So... I've been approached to write reviews

SuperflyTNT wrote: Well, I'd argue that there's plenty of guys who make a living at it. Tom Vasel is the most obvious, and you have to think that there's a shitload of money going his way. He does those paid previews for KS stuff, which is $2,000 minimum (I have a friend who does this and gave me pricing), and he owns Orlando Gaming Corporation LLC, the entity that runs Dice Tower Con. So, he took writing game reviews and made it into several businesses. Good on him, says I.

Huh? Pete, you LOVE going off the deep end. We never even came close to charging $2000, and besides the last paid preview is going up today. And I do NOT own Orlando Gaming Corporation. Seriously, do you vet anything you say?

tomvasel wrote:

SuperflyTNT wrote: Well, I'd argue that there's plenty of guys who make a living at it. Tom Vasel is the most obvious, and you have to think that there's a shitload of money going his way. He does those paid previews for KS stuff, which is $2,000 minimum (I have a friend who does this and gave me pricing), and he owns Orlando Gaming Corporation LLC, the entity that runs Dice Tower Con. So, he took writing game reviews and made it into several businesses. Good on him, says I.

Huh? Pete, you LOVE going off the deep end. We never even came close to charging $2000, and besides the last paid preview is going up today. And I do NOT own Orlando Gaming Corporation. Seriously, do you vet anything you say?

Fifty says no.

S.

tomvasel wrote: Huh? Pete, you LOVE going off the deep end. We never even came close to charging $2000, and besides the last paid preview is going up today. And I do NOT own Orlando Gaming Corporation. Seriously, do you vet anything you say?

Whatever, Tom. Enjoy your success. I made a mistake on the Orlando Gaming Con deal. I sincerely apologize. There's been several people who have either been asked to or have paid between $1500 and $2500 for a preview video, and I never ascribed that amount to you.

'Nuff said.

As to this whole "LOVE going off the deep end" thing, where am I doing that? I cut that shit out long ago. I mean, yeah, I was a big old dick for a while, but that was long ago. I've said so many KIND things about you and how you've managed to make your living doing something you love. What the fuck?

Remember the InD20 group, the Pixel Lincoln infomercial debacle? Larry and Tim BOTH said they stuck that guy for $2500.00 and I've had 2 other publishers be surprised that I wasn't charging people to do previews. So, that's where I got that number. I never ascribed it to you, again, and I'm sorry if there was confusion there.

You owe me a Grant, Sag.

Nothing to see here.

Ugh.

But it's not Friday!

This is even more evidence of why people should not get into board game reviews - other, big name reviewers get their knickers in a twist when you don't heap praise upon them and publicly ask how they can remain unbiased while collecting enough money to make a living AND employ other people.

Frohike, my advice is when/if you do start writing reviews, don't say shit about other reviewers good or bad. Public attacks are for politicians and you aren't trying to get elected. Just do your own thing and let them do theirs. People can read what they want. You'll avoid a lot of drama or alienating readers that way.

That statement may constitute a felony all on its own. You put the owners of this web site in a very bad position by posting it. I'd contact the police if you said it to me. Tom has a wife and kids.

Don't like this place much anymore.

Don't worry, Sag, I'm done here. This whole internet argument that stemmed from an innocuous and complimentary post about how people have made money by promoting board games is hilarious. I also am incredibly fucked off that some of you decided to take what I said out of context. It's easy to snip a line from a post and then repost it to change the context. Well, I deleted my original diatribe, so there you go. Peace is restored to the realm.

I do sincerely apologize for any inconvenience or hardship I may have caused anyone here, I including "Sagrilarus" and Tom Vasel. My intent wasn't that, which I thought was obvious.

EDIT:
I guess this also means that when I'm in Maryland for a trade show next month, I should probably not PM you to see if you want to get together for some Wings of War. Bummer...was looking forward to that.

I'll just leave this here.

www.brainygamer.com/the_brainy_gamer/201...ames-we-deserve.html

It's not 100% germane, but I like to go back and look at the general guidelines from time to time (the bullet list at the bottom).

Thought I'd update. It's obviously not a paid gig, but of course review copies will be involved. I don't really care about that as much as having a venue to submit written work. I was invited to provide some candidate titles for review and I volunteered a few titles from my own collection. I abstained from going for the easy ones like Nexus Ops or Earth Reborn and mostly went for middle-of-the-road, recent titles because I like a challenge and I know it's often difficult to write reviews for games that don't trigger the knee-jerk "must write about this immediately" response. So my first one was Castles of Mad King Ludwig. It actually got more interesting as I started to critique it, but I'm starting to realize that the flip side of a critique is to not become too self-indulgent and to know when to wrap it up, rather than extemporize about your own idiosyncratic ideas about game design. It's an interesting balance to which I'll need to acclimate since I'm more inclined toward academic writing.

Anyway, the managing editor is apparently swamped with his day job, so the gears have been moving very, very slowly. But the craft of hashing out a review in a couple of days felt really good.

I thought I'd update this thread in case anyone is curious about the trajectory this took. The venue ended up being pretty much what Pete was warning me about, though I'm not really that bitter about it. I feel like I got a brief education about how some of the system works, at least when it's driven by video game industry style publication models. It made me really appreciate what some of you folks have built for yourselves, either through this site's content, your blogs, your own relationships with designers/publishers, or your review gigs. You do good work.

In this particular gig, it became clear that I was in fact providing content for a mostly video game oriented site that really just wanted my words to build a review portfolio for more cred with board game publishers (leading to more review copies, and so on). I didn't get an overall sense of strong, edited work being written for a community of hobbyists.

In fact there was no real editing, per se, just a system of mostly ineffective peer review and someone designated to QA the metadata tags & push the publish button. The content was a stepping stone for review copies, most of which were meted out as pretty obvious left-overs based upon what the quartermaster wanted to review themselves (there was LOTS of kickstarter product in the queue). I didn't really care about this at first, since I don't care about review copies in general. If I'm sufficiently interested in a game, I just purchase it and unload it if it doesn't pass muster.

But I eventually hit a point of absurdity where I would be asked about what games I specifically would be interested in, would list a few that weren't on their radar, then after a month of radio silence, be asked to peer-review a piece written by the person who asked for my list. At that (rather bizarre) point, I felt strangely disconnected from what I was doing, like whatever I was writing or even requisitioning was really just feeding a tin pan alley content engine that was geared toward benefiting site presence and publisher relationships. It felt very abstract and pyramid schemey. The publication process was inordinately slow, making it difficult to self-promote in any kind of timely, relevant manner, which oddly clashed with the cult-of-the-new orientation of the site. Content expectations were very much geared toward a style of workman-like review that I just don't really care for, and perhaps most importantly, there was no sense of a community around this content.

That really, really got to me more than anything else, and more quickly than I expected; the sense that most of this was being written and broadcast into a vacuum as a quasi vanity project, quasi publisher promotional engine. It took the spirit out of my writing. Not just the meager content I ended up pushing through, but all of my writing.

So I've resigned.

I'm grateful for being offered that experience, since it gave me a more distinct idea of the type of writing I want to do and what sort of context I want for it. This definitely wasn't it.

What happened? I was asleep. Then I woke up and played some games. I miss anything?