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Introducing The Maw, your weekly RPS news liveblogAll the reporting that’s fit to devour
All the reporting that’s fit to devour
Image credit:Internet Archive Book Images
Image credit:Internet Archive Book Images
But there are a valiant few who stand against the beast and seek to misdirect its voracity, an unloved yet unstinting army of metamedia sorcerers you call Videogame News Writers. Each Monday, we fearful disciples of News gather with our adamantine shovels, proton accelerators and enchanted mirrors and ply the Maw withStarfieldupdates and Call of Duty roadmaps and indie gaming curios, till at long last, on Saturday, the Maw fades back into the underworld, temporarily placated.
What you blissfully unaware regular people call “slow news days” are, to us, periods of creeping panic akin to watching a nuclear reactor bubble over - times of frenzied barrel-scraping as the Maw thrashes about in discontent, obliged to subsist on meagre morsels such as, I don’t know, a report about a rumour about a teaser for the announcement of a trailer for a GTA 6 release date, for instance. What you call “clickbait headlines” are an aromatic but fast-burning artificial fuel we have devised to help us through these catastrophic lulls.
We are always experimenting with different ways to appease the Maw, trying to keep one step ahead - for the entity’s form is always shifting, and its tastes are as fickle as the ocean swell. I have the pleasure of introducing one such experiment today, a new method of experiencing news which, in a show of desperate perversity, we have named for the creature it is designed to combat. But I recognise that the mysteries of the Videogame News Writer’s trade can seem impenetrable to non-initiates. So let me try to frame all this in everyday terms.
(Actual announcement post follows)
The Mawis a weekly series of liveblogs for PC gaming news. It’ll run from Monday to Friday, and will include quick summaries and links for all the news we write on RPS, and more importantly, all the stuff wemightwrite up. You can follow it throughout the week, or you can jump in on Friday and treat it like a curated digest. Or, you can just read our regular news articles as usual.
Its digest function aside, I’m hoping the Maw will be a sort of RPS-brand social media hub, blissfully free of algorithmic interjections, and channelling a little of that old-timey web 2.0 forum energy. That’s right, folks - we’re reinventing Twitter on here, and I didn’t even have to pay $44 billion for the privilege.
(Actual announcement post ends)
Thus the sanitised description of the Maw we will distribute to lesser news-gathering organisations and corporate clients in the days and weeks ahead. Please appreciate that I am painting a cosy picture of the horrors of Videogame News Writing - after all, I do not wish to disturb you unduly and spark a mass panic. It’s harrowing to think of the ravenous and unforgiving Powers that haunt the shadows of the Known.
But do not despair. We News Writers have honed our craft for generations, ever since the Brigante shamans prophesied the coming of the first Videogame in the darkness of the fifth century BC, when the News mostly consisted of stuff like “Indie viral sensation Sorghum tops Highest Crop Yield charts for second winter running”. Our wards are thick, our boilers and arsenals well-stocked, our watch unsleeping. Only once in my lifetime has the Maw broken through our line and run amok, during the terrible slow summer of 2012 when all anyone could find to write about was bloody Zumba Fitness.
I hold out frail hope that, on some great day of bounty, we might actually channel enough in the way of DLC drops, update changelogs and/or posts about pettable videogame dogs to satisfy the Maw for good, or even burst it like a balloon. But I have tarried too long. Today is Monday, and close at hand I hear the screech of punctured spacetime and the thunder of cyclopean intestines. To arms, colleagues!FEED THE MAW.
