Jargon is a disease that grows within your game-journalist or game-journalist-wannabe or game-journalism-forum-lurking body. Jargon, in a public setting, is what makes you look like a dork, not your "Pool of Radiance" T-shirt. Trust me; I wore a "Pool of Radiance" T-shirt I'd gotten free from the videogame store where I'd worked when I went outside to fetch the newspaper one morning, and some totally hot older woman totally hit on me. It was because, while wearing that shirt, I didn't mention the size and shine of my massive d12's, my onyx-finished d8's, and the sexy charisma of my DM.
At any rate, the woman wasn't my type. It doesn't matter. I'm just saying that I didn't wear my jargon on my TSR-logo-emblazoned sleeve, and I was all the better off for it.
I still wouldn't ever wear that T-shirt in public. Just because. I mean, hell -- the color. It's not my kind of blue.
This isn't about my kind of blue, however. It's about the jargon that could get you killed both socially and professionally.
For the most part, all specialty journalism is guilty of some form or another of jargon. I'm sure, if I ever picked up an issue of Cigar Aficionado, I'd find plenty of brand-name-derived words for rolling papers or tobacco leaves that I never knew existed. When a cigar, however, is mentioned in a Rolling Stone interview, it's mentioned only in passing:
"John Denver was smoking a cigar when I met him at his crib in Hermosa Beach. He held it in his jeweled hand, turned up the volume on his gangster rap, and offered me a puff."
Whether or not the journalist took the puff doesn't matter. By that right, what the puff tasted like doesn't matter, either. What is important, in this interview of one music star, is building him as a character by using details. A cigar is that detail. A true cigar aficionado would read over this article, and probably wonder what cigars John Denver keeps stocked in his crib. It's the true cigar aficionado's choice, as a human being, to wonder about John Denver's tobacco preferences. It's the obsessive loon who reads a magazine about it.
When, say, an orange-T-shirt-wearing representative of G4 -- that's TV 4 Gamers, don't you know -- interviews Gary Coleman at E3, asking him what game is currently in his "PS2," someone comes off looking like an asshole. And it's not Gary Coleman -- poor guy went through a lot of shit in his life. Leave him the hell alone.
It's subtle references to games that we should be crusading for. Not what we have now. Oh, holy shit and Dear God, not what we have now.
Allow me to clarify:
Movies contain songs; many times, these songs are selected for reasons. Books make reference to Shakespearean plays. Shakespearean plays make references to old poems. The members of The Gameforms Project, by that right, should be able to quit their endeavor when one out of three Barbara Walters celebrity interviews includes a reference to videogames.
Gameforms' John Hummel says that he sees the videogame industry as where the film industry was in the early 1940s, and despite hating to make the film comparison, I'd say that's about right. I'm sure that all journalism about film in the late 1930s was of the present-day supermarket tabloid level of quality. I'm sure that, if you asked the average lawn-mowing southern man of the 1930s if films were art, he'd tell you no, and get the hell off his lawn. If you asked the average New York investment banker, he'd tell you hell no. If you asked the average Californian, he'd probably tell you no. They were still looking for gold in those days, if that helps the analogy along. To get an affirmative answer, you'd have to track down a rich anti-American American man living off his father's money in Paris, where they were already using words like "mise en scene."
Novels written around the time of Casablanca's popularity weren't too quick in using the "Here's looking at you, kid" catchphrase. Newspaper articles detailing earthquake death tolls probably didn't think half of one time of using it. In the same way, it's going to be a while before a CNN field reporter pushes his earpiece deeper into his ear and shouts into a microphone, "It's like the fucking big battle scene in Metal Gear Solid 2 over here!" And not just because it's going to still be a little while before we see the first giant robots.
**
In eighth grade, I took a "special class" called "novels" -- for gifted students who liked reading, and wanted to learn how to write. In that class, for whatever reason, we watched Ben-Hur. The teacher, a woman named Mrs. Slocum, was a jaunty six-foot-six, and thick, with a round nose. She had short blonde hair, and might have been a member of a secret underground rugby league where there are no rules. She told us that Ben-Hur was a classic because of many things -- its focus on one hero, its tale of that hero's journey, its epic cinematography, its historical setting, the sweat, tears, and blood (one man died during the year-long filming of the chariot-race sequence) that went into its making, and its age.
I questioned her -- how did the film's age make it a classic? She replied, and I quote, "Well, coupled with all of these things that make it great, it has to reach a certain age before anyone can reliably look back on it."
It took us an entire week of eighth grade to watch Ben Hur. It was at the end of our viewing that Mrs. Slocum lectured us on why the film is a classic. So I thought myself quite right when I told her, "Well, I've just seen it for the first time in my life, and I think it's a classic."
Mrs. Slocum, a heavy advocate of the metric system, was a centimeter away from telling me, "No, you don't."
If she'd said that, she might have been right. I'm not really sure anymore. I'll have to think about it again in ten or fifteen years.
