In the last few weeks I’ve gotten a couple e-mails about my writing, not the brief peek into my works of fiction that I’ve offered up here sporadically but my “bread-and-butter” of video game journalism. I’m not really a name or particularly well known by anyone so anytime I get an e-mail, whether encouragement or derision, I welcome it. Apparently I am at a stage where my writing gets noticed on its own merit but nobody puts two and two together about my collective work. Essentially there are fans of my writing individually, but there are no fans of me. This means the e-mails I get are usually about singular articles and rarely from the same person. One person once lauded me on my review of WET for how different it was from what other people were offering. Another shot me a message about how they didn’t like my review of Call of Juarez: Bound in Blood because it didn’t let them know anything about the game, a point I debated with them for a while. So an e-mail I got recently stuck out to me because it wasn’t anything about any of my pieces. It was about me.
It was from a sender who was curious about how to get involved in video game journalism, and it was a question I assume lots of real games journalists get often. I’m not a real games journalist, I still consider myself an amateur in the field despite receiving paid work, so I didn’t really know why he would be asking me that question when so many other people are doing a much better job of making it in this cut-throat world of writing about video games than I am. Before I answered him I inquired as to why he decided to ask me. His reasoning struck me, because he was sick of how mainstream sites review games or features and found my style to be different enough that he wanted advice on taking the same route, he assumed since I’m a fairly atypical writer that there may be some way I got into it that would help him out. An extension of that was that he asked if I considered myself a member of the “new games journalism” movement.
That is what got the gears in my head moving. I had never thought about if I subscribed to NGJ or not.
For those of you who read this blog for reasons other than my video game nonsense, I assume you don’t know about what that is. New Games Journalism is something that was coined a few years ago, and the meme answer for what it is would be a form of video game reviewing that relates more to travel journalism than tech writing. Essentially, video game journalism has always been maligned due to how closely games journalists have to work with the companies whose products they are tasked with discussing. In a way, games journalists are more a part of the industry than movie critics are in theirs. One of the reasons for this is, obviously, money. We all get paid from a tickle down of advertising, so if you anger a company that made a crappy game but gives you thousands of dollars a month for advertising, you are on a slippery slope. Examples of this have been documented to death and don’t need to be discussed here, but you could see why that would lead to problems. Especially when you take it a step further and realize that, unlike a tech review of a camera or a car where there are things that are good and things that are bad which would be generally accepted by a large amount of people reading those articles, video games are incredibly subjective. I’ve personally dealt with that conflict of interest on a few occasions. Where a writer is interested in getting his opinion known, and an editor is worried about offending an advertiser. It is never fun.
The New Games Journalism movement was a way to get away from that. Instead of plainly saying “this game has bad graphics and poor gameplay” somebody writing in the NGJ style would instead relate their experiences playing the game in an almost anecdotal way. In this way the reviewer is a canvas and the game is painting its experience onto them, the reviewer then relates those experiences to the gamer. It is no longer a mechanical dissection of the game that ends in a quantifiable score, it is now one gamer telling another gamer how he felt and what he thought while he was playing the game- it was up to the gamer to form their own opinion without being able to just say “this game got a 5, and it is bad.” This lead to many writers being able to take their opinions to blogs and independent sites, which lead to many of those sites being competitive with the bigger and more corporate websites.
Of course, as mentioned in an article on The Artful Gamer early in the year, it hasn’t quite gone the way people thought it would have. Many people feel that the movement has given way to reviewers simply doing the exact same thing they were doing before, only now it is more wordy and a bit “smarter.” Every writer got pretentiously intellectual, but never stopped to think about why the previous formula wasn’t really working. Nothing got changed. Writers and gamers alike still use scores to justify a good game, editors and journalists still bow to their advertising overlords at a disturbing rate. Even worse is how desperate independent games sites are now to make a market share. Show me a website that doesn’t have a Top 10 list of sexy game girls or some recycled article about the console wars in order to generate hits and I will show you a website that nobody goes to.
The irony in the article I just mentioned is that the authors suggestion on how to fix the new games journalism movement would be to make it even MORE pretentious and overwrought. I feel that suggestion would end up making the game reviews in need of artistic analysis instead of the games and would just muddle everything up, but that is just my opinion.
So, short (long) answer, no. I don’t consider myself a “new games journalist.” But, as I’ve said before, I consider myself an artist first and a gaming journalist second. I am an artist who uses games journalism as a medium. That isn’t to say that I don’t do traditional reviews occasionally, but I do the review that I feel has to be done for that game. If I play a game, and the game doesn’t lend itself to me writing something about how I felt and how it reminded me of experiences in my life, I write a regular review where I tell a gamer that the graphics were good and I had fun playing it. If I play a game, like my well received WET and Call of Juarez reviews, and it strikes me to write a short story or do something bizarre in order to put my feelings of the game across, then I will.
