Introducing The Maw, your weekly RPS news liveblog

There is a Creature that resides in the farthest corners of the cosmos and the deepest fathoms of the human psyche. It is a dreadful god of gossip and reportage, a hideous, paradiscursive entity of boundless appetite, whose Number is Infinity+1 and whose Sign is the Serrated Spiral. It's one of many abyssal denizens of a dungeon dimension outside of Time, where nothing changes and there is accordingly an apocalyptic hunger for News. My ancestors, the Brigante Celts who once ruled the misty valleys of Yorkshire, called it keno-augā-brājat, or “the cave that will never be filled”. But nowadays, we call it the Maw.

Alas, thanks to a loophole written into the Universal Contract by a feckless Creator, the Maw is periodically able to force itself through the Walls of Perception into our reality. These extra-dimensional invasions follow a sinister cadence, synchronised to the contours of the modern working week. Every Monday morning, the Maw surfaces in a cloud of quantum foam and caffeine fumes, flails its inexpressible kaiju limbs, and opens innumerable jaws that are at once larger than galleons and smaller than human skin pores. Every Monday morning, it threatens to swallow up the pitiful circle of firelight we call normality.

But there are a valiant few who stand against the beast and seek to misdirect its voracity, an unloved yet unstinting army of metamedia sorcerers you call Videogame News Writers. Each Monday, we fearful disciples of News gather with our adamantine shovels, proton accelerators and enchanted mirrors and ply the Maw with Starfield updates and Call of Duty roadmaps and indie gaming curios, till at long last, on Saturday, the Maw fades back into the underworld, temporarily placated.

What you blissfully unaware regular people call "slow news days" are, to us, periods of creeping panic akin to watching a nuclear reactor bubble over - times of frenzied barrel-scraping as the Maw thrashes about in discontent, obliged to subsist on meagre morsels such as, I don't know, a report about a rumour about a teaser for the announcement of a trailer for a GTA 6 release date, for instance. What you call “clickbait headlines” are an aromatic but fast-burning artificial fuel we have devised to help us through these catastrophic lulls.

We are always experimenting with different ways to appease the Maw, trying to keep one step ahead - for the entity’s form is always shifting, and its tastes are as fickle as the ocean swell. I have the pleasure of introducing one such experiment today, a new method of experiencing news which, in a show of desperate perversity, we have named for the creature it is designed to combat. But I recognise that the mysteries of the Videogame News Writer’s trade can seem impenetrable to non-initiates. So let me try to frame all this in everyday terms.

(Actual announcement post follows)

The Maw is a weekly series of liveblogs for PC gaming news. It'll run from Monday to Friday, and will include quick summaries and links for all the news we write on RPS, and more importantly, all the stuff we might write up. You can follow it throughout the week, or you can jump in on Friday and treat it like a curated digest. Or, you can just read our regular news articles as usual.

The thinking behind it is essentially that wonderful Terminally Capitalist mantra of doing more with less. There's a lot of gaming news each day, and RPS does not have a huge writing team - currently, there is only one news writer on shift at once, and in my case, I'm on watch for announcements and emerging stories while also trying to plan or write original pieces of my own. As such, I'm conscious that we aren't equipped to cover everything that comes down the pipe. The Maw addresses that by, essentially, turning all the planning we do into #Content. I already make lists of potential stories every day, so why not put that stuff out in the open? It means we can offer a more comprehensive overview of current events, while still being selective about what we actually turn into an individual article.

Its digest function aside, I’m hoping the Maw will be a sort of RPS-brand social media hub, blissfully free of algorithmic interjections, and channelling a little of that old-timey web 2.0 forum energy. That's right, folks - we're reinventing Twitter on here, and I didn't even have to pay $44 billion for the privilege.

In between news updates, we'll also publish bits and pieces about goings-on in the Treehouse, and the liveblog will obviously have a comments feed where you can hang out, chat about the gaming megaverse, and suggest things we might cover - providing you don't spam us to high heaven, of course, which will get you banned. If we see a comment that seems newsworthy or insightful, we might post it in the main feed. It's my hope that we can build a nice little community around the Maw, similar to the lovely stories and observations you all post beneath Alice0's WAWAPTW features and Ed's Sunday Papers round-ups.

(Actual announcement post ends)

Thus the sanitised description of the Maw we will distribute to lesser news-gathering organisations and corporate clients in the days and weeks ahead. Please appreciate that I am painting a cosy picture of the horrors of Videogame News Writing - after all, I do not wish to disturb you unduly and spark a mass panic. It's harrowing to think of the ravenous and unforgiving Powers that haunt the shadows of the Known.

But do not despair. We News Writers have honed our craft for generations, ever since the Brigante shamans prophesied the coming of the first Videogame in the darkness of the fifth century BC, when the News mostly consisted of stuff like “Indie viral sensation Sorghum tops Highest Crop Yield charts for second winter running”. Our wards are thick, our boilers and arsenals well-stocked, our watch unsleeping. Only once in my lifetime has the Maw broken through our line and run amok, during the terrible slow summer of 2012 when all anyone could find to write about was bloody Zumba Fitness.

I hold out frail hope that, on some great day of bounty, we might actually channel enough in the way of DLC drops, update changelogs and/or posts about pettable videogame dogs to satisfy the Maw for good, or even burst it like a balloon. But I have tarried too long. Today is Monday, and close at hand I hear the screech of punctured spacetime and the thunder of cyclopean intestines. To arms, colleagues! FEED THE MAW.