Editor's Column: Knowing Me, Knowing You. Aha…?

3 Mar, 2010

My internet’s dead.

As I write this my modem is sat on the desk, blinking irregularly at me like an old dog with gas. And much like said old dog with an unfortunate bowel complaint, I can’t in good conscience hold it accountable, for the fault lies with a dead landline that magically and inexplicably stopped working last week. And at first, it’s okay. I catch up on some reading; write some emails offline. Heavy Rain and Silent Hill Shattered Memories fell through my letterbox earlier this week, and I’ve been waiting for them since the dawn of time … or at least it certainly feels that way. I’m suddenly free to spend quality time with my other half (who doesn’t play games, incidentally) and mess about with my six-year-old (who – thank God – does). But because I’m me and surgically attached to either a keyboard or a controller, it takes approximately 1.4 days – or, more accurately, the amount of time it takes for me to finish Heavy Rain – for the novelty to become tedium and my freedom to clamp down like shackles.

I decide that it makes sense to use this time to write up my inaugural monthly column for this quasi-new, spangly and thoroughly awesome pet-project of mine, GGS.com. Yet it’s taken me five days to decide what to write about. After all – you don’t know me. I don’t know you. You come to this site because – well, because we’re awesome, right? However, you may have just simply been Googling WHY IS JUST DANCE STILL IN THE GAMING CHARTS IT SUCKS DONKEY BALLS and stumbled here accidentally (it features in our keywords search; I seem to ask that very same question with alarming frequency). Or maybe you were seeking dodgy images of girl gamers sucking in a literal sense? Yeah, that’s right – I’ve seen those keyword strings in our site stat referrals, too. Pft. Perverts.

Anyway.

A few people have asked me what’s different about ggsgamer.com: what it is that makes it – us – stand out from the thousands of other gaming sites across the globe. And my answer? Truthfully? Well . . . not much, really. There are definitely better sites than others out there (and Aeropause is just one of them). Conversely, there are also many, many worse. As for what’s special about us? Well . . .

GGS.com is the culmination of what is – cheesy as it sounds – something of a lifelong dream for me. Yeah, there were months of preparation, recruitment and backstage work, but the soul of this place is much, much older than that. As neither a pro-gamer nor testicularly-inclined, there aren’t many online homes for someone like me, particularly as I’m the kind of girl-gamer who has an aversion to the colour pink and misogynist editorials, and I have zero interest in MMORPGs or cooking games. Although I feel passionately about gaming, I take neither it nor myself particularly seriously. I like meeting other gamers from all walks of life, but I’m not particularly bothered if they’re male or female (although I am bothered by sweeping assumptions about gender-based gaming prowess – but that’s a topic for another column). I wanted a site that skimmed off the cream of the world’s gaming news and delivered the important bits, so I didn’t have to wade through the crap bits underneath – although I didn’t want it to patronise me with it’s elitist bollocks, either. I want a site that was generally pretty easy-going, but wasn’t completely vacuous, either (and thanks to our resident Smartypants Mitu, there’s little chance of that here). I want reviews that are not always complimentary but are always honest, and opinions are neither for sponsorship nor for sale. So in the end, and in the absence of many interesting, informative and informal places to talk about games – places that doesn’t write someone off because of their achievement score, or because -ohemgee – they wear a bra – I went ahead and made one myself. This place. Which is where you come in.

This website was created by me for people like me. By extension, I hope that it means it was created for people like you, too. So please: comment. Communicate. Pimp. Argue. As much as I love listening to myself speak, and as thoroughly awesome as the GGS.com crew are (and they are awesome, I promise), I’d love to hear from you – what you like about the site, what you don’t like, what we should do more of, what we should never, ever, EVER do again. Over the next few months we’ll be cranking open the dialogue a little further by posting up some staff interviews so that you can get to know us a bit more, so if you have any questions – generic or specific to a particular writer – post them here or send them to me via our contact form and I’ll pass them along. In the meantime, stop by and say hello, even if you’ve never commented before. After all, we’re just trying to get to know you guys – come on in and do the same.

Hopefully by then, my internet will be fecking working again.