But beyond even that, and this is what many people in the New Games Journalism movement (and especially those who consider gaming such an artform their articles are almost so pretentious to be unreadable) seem to forget is that we are writing for consumers. This isn’t some terrible thing. Without consumers there would be no gaming, let alone no gaming industry. The very first thing that I check off when I write a review is if my opinions were expressed in a way that satiates my inner starving artist. If the answer is yes, the second thing I check off is whether or not I think the review is going to help a gamer form an opinion on the game. The reason they need this opinion is because they are going to dedicate a great amount of time and money into it and deserve to be presented with an analysis.
That analysis doesn’t have to be in a heavily rigid article that ends in a numerical attribution to the review. It can be anything. It can be an analysis of why we are gamers and what gaming means to you like the Artful Gamer article would like, it can be a heavily pretentious mess of artistic crap, or it can be that aforementioned rigid and easily digestible scoring system. Over at FACEOFFGAMES I have free reign to do what I like to call ‘concept reviews.’ Like that Call of Juarez review, I may not even want to mention the game, but my tone of the article and the expression within will convey to the reader whether or not I enjoyed it. When I wrote about WET as if I were in the theater of a exploitation film, it was obvious that I was doing that because the game did such a great job at being an homage to exploration films of the past, and I put the effort into doing it that way because the game was entertaining. I didn’t think gamers needed to know, or cared, what I thought about graphics or music or the mechanics of the jumping. It was a game that was a piece of artistic expression, and my review reflected that. When I reviews Halo 3, I simply broke the game down and said what I did and didn’t like about it, because there really wasn’t a reason to sit down and write five pages on why Master Chief is a representation of our childhood or his silence is a commentary on our disconnect as a society. I wrote what I felt, and I felt like I should just write a regular review.
That is my problem with new games journalism, new new games journalism, or anything like that. I don’t feel as if any of it is actually genuine. I read articles about it, and like that Artful Gamer article, I feel like it is so forced. If I were a subscriber to new games journalism I would feel as if it was such a chore to constantly have to do something deep when I’m really just reviewing a game that involves using plants to kill the undead. Like Freud said, “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.” Sometimes a video game is just a video game and doesn’t need any flowery nonsense.
I feel as if many game journalists are thinking only about themselves and forgetting that we owe something to the people who actually buy the games. We don’t owe the advertisers, and we don’t owe the sites we work for, we owe the gamers who make up the culture. I may put my expression and opinion before the reader, but I put the reader well above anything else. I would never write a review that is so incomprehensible and far from helpful that the gamer wouldn’t be able to use it to help them form their own opinion.
I also feel as if games journalism can never, ever be treated like traditional journalism. Our bias as reviewers is a good thing- as long as that bias isn’t some advertising fueled nonsense. If EA gave me a thousand dollars to curry favor for me reviewing a big mess of theirs, I wouldn’t. But if I don’t like RPGs, and I end up reviewing an RPG, I’m not going to present my review as if I’m a journalist sitting in the middle of the aisle, because no matter what my bias is going to weigh on that review. Instead I come right out and say “I don’t like games like this” or if I do a concept review I will do something related to the tropes of the genre or reasoning behind why I don’t like the company. Reviews are about our personal opinions. Hiding your opinions as fact in the name of journalistic integrity does more harm than good. Just look at Fox News for an example of that.
The reason I have no problem with letting my bias known is because somebody somewhere is going to infer that from my review and still be able to form an opinion regardless of what I said, as long as I did my job as a reviewer. If I, for example, hate games like Chrono Trigger (impossible, but this is an example) and in my review of a new game like Chrono Trigger, one of the first things I do is say “I don’t like this game because it reminds me of Chrono Trigger and games like Chrono Trigger” that is fine. Somebody who absolutely loved Chrono Trigger will read my review and be able to understand that they will like the game, even though my review was in a negative tone. Now, if I sit down and write that review, and do it like many websites and magazines ask, where my opinions and bias take the backseat and I never write in the first person, my dislike of the game is going to bleed through with no real reference point. It is simply going to be a number at the bottom of the page and it won’t help anybody. I would have given Halo 3: ODST a 7 if FACEOFFGAMES used a scoring system, and my 7 would have held a decent amount of weight because I didn’t try to hide my bias towards the Halo series. Where as if I didn’t mention my bias and just pretended that I was neutral, that 7 would have been dishonest to the readers. Readers need to take a more active role in understanding individual writers and websites. If you are a Halo mark, and you know a reviewer doesn’t like Halo, than don’t take his word on the review. There should be more of a focus on journalists as an individual as opposed to journalists as a faceless collective under the same domain name.
My opinion on the issue is probably strange and seems a bit conflicting considering how I do traditional and non-traditional reviews and articles. I guess I’m kind of on the outside of the debate anyway, as most people seem to act as if artistic expression and games journalism are mutually exclusive. I’m a Journalism student and an artist, and I obviously disagree with that sentiment. I also know that if I just wrote all my reviews normal, or did all of my reviews as concepts, it would make me a complacent and crappy writer. The idea of blanketly treating all games as art is as odd to me as blanketly treating all games as if they weren’t art.
Of course, none of this answers the senders question about how to get into gaming journalism. But that is because I’m still wondering how to do that myself.
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