Silence And Space
On the parts of games where nothing happens
A journal about waiting is in a poor position to complain about a slow reply.
Silence And Space
On the parts of games where nothing happens
A journal about waiting is in a poor position to complain about a slow reply.
One address. It is read in batches, perhaps twice a week, by the person who writes the essays and does the timing, and it is answered at a pace that matches an irregular journal rather than a newsroom.
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The essays quote durations: how long a crossing takes, how many seconds of a scene contain no sound, how far a path runs before anything happens on it. All of those were timed by hand with a stopwatch, and hand timing has a margin that the measures page states openly. Even so, some figures will simply be wrong, and a reader who has re-timed one and found a real discrepancy should say so.
Include the version you played and, if the game offers them, any settings that alter movement speed or cutscene pacing. A crossing that takes four minutes on foot and ninety seconds on a mount is not a contradiction, and the essay should have said which it meant.
Several passages in this journal exist because a reader timed something nobody had thought to time. If you have sat with a stopwatch through a long walk, an empty corridor or a garden with nothing in it, the figures are welcome and interesting, and they are credited however you prefer or not at all.
Disagreement is the most common kind of letter and among the most welcome. A reader who thinks the waiting hall essay mistakes boredom for design is making an argument rather than reporting an error, and such letters change what gets written next without changing what has been written. Published judgements stay as published; that is what makes them judgements.
Requests for coverage, review copies, early access or embargo arrangements. The reason is structural rather than principled: this journal writes about games long after release, having bought them, and there is no version of a press arrangement that survives that. There is no list to join.
Discarded unread beyond the opening sentence: paid placements, revenue-share schemes, reciprocal linking arrangements, and consultancy offers concerning how this journal ranks in a search engine. None of that has any bearing on a publication with nothing to sell.
Corrections within a week. Everything else within a fortnight, sometimes longer, occasionally never — and a letter that goes unanswered has often had more effect on the next issue than one that got a prompt reply.
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