Guide to game journalism

PDF of a guide to game journalism.

Contents list:

• Part I Introduction to journalism
  • 1 Primary Sources
  • 2 Secondary sources.
  • 3 Specialist skills and expensive tools/data
  • 4 Veracity of sources
    • 4.1 Correlation vs causation
    • 4.2 Wire services and story verification
• Part II Generating a list of things to watch
  • 5 Direct sources
    • 5.1 More narrow interests
  • 6 Indirect sources
    • 6.1 Intellectual property
    • 6.2 Legal stuff (finding it, reading it, knowing what to look for)
    • 6.3 Game rating, classification and censorship boards.
    • 6.4 Game translators, game guides, game testers and related concepts
    • 6.5 Electrical standards testing
    • 6.6 Leaks and after action reports from game developers, publishers and related parties
  • 7 User comments, comments from notable figures, meta analysis and in game events
    • 7.1 On the nature of comments
    • 7.2 Meta review ranking sites
    • 7.3 Notable events within games
• Part III Business stuff
  • 8 Stock markets
    • Going long
    • Shorting and short selling
    • 8.1 Popular stocks and basic ideas of stocks
  • 9 Game company income streams
  • 10 Earnings, financial statements and investor reports
    • Investor relations. Investor reports, earnings predictions and matching thereof.
    • 10.1 Profit, income, expenses, expenditures, and loss
    • 10.2 Credit ratings
    • 10.3 Investor calls
    • 10.4 Investor removal of funds/investors pulling funds
  • 11 Bankruptcy
  • 12 Subsidiaries
  • 13 Mergers and buyouts
  • 14 Further accountancy and business lookup
  • 15 Hollywood accounting and the construction of the game industry
    • 15.1 Game industry makeup
  • 16 Lobbyists, industry groups, unions and you
  • 17 Game sales and sales windows
    • 17.1 What should a game cost?
    • 17.2 Game of the year and compilation editions
    • 17.3 Amazon and gamestop listings and the nature of placeholders
    • 17.4 PC download market, also console online premium services.
    • Consoles
    • 17.5 Popular physical disc/hardware retailers (online, brick and mortar?)?
    • Main bricks and mortar retailers, and some notable regional online, for the various countries.
  • 18 Consumer and morality advocacy/activism groups
• Part IV General interest section
  • 19 Game information databases
  • 20 Game conferences and you
    • 20.1 Notable game industry conferences
    • 20.2 Smaller conferences
    • 20.3 Hacker conferences
    • 20.4 Game jams and Tech demos
    • 20.5 Trailers and stage demos
    • 20.6 Awards and awards shows in general
  • 21 Science journals
  • 22 Competition/“esports”, challenge runs and speedrunning
    • 22.1 Competitive gaming and esports.
  • 23 Gambling
  • 24 Data analysis
    • 1) Unintended uses of a game, website, API or similar.
    • 2) Game playing
    • 3) ROM hacking analysis of files
    • 24.1 Historical analysis
  • 25 Test groups, focus groups and surveys
    • 25.1 Surveys
    • 25.2 Focus groups
    • 25.3 Test groups
  • 26 Review codes, embargoes, and riders
  • 27 Game theory and general design of games
  • 28 Market segments and game genres
• Part V Useful tools and analysis methods
  • 29 How to use a search engine
  • 30 Spreadsheet absolute basics
  • 31 Advanced text manipulation
    • 31.1 Column mode in notepad++
    • 31.2 Regular expressions
    • 31.3 Using grep, awk and sed
  • 32 Archive.org’s wayback machine and caching services
  • 33 Website analytics and web metrics
    • Google trends
  • 34 News alerts
  • 35 Web robots, crawlers and spiders
  • 36 Metadata
  • 37 Google books
  • 38 Google groups (usenet text search)
  • 39 New websites/domains

by FAST6191.