By Kieron Gillen on December 7th, 2008 at 11:25 am.
Auteurs records played. Skaven are clumsily daubed. Scripts hurriedly polished. For the RPS readers’ delectation, lists of interesting videogame reading from across the week are compiled (while trying to desperately not include a funny pop song Mer forwarded ). Just another Sunday, peeps.
- Hardcasual returns with a bang, as CliffyB explains how to save games journalism: “How did I, Cliff Blezinski, become CliffyB? Kitchen-squats. And when Cliffy B didn’t bed a dozen women a night, what’d he do? Juiced pheromones out of dominant apes and slurped them like a friggin Diet Soda. Cliffy B takes action. So when folks get upset about New Games Journalism, the Cliffster fixes it. He fixes it because he cares. He fixes it and runs twenty miles to tame his gluts and then he fixes it again.”. Thanks, Cliff! Also, L4D’s Tank on the economic crisis.
- Cheery groupblog The Reticule has made us a little jealous. They scored an interview with Mike “Faith No More/Mr Bungle/MIKE PATTON!|” Patton about his recent load of voice-work for videogames. What does it feel like to be a growling zombie? Find out herein.
- Wired published a large profile of Brock Pierce, concentrating on the decline and fall of the Gold Farming and the IGE. Big, serious journalism from the oft-brilliant Julian Dibbell. Highly recommended.
- This is more WARNING OF IMMINENT AWESOME than PRESENT AWESOME, but Shawn Elliott is arranging an e-mail Symposium on games journalism. Got an interesting selection of writers, critics and journalists from across the field, and we’re going to hack around the big questions. I’d pretty much retired from games journalism journalism – no, really – but this strikes me as something that may actually be useful. Its from the ashes of a previous project, which he’s shown here. Oh – and some people have already answered them. Here’s Troy’s.
- It’s been a spookily active week in games-journalism-journalism. The big blog-melee centred around SnappyGamer’s
annoyance that he writes like ramraiderannoyance that a cabal of pseudish writers is going to turn reviews into a wasteland where a man can’t find how many levels are in Fist-Bash VI and what button is up (There’s enough straw-men in Snappy’s piece to make me not feel too bad about tying together some of my own). The real meat is in the comments where the blogosphere descends, Snappy steps out from behind the piece’s deliberate posture and people talk. A shame that L. B. Jeffries’ piece over at Popmatters didn’t get as much attention. Starting from the most tired out title in the debate – Do Video Games Criticism Need a Lester Bangs? – he goes on to treat Bangs not as an icon of critical majesty, but as an actual writer, examining his techniques, his writing, what he did. Good stuff. Conversely, I have no idea what this is about. - Leigh updates sexyvideogamedeveloper land. SEXY.
- When people have a go at the music I end up linking off-handedly in the Sunday Papers, this is what I think they listen to. Then I don’t feel so bad.
Failed.
ractive.. *shivers*
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I’ve oft thought some sort of ‘Cliff Blezinski Facts’ would be a good idea.
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That video…
I’ve done work in After Effects before, but this takes the proverbial Hobnob. Loving the comments below it, particularly the “Did someone transmit 21st Century production tools back to 1983?” one.
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“Didn’t know that sundays, could be useful after all..”
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Homunculus: Coilhouse is a really smart blog.
KG
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Cheers for the mention, much appreciated :)
The Elliot e-symposium looks like it could prove genuinely interesting. I’ll be keeping tabs on this one.
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Ooooh. That Sexyvideogamedeveloper Land looks nice, and with such an awesome title, too!
Also: “No need to pick on your fellow bros, Broseph”
Hahaha!
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Roger Travis is like that one really uncool kid in the class that you wish would maybe keep his opinions to himself a tiny bit more…
If you ever read this Roger, sorry man, but it’s true.
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Oooh – comics!
(And lovely words as always, because Mr. Gillen knows what is new and better, we trust him.)
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This video games journalism journalism journalism is really getting too much. We demand more game trailers!
Also I got as far as ““Shine On Me” Will Burn Out All Your Irony Receptors” on Coilhouse and then I had to stop reading. I wonder if they would find that… ironic?
I don’t really.
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So, is the CliffyB article written by himself? Really annoying to read, stopped when my brain screamed in agony and my eye’s burned with all the fires from hell.
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Yeah, right. Sure. And you’re just posting these things because of contractual obligations. You’d rather wax prosaic over the glories of the tenth art (the ninth art, apparently, is some sort of rip-off of historiated initials, only with full words and larger rats). Only way out of here is in coffin, buddy. Or cocaine. Or fleeing the country to avoid being implicated in an erotic-asphyxiation scandal involving a Tory MP and Australian Soap stars. Because the best masturbation is performed for the benefit of professional performers.
