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New Games Journalism
Kotaku has a piece up today mentioning a style of video game editorializing called The New Games Journalism. This piece links to several others. State Wiki has a piece from early this year on what New Games Journalism is, and an examination of its goals. An example of the style is available on the Eve Online site in the PC Gamer article All About Eve. (large pdf) A seminal work referenced when discussing the style is Bow, Nigger, a sharply written and gripping piece about a duel in Jedi Outcast. From the editorial: "For one thing, my screen name has nothing to do with my ethnicity and for another, it's only a game and the fascist doing the typing is probably hundreds of miles away and far beyond anything you could call an actual influence on my life. But still... It's not very nice is it?"
It's blogging.
did you?
Because this doesn't seem like it responds in any coherent way to the linked piece except that it does involve some sort of word.
"...(hint: Native Americans are not from India, idiots.)..."
Yeah, really. You'd think everyone would know by now that they're of Asian descent.
Bill Clinton: Pimp we can believe in. - The Shirt!!!
I'm honored that a professional games journalist would take so much time and effort to write a formal essay which states the obvious fact that something like Penny Arcade casually talking about the games they play is far far more useful to me a consumer than slock ign/gamespy/gamespot reviews.
I never would've figured that out.
Games are art and as such quality is subjective. If journalist A honestly thinks Halo sucked and journalists B, C and D think Halo is great, who is to say who is right?
Which makes game reviews totally different from movie or music reviews.
Oh wait, no... it's exactly the same. There really is nothing new about "game journalism", except that it's typically done by far, far less experienced writers.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
Sometimes, words cause the killing, maiming, and screaming to start. It's worth paying attention to those words. The words themselves don't hurt, but the results do.
Call me a baldheaded cracker; I don't care really, because at the end of the day my paleface still gives me (subtle, but noticeable) privileges.
Here's a hint: with most words, context is everything. There are a hundred ways to use the word "right" -- and some of them are threatening.
Damn those pesky terrorists
And of the Eve piece (just finished reading it) is that unlike normal "reviews", you don't wade through "here's how you play, blah, blah, blah, and then you click this".
The author in both pieces inserts just enough information so you get the ghist, and you understand why it's so enjoyable. I read "Bow Nigger" some time ago and nearly fell out of my chair with enjoyment. After reading several reviews of "Jedi Knight II", this was the first piece that made me want to go play it - right now.
Not every game review should be like this - but I'd rather read 100 "Bow Nigger" tales than yet another "Halo 2 rocks because it's pretty!" Tell us why you loved it - and don't bog me down in the details, tell me why you liked it. What part? What scene in the game? Was there a moment that made you go "woah", or was it just the constant puzzle of trying to find the best place to stay alive with the adrenaline pounding in your ears?
Anyway. Just my $0.02.
52 Weeks, 52 Religions with John Hummel
The article isn't about the word "nigger."
I'll post something useful instead of just leaving it at that, so maybe it will be worth your time to read the article:
The author starts by describing a decline in gaming magazines and their sales and speculates on two options for improving profitability. The bean counters (the author thinks) will want to increase profits by cutting costs (labor costs) on the assumption that the actual writing in the magazine is irelevant. The editors should take a different approach, which is to make the magazine better by writing about games in a different way. He uses "Bow, Nigger" as an example of a different and better way of writing about games.
Along the way, the author understands that it's very very simple to write a buying guide and simpler still for a fanboy to do it. It's my opinion that game publishers (the bean counters) wouldn't mind publishing something in which all games are recommended.
When the axe came to the forest, the trees said, "Look out - the handle was once one of us."
I never really understood why "Native American" was considered a PC term.
I mean it wasn't America until the West made it America.
Would you prefer "stone-age peoples of North America"?
of these assholes in the online gaming world who think that it is cool or funny to call someone a nigger. I'm willing to bet that the majority of these dumbasses are little kids who wouldn't dare say the word in public, or to a black person's face for that matter. In fact, I would bet that you can't get in 1 hour of gaming in any FPS without hearing some kid, who sounds like they haven't even reached puberty yet, saying "hang all niggers, lynch them blah blah blah". It really fucks up the gaming experience.
