Sometimes I get extremely frustrated and or depressed with the state of supposed game journalism and its associated game writers. Primarily this revolves around the sheer juvenality and sensationalism of their work. But if I swing the other way, to the reporting of the mainstream press, even among its game journalists, there is a lack of knowledge and facts. NYTimes has plenty of game articles, but the majority of them have egregious errors or misunderstandings of the things they are talking about. There has to be a middle path, being able to report on games with a cool objective viewpoint. Being able to understand the technology and technical jargon, while understanding the non-technical aspects of narrative and game play.

When I think of this, there is an example that comes to mind. I used to frequent the website FiringSquad for years, primarily because they had ballsy reviews and various feature pieces that unlocked t he technology behind the games. Granted there was perhaps too narrow an emphasis on things like hardware and PC only games, but when FiringSquad did branch out and do articles on consoles and console games they had a lively perspective that was technical, objective, and free from the sensationalism and excitement that seems to dominate the current gaming literature. And they also had the balls to think Halo was nothing special as a game, a very unpopular opinion I hold. Despite it’s success and its phenomenon as a cultural product, as a game it was just a technically good FPS, nothing as amazing as one would be led to believe.

Also the work of Dan Hsu of Electronic Gaming Monthly, shows an inspiration highpoint, especially when he cut the crap and stuck it to Peter Moore. But it seems the gaming press suffers exactly form what the US press suffers from today, no balls, no bite, a lot of bullshit and fluff. Funny how the Whitehouse doesn’t allow any tough questions, just like the gaming industry doesn’t allow anyone to ask it hard question about real numbers and real issues…paragon being Microsoft…

Aside from my hate of PR and its subsequent bullshit, it seems gaming journalism also, in various feature articles, has a various failure of deeper criticism. The ‘insight’ of gaming journalism never seems to delve too deep, even the debates about gaming in academia are locked into bland debates about narrative, simulation, immersion, ludology, that don’t delve much away from various questions that have been in western through for millennia. But what do I want to get at that so many various people seem to be missing?

I think it goes back to a talk/discussion I had a few years ago. The title was “A Phenomenological Approach to Game Studies”, and though it just seemed obvious at the time, the key idea behind that talk continually resonates with me. To try and examine games as they are, for what they are, without all the various presuppositions we have developed as gamers, non-gamers, and people who think about games. I focused participant on the interfacing of people with the game, in this case we chose a gamecube, and had people play the orignal NES Legend of Zelda, and then Wind Waker, discussing the change in interface, world perception, and the ability of the player to figure it out. In this case we had some random girl come and try to play Zelda, really she had no clue where to go or what to do, but she could figure out how to play because the screen told her A does this, B that. This interface sticks with Zelda throughout, and is one of the key technical reasons for its wide appeal and universality. But before we even played the game, we talked about the hardware the controller, the very physical phenomena that one has to interact with to even begin playing a game. The type of thing that is hardly ever discussed anywhere in academic literature, and is of course always assumed in gaming journalism, perhaps only detailed in discussing a play control scheme as being useful or cumbersome.

That is a long way of saying, approach things from the bottom up. Cut through the hype, expectation, desire, and sensory assault and figure out what is going on here. As much as I enjoy the sharp wittism of Penny Arcade, or the snappy responses of various online blogs, and EGMs hard hitting reviews, I cannot find myself but annoyed that games aren’t being approached in a more critical manner by any of them. The Escapist often seems to approach this, being rather critical works written by people who know games, and yet I never feel as if I’ve learned anything new from The Escapist, it just seems to being teaching me some more details about various things I was already familiar with and without reaching thoughtful conclusions.

If games are going to go forward, and become something that can educate and inform people the way literature or film does, there needs to be the critical ideas that open that possibility. That is a possibility talked of here and there, written about, theorized about, and some people may say it’s already there if we look hard enough. But since gaming is ever fascinated with the new, and the latest iteration of an old concept, it seems no one has sat down and really analyzed any game or gaming in such a way that opens up the possibilities of that game or gaming. Often what we get are stilted academic attempts at proving such and such a theory, or such and such an interpretation. I don’t think either the gaming or the academic approach will on their own give gaming what it needs, nor will any sort of hybrid approach either, which is something that is emerging. The game makers? No, they are craftsmen primarily, and as such are primarily concerned with the honing of their work rather than what their games might lead to. What then? A new perspective, that conceptually reinvents the wheel about games. Or maybe can simple answer the question What is a Game? By saying not “this is a game”, but rather “this is”, free from the the presuppositions that ‘game’ necessarily brings with it.