MEN’S MAGAZINES

LOADED

Two full pages, the same as last year, and written in a less deranged style this time round. All reviews, except for a small retro section. Most of the references in the actual mag still denote gaming as a nerd pursuit, though.

FRONT

Your correspondent’s own irregular contributions are but a part of the space devoted to games in the crime-fixated Loaded For Juniors publication. Front’s games coverage has in fact just been reduced, but still occupies a whopping four pages of news, reviews and features, making it easily the biggest games coverage anywhere in the mainstream press.

FHM

A page, split between a PS2 feature and three reviews.

ESQUIRE

A quarter page of reviews in the "Shortlist" section, and very occasional other short pieces.

MAXIM

Three-quarters of a page (50% up on last year), into which eight reviews are squeezed.

ARENA

A single, tiny piece on the Berlin Computer Games Museum, but nothing else. Last year’s excellent regular full-page reviews section has disappeared. (As, in fact, have most of the bits of Arena you can understand without actually being Melvyn Bragg). Naturally, Eidos have chosen Arena in which to run their full-page ad for Tomb Raider 4.

GQ

No reviews, and no feature content. So that’ll be another full-page Eidos ad (Thief 2 this time), then.

LATER

Nothing at all. Full-page Eidos ad? The Nomad Soul.

CONCLUSION

No surprises here – as the age of the readership goes up, space devoted to games declines faster than a stockbroker’s sperm count. Bloke mags are (unsurprisingly) the most consistent sources of mainstream games coverage, but there are definite signs of a decrease even here, which is a little worrying.

GENERAL LIFESTYLE MAGS

SKY

Two pages again (although to be fair, one of them is almost entirely occupied by a Rayman 2 pic), mostly reviews but with some nice little columnettes too. The main mag also has a nice-looking one-page PS2 feature, but it comes just five pages after one on how you should never have a relationship with a gamesplayer, as they’ll be fat, greasy, smelly, beardy and obsessed with busty game heroines.

THE FACE

After a lull towards the end of last year when games coverage vanished altogether from the mag, The Face’s monthly full-page round-up has made a welcome return, though the reviews have got a lot shorter. Sadly, the fairly frequent forays into the main mag for games-based features don’t seem to have made a similar comeback.

EMPIRE

A half-page with two reviews, better informed than before, though including Army Men: Air Attack getting a "Must Play" logo but only a three-star score. More game ads than any other mag I saw.

SELECT

Games are a victim of the magazine’s recent redesign, with just a single Playstation review surviving.

TOUCH

A full page of reviews by Bits’ Emily Newton-Dunn, comparing favourably with the space devoted to other cultures.

CONCLUSION

General lifestyle mags are slowly beginning to treat games as a more acceptable form of culture, but gamers themselves are still seen as undesirable spods, a paradox that’s showing no signs of going away any time soon.

WOMEN’S/GIRLS’/TEEN MAGAZINES

Over recent years, industry pundits have maintained that the gaming demographic is becoming increasingly female, though basing these claims on almost totally anecdotal evidence. Now, it’s not particularly surprising that this supposed influx doesn’t show up in the readership figures of specialist games mags, which remain around 97% male – specialist magazines are, by definition, only bought by readers with a pretty dedicated interest in the subject. But if more girls are playing videogames on a casual basis, then you’d expect to see some evidence in the shape of passing coverage in magazines aimed predominantly at the female market. With this in mind, I seized on the excuse to trawl WH Smith’s lower shelves and finely scan the contents for hair tips, this season’s nail colours, gossip on Billie’s love life and, while I was there, videogames news. The results, across all age ranges, were pretty conclusive. (Since most of you probably won’t be terribly familiar with these titles, the estimated target age is in brackets.)

SMASH HITS (10-14)

Nothing.

TV STARS (10-14)

Nothing. And a scandalous £2.50 for 32 pages, too. Who do they think they are, Hugh Gollner or something?

TOP OF THE POPS (10-14)

Nothing.

LIVE & KICKING (10-14)

Nothing.

BLISS (11-15)

Nothing.

SUGAR (13-17)

A single 30-word review (of a PC strategy game, of all things), and a couple of game-related competition prizes.

J-17 (11-15, oddly)

A monthly half-page, containing four 30-word reviews of PC and console games. Although the issue I saw also included a feature on how to "Make your life a geek-free zone"

19 (16-21)

Nothing. But, funnily enough, did include a feature entitled "Spod-U-Like – Net nerds get sexy"

MORE! (16-21)

Nothing.

MINX (16-21)

Nothing.

PS (18-25)

Despite the promising title, nothing.

COSMOPOLITAN (18-35)

Nothing.

CONCLUSION

Girls, in fact, don’t play or care in the slightest about videogames after all. It’s official.

NEWSPAPERS

Disclaimer: No living being on Earth has enough spare time to read every major UK newspaper every day for a whole week. (It takes me until Tuesday afternoon to finish the Sundays, and I do nothing all day.) So if I’ve missed some microscopic tabloid games section hidden in amongst the gardening classifieds somewhere, don’t shoot me, okay? (Note: Unless an actual game was significantly mentioned, Pokemon coverage didn’t count.)

THE SUN

Nothing.

THE MIRROR

A very small corner of the Saturday kids pages.

TIMES

Still as schizophrenic as last year, with a single review (Rayman 2 on DC) in the Saturday kids supplement Meg@, and another couple (Pokemon Stadium and WWF Smackdown on N64) in the very adult "Weekend" section of the main paper. So apparently Rayman is for kids, and Pokemon and WWF are for grown-ups. I’m confused.

DAILY TELEGRAPH

The Thursday "Connected" section is still the No.1 source of videogames coverage in the national press, and little has changed in it over the past year. The only one of the papers to have anything which could be described as games-based feature content, and more, more detailed, reviews than anywhere else too.

