Author Archives: Leigh Alexander

Playing Catch-Up, Again

I’ve been sick. I’ve been busy. And it’s always sooooo much easier to tweet at you guys and reach out to you instantly than it is to write blog posts I don’t get paid for. But you love SVGL, and SVGL loves you, and so we are doing science and we’re still alive. What game was that again? Tsk, this industry, you know?

Anyway. I’m long overdue in pointing out to you a couple recent articles of mine you may have missed. Lately, I asked Ian Bogost what he thought of the indie scene — we ask the same question of all IGF finalists over at Gamasutra (check ‘em out so far; Bogost’s will run soon). His answer was, “You mean the puzzle platformer scene? It’s awesome, isn’t it?”
Sad but true. It seems that brutally difficult platform games have become the new paradigm for genius. In my latest Gama editorial, I wondered whether there’s a new trend going on – how did “hard” become the new “good”?

You can’t have missed my Kotaku feature, right? RIGHT? Well, if you did, you’re in for a doozy. I write about Katawa Shoujo, the erotic novel about disabled girls that originated on 4chan. As I like to say, if you hated that I was okay with Bayonetta, you’ll hate what I’m okay with now!
What about you guys? Favorite IGF nominees? Currently playing?

Character, Flaw?


Hello, SVGL friends — long time no see! Busy as always, with some labors of which you’ll hopefully see the fruit quite soon; the news pace has been picking up over at Gamasutra, too.

I’m still getting a lot of mileage out of Bayonetta, but Twitter followers know my favorite game in the universe right now is No More Heroes 2. I reviewed it at the AV Club, so those of you who have been waiting for more formalized thoughts from me besides “if you don’t love it you probably just shouldn’t ever talk to me again” and “no seriously listen this game is fucking brilliant“can read something that’s hopefully a little more professional here.
I think that, according to scale, this is the overall highest rating I’ve ever given any video game that I had to score. No More Heroes had a mindblowing idea with a few weaknesses in its execution; those weaknesses didn’t bother me as much as they seemed to bother others, but nonetheless I can appreciate a sequel that provides watertight solutions to previous flaws.
Speaking of which: I passed on Mass Effect 2; it’s not the kind of experience that interests me. I don’t really care for the “space opera” vein of science fiction, and I’m a little fatigued of dialogue trees. I can praise the first Mass Effect, which I did play at least for a good chunk of time, for how well-done it is, but I can’t say I enjoyed it. Fortunately, there is Gamasutra’s Chris Remo to offer you some thoughts on the ways Mass Effect 2 aimed to address the weaknesses of the original.
Back to No More Heroes 2. I’ve heard a lot of people say they feel that the newer, tighter trip to Santa Destroy loses some of the character that the first one had. Over at the Brainy Gamer, Michael Abbott has a thought-provoking articulation of this point of view. The perspective raises a couple questions for me.
I’ve always praised creative spirit over technical execution, maybe more than a professional reviewer ought. I’d always prefer a risky, high-impact experience with a lot of rough edges to a polished, fluid one that doesn’t really shake the paradigm or feel artistic. I like distinctive auteurs, and Grasshopper’s Suda51 is on my very short list.
I wonder if we’ve come to associate creativity with visible flaws? Does something with clumsy bits in it seem scrappier or nobler? Is there really a loss of “character” visible when something’s streamlined or polished? Do we need to see the creator’s errors to understand their vision and spirit?
One of the reasons I’m such a big fan of Hideo Kojima’s is his self-awareness. He knows his cutscenes are too long and that his sense of humor is weird, and he knows how critics feel about it. Yet he won’t change — in fact, much of the time in Metal Gear Solid 4, the elements for which his direction is most often criticized are exaggerated in a way that feels intentional. Therefore, Kojima’s work is a dialogue between himself and the players. They have a sense of “knowing” him because they know how he expresses himself in games.
Suda51 also has a distinctive identity, and a pattern of being behind games that are beloved for their concepts but encounter critical difficulty because of execution issues. Did we come to associate those design shortfalls with the “identity” of the creator? Because critics who like his work found themselves having to champion its “character,” flaws and all, could it be that in a well-executed No More Heroes game, we no longer recognize the visionary?
When an offbeat independent band suddenly produces an album that’s too polished, fans are likely to say they prefer the older, more distinctive material because it had more character. Same principle at work here?
For what it’s worth, I am not on the side of the fence that sees any kind of character loss in No More Heroes 2. As I said in the comments on Brainy Gamer, I really think the issue is simply that something can only be new once, and it won’t feel the same the second time.

