An Open Letter About "The Cord".



Dear Marathon Community,

I find myself in a unique position; while I am eternally grateful that anyone (much less a seemingly sizable group of people) is willing to engage my opinion pieces, it’s strange that I actually find myself in the position to be able to do this. I don’t say that to stroke my own ego, I say it because I think it’s important that I establish the context within which I made the decision to start covering video game updates (specifically Bungie’s and even more specifically Marathon’s).

About 70k tweets in about two and a half years amounts to not much more than my penchant for not shutting the fuck up. Some of that talk became too detailed to reduce to twitter threads, so I started a blog to just yap. I talk about a lot of things, music, movies, culture, and of course, video games. Due to a current hyper fixation on Bungie’s Marathon, a majority of that yap has been dedicated to the game.

Recently, it came to my attention that members of the community felt that there was far too much disingenuity coming from the usual voices they’d look to for Bungie updates; that these outlets or journalists have allowed their own subjective feelings to compromise the integrity of their coverage. I don’t quite think this is explicitly the case; at the very least I don’t think it’s intentional. I will not be naming names, I will not be lambasting career-long journalists who deserve respect for their contributions to this space simply because I don’t agree with their opinions; if you want to see me do that, follow me on Twitter, but I will not do it here.

Which brings me to a far, far more important point: Journalism is a job, it is a career that I respect and will not even attempt to reduce the value of by suggesting that I can do what a journalist can do, that I can hop in or out of this space like it’s some flippant hobby and not a job that puts food on people's tables. It requires an incalculable amount of ground work, much of which I do not have access to, and the ability to be as consistently level headed as possible. I will almost assuredly not be great at this, but I’m going to try my very best to do the thing I aim to do; which is regularly cover Marathon news, and I’ll make vertical and/or lateral moves from there depending on how I feel over time.

I will not simply be writing long winded "responses" to other articles, I will not be making opinion pieces out of them, and I certainly will not just be saying agreeable shit so that I can revel in people agreeing with me all day. I'm going to do my best to cover things factually and, should by personal opinion be warranted, try and defend any subjective takes with my own stated reasoning; you may not agree with those things every time, but they will be infrequent and not soaked in my own personal feelings about the subject matter. 

I may drop the ball, and I will be crude in my language if not outright unprofessional at times, but I will try my very best to keep personal biases from affecting my coverage. These updates will be separate from my usual blogposts, which I’ll still try and put out monthly. Given that I’m covering Bungie games as a way to strengthen my connection to this community, I have decided to name these weekly coverage updates “The Cord”.

I am going to try and have a retrospective for this week out on Monday (as it’s been particularly… informational), with the actual first installment of The Cord out on Tuesday, shortly after the title’s next mid week update.

This is a special little thing for us, many of y'all saw the "Cheating" blog I put up last month, I think I'd like to do more of that, gather data and statements from people who actually play this game; from the biggest streamers I have access to, to the 57 year old Halo dads who only have time on weekends. I want to know how we feel about this game, how we feel about the changes, what we want to see in the future;. This is our fucking game, I would like to know and relay what we think about it.

Now, speaking candidly, I would like to cover more than just Marathon, but between my inexperience and schedule, I want to keep it simple and contribute to the thing that got me into this unique position to begin with. Bear with me while I figure this out, I hope I can deliver. Thank you dearly for trusting me with this.

Regards,
Geezaws.

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