THE GUARDIAN

Almost an entire page in the Thursday "Online" supplement, with news as well as reviews. (Also a slightly bizarre "Are WAP phones the new Spectrums?" piece.) The Guide magazine on Saturdays also has a page of reviews.

INDEPENDENT

A third of a page at the back of the Saturday "Information" magazine, containing two PC and two PS reviews.

NEWS OF THE WORLD

Nothing

THE PEOPLE

Nothing

MAIL ON SUNDAY

Nothing

SUNDAY TIMES

Nothing, not even in the "Funday Times" kids pull-out.

INDEPENDENT ON SUNDAY

Nothing

CONCLUSION

The Internet, once seen as gaming’s geeky cousin, is now the flavour of the month with the papers. Net coverage is everywhere, whether it be the business, finance, shopping, music or arts sections. And to a degree, it’s gaming that’s paid the penalty, reduced to second-fiddle status of confined to the "kids" ghettos. The Telegraph and Guardian still hold up their end admirably, but everywhere else games are yesterday’s news. The decrease in actual column inches is slight, but the shift of focus is unmistakeable.

RADIO

Oddly, radio (hardly the best medium for videogames coverage, you’d think) was for years the only source of nationally-broadcast gaming info. But as TV has finally began to produce some long-overdue programming, albeit in the middle of the night, radio has gratefully relieved itself of the burden. Radio 5 Live’s The Big Byte has been a casualty of that station’s switch to exclusively news- and sport-based output, and Radio 1’s Digital Update has sadly disappeared from the airwaves too, leaving – to the best of by research – no games content on any UK network radio shows.

TV

BITS (Channel 4)

Okay, now pay attention, because this gets messy. The new series of Channel 4’s games show started last month (yep, I must have missed that press release too), and is currently shown on Tuesdays, Sunday mornings and Sunday nights. The Sunday night show is a repeat of the Tuesday show, but the Sunday morning show, which isn’t repeated anywhere, is a completely different one, made by a different producer but with the same presenters and focussed on console games while the Tuesday/Sunday night programme concentrates on the PC. Except for later in the series, when according to the production company the two shows might - or might not - actually be sharing much of the same content. All of this is true until next week (12^th May), when the Tuesday (PC) show moves to Fridays, with the repeat remaining on Sunday nights. Confused? Thought so.

Is it worth picking your way through this hideous scheduling mess to actually see it, though? Well, on the evidence of the first few shows, not really. While the production quality has undoubtedly improved since last year’s series, the same can’t be said of the content. The scripts are still appalling – disjointed and robotic and unengaging, delivered to camera in a pseudo-conversational style that’s totally at odds with the unnatural and stilted print-review manner in which they’re written. It took your correspondent quite a while to realise why the delivery comes across so cold and flat, but it finally dawned that while the three presenters often appear onscreen together, they almost never actually speak to one another, and indeed barely acknowledge each other’s existence. Compared to the same company’s video review-show Vids, it makes for a sterile atmosphere that fails to hold the viewer’s attention, except during the down-the-cleavage shots that seem to be a lot more commonplace in this series. The PC show is also padded out with unwelcome and irrelevant coverage of Internet and gadget reviews (who the hell cares about PDAs on a games show, and even if you did, would you base a £300 purchasing decision on a 10-second analysis from some game reviewers?), all of which must test the team’s already stretched-thin resources to breaking point.

On the upside, Bits’ reviews are as uncompromising as ever (it had been suggested there might be a shift of focus away from bad games in the new series), but – especially at the 1am timeslot the programme still mostly goes out at - it’s increasingly difficult to stay awake long enough to see all of them. It’s clear that the new two-shows-a-week schedule is destroying the quality of the programme - Bits badly needs a return to the old format, and fast.

CYBERNET (ITV)

ITV’s only videogames coverage (unless you’re in one of the few regions still showing Movies, Games And Videos, that is) remains buried in the middle of the night, showing at around 3am in most of the areas that show it at all. Which is a terrible shame, as the programme has improved noticeably in the last year. The formula is almost unchanged – reviews, news and interviews, no onscreen presenters, maximum in-game footage – but there seems to have been a very welcome injection of editorial talent, with games receiving proper and fairly well-informed criticism, and some inventive and funny feature content showing up too (notably a great Black And White piece that made its Bits counterpart look very weak indeed). Somewhat to your correspondent’s surprise, currently the best videogames show on TV, making its scheduling even more of a crime.

CONCLUSION

Despite gaming’s obvious suitability for TV, and the hefty audience that would presumably be interested, it’s still seen as a minority on a par with Czechoslovakian tiddlywinks. (Note: Not a euphemism.) Things may change with the planned arrival in the autumn of BBC2’s prime-time-ish Bleeding Thumbs, but it won’t be a day too soon.

THE FINAL RECKONING

Too modern and dynamic to be bothered reading even the easily-digestible fun-size info-snippets above? Try these tasty microwaveable soundbites, then.

1. Overall, mainstream-media games coverage has decreased slightly over the last year. Which, with one major console having been released and another imminent, is a little surprising.

2. However much we’d all like to believe otherwise, gaming is still an almost exclusively male pursuit.

3. Despite the average gamer now supposedly being 23 or thereabouts, as far as the mainstream press is concerned he’s still around 15.

4. Slightly unexpectedly, the Internet is now seen as "sexier" than videogaming. This may or may not be related to observation 2.

5. Games themselves are still quite cool. Admit to playing them, though, and you’re a social leper. Go figure.

6. Eidos are spending anything up to £500,000 a year advertising to people who ostensibly have no interest in videogames whatsoever. Man, they must have a *ton* of money to spare.