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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."
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
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?
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.
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.)