In Part I of our interview with the hardest working man in videogame journalism, Geoff Keighley, he revealed the inner workings of his new online show "Bonus Round." In Part II, he talked about his rise from writing previews at the age of 13 to respected multimedia maven at the age of 28. In this final installment, Keighley discusses why despite his success, coverage of videogames is still a hard sell with the mainstream media, and tells us what it takes to make a credible TV show tackling this form of entertainment.

As the revenues of the videogame industry continue to grow, has it gotten easier or harder to get mainstream media interested in your coverage?

All of us are struggling as journalists to get mainstream outlets to do more coverage of videogames. Spike TV has one show about videogames. Entertainment Weekly, most of our stuff goes on the Web site, not in the print magazine. A lot of the time, I feel like game journalists in general are pushing a big boulder up a hill in terms of just trying to get their editors and getting the executives at these networks to believe in videogame programming and the videogame industry.

In some ways, it mirrors what I felt coming out of college. I was talking to law schools and talking to other people about what career I was going to do, and it wasn't as if people thought that videogames were necessarily the next hot thing or particularly respected. In my circle of other gamers and game developers, everyone feels that games are the next hot thing. There's the big headlines about how it's bigger than the movie industry. But I don't know if that really translates into a lot of respect for the medium and people who write about it. That's why when covering it seriously in Entertainment Weekly and Business 2.0, I wanted to write stories that were powerful stories that happened to be about videogames, that would stand up whether I was writing about Larry Probst at Electronic Arts or Larry Ellison at Oracle. Just make them great, compelling business tales about these executives. All of us are still battling that, trying to tell the executives who are probably from an older generation that people really do passionately care about videogames and care about the medium.

What do these executives not understand?

That this is what people are doing on a Friday night, not necessarily going out to see a movie. They're sitting at home on Xbox Live playing videogames. Maybe I'm pushing the boulder up the wrong hill to some degree, in that I'm focusing too much in trying to get old school media and print magazines and linear TV networks to focus on this. Maybe more of it should really be interactive online media, because that's where these gamers are--maybe they don't want to watch a half-hour TV show or read a print review of a game. But I think it's about blending it all together.

That's why "Bonus Round" is great, because it's online, it's a new form of media, but I absolutely still feel that I need to embrace the old forms of media, because that's where a lot of the eyeballs are, and in order to move the business forward, that's what you have to focus. At the end of the day, more people are going to read Entertainment Weekly than are probably going to see "Bonus Round" right now. At the same point, you blend it all together: "Bonus Round" is growing, "Game Head" is gaining viewers and I'm sure there will be new things next year that help move the business forward a little bit.

Your various TV shows have all been informative, entertaining and credible, which is not true of most TV-style programming about videogames. What's the trick to achieving the right balance of all three?

The trick is actually something that's pretty simple: it's just respecting the audience, and speaking to the audience as opposed to down to the audience. Treat games like ESPN treats sports. Look at the way ESPN talks to sports fans. Last time I checked, Stuart Scott and Chris Berman--these are just regular guy's guys who just know the content and are insightful and can bring on good guests who debate and talk. On ESPN's "Around the Horn," it's not like they have three girls in bikinis talking about what's going on in the sports world. That was part of the problem--no one really knew how to cover games on TV, in part because no one had really put the effort into it. Or when people had tried, they weren't really people who were gamers and were the audience. It's very hard to understand what gamers want to see unless you are one yourself.

G4 experimented with a lot of stuff over a number of years. Some of it worked okay, some of it didn't. I think part of the problem there was just that there weren't a lot of resources to put towards really cracking the code on videogame programming. With "Game Head," Spike came to me and said, "Well, what kind of show do you want to do?" It's not like after every episode of the show we get notes from five executives commenting "That N'Gai Croal guy--he's not funny enough," or "You must have one female celebrity per segment."

We get to do a show that I'm proud of every week when I pull it up on my TiVo. It's a show that's entertaining for me to watch, and that's not a vanity thing for me. That's why I enjoy doing the show, because when I'm conducting interviews for the show, it's much like I would conduct an interview for a print magazine, except there happens to be a video camera there. It's great that I don't have to dumb myself down for that audience. And yeah, the questions that I ask are probably a little more mainstream, because I don't want it to be too hardcore, too inside baseball. But Jaimee [Kosanke], the producer of the show, is able to navigate around that, and cut a show that speaks to a wider audience.

