I might owe my entire career in video game journalism to Paul Magliulo. We were good friends in fourth grade, even though he kept trying to convince me that if you got a star on Don Flamenco it would make him go flying out of the ring. That was inexcusable bullshit. Anyway, he came in to school one day and he had made his own video game magazine by writing down a bunch of codes from Nintendo Power on some ruled notebook paper and tracing a picture of Mario for the cover.
It was called "Codes 4 Every Month." I totally wanted in on that. So when you ask me what my first publication was, it was called "Codes 4 Every Month" and I was ten. We weren’t in the same class for fifth grade, so the magazine went under faster than you could say "GameGO" (but not faster than "GameGO").
But in sixth grade - junior high - we got a great idea. We made a BIG magazine on contraband unruled Xerox paper, had his mom make photocopies, and passed them out. This time, there were LOTS of tracings of Mario. It was high-quality shit. This small-time operation died out when I started to write video game reviews for the sixth-grade newspaper.
By the time I reached eighth grade, Arnie Katz had pretty much succeeded at fostering a video game fanzine culture and, reading Fandom Central in the then-new Electronic Games magazine, I thought, you know, I could do this. So I made a fanzine with Microsoft Publisher 1.0. My then-eleven-year-old brother thought up the title - Video Zone - a year earlier, as a more-than-fitting replacement for "Codes 4 Every Month." Arnie reviewed it in Electronic Games. I was thirteen; it was 1993.
...
Have I really been doing this crap for ten years?
Okay, I’m joking around - video game journalism is not really crap. I find varying degrees of merit in dozens of video game-related websites and print magazines. But at the same time, my standards of quality have increased as my writing skills have increased. As I get better and better at this thing we call writing, I want to read less and less game journalism because very little of it is truly interesting on its own.
Teenaged kids with talent, these days, don’t make a print fanzine and mail it out to a few other people who, almost to a man, make their own print fanzines. They write for websites, the smallest and worst of which have readerships a thousand times that of Video Zone’s.
Now:
I cannot, by writing this article, make you into a good video game journalist. I can, however, tell you how not to make people think that you’re a particularly bad one. And that’s what we’re going to talk about today.
Disclaimer: just like in those lists in the AA pamphlets they have at church, if merely one or two of these apply to you, it does not necessarily mean you are a bad video game journalist. So don’t get all worried when I begin with…
1. You call Shigeru Miyamoto anything other than Shigeru Miyamoto. This can take any number of forms. F’rinstance, some people have not gotten past the fact that you do not refer to a person by their first name in a story, so just like they called George Washington "George" in their fifth-grade super-long 500-word essay, they call Shigeru Miyamoto "Shigeru" like they are friends.
It gets worse, though.
Shigsy, Shiggy, The Shigster, Shiggity Shiggity Shwa, whatever. If you sound like Rob Schneider at the copy machine when you refer to Shigeru Miyamoto, take some time to ponder if you really feel like you are conducting yourself in a professional manner.
To put it another way: Shigeru Miyamoto is not a mascot character. He is an actual human being with two kids and a dog. He is fun-loving, yes; I bet he probably wouldn’t even mind so much if you ran up to him yelling "SHIGGAH! SLAP ME SOME SKIN, HOMES!" He might even give you a low five and do the thing where you wiggle your fingers afterwards, if you did it too.
But would he think you were a professional person, or a slightly obsessed fan?
2. You have ever used the following sentence construction:
Details are sparse at the moment, but if other games in the ______ series are any indication, this game will feature ______.
There is nothing specifically wrong with this sentence. But if I read it in a game preview, I know that I need not bother reading anything else this person may write for at least a year, because he is not yet especially creative or interesting.
Anyway, this sentence is grammatically correct, which at least means that the next one doesn’t apply to you…
3. You lack basic writing skills. Somebody once wrote in to IGN and said something to the effect of: yo i herd you was looking for somebody who livse in the bay aria to cover sports games well i dont play allot of sports gamez but i could play some other games and tell you wat i think?
IGN’s response, of course, was to make him a senior editor.
Ha ha - I am just kidding.
Just in case you think I am unfairly bashing on IGN, consider this sentence from their recent Ikaruga (GCN) review: We don't care if every ship is either black or white or that the passing scenery isn't as bright as Fran's glow-in-the-dark Underoos (the ones with the streak mark) because they look very cool.
