Tim,
I've never written to a reviewer before. I just read your Soul Calibur II review and I wanted to say that I was totally blown away by it. It was the best review I've ever read. I've read countless reviews and I've never come across any with so much emotion and sincerity within them. I've never found a reviewer who felt so attached to a game before and was able to explain the reason why they loved it so much. Your review was so much better than all the others, because it wasn't a review in the classic sense of the world. You brought in your personal experience and told a story of how and why you love fighting games. I felt that I went on a journey where I with you from Japan, back into your past and then back into the present. That's never happened to me in a review and it was an amazing experience and I wanted to congratulate you on it.
I've also screamed at games, mainly when I've died and I'm seriously pissed. I think it's a natural thing, when you fuck up you need to expel the anger and screaming at the TV is the easiest way.
I hope you keep writing reviews for games that you love and pass on your love for games to other people.
Douglas Mendum
~
About videogames, more is said on the internet than anywhere else. This is because the internet, a "World-Wide Web," as it were, is large, and everyone, on some level or another, has access to it. Anyone with two working fingers can hop on a web forum, or even write for IGN, and say what it is they have to say.
Beyond our jargon-heavy conversations about RPG HP dynamics -- like, characters in Final Fantasy I can have a maximum of 999 HP, and characters in Final Fantasy X can totally go as high as 99,999 HP with the right enhancements -- and worrying about system price-points, or making fun of the Xbox's console footprint, or the ill-intentioned touch-sensitivity of the weak PS2 Dual Shock 2 shoulder buttons, we have a lot to say about games themselves. We, who play videogames, have plenty to say and communicate about videogames that goes beyond rewritten press releases or grinning G4 bastards.
Certain old men exist in this world, I hear, who can make you cry just by talking about fishing. It's because they grew up with fishing, and they lived with fishing, and everything they know about life, they learned from fishing. Their philosophies involve fish. Like a character in a well-crafted story, these old men have sensitivities that might resemble a still, shimmering sea.
It's neither the talent of the old men nor the nature of fishing that gives them these sensitivities. It's the basic concept of living a life in which you do one thing more than casually. You do something every day, and it becomes a part of you.
What sensitivities lurk beneath the hardened "We got an emergency!" speech of a PlanetGameCube.com staff member? That's not the question. The question is what makes this sensitivity worth communicating?
A videogame takes concentration to get into. It takes time to grow to love a videogame, especially one as complicated, strict, and cruel as The Guardian Legend. I have taken that time, and I have, on many occasions, loved The Guardian Legend. I have also had friends who couldn't "even play Tetris," because they were "so bad at videogames."
Have you ever met a person who just doesn't "have any talent for watching movies"? Have you met anyone who's "too old to start watching movies"?
You're going to yell at your computer monitor now, and call me an asshole for comparing games to movies. On the one hand, be aware that I'm calling myself an asshole for doing it.
Ahem.
How about a person who's "just no good at listening to the radio"?
The Chicago Sun-Times, in addition to being the home of Roger Ebert, currently employs John Grochowski as their weekly gambling columnist.
Forgive me for stepping out of line for a second, though -- what the hell? How much is there to say about gambling? Are we kept up-to-date on when new poker strategies are devised? Has he discovered that one method of pulling a slot-machine arm is more effective than another?
Videogames, however, require skill, and sometimes knowledge of the field of videogames. Sometimes you need to think quickly. And when you make a button-press that translates to an on-screen movement, it's your button press. (Except, of course, in the case of Kingdom Hearts, in which it could be something else entirely.)
Here's that image I promised I'd bring back:
When I press the big, red, A button on my NES Advantage, it makes Link stab out with his Wooden Sword, hitting the Old Man in the First Dungeon who's telling me that "Eastmost Peninsula is the Secret." It's because of my immature, fleeting, gamer-ish tendencies that I press the button, and it's because I press the button that Link stabs, and it's because Link stabs because of me that balls of harmful light echo out of the flames burning in the dark. And when Link starts to dance around, avoiding the fireballs, it's me who's tweaking the NES Advantage's joystick, me who's screaming at the TV, "Give me your best shot, old man!"
