What needs changing about game journalism? The fact that there isn't any.
Pick up an issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly, Game Informer, PSM, GMR, GamePro, Official Xbox Magazine, Videogame Underground, Official PlayStation Magazine, or GameNOW (or, if you prefer, visit IGN.com, Gamers.com, Gamespot, Gaming Age, or any of a thousand fansites and you won't find gaming journalism anywhere.
At this point some of you may be pumping your fists and mouthing "Right on!" to your computer screens, but what needs to be understood above all else is that I'm not lambasting a single one of those publications, or the people who work for them, for what they do. I've worked for several myself, and I have friends at almost all of the others.
That sort of game writing is what's out there, it fills a role, and it's what the public at large wants, as evidenced by the healthy circulation most of them enjoy. That they exist is not a problem, the problem is that nothing else does.
What games seem to most want to be these days are movies, so it's appropriate that when taking stock of what gaming journalism ought to be, we look at film journalism. Roughly, there are three categories: hard journalism, academically-oriented criticism, and consumer-oriented reviews.
The first category is where you find publications like Daily Variety, which reports everything from day-to-day brokered deals to more investigative pieces on the industry. These include looks at a certain studio's financial status and what got it there, or trends toward a certain genre in the season's films and what causes them, and so on.
The second category would be exemplified by something like Film Comment or Cahiers du Cinema, where there's little to no news to be found, and the object is not to decide whether a film is "good" or "bad" or "worth seeing" necessarily, but rather to analyze all aspects of it, from script to cinematography to sound design to acting, and look at what it does or doesn't do, and write a meaningful piece on that.
The final category would be filled by a magazine such as Entertainment Weekly, which offers a mix of light reportage and consumer-oriented writeups on current releases. This is where 99% of all game writing, whether print or online, can be found -- the domination of this form is so complete that the site where I gained enough notoriety to be asked to do this piece was called the Gaming Intelligence Agency, yet despite our general quality, all but one or two of our pieces still fell into this category.
"So all right," you say. "All game writing is based on the same template. What makes that not journalism?" To answer that question, one has to look to what's actually involved in this template.
There are four important components in all of the publications mentioned so far throughout this piece: news, features, previews, and reviews. If you contrast them with the traditional business of journalism, it's apparent where the distinction lies.
As it stands today, a "scoop" in gaming news consists of being the first to notice and retype a press release, or to break an NDA, or to negotiate exclusive access to a piece of information with PR handlers. Gaming features that are not retrospective in nature (top 10/25/100 lists and the like) rely on PR-sanctioned and orchestrated visits to a company headquarters where developers give interviews designed to reveal as much of the game as has been deemed appropriate.
Finally, previews are made possible only by the implicit agreement that in return for early access to unfinished builds of the game, nothing truly unflattering about the title will come out until the review, which is left as the only piece of game writing possible without a heavy helping of PR management -- as every fansite who buys their review copies at the store can tell you.
The practice of hard journalism as found in procedures such as checking facts, acquiring multiple confirming sources, and generally chasing stories rather than waiting for them to arrive, simply does not exist in this format. And that's fine. There's no sense in lambasting a publication for failing to provide something that's outside its scope.
This is the reason that it seems silly to castigate reviewers for not being sophisticated enough in their analysis, and the reason why I felt a little strange participating in this feature when part of the assignment was to consider how game journalism should "relate to social and cultural theory" -- obviously, it shouldn't. That's game criticism's job, which I could write an entire other piece along much the same lines about.
Game journalism (and criticism; this site's own examination of Metal Gear Solid 2's "dream space" by Tim Rogers is a favorite of the form for me) does exist, but it's rare, and generally not found in magazines: real examples that come to mind are the books Masters of Doom by David Kushner, Game Over by David Sheff and Opening the Xbox by Dean Takahashi.
Perhaps significantly, two of these revolve entirely around the American companies id and Microsoft; the Japanese corporate mindset is resistant in the face of examination and prodding, which makes hard journalism difficult on the console side of the industry.
Nevertheless, gaming journalism will only come about by attempting to penetrate that wall, and the desire by a paying audience to see it penetrated. It cannot be improved by eliminating the news section from a publication (how could it?) or by relating it to any particular theory; before we attempt to elevate journalism's status in game writing, we should try producing some in the first place.
Nich Maragos
can be contacted with the aid of some hard journalism
[Next: Chapter 6: The Greatest Piece Of Videogame-Related Journalism Ever Written: By Tim Rogers]
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