This month, chums, I’m going to answer my own question.

I’m just a little vagabond!

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The question I’m going to ask, and then answer, is one that’s bothered me for quite a while now, and it’s this:

"Why do games journalists never talk to their readers?"

Because it’s weird. After all, there’s no better way to find out what your readers love, hate and want than talking to them directly, and it’s never been easier to do that than it is nowadays, what with the Internet and everything. And yet it almost never happens. Why that be so, daddy?

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At first, there are a few seemingly obvious explanations.

You might, for example, think that magazine staff were simply too busy to waste their time on newsgroups and web forums. But that’s not it – while staff are worked harder now than they ever were when I was a full-time mag writer, the nature of magazine publishing means that there are always slack periods when hacks could easily spend a bit of time communicating with their readers.

I mean, how long does it take?

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Secondly, you might think that magazine staff thought themselves above such lowly pursuits as talking to ordinary gamers about games.

But that’s not it either – apart from a few hideous career types, most journos are still diehard game fans over and above everything else, and there’s nothing they like better than talking about them to pretty much anyone who’ll listen. (Especially if it gives them a chance to milk their "celebrity" status in front of a bunch of fanboys.)

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Or finally, you might possibly feel that so many of today’s magazine staffers do such an appallingly shoddy job that they’re simply too embarrassed to accept responsibility for their cowardly and semi-literate outpourings in front of the people who actually pay their wages.

But frankly, you’re being way too cynical there. Get out in the sun more.

Nope, the reason gaming writers don’t talk to you, their public, more often is this: What happens when they do.

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Because if you’ve been unlucky enough to visit the newsgroup set up to discuss Digi-related topics recently, you’ll probably have recoiled in horror at the waves of violent hatred directed at the Digi team by a bunch of tedious, obnoxious idiots who hijacked the group in order to flood it with the kind of misanthropic drivel that you’d get if you fed Eminem b-sides into Babelfish and translated them from English to Swedish to Serbo-Croat and back again.

Which is, in many ways, really a bit of a shame.

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Because writers SHOULD be held to account more often for the things they say, and it IS good when gamers can get reliable information direct from people who know without having to wait a month and buy a magazine, or rely on dodgy website rumour-mongering.