Time to get back in the swing of things with an article regrettably cited by Kotaku and GameSetWatch entitled, “Does Portal’s Success Presage Game Industry Shift?” In this bizarre piece, a writer on the game industry admits he has no sales data, cites no budget information, then suddenly makes the claim that Portal's “profit margin is easily better than AAA hardcore titles that require tens of millions to develop...” Huh?

I will understand if the reader doesn’t believe me when I say that I originally started this site to be serious. But you must trust your correspondent when he explains that sometimes an author feels he just hasn’t got any choice. And so I hope you will indulge me while I talk a little bit about The Escapist and its very odd pull-quotes.

The whole point of pull-quotes is to draw a hypothetical reader – imagine him impatiently flipping through the pages of a magazine while waiting for the dentist or for his plane to reach cruising altitude – into actually reading an article by highlighting a key point, an interesting fact or simply an intriguing turn of phrase. The point is not to stump the reader, nor is it to make him not interested in the article. Right?

One thing that struck me about this year’s Game Developers Conference was how so many people seemed to be sitting around nodding their heads at each other about how terrible it is that games do not feature enough meaning. Everyone agrees, or seems to agree, that video games just Don’t Mean Enough right now, and that’s why we aren’t being taken seriously by Roger Ebert and all his irritating friends-in-opinion. Onwards the march towards Great Import by injecting more Seriousness, more Sadness (games must make you cry, apparently) and more moving, tragic Reality.