JD (cont'd.): I was a music writer. I started out in the late '80s as a pop music writer with a minor specialty in Brazilian popular music, and I just got interested in the internet as a cultural medium. I was already interested in popular music as a democratic form, and the internet seemed more so. I was already in that realm and I just paid attention. So I went in to LambdaMOO and I hung out there.
I wasn't necessarily chasing a story. It was really a matter of one day at the staff room at The Village Voice talking about this thing I had seen a night earlier at LambdaMOO ... the editor said, "You should probably do a story about that."
So that kind of space, though I've tried to get away from it, has been my bread and butter.
Evan's right. Anyone with any brian in their head would not try to be a freelancer for any longer than it takes to get a staff position. But if the brains in your head keep you heading in directions that no one publication can really accommodate, then you'd better stay a freelancer. That's what I've done, and it's allowed me to be focused on not just the online gaming world, but a very peculiar niche of that and still pay the rent.
RP: Because it's a written format, because there's that written component to the community, people get sidetracked or star struck and think that if they can write in a forum, they can write for a website or a magazine. But the key element is not being able to put two words together, it's knowing what's interesting about the thing, right?
EVZ: I would say everyone can be a writer, but not everyone can get published. And being a journalist, that getting published part is helpful.
JD: It's important that you can frame these things in a way that a non-Halo audience can relate to.
RP: N'Gai, what's your story?
N'Gai Croal: The really interesting version is that the editor of Newsweek was a Stanford alumnus and I went to Stanford, and I wrote a column there that was critical of a Newsweek cover story on gangsta rap. And he called me and asked me what I didn't like about it, and I explained it to him and he offered me an internship. But I actually got an job offer for the Washington Post, so I took the job, but Newsweek sort of kept track of me, and six months later I interviewed, and that's how I ended up at Newsweek writing about technology.
How I got into writing about games was back in '99. I was sort of curious about the PlayStation era ... I was just curious as to how games had evolved since I'd been playing them in '94. I came out studying film in college and I was saying, "Have games hit the Citizen Kane phase?"
I got Newsweek to sign off on a two and a half week tour of the game industry. So I started with Bungie in Chicago, then I went to Dallas and met with GOD and id and Ion. Then to California where I met with Sony and Sega ... and then I went to Redmond and met with Microsoft and Nintendo. And I came back and my head was spinning, and I said to my editors, "I think I've seen the future and we need to be covering this."
RP: How do you resist ... when you go to those developer houses ... how do you resist that urge to walk into Bungie and look around and see the money being thrown around and how much fun they're having and say, "Screw this journalism crap, that's what I want to do"?
