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The New Games Journalism
aanand writes "Superstar UK games journalist Kieron Gillen (his blog seems to be down at the time of writing) has written a fascinating editorial/essay on what he calls The New Games Journalism, in which he discusses the future of printed and electronic games writing, and offers some good insights into where the next generation of writers might be headed."
his blog seems to be down at the time of writing
/.ing ever, just submitting the story was enough to take the site down.
Wow, the fastest
The IT section color scheme sucks.
Some magazines will continue to exist for the few who somehow wish to have the few, magazine-exclusive new updates about games.
The rest of us have moved on though. With the amount of information you can have at your finger tips immediately with online sites, I have no reason to go back to print media. Call of Duty's 1.3 patch came out yesterday; personally, I'd rather know that yesterday (due to the net) rather than on a cd in a couple of weeks with a gaming mag subscription. World of Warcraft has interesting updates all of the time that I'd have to wait to read about too.
I'm not sure I buy this quality of writing argument though. Gamespot's writers (and the Gamespot Live folks) often make their stories/videos more entertaining than the main mags in circulation at the bookstores.
I'd be bold and say printed mags will disappear, but I know that's not true. Despite massive amounts of annoying ads (another thing I can avoid with an internet subscription), some people still like to have a physical copy. They will continue to support a market, although the market will dwindle some over time.
More advertisments with hip dressed posers holding there new console and looking all edgy with there semi-emo coolness just dripping from the photo...
more titties and celebrities who got paid more than what you make in a year for giving a little blurb about some game that "Omg I think its like totally cool"
More sidetalking taco goodness.
More articles that just make gamers look like morons who will snap up whatever POS they are hocking just because some guy name "Extreme Tony" who is as hip and cool as the guy in ad for a sidetalking taco says we should buy it.
More bullshit in general.
"I am a kernel in the linux army"
insert credit addressed many of these same points in their feature Journalism: The Videogame.
At EB Games they had/have some deal where when you become a 'member' you get GMR magazine for free. Well, sometimes if you are selling a lot of games back, you'll make more money by 'becoming a member' (giving $10 bucks- Homestarmy *2). And 'members' get a free magazine.
So- basically you get a subscription to GMR for free.
I think this is one of the best games magazines out there. There are TONS of funny little tidbits throughout the magazine, on the bottom of the page, at the end of the reviews, etc. that you need to go looking for- kind of like Mad magazine.
Even the stupid listing of their staff is usually pretty funny- and the 'letters from subscribers' section is one of the most entertaining reads I get all month. It is as if someone combed through Slashdot Games and found the best 10 posts and put some 'snappy answers to stupid questions' reply.
At first I thought I woulnd't like the magazine, because it is multi-platform. I really don't have any reason to read about a Gamecube exclusive- I don't have a GC. But I read every article in the magazine, because it is written in an entertaining way. And now I am much better informed about what is happening out there in the gaming world.
I also read the 'Official Xbox Magazine' - because it has demo disks each month. Unfortunately this magazine suffers from some serious fan-boyism- which is to be expected from the 'Official' magazine. So trusting the previews or reviews of games is difficult, because they buy/sell ALL of the hype.
If EB ever offers you some stupid membership, with a magazine- give it a shot. Because you gotta read something while sitting on the toilet.
No reason to lie.
THE NEW GAMES JOURNALISM
This may turn a little manifesto, but forgive me. It's a juvenile form, but such posturing can occasionally serve a purpose. And sometimes, as Kate Bush's Cloudbusting is currently informing me, just saying it could even make it happen.
I return from Delfter Krug and an evening with comrades. After the traditional lusting after barmaids and discussing the various challenges facing the geek nation, we turn to one of the conversations that I, as a devotee of the gaming press, prayed that was happening somewhere in the universe at any particularly moment.
It was, simply, Games Journalism: Where now?
The money men are worried - and have been worried forever - about the encroaching nature of the internet on mags. They've got a point. Games magazines are, primarily, buying guides, offering either information about forthcoming games or definitive reviews of said shiny consumer items. What to get excited about and what to put money down on, basically. Web coverage does both, and usually quicker.
Secondly, they operate as a shit filter. You buy a mag so you don't have to spend all your life doing the necessary research to find everything out youself: A digest of what's knowing in gaming. While keeping track of what's actually worthwhile with forthcoming stuff is a little trickier , sites like Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic handily gather every web review in existence together and average the score. Assuming equality of judgements - which is a big assumption, but outside of the current piece's mandate - this is perhaps the finest shit filter ever invented. Anything genuinely good will be picked up. Abstractly, anyway.
So why buy mags?
Mag's offline abilities and toilet-based browsability are one thing, clearly. The second traditional reason is that they're mostly - and there's exceptions, clearly - hugely better written. If you want a little entertainment with your information, mags are where to turn.
Ironically enough, you'd be hard pressed to find a money man who actually believes this point. While none have quite dared say it to my face yet, an increasing number are opining in smoky boardrooms that the quality of writers simply doesn't affect a games magazine sales so they might as well turn to recruiting armies of kids who don't know better straight from college, burning them out in a year, and then getting another set. There's been companies who have worked on this assumption ever since the dawn of videogame journalism, and it's an attitude that appears to be spreading.
