What in the hell is Output Lag?

Welcome to Output Lag.

The purpose of this post is to describe exactly what Output Lag is, what I hope it will become, and what I can promise it won’t be. This is going to be a bit long.

How we got here

Over the last few years, the landscape of both the journalism and video game industries has gone through monumental changes that have, more or less, changed things completely.

I started my games journo adventure way back in 2006, where, as a junior in high school, I contributed as a volunteer reviewer for WorthPlaying (which is still going strong because of its incredible ownership—huge shoutout to Rainier and Judy!). I know, I’m old. Over the following nearly two decades, I jumped in and out of the industry, culminating in my most recent stint of almost two years, which at first felt like a dream job.

I was at a site I had long admired and respected. A site that once served as my primary source of gaming news, and that at one point I would check daily. And the team at the time was simply an All-Star Dream Team. I’m not exaggerating here…it’s wild to think back and reminisce that for a brief time I got to work alongside absolute legends, including Chris Carter, Kris Moyse, Zoey Handley, Eric Van Allen, CJ Andriessen, Timothy Monbleau, Andrea Shearon, Ripley, and Occams…like holy fuck the amount of talent just in these last 150 characters is unreal. But for reasons, the dream team was laid off over that two year period until none of us were left.

I promise, there’s a purpose to all of this backstory, not just rambling. Over the last two years, I saw, as many of us have, what led to the present; the situation that many game journo, and honestly just journalistic, press, and media sites for most industries, find themselves in.

These websites abandoned their communities in favor of chasing one thing: Google. You can say it’s hindsight or rose-tinted glasses but holy shit what a dumb idea it is to base your entire business model on the decisions of another business. I’m baffled by the idea that people up top who make decisions (for many big websites, mind you) think building entirely around Google for traffic (SEO/organic search traffic) while also relying on Google’s ads to generate revenue is a smart idea. Especially when Google changing things on a whim is a tale as old as time.

I miss the community. I miss the absolute passion for discussing games and movies, and culture with others in a fun and meaningful way. It’s been stripped away from every website because it’s “not as easy” as chasing the Google formula.

So, I created Output Lag.

What it is

I created Output Lag with a single goal: community first. I want this to ring true with essentially every decision Output Lag faces moving forward. So, how do I plan on doing that?

My original plan for Output Lag had an unhealthy amount of community features that I could never realistically implement, so I started with the basics: Community Blogs, Social Features like profile creation, friending other users, messaging them, maintaining a “feed” of blogs you interact with. You can even set up “groups” with other members so you can make your own internal blogs or discussions.

At the same time, Output Lag will also serve as a fun outlet where several other like-minded writers and I will share our thoughts and feelings with you on games, movies, TV shows, culture, anything really. A big rule I’ve instilled in everyone is that we just write what we want to write. Period. It may not be as ‘professional’ as other websites you may be used to, but that’s by design. With this in mind, we’ve also created a very lax “style guide” that the site will use. It mainly just makes sure the layout of posts fits with the site, but outside of that, every writer is encouraged to maintain their own voice with their writing. I’d rather you see Output Lag as a collection of writers you can depend on rather than a conforming single entity. This may be jarring at first, reading an article by someone in the first person, then jumping to another in the third person. To be honest, the editing will be very light. But I think that’s important.

As we move forward in the coming days, weeks, and months, the Community Blogs will continue to synergize with the main site. Popular blogs will be moved onto the front page featured slider, and over time, the entire system will change to integrate more naturally with the site.

What I hope it will become

Once things get rolling, I’m going to start asking you all what you want to see Output Lag become, and that’s what I hope it will become. We’ll discuss new features, changing existing ones, and even removing some together, and build this site together into what we want it to be.

I’ll continue adding more community and social features. I plan on posting a roadmap of sorts for the features I’m currently working on or plan to work on in the future, but for now, here are some things in the pipeline: trophies/rewards you can append to your profile for completing site-wide achievements or actions, a more streamlined blog posting system, community-driven experiences integrated right into the site, and more.

