Categorical Lies
Now, I'd like to list off the four categories of coverage that media outlets will pay you for: news, previews, reviews and features. You might recall that I got my start as a graphic design intern and subsequently secured a position as a designer, so I had to learn about these categories from other editors in my office and not from some pompous Xbox columnist, but that doesn't change the fact that there are four basic things that you'll be asked to write (with the fourth being kind of a catch-all category, at least for my purposes anyway). Let's take a look at each of these individually.
News: As you'd expect, news is precisely what it sounds like: news. Whenever something happens in the gaming world (like Toys R Us breaking the street date on BioShock today, meaning that they sold it before they were supposed to) that's news. Stuff happens everyday in the crazy video game industry, so there's always some kind of news to write up and those editors who focus on news are typically quite busy (though to be fair, most of the editors I know are incredibly busy all the time regardless of their specialty).
In order to write news articles, a sort of detachment must be observed. As the category most resembling true objective journalism, news requires that you not include any opinion in your story (which is why I'm not a particularly good news writer because I can't help slipping in flippant commentary). Typically, one of your many much-adored public relations contacts will send out a press release via email blast (one email aimed at a bunch of editors) and you essentially need to reword it so that you aren't plagiarizing. It sounds simple, but maintaining a decent stable of PR people is challenging and essential, especially when you exercise your ability to report on rumors and speculation.
Previews: This category can be broken down further into two parts, first-look previews and hands-on previews. First-looks involve simply seeing a game or maybe even just screenshots and getting a fact sheet to describe the game's basic functions. These are just a hair's breadth away from news in that you are mostly just looking at stuff remarkably similar to news press releases and then trying to find a way not to simply copy it. I hope I'm not bursting anyone's bubble here because, like news, there is a distinct art to writing a great first-look preview. You typically have very little to work with, yet you still have to find a way to make it exciting enough to read... which is really easy with a game like GTA 4 that everyone is curious about and will read anything anyone publishes, but decidedly more difficult for smaller titles (no, I'm not going to name names here) that nobody may know or care about at all.
On the other hand, hands-on previews involve you actually playing the game for at least fifteen minutes (though some of my fellow editors at rival publications may disagree saying that that's too much time, ha ha). One thing to note here is that these games are typically still in an unfinished state, so getting the game to run smoothly for fifteen minutes may be impossible. This is not indicative of the final product, however, so you have to give these "builds" the benefit of the doubt in most cases. That is why you will rarely see a preview (even a hands-on) that states a definitive opinion on whether or not a game will be good, though it may call out problem areas that need fixing before the game actually ships. For example, in my recent hands-on with Jericho, the copy of the game that I got would crash after each loading screen, but that has nothing to do with the release version of the game, to the point that you'll notice that I don't even mention it in the article. This can make things very difficult, but hey, you're the one that wanted to play video games for a living, remember?