WE: WHO PLAY
With the growth of the internet, I forecast the death of videogame magazines. Only a select, tiny few will remain -- even those that offer playable demo discs will go extinct once the beast that is "Online Play" and "Downloadable Content" is unleashed. Those that remain will do so for the people who prefer to have something to hold in their hands, or for people who are "just no good at using the internet."
Electronic Gaming Monthly, for one, will stick around, as will GamePro, because as long as there are mothers with children who game and sometimes get sick, there will be a market for the occasional issue accidentally-bought because of the little cartoon-character reviewers.
Sooner or later, we're going to be getting all we "need" to know about videogames from websites run by fans or large corporations. What IGN lacks in proofreaders they make up for in frequent, timely, informative updates, first screenshots, and streaming video. Conspiracy Entertainment's Dan Jevons is already quite convinced of this, I take it: in his Tokyopia.com staff profile, he lists his favorite magazine as "Print is dead." For the longest time, I thought "Print is dead" was the name of a magazine. It turns out it's not. Dan Jevons was making a statement.
And love BanGai-Oh!'s localization as I do, I'm not going to agree with that statement. At least, I'm not going to agree with it all the way.
As a "novelist" (it says so on my business card, you know), I'm obligated to at least believe halfway in the living and thriving of print media. On the other hand, I can admit with only a tiny splash of nostalgia for my it's-around-here-somewhere collection of old issues of Electronic Gaming Monthly that print is dead for some purposes. "Need-to-know" videogame journalism is one of those purposes.
What person in their right mind is going to read a magazine's blowout feature with first screen shots of Halo 2 when they can jump on IGN.com and download a damned high-resolution video detailing all the gameplay that has currently been revealed?
And you answer: uh, a person with a 56k modem?
And I retort: I'm talking about the near future, you sarcastic son of a bitch.
The correct answer to this question, then, is no one. Or, at least, no one whose intelligence is above below-average.
The question, then, is not "What needs to be said about videogames?"
It is "What do people want to read about videogames?"
Or even "What do people want to know about videogames?"
Someone whose identity I'll project posted on a website, saying that insert credit's Eric-Jon Waugh's review of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker was "the worst videogame review ever written." Several people agreed, either for the sake of agreeing or because they really agreed. "There's line that's been crossed," someone said. "There's such a thing as thinking too deeply about videogames."
This kind of underestimation of the human attention span is both wrong and counterproductive. Really, has Eric-Jon thought "too deeply" about videogames, in a way "no one should ever do"? If you damn him, I damn you for posting entire sentences consisting of "LOL OMG" when talking about your favorite games on message boards. If there is such a thing as thinking too deeply about videogames, then there is such a thing as thinking too shallowly, too. Be ashamed of yourself for clicking on all those screenshots.
The deal is this: someone has to think -- and write -- this way about videogames, if games or gamers are going to evolve. Someone has to write a scholarly analysis of Metal Gear Solid 2's endgame now if videogame history textbooks are going to exist in fifty years.
It's a free world we live in here, together. People are free to say what they want about whatever they want to talk about. We can do it out of scholarly concern to pass down knowledge, thoughtful concern to better an art form, or artful concern to entertain while talking about entertainment.
In what way we do this is a question of tact. Rather than open eight trillion websites that "succeed" The GIA, let's take what worked about The GIA, and revise; if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, revision is the sincerest form of imitation. By God, let's not keep Gamego-ing our GameFans. Let's buckle down, and think, with deep concern:
I was at a Japanese restaurant in the Kabukicho of Shinjuku this past January, or so the story goes. I was there with journalists. Videogames journalists, and a few videogame company employees. Artists and sound guys. Someone from Electronic Gaming Monthly was there. Another guy was from EDGE, I think. I think there was an IGN guy there, too. I'm not sure. I know some bastards from Activision were there, too. I use the term "bastards" affectionately. One guy who was there works for G4 now, I think. It doesn't matter. It was a lot of people. A big group of people getting a big group of drunk. They were getting drunk and talking about videogames, which they love. They were talking about videogames they hated. They were talking about things they hated within the realm of what they loved.
Someone mentioned Xenosaga, with its long-winded reliance on cut-scenes, animation, dialogue, and exposition. Someone called the gameplay "hollow and vapid." Someone else call the producer, Tetsuya Takahashi, a "moron" for trying to make a game too much like a movie.