In the meantime, I want Output Lag to be a reliable source of both community interaction and gaming-related content. And I mean it when I say reliable. No one here will be asked to change their opinion on anything, including review scores, etc. Our scoring system, for example, uses the entire 1-10 scale, so while overall our review scores may end up trending lower than others, that’s because we want to use the whole scale. What’s the point of having 1-10 if nothing is ever under a 6? We’ll have more details on that soon with our actual scoring guide.

As Output Lag continues to evolve, I just want it to be a community you want to be a part of.

What it won’t be

While I want to put the direction of the site in the community’s hands, there are a few lines I’ve drawn in the sand as to what the site will never be.

First, a source for guides. I’m done writing guides. Don’t get me wrong, I understand there are people that want them, and that they can be a “great source of traffic”. But you won’t find them here. At least, in a traditional sense. If one of our writers or someone in the community has the urge to write a guide for something they are really passionate about, go for it. But a guide will never be part of the content strategy at Output Lag. We want to focus on impressions, features, news, reviews, previews, and originals. And, hopefully, some day, exclusives.

By the same logic, nothing will be done at Output Lag to serve search engines or SEO. I know the game, I just don’t want to play it. In fact, I don’t have any SEO plugins or anything of the sort even installed on Output Lag. Everything written here should be done simply because the writer wants to write about it, or feels people want to know about it, or want to discuss it. Never will anything here be written because a trend on Google said a lot of people are searching for that topic right now.

I’ll also never implement ads, at least in the traditional sense, on Output Lag. Ads suck. They ruin sites. And ad rates are so low that it’s downright embarrassing to tell your community that their time is worth literal fractions of a penny for them to waste time letting an ad-ridden page load with the hopes they will accidentally click on them.

As of now, there are no sort of related monetization plans, but if in the future there is an opportunity for a sponsored post we genuinely feel passionate about or think the community will be, or something like that, we’ll be completely transparent about it and discuss it before engaging.

The great thing about Output Lag is it’s not my job. It’s a passion project. I was lucky to have something lined up when I was laid off earlier this year, and am in a spot financially where I can even afford for Output Lag to fail. That being said, even though it’s not my job, it is something I want to succeed at, so I’ll be investing the time, resources, and effort to help it do so.

In fact, a good mantra at Output Lag is to think about what a big corpo would do, and then do the opposite. Ads? Never. Chase Google Trends? Not here. If an indie company approaches us saying, “Hey, we think our game is cool, can we pay you to promote it?”, we’ll play it. And if we agree, and it is cool, we’ll tell the indie company to spend the money on making their game cooler and tell you about it anyway.

Lastly, Output Lag won’t be a wild, wild west for people to spew hatred in any form. We want discussion and community, hell, there can even be heated debates. But keep it focused on what we’re here to talk about: games and adjacent media. Our full rules will be going up in the coming days but a good rule of thumb is this: if you want to be an asshole, this isn’t the site for you. You’ve got X (formerly known as Twitter) for that. (And yes, I consciously made the decision to type out formerly known as Twitter.)

Wrapping it up

If you’ve read through this whole thing, you must have really been bored, but I do thank you for it. But to wrap things up, I want Output Lag to be a community we are all proud to be a part of. I’ll work hard to help it become that, and all I ask of you is to try and be a part of the community, if you want to. Start a Blog and tell your friends about it. Help me shape this thing into what you want it to be, a place you look forward to visiting and contributing to.

I’m very transparent and available. Any questions, just ask me. I’m lucky that I get to work from home and at my PC all day anyway, so I am able to quickly respond if anything goes wrong or if anything needs to be moderated until we have better systems in place.

I look forward to building this thing with you, Output Laggers. Yikes, that sucks. First task at hand: find something cooler to call each other.