In this article I confront the New Games Journalism movement, and take a look at where it went. As a wonderfully tongue-in-cheek article over at Hardcasual.net parodies, it is becoming obvious that we produced a dysfunctional and narcissistic child. While I cannot pretend to have the “answer” or “fix” for our current crisis, I do offer what I think is a credible alternative. We need to open a dialogue on this issue, I think, instead of diagnosing and treating it like an out-patient. This involves our very identity as gamers, and without a hard look at ourselves we are at risk of repeating a long, uninteresting, history.
A Bit of History
In the last three years I have witnessed a trend in game journalism and game writing. Throughout the 80s and 90s, and the first half of the new millennium, major print publishers were our primary source of game reviews. Cries of review bias and a lack of journalistic integrity were ubiquitous in the 90s… and represented a general discomfort with the idea of a publication being the arms-length advertising appendage of a major console/game publisher. Especially now, it is hard to conceive of Nintendo Power as a credible journalistic source. But, I can remember being 13 years old, dropping five bucks every month on the latest copy of GamePro magazine, knowing that its reviews were skewed at best, and all-out fabricated at worst. I bought a copy of Faceball 2000 for my GameBoy based on a raving review, only to find out it was a horrifically unplayable bastardization of Wolfenstein 3-D. But I still swallowed it, and purchased games in a frenzy.
The De-institutionalization Movement.
Fast-forward to 2005. Twenty years of cynicism mounted, and the “indie” game movement was gaining momentum. All of a sudden gamers and bloggers alike were crying for deeper, less biased, reviews of games. For the next couple of years we tossed accusations of marketing bias and journalistic poverty at the major online review networks, and saw them slowly crumble to what they are now. And I should be clear here… I think the de-institutionalization of game reviewing/writing was a major and welcome disruption of the status quo, and we are better for it. We saw smaller blogs sprout from the collective disillusionment, and the last three years have seen a gradual growth of this “new games journalism”, such that now I do not even find myself cruising the major gaming news networks for information on the latest’n'greatest.
A New Hope.
Now that the great publishing beasts have been defeated and their ashes scattered to the four corners of the Earth, we might take a brief respite to mull over where we have ended up. The “New Games Journalism” movement proposed originally in Kieron Gillen’s Manifesto gave some of us the courage to write about our “subjective” experiences of games. And there is something liberating in the idea: instead of relying upon the traditional objective review criteria (ie. on a 1-10 scale) we could turn to our experiences for inspiration. Like Tom Wolfe, we were going to embrace the “I” in game writing. We were going to build new communities of thinkers and write deeper, more insightful, ways of understanding the boxes of bits and bytes we’ve treasured for the last 30 years.
The New Dire Straits.
But something happened along the way that corrupted the heart of the NGJ ideal. Instead of becoming deeper and more insightful, we became pretentiously intellectual. Instead of writing about our personal connections to games and what they mean for the entire social collective as loving/breathing/thinking human beings, we write about our individual opinions. Instead of understanding the game-player dialectic as a holism – one implying and transforming the other – we atomize and deconstruct gameplay and player experiences as separate things. Instead of providing deep critiques of games and reflect upon what they express of our societies as they are now, the vast majority of critiques cherry-pick superficial aspects of a game – such as an NPC’s skin-colour or gender – and perpetuate the very stereotypes they wish to undermine. Journalistic objectivity has been replaced by opinion and thinned-down experiences, rather than exploring how games-publishers-societies-experiences set the stage for our opinions of them. We ignore hundreds of years of thought on the review of art and aesthetics, and instead feed off of the blogs and inane personal judgements of game developers who are themselves part of the mess.
Most disturbing in this stillborn transition to a NGJ, I think, is an insidious double-move that involves both the critique and reliance upon “AAA” publishers and the games they release. Where the major online and print publishers of yesteryear were financially dependent upon AAA developers, we have become personally dependent upon them in terms of our identities. Yes, we rant and rave that Electronic Arts and (to a lesser extent) Ubisoft refuse to “innovate” and have become creatively complacent institutions. We pick-apart their games and show that the games they release lack interesting characters, stories, novel narrative approaches, artistic details, and rely upon tired genres and franchises. But in doing that – what new insights about the relations between human beings and games have we come to? None. Or worse, this. We now consume game writing in the same way we consume games. I assure you that the AAA publishers have not suffered because of us.
This New Games Journalism – that was originally supposed to be something like travel writing – was profoundly corrupted in a consumeristic way of thinking about gaming. Instead of reading print mags, we now rely upon blogger “impressions” or “analyses” to justify our purchasing habits, just as we have already been doing for the last 20 years. In the end, journalistic coverage of new game titles consist of “previews” or “reviews” based on web-culled images and personal opinions, the modern re-incarnation of a blogger-driven GamePro. The advertising arms of Nintendo and Sony, where once were discernible in the popular “official” magazines and criticized on that basis, have now been fully integrated in blogger game writing. We now are at the edge of the most pernicious form of self-censorship possible: we have come to understand our tastes and subjective experiences in terms of the individual consumption that the AAA game economy relies upon while at the same time pretending and affirming that our tastes are trustworthy and personal in themselves. We consume games, and write many things about them, and believe that our self-created “communities” of consumption are thoughtful, social, and sufficiently critical. They are not.
The Way Out.
I recognize that this argument will receive some opposition, especially from those deeply committed to game writing and their particular game-playing habits. I recognize my own complacency here – in most articles I have written over the years there is an enticing view of the gamer as someone on a self-critical quest for meaning and self-transformation. Rather than presuming who we are as gamers (which I myself have done for too many years), it is the gamer her/him-self who needs to question his attachment to games.
