Gamers.com's vile message boards have a strictly less-vile thread devoted to Q&A about gaming journalism. The thread is not one that the staff of Gamers.com -- which includes Jeff Lundrigan, so is therefore cool -- started on their own. It is one that a reader started. Gamers.com simply links to it in a prominently featured place, so that everyone with some question regarding breaking into the world of gaming journalism can look at it, and maybe throw in a few comments.
Excepting my tongue-in-cheek entry -- my only reason for setting up an account in the first place -- and those of Gamers.com staff, not a single post on this thread contains a properly spelt word. (Exaggeration intended) The average fool, probably reading the site for news on the latest WWE Crush Hour screenshots -- like, it's got the car-combat of Twisted Metal, except the cars are being driven by your favorite wrestling superstars! -- simply says that he wants a job playing videogames for a living and that he'd totally make a good "reviewer."
A staff member makes a good point, and asks a good question. "Do any of you guys want to ever make games?" The same fools answer, "Yeah I got plenty of ideas and I showed them to my mom and I designed some characters and everything and it'll be so cool lollers."
These people, I gather, are mongoloids, eight years old, or both. If the New York Times editorials forecasting the intrusion of chat shorthand or l33t sp33k into the academic papers of America's elementary schools are more than alarmism, and these forum-posters are over the age of nine, God help us all. This world is going to look like a Mad Max movie before I'm fifty. And I'm not quite tough enough to be the one man that leaves the Thunderdome, if you know what I mean. God help me, I don't want to die in the desert. I'd rather freeze to death.
There's hardly a chance of freezing to death when you're writing for a well-hit website like PlanetGameCube.com -- the readers provide you with plenty of flames. Take a look at this one, which I received just three goddamned minutes after my review of Soul Calibur II was posted on said website:
Your comments disgust me. I have not played any Dreamcast or any Soul Caliber II. I did play Soul Caliber I in the arcades years years ago, and it was a good game, [yet] the way you rant about it is horrible. You just assume everyone has played the game, and I haven't. Since I haven't, you got someone who did not like your review one bit.
So is the life of a reviewer.
If you'd like to read the review that spawned this hatred, use your head and find it. My computer is currently not . . . online-capable thanks to a particularly violent kitten with a phone-cord-chewing tick. I don't remember the URL.
The point, however, is not the URL. It's the idea of anonymously flaming a reviewer you don't know on any level, much less personally, for so absently defined a reason. These are the same people who click on Gamers.com's "Submit Hype" button and give scores of "10" just because they hate the Xbox and the previous hype-submitter mentioned Halo in his ill support of his score of "1." In this case, it's both sides who are the criminal. This brings us to our first rule:
IN SUBJECTIVE GAMES JOURNALISM, THE READER IS ALWAYS GUILTY
And this is a problem. I'm not going to bother going into too much detail regarding my abovesaid bold stance, because I myself, at this moment, typing what I'm typing, am a videogame journalist. And, as rule #2 states:
IN SUBJECTIVE GAMES JOURNALISM, THE WRITER IS ALWAYS GUILTY
Which, to break it down semantically, brings us to:
IN SUBJECTIVE GAMES JOURNALISM, EVERYONE IS GUILTY
I imagine that, at the Dawn of Man, when we first used chisels and heavy rocks to carve out our first facsimiles of subjectivity, all matters involving appraisal of something subjective involved double-edged guilt. In the case of videogame journalism -- that is, journalism devoted especially to a young art form -- that guilt is the journalist's in that the journalist incites the wrath of select readers, and that guilt is the select readers' in that they are such touchy assholes in the first place.
Ahem. Note my bias, of course.
It is early in the life of subjective gaming. Those who play games like what they like because they like it. Most of them don't care to explain it any more deeply than that. Most of them don't care to hear it explained any more deeply than that. Most people who like certain games can't stand to hear any opinions contrary to their own. When they attack a journalist who gives a game an unfavorable review, they are attacking the review, not the journalist.
