Selling a Review Score

This actually happened last year when I was at 1UP, because I remember the 1UP side of it - the publisher wanted to know what scores would be given, we refused to tell, they threaten to yank the exclusive, etc. The usual nonsense.

And since I have many friends who used to work at IGN, I can also say I heard the story independently from them, as well.

It's stinky! And I'm glad that stories like this are coming out in the open. I wish my friends who knew about it could speak more openly and less anonymously about it, but there is still such an old boys' network, and an informal blacklist too. That's something else that has to change about game journalism.

In any case although I believe this story to be true it still only counts as hearsay, word against word, etc, and unless there were more evidence it's not really "newsworthy." Nevertheless the anecdote gives us a glimpse into how some people work the system.

And... for hilarity's sake, since we are speaking of untrustworthy reviews: Worst Review Ever?

Game Journalism is not the Only Journalism that Sucks We all complain about how bad game journalism is (and always point to to a handful of the usual suspects as exceptions) but maybe that's just because we actually know about and care about the industry. A friend of mine (who shall remain anonymous!) forwarded me this story yesterday: Japan's lonely hearts turn to dolls for sex, company.

My first thought was, how the hell can you write this story and not mention the very famous RealDoll, which is an American product?

Because either the writer didn't know about them - which indicates a lack of simple Googling - or, more likely, because the story is better if it's cast as "Look how weird/sad/lonely/perverted Japanese man are - aren't we glad we're not like that?" In which case it may have been the editor who excised the writer's sentences about RealDoll. I guess "Some Men Like Sex Dolls" is not much of a story.

Gross. MORE...

Rock Stars of Videogames

I was flying home from the weekend in LA (where I didn't really go to E3, just sampled the afterparty and saw some friends) when I found myself next to Chris Hecker, whom I hadn't seen in a long time. We got to talking about why there are still very few recognizable names and faces in the videogame industry. He reminded me of the famous ad announcing the founding of EA, headlined, "Can Computers Make You Cry?"

Well, we're still struggling to answer that question, but take a look at the photo on the right - the founding members of a company that ambitiously and grandiosely called itself Electronic Arts. A name that defies the Eberts who don't see the art in computer and video games. And the photo itself says unequivocally, "Not only are computer games art, we are artists."

It looks like it could be a publicity shot for a moody rock band. The photographer has captured real personality here, individuals - dressed in dark clothes and seemingly passionately united under the aegis of a single goal.

With a few notable exceptions (you know who they are - Will Wright, Shigeru Miyamoto) - the industry has turned away from personalizing game development, from regarding the people who work on games as individually important. No, far better for a studio like EA to let the public see the studio behind the franchise rather than a handful of creative geniuses. The franchise is longer-lived that way, the studio system more stable.

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Sustainable Journalism Game

Oops, sorry peeps, you only have one day left to apply for this odd, experimental position - an attempt to combine journalism with serious games. It's based around LA - you can telecommute but it says you have to check in to the office once in a while. $1,000 per week ain't bad!

*****

1. FREELANCE:
American Public Media
Contract reporter for sustainability journalism game
Los Angeles (can telecommute)
Application deadline: 04/06/2007
Posted: March 30, 2007
Freelance posting
American Public Media is looking for an environmental reporter with
expertise in human environmental impact to work on a groundbreaking
journalism game that will launch in advance of a fall 2007 series on the
sustainability of the consumer economy. As a Public Insight Journalism
game, data and comments generated by user play will inform the reporting
of the series.

This contract position is full time, pays $1,000/week, starts ASAP, and
will run for 5-8 weeks. The game team is based at the Marketplace offices
in Los Angeles. The contractor can work remotely, and would be expected
to come to the LA office at set checkpoints. The contractor needs to have
knowledge around human environmental impact, be comfortable with numbers
and creating and using databases. Apply for this position if you want to
break new ground and apply serious games to journalism!

For additional information, including details on how to apply, see:
http://journalism.berkeley.edu/jobs/details.php?cat=free&ID=5467

Julian Dibbell's Play Money

When I first met Julian, he was in the process of quitting his freelance writing career to become a full-time trader of virtual goods for one year. The book that resulted has just come out: Play Money. I've ordered it, and I'll post the review here.

Julian's previous book was My Tiny Life, a virtual autobiography. He also wrote the groundbreaking article The Unreal Estate Boom for Wired in 2002. He posts at Terra Nova.

The Big Score Issue

Scandal at Gamespy: a reviewer is angry that Gamespy inflated his score and added phrases he didn't write in order to justify the better score. Gamespy has taken down the article due to controversy.