A New New Games Journalism is concerned with our very being-as-gamers, in light of the specific games we play. It is concerned with how games are both the expression of our societies and selves, and how they come to shape our personal lives in how we play them. It is not based on our opinions of whether a particular game is good or bad or boring or fun, but rather whether we should be playing these games at all or doing other kinds of things. It should be concerned with how we can play games in the light of certain personal goals, or show how particular games transform us to see the world in certain ways. It will be concerned with understanding if games are actually playful or if they are steeped in some other form of activity like consumption or violence. This New New Games Journalism has to give us new opportunities for expressing ourselves in the social arenas we live in, rather than new opportunities for self-censorship and its associated self-deception.
We must write our personal narratives and think about them – just as Kieron Gillen pointed us towards – and show how they fall into a larger living world beyond mere opinion. And in doing that we have to resist the temptation to institutionalize game writing as form of rigid and lazy academic thought, a malignant tumour already beginning to metastasize in some places, and pursue it as a form of poetic self-expression. Game journalism can be just as exciting and enlightening as playing games themselves!
Yes, de-institutionalizing game writing was a step in the right direction, yes we need to become better writers (as Chris Buffa notes), and yes getting rid of objective review criteria was a good thing. Now is the time to take the ball and run with it – we have been running-in-place at the 50 yard line for far too long. There are already some writers out there trying to eke out an existence in the collective roar, but they remain at the fringes of what is read, and require more critical engagement in order to come to a fuller and less fragmented expression. We need a new community of writers willing to try something new together, rather than perpetuate the existing style.
With all the pomp and circumstance of a 15th century aristocrat, I pronounce the New Games Journalism movement dead, rotting in the ground, and in need of a successor.
Long live New New Games Journalism!
Update: Brendan Caldwell wrote an excellent response to my article (and several others on NGJ) that both critiques my position as he sees it, and brings up new, thoughtful questions about the practice of game writing. I highly recommend reading it.
Author’s note: Although this article has been worded quite strongly, I truly mean no personal disrespect to the writers and gamers and journalists implied or critiqued here. Rather, this is an opportunity to really open up a new discourse on game writing that is sorely overdue. I hope that this produces (even heated) responses, rather than quashes them.
History: For you collector, preservationist, historical types.
Indie Games: Reflections on indie games and their developers
Industry and Journalism: Commentary on the industry and its journalism.
Interviews: Conversations with interesting people, or interviews with Chris.
News: Current hubbub, moral panics and announcements for this site.
Philosophy and Psychology: Understanding how gaming intersects with human dwelling
Retro Gaming: Classic adventure, role-playing and action games of yore.
Storytelling, Narrative, and Writing: How and why stories and writing are important.
Visual Art: The roles that visual experiences and aesthetics play in games.
Worth Reading: Books, articles and blogs that are worth your time and money.
From Jamie Love:
I hoped/knew someone was going to cut through it all with a hot knife. I’m a little dazed to finally read it. Maybe I wasn’t expecting it. Certainly there is no one better suited to write it. Thank-you for having the courage to tackle this Chris.
From chris:
Thanks for the response Jamie. So, any thoughts on how this might be done?
From Kylie Prymus:
I’m a bit confused about the distinction between the new and the new new. Let me see if I’ve got this right:
OGJ – print publications and their internet counterparts a la EGM, Gamespot. Often transparently biased.
NGJ – mainstream critics that are more neutral and write a bit more personally/passionately (rather than just technical descriptions) a la Totilo, Croal, as well as bloggers with similar engagement. Often a focus on hyper-intellectualizing but at the end of the day still driven by what makes games good and how to make them better.
NNGJ – less concern with whether particular games are good or bad and more concern with how games (in general?) make us feel? Is it a move away from the possibly inappropriate moniker of “games” because it doesn’t view games as necessarily about fun but more about their affect on us? Emotionally/Intellectually/Psychologically?
Maybe I’m not someone as stepped in NGJ as I am in what you’re calling NNGJ so I assumed that’s what you meant by NGJ. But then you mentioned blogs like Vorpal Bunny and Man Bytes Blog as examples – of NNGJ? I think I can really get on board with the idea – hell, I own Faceball 2000 and can talk at length about how it makes me feel! – if I can understand the distinction a bit better.
From chris:
Hi Kylie – Thanks for helping to think through the problem with us – it isn’t exactly easy to pick things apart in the article.
OGJ: Yes! Great way of putting it. Almost hilarious in its transparency
What-Became-of-NGJ: I think you’re following the direction I’m going here. Mainstream critics that act more as marketing research focus groups rather than real, self-critical, thinkers. Instead of critiquing their tastes and interests in games or showing how games fall into a particular way of being/living, they prod at a game and tell us what was good or bad about it. This is shrouded under the umbrella of “making games better by providing reviews of them” – and I do not doubt their genuineness here – however this is just another form of market research and product improvement. There is nobody asking the question “Why should we play games at all?”, or “Why do I need to buy new games?”
My-Idea-of-NNGJ: I don’t think we need more blogs about how people “feel” about games… I think we’ve endured too many people spouting off their opinions on how games make them feel
Yes, NNGJ *would* involve understanding IF games can transform us emotionally/intellectually/psychologically, but it is not limited to that. NNGJ would also involve understanding just where games fit in our whole culture, and why we play them. We did a tremendous disservice to Kieron Gillen’s idea when we refused to become reflective about the incredibly complex roles games play in our societies. Instead, we turned inwards and became narcissists, trying to show how our opinions on games are the most important thing in the world.
