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New Games Journalism: Ten Unmissable Articles
The excellent gamesblog at the Guardian has been doing pieces of late on the phenomenon known as New Games Journalism (a topic we've mentioned here in the past). They have an article listing ten unmissable pieces of New Games Journalism, articles that help to define the genre. From the article: "This is a varied bunch, but I think what connects them is emotion, insight, and often a narrative rather than methodical structure. Whatever, just read and enjoy."
It all a good idea as it helps gamers become more informed. If it keeps a few bucks in my pocket than I am a happy customer. I like to read most anything games-oriented so I say bring it on...
I had just read The Great Scam the other day and was very entertained by it's great writing style. However, from talking to EVE Online players, I (like them) have come to believe that the piece is a total fabrication. That is not Journalism, that is just creative writing. Lets call a spade a spade.
Knight37 - Once a Gamer, Always a Gamer
A Rape in Cyberspace
Possessing Barbie
Dreaming in an empty room: a defense of Metal Gear Solid 2
Shoot Club: Saving Private Donny
ZangbandTK: Confessions of a Dungeon Hack
The Great Scam
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
Going Planetside
Red Eye #114
Sex in Games: Rez + VibratorCreative Demolition
That's not even in the dictionary.
I personally think this review of Katamari Damacy over at insert credit is one of the best reviews of a video game I've ever seen. It really cuts to the heart of what games are all about and why this silly little game is so fun. Made more of an impression on me than most of the reviews linked from this article. I ran into it by accident on Google one day, and now I read the site pretty regularly. Was very impressed.
hot foreign sheep.
I mean, are these article and the rest of the "new" gaming literature really great, or just great by comparison? And will game criticism and reviews ever get a forum like the New York Review of Books or the prestigious film commentary journals?
Old Man Murray's reviews of basically everything are far better as a) journalism and b) zeitgeist critique than anything by these mamby-pamby Nu-Kritik lamebots. OMM 4EVR!
It'll be interesting to see what effect this NGJ has on the gaming media and media in general. There are clearly some talented people out there who we might never have heard from previously. Of course, there's a lot of junk too! In any case, here's a tool I whipped up using Yahoo's Search API for doing video game news searches which NGJs might find useful. I built it to help me find interesting things to write about and to help see developing patterns or trends.
http://www.proliphus.com/yws/peywsnews.php
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Wow.
That is easily the most well-written article about video games I have ever read.
I feal... warped
Like when you learn that Santa isn't real. When you learn something that forces you to a realization, that the magic has left the room. The innocence has been lost.
I don't think I'll ever be able to play video games the same way again. This game had changed me, and I didn't even realize it.
Damn. Now I'm all depressed... I guess I should go back to work...
If you want a short poor attempt injecting some NGJ into a review, try Zonk's review of Burnout 3.
At the time, I thought the paragraph about the crash was a cringe-worthy attempt at NGJ. After re-reading it, I still do.
My stupid web site
Good journalism or not, Metal Gear Solid 2 is not a good game. It may be art but is definitely wasn't fun, and I know because I forced myself to finish it after paying 50 bucks for it. I remember hearing someone describe it as "a soap opera with a dart gun." If you want to piss off your target audience, that's the kind of game to make.
"Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?" - Patrick Henry
Funny how HK thinks that the US government going after Napster is tantamount to "mind control".... I wonder how he feels about sharing copies of his video games on KaZaa...
Reading the linked articles, it's like the reviewers decided covering all the details about whatever game they were reporting on was too much work and decided to write about themselves instead.
One of the reviews was 90% about fighting with his kid brother or something ridiculous like that. I'm not entirely certain because I don't give a flying fuck about the reviewer or his brother. It was very difficult getting a sense of the game, you have filter all that crap out and then there's little left.
NGJ is apparently a scam. The "reviewers" claim they are doing work and addressing something the masses care about, the latest games. In reality they are just writing bad literature and self absorbed crap I could go read blogs to get.