The thing is, I can understand both sides - as can all of us working for game pubs. On the one hand, I'd be pissed as a writer if my score and text were altered without my knowledge. I mean, what are you paying me for? Give me feedback, but don't make up stuff I didn't say. My NAME is on it.

But as an editor dealing with freelancers I know ... time is of the essence; we don't have time to ask the freelancer to reconsider, maybe replay the game. And when the review goes up, readers respond to it as a Gamespy review, not as a Nich Maragos review.

The problem is when Gamespy's editorial opinion is different from the reviewer's. And ultimately, the question is, does the editor have control over the voice of the entire product (the website or magazine)? In this case, the editors had already given an earlier version of the game a pretty decent score - they liked the game. So what do you do when one guy goes against that and gets all curmudgeonly? Do you let one lone, cranky reviewer have the final say? What if the editor thinks the reviewer was out of line?

It's not a case of "Gamespy sucks Nintendo's cock" or any other crappy shallow assessment of the situation; Gamespy has a right to try to control the editorial voice. The problem is we feed on an industry where TIME is at a premium - the idea is, whoever gets the newest stuff up FIRST wins. So we scramble to put up reviews and previews and news as fast as we possibly can. And in this case it meant that Gamespy editorial decided to quickly edit a freelancer's review to reflect more closely what they thought the game should get, instead of trying to talk to the reviewer and come to a better solution.

Are review scores sometimes artificially inflated? Of course. There was a notorious incident of Maxim, of all pubs, inflating a score after a prominent game publisher called them up for a chat. But I doubt very much in this case that Gamespy got an angry call from Nintendo. I think it far more likely that the decision was internal.

I don't know what the answer is. Maybe we're still asking the wrong questions. Maybe instead of haggling over scores we need to look more closely at the systemic issues of covering this industry. Maybe we need to ditch the review scores. Maybe we need to take more time developing stories about games.

Maybe we need a revolution.

The Times = Legitimacy*

There is a piece in last Sunday's New York Times about the New Games Journalism. (Free registration required.) Go read it; although it's brief, regurgitates all the old saws of the NGJ, and says odd things about how Americans rarely write NGJ, it is after all in the Sunday Times.

via Kotaku

*If the Times equals legitimacy, then what does the Post equal?

Meet the new games journalism, same as the old games journalism.

I've been considering this at least warm topic, the new games journalism, for the past week, going through the archives both tangible and in my head. I've come to a conclusion about why it's so hard to pin down the genre: It doesn't exist. Or if it did exist, it actually was the advent of reviews, previews and the like (screenshots!), the same material someone has mistakenly labeled "old games journalism". What we are calling the new games journalism is actually the old, original form of the art.

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In Defense of Old Game Journalism

Someone needs a hug.

I have a few thoughts about this. First, I don't think I'm quite clear on what "New Game Journalism" really is, although one of my articles has been included in the Guardian round-up. When I joked about this on IM with Julian Dibbell, whose article "A Rape in Cyberspace" is also included, we decided that we weren't sure when our writing became labelled as NGJ. I admit that when I started GGA I was tired of reviews and previews, and I knew I wanted to write about so much more than that. But at the same time I still read reviews and previews, and I still read industry news, too.

Writing experientially to me has always been a part of journalism - we have called it "gonzo" journalism in the past, but look back at 19th century American journalists - like Mark Twain - and you'll see that it's always been a facet of writing for the public. Such writing is not now intended to replace traditional, or "standard" journalism (calling it "old", as UK Resistance does, I think dates it too much). If a reporter were to turn in a piece on Baghdad, for example, we news consumers would be served well by hearing the traditional journalistic take on events, but there is also something extremely valuable about hearing the reporter's personal experiences: what was it like to try to get this piece together? What does it feel like to live in Baghdad, to dodge car bombs every day, to see your colleagues die off one by one? Writing about that adds immesurably to our understanding of the situation.

Same goes for music. Tell me, in one piece, what an album and artist are like, where they come from, what the influences are; but excite and inspire me by describing what it feels to be in the audience at an incredible rock show, to be on tour with them.

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The Guardian's Top 10 Examples of New Games Journalism

Check it.

Includes one of GGA's own articles. Can you guess which one?

Summing up Game Journalism

Amit sums it all up to tell you why your game magazine sucks. He acknowledges that a lot of people have said this all before, and we've been saying it since, oh, 1999? At least? The real question is, why do we still have to say it?

