The raison d'etre

Why does The Qun exist?

It’s a fair question to ask: Why does this substack exist? After all, why not just ship out game reviews and features to some publication as a freelancer? Or better yet, join a publication.

The fact is I’ve been down those paths before and I’ve seen how the story ends. In both cases, editorial policy around gaming tends to be rather flaky. It all starts off with a great deal of excitement, then there’s hemming and hawing, mixed signals and finally, shutdown.

Along the way, you also get to hear such lines as:

“keep articles down to 500 words”
“instead of an article, make it a webstory”
“can you do it as a listicle instead?”
“stick to the big games only”
“let’s cap it at one article per month”
“we don’t really have a gaming section”

The list goes on, but my memory sadly doesn’t, so that’s your lot, I’m afraid. But as always, I digress. So to once again attempt to answer the original question and not turn this into a platform from which to grind several axes: The purpose of this substack is to put out my thoughts, views, analyses and postulations in a manner unencumbered by anyone else’s editorial policies but my own.

What that means is that I will be able to give gems like Sovereign Syndicate and The Invincible the same amount of love and attention as a Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth or Rise of the Ronin. It also means I will be able to serve up the same amount of ire to those decrying diversity as “woke” or “social justice groupthink” as those who shoehorn tokenism into games at the expense of coherent narrative.

It also means that I can strictly adhere to my own styleguide, meaning titles (of films, books, games, publications etc) and my own soliloquies are italicised, the medium of communication is British English, and m-dashes and hyphens are not interchangeable.

And finally, perhaps also most importantly, what it means is that I can present my aforementioned thoughts, views, analyses and postulations to you in a clean format without any “click to read more” buttons, poorly formatted embeds and ads blocking up half the screen.

For now, this will be a weekly (I hope) despatch in text form. Maybe some day I’ll expand to podcasts or videos, but that day is not this day. Nor is it any other day in the near future.

And without further ado, thank you and I’m delighted to have you along for the ride.

PS: This week, among the games I’m playing (and plan to write about) is Rise of the Ronin. Check out the trailer below: