If there is one thing I've noticed as a writer it is that this community is home to others who are no slouches when it comes to wrangling up wayword words. While Game Informer Online serves as a nexus for those who write about games or report on games or are interested in gaming and gaming culture and reading what those who write and report on games have to say, being able to bring those readers over to individual sites outside Game Informer, as well as deciding what we create outside the community to share with the one here, are both things that I think hold the community back from being as powerful as it can be. As influential as it can be.
Influence and power after all are big topics in the industry: in a way this just mirrors popular culture and the cult of the amateur that is a byproduct of the changes technology and social habits have created. We see this in the role and questions about the role of social media and Lets Play have in gaming, in the question of the who exactly is a gaming "journalist" and what it means to be one, in the rise of fanblogs and fan sites and those fanblogs who want to be taken seriously and those professional sites which claim they are just fanblogs when serious questions are raised about their role in the industry and the nature of their reporting.
Having everyday gamers getting more involved with gaming is not a bad thing: far from it. After all it is the engagement of gamers with their culture and their industry which really sets gaming apart from other entertainment fields. Television and books and Hollywood don't really capitalize on Kickstarter for example and yet gamers of all niches and of forgotten franchises are able to get product that they enjoy by engaging the industry with their wallet. Outside of the independent scene this engagement of the common gamer with their wallet towards the industry can result in multibillion dollar corporations changing their entire product due to gamers actively engaging with their culture and their industry.
But I do fault what is in wider society and especially amongst our generation and the one behind us the need to elevate and participate in the cult of the amateur: where engagement with culture and industry and scholarship seeks not to create dialogue or understand what this thing we all enjoy and sometimes break the TV by hurling our controllers at is about, or understanding who we are and who our fellow gamers are, but seeks to promulgate the same flaws and grievances to be found in the current culture and industry by mirroring those same problems in ones' own work or by believing that saying anything is no different from having anything worth saying.
In the context of those of us in this community, those of us who are content creators or who are interested in having those who like the material produced by the content creators, this means that this lack of unity in the community, both on Game Informer Online itself (the changes to the community I discussed in the previous Community Council blog) and amongst the sites and communities that those of us in the community belong to or work for outside of Game Informer Online makes it all the harder to create communities and content that rises above the babble of the cult of the amateur and against the unprofessional professionals in the industry proper:
What I propose is a working together between the communities and sites we are part of outside of Game Informer Online. A creation of a meta-community. Doing so will help the community here on Game Informer Online by bringing forth new and better content as well as new community members who bring their own views and content to contribute, as well as create stronger bonds between outside communities and sites / platforms so as to help make the culture and industry and our fellow gamers aware of alternative content and views which can be found in the culture and industry and of which of course we help produce or create or facilitate the discussion of.
How to do this? It can be as simple as discussing amongst ourselves here on Game Informer Online, in the comments below for example or elsewhere, ways to better integrate the site experience and community with our content, what content we would like to produce together as a community, what content we would like to produce as individuals and / or as a community with outside communities, and sharing the content we create here with other communities to make them aware of what makes this place and its community unique and worth participating in.
It could also mean working together with our disparate sites to contact gaming culture and industry leaders with a more unified voice, so as to make it so that as a unified force we would hear back whereas smaller individual sites would not; working with developers and publishers to create a space where they can more freely discuss their work without worry of the ones reporting on it bringing bias to the reporting as I have discussed in prior blogs; working with other content producers (such as the Lets Play community) to create content for our communities or to make content our communities produce material they might want to cover.
The gaming culture and industry is changing almost every day it appears: if we do not want to be swept aside by the tides of change and history, then Let Us Cling Together.