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In part two of our Inside the Games interview with GameLife Editor Chris Kohler (read part one here), he discusses his day to day duties at GameLife, aspirations for the future, and personal interests aside from writing and editing.
"I do a little bit of everything," Kohler said. "It’s very much like when I was writing a fanzine."
Chris’ duties include researching news, conducting interviews, reviewing games, and writing opinion columns.
"It’s not whatever I want to do at any time," Kohler said, "but I do have the freedom and I do get to do a lot of different things."
Most editors’ duties include deciding which content to run and revising content generated by writers before it is published. Rather than fall back into this role, Kohler still generates content.
"I really still want to – that’s what’s fun for me," Kohler said. "That’s why I’m doing this in the first place. I didn’t say to myself ’I want to sit and edit other people’s stories,’ even though I do, and there’s a certain enjoyment to that too."
Chris then recalled his experiences in editing writer submissions while running his fanzine.
"I’d get a story from someone that they would have written out in longhand on a piece of notebook paper and mailed to me, and typing that up and editing that was always an interesting challenge," Kohler said.
From fanzine to Editor of GameLife – many aspiring journalists would consider their journey complete at Chris’ level of accomplishment. Even still, Chris aims higher.
"The dream would be to take GameLife to the point where not just the audience that we have reads it, but everybody reads it," Kohler said. "That’s where I’d like to go."
Chris also shared another personal goal.
"Be the Rodger Ebert of video games," Kohler said. "Be the one where once a video game is out, I need to know what Chris Kohler thinks. That is the unattainable super-high goal. That’s the moon, and you try to get as far as you can."
While not the most concrete of goals, Chris knows how to progress towards it.
"Just learning as much as I can about the business, about games, about critiquing, so that every time I write something it becomes more and more valid because I’ve got more experience under my belt," Kohler said.
Chris then shared his personal interest in an uncommon genre of music when asked for information about himself that nobody would know.
"I really like Irish traditional music," Kohler said, "and I play the Irish whistle really badly."
Chris then recanted, remembering that people would know this about him due to a piece he wrote in August 2008: Irish Music for Videogame Music Fans. When pressed to come up with an unknown fact, Chris reached back to high school.
"I was in drama club in high school," Kohler said. "No one cares, no one cares."
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