Bob Blauschild Responds To My Open Letter!

[You may recall I recently wrote an open letter to the designer of a couple obscure adventure games that used to make me pound my little fist against the Apple IIe’s keyboard in frustration in my childhood, at the same time they formed my earliest and best nostalgic memories of gaming. Thanks to the magic of the internet, my letter reached former Sirius Software designer Bob Blauschild, who’s given me permission to publish his response in its unedited entirety. This is one of the coolest things that has ever happened in my career.]

Dear Leigh,


It was quite a shock, seeing your open letter to me. Hard to believe, but the number of letters sent to me by hot young babes (assuming that that’s your picture) has declined significantly over the past several decades. I was initially hesitant to respond. Your letter is so well written that any response I might offer could seem nearly illiterate in comparison. But you’re the pro in this field and I’m but an historical footnote, so with that in mind, here goes –


I’m touched that you fondly remember spending day after day hacking away at my games. I can’t apologize for making them too hard for a six-year-old. The target audience was approximately 10 or 12 to 40, and one goal was to make the puzzles difficult enough to make the game last a week or more to justify the price, without being so difficult as to drive the player to go postal (especially when my name was on the product and my address was in the phonebook).


I take it from the tone of your letter that your claims of suffering “childhood damage” and being “traumatized for life” at the hands of my code are somewhat exaggerated to show your commitment to the intensity with which you attacked the games. If they in any way led to developing a passion for thinking through challenges, then I’ll take just a little credit.


There is one section of your letter that does require a response. You list several Sirius Software games – Critical Mass, Escape from Rungistan, Kabul Spy, Blade of Blackpool, and Gruds in Space – and state that you are unsure about whether I was responsible for of all of those. I was not. The first two were mine, the second two were written by Tim Wilson, and the third I can’t recall much about now. As for your research that told you that Sirius Software’s adventure game titles were merely poor clones of Sierra’s Hi-Res Adventures, everyone’s entitled to their opinion, no matter how horribly wrong it is.


In the early 80’s I was interested in finding out why computer games were so expensive. Must be something there to justify the price, so I plunked down my $40 for “The Princess and the Wizard.” I was quickly hooked, and blew through all the graphic adventure games that were available. But there weren’t many, so thereafter I decided to try writing one myself as a hobby. But I didn’t want to just duplicate what was currently available. “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” with its non-stop action was a big deal then. What if I were to insert action sequences and moments of possible panic into my graphic adventure game? And how about adding some humor? That’s what I did, and the result was something new that outsold all of the Sierra games for a few months.


I wrote a second game, then went back to concentrating on designing chips in Silicon Valley, and then your letter showed up 26 years later.


Thank you for the jolt of nostalgia. Your writing style is terrific, and your success as a writer is well deserved.


Best Regards,

Bob Blauschild


[Bonus Material: Bob directed me to a site where, also thanks to the magic of the internet, Escape From Rungistan is playable — as are Critical Mass and likely a host of other amazing things. I still keep dying, but I’ll conquer it yet!

Thank you for everything, Bob!]

An Open Letter To Mr. Bob Blauschild, Formerly Of Sirius Software

[no. what i need is to bash my face against the keys a few more times, perhaps try typing some curse words.]

Dear Mr. Blauschild,

As you may have realized from my blog and body of work widely available on the Internet, I am a video game journalist. I was tonight the recipient of a sudden electroshock of nostalgia, during which I suddenly remembered that you, sir, are the source of my fear of elevators.

You see, Mr. Blauschild, I am actually the heir to my father’s consumer technology journalism mantle. My father covered a variety of home entertainment products including what were at the time fairly newly-invented items including the home personal computer, the home videocasette player, and the home video game console. As a result, I was raised with plenty of access to press review copies of just about every Apple II and Commodore 64 game ever developed, and that, sir, includes your portfolio of work as a designer of text games accompanied by graphics published under the marquee of Sirius Software.

Mr. Blauschild, you developed quite a few excellent products which stumped me mightily — I was only five or six years old at the time, and precocious but not especially freakish, please understand. So it was that your titles Critical Mass and Escape From Rungistan came to form one of the earliest gaming palettes that I can to this day recall. So did Kabul Spy, Blade of Blackpoole and Gruds In Space, but I am unsure whether you are the one to whom I can assign responsibility for these titles.

