“In an age when showy CEOs shout hubristic, trite predictions about the inevitable future of games, The Wii U offers an understated bravado that’s far more courageous. With it, Nintendo admits, “we don’t know either.” We don’t know what video games are anymore, or what they will become. It’s a huge risk, and it’s probably the most daring move Nintendo has made in its 125-year history. Domestication through polite ferocity. Feral design.”
– Ian Bogost, “Wii Can’t Go On, Wii’ll Go On“
I’ve Done It Now
Welp, my colleague Quintin Smith and I have just collaborated on probably the most let’s-call-it-experimental thing I’ve probably ever published. I describe the project here a little bit, but really, you should just go and read it.
…Probably?
Happy Thanksgiving!
[latest music recos: slightly late to naomi punk, which is shocking considering how cool it makes early grunge sound again — love this track best, i think. for spotify users, i have two recent mixtapes: this one is robust and eclectic, this one is for warm drinks, frozen leaves and early sunsets.]
How To Be A Game Journalist
Do you like video games? If so, you may already qualify for your dream job. That’s right: Games journalism, the art of writing about games in order to gain fame, prestige, and free copies of things. It can also be quite lucrative, so if you’re reading this, feel free to send your boss the kiss-off email you’ve been composing in your head for years. The rest of your life is about to begin now.
Not only will games journalism give you a career, it’ll give you the social network and peer recognition you’ve always longed for. Lonely? Not anymore! Get ready to meet your 200 new internet friends and thousands of Twitter followers!
This sounds great, you’re saying. But how do I do games journalism?
You need a lot of feelings and opinions. This part is essential. Unlike other people, when you play a video game you have experiences and responses and thoughts, and probably most people have never had those before. You should write them down. If you don’t have particularly strong opinions, fear not: Just be very emotional, and you will get a lot of attention. Attention is, of course, the measure of quality.
You need a lot of passion and faith. Nobody believes in the games industry like you do, and you need to show those jaded assholes how much you care. That you have a heart in your chest that beats sets you apart from so many others who don’t have feelings or who don’t believe in anything. You are more honest than everyone else, and that’s admirable. That’s all that counts.
You need the nobility to pour your heart out for free on a daily basis if gaming is ever to be saved. Oh, yeah. It needs saving, which is why you must write that blog post. Spend three weeks on it. Tweet about it many times; it is tough but you are making progress. It’s important work.
You must keep in mind that everyone who is more experienced than you are is always wrong. Doing games journalism is not a want, it is a need. You have suffered in silence too long, praying quietly at the altar of your living room console while all of these boring jerks do all this work in the industry. How have you let them ruin everything for so long? Why have you deprived them of the change engine fueling your single voice? Rise now, tell them what’s broken and how to fix it. You can make, like, two bucks a word telling people how to fix things. Didn’t you know that?
Wait. No. You don’t care about money. This isn’t about money. You and your friends have run a fansite for years because you care, and your caring about video games must continue to supersede your self respect or your interest in craft or boring things like that. You don’t want to be a professional, you just want to live your dream, do what you love and save the games industry, and those are the most important activities.
Like, you’re just a games journalist, not some, like, journalist. Anyone who asks to be taken seriously or paid well is the enemy. Don’t forget it. Scrutinize everything they do. It’s a thankless job, but at least you’ll get to be the first person to see some trailer someday. You will get a bobblehead that none of your friends have. Tell them that they can’t even buy it in a store. It’s a press gift. You’re press. Oh my god, your badge says press and you can walk to the front of the line.
You might even get an email from a developer you’ve heard of telling you that you did a good job writing about their game. The day you see that name in your inbox will make up for all of your suffering. You can tell your colleagues you were ‘just talking to’ so and so.
You must root out corruption wherever you find it. Don’t stand for it. Everyone but you accepts junkets, bribes and freebies. This is just how the games industry is, and you don’t even have to work in it to know that. You’re just that special. And if you’ve been at this for a long time, like a year or something, that’s when you get really good at calling people out on their shit. Think about it: One day they’re names on your most favorite website, the next they’ve got a lot of explaining to do. They’re accountable to you. That’s part of your job.
Wait, yeah. This is your job. You’re not some fan writer. You’re going to get an award for this someday. People who say there’s no journalism in games have never read your interview with the guy who made that thing, and they’ve never read it because they don’t get it so you have nothing to explain, not to that sort. You can laugh quietly to yourself; they’ll learn.