I think though that more than just pointing out what's wrong and spiraling us into a pit of despair, some of his bullets are constructive. Take number three, for example. "You've lost the hardcore gamer. This is a good thing." Yes, that's right. You'll never be hardcore enough for the hardcore, anyway. They need too much information, too fast - and as Amit points out, the best delivery system for that is online. But that's fine. Your mainstream gamers what more than tips, tricks, cheat codes, standard reviews (ah, see also, number five: "Your reviews are boring.") We read books, we see movies, we think about games. We could use at least one RES of games.

And what about aesthetics? Amit forgot to mention that most game magazines look the same - terrifically noisy, with a cartoon character on the cover drowning under neon-colored bubble text. Is this going to make the average 28-year-old gamer, male or female, feel smart for buying it? Is this going to be the irresistable candy that lures the subscribers?

But we all know this, already. So many of you readers and my colleagues have complained about these very issues. I tried last year to start a new games magazine - it didn't get far, as we foundered on getting funding and our total inexperience, and got seriously tangled in priorities. It was a crushing experience. But I've recovered now, and the engine's warming up, and I've got new ideas and new strategies. Who's with me? Damn it, when are we going to stop talking and make it happen?

I'm tired of waiting. What about you?

Mao and the New Games Journalism

You may remember early Christian game reviews. Endless rants against every game that came out for either being too violent, or having less Jesus than a Jack Chick comic. While this sub-community has matured in recent years to more coherent review methods, I invite you to revisit the glory days of weird-ass reviews. Stand and bear witness to Maoist game reviews.

Unfortunately, these guys haven't been keeping their reviews up to date, but they cover some of the classic PC games from 3-5 years ago. From the review of Fallout 1 & 2:

"...in the opinion of this reviewer, Fallout is more of a Maoist Role Playing Game than "linear" RPGs such as Myst. Just like there are many roads to socialism, where some are better than others and some are false turns, the player in Fallout will discover ways to do much better or play the game from an entirely different perspective the second, third, and further times through the game." MORE...

Posted by ClockworkGrue at 07:00 AM | TrackBack (0) | Comments (2) last by: BrainFromArous

Business: it's just a game.

Yesterday I heard a story on NPR Marketplace about a new book, Got Game, from Mitchell Wade and John C. Beck.(Note to future game-technology authors: please please please come up with new catch phrases for titles. Don't try to be cute. It's all been done.) In a brief interview, Wade talked about how video game training has influenced the next generation of business people and entrepreneurs. Some of his research sounds interesting and worthy of further investigation. For example, game-raised workers exhibit:

1. Willingness to take measured risks - gamers learn this innately long before they get to business school.

2. Different way of interacting with others. For example, less respect for hierarchy and seniority. In game world, anyone can be beaten by a 12-year-old. Gamers tend to respect ability, not seniority.

3. Seriousness about expertise, and being rewarded for that expertise. No matter how many times you fail in a game, if you REALLY want it, you CAN beat it. No doubt a helpful attitude in business.

One other thing Wade emphasized was that these characteristics were found in their research pool regardless of whether the subjects play games currently; the important thing for the data seems to be that they had played games.

Public Beta

More evidence of the emergence of mid-to-high brow gaming criticism, Public Beta out of the UK. Looks like they have a magazine and a book in the offing.

They're launching their effort with a call for answers to "difficult questions about video games" - belyingly basic stuff. "What is a videogame?" and "What makes a video game rubbish?" and "Where do you play games?" I'm going to take a stab at answering; mostly because I like to see new efforts to frame this medium. And it's a chance to frame a self-portrait as gamer. The call for answers is open; you can download a sheet in the right column and give their questions a stab yourself.

Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Interactive Fiction

Andrew Vestal and Nich Maragos have written a delightfully engaging, mind-bogglingly thorough piece on interactive fiction on 1up. Bill Mackenty, who sent it to me, noted that it was the best treatment he'd seen in years, and I have to agree. It's long, but worth reading every word.

Critic Critique

Every once in a while, somebody at GGA likes to talk about the lack of quality writing in game reviews. Call it payola. Call it 8-out-of-10 syndrome. Call it the collective identity-loss within the critical community in general.

All of this making even more remarkable David Smith's review of Manhunt at 1up.com.

From the opening of the review:

My experience with Manhunt progressed through four distinct stages, and instead of ticking off the usual bullet points about graphics, sound, control, and the like, I'd rather just describe those stages in sequence. It makes it easier to explain what Manhunt does well, and to explain the point at which I think it ultimately fails.

