Changing culture, one gamerscore at a time.

I’m beginning to wonder if games journalism is going downhill.

Sometimes I’ll plod my way through the hundreds of new little blue numbers next to my RSS feeds, and begin to wonder if the realms of games critique and games journalism have somehow merged, and everyone suddenly needs to have a huge, overpersonalized opinion on every single news item they pass through their journalistic digestive system that particular day.

Take, for example, Kotaku. I’m down with news sites that update every ten seconds, in fact, I love and adore them. But when you link to a “friend” site that’s basically a Kotaku for pornography, I switch off, de-bookmark you and never bother with you again. Joystiq seem to have got it fairly right. I can read news, there’s no naked women or suggestive jokes, nothing groan-inducingly masculine, and nothing seriously boring, either. Their contributors are funny, and well-read.

But when it comes to a site that does both news and reviews, as said news site Joystiq is leaning towards doing more and more often these days, things tend to go a little south for me in my perception of what they are actually doing on my RSS feed list.

Let me clarify. I’m not ragging on Joystiq. I think it’s one of the best sites for gaming news on the internet, if not the best, hands down and without question. But that’s all I want from it. News. I don’t want reviews, if I wanted reviews I’d digitally plonk myself down at Eurogamer or IGN and read away there. I don’t want objective opinion breaking the flow of constant factual information.

Are sites like Xbox 360 Fanboy supposed to be sarcastically titled, or are they serious in their contempt for other platforms? I don’t understand the naming game for websites these days. IGN I get. Eurogamer, I understand. Hell, even the name “Kotaku” is pretty damn clever. But anything with “fanboy” in the title and I just instantly shut the hell down.

When you’re writing reviews, do you ever feel like telling the people who ask you to say “we” instead of “I” to either sit down with you and play the game, or let you write the review in the logical format it should be in? I’ve never actually done so but I feel like doing so all the time. I sat and played this particular title for fifty hours. Me, not you, not the editor, not the man in marketing. I did. It’s my blood, sweat and tears on that controller, and I’m not going to imply I couldn’t play it all myself simply for the sake of abiding to a house style.

I love reviews that start with long, pointless, borderline-unrelated anecdotes. This review is a damn good example of what I’m talking about. Tim Rogers, if you’re not familiar with his work already (and if you’re a games journalist, you should be seriously ashamed if you’ve not read anything by the pioneer of New Games Journalism), has an odd habit. A habit of writing almost a thousand words, as he states on his website, without even actually beginning to talk about the game in question yet.

I love things like this. There’s a person behind all of those words, and he’s clearly trying to put me in his mindset. I don’t know Hilary Goldstein, bar a single short email conversation while I was working at IGN that gave me the distinct impression that he held either interns or UK IGN employees in the utmost contempt. Nor do I know Tom Bramwell, nice pleasant chap though he is. When I read reviews on some of the bigger gaming sites I learn a lot about the game, but I’m not really feeling anything. I can’t identify with the person behind the title. Eurogamer definitely, as they speak in proper god-damn British English, but not so much with three-page “down my nose” reviews from the Fox Interactive boys across the pond.

Look at GamerNode. I know Eddie. I know when he talks about a specific point in a title that he dislikes things like this, and I can look past that bias simply because he’s made the effort to talk about it in a fair manner anyway. Look at Kyle’s epic GTA IV review. That took a lot of courage, and most importantly, a ton of personality and honesty. IGN’s Michael Thomlensen reviewed the game for his Contrarian Corner column (a column devoted solely to watching what everyone else has said and then saying the opposite, giggling with glee as the hit counter rises along with the number of fanboy death-threats), and he didn’t like the game because his girlfriend had left him to move to New York, and Liberty City reminded him of this.

This is not personality. This, my friends, is bias. This is what we all strive to avoid. I cannot, for the life of me, fathom why people enjoy wrestling, either watching it or performing it, as let’s be honest, if I was AJ Styles, my CV would start with “actor” and not “cage fighter”. But I went to an event, previewed TNA iMPACT!, and I enjoyed it. It was simple, and fun. I could have spent hours tearing into the poor title because I thought wrestling games glamorized the concept of treating women like objects and promoting steroid-driven masculinity-overdosed homophobia due to the lack of average joes in the title.

The press needs a serious kicking, sometimes. I’m working my way into it, and already, I have one moral standard. I will not write for your publication if your site contains anything that sounds like “Top 10 Sexiest…” or even forum threads simply talking about who’s the “hottest chick” in whatever title the chauvanists-in-denial demographic are swooning over lately. If you want respect, respect human beings. If you want to respect human beings, you’ve really got to start by respecting both genders. What in God’s name makes you think I’m ever going to want to review X-Blades? Or talk about how “hot” the protagonist is? I might as well change my name to Gary Glitter by deed poll and be done with it.

Top ten lists in general are seriously lazy, for the most part. There are a few exceptions, where someone’s gone to serious effort to really find some obscure, cult-like references and sources for their material, and I’m down with that. I can compare my list with yours, and I learn at the same time. It’s all good, there. I like the unconventional lists; the top ten most lazily designed Street Fighter characters, or the top ten musical compositions in videogames.

But “top one hundred game developers”? What a waste of time. If anyone bar Shigeru Miyamoto was at the top of that list, there would be a huge outcry on the internet, and Nintendo Wiis around the world would become self-aware and kill the non-believers as they slept. And yet, you could supposedly argue that we care about the other ninety-nine. We’re not human if we’re not that least bit more curious about who won. There’s nothing wrong with cheering for a losing team, but it’d be nice if they threw the Japanese genius off the top spot and stuck someone else up there, for a change.

In fact, it’d be nice if people somehow managed to remove their heads from the insides of videogame celebrities like Miyamoto and Cliffy B (I’ll start calling him by the name he prefers once he stops acting like he’s just stumbled out of a frat party). They are rightfully respected. Pikmin, Super Mario, Gears of War, The Sims… these are all phoenomenally important games that furthered their respective genres, or in the case of some of them, created completely new ones. But people like Jonathan Blow and the two fellas at 2D Boy deserve a little bit more respect. Mario’s awesome, but he wasn’t funded through loans and life savings. There’s love and desperation in World of Goo and Braid, and nothing but professionalism in Super Mario Galaxy.

Jesus, if I could keep going on and on about the state of games journalism, I’d be here till sometime into Tuesday next year. I am by no means a god of journalists: I am a low-ranking freelancer with high hopes. I suffer from the “graphics/gameplay/story etc” review format virus occasionally until I get an antidote in the form of Insert Credit, or Zero Punctuation.

Games journalists have the best job in the world, but they’re also responsible for the regurgitated opinions of millions of gamers all over the world. The reviews you write, the scores you give, the number one you award… this stuff matters to people. I’ve seen people sell their consoles because a flagship title was given a low score. I’ve also seen films drop into DVD early for the same reasons, though for some reason those intolerable “genre name here” Movie” blights on the film industry seem to keep on appearing everywhere I look.

New or old games journalism, I’d just like to see more of a division. Blog about news, definitely. Review as a person, definitely. Report on news but sic that personality of yours until the facts are out of the way, first. Breathe. Don’t be biased.

And stop giving Tomonobu Itagaki money.