I think Denis over at Vorpal Bunny Ranch and Corvus at Man Bytes Blog are two folks earnestly trying to open our eyes to a different view on games and why we play them. Denis is a gay gamer and really puts himself on the line to understand how games and sexuality (among other things) are inherently linked together. Corvus is a storyteller and has been digging at how stories and games are related. But like any other kind of journalist or thinker, they need a community to participate in refining their thoughts. With a new community of writers we could really push the line on this whole business, instead of getting caught up in the infinite ‘I played a game/Here is my opinion/Here is your response/Yay now games are better’ loop. I don’t know what NNGJ would really look like, but I suspect that it would be much closer to Kieron Gillen’s manifesto with some critical changes in view of what has happened in the last 3 years.
Hilarious that you own Faceball 2000. I admit that I kept my copy, now thankfully buried in a storage box of Nintendo equipment.
From Justin:
This was an interesting and somewhat unexpected read, which I can’t comment much on, since I feel considerably out of the loop when it comes to games journalism of any kind… yours being the only gaming-related blog that I regularly read and that’s because you don’t post so frequently that I can’t keep up.
It is, indeed, slightly difficult to know what you mean by NNGJ without a definitive exemplar – do you think you could write one yourself? I get the sense that this NNGJ takes an approach where the relationship between the particular player, society and the game are all considered, and how they affect each other – is that right? I once wrote something essay-like that looked at some very deep (I think) relationships between games and society, although not focused on a particular game, which might have some use if I polish it up… Or maybe not.
From chris:
Justin,
Thanks for the reply. I agree that we need some concrete examples of it, and I’m in the process of working on a few ideas. Putting this together will take me some time, I suspect. But I am inspired to do something about it.
Yes – I think you’ve understood me exactly on the point that it’s about the relationships between games and ourselves and society. If you have even a rough article to contribute, I’d love to read it. Polish always can come later.
… and *ahem* I wish I could post a little more frequently. *blush*
From Infinity's End:
Hey, I just wanted to let you know that I just found out about this site through a friend and I deeply respect and admire your writing and thoughts. I have boycotted most gaming journalism/reviews for quite a while now after growing up and realizing that it’s mostly just biased, immature crap. (I was also one of the few among my peers that was happy when EGM shut its doors.)
I think it has to do a lot with market. There’s ALWAYS going to be the younger demographic where a lot of gaming journalism will always be geared towards: Kids 13-18 who read junk like 1up.com, IGN, gamespy, gamespot, etc. So even though it’s frustrating to know the way these people write their opinions on games, it’s always going to be there, regardless of any “movement” that some may try to strive towards. Let me know when you find that the whole of gaming journalism is any different, because I’ll be happy to come back.
From chris:
Thanks for the reply and the gracious words, Infinity’s End!
I agree with you that the market is partly responsible here – but keep in mind that the readership of the sites you’re referring to is primarily ages 20-30. It is disturbing to me that older “kids” like myself are still so easily transformed into consumers. As I said in another post, if we actually made *good* games for teenagers, we would see a different kind of teenager in a few years. Instead, we feed them with Killzone and GTA IV. That’s why I think some amount of responsibility has to be taken by publishers/developers who now partly determine for the public what their gaming tastes are. I don’t think gaming journalism is ever going to become much different, sadly. But that does not mean that all is lost – I really believe that the small efforts out there (read some of the blogs linked to at the end of this article) are holding on to the last threads of responsible and meaningful game writing.
Thanks for writing – you’re always welcome to come back!
From Tom Camfield:
LONG!
Erm, I didn’t really follow that. Kieron’s a British video game journalist, and so your Americanised explanation of his actions is inaccurate. We had mags with awesome objective reviews: stuff like Amiga Power, Your Sinclair, etc etc, consistently funny and accurate.
Here’s the formation of NGJ:
OGJ was an assessment of a game based on things like: graphics, sound, technical things like whether it crashes, and “gameplay” and “longetivity”. It was a supposed objective assessment. Kieron used to work on Amiga Power, and AP objectively assessed games, and it was consistently awesome. Kieron’s NGJ wasn’t, therefore, created to reject objective reviews on the ground of objective reviews being rubbish, because he knows AP did great objective reviews. (And, ahem, he said in the manifesto NGJ wasn’t supposed to replace OGJ.)
But! Kieron has this problem, he absolutely loves games that are objectively a bit rough around the edges. Also, he loves wide expansive games like Legends of Valour, Deus Ex, Vampire: The Masquerade that let you do your own thing. Also, Kieron is incredibly self-aggrandising. It should be noted that all writers on Amiga Power referred to themselves, sometimes ironically, as Mighty Beings.
So Kieron, now working for PC Gamer, finds he has to review a lot of these rough games that are awesome to play, but objectively, maybe they fall down a bit. And, more specifically, ones where you get to do loads of interesting things, which add up to something awesome, even if the shooty aspect is a bit wonky, or the graphics are old and nasty. And, even more specifically, the PC game Deus Ex. Instead of giving Deus Ex 80-odd percent like other publications, because of the aforementioned wonkiness, KG (Kieron) gave it 96 or something similar, because while objectively it may have faults, the overall experience was something far grander. He took a leap of faith and was proved correct by history, which agreed with his assessment in a major way. Note however, that he wrote the review, not as a list of good and bad, but as the protagonist approaching an enemy base, and approaching it in different manners, ie all out attack, sniper fire, close stealth etc, to illuminate the different ways of playing. Snapshots of Kieron’s experience of the game, if you will.