The percieved anonymity of the internet has allowed cowards and ignorant fucks all over the world to show their true colors. The worst part about it is that your kids, and possibly even your coworkers, are probably some of them! Good to know that we've made such great strides towards eliminating social inequality.
I consider myself to be one of the few real Jedi's on this earth, and using of such a sacred word in such a joking manner offends me greatly.
I will inform the proper authorities promptly
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
I'm sorry but I disagree. I find it offensive when I see people using labels like "jew" or "nigger", or language such as "rape" online. It's not because I'm black, jewish or a rape victim, it's because this sort of language just isn't necessary.
And it's not about being labelled anything because I get just as offended when I see other people being targeted, it's because that displaying that level of idiocy and bigotry isn't something that 99 percent of the perpetrators would have the balls to do in real life. As the Penny Arcade "shitcock" strip illustrated, the anonymity of a public server just seems to draw a certain amount of sheer stupidity and bring out the moron in otherwise rational people.
I swear, if half these idiots had the faintest idea of what it's like to be sexually assaulted then they'd never use the word rape in jest. If they have the slightest idea of what real violence felt like then they wouldn't think of threatening to track someone down, rape their family in front of their eyes, kill them and then start on you (as one less than well-adjusted young man once did to me) just for besting them in a 1v1 matchup.
Seriously, there are some gamers who are clueless imbeciles when it comes to what they say and do, and it seems to me that the proportion of gamers who you'll come across like that online is far greater than the proportion of people who you'll come across like that in real life.
Frankly, I don't need it: I play games to enjoy myself not to encounter racial hatred. And online gaming doesn't need it either: it's this sort of anti-social behaviour that gets gaming a really bad name.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Voldemort!
Hokey statistics and ancient misconceptions are no match for a good thought in your head, kid!
I've been wondering lately about the state of gaming journalism. As an art form, videogames have only existed for twenty-five years or so, and really it's hard to call anything before the 8-bit era art (there are arguments that could be made about that, whatever doubts I may have as to their veracity, butthey are beside the point I look to make here). Yet for some reason, this is still the best gaming journalism can do, and its best, it must be said, is really, really pathetic.
Compare gaming criticism to music criticism, or better still to film criticism, and you'll see how badly, glaringly we lack. (I say we because I am including myself in the community ostensibly serviced by these publications) While there are magazines and sites such as Harry Knowles' and Entertainment Weekly in the film world who are just as sensationalistic and producer-fellating as anything in the gaming world, there are also thoughtful, interesting critics such as Roger Ebert, Paul Tatara, or David Denby, who bring a level of depth and insight into the collaborative artwork they contemplate.
Meanwhile, the best reviews available for gaming are arguably a paragraph-long offhanded comment in the latest Penny Arcade newspost. Film and Gaming are both business-driven, collaborative art forms that engage more than one of the audience's senses, generate emotional responses, and entertain for long stretches of time. Given these parallels, why is gaming criticism in a rut?
My first partial answer to that question lies in the multi-part review system. If you've read the gaming press, you know the drill. First up is a blurb of hype from the press packet, then comes a bit of discussion on the plot and the game's development process. Then the graphics are reviewed, and perhaps a score is given on graphics. Then the audio is reviewed, and this is scored as well. Next the controls, and finally the gameplay mechanics. Then it's all summarized in a paragraph or two at the end, and an overall score or grade is given to the entire product. This is the review we've been reading for years, just the way we're used to.
This review sucks.
I believe that gaming as an art form has moved beyond the point where it's appropriate to consider a game on its different components separately, and that we've been beyond the era when this would be considered appropriate since the 16-bit era, the launch of the original Playstation at the latest. For those of you keeping score at home, the Playstation turned nine this year. Yet in those nine years, the best gaming criticism can come up with is still the useless crap one can read at IGN.
1995 also marked the birth of one of the great experiments in gaming journalism, the US release of Next Generation magazine. Originally just an overseas port of stories found in the UK magazine Edge, Next Generation took on a life of its own and tried to ride the line between industry hype (the infamous Blasto cover, the year-early favorable Daikatana review) and honest, serious thought given to gaming as hobby and art. It was one of the first attempts to write about gaming from the same place that Rolling Stone in its heyday wrote about music. At its best, it even approached respectability. It was even one of the first magazines with serious on-line content.