Current internet research informs me that indeed Sirius Software’s adventure titles were merely poor clones of what Sierra titled at the time its “Hi-Res Adventures,” but my young mind knew no difference, and I’ll have you know that Escape From Rungistan challenged me for years. That action sequence with the skis? I even consulted my uncle, a ski aficionado, for advice on how commands like LEAN RIGHT and LEAN LEFT might correspond to actual skiing, but all I ever ended up with was a face full of splinters (via text, naturally). I once had a dream I arrived at the animated cannibals that I saw in the game’s manual — and bragged to my friends that I indeed passed the ski sequence — but in truth, it was a dream only.

Although my young days were filled with fantasies of triumph, I never did beat any of your games, Mr. Blauschild. I was only six years old.

However, my particular bone to pick with you hinges on the odd title Critical Mass, which as I’m certain you recall begins in an office in which the word LITHIUM is written on the wall to inform the player of a password for later use. Why should a six-year-old know the meaning of the word LITHIUM, Mr. Blauschild? Well, I knew it not, but what really took its place beneath my skin was the “action sequence” that followed the player character’s exiting his office via text command.

As I’m sure you cannot not have forgotten, almost immediately upon opening gameplay, the player is placed in a plummeting elevator, and if the player does not type “JUMP” at the precisely-timed correct moment (followed, of course, by the seminal ‘Return’ key), the player will die — after being informed that one’s elbows and knees have switched places, or perhaps it was the hips and shoulders, or other such gruesome penalty.

Mr. Blauschild, I was six years old, and it took me months — I jest not, months, sir — of repeated attempts before I fundamentally understood the idea of action gameplay timing. I did pass that point in your game, indeed I did. I arrived at the airport and bestowed the flower upon the Hare Krishna (I had no idea, of course, what Krishnas were). I took the plane to France where I was delighted by your clever street names such as “Rue La Chat” and “Rue La Pig” — and was then immediately frustrated by the key in the drain pipe, the flooding streets.

But to this day, Mr. Blauschild, every time I enter an elevator in my normative adult life — I am now twenty-something, sir — I recall your game, Critical Mass, and wonder whether, should the elevator plummet, my upper and lower joints will trade places if I do not JUMP at precisely the assigned moment. My body temperature perceptibly lowers, and every time — every time I enter an elevator, Mr. Blauschild, and I a New York resident! — I prepare myself to JUMP. I am traumatized, and it is your fault.

This means, Mr. Blauschild, formerly of Sirius Software, developer of the games that formed my childhood sustenance, that I shall never forget you. And this means, in addition to having traumatized me for life, you taught me action gameplay timing, sir. Not only were there the skis in Escape From Rungistan, but there was that hellacious “call Gidget” waterski sequence in Critical Mass. What is with you and skis, dear sir? I know not — but I concede, here and now, that you helped create me as I am.

Today I am a game journalist, Mr. Blauschild. And you taught me not only my terror of elevators and my comprehension of action gameplay timing, but my love of the intellectual interactive puzzle, my yen for banging my head against the steep wall of frustration, my asbsolute addiction to outwitting the sadistic logic of a game designer.

Certainly, you are not sole among my earliest mentors; I must thank early Origin Systems veteran Dallas Snell for Ring Quest, Phillip and Bob Hess for the insanely ruthless Death in the Caribbean, of course, the Williamses Ken and Roberta (because before King’s Quest, there were Mystery House and The Dark Crystal, of course). And slightly later, I owe my gratitude to Al Lowe for teaching me, by way of Leisure Suit Larry, what a “prophylactic” is at the age of eight or so (yes, precocious, intellectual independence, hallelujah)!

But perhaps against all odds, Mr. Blauschild, I loved and loathed alike your titles first and best. Thank you, in both highest esteem and admiration, and in good-natured frustration, bitterness and childhood damage, for my passion and for my livelihood. All that exists to be read with my name beneath the headline was born in part of you.

Sincerely yours,

Leigh Alexander
News Director, Gamasutra
Proprietress, Sexy Videogameland
leighalexander1 at gmail dot com

PS: To all gentlemen and women herein named, I forever adore you, genuinely.