The central question of this piece, then, is actually two questions, and they're both the same question:
Did I, at fourteen, really have the right to consider Ben Hur a classic?
Do videogames need their own devoted journalism?
The answer, at the moment, is no. It used to be yes. Now, it is no. It will be no, probably, for another fifty or sixty years.
The tides of time come in, and drift out. You either swim and enjoy it, or stand on the beach and obsess over what's left behind.
***
I'm going to start concluding this piece. I'll start by telling you that 1988 was a good time for videogame journalism.
It was a good time because those who wrote the Nintendo Fun Club newsletters loved what they were doing. They were excited, and pioneers. God love them.
It was a good time for Steve Harris, a high school dropout and world Centipede high-score record-holder, who founded Sendai Publishing, lovingly crafted Electronic Gaming Monthly's crimes against modern graphic-design, spelling-error-riddled-capsule-game-reviews, and edge-of-the-moment genius, and went on to one day buy a Lamborghini.
Now, the times have changed. While Electronic Gaming Monthly -- now a Ziff-Davis publication -- still holds sway over American supermarket shelves, is sold in every Japanese Tower Records, and sits in latest-issue form atop my coffee table, its respect does not extend beyond the reach of its jargon.
In a recent issue (#709, May 9, 2003), "with help from the experts at the all-videogame cable network G4," editors of Entertainment Weekly selected "100 videogames that represent both the history and the future of interactive entertainment." Rather than take issue with the selections, or the fact-checking (which would be easy -- according to EW, Super Mario Bros. was released in 1987 (it was 1985) and Final Fantasy VII is four discs (it's three)), I'm going to point out something of a Tangential Portentous Indicator.
That tangent begins like this:
Each capsule blurb for the first fifty entires on the list consists of a description of the game, in black text, and then an interesting fact, in red text. Number 10 on Entertainment Weekly and G4's list is Capcom's Street Fighter II. Street Fighter II's red text is this:
GOTCHA: At the height of SF II's popularity, a videogame magazine published a code that would unlock a secret character named Sheng Long. Too bad the elusive character turned out to be an April Fools' Day prank.
Between the lines, I read this:
The name of the "videogame magazine" is not important at all. I could chalk this up to bad fact-checking. I won't. The people at G4 media, while mostly annoying assholes (and that's meant objectively, as "be an annoying asshole" is probably in the employee handbook) who rush around E3 in their carbon-copy T-shirts interviewing tourists, are not stupid assholes with no knowledge of videogame journalism. Hell, I'm sure even the models hired to smile on their vapid "cool" television programs know a thing or two about Nintendo Power, at least.
Using my semantic psychic powers, I have discerned both that someone involved in the list-making remembered the prank (evidence: the prank's being mentioned) and that the person who remembered the prank knew it came from Electronic Gaming Monthly (evidence: trust me). It was an editor of Entertainment Weekly, no doubt, who decided the magazine's name should be cut for the sake of a word count. The reasoning is clear: if the editor of the story had left in the name Electronic Gaming Monthly, in accordance with the first-reference rule, it would have to be modified with an appositive: "Electronic Gaming Monthly, a videogame magazine."
The tangent goes on like this, pointing into shameful, black infinity:
In the West Lobby of the Los Angeles Convention Center on the first day of the 2003 Electronic Entertainment Expo, I saw a curious thing.
Orange-shirted grinning employees of G4 Media were running around with microphones, harassing show attendees. They had a little kiosk set up, and were giving anyone stupid enough free "G4" tattoos -- yes, the kind applied with a needle -- and a plastic bag of promotional materials. The people who received tattoos sold space on their arms to G4 in exchange for a few seconds of a television interview. Anyone not willing to be stabbed in the arm with idiocy was welcome to have their picture taken with a grinning G4 Booth Babe.
"Booth Babe" is a slang term. It might be better defined as jargon. It was coined in or around 1994 by videogame magazines whose staffs attended the first E3, and found themselves flattered by the hundreds of large-breasted girls in tight shirts hired by videogame company PR firms to hand out flyers. A "booth babe photo album" became a kitsch addition to any keeping-it-real, jargon-heavy videogame magazine. Some videogame magazines' editors, in fact, never appeared in photographic form in their magazines outside the booth babe photo album.
A careful observation, thanks to my genius IQ:
The G4 Booth Babes wore tight T-shirts that read "G4 Booth Babe."
I read between the lines: I'm going straight to hell, along with any man who's ever masturbated.
*****
We are all guilty, us who write about what we play. We are all guilty of building an inverted pyramid out of our jargon. We are all guilty on different levels. Some of our inverted pyramids, when you get to the bottom of them, are Aztec, and flat. Some of our inverted pyramids, when you get to the bottom of them, are worse -- they are Egyptian, with points that vanish into nothingness.
[Next: WE: WHO PLAY]
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