It was also, naturally, a gigantic financial failure. By the end of its run, it had been turned into candy-coated hundred pages of glossy toilet paper, no better than Game Informer. The pioneering website was replaced with the dreaded (and thankfully deceased) Daily Radar, a name still spoken in hushed voices lest the ghost of Dan Egger's career somehow rise to haunt us all.
There have been other experiments in gaming journalism (eg. the short-lived but brilliant PCXL, basically Maxim for nerds), but all have fallen by the wayside. In the end, the bullet-point categorized review stands tall above a field of fallen competition.
And as mentioned previously, it sucks. These categorized
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
I'm with what George Carlin said about this one. The word has no harmful intent in and of itself; it's all about the context in which you use it.
This article did not use it to directly demean black people, so it's pretty much safe.
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
You make a good point. These days, you can hardly label anyone with any word without being labelled racist. You can call them "Negroes" and get called a racist, yet they have the United Negro College Fund. You can call them "Colored People", but there's the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Even something innocuous as "Black" will get reactions from some people. Now, we're supposed to use "African-Americans", though a lot of people labelled this way have had roots in this country for far longer than most. Not to mention that "African American" treats Africa like some monolithic culture and somehow diminishes the sheer variety of cultures found there. Not to mention that many recent immigrants from Africa are annoyed by that label. So, really, it does depend on context.
Money men didn't get to be money men by making stupid decisions.
If they think that "the quality of writers simply doesn't affect a games magazine sales" maybe it's because the quality of writers simply doesn't affect a games magazine sales.
</devil's advocate>
-- should you believe authority without question?
If Games Journalism is just a job to you, you really shouldn't be doing it. The word should be "vocation".
This quote applies to more than just games journalism. Any of these tossers on /. who have asked, "I'm at A University studying Computer Science - will I get a job?" should be listening up.
People bitch, whine, moan, complain, etc. about how they lost their jobs at the end of the tech bubble, and about how there are no tech jobs available now. I, however, whole-heartedly support the paring down of the industry. In the late 90's, all the news could report on was how much money people were making founding dot-com companies. So, every person out there looking to make a quick buck said, "Hey - I could totally make it selling Vievelflutzers on the Internet." So, millions flocked to Universities, Community Colleges, and Barnes & Noble to get their hands on "Programming for Dummies."
Well, guess what. Programming is not for dummies. It never has been. Programming is a science and an art, and there is no way that you can do it properly without enjoying doing it. You have to enjoy spending hours racking your brain about organizing data structures, communicating with collegues about new ideas, and researching what other people have already done. It's a difficult field, and if you're just there because your buddy told you that you could make millions, you have no choice of making it.
Go figure out what you like doing, and do it. Don't try to do my job half-assed.
Well, we're all good then, since India is in Asia :)
One man's Funny is another man's Offtopic.
You're being too sensitive. The word's context is that of a quote (read the article). There is no racist usage of the word except from the quote in the story - a phenomenal writing about a game, by the way.
At the bottom is GameSpy, which is now a malware distributor.
"Next Generation" was worth reading, in its day.
This isn't journalism. It's blogging.
I'm not sure I understand the point you're trying to make. Journalism entails the publishing of facts and opinions to a wide audience. Blogging does the same thing. Just because the "journalist" is trained and being paid in no way makes that piece of writing any more valuable than the amateur blogger. Writing is writing, and the source should not matter, only the quality of the content and the effect it has on the audience.
The "Bow, Nigger" article is fabulous. It does a good job of providing some insight into the game, is funny at the same time, and also tackles some of the more pressing issues in online gaming (cheating, harrassment, etc). By labelling it as "blogging" and refusing to call it "journalism" by your standards, are you trying to devalue it? Would you not go and see an indie band because they burned their CD's at home, and aren't played on the radio? Are they not still considered musicians?
I'm tired of people being so down on blogging. Writing is writing, and it makes no difference whatsoever in what forum it's being presented. Please start judging it by its quality, and not its source. That's what art is all about.
Do you think it just might be possible that one could read or write about video games for a purpose beyond simple consumer awareness?
When your local university has classes on film criticism, do you mock them because they're considering greater questions than whether or not "Blade: Trinity" is worth seeing this week at the multiplex?
