New! Exciting! The RPS Writer Hive
We get sent a lot of emails from people asking to write for us. Some want money, so we hiss at them until they leave us alone. We're unbelievably poor! If we give you some of our money, we'll surely die. Many don't want shiny gold, merely prestige and appreciation, and while we're pleased to be thought of so highly (you make us feel like a natural woman) we're still not up for posting unsolicited submissions. RPS' tone is important to us and if we open the door to one thing, we'll never be able to close it. Like that scene where they turn off the ghost storage machine in Ghostbusters, only with crazed rants about Bioshock instead of skeletal taxi drivers.
But! We really would like to support budding games writers - reviewers, interviewers, feature writers, diarists... People who want to write about videogames. So we've created a new section on the forum specifically to showcase them: the Writer Hive.
It's your chance to share your words and thoughts with an intelligent and enthusiastic PC gaming audience, and it also means the RPS Hivemind can take a gander at what you've got to offer, and when we spot something grand we'll likely link to it on the main site in some form.
Not entirely sure what kind of stuff is likely to turn up in there - quite excited to find out, too - so I don't want to overcomplicate things with too many stipulations, but obviously standard forum rules apply: don't be a bastard, basically. Articles slagging people/groups of people/ideologies/y'know off will get wiped promptly. Be intelligent and/or enthusiastic, not a whiny hate-merchant. And if you must tear a game to bits, remember to aim your blows at it, not the people behind it. There can be legal repercussions to slander and libel, but moreover it's about being a decent human being.
The only other thing is that the Hive isn't a link dump - any topic whose first post isn't an original piece of writing will get deleted. By all means paste in an entire piece you've posted elsewhere, but don't just leave a URL and bugger off. It's bitty and messy. At the top of the Hive, there's a stickied thread specifically for folk to leave links to their own blogs in. Which'll be pretty useful in itself. As regards the Hive in general, though: come here to show off, not to farm traffic.
That's it. Go!