Gotta Have Faith


Does this picture of Faith from Mirror’s Edge look a little… different to you? In case you didn’t catch it today, my latest Kotaku feature is up! I’m too tired to explain it, so please just go read it.

Speaking of Mirror’s Edge, in case you’re wondering what’s going on with EA today, I wrote at length at Gamasutra both about the financial results and the layoffs as well as EA’s long-term plans.

Lord, I worked a lot this week. I’m moving this weekend and my first act in my new place will be to place myself face-down in my pillow.

Evolution, Revolution

So while I’m putting things into moving boxes and wondering how Zelda will tolerate taking a long subway trip inside a duffel bag thing that’s made to carry cats, you should read Stephen Totilo’s chat with Miyamoto. I can’t say enough good things about the work Totilo does, especially as far as his interviews, which I tend to find the only ones worth reading out there. I especially like the way (you’ll see if you read the piece) Totilo presses Miyamoto on a question he didn’t exactly answer, which I dunno if many game journos would have the balls to do. Most interviews game journos do with him read like holy shit, it’s Miyamoto, and I’m quite sure I wouldn’t do any better.

I did squeeze in an interview of my own lately, though. No, not with Miyamoto. You may or may not have noticed I’ve had survival horror on the brain all month, writing about the state of the genre, reviewing and discussing Silent Hill, chatting with Mitch and Michael on the Brainy Gamer podcast recently — and most of that discussion ends up coming down to the combat issue. How much to have, how capable the player should be, whether there are better ways to create a horror mood than by attacking the player.

I’ve never played Frictional Games’ Penumbra titles, which take the minimized-combat approach (since the nightmares of my brand-new PC continue, it’s not hard to see how I’d rather put nails in my eyes than rely on computers for large games) — but real survival-horror buffs always bring them up to me, and the games enjoy quite a loyal following online, from what I’ve always seen. I had a chance to interview the devs about their approach to the genre — frightening without fighting — and the new game they’re working on now.

While we were talking Miyamoto walked in because he just wanted to hang out with us but he didn’t really say anything interesting so I just left that part out.

…Yep. But anyway, back to Totilo’s article. Was talking with him about it after it ran — mostly about Miyamoto’s most interesting question (he turned the tables and started interviewing the interviewer!): What’s innovative about today’s hardcore titles?

Just that question alone, and the things he says about his recent projects do provide a bit of insight into how he’s seeing this casual-hardcore spectrum — in other words, not as a spectrum. To Nintendo there’s “different” and “not different.” And I’m sort of torn about it; on one hand, you could call Nintendo “different” or “innovative” because its games are distinctly different than anything that’s available on the other platforms, arguably with a more consistent vision and a stronger identity than any other developer’s first-party stuff.

But that consistent vision and strong identity has been built by iterating very subtly, not by taking particularly high-risk moves. I’ve admired Nintendo most for the fact that, as technology evolves, they always manage to produce a franchise title that leverages the new tech while still keeping, say, Mario’s literal formula straight. What impresses me most about Galaxy is that it’s exactly what Super Mario Bros would be on spheres; it’s a Super Mario Bros. made precisely for the Wii era, taking the “words” from the 1980′s, so to speak, and translating them verbatim into the newer, more complex language of the new century’s first decade.

But it’s still the same words in newer language — that’s evolution, not revolution; it’s iteration, not innovation.

I’m sure, though, when we look back in twenty years at Nintendo’s innovations, it’ll be things like motion controls and wide-appeal Wii Fit-style things that are more “products” than “video games” for which they’re remembered. Point is, what I took away from Totilo’s Miyamoto interview is that he simply doesn’t see “casual” versus “hardcore” the way we do.

Which would probably explain a lot, huh?

Space Decides For Me


Yahoo, I am moving to a new apartment this weekend. I have a wagon full of trade-ins that will probably pay for Fable II, Fallout 3 and finally Rock Band 2 so I can catch up.

The new apartment’s decent-sized, but I still don’t have room for any more instrument peripherals in my living room. I have three guitars, a drum set, an (unopened) DDR pad, five consoles and a game collection that accounts for the unsettling majority of my moving boxes. I wonder if the movers are going to think I’m weird when so much of the property they are transporting is video games.