Bill Laird, a reader of PlanetGameCube.com, whose email to me regarding my Splinter Cell review was thankfully not a flame, raises an important question about we who read videogame journalism:
"I have no idea why I read reviews of games I've already purchased."
I replied, and told him I do the same thing with movies. Sometimes, I told him, I go back and read through the Roger Ebert archive when I'm bored with everything else on the internet, or on a break from writing. On the one hand, somewhere deep inside, it warms us who read when a critic positively reviews something we like. On the other hand, it burns us who read when a critic negatively reviews something we like. The bare notion that someone can like what we like has no doubt been responsible for many spontaneous marriages. The bare notion that someone can dislike something we like, or that someone can like something we dislike has no doubt been responsible for many long wars.
Warmth and burning is what critical journalism is all about. Either a review evokes a happy warmth or an angry burning. Much as reader reviews on Amazon.com tend to be either one star or five, no one who cares about a game will not care about the review of that game. This answers the question of why people read.
It is extreme displeasure with something that moves us to review it with one star. It is extreme satisfaction that pushes us to rate it five stars. Anyone who disagrees is worth violently disagreeing with.
This is what I'll call "aesthetic guilt." It's a relatively modern thing. The modern thing about it is that the "guilt" is not really "guilt" so much as it is a hole where guilt should go. Really, you who behave this way: you should be ashamed of yourselves, and guilty.
DAMN IT, MAN, THINK OF YOURSELF
Man's desire to push on other people the things he likes has caused many a bloody religious crusade. It has also caused some gushing book reviews and healthily self-conscious magazine feature articles.
The problem in games journalism is that all guilty parties -- the writers and the readers -- don't understand where games end and people's opinions of them begin. Nor do they understand where people's opinions end and the people themselves begin. Those who post their opinions of games or game company mergers on internet forums do so with respect to the unwritten law of gaming journalism and gaming journalism discussion that dictates no personality be used unless it's insincere or strictly part of the formula.
One not-absolutely-horrible website with a dreadful URL features reviews that, almost always (I haven't read all of them, nor do I plan to), either begin or end with some sort of seven-word personal anecdote.
"When I was a kid, I played Castlevania."
I become partly thankful, and prideful, for and of my experience with PlanetGameCube.com: it has helped me to reconstruct, in my head, entire sections of website "staff guide" documents:
Begin and/or end every review with some sort of personal anecdotal declaration. Make it look like a fact. Keep it to one sentence, or two, if it's particularly interesting. If you have trouble determining if your anecdote is interesting, email it to a senior editor. These guys have been around. They can help you out. More walking than you've ever done in your entire lives.
And there are kids -- droves of them -- who chew on pencils hovering over note cards, who just want to be involved in the videogame-related media, wondering, how am I going to squeeze in my anecdote?
Once they get that out of the way, they write that review like they're a schoolgirl talking in one of their favorite Japanese animes: quick, and fast, and gushing, and a little shy, and a little cute, and a little funny, and a little lollers. The things to say come easily, both because they're pre-laid-out into the specific categories of "graphics," "sound," and "gameplay," and because they're speaking in a language they've been fluent in six minutes after their fandoms were born. It is through much web-foruming and Gamers.com-hype-writing that they hone this language to knife-sharpness.
The language I speak of is jargon.
Oh yes, we can all use jargon. Everyone assembled here, everyone reading this is either a gamer, a game journalist, both of the above, or someone interested in games. Surely, you can't be a gaming journalist if you're not a gamer (though surely you can get a gaming PR job without being a gamer . . . ahem). If you're a gamer, and you succeed in becoming a games journalist, either you have friends in high places or you know how to talk about games. In some cases, maybe it's both. Whether it's both or just one or the other, however, one thing holds true:
WE ARE ALL GUILTY OF JARGON IN THE FIRST DEGREE
In the next installment, I shall discuss our penance. Bring your controller-cord rosaries and desire to be rehabilitated.
[Next: BOOTH BABES = TEH R0XX0RZ!]
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