In terms of fondness for shiny silver discs, there's only one thing a precious to me as DVDs. Video games have been with me for damn near long as I can remember, with all the attendant psychological damage exposure to Jet Set Willy's pirouetting rabbits causes. As such I've played a lot of games, and I've read a lot about games. Hell, I've even wrote about a few of them. It's as important to have a reliable, knowledgeable sources of games journalism as it is to have the same about films, although you'd be struggling to find such.
This hasn't gone unnoticed by everyone. Does anyone find much that's genuinely enjoyable in games mags these days? Does anyone trust anything they read, or do they just play the demos and decide for themself? Certainly I wouldn't trust the Offical Playstation 2 mag as far as I could throw it were it made of lead, and sadly that seems to be the most professional and balanced mag for the format. Edge has maintained it's high journalistic standard for years, with great features and quality writing, but it's reviews have always, always been so out of touch with reality that it doesn't seem to be possible that they should appear in the same mag as the rest of it.
With a few exceptions, other mags fall into the same trap of bland, low rent PR flyer reproductions, vague reviews and endless, endless pages of hints and tips typically cribbed from GameFAQs. This prompted a call for a new way of writing about games, and this call was named New Games Journalism. The last couple of weeks has caused what the few affected people would call a controversial shitstorm, although seeing as there's a very slender fraction of the already very slender faction of gamers in the world who've even heard the term New Games Journalism I can't help but feel like they're just shouting in an echo chamber.
Anyhoo, The Grauniad online stuck up a link to the top ten examples of the new breed, the seminal work seemingly being agreed upon as this piece called 'Bow, Nigger'. Go read it if you haven't already. It's okay. I'll wait.
{sleep} Tippy sleeps.
{sleep} Tippy sleeps.
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{sleep} Tippy sleeps. Thorin sits down and starts singing about gold.
{sleep} Tippy sleeps.
Ah, welcome back. That little escapade in Jedi Knight is certainly readable. It's not trying to review the game in any conventional sense, but it's typical of the ethos. It wants to tell you what the game made the writer feel, not purely the mechanics of the game. Laudable, but frankly a daft goal.
Games, sadly, aren't interesting enough for the goals NGJ exponents set themselves. How many games made in the last ten years can truly be described as memorable, let alone affecting enough to provoke an emotional response? By this logic there's next to nothing good to be said about R-Type Final, Gradius V, Psyvariar et al. After all, it's just shooting and mildly irritating when you die, innit? Outrun 2 is just a driving game, innit? The fact that they're 'just' tremendous amounts of fun is going to be difficult to work into the structures inadvertently set up in a bid to free themselves of structure.
Reading the rest of The Grauniad's linkage reveals a common thread; the articles are at least as much about the author as they are about the subject. This is fine, as long as you know enough about the writer's character and personality to know if you'll react the same way. I'd wager that you don't. I'd wager you don't even know the writer's name.
The current teacup/storm interface seems to be more about replacing Old journalism with New journalism, which even NGJ stalwarts aren't suggesting. Carry on writing what you're writing, but it's going to be of niche interest in a niche market. Contrary to the occasional statement to the contrary in games mags, Video gaming is still very far from mainstream regardless how many PS2s Sony shift. It's partly games mags fault, as if they can't produce a competent magazine it's easy to see why TV execs are loathe to touch games with a bargepole. Certainly standards need to be raised, but 15000 word essays on what it's like to be part of a guild in Everquest isn't the way forward.
Old games journalism is derided for it's near slavish devotion to format; how good the graphics are, how good the sounds are, how good the controls are, percentage mark (rarely below 74% no matter how shoddy the game), next game please. The problem with moving away from breaking things down into categories like this is pretty simple, you need to know these things to know if the game's any good or not. You can't treat a game like a film, they're clearly not equivalent. Films have no user interface, games do. Graphic complexity is only relevant to a film in exceptional CG occasions, but you need to know this to see if it'll run on your PC.
If NGJ floats your boat and writing it sinks your submarine, fair play to you. I'm just not sure it's currently necessary. Of more practical use is Old Games Journalism, done better. There are countless reviews of countless game describing something as 'very playable', which only says that the game works functionally and says nothing of its quality. Grrr. We just need more people who can better explain why something's good, and the bottom line (as in all criticism), wether the game is worth your cash or not. It's difficult, but there are people who can do it given the chances.
"The worth of gaming lies in the gamer not the game." Interesting. Unsustainable, but interesting. It's rather like saying the worth of a car is in the driver, not the engine, brakes, suspension and so forth. Much as we'd also like to assume that the mechanics of a game are irrelevant to your enjoyment of it, they quite clearly aren't. Duff controls and shonky collision detection were sadly not consigned to the dustbin of history along with the Spectrum, and we need people to point this out in nice clear terms to stop us all wasting our hard earned dosh.
It's a glib statement to say we're better off fixing the wheels we've got rather than re-inventing them, especially when I'm not going to offer any points on how to do this. Would that I could, but this writing lark is just a hobby for me and I've no delusions of ability. It seems that game mags opt for the cheapest possible employees rather than those that would necessarily perform best, and given Future Publishing's near-monopoly on UK computer mags there's little incentive for raising their game apart from steadily declining sales. However it's vital to get even the majority of current gamers to even read about games in the first place, which will open doors to other media. Then we can start thinking about esoterica. Until we can get something as seemingly basic as, "Is this any good?" answered in an entertaining way it seems a bad idea to start build anything on top of it.
If you've any thoughts on the subject please nip over to our forums and share 'em. Be warned though, this article was intended to be a two paragraph post before it grew out of hand so you may want to keep tighter reign on you words than I can exercise. Some more concise, insightive and funnier points on the matter can be found over on the ever excellent UK:Resistance site.