Get over yourself, for a minute. As surprising as it must be, it's possible to have thoughts about the video game experience beyond "should I buy this or not?"
I never have frustrations, the reason is, to wit:
If at first I don't succeed, I quit!
You're welcome. Now pull your knee jerk reaction back and read the fricking piece and you'd understand why it's not a problem. However you just stop at seeing the words and freak out.
Immature, hypersensitive, or stupid, I guess you can take your pick.
Everything someone says is merely a "word". It's the idea behind the words that bothers people... If someone makes fun of me, obviously I don't care about the word either. What bothers me is the idea the person is expessing, for instance if they're implying I'm a less "valid" person than he/she or someone else is... It's the whole feeling of someone else indicating to you that they feel you are "below" them in some manner, and the feeling that someone else is hostile towards you when you don't feel you deserve it.
"Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" is probably the most misguided defensive statement I've ever heard, seeing as how it's an outright lie, as evidenced by the extremely noticable reactions essentially all people have to insults/taunting etc.
Yes, it does.
For instance, at work, if some money goes missing from the drawer, I'm not the first person they suspect.
People don't lock their car doors when I walk down the sidewalk. When I drive a nice car, I don't get pulled over on suspicion of having stolen it, or on suspicion of nothing at all.
When I do get hired for a job, there's no sneaking suspcion on my or anyone else's part that the color of my skin, and not the legitimacy or quality of my experience, was the deciding factor.
Not to mention the amazing perks I'm likely to get should I find myself in the criminal justice system; for instance, a considerably lesser likelyhood of getting the death penalty, or of serving any time at all, especially for drugs.
See, that's what "white privledge" means - all those things that are so great, yet so transparent that you forget that not everyone benefits from them. These are things that you shouldn't have to be white to have, I agree. But to simply dismiss the leigions of minorities who lack these privledges every day, on the basis of some hypothetical reverse discrimination that I doubt has actually ever occured for you, isn't quite racist - it's just stupid.
I never have frustrations, the reason is, to wit:
If at first I don't succeed, I quit!
Best game journalism comes from ebgames.com and amazon.com review posts. These are people who buy the game or tell you straight dirt or what sucks or broke.
Their messages are short to the point, and they review it for the love/hate of the product for no money. The reviews come from people of all backgrounds, sex, diversity, age etc. What journalism is more pure than that?
are a fucking idiot. Learn to type. He's not whining about anything you fucking moron. God, I don't even think there's enough insults to cover the bounds of your stupidity.
(Now, before you mod me a troll, remember, I'm only saying what everyone else was thinking.)
Wheel in the sky keeps on turnin'.
Insert Credit is one game site I hit up consistently. They frequently look at Japanese releases and what's going to be coming here stateside. Katamari Damacy is one of those bizarre, fiendishly successful titles which showed up on IC's radar first in the Western gaming-news scene.
The other site that really interests me is Tetsuya Mizuguchi's personal blog. It is like a glimpse into the life and mind of a game designer -- not just any designer mind you but the genius behind Rez. So hearing what he has to say on games and the Japanese techno-culture is interesting if only for the context it lends.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Douglas Hofstadter highlighted an important distinction when discussing speech that is pertinent to this.
What he calls the "Use/Mention" distinction is very important - it's racist to use the N word, however if someone else uses it publically, the fact of it being used can be mentioned without this being racist also, consider, for example a (hypothetical) news story :
Porkbarrel B. Votebuyer, the legendary, and legendarily corrupt representative was today relieved of his duties for calling a colleague a "Damn Nigger Lover"
The reader needs to know what he said to understand how he could be fired on the spot.
I can sympathize with the surprise of coming across the word in a headline, but since the link is to a page with that exact headline, and that page is a good faith examination of anonymous racial taunting in an on-line game, I think it's a valid mention of the N word.
Besides being a gripping read, Bow, Nigger conveyed to me exactly the information that would help me make a good choice buying this game. Specifically, I buy a game if I think that it will have a long life on my hard drive, and that means multiplayer. Through the course of the interesting narrative, the author touched on the mechanics of the game and the quality of the effects. But, more importantly, he conveyed the intangibles that are absent in any standard game review I've seen before. After reading the story I felt a sense of how the game actually plays, as well as a sense of its online community.
