In every Bookmarks file a few duds must fall. Here's a couple of sites that I used to visit but now avoid, and why.
PVP Online. In the online comics world, this is one of the biggies. I visited regularly until I realized that it's not funny, and it never was. I like Scott Kurtz's style, but his writing is just incredibly average. The strip that did me in went something like this...
Panel 1. Guy: Boy, sure glad I made cookies!
Panel 2. Guy: Hey, who ate my cookies?
Panel 3. Guy: Fatty, did you eat my cookies?
Panel 4. Fatty: Mope. (Mouth gummed with cookies.)
Plus Kurtz is a complete schizo, liable to fly off the handle in one newspost and then start bawling about how lazy he is in the next.
Gameforms. Actually, I still do check Gameforms because they do have some nice articles... but I have vowed to never again read their letter column. See, they used to have a nice letter column, and for about two months I enjoyed it and contributed to it. Then that editor decided to leave and they pulled out all the stops searching for a replacement. The guy they chose, John Hummel, immediately annoyed me by declaring Wednesdays Haiku Day or some such bullshit. So an intelligent discourse on Modern Issues in Video Gaming was sent into the crapper.
I stuck around for a couple weeks after that, but it soon became apparant that Hummel is less interested in gaming and more directed towards turning himself into an Internet Celebrity. Every column started to begin with interminable monologues about his home life, his affection for tentacle porn, the girls he finds attractive that piss off his wife, whatever. The once mighty Gameforms locol now stands as one man's weblog, with a couple of viewer mails thrown in the middle.
I wonder if he's still doing Haiku Day.
Ludology.org. For a time I was this guy's biggest fan. He was writing about game theory, about scholarly approaches to talking about video games, that sort of thing. Then he spent far too long not posting much of anything, instead working on a second website that was supposed to be the next big thing in intelligent gaming: newsgaming. Although he spent lots of time creating the interesting idea that newsgaming is gaming done to current events, his site ended up presenting one single flash "game" where you bomb a Middle Eastern country. Sometimes your bombs kill terrorists, and sometimes they kill innocents... my christ, what an amazing statement, War Is Hell! I could go to any elementary school and see deeper topics covered on the painted-hand-as-turkey wall.
And when he came back, he stopped talking about games and instead started talking about talking about games. Now all the "news" is about upcoming speeches and conferences.
He's kicked off another site, this one purportedly dedicated to "games that go beyond entertainment. ... This includes new genres such as advergaming, newsgaming, political games, simulations and edutainment." I think our Ludologist has officially spread himself too thin.