Which, as the manifesto states, is exactly what NGJ is. Snapshots of ones own experience in the game. Championed by Kieron, a. because it’s the best way of assessing the games he loves without them coming out as 70%, and b. because Kieron was already doing it that way, and he wanted everyone to worship him as a God for what he was doing. Because he’s like that, in a funky skillo kind of way.
Now, what’s this NNGJ?
First, what have we got already? We have OGJ (standing back from the game and assessing its merits) and NGJ (inside view of the experience). You say NGJ is corrupted by narcissism, that it’s reviewing by subjectivity. Well, it’s not really supposed to be for reviews, and it’s not supposed to be ‘your view’ as opposed to ‘what you did in this game’, hence the travel journalism ideal. So the purported NGJ isn’t NGJ, but just subjective reviewing, which is as tedious as you say. Let’s call it SGJ.
NNGJ seems to be, well, one of two things. First, it seems to want NGJ as it was originally supposed to be, and then second, you seem to want: academic writing about games. People writing about the anthropological, psychological, philosophical aspects. Fine. Let’s call it AGJ, right?
From Tom Camfield:
Oh, and early NGJ featured in Edge and PC Gamer, so it’s not about de-institutionalization, it was actually about how to rescue these institutions from the rise of the internet, since the traditional way to fill mags was with previews and reviews and both of these the internet could do. The NGJ approach was Kieron’s answer, since it seemed to be something different a print mag could offer. So it was actually supposed to save institutions, so you got that backward.
And re-reading I see you’re down on academic writing and want something more poetic, so how about PGJ, philosophical games journalism, which seems to be what you’re talking about: you may be interested in aesthetic philosophy which looks at a lot of the issues you want to examine, although it does it for books, films and art etc and not gaming yet.
From chris:
Hi Tom. Thanks for your insight here. Glad to hear from someone who knows Kieron – I’m not familiar with him personally, only his NGJ article which gave me a lot of inspiration.
Your description of the background of (his involvement in) the British game journalism scene is fascinating. I completely agree with you that my viewpoint was drawn from a North American perspective, and overstates the problem for many other places. I should state that more clearly: this is my perspective on where Game Journalism has went in North America, especially in my own life – and I cannot imagine the different experiences people have of it from their own hometowns. I’m an avid reader of “Retro Gamer” magazine (a *wonderful* UK-based pub) and if that is any indicator of the quality of mags on that side of the pond, count me in!
However, things are quite a bit bleaker out here. This week I walked through an aisle of OGJ magazine racks, and there was not a single independent publication available. All of them were barely-concealed advertising engines for the major hardware corps.
Keep in mind that when you say PC Gamer, that means something *very* different to us folks in North America. The UK edition is a different beast, through and though. On this end of things, de-institutionalization really became a reality. “Rescuing” some of the major publications, in my memory, was not one of the paths we took. They’ve simply begun to disappear. For instance, N’Gai Croal is one of the celebrities out here, but he’s writing for a public news institution, not a gaming publication. There is a very short list of “names” that write for the gaming pubs now.
Philosophical games journalism – sure! As you’ll note from the title of this blog, I’m all for taking a more thoughtful (aesthetic) approach to gaming. It’s less a case of finding the right name for me, and more of finding the right kinds of people that might write about their experiences in a somewhat less self-celebratory manner. I’d really love to hear how people’s lives revolve around games, and what they mean for them, rather than what their opinion is (good? bad?) of the latest shooter.
I really appreciate the time you took to write in, Tom. I’m a Western Canadian writer, and it is sometimes difficult for me to appreciate how different things are in other areas of the world. My thanks for that.
From David:
Great article, and excellent comments.
Just one question. You say NNGJ shouldn’t be about improving games, rather, it should be about understanding the interaction between people, society, and gaming. Can’t it be both?
From Ben Abraham:
This is a great piece, even if I’m not completely sold on the idea of needing a new new games journalism. The comments thread has been particularly enlightening, and I hope you manage to do some of what you’re looking for, Chris.
From mbp:
Great article Chris and an important wake up call to the state of games criticism. It seems we have moved from an era of reviewers being in the pocket of game publishers to era of opinionated posturing and criticism that thinks it is art. Some of this new games journalism stuff can be entertaining but it fails in it’s fundamental objective: it doesn’t properly inform the buying decision.
With books and films I find that it is relatively easy to determine before purchase whether or not I will enjoy a title. Computer games are more expensive than either but the failings of game criticism have made game purchasing a much bigger gamble. It only takes a few lemons bought for €50 a pop to convince a punter not to spend that kind of money on games in future. Safer to wait a few months for a game to hit the bargain shelves.
Increasingly I find myself falling back on review aggregation as practised by metacritic and game rankings. I hate doing this because they are so impersonal and because I know that aggregation tends towards the lowest common denominator. I try to look beyond the headline score – noting which sources rate a game highly for example and comparing user scores with critic scores. Its not ideal but its the best I can do at the moment.
From Paul Barnett:
Hmmm…
When i was a nipper (child) I read Gary Pen in the UK mags. He was my Lester Bangs. I think Kieron is a modern day version. Perhaps instead of NGJ you just need to find a voice, stick to your truths and hope you write in a way that sings from your soul to other gamers?
I think your obvious frustration with the current situation is your fuel. Don’t Assume you need to define a system, just write cool stuff.
