Gamer Blog Genre Analysis, Introduction and Part 1

Introduction

For my genre analysis I have chosen the "subgenre" of the gamer blog, that is, blogs related to or revolving around the hobby of playing electronic video games. All three of the blogs were chosen not only for their relevance to the gaming hobby, but also because they have at times served as more personal blogs for the authors; these three blogs are game girl advance, PvP, and Penny-Arcade. The last two choices may seem unusual to anyone familiar with them as they are primarily seen as webcomics. This is generally considered to be a separate phenomenon on the Internet, and indeed the creators of Penny-Arcade seem to share this view. However, the author of PvP, Scott Kurtz, identifies the "rant" aspect of his website as a blog, and the Penny-Arcade rants embody many of the same aspects as Kurtz's; hence, even if these are ultimately found not to be truly representative of the blog medium, they bear looking in to. I have been following these three blogs for the past three weeks, but I have also browsed through their archives, so some refferences in this analysis may be more recent than others.

A final note: I conform to the convention on the Internet of reffering in text to other sites by how they reffer to themselves, regardless of percieved errors in syntax, grammar, etc. Thus, PvP will be reffered to with the ends capitalized, and game girl advance will remain uncapitalized throughout the text.

Part 1: Dependence and Uniqueness

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Giving It That Personal Touch

In this first installment, I'd like to focus on the nature of the average gamer blog's relationship with other gaming websites on the Internet, be they other blogs, news sites, company sites, or what have you. All three of these blogs, to some extent or another, deal with news in the video game industry. This can range from news on the development or release of video games themselves, to other events in the gaming industry, to "current events" related to video gaming. However, like a good number of other "news blogs" in general, gamer blogs are rarely the initial source of the news itself (though, with these three at least, there have been exceptions in the past). This has the effect of making the blog redundant in terms of mere delivery of news to the audience, as readers can just as easily access the relevant sites. What, then, makes it worth the reader's time to visit these blogs?

It may be that blogs tend to have a more personal, informal feel to it than a news site. Most of the time a blogger will share his opinion of the news he is presenting. This can often be much less formal than one would expect even of relatively informal news sites:

"There's an option [in the game] that you can vote in to make everyone auto-ready after a short interval, which really argues for itself in my opinion. Waiting for Bra$$Munky to set down his bong has never been - to me, now - a good time investment." --- Jerry Holkins, a.k.a. "Tycho Brahe"

Another thing to consider is a blogger's reactions to the games they actually play. Less constrained than a formal game review one might find at other sites, these can be as short or as long as a blogger feels, on any aspect they feel like commenting on. For games that see continual play by the blogger, these reactions can also extend for much longer. Note the number of refferences to the game World of Warcraft in the PvP blog archives for this past August.

On to Part 2