I'm searching now, in another window, for a copy of JKII on ebay, since I passed over this title when it was released.
So where did this alternative meaning of "rape" come from? It came from people actually using violent sexual behaviour - the traditional meaning of the word "rape" - to describe how they beat someone. It's not "a good word to show that something was done forcefully", it's using violent language to project violent imagery.
There are a hundred better ways to describe beating someone in a game - "total domination", "whooping someone's ass", etc - and a fair proportion of those wouldn't be to everyone's liking but "rape" is hardly a word that's a readily acceptable alternative to 99 percent of the population, and definitely not to 50 percent.
Is it any wonder that gamers get easily stereotyped as mal-adjusted geeks with poor social skills when language as colourful as "rape" is considered a harmless part of their lexicon? Come on, would you use it to describe to your girlfriend, wife, mother or grandmother how effectively you won a game? I don't think so, and I think you know why.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I think it's not so much that these guys are talking about "the way it is", as the biases are very obvious in both contexts - on both the Daily Show, and Penny Arcade, you know where the authors are coming from and so you can take that point of mental origin into account when reading what they have to say.
With a supposed "unbiased" source of news or game reviews, it's harder to know which way the books have been cooked, so to speak - and thus the information you derive from that source can be off because you are not able to account for the bias that is really there.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
This happened to the athlete, Kriss Akabusi. After winning a race in the USA, he was interviewed by a news reporter:
"So, Kriss, what does this mean to you as an African-American?" ..."
"I'm not American, I'm British"
"Yes, but as a British African-American
"I'm not African. I'm not American. I'm British."
And tomorrow the stock exchange will be the human race
I hate censorship as much as anyone else here on Slashdot but what I'm not talking about censorship, I'm talking about respect for other people.
Would you walk up to some random guy in the street and call him "nigger" or "jew"? If you were playing pool against some guy you'd just met in a bar and you totally outclassed him would you tell him that you've just "raped" him? No? Why not? Is it perhaps because such language would be offensive and inappropriate?
The fact that he's two foot away from you and could easily take a swing at your head factors into the equation just a little bit too, doesn't it? It's a lot riskier situation than doing the same thing online when you're hiding behind the anonymity of the Internet, isn't it?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
No, you can do more. You can reply with something like,
You'd be surprised how many people in a game will chime in and back you up, but who didn't bother to say anything about it. Well, okay, maybe you wouldn't be surprised, but I sometimes am.
Then frag the hell out of them.
That machine was a slouch in the CPU area. Barely faster than an Xbox CPU, but with all that 'wonderful' Windows overhead. Halo1 may not have a lot of geometry, but it features tons of shader effects, large environments, advanced AI, and bump maps on everything. (Not a lot of PC games have done some of this stuff prior to Halo, so drivers and everything simply weren't tuned for the game's requirements, which just exasperated performance issues.) Gearbox should have certainly done a better job on the port, but your machine had a pretty big weakness. :D
And a problem with your criteria is this - most games sold today exceed your requirements (ex: see most console games). Where do we go from there? Meeting a technical level is great and important, but ideally most games are going to achieve that. We need to be able to go further...
Disregarding that, I do agree a similar review check should be made on all software (especially for framerate, being relatively bug-free, and controls). But I think we should treat it as a basic requirement - it shouldn't factor into the game's 'important' score like it does now ("One star off for a bad framerate!"). It should just be a separate score, a simple yes or no. Then the game's content should be reviewed separately.
Right now if a game has a good story, or fun multiplayer, or some other really positive factor it can somehow outweigh basic unacceptable faults like a crappy framerate. That isn't right - devs need to be held to a certain level of expected technical quality. We don't really see films released that are unintentionally lit incorrectly, right? It needs to be that if a game can't work correctly, it completely fails some kind of very important criteria. No amount of quality in the rest of it should let it avoid that mark of shame.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. -- Francis Bacon
You have to remember that this guy is writing in the context of the British games magazine market. The style of writing in many of the magazines is a cross between Viz, FHM and the Sun ('Adult' cartoons with fart and dick jokes, Playboy with more articles and tabloid crap for non-Brits).
Given that background, I can see why he would want to spark a revolution in games writing.