Of course Kerion wrote a manifesto, it’s why he is Kieron. I am not so sure their in gold in those mines for you to find.
As for the point of reviews, I long ago decided it was noting more than the historic record. The idea that reviews do much other than to curb excess or highlight the weak has long gone. Computer game reviews are not the same as theatre, bad reviews there destroy productions, its more like movie reviews, you know, entertaining but only a small weight on the decision scales.
What sort of weight do you think people place on reviews?
Do they play the demo?
Do they ask friends?
Do they seek out someone who already has the game?
Do they go on gut instinct?
Do they just have a handful of people who they trust?
I did a straw poll around the office, out of the 40 people I asked I couldn’t find anyone who just went ‘The reviews the thing!’. On the other-hand I do try things that rockpapershotgun bring to my attention.
I asked m boy (he is 10) and his friends (3 of them), the response was overwhemling, they get interested or hooked via previews and marketing or from each other. They also don’t seem to use reviews.
Like I said at the start…
Perhaps instead of NGJ you just need to find a voice, stick to your truths and hope you write in a way that sings from your soul to other gamers?
From Nick Cooper:
Linked from Rockpapershotgun
Tom’s thoughts were particularly enlightening.
As a reader of AP back then, I’ve always seen Kieron’s NGJ menifesto as a modest (if massively drenched in ego) attempt to inject personal experience into a review. Narcisistic it may be, but it allows a much needed injection of what gaming is about to many people – the anecdotes, the stories, the experiences, often of the individual – which I welcome, as a reader.
As a reader of games writing, and as someone working on a socio-cultural studies PhD, I welcome this call for philosophical or academic games writing (I wonder if, once it is in this academic vein, it’s still journalism?).
That being said, whilst all the talk of ‘being-as-gamers’ and constant repetitions of ‘how’ rather than ‘why’ speak to my academic interests. You seem to be asking for a specific manner of writing for a minimal audience.
The call for the personal experience as situated in a self-critical evaluation of the wider social dynamics of games and ‘being-as-gamer’ seems to suggest a skillset that is either steeped in academic critique or poetics. Finding such writers may prove difficult, making such wirtig appeal to a wider audience is going to be even more difficult.
If the call were to be re-iterated, I would personally suggest a move away from the clearly academic form in this piece; it suggests an academic formalism which would alienate many.
Your link to the GoW article is a prime example. A good disucssion of the gender dynamics of the game, with a historiographic situation and wider issues of gender in cultural forms.
But that begs the question – could this not easily fit into a traditional review or ciritcal piece? Is it not, on rare occasions, being done already? Do you really have to talk about ‘ludonarrative’ as the GoW article does, or can and should this be made accessible.
Cutural critique can be done in an academic or poetic vein without alienating readers (even as discomforting such socio-cultural critique can be). I worry that couching your call in such clearly academic terms vastly limit the scope of this call.
If the examples you show are of people adressing the need to situate games writing in a critical analysis of the game-playing/being and wider social interactions – should not the call be, is not the important challenge, to apply that to a more accessible form of games writing?
From Jazmeister:
It’s a bit like Communism, really – how many people argue that Communism “didn’t work”, when the USSR ended up looking nothing like a union of socialist republics? Lots. Same with NGJ; you spot a lot of the original manifesto in tons of reviews. Francis’ Oblivion review was quite traveloggy, right?
The problem is like the problem with Punk Rock, or Emo music, or pretty much anything that is cool and new and interesting to enough attract dull, influential people with insecurities. People adopt it and adapt it and join in until “They’re selling hippie wigs in Woolworths, man.”
Maybe NGJ has split like those things have; its great, ballooning corpse flying high in the parade, decrying the evils of good graphics and making very little sense; and those who get what Gillen was saying, aren’t too shy to confess they were sitting forward and goggling madly as they leapt from the moving car and scorpion kicked the MechaLich. Just like there are still people who garden quietly and put on old vinyls and wish for “Anarchy in the UK”.
From mbp:
God help me Chris but I have just re-read your article and my earlier comment and I think I completely misunderstood you.
When you said in italics “Game journalism can be just as exciting and enlightening as playing games themselves!” I thought you were poking light hearted fun at criticism that thinks it is art.
If you seriously believe that then I have to fundamentally disagree. In fact I think this “criticism as an art form” movement is a big part of the reason why we are currently so badly served by game reviews.
Criticism can never be more important than the thing itself. Criticism is a tool to aid the buying process, nothing more nothing less. Once the purchasing decision has been made the critic becomes irrelevant. The game and the playing of it are everything.
From chris:
Yikes! I don’t even know how to respond to all of your excellent comments in an organized fashion
@David – good point – absolutely. My take on it is that good game criticism *may* lead to better game development, but is not written with that goal in mind, specifically. If it is written with future game development in mind, then it has the tendency to become marketing/product development fodder.
@Ben – thank you! I’m trying to figure out a way of critiquing games through its own medium. Stay tuned.
@mbp – interesting view you bring. Hidden deep inside somewhere in this article is my opinion that consumption is undermining the prospect of meaningful games. Meaning that I don’t think game criticism should really be the same thing as game reviewing – I don’t think NGJ should be part of the build-market-review-sell cycle. (ie. I don’t think we read art critics in order to decide if we buy a painting or not).
