If you know anything about me, you know that gaming is my passion. I love this medium. I love this artform. I love this industry. I feel fortunate to be alive during a time of such innovation in the melding of visual and interactive entertainment. But for the last few weeks, ever since the beginning and ending of E3 and its aftermath, I’ve been worried about the state of certain facets of our industry — namely, our gaming press.

I have been wanting to write a post addressing certain issues for quite some time, but I could never collect my thoughts well enough to put together a case to present. So during this year’s E3 I made a point of listening to responses from both the gaming community and the gaming press via forums, comments, blogs, and podcasts.

It is apparent to me that the press is not happy about where E3 stands as an event. I haven’t been able to discern whether or not if, overall, they are dissatisfied as games journalists or simply as gamers, but I am not sure that it matters. I don’t know that they have much reason to be upset either way.
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Welcome to the new iteration of Bearly Commentary. You may have noticed that I have not updated the comic version of this feature in some time. This happened for several reasons.

I was never entirely happy with the way the comic ended up being formatted. It was an experiment to begin with and I felt that it worked, for the most part, at first. However, it became apparent after not long that the space limit for text that I had arbitrarily set for myself was proving to be too restricting for all that I found myself wanting to say on a given subject. Being humorous in every edition wasn’t my intention and I felt that I had shoe-horned myself into that. Rather than let it get out of control I decided to come up with a new way of doing this.

I have grown attached to the panda as well as the name of the feature, so they will be staying, but I will be using them in blog posts as opposed to regularly in a comic. The comic itself will, I think, not appear anymore in its current form. Instead, I may adapt it later on down the line to supplement the blog posts. No guarantees, though.

This post has simply been to update you on what’s going on. I will have a real edition of Bearly Commentary for you in the near future.