Ode to the Games Journal

As some of you may have heard by now, The Games Journal has decided to throw in the towel. A sad day.

If you look at some of the later issues, a great number of the articles were submitted by Greg, himself. For the October issue, there was only a single submission: Ethics in Gaming 5.0 by yours truly. Greg wrote to me two weeks ago and told me that he wouldn't be able to publish the journal with only one submission and that he was throwing in the towel.

I suspect the lack of submissions to TGJ is due to the great number of blogs and other private web sites. It used to be easier to send an article to someone else to publish rather than go through the trouble of doing it yourself. This is no longer true.

Still, there is something to be said for having a collection of articles in one place all having been checked by an editor for length and quality. Self-publishing simply means that other people have to wade through everything to find the good stuff; and some of that good stuff could be better with a bit of editing.

Alfred's "best of the blogosphere" posts, along with all of those other blogs that point out good material on the net, such as Techdirt, are doing the "collecting job" that a journal should do. The difference is that, unlike a monthly journal, a blog journal (or "blournal") "publishes" as necessary instead of once a month with a certain number of articles. The other difference is that a blournal doesn't edit the articles it links to.

TGJ, like the Game Cabinet, published hundreds of useful and excellent articles in its time. Among my favorites:

Two summaries of the games industry:
To Boldly Go
A Brief History of Gaming

The tactical art of trading in games, first in a series of articles on game strategy:
Trading

The fine art of teaching games:
Teaching Rules

A look at game systems, first in a series:
Game Systems

Hosting a Games Day, which I refered to before starting my own:
Games Day

Groundrules for gaming in a game group:
Groundrules

Misadventures in Gaming, just one of a long series, the rest of which used to be on the Terminal City Gamers site (are they still on line somewhere?):
Misadventures in Gaming

The story arc in a game, first in a series of game design elements:
Story Arc

Game Design by Wolfgang Kramer:
What Makes a Game

A good overview on dice:
Dice Fest

A survey of board types:
Boards

How games and computers could interact:
Bits and Pieces

You'll note how many of these are precient to the topics we write about here on Gone Gaming. I left out all of the reviews, puzzles, letters, and so on.

So long TGJ.

Greg: what are you going to do next?

Everyone else: on we go.