Authors' Instructions

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Article Submission Rules

  1. The article must be original material that has not been previously published.

  2. The article must be written under the author's real name. No alias is allowed.

  3. Shared authorship is allowed if one author is designated as the lead author.

  4. The author must hold no commercial or non-commercial tie-in to any party (such as a developer or publisher) that may be perceived as conflict of interest. Any misrepresentation by the author that is either misleading or fraudulent is strictly forbidden.

  5. The article must be written in English. No obscene language should be used. The minimum length of the article is 1,000 words. There is no maximum length limit.

  6. The author must adhere to our style guides when composing the article.

  7. For review or preview article, the author is expected to have sufficient familiarity with the game through first-hand experience in playing. It is not required, though highly recommended, that the author completes the game to the end before reviewing it.

  8. The author should comply with the negotiated deadline for the article submission.

  9. An internal peer review process may check on the accuracy of the contents in the submitted article but will not censor the opinion expressed by the author.

  10. For review or preview article, the submission should include screenshots and boxshots of the game if available. We prefer a minimum of 3-5 screenshots and a boxshot of the front cover. Additional gallery images, including back cover and promotional poster, may be submitted. For interview or feature article, gallery images for illustration may be submitted.

  11. For cheat article, the submission should be in the form of a FAQ, hint file, solution, strategy guide, or walkthrough. The submission should include screenshots of the game if applicable. Screenshots may be annotated for illustration. Additional gallery images for illustration may be submitted.

  12. All images should be in lossless raster format (such as bmp, gif, or png, but not jpg/jpeg) and in "adequate" bit color depth and "acceptable" resolution. For screenshots, the full screen must be captured, preferably in the maximum resolution (such as 320x200 pixels, 640x400 pixels, 640x480 pixels, 800x600 pixels, and so on) and bit color depth (such as 4 bit or 16 colors, 8 bit or 256 colors, 16 bit or 65,536 colors, and so on) that are natively supported by the game. Screen should be captured in widescreen resolution only if the game supports it natively. No letterboxing, pillarboxing, pan and scan, or stretching is permitted if the game does not offer a widescreen mode. For boxshots, the whole cover must be included. No cropping is allowed. Overcompressing or resampling the images should be avoided. Screenshots submitted in batches must be sorted in chronological order by which they appear in the game. Each screenshot and illustrative image must include a short caption. The captions must not be embedded into the images. Other media, such as video and audio clips as well as executable demos, are not accepted for inclusion with the article.

  13. A game rating based on our ratings system must be given for review article.

  14. The article should be written in either plain text flat file or rich text UTF-8 encoded Unicode format. It should use standard ASCII text, word wrap, and CR/LF paragraph break format.

  15. For review or preview article, technical data about the game must be submitted. These include the names of publisher and developer, actual or anticipated release date (year and, if available, month), platform on which the game is played, medium in which the game is packaged, and system requirements. If the game is available on multiple platforms or media, only the platform and medium of the game on which the article is based should be included. System requirements must be copied verbatim from official game documentation.

  16. An editor may make minor editorial changes to the article, such as to correct grammar and spelling, without the explicit permission of the author. The author will be able to preview the edited article before publication.

  17. By submitting the article, the author agrees to grant us the non-exclusive right to publish the article on this site without fee for an indefinite period. This authorization, once given, is not retractable. The right may be shared or transferred at the discretion of the owner of this site at any time, regardless of the author's current relationship with the site. The author still holds all other non-commercial (but not commercial) rights of the article and is responsible for the opinion and content expressed within.

  18. The Editor-in-Chief reserves the final right to accept or refuse publication of the submitted article.

  19. Failure to comply with our editorial policy, which is subject to change without notice, may result in the withdrawal of publishing right and privilege for this site.

  20. Submission of the article implies that the author agrees to comply with all the above terms and conditions.

Style Guides

  1. Write in complete sentences. Structure your article in an essay format.

  2. Read our articles to familiarize yourself with our writing style and structure, so to avoid heavy copy editing of your submitted work.

  3. Structure your review or preview article to include, in order, introduction, story synopsis, production value (such as graphic, sound, and packaging), gameplay element (such as interface, puzzle, and multiplayer), and conclusion. Do not use headings to structure your review or preview article.

  4. Do not include personal anecdotes that are irrelevant to the gaming experience from your readers' perspective.

  5. Avoid cryptic commentaries in the captions. Include simple descriptions of the images instead.

  6. Use simple present tense, whenever possible. Rephrase your sentences to avoid simple past, simple future, past perfect, and future perfect tenses.

  7. Use proper hyphenations. Choose only commonly accepted forms of noun-noun, adverb-adjective, and adjective-noun compound modifiers. Do not invent nonsensical hyphenated words for emphasis. Do not confuse hyphens with dashes.

  8. Use double quotation marks to quote per verbatim statements made by others or to call attention to words for emphasis (air quotes, scare quotes). Use single quotation marks if the quoted segment is already enveloped by double quotes.

  9. Do not alter the text in any way (including formatting) of per verbatim statements made by others, such as quotes and interviewee answers.

  10. Use commas to separate items in a list (serial commas) or to separate independent clauses in a sentence (conjunction commas). Do not use comma splices except with multiple short clauses.

  11. Put commas or periods outside the quotation marks, except when the sense of the punctuation mark is part of the quotation.

  12. Avoid using semicolons, dashes, and colons, whenever possible. Restructure the breaks into separate sentences instead.

  13. Avoid using slashes, whenever possible. Do not replace slashes with hyphens to form nonsensical compound words.

  14. Do not use ellipses, except as part of the proper names or quotations.

  15. Use only parentheses to bracket words inside a sentence. Do not use box, curly, or angle backets except as part of the proper names or quotations.

  16. Express numbers in numerical format. Use commas to separate every third digits in a large number.

  17. Do not format or change fonts for emphasis.

  18. Do not use contractions. Write out your words in full instead.

  19. Ensure correct capitalization of proper names, such as game titles, company names, and common acronyms. Do not use punctuations for acronyms and initialisms to separate the letters except when the inclusions are deliberate (as in game titles or company names).

  20. Include complete technical data of the games in your review or preview article. Write out the names of the developers and the publishers in full. Include both the number of disks and the type of media in the game packages. Copy verbatim system requirements to include correct punctuations, capitalizations, and formatting.

  21. Write in only American English.

  22. Proofread your article using a spellchecker and a grammar checker before submission.