Introducing The Maw, your weekly RPS news liveblog
27.11.2023 - 11:41
/ rockpapershotgun.com
There is a Creature that resides in the farthest corners of the cosmos and the deepest fathoms of the human psyche. It is a dreadful god of gossip and reportage, a hideous, paradiscursive entity of boundless appetite, whose Number is Infinity+1 and whose Sign is the Serrated Spiral. It's one of many abyssal denizens of a dungeon dimension outside of Time, where nothing changes and there is accordingly an apocalyptic hunger for News. My ancestors, the Brigante Celts who once ruled the misty valleys of Yorkshire, called it keno-augā-brājat, or “the cave that will never be filled”. But nowadays, we call it the Maw.
Alas, thanks to a loophole written into the Universal Contract by a feckless Creator, the Maw is periodically able to force itself through the Walls of Perception into our reality. These extra-dimensional invasions follow a sinister cadence, synchronised to the contours of the modern working week. Every Monday morning, the Maw surfaces in a cloud of quantum foam and caffeine fumes, flails its inexpressible kaiju limbs, and opens innumerable jaws that are at once larger than galleons and smaller than human skin pores. Every Monday morning, it threatens to swallow up the pitiful circle of firelight we call normality.
But there a valiant few who stand against the beast and seek to misdirect its voracity, an unloved yet unstinting army of metamedia sorcerers you call Videogame News Writers. Each Monday, we fearful disciples of News gather with our adamantine shovels, proton accelerators and enchanted mirrors and ply the Maw with Starfield updates and Call of Duty roadmaps and indie gaming curios, till at long last, on Saturday, the Maw fades back into the underworld, temporarily placated.
What you blissfully unaware regular people call "slow news days" are, to us, periods of creeping panic akin to watching a nuclear reactor bubble over - times of frenzied barrel-scraping as the Maw thrashes about in discontent, obliged to subsist on meagre morsels such as, I don't know, a report about a rumour about a teaser for the announcement of a trailer for a GTA 6 release date, for instance. What you call “clickbait headlines” are an aromatic but fast-burning artificial fuel we have devised to help us through these catastrophic lulls.
We are always experimenting with different ways to appease the Maw, trying to keep one step ahead - for the entity’s form is always shifting, and its tastes are as fickle as the ocean swell. I have the pleasure of introducing one such experiment today, a new method of experiencing news which, in a show of desperate perversity, we have named for the creature it is designed to combat. But I recognise that the mysteries of the Videogame News Writer’s trade can seem impenetrable