So my next question for all of you is, is this a step in the right direction when compared to the usual technical rundown?

Room to Play

I never mentioned it before, because I was overloaded with stuff at the time I think, but I contributed an editorial article to Insert Credit a little while ago, called Room to Play.

I'm sure you've all seen Insert Credit. If you haven't, you should check it out. Lots of smart, and smart-ass, writing.

Unprofessional Video Game Writing

As an occasionaly scuba diver with a passion for deep blue depths, I was eager to play EverBlue 2, a February 2003 PlayStation2 release from Capcom.

The game is an odd mix of console-style Japanese RPG and first person underwater exploration. Not poorly executed either! There are definitely some limitations on the "freedom" of swimming around underwater, and the game takes broad liberties with scuba diving. But the gameplay of searching out sunken wrecks, exploring and excavating them, and helping people on shore with lost items - it's all good times.

I wanted to review EverBlue 2, but I didn't want to review it in the context of being a video game, I wanted to review the game's capacity to reflect the experience of scuba diving.

I contacted Rodale's Scuba Diving magazine, a publication that concerns itself with hot diving spots and new rebreathers. I pitched them their first video game review.

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Sunday Reading Material

Justin brought back a stack of magazines when he visited the Ziff-Davis offices last week, and they've been sitting on our dining room table taunting me: "Reeeead usssss, Jane!" So this morning I sat down with my toast and my coffee and started to go through them.

The first one I picked up was GameNow, described by Z-D as catering to "8-12 year olds who aspire to be 17." Justin pointed out that the cover for that market was a bit absurd: it shows a pendulous-breasted Taki fromSoul Calibur II, nipples clearly poking out through her leotard. Mmmmkay.

Anyhow, the inside was surprising, particularly the devastatingly honest review given to Tomb Raider: Angel of Darkness by one Ethan Einhorn:

We waited three years for this?!! Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Angel of Darkness must be the sloppiest major game release I've ever played. [Emphasis in original.] Everything - the framerate, the puzzles, the sound effects - is unacceptably coarse.

[He gives some examples of what he means, then goes on:] And those are just the little issues. More damning is the positively ancient control scheme. After playing such games as Metal Gear Solid 2 and Splinter Cell, Tomb Raider's traditional setup feels awful. I want real analog ontrol, not the three-speed approximation present here. Lara moves like a robot, and her imprecise jumps are guarranteed to throw you off cliffs. Being forced to save your game after every successful jump in a platform-filled cavern does not equal fun.

Final score: D-. As deserved.

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Buzzcut Cometh

Ludology links us to buzzcut.com - a rich weblog covering theory and criticism of electronic entertainment. It's open to contributors; so far the content is a solo effort of David Thomas. Thomas has been reviewing games for the Denver Post for about four years. Looks like he's eager to use the web to chart his thoughts between reviews - his The Theology of Games post has a breezy tone somewhere between critic and lay-philosopher. He's published an extensive bibliography - cheers for more studied gameheads sharing their thoughts online!

Christian Gaming's No Shelf

Greetings from the Christian Game Developers' Conference. There's a few issues I'm tracking here; one of which is factionalism - reproducing denominations in the world of Christian video games. There are people here who are excited to see action-packed first person shooters based in a world of Christian faith (like N'Lightning's games). Finally there are professional-looking games that modern Christian gamers can enjoy!

But if you look on Sunday School Software's NO SHELF you'll see those games are immediately dismissed, mostly because of their gameplay model. To quote:

"Your mentor and brethren have been captured by demon possessed Roman soldiers." I wish I was making that up. Do we need a game about "demon possessed Roman soldiers" ?? I think not.

They have high standards for Christian entertainment software; maybe they're biased: they also produce Christian educational software.

Seeing internal criticism of Christian games from Christians highlights some of the perils of participating in this particular industry. I'll post more coverage of the conference next week.

Rick Jones's Disappointment With Games

Cleaning out a back room in Jane's old house, I found a copy of MechCommander for the PC. I'd never played this title before, but I'd enjoyed other mech computer games. Jane had staged a clever take over of "Knights of the Old Republic" on our Xbox, so I fired it up MechCommander tonight. Old games can still be good times!

I went looking for some reviews - MobyGames is a reliable collection of user reviews for games too old to be for sale. There were three reviews for MechCommander, one of them written by Rick Jones, someone who was pretty disappointed with the game. I did a search on the MobyGames site, and I found Rick Jones is kind of a game curmudgeon: Rap Sheet - User : Rick Jones. Here's some of his one-line game summaries:

"A horribly disappointing bug jar."
"A Disgrace To The Entire Series"
"An innovative but ultimately unsatisfying game"
"The best hockey game there is, but not the best there COULD be"
"An atrocious waste of time - it's not even offensive."
"One of the most disappointing games ever published."

