Jason Preston
Writing

Where are the video game blogs?

Jason Preston · 5 min read ·

When I launched Flicker Gaming a few years ago, one of the things I wanted to do beforehand was find out who mattered in video game blogging. It makes perfect sense to know the turf before you start playing ball on it, which is why doing business blog strategy is one of the services we offer at Parnassus Group. Part of that is making sure that the client understands the blogging niche they are trying to enter.

Roughly two years later, there still isn’t a very good place to figure out who is in what community. I’ve always thought that this is a glaring omission in the blogosphere. Blogs are such social vehicles, and if you blog in a certain space for long enough, you do find community, but it’s all very nebulous.

So, after blogging about video games for a couple of years, I’m putting together a list that should be a rough guide to the video game blogging community, at least as I see it. This list will be incomplete. I will forget people, yes, but there are also communities within communities, and undoubtedly there are bloggers I haven’t heard of.

If that’s you, and you want on this list, shoot me an e-mail. I’ll check out your blog.

Video game blogs come in two basic categories: video game news blogs, and personal blogs where video games are covered. Together we all make a kind of self-supplying editorial community. (As a side note, the news blogs are usually written by several people, and the personal blogs are usually written by one. But not always).

As much as I like to play favorites, these lists are ordered by PageRank, and failing that, alphabetically. That means that the blogs Google likes best are on top of the list.

Video Game News Blogs

  • Destructoid - I met Niero while rumbling through the world of taking boring news stories and making them clever. Destructoid has always been able to find some of the juiciest tidbits, and I’m sure they will be happy to know their PR is equal to that of Kotaku and Joystiq.

  • Kotaku - In every sphere there are behemoths. In video games, Kotaku is one of them. One of the Gawker Media blogs, it gets an instant leg up from that affiliate. It does, however, kick some serious booty in its own right.

  • Joystiq - The other behemoth, Joystiq, covers roughly the same beat as Kotaku, but does it with a slightly different style. Check ‘em both out, and see which one you like better.

  • Playfeed - this is the games part of GearLive media, another blogging collective like Weblogs, Inc. and Gawker. GearLive is run by my buddy Andru Edwards, who is a phenomenally good guy. You should give this blog a look.

  • 4 Color Rebellion - This news blog has a good indie tint to it, so if that’s the scene you’re after give it a shot. Everybody likes a site that cares more about Smash Brothers than Halo 3 (yeah, yeah, I just dated this post).

  • Aeropause - A little lower profile spot for collecting your gaming gossip. I know I said I wouldn’t play favorites, but I like this one for some reason.

  • British Gaming Blog - There aren’t a whole ton of bells and whistles on this one, but do check it out for massive numbers of very pretty screenshots.

OK, that list goes on, clearly. But those are blogs whose business it is to be discovered by readers. If you can’t find them on your own, they are failing at what they do. What you’re really interested in are the individual blogs, where “real people” blog about their impressions and thoughts and favorite football teams. Well here’s that list:

Personal Video Game Blogs

There are way too many of these for me to write a little note about each one, mostly because all of those notes would be roughly the same. You’ll just have to make do with: these are all awesome people, writing about games.

  • Major Nelson - OK, Nelson gets a note just because he’s in a weird place. He’s the director of programming for Xbox Live at Microsoft, and he spans several groups of game bloggers simply because he’s so damn important to the industry.

  • Acid for Blood

  • AFK Gamer - as Troy correctly pointed out, this one definitely deserves to be on the list. Largely MMO stuff.

  • The Buttonmasher - Tony is, in my book, the original gameblogging badass. He started the Carnival of Gamers, which was my real introduction into the community, and maintains a thoroughly entertaining blog.

  • Cathode Tan

  • Curmudgeon Gamer

  • Grumpy Gamer

  • Tea Leaves - Another note. This blog is a bit more “thoughtful” than some of the others. I really like it.

  • Man Bytes Blog - Corvus is undoubtedly one of the more intelligent gamers out there, and MBB runs the gamut from incomprehensibly deep design theory to the ever-interesting Blogs of the Round Table.

  • Kill Ten Rats - Expect a lot of MMO talk. I have always loved the name.

  • The Game Chair - Used to be a reviews blog run by my buddy Seth. He closed shop and converted it to a personal blog, but hasn’t posted much. Here’s hoping he starts doing it regularly.

  • Flash of Steel

  • G-pinions

  • JaySlacks - Highly opinionated and highly entertaining.

  • Hawty McBloggy - I have no idea why bs angel’s PageRank is zero, but this is no indication of the quality of her blog. It is teh awesome.

  • Jason-Preston.com - Oh, and me of course.

Outside categorization

  • Gamers With Jobs - I had basically no idea how to categorize this place, but I would have trouble compiling the “video game blogosphere” and leaving GWJ out of the picture. So here it is.

You can also find tons of good gaming blogs by simply cruising the entries to the currently-defunct (but not entirely dead) Carnival of Gamers, hosted by The Buttonmasher.

And of course, there’s the wide (and exploding) world of video game podcasts, which I haven’t even touched on here. Perhaps another time.