Editor's blog: Introducing the columnists

For some years now, Eurogamer has run an opinion piece every Saturday morning. It used to be called the Saturday Soapbox. It's been a stalwart part of the site which a ragtag bunch of Eurogamer staffers and contributors has used to express their thoughts - sometimes serious, sometimes flippant, sometimes furious, sometimes ruminative, sometimes borderline irrelevant - about the state of games and the games industry. We hope you've enjoyed reading it, or enjoyed being angry afterwards, at any rate.

Starting today, our tradition of Saturday morning opinion is going to take a new form. Allow me to introduce our four new regular columnists: Jon Blyth, Cara Ellison, David Goldfarb and Rich Stanton!

These four - made up of three eminent current and former UK games journalists, and one game developer - will be taking turns to fill the Saturday morning slot with their unique perspectives on the gaming world. Think of them as the columnists in a national newspaper, complete with their name in big letters and quizzical headshot up top. First up is Rich, no stranger to Eurogamer, who writes today about Grand Theft Auto's growing pains.

You'll still see opinion pieces from myself, Christian, Martin and the rest of the Eurogamer staff, by the way. Expect these to be popping up whenever on a more ad-hoc basis, though, and focusing on the issues of the day. To extend the newspaper analogy, think of them as the leader column, all sober-looking under a gothic script logo. (But still sometimes wrong and silly, no doubt.)

But now, without further ado, let me introduce you to our four columnists:

Rich Stanton (@richstanton) has been writing for Eurogamer since 2011, and also contributes to places like the Guardian and Rock, Paper, Shotgun. Prior to that he was a staffer for Edge magazine. He is the author of the upcoming book A Brief History of Videogames, lives in Bath, and believes Solaire is Lord Gwyn's firstborn. Rich, a Scot, is known for his untamed hair, opinions and velvet jacket; some highlights of his Eurogamer writing career include this retrospective look at Half-Life 2, this argument that Dark Souls tells a better story than Skyrim and a column about the age-old games-as-art debate, Who Framed Roger Ebert?

David Goldfarb (@locust9) is an independent game designer and writer. Most recently he was game director on Payday 2. Prior to that he was lead designer as well as lead writer at DICE on Battlefield 3 and Battlefield Bad Company 2. He's worked for Guerrilla Games, Milestone Games and has been in the games industry for over 17 years. His career began in quality assurance at Acclaim Entertainment, QAing titles like Bust-A-Move 2 and Turok for the N64 and PC. (Man, Bust-A-Move 2 was great.) He lives in Stockholm, Sweden.

Cara Ellison (@caraellison) - another Scot - is a writer and self-described professional vagabond who trots the globe for her crowd-funded Embed With Games series documenting the work of indie developers the world over. She also writes the S.EXE series about sex in games for Rock, Paper, Shotgun and contributes to the likes of The Guardian, the New Statesman and, oh hey look, Eurogamer. Her Eurogamer archive includes this beautifully apt deconstruction of The Stanley Parable and this review of an extremely bad game.

Jon Blyth (@disappointment), also known as Log, wrote about video games in most of the magazines for many years, as well as making some videos. You might know him from his work in PC Zone or the Official Xbox Magazine, or from IGN's hard-hitting documentary series The Blyth Report, or from the Regular Features podcast. He left games journalism to run a pub in Nottingham in July, but we've tempted him to comment from the sidelines here on Eurogamer.

You'll find David's first column here next week, while Cara and Jon will be with us in the first weeks of 2015. We hope you enjoy them! Or enjoy being angry at them...