The reason why the money-men's line has been gaining credence is that things are pretty tight in publishing. Sales of this generation of magazines have been nowhere near what they'd expecting. The biggest selling British games mag circa this period in the games console cycle was 450,000 or so. The current best-selling title has managed 200,000. This doesn't look good on spreadsheets, so they're tightening their belts and looking for places loose a few pounds. Creating a culture where Editorial is basically disposable is one, certainly.
However, it's in these periods of a magazine's industry's life that comes the chance for radical change. When things are bad, it's a war between money-men who want to keep profits by reducing costs and the editorial who want to keep profits by being *better*. The idea of "being better" is somewhat alien to the money-people, who've pretty much forgotten any idea of what creative impulses actually are - or, more relevantly, the ability to have faith in anyone else's.
So, to choose a parallel, at the turn of the millennium the money men came to prominence in the music mags, and pretty much destroyed them all. In a similar situation in the seventies, the music's press slump was reversed by discovering a new underground to write about and new writers to express their love of in increasingly imaginative ways. Ideally, since I selfishly enjoy writing about games while still wanting to be able to meet my gaze in the bathroom
Having not had the opportunity to read British gaming mags, I cannot speak from personal knowledge of how good they are. Assuming your claim is true, though, the idea seems much more realistic.
Videogame writing is probably the poorest in the entire publishing industry. Game reviews are worse than the very shallowest movie reviews; at least movie reviewers almost always see the complete film. You say these magazines are little more than buying guides -- well, if a catalog is a buying guide, than maybe. Previews are almost always breathlessly aroused by the thinnest drip of screenshottage and developer quotes. Reviews have more to do with the surrounding hype and the reviewer's "prestige" -- IGN's highest rated PC game is BLACK & WHITE. (Yes it has interesting mechanics. But so does Battlecruiser 3000AD. Neither are good games or good values)
It's just a pale shadow of hollywood "journalism". I know you want to justify your favorite lonely pastime but face it: it doesn't deserve to be taken seriously. I'd hope for a post discussing what they might do to begin improving the sad state of things.
Tomer Gabel
This is a trend that I've been observing for the last 18 months or so, and I really have to give Penny Arcade kudos for bringing it to a point:
Most gamers, overall, don't trust review sites.
And why should we? We read the same hype for a game coming out in six months from a magazine or one of the new giant conglomerates of GameSpy IGN Gamespot (former Gamespot and Gamecenter) and Daily Radar (the latter which has mercifully passed on). "This game will be the greatest! Look at the graphics! Reasons to bash this other console or game before it's released!"
And when the game comes out, some reviewers will stick to their guns calling it great, some will trash it and we'll never talk about ti again, because the "Next Great Game!" is about to be released.
We've come to see it's all just marketing. It's not that it wasn't before, but back when Voodoo Extreme first popped up, it was just Billy "Wicked" Wilson talking about going to Kung Fu and what was happening in the gaming world.
Then IGN bought it, and what is it now? I haven't even looked at it for probably years now.
It's not that marketing and commercialism is bad, but after awhile it's like having nothing but Ding Dongs to eat. You start to hunger for something more. You start to wonder if your next meal will be different or more of the same.
Tycho and Gabe mentioned this when they bashed reviewers. Not just for "I like this game it's cool and you suck", but for pointing out how innaccurate their reviewers were, as if maybe - just maybe! - the game hadn't truly been played. That some "reporter" had spent an hour with the game, decided they didn't like it, and that was it.
So who do we trust? And that's probably the reason why, as Mr. Gillon pointed out, we're looking not for reviews and articles, but people. People who are like us, or even not like us - but we get to know their opinions and viewpoints so we feel like we can trust them. When Tycho says he likes a game, we know his stances on RPGs or card games or whatever, and can judge based on that.
When Timothy Long of Insert Credit talks about a how he got Astroboy off of a former bunny girl, how he's playing the game is as important as the game review itself. We know him, and while we might not always agree, at least we know why he feels that way about the game.
I read "Bow, Nigger" as referrenced by Mr. Gillon, and thought it was one of the best damn articles I've read this year - and it made me want to go play "Jedi Knight II". It's been sitting on a shelf at home, waiting for me, but now I understand how it can be played.
I wonder what will happen to game magazines in the long run. Readership is down, and I imagine most of them will wind up like either Nintendo Power - really just an advertisement for Nintendo, or Gamefan, a former magazine made of game lovers that crashed during the Dot-Com Bust.
Probably it will be as it always is: cycles. Something new rises up (like Mr. Gillon mentions, the alternative scene in Seattle from musicians tired of being force-fed 80's culture). It has underground movement, then one day somebody realizes you can make money off of it (see also "rap music"). It gets popular, then turned into the same marketing glitz, and then the soul is gone, and it starts up again.
Game magazines will do the same. I predict that in a few years we'll have a true "Fanzine" pop up - maybe all on the Internet, maybe sold through a few fans online, propped up with CafePress like goodies. It will grow, people will love the folks running it, and then it will get bought out and everything good about it will be gone.
And we'll start again. Like we always do. Because in the end, while we don't think we can trust people, we're always looking to reach out and form those communities to tell each other how we feel about what we enjoy.
Some will just do it better than others - and the cycle all starts again.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel