Video Game Journalism - Breaking Into the Games Industry by Volunteer Writing for Blogs

Video game journalism is considered as the branch of the journalism. This branch is basically concerned with the task of reporting and discussing about the video games. The video games journalism is typically based on the core reveal, the preview and on the review cycle. Recently it has been seen that there has been a tremendous growth in the online publications and the blogs that deal with video games. This branch of journalism also deals with new games journalism.

The main function of a game journalist is to play games and produce a review of those. The main strategy with which these people work is to make the games more user friendly and object oriented. For this, they even contact the game developers and have meetings with them for discussions about the methods to work along the strategy and fulfillment of deadlines. They also write articles about the games and get them published on the game websites, social networking sites?walls, game expos and press releases.

Video game journalism has many consumers like:

• The Blogs recently there was major hype over the internet by the blogs called the Joystiq, and the Kotaku. These were two main mass appeal blogs. These were known as the primary tabloid sites that deals with the games journalism.
• Online: 1UP, game spot, IGN, gamersyndrome and GameSpy are known as the four stalwarts in the entire online journalism for the games. All these means cater wide audience, and contain enormous amounts of the information for all the major platforms. They have paid subscriptions and therefore offer extensive community features.
• Online Sites: recently Eurogamer has been launched and is known as the youngest online site offering a lean design. This site mainly serves the things like English-speaking, and European gamers. It does not include any kind of the paid subscription.
• Video-based consumers- under this category Gametrailers are included. This is a kind of the media website that provides the video game related web content. It also provides the free access to the original programming environment in the form of reviews and previews. Game trailers also enable its users to record the game play.

The media industry involving video games is often criticized for holding various lax journalistic standards. The main areas of issues in video game journalism are:
Conflicts of interest: here the publication that is responsible for reviewing the games on receiving the advertising revenue from the various publishers of the games when invited to the ‘press day' parties is sometimes held in suspicion.

Time spent on the game: here the video game reviewers often try to tread a line between the producing of the timely copy of games and their playing so that they are able to critique it.

In order to become a game journalist, you have to first become a good gamer and a good writer. You can also work forward to get a degree in journalism and try to get a job in the same field. After a bit of work experience, you can approach a gaming company and work as a trainee there. You can now move step by step to get yourself positioned at the games journalist’s chair.