Do you think in modern era of the internet, with blogs and user generated content, that people now expect it to be some kind of stepping stone?
AK: Yes, the lines have been blurred. I do not say this to be discouraging, but I am saying it as somebody who recently folded a web site because I found no way of making money at it. The reality is, there is a delusive factor and it has always beset writers (at least for my entire career and well back beyond that) that people confuse the ability to type with the ability to write.
Artists are lucky. People inevitably find out if they can or can't draw. If you can't, you can't. People say to me things like, "I could have written that if I had had the time." That's like saying, "I could have done that brain surgery if I had all that training".
The fact is, I love the internet. I ran web sites starting in the early '90s. After leaving the electronic gaming world, I became the editor in chief and the chief editorial architect at a site named CollectingChannel.com that became the fourth largest site on the internet, when I was doing it.
I love the internet, I spend a lot time with my friends on the internet, but when it comes to writing, there are 100 times more people writing than there should be. When you look at the blogs they are mostly terrible, mostly a waste of time. It's a waste of time for the writer, a waste of time for the reader. Of course there are exceptions, but the average blog is read by seven people.
It is very difficult to gain an audience because there are so many voices.
AK: Yeah, there is a bad signal-to-noise ratio. There is a lot of noise and it makes it very difficult for people to find an audience. There have always been people who felt a yearning to become writers without the desire to submit their work to nay kind of critical scrutiny. They start their own little magazine, now they start a blog. Most of them are not very good. There is no question that the abundance of online material about video and computer gaming has largely destroyed the newsstand magazines.
With several magazines folding over the last year, what do you think of the industry now? I have not really followed print magazines since
Next Generation folded a decade ago.
AK: There is a reason for that. They don't respect your intelligence. By the way, neither did
Next Generation. They reviewed games they had never seen.
I liked
Next Generation because they were the first guys to have a retro column.
AK: Yeah, they did that. They would also trumpet some game was rumored to be under development in Japan as the greatest game ever. Then, a month or two later, they would review it, based on screenshot or something, and it would be "almost" the greatest game ever. Then a few months later the American edition would come out and it would be crap. They were marks.
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