Anyway, point is, you lose, World Tour. I like Guitar Hero for the guitar, period. No more room for band sets. Which means I’ll check out World Tour when my abundant riches from my career in game journalism allow me to buy a Cribs-style mansion with a gigantic arcade and entertainment suite and I can devote an entire room to rhythm games.

…Right. Never.

UPDATE: However, if this requires buying separate peripherals I probably would. Shit. Did I just say that out loud?

The Princess Debut Rebellion


I’ve been asked a lot lately which title I’ve chosen to focus on among the Fall release megadump — since I readily admit I can’t play them all (sorry, Dead Space, regrets, dear LBP). And indeed, I have chosen a partner for the Autumn Dance — it’s just that, until now, I’ve kept a little mum about who the lucky title is.

But I got to be on Michael Abbott’s latest “Gamers’ Confab” podcast over at Brainy Gamer the other night, in which I finally came clean. This October, the lion’s share of my time has gone to… Princess Debut.

If you haven’t heard of it, I can’t say I’m surprised. There’s literally nothing out there on the title. It’s developed by Cave — you know, they make all the crazy shooters — and published by Natsume, the company that publishes (or, co-publishes) the Harvest Moon games over here in the U.S. If that seems like a weird mashup, the result is even stranger — it’s a touch-screen rhythm-action dance game dating sim. Really. I swear I’m not making it up.

The game casts you as an adorable schoolgirl who, at the story’s outset, learns she has a royal body double in another world that she can access through her bedroom closet. Her princess alter-ego is fretting over an upcoming dance competition — she can’t dance, and she’s nervous about courting a prince to be her dance partner. The solution? Switch places.

Voila, welcome typical anime schoolgirl (who likes naps, snacks and other bishoujo conventions) to the lovely Flower Kingdom, where dance is law, animals talk, and you’ve got thirty days to master your dance lessons (a rabbit in a top hat named Tony is your instructor) and navigate social relationships with handsome princes (who are all archetypes! YES!) . You also have to keep your secret about being a fake princess and win dance contests.

The more I write this, the more it sounds like one of the satires I sometimes write here. Longtime Sexy Videogameland readers will remember I used to solicit your crazy ideas in weekly “Best of SVGL” championships back when I still had time to think them up — this sounds like the time we all came up with crazy fantasies for games that will never get made.

But even though Princess Debut contains every possible element I think is awesome — rhythm action, poking fun at anime tropes, dating sim gameplay and talking animals — I swear to god I’m not imagining it. It is quite real, I assure you, and damn me if it isn’t the only game I want to play right now. I’ve beaten it three times already and I still keep playing because I want to get all the endings (five princes, two endings each, plus a sixth “secret” prince — of course).

I’m serious. I’m hooked. I even have Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia sitting here neglected (in part because it’s too hard, I think) — yeah, yeah, it’s beautiful, another fabulous 2D DS Castlevania, back to Princess Debut.

Princess Debut seems largely like fun bubblegum — and in essence, it is. Nothing wrong with that. The rhythm gameplay is a bit too easy, and you’d be hard-pressed to call it a stirring emotional experience. And yet, it’s got surprising depth.

Gameplay is about fifty percent dancing (and improving your skills) and fifty percent walking around and talking to people (and improving your relationships). As I said, the dance gameplay itself is not especially immersive; more of a time waster than a real challenge. What’s interesting is that while you’re playing on the bottom screen, in the top screen, the characters are doing rather detailed dances that are very clearly modeled on real professional dancers.

The 3D models are not sophisticated at all — perhaps a little creepy, even — but the dancing is fun to watch. Think of the cheezy, vicarious thrill you get whenever you peep one of those TV reality shows or camp musicals. And the music is pretty surprisingly clever — since the game’s dancing spans genres like Viennese Waltz, Samba, Jive and Tango, the devs made the interesting decision to remix classical music. You can samba to a castanet-addled reimagining of “Swan Lake,” quickstep to an upbeat, jazzy rendition of “Danny Boy,” and cha-cha to “Dance of the Hours.” Really neat for fans of classic tunes.

And since it’s sort of hard to watch while you’re playing, the game has an accompanying “movie mode” that lets you dress up your character in any of the outfits you’ve unlocked, pick which prince she dances with, pick the song and dance, and just watch — normally not at all the sort of thing I thought I’d ever be interested in, but perhaps it’s tapping into my long-dormant, female “play with dolls” instinct (I preferred games to girly things as a kid).

