The Games Journal

A lot has been said about the decision of Greg Aleknevicus to cease production of the webzine The Games Journal. I think Yehuda Berlinger illustrated how I feel about it on the Gone Gaming blog.

It was indeed a serious issue that very few articles we being submitted. The Games Journal was driven by contributions - Greg, while an excellent and fairly prolific writer, could not have written all the content by himself. This was discussed in a recent episode of Mark Johnson's Boardgames To Go podcast where Greg was a guest. Yehuda had known for a couple of weeks that TGJ was shutting down. That means Greg might have already known that he was going to turn off TGJ when he talked to Mark on the show.

This is all pointing to the recent explosion of media on the German boardgaming hobby, which Mark has mentioned many times on his podcast. With so much creative energy being directed to individual gamer weblogs and podcasts, and into BoardGameGeek, The Gamewire and other boardgaming websites, there was less available energy that Greg could call on for submissions. It doesn't really matter that the content type is very different. Most weblogs are less formal than the average TGJ article. Most of us just type up the recent game night events, or dump current thoughts onto the electronic page. There's very little in the way of researched, edited material which was one of the most valuable features onTGJ (Yehuda linked to several of them above).

In closing, I'll miss having TGJ around. I was never one of the first to hit the site when publishing time came around, but when I did visit I burned through all the past issues that I'd missed.

I do feel that it's pretty silly for so many of us to be mourning its demise now when we never did direct any creative energy into submitting content. Now it's too late, and all we can offer is condolences and thanks.

Thanks to Greg, TGJ's editor, Frank Branham, TGJ's publisher, and all the contributors over the years.

The Games Journal, July 2000 - September 2005