Personally, I think the streak mark is from all that frothing demand.
Anyway, the point is, the first thing you need is basic writing skills. If you make spelling errors, use words incorrectly, or do anything else that simply violates basic rules of grammar, spelling, punctuation, word usage, then you need to fix that first, before you start worrying about anything else.
4. You show little concern for getting facts correct. If you open your review of Secret of Mana by saying that Yasunori Mitsuda composed the soundtrack - like an EGM freelancer did about a year ago - your credibility is blown. I shouldn’t have to say this, but journalists must not tolerate factual errors. Don’t rely on your own spotty memory and for God’s sake, don’t rely on Internet sources unless you double and triple-check them.
Surprisingly enough, mainstream reporters and academics tend to make the biggest errors. In fact, having read most of them, I would go so far as to say that most if not all academic books on video games feature numerous factual errors. I am often reminded of the section in Eugene F. Provenzo Jr.’s 1991 book Video Kids: Making Sense of Nintendo where the University of Miami professor professed that the three major video game consoles are manufactured by Nintendo, Sega, and Activision.
Two of my pet peeves in this category are:
Misspelling Japanese Names. It’s absolutely amazing to me how an author can show embarrassingly giddy admiration towards the Japanese game designer of his or her particular affection - then spell their name wrong. How, exactly, is this showing respect for a person?
Just Fucking Making Shit Up. I’ve read some Wind Waker reviews in which the game is referred to as Zelda 9 or, for extra pretentiousness, Zelda IX. What the hell game is that?
5. You lazily separate your reviews into huge sections with bold, generic headings. Tim makes fun, in his entry for this collection, of reviews that are separated with huge, static, bold headlines that read GRAPHICS/SOUND/GAMEPLAY/OVERALL. And of course, this practice is borderline retarded. But I will admit to you that when I write a game review there is a template in my head that looks, well, something like GRAPHICS/SOUND/GAMEPLAY/OVERALL.
One difference, of course, is effective transitions rather than artificial section breaks. How to do that, I can’t teach you. Transitioning between talking about graphics and talking about sounds is relatively easy. Transitioning between gameplay and graphics is not - unless you’re a bad video game reviewer, in which case you just write "For a game with such good graphics, the gameplay is lacking."
The lesson is that it’s important to know where you’re going, and all the stops you’re going to make along the way - but leave time for detours. You might in fact find that during your writing, you get an idea for another paragraph or idea that you didn’t originally think of. (In fact, I would hope that you find this to be the case rather often.) But let that only emphasize the point that you must have a road map in your head first, because if you take a detour you need to know how to get back.
In short, you have to let your writing feel organic, but you have to cover the basics. If you leave something out or don’t cover it in enough depth, you have blown it.
6. You are just a boring son of a bitch. People reading your writing might be doing it to glean information on a game that they’re thinking about buying. But they might be reading it because they’re bored, and you need to, you know, entertain them. I’m not trying very hard to be entertaining with this article, but neither am I just sort of throwing down words on the page. For instance, I rewrote that last sentence about three times, and this one about four, before I settled on what you’re reading right now.
Point is that good writing needs to go beyond simply not violating rules of grammar, word usage, spelling, and punctuation. You can write a game review with zero technical errors, no factual inaccuracy, appropriate vocabulary, and no gaping content holes, and it can still be impenetrable, sleep-inducing crap.
You need to engage the reader, too. If you don’t, it doesn’t matter what you’ve written because nobody’s going to read it.
And how, exactly, do we entertain our readers? Well, you’re not going to if...
7. You fill up your review with unsuccessful attempts at humor. Ever since Seanbaby showed that video game humor can make you famous, everybody thinks they are a god damned funny motherfucker. Some people are correct to think this, and some people are dead wrong. Show a few of your jokes to somebody who is not your mom, and ask for their unvarnished opinion. See if they laugh. If not, it’s back to the drawing board - no matter how funny you or your mom finds your stuff.
Here are some examples, both semi-plagiarized from various sources. Let’s say you’re writing a review of a piece of shit game - a veritable humor goldmine if ever there was one:
EXAMPLE ONE:
Ninja Assault’s very premise is bullshit - everybody knows real ninjas don’t use guns. Real ninjas run around on city streets in broad daylight making dogs explode with their swords.
