If you pay attention to the machinations of the game journalism world, you may have observed the following sequence in the past week:

* Tony Rice set up a set of links to interesting game blog posts called the Carnival of Gamers on his generally excellent blog, Button Mashing.
* The Carnival gets noticed by quite a variety of influential weblogs which point lots of traffic its way and generally get people to notice some blogs they might not have known about.
* Matthew Gallant at Computer Games Online sees the Carnival and writes a rather negative take on the whole thing based entirely on the Carnival’s first entry, a diatribe called The Best Reviews Money Can Buy on peterb’s Tea Leaves blog.
* Josh at Cathode Tan wrote up a quick post taking Gallant to task, which resulted in a lengthy string of back and forth comments which quickly descends into petty insults between Josh, Matthew and other involved/interested parties.
* Places like Mile Zero, and Tea Leaves itself jump in to comment, leading to more comment thread flame wars.

If you missed all this Internet drama, I consider you lucky.

The Video Game Ombudsman: Bloggers vs. The Establishment — Round Googol