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Happy Meta-Sunday. Even Dibbell recounts the IGE story in terms of his life as a games journalist. The Reticule (sometimes fondly referred to as “The Official Blog of the RPS Chatroom”) scores by sending Patton to the front. And music to hate your music haters by.
And all this before Tim Stone’s piece.
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Pepper: No. It’s a parody.
KG
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Thanks KG.
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Sometimes I do wonder why games journalists don’t use the time lost talking about what games journalism should be, to actually, you know, make games journalism what it should be.
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Thanks for the link love!
Look forward to your contributions to Shawn Elliot’s Reviews Symposium.
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Geralt? Is that you?
Seriously, especially if you look at all the red heads running about with a death wish. By death wish I mean jumping about whilst having so much wire in your dress you could have torn off by the spring.
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qrter: Me too. Why do you think we launched RPS?
KG
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Bhazor: Man, you’ve just made me remember that I forgot to include a gag about it being the intro sequence for the new console Witcher.
KG
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Reply to KG
To get a bit of mail to open?
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To keep Alec from visiting other parts of the internet?
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Re: the Snappy Gamer piece.
If you read this article assuming the author reads RPS (and as a poster at World of Stuart he probably does), it basically comes across as a critique of you combined with Mark Ramshaw, which becomes even more fun when you realise he probably got the links for the article from your previous Sunday Papers piece and that he thinks games journalism is becoming more pretentious probably because he reads your Sunday Papers (and lots of RPS) and keeps following links to lots of people who take videogaming very seriously!
It then becomes very sad when you have a go at him when he’s probably been reading you since AP :(
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While wondering about games journalists talking about games journalism, I also tend to think each discipline (let’s say games can be art, for the moment) gets the reviews and reviewers it deserves.
Although there are notable exceptions, the games industry as a whole seems to be fixated on pumping out games that have a hard time hitting the level of a mediocre Hollywood action blockbuster.
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I wish Leigh Alexander had asked Dan Paladin when the goddamn patch for Castle Crashers was coming.
On the subject of the Snappy Gamer piece: I’ve always found it peculiar that games journalism is the sort of journalism that attracts the most inward reflection. Maybe I’m not reading the right things, but it just doesn’t seem like critics in other media really care about the sorts of things New Games Journalism wanted to address.
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How do you know what it’s supposed to be unless you talk about it?
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That’s partly my point, how did movie critics and theatre critics and the likes seem to just reach a consensus as to how their job should be done, whereas games journalism is such a hotbed of discussion.
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@ Pags
See every comment about FOX News ever, tabloid press vs broadsheet, tv news vs print journalism, there’s loads of inward looking stuff about journalism.
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Because games journalists aren’t proud to call themselves games journalists, because onlookers still see video games as childish. That’s changing, of course.
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That video (from the album Stock Footage Apocalypse) is at least funny. Someone needed to one up The Darkness for throwback value sooner or later. But but but the guy linked to that nightmarish brokencyde clip, thus increasing its memishness and if I’m to have any hope for the species that needs to just disappear un regarded (Don’t click on it! Don’t!).
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I’m not really talking about journalism though; honestly, calling game critics ‘journalists’ is a misnomer because there’s very little journalism involved – for the most part, they’re critics and that’s all. Any games ‘journalism’ (such as that Wired piece on gold farming) is just standard news journalism; the fact that the common thread is games is actually of little consequence because the article is really about money and people. The game aspect is just what ties it all together and in that sense it could’ve been about anything.
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Not quite sure what you’re arguing there, Pags. News journalists interview people, report on what they’ve seen. So do games journalists. What’s the difference?
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“games journalists aren’t proud to call themselves games journalists”
I don’t think that’s true.
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News journalists are reporting based on who they’re writing for, creating arguments and pushing an agenda. The closest a game critic gets to that is going to a dev HQ and saying “well this is what the game looks like”. There’s a much greater emphasis on impartiality there, it’s not really the same.
I didn’t really want to focus on the journalism side of things anyway; my initial comment was more to do with the critique side of things, Tom’s comment just sort of forced me onto the subject of journalism as well.
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Wahey, thanks for the link to the Patton interview, hope people enjoy reading what he has to say.
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Guys, I like to insult your music taste because all the music you like sounds like it could quite easily be in a car advert. Still, your patton interview you posted has reassured me it’s not all bad :)
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You forgot to ask him about the possible Faith No More reunion next year Chris! Forshame.
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Also, with 12 games, and 12 months, aren’t we so far missing two days of Excellent Christmas Content?
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Unless, of course, it’s not supposed to end before Christmas day…
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I think the hard thing for games journalists, and for any journalists specialising in a part of the entertainment industry, is that it’s very reliant on the industry itself, which makes it much harder to practice ‘independent journalism’, by which I mean things like investigative journalism.
