paths gaming would soon take on.
After seeing today’s sad news, I clicked my browser’s URL bar and jumped the “page number” on Joystiq to “9000,” to see how well the site archived its old stuff, and whether I was still wearing rose-tinted glasses. Up popped this brief from 2005 about an editorial posted at IGDA insisting that “gaming journalism needs to grow up.” It read, in part: "Many of the gaming blogs are delving into the 'whys' of game development, instead of the 'hows and whens.' Not only are the blogs daring to dig, they're doing a really good job of it.” Thanks to sites like Joystiq, I think gaming journalism really did grow up.
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