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Submitted by YOUR NEW REALITY

Being paid to review video games would, for most guys under 40, be a dream job. But what’s it actually like to be a professional video game reviewer?

According to Charles Brooker, it was a pretty sweet gig. Until he told people what he did for a living :

As jobs go, it was a curate’s egg. On the one hand, I could legitimately sit around playing games until three in the morning without feeling guilty - even if I wasn’t specifically reviewing whatever I was currently playing, it all provided useful background knowledge. It never felt like work.

But on the other hand, whenever I told people what I did, they pulled pained, sympathetic expressions and automatically began treating me like some kind of adult baby, as though I’d suddenly started wheeling myself around the room on an undersized tricycle, gurgling and suckling on a dummy. Because games are for kids, right? So I was essentially a grown man reviewing Mr Men books, yeah?

And when I wasn’t viewed as a child, I was viewed as a nerd. How sad my little interests were. How dorky. It was bad enough enjoying the damn things but, being a games journalist, I took things one stage further by developing some understanding of how they were actually constructed. I might look at a new release and be impressed by the polygon count or the draw distance. Apparently this made me a tedious loser, because society decrees anyone who knows anything whatsoever about computers to be a boring idiot, while those possessing a similar level of nerd-knowledge of football or cinema or food are well-informed and sophisticated and sexually attractive and cool.

Exactly. Brooker’s thoughts on Grand Theft Auto IV are worth a read.

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