A couple of games journalists have tried to write investigative pieces on piracy, for example, but when the industry itself keeps their lips tightly shut on actual statistics, it becomes very hard to write such an article.
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Tank thing = cheap rip off of senator gronk http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33204
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“how did movie critics and theatre critics and the likes seem to just reach a consensus as to how their job should be done”
Um, they didn’t. Ever heard of Pauline Kael or Cahiers du Cinema? And it’s hardly as if, say, Mark Kermode and Paul Ross agree on what their job is.
Getting back to the Snappy Gamer piece itself, I’m struggling to understand why it’s such a terrible thing for games journalism that the “average gamer” doesn’t read games journalism. The average movie-goer doesn’t read reviews either, and certainly isn’t reading specialist criticism. What’s the circulation of Sight and Sound?
True enough, although that’s true in other (non-creative) industries that manage to have independent journalism. The problem is that the potential sources for news about a game are more or less always concentrated in the same place. There are slightly more potential sources for hardware (see the Wii Motion Plus leak), but still, everyone’s bound by NDAs which seem to be taken a bit more seriously than confidentiality agreements in the industry I cover. Still, it’s telling that Shawn’s symposium is overwhelmingly review focused, which points to a journalists-as-critics model rather than journalists-as-reporters. Most games journalists, it seems to me, straddle both worlds to a certain extent, and that’s fairly unusual for journalism.
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Oooh, I was only thinking today “I’d love to see an intervies with Mike Patton about his voiceover work”, and lo & behold, RPS delivers.
Nice :D
Now all I need is a Dwight Schultz interview on the same subject.
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re: the Snappy Gamer piece
Interesting read along with the comments. I guess it shouldn’t surprise me to get a glimpse of the game journalism infraculture through the latter, but it did. There exists one for anything you can do online, but since I only read RPS and Tigsource I haven’t really had a chance to see dissension in the tribes at work.
The original Snappy Gamer article was asinine, though. I didn’t expect such feedback but I guess the matter at hand was just something that people wanted to talk about anyway.
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I can hardly stand reading half of the reviews I come across anymore, because they aren’t though out to the max.
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I’m awaiting the dawn of game journalism journalism journalism. Thats when people write about people writing about people writing about games. It’ll be riveting. Here’s the thing, i can find game reviewer i trust and agree with. But every other medium i know less well, so all the other media’s critical journalists are harder to judge and thus harder to trust. But i scarecly give a damn about movies and i never have time to read books.
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Here , this is what gaming journalism is all about…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZyRyEsfJuUw
fools.
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Thanks for the shout out man. It’s funny how that article came about, I’d read so many people telling me that game criticism needed a Lester Bangs that I decided to see what all the fuss was about.
After studying him for a while I just sorta blinked, looked around, and realized there were plenty of people fulfilling his function. Now what we really need is a Samuel Johnson of video games…
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I think that’s what we’re doing in all these comments sections under articles/posts from game journalists talking about game journalism.
So, um. Good morning. ;)
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U R MR GAY.
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“Don’t get frustrated when things don’t change, because that isn’t your function.” (from the Bangs article)
I think that’s an interesting comment, since a common theme in games journalism has been supporting innovation against repetitive pop culture rubbish. You’re not going to stop Activision from releasing a thousand Call of Dutys and Guitar Heros, but you can encourage people to try out World of Goo and Psychonauts.
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NO QRTER! COMMENT THREADS IS NOT JOURNALISM! I HAVE NO JOURNALS.
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Damn, I didn’t pick up on Patton doing the L4D Infected and I put in about 20 hours of play with that demo. Shame on me.
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You say this, but you do not understand this is the time of..
THE NEW GAMES NON-JOURNALISM
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Old Work Non-Journalism?
Actually, that’s what I do at work.
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Thanks for the mention of our fair Reticule :)
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The Witcher: Karaoke Edition(TM) (r) Pony Canyon, a subsidiary of Fujisankei Communications Group.
See, I listened to it, but what I’ve got in my head now is ‘Wild Boys’ by Duran Duran.
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Oh nice, the preview translates typed-out symbols into characters, but the post itself doesn’t. Another failure for the RPS blog-code list!
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Mike Patton is a genius! Doing the Crank 2 score aswell amazing!
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The day I hear “Quote Unquote” in a game is the day I can die a happy man.
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I think a sample from “My Ass Is On Fire” (guess which line?) would fit nicely when a molotov hits the Infected.
But yeah, Patton or, heck, Tomahawk scoring a game would be bliss. Or for other very awesome ex-Bungle action, the Secret Chiefs 3. Man that’s good.
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Ok. That video. It has to be some sort of enormous trolling attempt, surely.
My brain cannot contain the idea that it’s serious.
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I M MR GAY
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N0 I M MR GAY
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