So what's the trick? It's a) respecting the audience, and b) because of that respect you have for the audience, bringing them the information they deserve for giving you a half-hour of their time. It's all about value add to me. Yeah, you want to do it in an entertaining fashion, but you also don't want to waste people's time. Gamers are making $60 purchase decisions about which games to buy--

Plus microtransactions.

Yeah. You add it up, people are spending hundreds of dollars a month on games. I look at how many reviews there are out there for movies, which is a $10 experience--more once you add in popcorn--versus videogames. People are spending $500 or $600 on consoles, and then games on top of that. They're consumers who spend a lot of money, and I think they care about the business. If you're going to do a TV show for them--absolutely, there's room to do entertaining TV shows about videogames. That's what a lot of people think about now.

Is that how you see "Game Head," as an entertaining show about videogames?

What I'm doing now with "Game Head" is basically a newsmagazine about the business. The format of it is nothing revolutionary; it's just taking what a print magazine is and transitioning it over to the TV realm. There's still room for someone to develop a half-hour show about gaming that's more entertaining, that has a broader concept to it. That's the $64,000 question: who's going to be able to do that, and who's going to do that first? I have some ideas about that, which I'm toying with. But by and large, the reason "Game Head" works is because it doesn't try to be that as well. It doesn't try to be funny and informative. If you try and throw everything into a show like that, you end up often with an unfocused mess.

If you're a gamer, and you want information on the business and learn something on the show so that when you're talking to your buddies next week, you might sound a little smarter about what's going on in the gaming world--that's what "Game Head" is for you. The trick is not trying to pander to the audience. Luckily, the executives at Spike sort of leave us alone to create that show. Because they're not gamers, and they understand they're not gamers, but they say, "You're speaking to a specific audience, and you seem to know how to speak to them, so do the show that you want to do." At the end of the day, I think they were surprised that the show rated as high as it did, because they were like, "Wow. There is an audience out there that wants to see a show like this." It's not like I've done focus groups--I'm sure a lot of them are hardcore gamers--but there may also be mainstream people who are interested in the business and want to learn about it. If you watch a show like "Game Head," you're able to watch it and actually learn something.

My hope with a show like this is that someone might watch it and say, "I've never bought a videogame system before--or, I used to have an NES [Nintendo Entertainment System], haven't bought anything lately, but I watched that show, I heard this guy talking about the Playstation 3, and hey, I want to go out and buy one because of that." To me, that would be the ultimate compliment to the show, if it introduces new people to the business or brings people back to the business who had gone away. So Mr. Iwata will do it with his Miis, and I'll do it with "Game Head."

[Laughs] You stole my joke, man. Last question: what should we look forward to next year on "Bonus Round"?

We're planning to do a new "Bonus Round" every month, and I'm hoping you'll be one of our guests in 2007. Obviously, the first couple were perfectly timed for the release of the new consoles, so I've done a Sony one and a Nintendo one. We're going to have a broader palette of topics for next year. I'm really interested in talking about things like online downloadable games--David Jaffe told me a little while ago that he really wants to come on, so I'd love to bring him on to talk about Calling All Cars and some of the other titles that are coming out online. I'd like to look at microtransactions, larger trends in game design, really creating an open forum. Even for game designers, when they have issues that they want to talk about, I hope they'll start coming to me and saying, "Hey, why don't we do a 'Bonus Round' about this issue?" As opposed to me pushing topics on people, I'd love for them to pull me in a certain direction and say , "I really want to come on and talk about this issue." And see "Bonus Round" as a forum for people to come on and debate these topics.

I'd do a "Bonus Round" on what's going to happen with E3 next year, and bring on a bunch of executives from game companies and talk about what these changes mean. That's absolutely a very inside baseball topic, but I think there's an audience that wants to know. And right now, there's nowhere for them to go to hear about these topics. They can endlessly go back and forth with each other in threads like Gaming-Age Forums or somewhere like that. But in order to hear from the people that make the decisions and the people that matter, "Bonus Round" is a great venue for that. So I hope we have a whole bunch of different topics that we cover in '07, with a rotating group of guests. Michael Pachter joined us again for the second "Bonus Round," but I think we're going to keep rotating, and you'll see some guests come back in future "Bonus Round" episodes. Having a revolving cast of characters that bring new perspectives to the table. And by this time next year, hopefully we'll have a good dozen "Bonus Round" episodes under our belt, and more to come.

Click herefor part I of our interview with Keighley; for Part II, click here.