I’m a good writer, I think. I have the skills to write a good analysis. I just have no clue on how to go about getting a job like that.
Pick every magazine thats dedicated to video games, both console and PC and Mac, and send in your articles, same with websites. From what I understand , most do not pay really well, so be prepared for some disapointment in that regard.
As well, start up your own webpage , and post your reviews there, get your dedicated readers happening and you should start to get noticed by the people that matter.
Declan
Probably by getting a job with a video game maker. Not sure where you live, but this seems like a hot one in FL.
Clancy, do you currently work with video and computer games? Does your job require you to deal with them on a daily basis? (i.e. an electronics store or video rental place?) If not, have you considered getting such a job?
If you had some experience of this kind, even if it wasn’t working for an actual video game company, it’d be good to have on your resume.
Also I’d imagine having a position reviewing something else other than video games (movies, consumables, anything at all really) with a paper or online publication would be good experience as well.
It really depends on if you want to be paid or not.
Game Rankings lists 482 game sites/magazines and I believe a good portion are manned by a volunteer staff.
If you want to be paid, good luck to you, it’s a very hard industry to bust into. I’d say start with your local paper and bug the hell out of them. Maybe they’ll give you a chance if your sample writing is good enough.
But if you don’t care about payment and just want to gather a little experience, see you name on a website and maybe get a few free review copies, toss me an email at john@gamingtarget.com and we’ll talk. I write for Gaming Target and if I could be ever so not modest, I think we’re one of the best game sites no one’s ever heard of.
Also, give epinions.com a look. A great place to post video game reviews (and you can even earn “royalties” on your work) and a good place to see some very good writers and some not so very good writers.
Wow, better response than I had hoped for. I should get to work.
BTW, I live in New York City.
Sorry, I gotta say I think E-pinions pretty much sucks (I used to write there but I took all my reviews off). They no longer really pay any money, either.
Not exactly a journalistic job but this might be of interest http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61928-2004May27.html
Wow, NYC, well if you can make it there, … you know the rest. 
I’m sure they have a few “underground” newspapers in NYC (i.e. papers that include Cecil’s column). You might want to contact them, send them some reviews and tell them you will work for nothing. If they publish you, the money will follow.
I doubt you can get a full-time salaried job doing it; the higher-paid game reviewers are also well-known game designers. And if the gamer press is anything like the comics press (I sell articles to The Comics Journal once in a while), your peak output for getting published may be two or three $40 articles a year.
I think your best bet for making money doing what you love might involve starting your own PDF e-magazine and selling advertising in it (although if you have any skills at all in ad sales, you could pull down serious bucks doing that for a real publisher and forget about writing).
Or, find a rich, indulgent relative to subsidize your career.
Oh wait, I have a better idea!
The first generation of rock journalists (Albert Goldman, Greil Marcus, Lester Bangs) made a huge splash in the 60s-70s because only a handful of people out there knew how to write intelligently about popular music.* Try and emulate their careers. Write up some clips, send them to a magazine that doesn’t specifically tilt towards a gamer demographic but could (Spin, Gear, Details, Blender) and sell them on the idea that your articles are relevant to their readers’ interests. Casually drop hints that a feature like yours could open that magazine up to more ads from the computer game industry.
It’s a shot…
*Frank Zappa once dismissed “rock journalism” as “People who can’t write, interviewing people who can’t talk, for the benefit of people who can’t read.” These three writers were among the first to break the mold.
AFAIK, this is untrue. The best paid game reviewers write for EGM, Game Informer, IGN and GameSpot. Not a game developer among them. Just twentysomethings with a dream like yours that they get to live.
NO AFAIK, just fact, this is the best idea yet!
Hey, guess what kind of site I run?
We started it (my partner and I) years ago and we’re paying our freight and making a profit.
If you’re interested look in my profile.
And I’m proud to see that my site is there and well represented. I’m especially proud of the fact that our average rating isn’t FIVE STARS!!! We’re realists. If a game sucks we don’t mind saying it. Too many sites chickenshit out on that.
I don’t think I’ve ever read your site Jonathan.
I’ll have to give it a look after work.
Well, here’s my story. I used to write game reviews for (the now defunct) MPOG.com, but it came about quite by accident. I remember that the head reviewer posted a message in one of the videogame newsgroups that I subscribe to, basically asking if anyone would be interested in writing game reviews. I emailed him a sample review of one of my videogames, and apparently he liked it so much that he immediately hired me. So that’s how I started writing videogame reviews…
I think you’re a little misunderstood when it comes to the star ratings. Those aren’t the sites average review score (that’s on the far right in the site list), but the acerage reader score of all of your sites articles.
No, I dug it. We get tons of hate mail when we give a game a bad review.
But we’re business to business and not a site for the kids. Those youngsters that come to our site are often outraged at our reviews.