61 Frames Per Second by John Constantine Today in Nerve's videogame blog: Golden Axe dresses down to its skivvies. Plus: Spore takes on evolution, reaches a stalemate, and takes evolution out for a beer.
The press has accused us of launching a print version of Nerve.com out of love for the traditional magazine — I say "accused" because love is not highly regarded when it appears on the cost-benefit matrix of business decisions. The science of business is normally conducted in a love
vacuum; strong affection is thought to distort perception, like a bad eyeglass prescription or a martini at lunch. If so, then we at Nerve are a few cocktails into the day. We love print
magazines — the nap, the crinkle, the color saturation, the weight. We are discovering, like Patrick Swayze in Ghost, that physical existence has its advantages.
Of course our deepest allegiance is not to print, nor the Internet, nor any other medium, but rather to our writers and photographers and their creations, and what we think of more broadly as the Nerve.com sensibility. Its essence is this: the complexity of life is to be savored; little is more complex (and worthy of savoring) than the human experience of sexuality. It's about a more modern, less judgmental attitude toward sex, and through sex, life. All this martini-sipping and affection for the subject matter may seem a bit old-fashioned; if so, we're delighted. Passion is an endangered sentiment in the publishing industry — it's a distraction from the
lowest-common-denominator salesmanship that fills bank accounts. Here's the formula that generates most of the glossies next to us on the newsstand: identify a demographic that advertisers want to reach, conduct studies to find out what its constituents want to read, and give it
to them.
When we started Nerve.com in 1997, we didn't know any better; we did it backwards: we started with an idea, a longing, and built a magazine around it. We haven't generated any studies, and we've done virtually no marketing, and yet hundreds of thousands of people visit our website each month. There, in the glare of the computer screen, every week our writers and photographers limn the frail human precinct, the stubborn, beautiful connection between mind and skin.
