Are you woke enough to be a video games journalist?

We have some of the best journalists in the world. Respectable, hard-working and dedicated to the cold, hard facts of the story. Whether they are reporting on the latest breaking national news from Westminster, or an important regional story, these bastions of truth could always be relied upon to ask serious, hard-hitting questions and committed to impartiality at all times. Guaranteed to deliver a great story on the editor’s desk, just in time for publication.

There can be no finer example of this than video games journalists. As  paragons of intellect, gamers have, for decades, sought solace in their knowledge. They write at length about the new releases and rate the games that people buy.

I should know. For two decades I was an avid gamer.

It all started around the age of ten, when my parents first bought me an Atari 2600 console. I would sit, transfixed to the screen, into the early hours, playing Pac-Man and Chopper Command — hammering the solitary red button and frantically manoeuvring the joystick, all while ignoring the warning signs of repetitive strain injury and early onset arthritis.

As the years progressed, I upgraded to bigger and better consoles and computers. Next on the evolutionary electronic ladder was the Commodore 64: it came bundled with the game Midnight Resistance. In order to play each successive level — if memory serves me correctly — you had to manually flip the cassette tape and rewind it to the start. This was extremely frustrating. It was an incredible game, but alas, those were the technological limitations of the time. Then, my world changed when I unwrapped an Amiga 500 on Christmas Day, 1990.

Magazines were launched to cater for the burgeoning home entertainment market. Amiga Format became my teenage bible. Launched in 1989 with an average monthly circulation of 150,000, it featured free demo games on the three-and-a-half inch floppy disk that frequented its cover. But most importantly of all, it contained reviews of the latest video games. These were written by passionate and well-informed journalists, skilled and knowledgeable about every important aspect of the game: frame-rate, plot, narrative, graphics and sound.

In the thirty years since I played my first console, the video games market has risen inexorably. With an estimated 2.7 billion video gamers in the world, generating a global revenue of $159 billion in 2020, video games journalists can wield a lot of influence over the market.

Maybe you’re looking for a career change in 2021? If so, how do you become one now? Do you, dear reader, possess the requisite skills and qualifications to join this illustrious band of intrepid sages? Read on and find out.

To get started, you could become one of the thousands of reviewers on YouTube. But getting your voice heard — which is by far the most important part of your review — will be difficult in a crowded market. In order to become successful you will need to be employed by IGN or Game Informer — the latter is a magazine with a monthly circulation of over seven million. So expect to be remunerated handsomely for your journalism.

You need not worry about spending hours honing your gaming skills — dexterity is not required. Many games now feature a super-easy mode experienced gamers refer to pejoratively as “journalist mode”. A lot of games journalists now waste little time on a game’s technical prowess and tend to focus more on important things, like social justice activism.

This has become the real focal point for many games journalists today. You see, video games have become the latest victim of the intersectional culture war that has dominated 21st-century discourse. Now, the salient part of a video game review appears to be a character’s identity.

There’s one thing all aspiring video games journalists must remember. If you happen to belong to a minority group, be sure to mention this as often as possible in your reviews. This is important. I shall return to this later.

Where previous generations of journalists focused on boring things like gameplay, story and technical details, many now focus on the real burning issues, such as: how many women are in the game? Are transgender/gay and disabled characters properly represented? Why are there so few BAME characters in this historically accurate war strategy game?

With so much to complain about, your possibilities are, to paraphrase the Playstation advert, endless.

In these woke capitalist times we live in, many game developers and software designers now fall over themselves to be as diverse and inclusive as possible. They anticipate your persistent complaints and attempt to shoehorn every conceivable variation of gender, identity and ethnicity into their game. What can be left to say when the companies have bent over backwards, apologised for existing and given you what you want?

The problem is, it will never be enough for the games journalist. You must always push for more. No matter how hard these companies work to be as woke as possible, you must always demand more. If half the characters are BAME, why not all of them? If customisation includes male and female options, why not non-binary? (As featured in the new Call of Duty – Black Ops game).

You must always remember the developers who acquiesce in your progressive demands — give them glowing reviews and rewards — regardless of the quality of the game.

Should you choose this career, always — I repeat,  always — remember the importance of politics. It is what every gamer wants. They are not simply looking to escape reality for a few hours. Gamers love it when you incorporate your own political ideology into a game that has absolutely no connection or relevance to the review. Make sure you feature regular references to how much you hate Donald Trump — the links are obvious, especially when reviewing games like Crash Bandicoot. After all, the character is orange, sort of.

You must also claim to support free speech, as long as it is an opinion you agree with. Any criticism or backlash from fellow journalists or gamers, take to the internet, where you can harass them and have them cancelled or banned. Should things get a bit too heated, well: remember that minority group status earlier? Be sure to mention this for victimhood points. Users will side with you every time. Your opponent will be labelled a racist.

Video games journalism has evolved from a once respected career, requiring hard work and dedication, to one more reminiscent of a sinecure.

Should this be the career path for you in a post-Covid world, I wish you the best of luck. But perhaps leave the politics out of it.

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