Oh Brave New World, that has such Tweets in it!
By Gaff 2 Comments
A random twitter from Yoshinori Ono, producer of Street Fighter 4.Plz you tell it voice to CAPCOM USA !! ;D I wish make New DS!! RT @poeria: a yes would love a new darkstalker#ForAnewDarkstalkersGame
You know, it's weird when you think about it. Not too long ago, gamers relied on magazines for video game news. You scrutinize every screen shot, every quote from a developer, every word in a news story. Then came the web: 24 hours, 7 days a week, news at your finger tips! Magazines quickly started having trouble, sites like Kotaku, Joystiq quickly became the go-to sources for news stories.
And then: Twitter happened! Micro-blogging became a quick and easy way to refer to news stories, post thoughts, or, as dear mister Ono is doing above, connect with the other people. And damn it, he singlehandedly kept my interest in Street Fighter 4 up well after its release: him being absolutely adorably childlike in his enthusiasm doesn't help either.
Now here's a dilemma: with developers talking directly to their fan-base, teasing them, doing impromptu Q&A sessions, where does that leave game journalism?
A few days ago, Jeff Green linked this Mashable article (again, over Twitter), discussing the new role of journalism in this new, Web 2.0 age. Extremely short summary: basically, journalists are becoming editors, filtering noise and giving context to news stories as they pop up, and managing information flows, both from the industry side and their audience - sounds familiar, but I won't blow the crew's trumpet just yet! -. On the other hand, Twitter (coupled with the insane rise of podcasts) also provides game journalists an opportunity to be more prolific: for instance, I tend to go to someone like Jeremy Parish or Kat Bailey at 1Up for my RPG fix, someone like John Davison for interesting micro-games on the Apple App Store and yes, our own Giantbomb crew here for a variety of genres.
An interesting aside would be contrasting the rise of stuff like Metacritic ("standardizing" scores) versus this diversification at the journalism end, but that's perhaps something for another time.
Also, looking at the title, I so wish someone would make a service named Twatter.
Do you use Twitter, or do you hate how important it has become? Do you like how you can "stalk" someone, or do you feel a huge sense of TMI, information overload sometimes?