Double Touch

“Professionalism drives you to do enough to fulfil a code of ethics.
Enthusiasm drives you to do as much as you humanly can.” – Tom Francis.

Tom Francis, staff writer and former disc editor of Pc Gamer, is not the type of person you would expect to find working on the biggest selling PC magazine in the UK. In many respects he has had an unconventional rise through the echelons at Future Publishing and, as will be become apparent, it appears so have most of his contemporaries.
Francis started his career after graduating from the University of Southampton with a first in both Mathematics and Philosophy. Both of which are “more or less completely irrelevant”, to his job he notes. As for the other “writers on the magazine a couple have degrees in the sciences - two have
English degrees, but I don't think anyone actually did Journalism at University.”

In fact Francis is quick to highlight how little geared toward journalism his education and training was. “I hadn't worked for any other publications before joining PC Gamer, but I joined as a Disc Editor and graduated to a writer by contributing to the magazine on the side.” He also cannot write in Shorthand. “I'm not very old-school”, he admits.

So what did get Francis what must be one of the most coveted jobs in the games press? Francis recollects on that fateful interview: “I originally applied for a Staff Writer position at PC Gamer and didn't get an interview. When I was interviewed for the disc editor position a few months later, fairly late in the process, then-editor Mark Donald and technical editor Mark Sutherns were already pretty sure they'd found their candidate before I applied. I also wasn't terribly impressive on the technical questions, and I could feel myself bluffing appallingly on one.

But then they asked what sort of games I liked, and my answers… got us talking about games in general. From there the interview went wildly over schedule, the question-and-answer format disintegrated into a mutual exchange of bizarre tales of weird and terrible things we'd each done in games, and I laughed more than I did when I'm just hanging out with my friends. I was sure I'd flunked it on the technical questions, but I discovered later that that conversation clinched it.

Eighteen months later, Mark Donald took me aside and said he thought I'd be better used as a full-time writer. I didn't bring up that this was exactly what I originally applied to do, or that the application didn't get very far.”

Pc Gamer is based in Bath; to be precise a rather dull and uninteresting building on Monmouth Street, near the heart of the city. The Future office itself is not exactly what you’d call Ugly Betty material, open plan and cohabiting with four other magazines, it has a particular informal and close-knit vibe. Intrigued I ask him what it’s like to write for such a high profile magazine, and particularly, one in which you love the subject matter.

“We work to a four-week deadline for each issue, and everyone's pressure level varies during that”, states Francis. “My editor, art editor and production editor all work late and come in early for three or four days near the magazine's real deadline, when pages need to be proofed and signed out, and the cover needs to be finalised. My own section needs to be completed very early in the issue, but to
no hard deadline, so there's little pressure there. The pressure in my job is when reviewing an important game late in the issue, because the thoroughness of the review, the amount of copy produced, and the quality and balance of the copy all need to be at their peak at the same time. I typically stay late, take the piece home, and carry a printout of it to re-read with a fresher perspective first thing in the morning, then redraft a lot. The first draft usually reads fine, but I'm rarely happy that I'm doing the game justice or striking a fair balance of praise and criticism, and that's what I spend most of my time trying to get right.”


Indeed, for Tom this is clearly an issue of extreme importance and his writing is testament to it. I ask if a good example of this process could be seen in the recent Pc Gamer review of Bioshock. “That one was redrafted until 4am the night before deadline. Generally the better the game is, the longer I obsess over whether I 'm doing it justice”, he replies.

To be a good magazine journalist you need “clarity and enthusiasm” he adds. “You don't need to be a very funny or very clever writer - in fact, most bad articles are the result of someone trying too hard to be one or the other at the expense of actually getting to the point. Others just focus on one detail or point without explaining the information a reader needs to understand or care about it. You just need to be able to look at what you've written with fresh eyes, and see where you've failed to give a complete picture of what you're talking about. It's surprisingly difficult, and we all get it wrong now and then.

Enthusiasm is important partly because it always shows through, and that makes a more entertaining and exciting article, but also because it has a knock-on effect on how you go about your job. If I was writing about something I don't care about, like football, I'd always be looking to get the job done with the minimum effort. But because I'm writing about something I love, I'm more interested in the story itself than in going home on time at the end of the day.”