You should be a contrarian. You get together with your coworkers in the bar and have a beer and laugh about how you’re going to do this, like, crazy thing. You’re going to give Halo 4 a score of 2. Wait, how, why? Oh my god, you guys. You’ll see. Spread yourself out in the booth. Stick your chest out. You’re a breath of fresh air, you’re a rebel. Fuck professionalism, there’s no name for what you do.
This is your work. This is your identity. You are above reproach, except for when you’re not, and then while you seethe in secret about having your incredibly hard work and your precious integrity undermined, you know how to blog the perfect apology. You are so deferential. You call your readers “folks.” You tell them how hard you’ve been working to build something or other and how they’ve been helping. You all love games. Isn’t that what it’s all about, the games?
Yeah. It’s all about the games. That’s why you do this.
With Friends
I’m just back from delivering a keynote at the Boston Festival of Indie Games’ first annual event! Hey look it’s me (thanks for the picture, Elliott)! While I was there, I did some lite recon on the Boston dev culture and community to find out how the locals feel about working there these days. Read my newest article: ‘In Boston, strong community means resilience in the face of change.’
I’ve been thinking a lot about community events lately; in my latest Creators’ Project column I write about some things designers I like are doing to foster public gaming and participatory events. One of the guys I wrote about is Hokra creator Ramiro Corbetta, who I just interviewed in some depth at Gamasutra about ways to encourage design that brings people together: Check out ‘Why indie games make meaningful spectator sports‘.
People have played with simple, timeless things forever — find me someone who doesn’t know how to play tic-tac-toe, and even if you can do that, bet you they can learn it in under five minutes. Minesweeper is one of those games I’d say has reached, or nearly reached, modern folk status as far as being (along with Solitaire) a continuous feature of the PC experience. Read my new piece, Reinventing Minesweeper: It was almost purple, about how Microsoft has tapped a NY-based company to bring those classics up to date. Like, where do you even begin? How has the “casual” audience changed?
Speaking of playing together in person, I went to Nintendo’s Wii U event. I’m still getting used to saying “Wii U.” Don’t like to say it, so I keep saying “Nintendo’s new thing.” Can’t help but think of how much we laughed at how the word Wii would never take off, right before the word Wii proceeded to be something that everyone understands to mean a Nintendo game console.
It looks like a fun thing you can play on your couch. With your girlfriend, because girls are shit at video games. Obviously I’m messing with you, but you can read my new article on “Girlfriend Mode” — a firm did a study that suggests controversial name conventions can actually be extremely useful in selling people totally reasonable and cool features.
Nostalgia culture
Coincidentally, two pieces I’ve done relating to nostalgia and childhood memory have come online at about the same time. You might know I do a column in Edge magazine, and then a couple months after those hit newsstands the columns come online. Wasn’t that long ago that my last one, about how the way we cover and examine games needs to grow up, was generating some discussion on Twitter, which, by the way, I very much appreciated following!
I guess it makes sense to follow a discussion on looking ahead with one about looking back. Here, I discuss the important role nostalgia plays in both writing about and creating games. At the same time, today’s column at Gamasutra takes the idea a step further: While ultimately languishing in terminal adolescence and obsessing on the memory of what little boys used to like is one of the greatest forces holding games back, there exist some clear examples of how a selective and insightful relationship with our childhood memories can actually create more timeless and universal games.
It’s the idea of “intelligent nostalgia” — what to keep from our valuable past and what to let go of.
Okay, okay
Despite the degree to which Formspring once exhausted me, I’ve experienced a temporary leave of my senses and opened my page up again. Fielding questions on there has let me know how much some of you miss having regular posts here at this blog, an occupation I’ve let lie since May of this year.
I stopped blogging here for a couple obvious reasons: I’ve been short on time, and now that I’m full-time freelance (editor-at-large at Gamasutra, and making contributions to other sites in the rest of my time) I need every last idea spark I can get to develop work across the platforms I serve. If it’s worth pestering you about here, it’s probably worth formalizing into something I can actually sell.
That never stopped me from blogging before, since I always thought it was important to have a one-stop repository that connects me to the people that read my work. But I’ve gotten so active on social media platforms that there’s always a home for people who want to follow me: I promote links and discussion on Twitter, have a Facebook page for people who prefer to get links and to comment there, and I even have a Google+ page if you hate Twitter and Facebook.
But a lot of people have been telling me they wish I still updated here, and if that’s what you want I’m gonna try to do that, at least until I get a proper website, an ambition I’ve kind of fruitlessly cultivated for a couple years now.
