IGNN
The Imaginary Game News Network (aka www.IGNNite.com) began in the summer of 2009 as an experiment in learning how to blog. My first thought was that I wanted to write about the business of video games and publish those article on my fledgling consulting business site, sharing my insights and prophesizing about the future of gaming. But prophecy is tricky, particularly if you’re seriously trying to predict the future, so perhaps it’s for the best that my efforts to peer into the unknown quickly devolved into something I enjoy a great deal more, which is being silly and having loads of fun in the process. My early attempts at crystal ball-gazing turned into lampoons of Internet news and magazine coverage but with a gaming twist.
Over the next month and a half, I wrestled with the WordPress format, trying to get it to do things that I wanted it to do but that clearly nobody else out of the millions of bloggers who already used the platform had any interest in doing. And so I fumbled about in Beta until I had the semblance of a design, all the while adding content under a battalion of pseudonyms for the imaginary IGNN staff. As one Twitterer commented; “IGNN is a complete work of fiction. Brilliant!” I love that guy, because that’s exactly what it is, and it’s exactly what the gaming world has never had except for the odd fake story tossed into the daily mix of rumors, reviews, and announcements that hundreds of publications break their backs to provide to the world’s insatiable news-hungry gamers. Would one dedicated fake news site corrupt them all, I wondered? Would any gamer worth his over-sized thumbs even care about “imaginary” game news? We shall see.