He reviews a wide range of games, and he's seldom satisfied. That's not to say that Rick doesn't like games; he's a fan of strategy and simulations it seems. But for a medium that's reviewed by so many boosters, it's refreshing to read a little bit of Rick Jones, who has trouble looking past the greater potential of games.

Gaming's Lester Bangs

Michael Goldberg sat across the table for me at a lunch with cloth napkins. He was full of energy talking about a new web site, "Addicted to Noise." It was 1995 and he wanted to use web publishing to salute and chronicle Rock and Roll. He had a guiding spirit in this undertaking - Lester Bangs. I was 20 years old. I didn't know. Who was Lester Bangs?

Only the greatest rock writer ever, Michael raved. I started rereading some of his essays last night. His writing is filled with so much passion, so much of a yearning to transmit music on paper, so much unflinching desire to see rock and roll really rock, to ditch the weak sauce, to leave behind half-baked follow-ons, to relentlessly keep a strong pulse.

Lester Bangs wrote freelance for Rolling Stone in its earliest days. And for music magazines when they were more like zines; thin pages, created and photocopied by fans of new music.

So where is the Lester Bangs of game writing? Where is a game critic who writes reviews and essays suffused with the feeling of long evenings on the couch, or hunched over in your chair attacking orcs and covenant forces and levelling up and all that goes into a long dark personal play experience? Saluting the mystic savagery of time spent in the screen.

Lester Bangs didn't profit much from his excess in prose. But he did benchmark a certain ecstacy for living in media. Maybe the inspirational critic to salute games is today toiling for some small fan sites. Maybe he or she will pass away quietly in a pile of cartridges; and I'll be reading their compilation offline in years to come. But I'd rather hear about them now - anyone got any suggestions?

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Brief Historical Accountability in Videogames

GameSpy is running an excellent series 25 Dumbest Moments in Gaming History, holding the game industry accountable for their most collosal mistakes. It is remarkable to see how many misjudgements are repeated, and how rapidly. My favourite in this regard was the Sega Saturn controller retooled for the American audience, foreshadowing the XBox oversized controller debacle (which is also covered).

These "25 most" and "10 least" features run by the major gaming news sites are the closest thing most popular gaming journalism gets to writing videogame history. It's obvious from the reporter commentaries in these pieces that the journalists in the videogame press are self-selected, dedicated fans of the hardware and software. Amidst some dead-horse flogging and groundless pontificating, they evince impressive, comprehensive knowledge of the medium; I wonder if it could be tapped in other ways besides "25 best" and "10 games that..."

A Call for Better Screenshot Journalism

I've been curious about Final Fantasy XI for some time now. How is a massively-scripted cinematic single-player adventure game series going to map to a multiplayer online world?

GameSpy's has good preview coverage of the Japanese version of Final Fantasy XI. The author, Raymond "Psylancer" Padilla, bemoans the pain-in-the-butt menus that cover the screen during play. So I was curious to see the screenshots, to see what he was talking about. But the screenshots attached to the article were all clean, showing none of the crowded interface and menus lamented at length in the piece.

Pictures are a part of game journalism. When I worked at Gamers.com, we bought video cards that ran the PlayStation signal through a computer, so you could take digital photos of your virtual travels. It was expensive and slightly a pain in the ass.

One alternative is to use the online screenshot repositories that the game companies provide for journalists. Nearly all of my game reviews for MindJack have used these official screenshots, because I'm too broke, busy and uncoordinated to be taking console screenshots myself.

But I expect more from the professional sites, like GameSpy. Maybe they use freelancers, who don't have video capture setups. Either way, as a game player, I want to see the interface. I want to see screenshots showing me the choices available in the game, the resources I must manage, the units at my command, even if the buttons are in a foreign language.

So publishers, please include more nuts-and-bolts interface and menu screenshots in your PR archives. Journalists and screen capturers, please include screenshots that show the core of the game, what a player sees 90% of the time, and not just the pretty people and pretty landscapes.

Ethics in Videogame Journalism

GGA's own Justin Hall writes about the state of online videogame criticism for the Online Journalism Review.

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A survey of Game Journalism Online

I'm working on a survey of game journalism online for the Online Journalism Review. Where do you get your news and *views?