For one, the article single-handedly convinced me to play through MGS2 in its entirety, looking at what I originally considered to be a hopelessly mangled story from a fresh perspective, and it instantly went from being one of my least favorite games to my second favorite game of all time (right behind the absolutely uparalleled ICO).
Second, the article introduced me to Tim Rogers, who has quickly become my favorite online writer. Rogers is definitely the love-him-or-hate-him type--your opinion will have a lot to do with your tastes in postmodern art, and even more to do with your tolerance for complete and unabashed pretentiousness. I liked him well enough before I found his (now-defunct) LiveJournal, but when I read this entry I gained a whole new level of respect for him and his writing. If you haven't read anything by Tim Rogers I suggest you check out the above two links, as well as live from seoul: tim rogers' 2003 insertcredit fukubukuro, in particular this one entry that, like all the other links in this post, ranks up there as one of my favorite articles of all time.
Worth noting--Tim Rogers's favorite online publisher, insertcredit.com, says the following about his methods: "If you're going for the Tim style, be sure to fabricate some element of your piece. It doesn't matter how small; the desire is merely to see how many emails you can get. Constant self-reference and inside joking is the way to play here. Drop as many names as possible. Make supplemental videos with lots of screaming and bizarre word pairings. Devise new names for all of your friends, and tell the world about it!"
Anything you might ever need to say about anything has already been said better by Penny Arcade.
The thing with articles like NGJ, is that readers can sometimes get confused. That is to say that some readers need an instant buying decision and those percentage scores often help them. Of course, they'd probably like the works of creative journalism as well, but it gets tricky to include commentary articles about products because you run the risk of annoying the reader when they're looking for a percentage score and find that there is none.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
Here's a list of each article and the exact sentence that made want to stop reading. Just for reference, I tried reading these as if I was reading any other piece of journalism or opinion in a paper or online publication, and yes, I am an English major.
From A Rape in Cyberspace
"A good many months ago -- let's say about halfway between the first time you heard the words information superhighway and the first time you wished you never had --"
I stuttered before I even finished this sentence, as, for one, it has a very snooty "I know more about the Internet than you, you unwashed thing" ring to it. But I was more annoyed that Dibbell was hamming up his already captivating and empathy-inducing story of virtual rape with this cheesy noir hyperbole.
From Posessing Barbie
""I have a confession to make." typed BabyDoll."
I confess, I was really looking for a quick way out of this one. Any "real" journalist, or heck, let's say creative writer, should check punctuation before they publish something. People wonder why the rest of the world doesn't take NGJ seriously. Maybe it's the shitty sub-par editing?
From Dreaming in an empty room
"And . . . to a certain deeper extent, creepy as hell."
The ellipsis in this sentence totally blew me away. Not only is it in completely the wrong place, but Tim felt he needed to expand it with extra spaces. Call me crazy, but if I'm reading an article and I see an ellipsis with extra spaces, there had better be something great after it. As you can see, there isn't. It's a horrible stew of a sentence, flailingly trying to piece together bits of common idiom into a coherent thought. Also, for God's sake, Tim, capitalize your title so it looks like one!
From Shoot Club: Saving Private Donny
"When it came time to make a man jump on a banana, he pronounced it 'gay' and put the controller down."
At first, this seems like a normal, slightly stilted sentence. Nothing a little bit more editing couldn't fix. But you should know that until this point in the narrative, it was all in present tense. In fact, Tom returns to present tense for the rest of the paragraph. I would make fun of him for it, but I just can't find anything else to say.
From ZangbandTK: Confessions of a Dungeon Hack
"Plain, though no-one would ever say that to her face for fear of her tearing off their arm and using it as a particularly bloody stole."
Is it a fragment? Is it a run-on? Is it a poor choice of voices? Is it an adverb obstructing the flow of expression? Holy shit, batman! It's all four rolled into one! At this point I should clarify that what I'm objecting to here isn't writing that's wrong in a technical sense. We're all adults here, and I feel we can use sentence fragments as we please.
What I'm objecting to here is writing that is aesthetically bad. Seriously, try reading this without feeling nauseous. Maybe if you're a native German speaker, you're used to seeing long strings of similar-looking words. I envy you, because this makes me woozy.