@Paul Barnett – welcome! “Perhaps instead of NGJ you just need to find a voice, stick to your truths and hope you write in a way that sings from your soul to other gamers?” I fully agree with you here. The problem is *how* we do that without becoming opinionated narcissists, and actually offer something new to other gamers, rather than restate what we already know. And yes – we don’t need a new “system” or institution to tell us how to write about games – a few individuals can really put out some amazingly inspired work. But geez, some days it gets lonely at the bottom!
Interesting that kids don’t rely on reviews – that tells us something very important I think. Perhaps reviews are no longer going to be in demand in the future.
@Nick Cooper – Wow, I hope I didn’t imply that Kieron’s writing style was narcissistic – I don’t think it is at all. You bring up some interesting points. First, I don’t mind writing for a small audience; in fact, I think writing for a small audience is the best way to ensure that what I’m writing is relevant. This page is a good example of that – it’s not exactly Rock-Paper-Shotgun
. You’re absolutely correct that I’m interested in poetics as a way of writing about, and understanding, games. Despite my reliance upon it, I really, really, hate academic language in game writing. It’s not only that it alienates the audience, but it needlessly formalizes an informal tradition. Words like “ludonarrative” give me the chills, to be honest. I think your point highlights exactly what I’d like to see in game writing – insight without the academic nonsense. But again, I really do think “accessibility” is the wrong direction here. The Wii is accessible. Tic-Tac-Toe is accessible. But do we draw our greatest cultural insights from reading accessible stuff? It seems to me that “poetic” does not automatically mean accessible. In my mind it instead means insightful, penetrating, disruptive, and enlightening. There are many people out in the world not interested in poetics, and that’s fine to me. But for those of us who want a richer experience of gaming, and are willing to put the work into reading/playing/writing it, we do need some kind of poetic language to work with. Thanks for the comment.
mbp #2 – I suppose I could have been poking fun at it in retrospect, but at the time I meant what I said
Criticism *can* be just as, or more important, than the thing itself. To back up that claim, take Aristotle. He is a great example of a drama/literary critic whose works are so deep and insightful that an entire civilization’s worth of literature grew out of his ideas on greek tragedies. Nobody reads Aristotle to make purchasing decisions. 
I think that your disagreement with me is on the basis of a completely different idea of what a game is. I’m not interested in games-as-products. I’m interested in them as works of art, big and small.
Thanks again to the amazing responses thus far!
From Shaquil R. Hansford:
Okay, I just read this (excuse the language) fucking incredible article, and I know I’m really really really really late to the party. It sucks to be the new guy, especially in games journalism. First I had no idea what NGJ was, then I read Keiron’s thing, and found out that post was more than four years old. Now I find this, and my mind is blown, because I actually like this (hated NGJ). I’ll have a better comment after I take a quick shower. Need to collect my thoughts and then read more posts.
Everyone who’s commented on this article (or the comments I’ve read so far) seem like it’d be great to talk to. Wish I could somehow get in contact with any of you guys or work with any of you guys or just SEE something you guys have written to get an idea of where the best shit in games journalism is. I don’t know, I’ll have a better comment in about 20 minutes. Assuming anyone will even respond to this old ass article.
From chris:
Hi Shaquil. Glad you could join the chaos! First off, thank you for the kind response. The NGJ “movement” (if it can be called that) really did not take off, and instead fragmented into a million individual efforts. Rough blogger “communities” have formed to take up the slack created by the slow burning of the major publications, and the Artful Gamer is just one of those blogs that attempts to make sense of the insanity.
Take a look at some of the blogs I linked to in the sentence “There are already some writers out there trying…” – those are all small individual attempts at realizing something meaningful about games without becoming pretentious or intellectual about it. None of them master game journalism, but they all contribute something unique, and when taken in sum (and keep in mind many of us are ‘writing to one another’ through our blog posts) create an interesting and vibrant community of game writers.
That being said, I have another article to recommend, recently written by Jamie Love of Toronto Thumbs:
http://www.torontothumbs.com/2009/06/14/being-samus-and-other-metroid-musings/
I consider Jamie’s “BEING SAMUS” article one of the finest examples of game writing to date. Feel free to contradict me on that, but I really think he’s pulled something special off in that article in terms of downright making sense, as well as leaving the writing community in a better state than when he joined it
Again, glad you found something of use here. Many of those who commented on my article have blogs of their own with valuable thoughts on games. And er, don’t worry about showing up late to the party
From Shaquil R. Hansford:
Okay, so I’ve gotten everything down and good in my mind, and I know exactly how to respond to this. The problem I’ve found with New Games Journalism, Old Games Journalism, and NEW New Games Journalism are all the same. No matter what form of games journalism you write, when it comes down to it the only people who are going to read a subjective review in the style of new games journalism or new new games journalism are, of course, games journalists. And maybe the girlfriends they force to read it (guilty as charged).
When the overwhelming fact is that the lifeblood of your very passion is also what binds you to constant mediocrity, and fleeting success, there’s really nothing to do but cry about it. I can’t relate to anyone talking about a UK magazine, because I’m American, and all our magazines have been pure crap or decently entertaining. I can say, though, that the way things are shaping up it seems like I probably would’ve been better off born across the pond.
But back to my major point. I’d love to write articles about the love of gaming, articles that aren’t one of those corny “Top Ten Reasons The PSP SUCKS!” pieces of crap, but who’s going to read it? Other writers? They barely have time to read over their own stuff. Games Journalism is sadly shaping up to be one of those fields where the only way you can succeed in it is to already be famous.
