I wrote a piece last year about video game website headlines, and how the quest for SEO prominence and a reliance on "clickbait" was making so many of them borderline unreadable. I think about that story almost every day as I scan the internet for news, because almost every day I am forced to read terrible headlines that are quite frankly exhausting to try to decipher.
As I hack through my feed like a Victorian-era explorer tripping through a jungle with a blunt machete, there are always exceptions. And a lot of those exceptions come from one website: PC Gamer. So in the interests of balancing out my criticisms, I thought I'd give them a little shout out here.
While other sites engineer their headlines like the villain of a narrative-based puzzle game, and render the subject matter so opaque you're forced to click through just to find out what the hell they're talking about, lately it seems like PC Gamer's heds have simply gone the other direction, using entire sentences to spell out a story's content with as much detail as possible, clickbait be damned.
Take some recent headlines:
This one would probably have appeared on another site as something like "Steam's Strategy Smash Gets A Big Update", or "Fans Of Steam Game Rejoice At Online Feature News". Here, though, it just...says it all.Â
As does this one:
Not sure it's news, to be honest, but I appreciate the clarity on the blog's subject matter regardless. If I had clicked on it, I'd have known exactly what I was getting myself in for.Â
A third headline from last week reads:
Again, thank you, I was fully prepared for everything this blog was going to cover, and upon reading it was not disappointed in the slightest.
For a slightly more recent example, how about this one from Saturday, which reads...uh...:
There's a future where you and your graphics card decide what a game looks like, not the developers
OK, well...yikes, you can't win 'em all I guess. Look, I said most headlines have been excellent, not all of them.
I have no idea how this is going for the site's traffic, or why PC Gamer's editorial team decided to buck an industry-wide trend (I contacted them a few times but they never got back to me), but as someone who spends most of his time reading websites instead of writing for them, I just wanted to publicly say how appreciative I am of a website that doesn't treat me like some chud who has to be tricked into reading any of its (quite often very good) blogs.
UPDATE 6:26pm, October 14: Some background! PC Gamer's Strategic Director Evan Lahti tells Aftermath:
It's not typically great writing hygiene to make a headline really long, but in most cases it gives us enough room to achieve this kind of conversational voice we've come to enjoy, that lets us get a piece of hard information down and then sarcasm alongside it, or some setup/payoff combination like that. So I guess it's mainly a voice thing, in many of those stories. But from a reader behavior POV longer headlines do occupy more space on some platforms, like Google Discover - obviously they get cut off at a certain character count, but in some cases we think that an ellipsis at the end of a HL can be a source of curiosity, not that we're engineering that or something.
The other broad thing we think about is the homogeneity of the media environment at large, wanting to find ways to become and remain distinct, not just to our peers in gaming but the internet at large. Everyone's been playing from the same playbook for roughly a decade, as you note the best SEO techniques are known, and any new ones are immediately recognized and dispersed, "SEO voice" absolutely sucks, and in that environment where everyone's chasing that (I'm sure you can relate), you have to have a special sauce.
It's definitely not a silver bullet or something, we still feel the changes in the the sudden, arbitrary shifts in the algorithmic sea like everyone else, of course. But we're having fun, and clearly you are too, which is great to see.
It is great!