One of them mentioned what an asshole Yuji Naka is. Another one threw half a tantrum about a comment Tecmo's Tomonobu Itagaki had made. One called Konami's own Castlevania producer Koji Igarashi a "goth jackass." Another one debunked rumors that Capcom's Shinji Mikami, producer of the Resident Evil series and father of "Survival Horror" was cool, by saying that "he's such a fucking loser."
Something along the lines of the following was said: No one who makes videogames can be cool. No one who writes about videogames, really, is "cool." It's a dork's hobby. All of us here -- we're dorks.
No one raised a finger in protest. No one had the reason, the balls, or the sobriety. I almost had a little of each. My little of each amounted to a lot of nothing. I said nothing.
Now, I've had time to think it over. I'll tell you what I think, now:
Are we: who play, all "dorks"? Does this hobby, as a hobby, make us "uncool"? Or is it a certain level of devotion that makes us "dorks"? Can you call any addicted-to-his-job stock-broker a "dork"? What if he's got a really cool haircut, and drives a Mercedes? What if he kills a guy, and has a hundred underlings who are totally eager to help him hide the corpse? Does his serious manner of dealing with it all make him a "dork"?
Much as "too much of a good thing" can corrupt and pollute a conservative mind, any kind of fandom can turn any kind of neutral, normal, healthy person into an internet-junkie, or worse -- an amateur journalist.
Still, as long as fun things exist, people will exist who will take their liking of said fun things too far, and they will discuss to infinity. These fun things, being fun for many people outside the realm of losers, will be corporation-ized and made pretend-cool by guys in orange shirts at trade shows and ad executives who think they're actually going to sell more than half of one Nokia N-Gage based on a picture of some radical bastard kneeling on a skateboard in front of a computer-rendered car. Every effort to make it look "cool" will fall as flat as every attempt to prove it "art," simply because people are looking in the wrong places. They are looking at the games. They should be looking at -- or, perhaps, for -- people.
I believe the original question was "what do people want to read about videogames?" This might not mean what they're asking for right this moment -- maybe it's something they don't know they want. Or maybe it's just a higher quality version of something they're getting already?
Designer diaries? Exclusive interviews? That's good. Get a designer with a flair for the written word, and dress his thoughts up nicely enough, and you get material that you can pass off to, hell, Entertainment Weekly. Maybe big, fashionable CG spreads in other, more "arty" magazines?
Yes, I have just spoken: the future of videogame journalism lies not in faster, better, glossier, and with bigger demo discs -- it lies in interesting, thoughtful content outside the scope of press releases, displayed in places more prominent than magazines whose polybags cause a whole section of the rack at my local Target store to bulge out in a way that slightly embarrasses me.
A journalist for one such magazine told me Shinji Mikami couldn't be cool, because he thought he was cool. He wasn't a rock star because he thought he was a rock star. What makes the typical IRC-monkey a "geek" or a "dork," or even a "nerd"? The answer is simple -- they're quick to jump on the bandwagon. Gamers -- I mean, "We who play" -- are born and raised as regular human beings until we become "gamers," and from then, we're half-ostracized, whether it's for real or just in our minds. I mention in one article how during high school I never told anyone I played videogames, because I was ashamed of it. That shame, which I describe in that same article as starting to fade out of gaming culture, lingers in the "hardcore" gamers of today, the gamers too quick to give up at becoming anything else that they proclaim themselves nerds (and sometimes with an undeniable sense of humor).
By this journalist's rule, then, are gamers who declare themselves dorks not dorks at all? Or is the "hardcore" way of thinking with which they scrutinize a game designer for wanting to be "cool" twisted and used as a snobbish means to make being a "dork" cool? After all, these are people who read websites that advertise "new for nerds" as "stuff that matters." Does it? Does it really matter? Is it useful?
Oscar Widle says that a man can invent a useful thing only if he does not admire it, and he can be forgiven for inventing a useless thing as long as he admires it immensely. I see much admiring of the useful among gamers these days, whether the "useful" is a DDR pad that's meant to be used for DDR games, being collected only out of a completist's elite admiration, and then thrown in a closet where no one can admire it.
Oscar Wilde also says that "All art is quite useless." My mother used to tell me that videogames were useless. I'm inclined to agree; in life, nothing outside air, food, water, shelter, and the occasional round of sexual intercourse is "necessary." What good, really, do videogames do? If there is a line that seperates human invented uselessnesses into diversion and art, I think videogames clearly lie on the "art" side. Such is their kind uselessness.
