Marketing is Evil and Wrong and Here's Some:

For the past few weeks, I've been getting around ten times the hits on this blog (and on the old one). Now, fair enough, ten times nothing is still nothing. And of those people admiring the sites, only 5% will find anything useful or interesting.

This (despicable) inflation of traffic is due to evil Bruce Everiss. Bruce is in marketing (nuff said, am I right?) and has figured out some key marketing ideas, such as "hyperlinks link people to other internet pages", and thusly came up with this list of hyperlinks to circle jerk a bunch of games industry blogging dudes who happen to be on an invite-only forum.

I have been unduly noted twice in this list, which has been copied around, contaminating the blogs like... like a virus. A sort of "viral marketing". Ha. I just equated marketing to a disease! The marketers are going to hate that shit. +1 to the good guys!

Anyway, as a pure, good human being who doesn't spread marketing evil and lies and racial hatred, I want to re-post this travesty. I resent every hit I've received as a result of this "viral" post (haha. Eat that, marketeers!), and just say one thing to anyone who has arrived here as a result of clicking one of the links below: BAAAAAAA. YOU ARE LIKE A SHEEP AMONGST SHEEPS.


Most of the knowledge available to keen gamers about the gaming industry can be of a pretty low quality. This is because that knowledge is third or fourth hand. As a very minimum it has been “spun” by a marketing department (I have done loads of this) and then “interpreted” by a journalist. But there is a way round this, keen enthusiasts can get their knowledge directly from the horses mouth, if they read the right blogs.
Whilst there aren’t many blogs from the publishing side of the video game industry there a quite a few from the development side. And they are excellent. These are the guys who actually make the games that everyone plays, so they know what they are talking about. And when they analyse a game they do so with an authority no magazine could match. These guys are the complete opposite of the fanboy, they are intelligent, informed and incisive. There are quite a few in my blogroll but here are a random selection:

• Mainly About Games. Informative and well written it has a nice personal feel to it.
• Dopass.com. Short entries not just about gaming. Funny at times.
• A path through possibility. Irregular updating but well worth a read for some incisive commentary. [Edit: Irregular is less correct than "defuct"].
  
• Japanmanship. An incredibly good read of a Western developer’s life in Japan.
• Magical Wasteland. Refreshingly irreverant.
• Survival Horror. Does what it says on the tin.
• Gamedev.net. A big and serious site with a lot of good content.
• Seven Degrees of Freedom. Very nice diary style blog.
• Random Encounters in Imaginary Realms. Just cherry picks the good stuff.
• Cheeky. Sparse and interesting development diary.
• Peter Mackay’s projects and development diary. Quake on Gamecube.
• Life In The Rain. Often long interesting personal articles.
• T=Machine. Wide ranging blog with much that is happening at the sharp end online.
• Black Company Studios. Semi diary semi event driven articles. Nice.
• .mischief.mayhem.soap. A serious game developer’s blog.
• JakeWorld Blog. The life of a game developer.
• Gamefeil. Games, comics, diary.
• Scientific Ninja. Technical stuff here.
• Devbump. Aggregation of gaming articles.
• Nimblebit. Game development diary. Lots of technical stuff.
• It’s Bezness time. Bedroom developer diary. [Edit: See last post: no longer in the bedroom]
  
• I love it, I feel like Sisyphus. On start-ups, game development and programming.

For anyone with any interest in games the above blogs are just pure gold. Japanmanship, for instance is written by a game developer who works for a Japenese games company, lives in Japan and speaks Japanese. If you want to understand the game industry in Japan there is no finer source of knowledge. It amazes me when fanboys with a millionth of his knowledge and experience argue with him on forums.

Note to bloggers, journalists etc, feel free to copy and paste the above list or even the whole article to anywhere you want. [Edit: I will, if only to show what an EVIL MARKETING MAN YOU ARE]

P.S. None of the people linked even ASKED to be on this list, so click on all the links to show your support against their victimization, but don't even read what they have to say (because you wouldn't have if you avoided all the synister marketing threats to freedom in the first place).