It’s like if you didn’t start out back when Gamespot was just an idea in someone’s notebook, there’s no shimmering ghost of a chance to do anything of note, or go anywhere worth mentioning in the field. 90% Of the gamers out there are fanboys with the reading level of the average African seven month old, and the attention span of The Cole Train on Red Bull and Budweiser. Most of the people I know that even buy magazines only do so to look at the fancy pictures and ads. The most reading they do is of the clever little captions. Oh joy.
Oh, and I LOVED EGM. I was a kid, but I loved it. So whoever has beef with THAT, well then… you’re not a nice person. So there.
From Shaquil R. Hansford:
Sorry for the double post, but I just noticed your response. Thanks for the instant feedback, and can’t wait to see what you think of my previous post ^^^^
I’ll get started reading the blogs you’ve suggested. Hopefully this stuff will make me a little more light-hearted. I still loved the article. It’s really inspirational. I just can’t be bothered trying to smile for too long.
From chris:
Shaquil, in response to your latest comment, I suspect that finding a large (interesting) audience to write to is no longer viable. That is why I believe that a small, intimate, interesting blogger community far exceeds the lowest-common-denominator mentality that you find in the larger publications (who have large subscriber bases). I think the quality of discussion in this thread is a perfect example of how articulate folks can come together to make a community worth writing for. Michael Abbott’s “Brainy Gamer” blog has a much larger community of commentators (although the quality of thoughts in the comment threads varies greatly), and generates an number excellent number of responses. All from just one guy’s articles!
Personally, I’d rather reap the glory and respect from my fellow gamers who are interested in the same writing/games as me, than the off-hand thank you of a million readers.
From WarpZone:
Uh… maybe I’m missing the forest because of the trees or whatever, but I don’t personally google, say… Brutal Legend because I want to know what statement it makes about the relationship between mankind and his creations and the broader implications for society as a whole. I google Brutal Legend because I want to know if it’s worth 70 bucks or not.
I don’t think you can take a video game and write philosophically about it. Video games are too functional of a medium. As a gaming culture writer you have the option of waxing philosophical about a game, but don’t expect it to be a huge draw. Thinky writing never is. That’s one of the unfortunate truths of the Human Condition philosophers have been whining about for centuries.
I will say that I played Home the other day, and it was one of the most profound experiences I’ve ever had. This profound statement was not made by a games journalist. It was made by an indie game developer. The statement made by the games journalist made was “Play Home. It’s free. It takes five minutes to play and it’s totally worth it. Here’s the link. Home good.”
I’m not sure what more than that you expect a Gaming Journalist to do. I’m not sure what you more than that expect readers to want Gaming Journalists to do.
But then what do I know? I’m just a gamer. I push the buttons what makes the things do stuff to things.
From chris:
@WarpZone – You’re welcome to whatever opinion you wish to have about game writing of course, and if you want to treat game writing as marketing, then go for it. But while you’re doing that, you’re losing the ability to enrich your gaming experience through personal reflection. And if you don’t see value in reflecting upon something (obviously you do, otherwise why write a comment here?), there’s not much else to say.
If you think that getting a game recommendation in the form of “play this” is a valuable form of writing, then how do you distinguish Indie Game Developer #1′s recommendation from Indie Game Developer #2? Is it on the basis of their good looks, their cool web site, or the kind of shoes they wear? I’m being a bit facetious here because I’m not convinced that you really believe that “thinky” game writing is useless.
I’m just a gamer too. I want to play games and talk about them. I’m not satisfied with buying $2000 of games a year and consuming them like TV. I push buttons to make things do stuff. But I could also be doing that in a factory, or as a secretary, or in front of my TV. But I want to play games and write about them rather than do all of those forms of button pushing. Ever ask yourself why you play games? Or why would you end up reading and commenting on a site like this if you really thought game writing was just a waste of time?
Not trying to be an ass here, just hoping that your next comment will be a bit more self-reflective.
From Gary:
engaging writing is engaging writing. I’m sure if @warpzone read something engaging, he/she would keep reading it. I think there is value for reviews…but what I think most NGJ is doing is more “virtual ethnography” than journalism.
But even more to the fact, I think we need something akin to Film Theory in video games. Film theory brought about a grammar to discuss how film should be talked about and how it should be analyzed. While we have a lot of books about video games, there isn’t one grammar to discuss game theory.
I kind of agree with someone like Henry Jenkins who believes games are like an ecology and landscapes moreso than a linear cut. But I have no idea how we can write that. How do you apply something like postmodern theory or feminist theory to a video game without it sound like a narrative discussion. I’m not a ludologist by any means, but I think that there is value to a discussion of games as games and not just as a narrative like NGJ proposes.
But I have no idea what that would look like. I’m thinking of something along the lines of sports writing, but I’m not sure.
From David Russell Gutsche:
Hello there.
1) Your artcile was fantastic.
2) It made me think of things.
3) Those things are down there.
One of the most important things to remember when discussing New Games Journalism is that Wolfe’s New Journalism was not merely immersive and subjective, but also quite narrative-driven. New Journalism was, in many ways, an attempt to fuse novel and report. While being subjective – on the “I” – it was also quite focused on style and flow.
In other words, New Journalism is not subjective journalism. As I’m writing this, I feel like this distinction was already touched on in one of the replies to your article, but I could be wrong. Anyway, I press on. New Journalism has subjective elements, but I think what most people are talking about when they discuss New Games Journalism is not a personal narrative but a personal opinion. You touch on this in your article, complaining that “we write about our individual opinions” instead of “becoming deeper and more insightful.” Please correct me if I’m wrong, but subjective journalism has everything to do with individual opinions. Heck, all journalism has to do with individual opinion; subjective journalism just has the balls to admit it.