Maybe it's time to listen to Oscar Wilde and my mother, and begin admiring the uselessness of videogames. Reporting on them like newspapers report on earthquakes is just silly. Let's admire them correctly. We already like them enough. Let's try to do something worth doing with that liking. Let's keep it in focus. Not let it get out of hand.
The long and short of what I'm saying is that videogaming needs a journalistic -- and perhaps even literary -- voice. Given the amount of input that is required of a player who plays a videogame, a videogame review should include more of the reviewer's personality and less press-release talk. Many saluted the genius of Electronic Gaming Monthly's "Review Crew" in 1989: rather than one, sterile review of a game, EGM took a hint from Japanese gaming Bible Famitsu (which shall be around for all time, amen), and featured four viewpoints, from four different types of gamers. We grew up with those gamers -- we grew up knowing how Steve was all about arcade-style action, and how Sushi-X loved fighting games and was in awe of his own hatred for portable systems. GamePro had reviewers who specialized in certain types of games; a reviewer who liked an RPG would be the only person rating the RPGs, leading the casual readers (and what are magazine-readers, if not casual?) to believe that a game which wasn't right for them was better than they'd be able to find it.
If, say, one long-form review were to be published, weekly, in a widely-read publication, and if the writer of this review were to be a thoughtful individual who could make interesting writing about videogames into simply interesting writing -- that would accomplish something.
Ahem.
I'm not asking for a New Yorker column just yet -- though I can imagine what it'd look like: maybe with one screenshot in the middle of each page, like they'd feature poetry, or a cartoon.
Ahem.
Mainstream and higher media's treatment of videogames has been, even until now, patronizing. The Indianapolis Star ran a syndicated -- and three months late -- review of The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, and it sadly and predictably follows the "GRAPHICS / SOUND / GAMEPLAY" formula, stopping at the end of each bullet point to explain the most essential information: the graphics are cartoon-like, and even at their darkest, won't scare your children; the music is happy and giddy at times, and engaging for your children; the gameplay is a little challenging, and might put off some children under nine; it might help if parents observe their child's playing.
I'm not making that up.
And I'm not making this up, either:
Entertainment Weekly says, of Final Fantasy VII:
"Unusual for a game marketed to kids, FFVII included several curse words."
For one thing, the game was rated "T." And the curse words were as extreme as "shit." And who said it was marketed "at" kids? And what's with the use of the word "included"? In journalism, are we not to use the eternal present when discussing works of artistic value? In the preceding paragraph, EW calls Final Fantasy VII "Four discs of role-playing heaven with spectacular animation, a Hollywood-worthy musical score, and more than 80 hours of stirring play . . ."
Hell.
Anyone who's played Metal Gear Solid 2 can tell you that videogames are no longer something targeted only at children and fat, reclusive adults who love them so much they're willing to do more walking than they've done in their entire lives just to score free T-shirts and magazines emblazoned with images of the hobby they love. Anyone who's taught English in Tokyo might be able to tell you a story of how a thirteen-year-old girl once said she was playing writer Shigesato Itoi's 1993 postmodern literary videogame masterpiece Mother 2 because her dad told her to.
I've received emails from university professors, telling me that they enjoy my writing about videogames despite their having not played a game since Ms. Pac-Man. All of them have found insert credit through an auspicious link on a Haruki Murakami discussion forum. If I've entertained these people, what are the chances that a more-refined, sparse style -- a more literary approach, with games mentioned more tangentially and/or metaphysically -- might entertain readers of The New Yorker? Rather than crusade for games' recognition as art, I'll simply treat them that way, writing pieces that fall somewhere comfortably between my own shamelessly nostalgic story about Super Mario Bros. 3 and Eric-Jon's literary-criticism-esque review of the newest Zelda.
At least, someone, please, get me a column in the Chicago Sun-Times.
I deserve at least that. After all, I've just completed the greatest piece of videogame-related journalism ever written: by tim rogers.
-- tim rogers
is so cool, he's twenty-three, vegetarian, and will totally soon purchase an MTV crib in hermosa beach
[Next: Chapter 7: Room to Play]
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