EXAMPLE TWO:
Ninja Assault’s graphics are nastier than the streak mark in Fran’s Underoos.
Now, Example Two is a stupid joke that will nonetheless make a few 11-year-olds laugh and beg their parents for an IGN Insider subscription. But Example One - by far the funnier joke - will pass over the heads of said 11-year-olds as well as alienating anyone who doesn’t remember Ninja Gaiden.
(Well, good.)
Some general comments on humor: Every person, at some time in their lives, will succeed at being intentionally funny. Most people cannot do this on a consistent, or even frequent, basis. Rather, they get laughs based on an off-the-cuff remark that succeeds mainly because of its improvisational, spur-of-the-moment nature. Some people are good at these moments, but soon find out that they are not universally funny. They are the classic "well, you had to be there" stories that you hear after the fact, and you try to squeeze out a polite chuckle while thinking "…no, that is not funny at all, you jerk."
Then there are the legitimately humorous jokes and witty asides that make you laugh even though you weren’t "there." These are much harder to write and in fact even if you do write a good one, there’s no guarantee that everyone will laugh at it. Now, humor like this is based in absurdity, in outlandishness. Thus, the more absurd or outlandish the joke is, the funnier it is. But as the joke gets more and more absurd, some people will fail to "get" the joke; still more people will begin to find it offensive.
By simple logic, this means that the funnier something is, fewer and fewer people will find it funny.
(What’s red and silver and can’t see? A baby with forks in its eyes.)
8. You can write a thousand-word feature without saying anything original or unique. It should go without saying that the point of writing something is to write something original - New York Times reporters notwithstanding.
Every human being is an individual, a unique person capable of original thought. So why are so many game reviews or even opinion columns completely unoriginal? You should begin every piece by saying, "What can I write here that nobody else has written, or that will at least teach a fair amount of people something new?"
"What is my take on this game, and why is it important or valid?" This is a good question to ask, but beware the pitfalls: in your zeal to say something new, don’t make shit up (see #4 above).
Well, now that I’ve been negative for a good three pages, let’s try to look at the positive aspects of all this. It might help to think of the above not as a list of flaws but as a pyramid of strengths that you can build - quite a bit like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Check that out, unless you already remember it perfectly from Psych. The idea is, we first need to take care of important things like breathing, eating, etc. After that, we think about shelter, safety. After that comes emotional needs. Et cetera. Only once the base of the pyramid is stable can we add on to it.
In other words, if you’re choking me and I’m being deprived of oxygen, I’m not going to sit there worrying about whether you love me, or what.
So consider, then, Kohler’s Hierarchy of Video Game Reviewing Skills, from bottom to top:
/ TEACH! \
/ ORIGINAL STYLE \
/ COVER THE BASES \
/ GET FACTS STRAIGHT \
/ BASIC WRITING SKILLS \
Now, obviously not every piece on every website is going to say something new and original. But that’s not to say that you shouldn’t always try. That’s why this is at the top of the pyramid - a pyramid whose apex is theoretical rather than actual, because there is no perfect piece of writing.
Let’s finish up.
Just so you’re aware, at the same time that I was putting this into words, I was writing three game reviews for Animerica. Those reviews were in the back of my mind as I wrote this, and of course this was in the back of my mind as I wrote those reviews - could I live up to the high standard of quality that I’ve set in this piece? Read my Giftpia review in the August issue, and you tell me.
With most things that involve me that are posted on Insert Credit, I seem to be sort of putting my ass on the line in some way or another - goofy pictures with Brandon, ridiculous and profane dialogue in Tim’s videos, stupid antics at Neo Geo Land. I’m sure some people think I’m crazy by this point. But I’m betting that more people will say, "Hey, that was entertaining."
So the reason that I’m submitting this piece anyway is because I think that more people are going to say, "Yeah, that makes sense, I guess." Either way, though, after presenting this for public consumption and debate I will have learned something more about what works and what doesn’t, continuing my own personal impossible climb to the non-existent apex of a metaphorical pyramid of my own creation.
Chris Kohler
continues to shine bright and full, like the star that he is
[Next: Chapter 4: At The Teat - Misery At The Hands Of The Established Gaming Media]
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