Gameforms

When the GIA closed on April 1, 2002, gamers around the world first thought it was an April Fools' joke. Then they thought it was the end of a revolutionary time on the Internet, where gamers could get... uh... Intelligent Gaming news... from an Agency. Yeah.

But with closer inspection, they found that they were yet again wrong, as most of the GIA's staff had been working on a more professional approach to gaming news, through Gameforms, a new site that opened on May 1, 2002.

Actually, conforming to the casualty on the Internet, they were a day late, but that's not the point.

Gameforms, headed by Andrew Kaufmann, promises to be the new Internet leader of news for RPG, puzzle, music and other thought-inducing games. Their ominous motto is: "Art forms. Life forms. Gameforms."

Gameforms can be found at http://www.gameforms.com

I never really liked the GIA, although I have to admit that I started to read it more often when it began to broaden its net beyond the sparse, inconsequential backwater of franchise console RPGs. Even towards the end though it was still too caught up in fanboyish received opinion ("The SNES and the PSX are the only consoles worth a damn, because Square made some games for them"; "Square are the somehow hugely artistically worthy because they spend loads of money and were briefly 'phenomenonized' by the sheep-like Japanese game-buying public", etc.) and spent too long explaining in great detail what the box of Dance Squirrel Saga Gaiden III was going to smell like instead of talking about games.

Gameforms is the successor to GIA, opened after the GIA eventually collapsed under its complete lack of revenue or business model. Early indications are not good. Gameforms seems to carry over (and extend) the GIA's elitist pretentiousness while coupling it with a truly hideous site design. Without the archives of information and media on hundreds of games (albeit skewed to certain specialisations), and in fact very little content at all that hasn't been beaten to death elsewhere, it is difficult to see how GameForms will attract readers. At least their bandwidth bills won't bankrupt them though.