By Todd Russell
Some (many?) of you reading may remember when reading game magazines was exciting. Not as exciting as playing the games these rags talked about, but still, they’d showed off games coming soon, games coming not too soon and games that were already available to play.
They even used to review games in a way that wasn’t like they were completely in the tank for companies. I mean reviews that were, well, honest.
I’m talking some great videogame magazines like Electronic Gaming Monthly and GamePro.
Fast forward to the internet that has brought more good than bad, but it’s put the hurt on print. Magazines, newspapers, unless they are online, they are not what they used to be. In fact, EGM mentioned above tried to go online, but it failed.
And then there’s video, oh my, with YouTube, Tiktok, Twitch and so on, well, doesn’t leave as much time for reading.
Speed is part of the problem, because the perception that watching something will be less time consuming, when the opposite is true.
How fast do you read?
Everything You Need to Know About Average Reading Speed (swiftread.com) – a good article on the subject of reading.
Being a writer, of course words are important to me, as is reading. I like watching videos, but not more than reading. In a recent post where I commented in detail about watching a video, the YouTuber replied that he would “never read all that” and it made me laugh. Not that I was offended, no, but that someone would expect us to watch several minutes of video but not read a response which actually takes most adults less time to read than watch his entire video (laced with ads, cough).
There is a problem we have in society with reading. People don’t read like they used to. Am not preaching read, read, read, because obviously I’m biased, but I’m saddened by a world where we stop reading. This website requires reading or you’re simply not going to enjoy it very much. It’s built especially for gamers that enjoy reading.
If you’re a gamer that doesn’t enjoy reading, you probably won’t like this website as much. Pity, it’s built for gamer readers, with you in mind. It’s the kind of gaming website I’d want to read. It doesn’t have any ads, you don’t need a pop-up blocker, yadda, yadda,. This article isn’t an advertisement for this site, it’s more about how much we lose in society when we completely focus on getting information and entertainment passively watching videos — many of which are saturated with ad breaks or live reads — over reading.
I’m not down on videos or streaming, heck I’m closing in on 2,000 hours streaming on Twitch (follow PlayGamesMoredotcom) over the last three years. So, yeah, I think watching videos is worthwhile. There are gaming-related happenings that don’t translate as well to text as in video, will fully acknowledge that. I like watching movies and entertaining gamer streams.
I’ve seen search engines become less valuable answering queries by giving top results to videos over text articles. In most cases, I don’t want to watch a how-to video for something simple versus text instruction, but search engines will serve video how-tos to me over text results.
When writing articles here, there is no target word goal, but most articles are under 1,000 words. If you average around 200 words a minute, that means we’re asking for a few minutes of your time or less every day to read what’s new here. Hopefully, while you’re enjoying your morning tea, coffee or whatever desired beverage, you can enjoy whatever is newly published.
I get if you’d rather play games more, which is what we’re truly about, so that’s another reason why we typically update only once per day, but there are in between times when playing games that it’s nice to read about games, gaming and the like. There have been days we publish more than once but that’s the exception.
Do you spend more time watching videos about gaming than reading about them? Let us know in the comments. There isn’t any wrong or right here, just curious if the trend continues to make reading even less popular?