As you dance more, you level up, unlock more songs, and get more accessories — plenty to love for dress-up fetishists. Throughout the game’s story, though, you’re supposed to be choosing a partner, interacting with various princes and their personality quirks and trying to get one to pick you.

Although the social/romantic elements are not especially mature or sophisticated (this is an all-ages title) beyond what you normally see in the dating genre, there are still innumerable choices, ways to play, conversations to have, responses to give, and it’s overall warm, funny, entertaining and well-done. As such, the replay value’s extremely high, and there are plenty of unlockables to keep going for, too. The more you play it, the fonder you become and the happier it makes you.

So this is my October pick, and I’m sticking to it. Overwhelmed by serious, rich blockbuster console titles? Dance it off! I really hope you guys will give it a whirl if you can — and if my majority-male audience is manly enough to enjoy something so distinctively pink.

Aw, look at her little face! C’mon!

Dysfunctional Family Circle


First off, thanks everyone for the birthday wishes! It was so nice to get so many comments.

Video games have the potential to be a plodding, tech-focused industry, and while there is certainly a broad and nuanced consumer base for them (broader than most realize), those who read internet game journalism still represent a fairly niche portion of the audience. We’re not accustomed to being buzzworthy or sexy, the way, say, celebrity gossip, fashion or the film biz is. And yet, we’d like to be a little more buzzworthy, in general — we’ve got the hot-looking (albeit digital) icons, we’ve got the big explosions, the talent, the high action and the tearjerkers. Why can’t we have some sexy headlines, too?

It’s sort of a sensible demand, and I agree with the sentiment that the industry needs more celebrities, more champions, more people that can really stand at the forefront of things as beloved ambassadors — as Cliff Bleszinski says in Gamasutra’s current feature, “visionaries.” We’ve got a few of those, of course, but generally those folks don’t talk to the media much. They tend to be “Wizard of Oz” personas behind the scenes, don’t they?

I’ve written before about how, failing actual celebrities, we’ve made “controversial” figures out of just about anything we can get our hands on, ready to seize on vague quotes to create an imagined feud, ready to populate and respawn relatively tame challenges or dissensions from industry people to craft them into maverick media stars.

Imposing Our Personal Narratives

Though the quote didn’t make it into my final interview stories, I remember that during my talk with EA CEO John Riccitiello recently, he noted that “people wanted to impose their personal narrative” on his company’s bid to acquire Take-Two, imagining a contentious war of egos, fierce verbal exchanges and slamming boardroom doors, an out-and-out, one-on-one testosterone battle between Riccitiello and the (rather generative!) Strauss Zelnick. Though I’m sure Riccitiello would not have told me if it’d indeed been that way, he maintains the negotiations were professional, civil, and essentially uneventful — but that doesn’t make good headlines, does it?

People want to impose their personal narratives on a lot of things, and often the media caters to this wish — they do it with politics, business, art and film, whatever you pick. And “the media” is often criticized (as if “the media” comprised some nebulous, single-headed monster) for its steps over the line between sensationalism and its duty to the truth.

So yeah, this Edge story about Deus Ex. I’m slightly lazy today, so I’ll let Gillen explain:

The forthcoming issue of videogame bible Edge has a large feature on Eidos Montreal’s development of Deus Ex 3. To tease it, Edge Online runs a short story with the headline “Deus Ex was “Kinda Slow” Says Deus Ex 3 Dev” before offering a quote from Lead Designer Jean-Francois Dugas: “There weren’t enough exciting, memorable moments. It was aimed more towards a simulation rather than a game experience.”. Internet explodes.

It is only part of the story. In a literal sense.

In other words, the “kinda slow” line was out of context and dredged out of an interview with a plethora of much more relevant quotes, or at the very least, quotes that could have been taken out of context to precisely the opposite effect. And yes, this happens often in media — but on the internet, news stories can provoke widespread reaction. And that reaction can impact people’s relationship to their work at best — and their game performance and their job status at worst.

Why This Happens

We live in a world where blogs, forums and Digg influence game-buying habits as much as, if not more than, “proper” media. When a journalist takes something out of context to grab a headline, that angle on the truth is free to proliferate across amateur sites and aggregators even further out of context — in short, it becomes a game of Telephone, where the end result could theoretically turn out so divorced from its source that the source can no longer be found.