In other words, I think you might be a bit wrong in your interpretation of what subjective journalism – New Games Journalism – was supposed to be about. It’s not necessarily about becoming deeper, but becoming aware that the experience of a game will be different for every player.
New Games Journalism was a push against cold and distant institutional reviews that attempted to numerically judge an experience for a collective group of people. Most of the time, a review is written by one person. That person becomes infinitely more reliable when s/he is willing to admit subjectivity.
That stated, I think you are completely correct in your assessment of the perverse subjectivity possessing the gaming industry at this point in time: “We ignore hundreds of years of thought on the review of art and aesthetics, and instead feed off of the blogs and inane personal judgements of game developers who are themselves part of the mess.” Our internet culture is too subjective. Quantity has overwhelmed quality.
If everyone can blog, every voice gets heard. This isn’t necessarily bad; in an idyllic world, every voice is heard. But if every voice is heard by the entire population, the great voices get lost.
By taking New Games Journalism too far, we run the risk of becoming part of the mess. Just because we have an opinion about a game does not necessarily mean that the world needs to know about it. Your friends might like to know about it. Perhaps even the game developers would appreciate some feedback. But there need to be avenues for expression, so that the reader / consumer isn’t bombarded by a sea of meritless opinion.
As far as New New Games Journalism is concerned, I’m in. I love it. Writers / reviewers need to think about games in terms of meaning – societal and person – not simply as products to be evaluated within a gaming vacuum. At this point in time, games are only being reviewed in comparison to other games. While this is obviously necessary, we need to approach games with a larger lens. While inevitably – and helpfully – comparing games to one another, we must also be able to see games within the larger scope of society, attempting to evaluate them as valuable experiences.
As alluded to by Chris in the previous posts and responses, much of this will be theory regarding the nature of video games and how they relate to culture. Not that you haven’t though of this, but there are certainly specific examples that can be helpful. For example, let’s look at Bioshock.
I could write a review in which I express my feelings about the experience – I absolutely loved playing Bioshock – alongside my beliefs regarding the importance of the game in terms of fictional studies of human nature. Bioshock is a wonderful science-fiction text that deals with the need for purpose that every human feels, especially the disturbing lengths we will go to in order to achieve that purpose. To study Bioshock as an objective gaming experience – an evaluation of elements, like graphics, sound, immersion level – or even to write about it as a subjective experience – how the game made you feel, personal likes and dislikes – is missing the fact that Bioshock is more than both of those things. It is a game, it is an experience, and it is a text to be analyzed. Actually, it’s probably way more than those three things. But, for this example – since it’s already getting long – even choosing to assess it as only one of those categories is a bit narrow.
Chris, I agree. I – and, of course, many others – believe that it is time for something more meaningful. Thinking about why we play games – not to mention the merits of playing – is going to be an incredibly important topic in the coming years of video game theory. Games aren’t just toys to be reviewed against other toys. They have become a part of our culture, and it’s time we acknowledge them as such.
Also, this is my first encounter with this website. Seems pretty sweet. You don’t necessarily have to respond to this – in fact, I’m not sure you’ll even end up reading it – but I’d love to dialogue about these things. It seems that conversation is the best way to flesh out ideas, and the culture of video games matters greatly to me as a thinking man.
Oh, and thanks for writing. I’m about to go read more of your writing things.
From chris:
@David – Wow, my thanks for your extensive response! I’m glad that it inspired some ideas. Let me work through your response it thought by thought…
I hadn’t considered the narrative aspects – you’re absolutely right about that. “Storytelling” seems to be pretty darned central to NGJ. I’m a little less strict about what constitutes a “narrative” exactly, since personal narratives are often different than other forms of narratives (short stories, stories told through gameplay, novels, etc) — but your distinction that narrative != opinion is spot on. I’m glad to be wrong about that, since you’re articulating something that I only had a glimpse of when I first wrote this article.
I like your point regarding the ubiquity of (game)blogging. One of the unfortunate outcomes has indeed been voicelessness — there are so many blogs out there that I can’t tell which ones matter anymore. In the end, I end up reading ones that I “trust” because I trust their writers, either because they’re personal acquaintances or because they’re great writers. I suspect that the constitution of online micro-communities will be the only solution to the ubiquity of gameblogging. The swath of people I now follow on Twitter (and have gaming conversations with) are a great example of that.
Your protoreview of BioShock highlights exactly the problem we face now: how the hell do we actually write this stuff? The categorical approach won’t work, as you’ve said; the subjectivist approach falls flat after one sentence. But what then? That’s where, in my not-so-humble opinion, we’ve been stuck for years. I’m sure there are examples of people doing great things reviewing games – but I’ve seen SO FEW writers taking this seriously since I wrote this article that the situation is more dismal than it was 1 year ago. In fact, a handful of the writers whom I refer to in this article have ironically become part of the mainstream review institutions and no longer are independent and creative voices.
I’d like to enshrine one of your last comments somewhere: “Thinking about why we play games – not to mention the merits of playing – is going to be an incredibly important topic in the coming years of video game theory.” No one – to my knowledge – has come up with a sensible and meaningful answer to your first question. And to the second part, people only seem to come up with (moralistic) opinions that don’t get us very far. Including me!
Thanks again for your inspired response David! I’m so glad to have the chance to think about this issue again, especially as I’ve become even more disillusioned with the prospect of writing for games over the last year.
- Chris