It was also nice of you guys to ask on Formspring about memep00l, sort of my first actual experiment into writing any kind of fiction in public. I’m into the social media format and am very pleased that some people care about the narrative so far. I’ll be catching up on that soon.
I’ve also been spending time with another first-for-me — I’ve always wanted to learn to do interactive fiction, since I’m such a big fan of it. I’m very slowly teaching myself Inform 7 using Aaron Reed’s excellent book, and in the meantime I thought I’d explore interactive writing using a simpler tool that lets me experiment with how to structure story and choices.
I have been enjoying playing with Inklewriter (thought I’d give it a try after writing about it here) — incidentally, it has a Future Voices competition closing in just a few days if anyone wants to try and slip an entry in under the wire. I seem to struggle with finishing large projects, but hopefully I will have a little “game” to show one of these days soon.
More recently, I’ve done an editorial on whether there’s a conflict between telling complex stories — that might not have neat or nice endings — and the player’s desire to win. Would love to know what you think. I also went in-depth with FarmVille 2‘s head designer on whether the game addresses some of the chronic and fricative design problems I’ve seen with Zynga games in the past.
Aside from that, I attended an art exhibit about cats with money, which sent me musing at Boing Boing on internet cat culture and classism.
I have loads going on in the coming weeks, as per usual, I guess, but I’ll give blogging more a shot. Thanks for everything, everyone!
Yes, This
”There was no evil executive coming in from on high telling us to make the game more lowbrow. The team was not a bunch of sniveling adolescent boys (a couple were, to be honest, but most were of the aforementioned good type). I think instead that the problem was structural— deeply structural to the product itself, at a level where no amount of “smart” versus “dumb” choices can really change things. One of those games centered around shooting aliens with guns and lasers. Another was about navigating an environment and punching people until they died.
The very second you try to wrap actions like those in a “good story” that does not somehow address what happens during the mechanical part of the experience is the second you fail to write a good story.”
Catch-Up Catch-Up
Agh, well! I’ve done that thing again where I don’t update my blog, and now so much has happened that I keep putting off the doubless-endless update until the ghostly thing gets larger and larger. Unfortunately, the cure for this is for me to just give you a list of links in case you missed anything I’ve written in the whirlwind that my last few weeks have been.
Thank you for everything! In not any particular order:
I just got back from Copenhagen, where I had a fascinating studio tour thanks to Reto-Moto. I don’t usually get to go this in-depth with developers at work.
The Atlantic profile of Jon Blow caused a big stir, and here’s my response to why focusing on personalities and creators in games seems to compel “outsiders” so much.
I appear on the Just Talking podcast, where I’m interviewed about my career, including how I’ve handled some things I’ve not really been asked about before.
I review Silent Hill: Downpour for Paste, James illustrates. The juxtaposition is… funny.
In a media sea of “Girls Shows” and increasingly vocal empowerment rally cries, I write about how I still feel bad sometimes. Was very comforted by the tide of empathy from others who feel the same.
I attempt to identify the precise design philosophies that make Zynga games evil struggle to retain their long-term user numbers.
Many designers (an artists of all kinds) know that constraint is good for all kinds of creativity, but there’s a new wave of game makers demonstrating a new take on this idea.
In our monthly “Ask Gamasutra” feature, the Gamasutra staff and I share what we do and don’t like about the press releases we get from PR folks.
Another one of my monthly Edge columns has come up online; this one’s about my frustration with the binary perception gulf between “game writers” and “game designers.”
I spoke to Kellee Santiago when she left thatgamecompany. I also spoke to Robin Hunicke on her own exit, as she joins her friend Keita Takahashi at Glitch maker Tiny Speck. Wish great luck to them both.
I also talked to Suda51 about Lollipop Chainsaw and the things he wants to do in the new media landscape. Big fan of his.
Here’s Anna Anthropy on her new book, Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, and her new game, dys4ia.
I think that’s it, probably, maybe? Lord, I dunno. Sorry. Lots going on.
Stupid Games
“Angry Birds, it seems, is our Tetris: the string of digital prayer beads that our entire culture can twiddle in moments of rapture or anxiety — economic, political or existential.”
True Enough
“There is value, though, in the notion of the geek role model. Though many of us have enjoyed uplift to a higher plane of living there are still millions stuck in podunk towns, surrounded by bullies and morons. The Internet is great at letting people know that they’re not alone, but it doesn’t magically transport you to San Francisco or Brooklyn or wherever else all of your people congregate. In cultural wastelands, it is still possible for a geek to feel alone. That’s why geek heritage is important.”
– Gus Mastrapa, “On Being A Geek”