For example, Kotaku — which, in my experience usually aims to be more responsible about context and sourcing than it’s often given credit for — picked up Edge’s headline, and Luke Plunkett was apparently so worried about people’s inappropriate reactions that he qualified the statement with plenty of context — in italics, even! But even despite this, a good portion of Kotaku’s audience is unlikely to read the whole post, and the editorializing will take place in the comments anyway.

So yes, I do think Edge crossed a line. I think it was poorly done of what’s normally a very high-quality site. But while I could sit here and self-righteously exoriate Edge for being irresponsible, unethical, hit-driven, traffic-obsessed, blah blah blah, and all the things it seems knee-jerk to do, it’s unfortunately not that simple.

Joined By Challenge

Both game developers and game journalists have a couple key things in common: serving their audience is their job, and if they do this well, they will be successful. And their industries are both highly competitive, even saturated — game developers must do their best to ensure that their game is the one that the average consumer drops $60 on this month, and game journalists must do their best to ensure that their site is the one that garners the biggest piece of the Web traffic pie.

(Note the traffic thing is simplified; not all journalists are paid on the traffic they do, and not all sites have a direct correlation between traffic and money. It depends on other factors of a media company’s business models. But the point remains that a web site that nobody reads won’t be around for long; a writer who doesn’t get read isn’t going to have a job for long.)

And this is the era of New Media. While journalists are busily aiming to score proper interviews, do research, cite their sources and observe embargoes and all those fussy details — you know, journalism — blogs not only have more freedom to make entertainment more important than ethics, but they also frequently have a devoted community around them that enjoys being free to speak back. So news sites like Edge (and like its competitor, Gamasutra, which employs me) face stiff competition in attaining an audience’s attention.

Not an excuse, I know; that’s just business. And as Wolf_Dog wrote to me in a recent email, “sensationalism is nothing new.” But I think we’ve got something a little different here in the games biz, something unique to us, that makes it complicated.

Consumption Culture

I feel like situations like this might occur less often if we didn’t have a larger culture within the gaming audience wherein we have, as I recently wrote at length, become extremely demanding in a fashion that borders on entitlement. Our hit-driven business has created among the consumer culture an environment where each new event is required to be more exciting than the last, and the hype cycle breeds such high expectations that chronic cynicism and negativity is an inevitability. I mean, here we are, talking about how inappropriate it was to bait explosive audience reaction — regarding what’s really a vague, tepid criticism of an old game. Why is it such a big deal?

Oh, and here’s another thing journalists and game developers have in common: They feel, quite a lot of the time, that they will never be able to please their audience no matter what they do.

We won’t be able to make you happy, so we’ll stand for just being able to hang on to your attention. Somewhere in the world at this very moment, game designers are putting heads together trying to puzzle out just what tactic they can try to make you play their next game for longer than you played their last one. At the same time, a game publication’s brass are discussing with their editors how they can boost reader retention.

If neither of them can cater to the consumption habits of their audience, they won’t last — especially in an oversaturated space where there is plenty of competition. And so to align with the audience’s consumption habits, both games and game journalism are forced to align with the audience’s culture — a culture that wants celebrity, wants controversy, wants things to buzz about, and, unfortunately, wants things to complain about, to take up arms about, to band together over.

Chickens And Eggs

And certainly, one end does perpetuate the other. Has the audience been trained to expect disappointment, to have minimal attention spans, by the hype-driven (and thus continually disappointing) game industry? Has the audience developed its resentful mob mentality by being told what they do and don’t want by a slate of envious, immature game journalists whose largest qualification is that they are more obsessive enthusiasts than those for whom they write?

Journalists and developers will say that they’ve become whatever it is they’ve become because of turning backbends to please an unpleasable audience; the audience can just as easily say they’ve been made what they are by the media they consume.

I have in the past plucked out what I think is the juiciest headline quote from an interview I’ve done. And I confess that my standards for juiciness have at least a little to do with an awareness of what people will click on. I like to think I’m responsible about it, but I’m pretty sure Edge didn’t think it was being irresponsible with this Deus Ex quote either. As a matter of fact, I wonder if I might not have zeroed in on the exact same headline. I can’t say for sure.

It’s kind of a slippery slope, and the crap thing is that it isn’t really anybody’s fault. In the dysfunctional family circle of game industry, game media, and game consumer, anyone can always point the finger to the left or to the right of themselves.