From The Great Scam
"You would then sell these pebbles for approximately the same price that an illiterate slave would have received for an ounce of cotton."
Okay, so technically this isn't the first sentence in the article that doesn't make sense, but I was so incredulous over his line about this being a story of "the worst of the human condition," I read longer than I should have. I think the objection here is obvious: it makes no sense. On top of that, it's belligerent, whiny, and exaggerative. It belongs on a slashdot thread about P2P, not in one of the supposedly "best" articles in New Gaming Journalism.
From Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
"What games communicate convincingly is the now."
Actually, this was a fairly decent article except for the tightly-pa
A strain of paranoid prevention can be worse than the disease, whate'er the intention.
The point(s) brought up in Possessing Barbie, as far as There goes, are pretty obvious and not too interestingly written either. It seems to me that the fact that this subject matter is being written in a narrative format is the only reason that it's being deamed fresh and/or "unmissable."
A much better article on There is available here, though it has been featured on Slashdot in the past.
- colin
Bow, Nigger, Possessing Barbie, or Game Girl Advance's much-linked-to Rez piece really helped me consider games as something more than just products again.
Some of these articles seemed* marred by overly confusing writing, some were a wee bit too self-indulgent (I don't really want to hear all about your living situation, and maybe I don't fully understand how gaming can be a lifestyle), but I do like the idea: depict one possible narrative out of the many that a game might provide in cooperation with its players from the point of view of such a player. Show me what it's like to play that particular game, what it feels like, what kind of environment it provides. Makes games seem interesting again - just like when I was 10 or 11 or so and thought I could do anything I want in adventure games.
Beyond all the stuff one might usually think of as art, beyond the music, images, animation and prose, videogames are interactive narratives of a kind not seen before. Whether it's by design or due to technical limitations or combinatorial explosion issues, you're often encouraged (or forced) to play a certain way, to deal with somebody else's situations in ways that aren't entirely yours either. And yet, thanks to the simulationist(/-ish) aspect of video games, you identify, to some extent, with your avatar - much more than in other kinds of games (gamebooks and role-playing games aside). You're much more likely to develop a desire to talk to HL2 characters or to leave the road and explore the countryside in a racing game than to have your chess "characters" argue their way out of being taken. And your Monopoly "character", too, is much farther from Avatar-hood than your MUD/MOO/MassivelyMultiplayerOnlineWhatever persona. (Those weren't the most appropriate comparisons maybe.)
A game designer, given free rein, wields considerably power here, power that could be used to make a point or to thoroughly engage/enrichen/mess with players' minds. For a simple example, consider an FPS that tries to make you feel really awful about all that killing - and yet killing is all you can do, other than quit in disgust. It's a reaction some not-so-desensitized people exhibit anyway, but what if that was the effect it's supposed to have? What if killing wasn't all you can do, but your on-screen avatar had an instinctual life of its own, thwarting your attempts to clear up a terrible "misunderstanding"? (There have been a few text adventures that made you feel what it's like to be unable to act different in a given situation - domestic abuse or social anxiety, for example. I wouldn't call them games, and they didn't exactly have a lot of "replay value", but they do prove (to me that video "games" could be all kinds of things they usually aren't. Those "things" needn't be all grim and serious either, I just couldn't think of anything else.)
So I like NGJ because it often explores these boundaries - between you-the-player and you-your-avatar, between actions in the game-world and their relevance in the real one - and for the sheer joy of gaming it (sometimes) manages to get across. This immersion is something traditional, more "descriptive" reviews sometimes seem to lack. And maybe there's some starry-eyed wishful thinking involved, a desire for games to be something more, but... oh, well. That desire has always been the primary reason I've been interested in games. (Some games I've played because they had pretty snowfall. So? Anything wrong with that?)
</disorganised braindump>
(*I'm not a native speaker, so what do I know.)
Here's another interesting take on dungeon hacking. This one's based on nethack.
You have a sad feeling for a moment, then it passes
You'll laugh. You'll cry. It's (arguably) postmodern. And it's only one page long.