Starting Monday, February 6, I will be a full-time reporter at the Gawker Media blog Kotaku, where I will be covering stories in gaming news and culture.
This is an extremely exciting opportunity for me. As one of the biggest websites in the industry, with a gigantic, loyal readership that includes just about every gamer on the planet, Kotaku will be a fantastic platform for my work and an excellent place for me to write, learn, and report. In other words, I can’t fucking wait.
On Twitter yesterday, my friend Andrew Groen wrote something that bugged me.
“It’s always baffling that so many people place so much importance on the story of a video game when game stories are near universally shit,” he said.
While Twitter is regularly filled with sweeping generalizations like this, Andrew’s statement rubbed me all sorts of wrong ways. “Game stories are near universally shit.” What does that even mean? How can a 30-year-old form of media that has told tales in myriad forms, from the text-based enchantments of interactive fiction to the melodramatic zippers of Japanese role-playing games, be “near universally shit”?
Dear Spike VGA Producers,
I get it. You’ve got obligations. You have to appeal to a broad audience. Your references can’t be too niche or obscure. You have to keep people watching. You have to appease advertisers and wrangle exclusive deals out of game publishers. I don’t envy your jobs.
But after watching the 2011 Spike TV Video Game Awards this Saturday night, I can’t help but wish you’d try a little bit harder not to embarrass the people you’re trying to entertain.
vis·cer·al [vis-er-uhl]
adjective
1. of or pertaining to the viscera.
2. affecting the viscera.
3. of the nature of or resembling viscera.
4. characterized by or proceeding from instinct rather than intellect: a visceral reaction.
5. characterized by or dealing with coarse or base emotions; earthy; crude: a visceral literary style.
Though I already showed you how to review games, I didn’t spend a great deal of time talking about the most important part of the process: scoring.
See, sometimes in the drunken stupor of my day-to-day existence, I forget that gamers hate reading just as much as reviewers hate playing games. Every second spent reading a game review is a second they could instead spend doing far more interesting things, like complaining about DLC on message boards.
Enter the review score, that glorious integer that helps prevent nonsense like “critical thinking” and “intelligent discussion.” Thanks to these scores, there’s no need to read reviews — all you have to do is scroll down the page a little bit for an instant evaluation of any game’s content.
So how do we come up with these mystical numbers? Reviewers typically pick one of several possible methods:
I get a lot of emails from aspiring writers. “I want to write videogame reviews,” they say. “Where should I start?”
They usually add long, rambling sentences about their work history or education or some other nonsense that I can’t be bothered to read thanks to my busy schedule of reading websites about fantasy football. Then they ask for tips and tricks, as if I’m some sort of Nintendo Power hotline for game reviewers.
I can’t blame them. You see, writing reviews is awesome. Everybody wants to do it.
So here’s my tip: Don’t play videogames.
The following story was originally published in Issue 3 of Kill Screen Magazine, which you can purchase online. Special thanks to Chris Dahlen for being a superstar editor.
It’s summer, 2000. Camp’s busy and bustling; all the boys are out playing sports or getting food or hanging with the girls. But not me. I’m sitting inside my bunk, doodling in a notebook, because the day before camp started I’d first set up my own Multi-User Dungeon—or MUD—a virtual world that I could shape at my discretion. Read the rest of this entry »
Dear Mario,
It’s over. You win. You’ve almost completely defeated my army. I spent yesterday afternoon calling Goomba wives and informing them that their husbands were killed in action. Have you ever heard a Goomba woman cry? It’s haunting.
Today I have to ask my supplier for a new shipment of Bob-ombs. They don’t come cheap, you know. We have special camps set up in Saudi Arabia. It typically takes five years to convince a Bob-omb to leave his family and join the cause. Then we have to get him here. Do you know how difficult it is to get a Bob-omb past airport security?
