If you haven’t read my Antihero piece from earlier today, you might have missed my descent into warm fuzzies for the good old days. I wasn’t sure what had caused me to slip into darkness until it dawned on me that I received a missive from my counterpart at our old digs, Pocket Tactics. Why would that send me into a state of depression? Well, it’s been just over a year now since I picked up my ball and went home and, yes, there are days I miss it. I love it over here at Stately Play, don’t get me wrong, but getting paid didn’t suck.
Anyway, the editor of Pocket Tactics has been there for a year now and is hitting up their readership to see what they can do better. Knowing that a lot of you used to be readers of their site, they were hoping you could give them a little feedback on why you don’t read Pocket Tactics like you used to, or at least not as often.
They currently have a survey up on their front page and you should head over and take a gander. I’m sure they’d love some constructive criticism of what we feel they can do better, or praise over the stuff that they’ve made better since the door hit me in the ass. Considering it used to be the house we lived in, I’m hoping we can help them keep it standing for the foreseeable future.
Off topic, but speaking of ch-ch-ch-ch-changes, when I hit my bookmark to the iOS games blog at BGG the other day, it came up as RPG Geek instead. That wasn’t weird at all.
Could be worse. If it had come up as Video Game Geek, you’d know the blog’s days were numbered…
Lol, well, I AM an rpg geek and I still thought it was odd.
Did the survey and found the last question surprisingly hard. I think their writers haven’t found a distinctive voice yet (one writer is just dull) and this is reflected in the community. We need the spiky enthusiastic-yet-reflective-knowingly-overintellectualising-the-trivial-with-sardonic-humour melange that old PT had and new PT doesn’t.
Me too.
My biggest reflection was the old PT focused on a very specific subset of games with a strong strategy element (hence the T in PT). Often wargames, boardgame ports, and the occasional thoughtful puzzler. Games that the writers loved to play themselves (or at least thought they would love before playing and finding the games fall short of expectations) and wanted to highlight for others. So they had a strong cult following of gamers whose tastes highly overlapped with theirs [does that make us cultists?].
There are plenty of general interest game reviews sites out there, but I may or may not share the taste of the individual reviewer, or even (especially?) an aggregate of general interest reviews like on metacritic, so they become hit or miss, whereas I pretty much always came away with the same personal opinion of any game reviewed on PT classic.
So, my sense is the current PT is trying to cover a much wider range of games, with good writers, but ones who have a more diverse range of tastes. And they may be more interested in volume of reviews rather than finding the games they most enjoy themselves. Maybe that will be a good strategy for them and they will reach more readers and increase their ad revenue. But SP will be my first choice as long as the writers here keep writing about what they are passionate about, with that shared sense of style and taste, well-described by Spice above.
[TL;DR I guess it’s a matter of specific shared tastes for me, both in game selection and writing style, rather than writing for the widest possible audience.]