(A random Slashdot reply to yet another game journalism discussion by yours truly on the idiocy. Sorry if I've written about this earlier; I think I need to sound like a broken record at times. =)

Know what's even more disheartening to me as a game fan? I stopped watching game TV when I realized what these people were doing: Okay, the game makers spent several months or even years making a game. These people cherish the game for one five-minute appearance. (Three of which are spent showing kEwL pre-rendered FMVs from the game.) And in the remaining time, they have barely enough time to say whether they think the game was good enough to spend money on. If I were to be a pessimist and say the success of the game hinged solely on these reviews, I'd say it'd be absolutely sickening to think how they treat the games. Game TV show crunches a game that took a long time to make, and for everyone who bought it, a month or two's evenings to play through, into a three-sentence review, says it was "kind of okay" and slaps it some semi-arbitrary rating, and that's the last we'd hear of the game, ever. (And frequently is, if you rely only in this TV program to get your game information!) What kind of message does this program give? "We're drowning in games, make less of them" to the publishers and "we don't care enough of these games to demand our producers to get us more air time to do this properly, so all you get are really chopped reviews, sorry", secondly, to the viewers.

TV is the worst possible medium for game reviews, you just can't cram information about, say, five games to a 30-minute weekly program. It's a little bit better medium for in-depth stuff like interviews, documentaries and like.

Lately, there has been a lot of talk about this "new game journalism" thing. Some Mad Linking may give a little bit of insight on what this thing means. Basically, the New Game Journalism emphasizes the writer's own experience about the games.

There has been... critique, quite obviously.

I know I regret I said this, but The Gameless Game was actually quite inspired by New Game Journalism. Specifically, Insert Credit and their oftentimes gigantically ponderous... and sometimes not... kind of writing.

When I started writing stuff for this weblog, I had one guiding idea in mind: Why should anyone read game articles, anyway? To me, it always seemed that people based their buying decisions on either brand loyalty or, in case of hopeful cases, word-of-mouth. If I were a dictator, the game magazines would publish academic analyses of games instead of reviews which nobody reads or trusts.

And, of course, if there were any justice in the world, that would be how print magazines would still stay interesting. Some of the major functions of the magazines these days are news, reviews, features and opinion pieces. News are getting obsolete in the era when the net is full of hints on what's coming up to the market next. Merging "reviews" and "features" indeed might do some good.

The problem is, as hinted in the linked criticism, is that the "opinion pieces" tend to get tangled there too. And "opinion" also frequently is nothing at all like "opinion". Just "irrelevant facts".

Here's a hopefully illustrative example. There once was a great idea to do a "first-hand" review of Animal Crossing - that would transcend a mere review but also provide humor. Well, that was done. End result? I'm still waiting until Doug gets his hands on this one, he at least doesn't pretend to be a journalist or anything. If I want to see a game broken, I leave it to the professionals, because that way, I can read about the subject and not wade through uninteresting details like having to ponder the deep philosophical significance of the fact that right now, here in this world, is a person willing to eat a burrito. Out of a microwave. Such decadence of manners and morals!

One of the frequently read mottos on one web site I frequent was "Journalism, not journal writing". We need New Game Journalism, not New Game Journal Writing. UK Resistance's article talked about game journalism not being about "referencing the works of Jean-Paul Satre when reviewing Need for Speed Underground 2" - I think it could be about that if it actually had anything to do with that. Depth is needed when called for.

And now, some New Game Journal Writing (I guess the whole piece is about New Game Journal Writing, but still)...

The Gameless Game was born out of need to write deep articles. From the beginning, it was evident that I wanted to write few articles but good ones. I haven't been completely succesful yet, because I try to find my point... but that far I have already unraveled.

And now, some Sartre. I mean, Apocalypse.

"Commitment and Counter-Insurgency, by Col. Walter E. Kurtz. As long as our officers and troops perform tours of duty limited to one year, they will remain dilettantes in war and tourists in Vietnam. As long as cold beer, hot food, rock and roll and all the other amenities remain the expected norm, our conduct of the war will gain only impotence. We need fewer men, and better; if they were committed, this war could be won with a fourth of our present force..."