Are you like me?

Sometimes it feels like I spend far more time reading about and discussing video games, on blogs and online forums, than I actually do playing them. I’m not sure of the actual breakdown, but it’s true I spend at least a couple hours every day scrolling through Google Reader and catching up on the latest threads at Quarter to Three and Beyond 3D. But I don’t play games every day.

It’s a strange property of the internet. Gaming isn’t alone in this. I keep tabs on my favorite music, movies and television shows through my collection of RSS feeds and favored online communities. But I think the ratio is probably most lopsided when it comes to games. It probably doesn’t hurt that I tend to listen to music or watch DVDs while I’m online. That kind of multitasking is harder to do with an interactive experience.

So just what the hell am I really doing? I’ve had to ask myself whether I like games more in theory than in actuality.  But that’s not really true, at least in my case. When I can tear myself away from the crack-pipe that is the interwebs. That constant desire to keep on top of the day’s happenings is really hard to overcome at times.

The proliferation of news feeds has allowed me to be a lot more efficient than I use to be. I can’t believe I actually use to go and visit every single site individually to check for updates, one at a time in something of a routine that built up over the years like an animal. But it has also changed my perception about what passes for news reporting among the enthusiast press.

If you’re like me you’ve probably subscribed to the main feeds from all the big gaming blogs, Kotaku, Joystiq, IGN, plus some hardware sites like Ars Technica, HardOCP, the Tech Report, plus a bunch of smaller of more focused sites, all of which cover gaming to some degree. When you put the stories from all these sites next to each other in a RSS aggregator it becomes rather clear what an echo chamber the gaming blogs really are. They all spend most of the day reposting the same stories over and over again, accompanied by the same puerile snark that passes for “analysis” or “commentary” but is really just there to maintain the fiction that these “writers” aren’t doing work better suited to a bot.

So don’t mistake my intentions. This blog isn’t really an attempt to horn in on the circle jerk. I find some of the crap I read on a daily basis deeply amusing, and other stories are simply outrageous. In either case this failure of journalism deserves some kind of response. So I will use this blog to mock those who’ve earned it, lambaste break downs in basic due diligence and at times correct rampant misconceptions that too often seem to spread like wild-fire.

So, that’s the idea, anyway. The ambition is for Gamer Blahhhg to be to Kotaku and Joystiq and their ilk what the Daily Show is to Fox News. I can’t tell you how successful we’ll be at that, nor exactly what form the satire will take. But I’m filled hate, and that’s a good start.