TOM FRANCIS
REGRETS THIS ALREADY

PC Gamer Has Been Allowed Onto The Internet

We tried an experiment a while back, where we suddenly started putting our hearts and souls into our little corner of computerandvideogames.com to see if a) we could do it, b) people would like it, and c) people would like something more. We could and they did and they would.

This information was then fed into a much larger and darker decision-making process that I had really nothing to do with, the first stage of which acts a little like a paper shredder, but it eventually resulted in us getting a site anyway.

We have wanted this very badly for a very long time and worked very hard to get it. So, thank you to all who responded to my thinly veiled call for you to express deep dissatisfaction with our previous web presence, and welcome to our new one.

Since Tim was away at E3, I was in charge of the site launch, and Graham helmed the magazine. It’s been a frantic… Christ, one week? Feels like a month. It’s been a frantic week in which we’ve put up over a hundred and fifty articles, so I thought I’d highlight some of the stuff I’m most pleased with so far.

• Project Dust
  This was the first time I read news I did not know on our own site, and it happened to be the most surprising and interesting reveal of E3. It’s also great to see something exciting like that and not have the “But is it coming to PC?” anxiety. It’s on our site, so yes.
   
• Gaming’s best cereal-based shooter
  Evan’s wonderfully uncynical look at a piece of Americana I’d heard of but really knew nothing about, and the bizarre surrounding culture.
   
• 20 beautiful new Brink shots
  This just makes me happy because it’s just not something we could do effectively before, and it looks superb on the page. It was a personal quest of mine to ensure that whenever we showed off screenshots, you’d just have to click them to get straight to the full, high-res, clean, unwatermarked original file.
   
• Transformice
  Jaz’s post is a great statement of the kind of free game coverage I’ve always wanted. To me, “Here’s a free game that’s mildly entertaining for thirty seconds” is not news – I can see ten of those a day on sites dedicated to that stuff. If we’re talking about one in particular, I want to know why, ideally in the form of a funny story about what happened while playing it.
   
• Engineering victory in Supreme Commander 2
  After helping us out for two crucial weeks, Tom Senior surprised us all by writing his best piece (that I’ve read) on his last day. A great guide to a hilarious tactic with truly magnificent screenshots. I can always tell when someone’s writing about something they know and love, because it’s the only kind of article I can read through without wanting to change anything – the writing just clicks.
   
• Microsoft’s shameful E3 PC showing
  This is why I like having Tim as an editor. At PC Gamer we’re lucky enough to carry some authority without being an official mag beholden to anyone, so when someone screws over our platform, we can say so in no uncertain terms. No-one more so than Tim. I’ve always been proud of PC Gamer’s history of eloquent indignation: I think we do a good job of standing up for gamers without sounding whiny or getting hysterical. Rants are commonplace online, good rhetoric is not.
   

Deus Ex Week
Controlling the launch madness means most of the really substantial stuff I’ve contributed is what I wrote ahead of time – namely a week of Deus Ex and Deus Ex 3 features. It’s been an interesting prototype of how we can provide really nerdily detailed coverage of a hugely exciting game in both the magazine and the website, without rendering either one redundant.

In both the UK and the US, the mag carries a six-page feature that has all the juicy information and probably the best summary of why Human Revolution is worth getting excited about. It has more screenshots and art than have been released online, and it came out well before anyone was allowed to say word one about the game on the web.

On the site, you get the full interviews it was based on, a blow-by-blow account of exactly what I saw and what I thought of it, some informal chatting about the art, and a reminder or two of what we loved about the original. It’s almost the opposite of conventional wisdom about the web versus print: the web’s supposed to be quick and brief, but I think it can be a place where people get to choose the level of depth they want. Print’s sometimes characterised as long-form and slow, but here it’s faster and punchier at presenting the juicy details.

The blow-by-blow in particular was really fun to write. It’s an attempt to address two of my most common frustrations with previews: “Stop wanking and tell me what you saw,” and “Don’t just tell me what you saw, tell me what you thought of it.” Writing it like a liveblog presented a really convenient format for getting facts and impressions side by side without a lot of structural wrangling to fit it into flowing prose.

Of the interviews, I think the one with art director Jonathan Jacques-Belletete stands up best on its own. Knowing I’d also be talking to the game design and story people separately freed me up to ask some more wide-ranging stuff, and see where the discussion went. And I really liked how honest he was when I asked about the risk of going obviously futuristic when that was so badly received in Invisible War.

Big thanks to Lewis Denby and Jaz for their help getting the interviews into electrowords.

I am now profoundly exhausted, so please be nice. The feedback so far has been amazing, but what remains to be seen is whether people who like these articles will take the time to link them on their weblogs, forumhaunts and Facetwitters. We finally have the chance to live or die by the quality of our stuff, so now we work overtime to make it as good as we can – and see who notices.