No five-year-old says "I want to be a journalist when I grow up." It's just not fathomable. It's not reasonable. It's morbid. It's sick. If your five-year-old says he wants to be a journalist when he grows up, he's most likely going to end up skinning puppies behind a tool shed somewhere. He's not normal.
Because the fact of the matter is that children don't regularly read. Children don't know what in the hell journalists are, because children, on the average, don't take in too much journalism. It's not until a child reaches somewhere around the age of seven or nine that he starts to sit Indian-style on the living room floor while his dad watches NBC Nightly News. Jaw maybe dropped, the poor kid probably doesn't have much more to say than "I want to watch cartoons," and he probably says it with a speech impediment of some sort.
Children don't like reading things unless they're promised many pictures. When they reach the age where it's common to be asked to read a "chapter book," they scan the chapters of those books for "good pages" -- pages containing lots of dialogue, or else short paragraphs. When their mothers ask them to do their homework, they reply, "It's just one chapter, mom -- and it's, like, half good pages!"
It's this want of pictures and spare writing that used to attract the average child to comic books. It's the all-dialogue-and-pictures nature of comic books that used to lead the average parent to damn them as filthy mind-polluting tools of Satan. The average parent, ever the as-the-Fresh-Prince-would-have-us-know hypocrite, would want their child to read War and Peace, even though they themselves have never, ever read War and Peace. Trust me, if you simply think you've read War and Peace, you're probably wrong. Same goes for Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which you may think you've read as Alice in Wonderland.
Some shallow piece of depth lodged somewhere in my nine-year-old brain began to tire of comic books and their "Hero wins, hero gets a girl, hero dies, hero comes back" continuities, and I came across an issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly on my Wichita, Kansas grocery store rack. I noticed immediately that it was a magazine about videogames: Issue #4, it featured a blown-up, grainy screenshot of Ghouls 'n' Ghosts for Sega Genesis as the front cover. Though perhaps ugly in this day of Photoshop, its sheer size struck me: this is a big picture. This is the kind of picture I want to see. Not yet aware that the genius of the "Review Crew" had been ripped right clean off Famitsu, fourteen years from the day I found a copy of British magazine gamesTM at Barnes and Noble and cried silent tears at a two-page spread devoted to one screen shot of Konami's "Bury me with my money" classic Sunset Riders, I fell into a quiet awe of a magazine about videogames.
I'd been no complete stranger to videogame magazines before I picked up Electronic Gaming Monthly #4, and I went on to become much less of a stranger to them. My brother's friend had been a subscriber to Nintendo Power since the Fun Club days. Every once in a while, when I was sick, my mother would buy me a copy of Videogames and Computer Entertainment from the drug store next door to the doctor's office. Before my fourth-grade teacher made me read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, I knew the names of Arnie Katz, Andy Eddy, Ed Semrad, and Steve Harris. I was (and still am) able to cite every score of every game EGM ever reviewed. I chalk this up more to my freakish memory skills than anything else.
So, what the fairytales tell you is true: every child gets into reading by way of some inane thing or another. It wasn't until the "1992 Video Game Buyer's Guide" that I began to notice the rampant spelling and grammatical errors in videogame journalism. It was a young form of journalism indeed. One might even call it young and "immature," like the games themselves -- or, more appropriately, like that one uncle a small child looks up to, the one who fixes cars, the one who quite passively pushes a child to say, "I want to fix cars when I grow up!" Parents don't like these kinds of uncles, the ones who dash every child's God-given aspiration to grow up to be President of the United States. Nor do they like magazines that make a nine-year-old who'd previously told teachers at his freak-genius-academy-school that he wanted to be a prosthetic surgeon start telling people he wants to play videogames for a living.
It's a sad story, sometimes, that reality finds our children. At age nine, so it was that I gave up thinking I'd grow up to design flawlessly working robotic arms and legs, and instead directed my obscene IQ at more intently playing videogames. It was around this time that I sought to complete a perfect run of The Legend of Zelda. I used to look over the high scores pages in Electronic Gaming Monthly with different wishes than those of all the other kids who did the same thing: I wanted to pull off something I couldn't prove. I wanted to play videogames in a way that was mine. I cherished every moment of a game that was mine.
This is an image I'm going to use again, later in this story. It's because of this kind of full-circle thing that I call this the greatest piece of videogame-related journalism ever written: by tim rogers.
Here's the image:
It's because of my input, my fingers on the buttons -- it is because of the person I am that the sprite Link is bothers to stab the old man in the dungeon, resulting in glowing balls of energy issuing from the flames in the dark.
I understood from long ago that videogames are different from other things that can be critiqued. Beyond the coolness of new graphical techniques, beyond what can be shown in blowout screenshots, and far above what can be outlined in bold type, there is something human, and organic, about the way a game is played that should -- and shame on your for not thinking so -- always, without fail, have an impact on what is said about games by people who think they have something to say about them.
My belief was cemented one day in 1994 when, fat, friendless, and repulsive, I read Jeff "Lucky" Lundrigan's review of Final Fantasy III in Game Players. That review (a 9.8) opens with a killer:
"For many years, there was a hole deep in my body. I tried to fill it, with booze, and countless women. Then, along came Final Fantasy III."
The way Lundrigan mentions his "hole," "booze," and "countless women" (emphasis on the "countless") hooked me -- and it wasn't just because he'd hinted at the classic adult pastimes of drinking and promiscuity: He'd put himself ahead of the game. He'd put his own personality before his review of the game. It struck me as completely natural. It was then that I began to harbor the strong belief that this is how writing about videogames should be done.
It's perhaps because of my belief that I was turned down -- and quite savagely -- for a position at my childhood dream Electronic Gaming Monthly. It's because of my belief that I get plenty of fanmail concerning a piece about Super Mario Bros. 3, and because of my belief that insert credit's Brandon Sheffield calls me the "anomaly of the staff page." It's because I'm able to mention names like Haruki Murakami and Mark Twain when talking about videogames that large angry women from Kentucky will push to have me banned from certain pop-up-ridden web forums. It's because of something quite contrary to me that Chris Kohler is moved to IM me, out of nowhere, right this second
[08:43:30] chris: Why Games Domain has to change all the I's to we's in my reviews, I don't get.
Between the fan mails and the editorial misunderstandings, there is a deep disturbance in the force that governs the way videogames are talked about professionally. Some have likened the editors of the world's gaming magazines to a "fraternity" of press-release rewriters. I have sensed this disturbance ever since Ultra Game Players, a lovely magazine sometimes marred by its own exuberant stupidity regarding dead horse jokes, became PSM -- standing for "PlayStation Magazine" -- a trim, glossy, "100% Unbiased, Unofficial!" menagerie of press-release rewrites that, according (with "Caution!") to the polybag containing the free-at-E3 "Swimsuit Issue!" "May cause extreme brand loyalty!"
This isn't about brand loyalty. It isn't about whether or not videogames are art. It's about the invisible fine line between the falsely mature and the falsely immature. It's about the future of videogame journalism. And it's not what you think. As I say in my novel Pyramid, as Luo Guanzhong said in his novel Water Margin, "This is a tale that will take much time in the telling."
Let us begin, then, with a parable of sorts, one which I call "The Conflict: Desert Storm Del Scorcho Incident."
Watch the video. Then attempt to make some sense out of it by reading the body of the greatest piece of videogame-related journalism ever written: by tim rogers, found by clicking the following link.
[Next: the conflict: desert storm del scorcho incident: an adventure in postmodern investigative reporting]
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