Foreword

From Styleguide

"Early in the millennium, the gamers were the real winners: The Playstation 2, Gamecube, and XBox provided countless hours of gaming goodness."

Ugh...that was pretty ugly, wasn't it? Besides its generic garbage of a message and two horrendous clichés, that opening sentence has style problems that a blind copyeditor wouldn’t tolerate. For the record, it's "PlayStation" (with an internally capitalized "S"), "GameCube" (again, with an internally capitalized letter), and "Xbox" (breaking the pattern with a lowercased "b").

Why does it matter? After all, we’re talking about videogames – kids’ stuff, right? Little Billy Pokégamer doesn’t care whether it’s GameCube, Gamecube, or Game Cube. He knows what it is, and isn’t that enough?

Except that it's not just Little Billy Pokégamer who’s reading about videogames. The average age of my magazine’s readers is over 21 years old. Heck, the average age of gamers in the U.S. is over 29 years old. And for videogame writing to be taken seriously by adults, it has to be written for adults. That doesn’t just mean correct grammar and spelling (though those are musts, obviously). It also means a level of consistency that shows writers aren’t just pulling industry terms out of their asses (or worse, Wikipedia).

That's why I was thrilled when I heard about a style guide designed to help game journalists everywhere. It's not as though I've been clamoring for one myself — my publishing company has its own style guide, which is enforced by a team of copy editors. But not every magazine, major website, fansite or blogger has access to such resources.

The thing is, for any one publication (including mine) to be treated with respect, all game writing must be held to the same high standards. In other words, who really gives a rat's behind if a few publications or websites are well-written if the general public thinks game journalism as a whole is meant for the 10-and-under crowd?

The kicker being this: Overall, game writing has a great deal of room to mature, and it starts with this style guide.

Now if only we can somehow get everyone to retire the phrase “gaming goodness” once and for all...

Dan "Shoe" Hsu

Editor-in-Chief

EGM: Electronic Gaming Monthly