Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Games journalism, back when we were all young bucks with spotty faces and an infinite capacity for fizzy lager drinks, used to work like this: you’d be sent game review code far in advance of its release, and you’d be able to publish your review days or even weeks before street-date. This system was expected and indeed necessary for magazines, with their weeks-long production cycle and de facto chokehold on gaming criticism. When gamers went to game shops, they’d thus have at least a working sense of what might or might not be worth their hard-earned.

Today, especially but not solely for websites, it’s become pretty much standard to be embargoed from publishing a game review until the day the game goes on sale – so not until the opportunity to buy the game has already come about.
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I wasn’t really following the Mafia II is-it-good-or-nob controversy, for the simple reason that I thought it was probably a little bit nob. When the initial reviews came in, there was a clear division between people who thought it was a bit of a disappointment and people who thought it was supa-dupa-fly. To be honest, I presumed that the people who liked it were presumably just not very bright and had fell into the AAA-game + pretty + a bit of hype = 9/10 trap, because I can be just as judgemental as any reader when I put my mind to it. Quinns didn’t like it much. John felt similarly. Both particularly singled out the narrative for eye-rolling, with Walker noting it “should be damned is for its banal story” and despite the perhaps-best-ever acting “the lines they’re delivering, however, are blabber.”

So, no, none of this exactly put it on my To Play list.
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Spoilers have been on my mind. Not the Darth Vader is Bruce Willis in the Sixth Sense way, but whether the way we think about and talk about spoilers in reviews are actually appropriate for the form. In short: we spend a lot of time debating about things which barely affect our experiences at all while tearing other things free from the still living torso of a game which absolutely alters what everyone who reads then plays takes away. The first question I’m wondering is “why is there is this double-standard?” The second question “is there anything we do about it?” And the third is “should we”?
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Well, everyone else is doing it, we probably should too.

The forthcoming issue of videogame bible Edge has a large feature on Eidos Montreal’s development of Deus Ex 3. To tease it, Edge Online runs a short story with the headline “Deus Ex was “Kinda Slow” Says Deus Ex 3 Dev” before offering a quote from Lead Designer Jean-Francois Dugas: “There weren’t enough exciting, memorable moments. It was aimed more towards a simulation rather than a game experience.”. Internet explodes.

It is only part of the story. In a literal sense.
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A few months back, I met up with EA Mythic’s vocal Creative Director in a bar near London Liverpool Street Station. We ordered drinks. We set the tape rolling. After three hours, I stopped the dictaphone and we stumbled off. We’d covered a lot of ground – pretty much everything away from Warhammer itself, which was out of bounds for the usual PR-reasons. Since the full transcript would run to tens of thousands of words, I’m going to break it down to individual segments which I’ll lob up every week or two. And it’s just as well, as much of what Paul says is going to lead to debate and each topic should be taken apart individually.

The first one’s about Games Journalism, how it should work, how it worked for him, how journalists minds get broken, the problems of journos turning devs, where it’s gone wrong and how RPS has invented a time-machine (to our mild embarrassment).
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