I have ambitions. I want to write one of the Great Works; the century works. Something that lasts, like Paradise Lost, or Don Quixote or Blondie by Lester Bangs. What you are now reading is not my ambition. This is a shitpost on the internet about video games journalism.
Which begs the question: how, exactly, is games writing to be classified? When the ghost of Silas Marner emerges from the black of the cosmos and announces the place of games writing in the dewey decimal system of Literary Limbo, will it be closer to journalism or manuals on car repair?
The appeal of games writing is simple. Chet from Old Man Muarry articulated it pretty directly: “games are more objectively reviewed than most forms of entertainment. I can give you facts about the game, number of levels, frame rate and system it will run on. What can I say about a movie? The print I viewed had no scratches? This book sucked but the binding was nice?” Video games make objective promises and can just as easily be shown to be full of shit. Games writing is a creative branch of technical writing, just as games themselves are the creative branch of computer science. Games writing can be funny, really funny like Old Man Muarry was, because it has an objective standard to enforce. OMM launched by comparing pre-release hype for the 1990s FPS Tresspasser with the disappointed reviews. Games writing is also a literature of embarrassment. Its primary subject is publishers and developers who fail, repeatedly, to deliver on objective, technical promises. This, in subdued form, is the structure of the “video game review.” Just look at how angry those guys were for a while!
When I was graduating with my masters and prowling around magazines and websites for a staff position, I met a lot of young writers who were looking to get into games writing. These were college types; young professionals with too-nice apartments, supported to various degrees by a generous endowment from the Daddy’s Money Foundation. As, indeed, I was myself. But, after a brief and abortive site founded in the year 2000 called Angry Gamers I decided games writing wasn’t for me. I loved it, you see. Loved OMM with its obtuse highbrow references and Gen-X referential sarcasm. Loved Something Awful for its base scatology. Loved PC Gamer for its camaraderie and Computer Gaming World for its occasional egghead forays into the theory of video-games. Scott McCloud did a strip for them and if there’s anyone who deserves the blame for what I’m trying to do in most of my writing, it’s Scott McCloud. I just never really got into playing video games. Which felt like a pretty impossible barrier to writing cogently about them.
The young writers I met didn’t play video games either. They just thought video games were the future; “where things are going.” You have to understand: writers want to write and when it comes to subject matter they can be very flexible. I’ve seen great writers thrilled to death to be writing 500 word true crime summaries for crummy blogs; seen the editor of religion at a very prominent website who grew up atheist and whose previous beat was the city council at a local newspaper. Writers go where the work is and for a while, about ten years after the turn of the century, it seemed like the work was in games writing. Once they got into it it became “games journalism,” which I suppose sounded better to them.
It’d be too simple to say that this influx of carpetbaggers is behind the various gamer gates (I think we’re up to 3 now?) but, no. game gate is a homegrown phenomena. It’s internet drama blown up to gargantuan proportions; internet drama on the floor of the United Nations. But Zoe Quinn and Internet Aristocrat and all the rest of them are real games people: it’s a nerd clique social implosion, colored by all the usual histrionics and weighed down by suicide. This is relatively common as internet dramas go.
The difference between gamer gate and other, smaller dramas is the presence of a press to cover it. A press, trained in journalism programs that stress the “call to action” ending as a necessary component of reportage, filing stories on impossible deadlines. Not just Kotaku: Huffington Post, all the rest of them. The blog class of the press who prepackaged the drama so it was comprehensible to the bigger and less tech-literate fish. That the drama turned into a confrontation between hardcore gamers and this commentariat itself is the interesting thing.
The internet is the commentariat. So message board posters and streamers, mostly writers themselves, are engaged in a territorial dispute. But the territory is getting smaller and smaller: the streamers and the online commenters, being mostly “amateur” and thus less dependent on outside support are thriving while the “professionals,” their platforms waning and choked with ads, fight back anemically, cloaking themselves in the “nobility” of their profession. It’s a sad display.
There’s a lot of invective against the so-called “games journalists” today. And I get it. But my perception is colored by memory. I remember taking a tour of the Huffington Post at the height of their powers. The office took up the whole floor of a building on Broadway, not far from Union Square. And it was full of endless cubicles, like the matte painting from Tron, cubicles stretching to the horizon. And in each one was a writer, their ears covered by headphones, typing furiously on a laptop. Each of their heads was filled with music but for visitors, like myself, the cyclopean room was silent. Silent but for the sound of knuckles moving under skin and the dull clicking of keys, these quiet sounds amplified by sheer numbers until they thrummed in the air like a swarm of cicadas. Bone crickets at midday. That’s what I think of when I think of the “games journalists.” That and their little unused cereal bar covered with nerf guns. Remember: that was when things were good. That was the best they ever had, the best they could expect. That was the zenith.
All writers end up on substack eventually, but they didn’t know that yet. The post has beaten the page. Of course it has. How else could things have gone?
Games writing itself seems fine to me, although I suppose it’s become games video. It’s still entertaining. Developers still fuck up. I like Warlockracy. But I pity the games journalist.
Penny Arcade started their own game writing site back in the day, hiring Ben Kuchera to write it. He wrote a story there about a piece of advertising for one of the PlayStations. It was a television spot set to Lou Reed’s “Perfect Day,” the implication being that playing PlayStation is all you need to have a “perfect day.” In the piece, Ben reflected ruefully that the perfect days of his life had involved no video games at all. He also wrote a piece about flying around with a water powered jet pack, justifying its connection to games by saying that, in “Mario Sunshine”, Mario himself travelled via water jetpack.
Therein lies the tragedy. Games journalists don’t want to write about video games, but they want to write. They also want to make money at it and video games meant a paycheck for a while. Maybe that guy who couldn’t get past the tutorial for Cup Head could have, in a different life, spun his snappy takes and social conscience into a syndicated column and turned that into a novel of greed and corruption soon to be a major motion picture starring Dick York and Anne Margret. I don’t know. I gotta assume, somewhere within themselves, every writer shares that ambition I talked about earlier. Or something saner, but still nobler than “games journalism.” Games journalism is a sinking ship and there’s a lot of digital egos lashed to its mast.
Games journalism has fucked up a lot in objectively identifiable ways. In the end, when it disappears, it will be remembered as CrowbCat remembers: a series of embarrassing clips and screenshots, presented without commentary but with perfect comedic timing. This is the fate of all things in games writing. Schadenfreude is plentiful and compliments are rare. This might be the fate of internet entities in general; it always ends with Null giving a three-hour livestream to sum up the body count and a headstone reading “MANGOSTEEN.”
The game is always rigged. Doesn’t matter what you’re playing.