As for current events…the salad days are over for us. First Maggie Greene and now this. With Croal gone there isn’t really a central figure behind game criticism or even a specific publication. The odd thing about Croal was that unlike Totillo or Crecente, people really unified behind him. He wrote regular journalism but wasn’t afraid to push the envelope or indulge in a little theory. He also posted links to Brainy Gamer along with the random obscure website.

Methinks all those journos are going to be stepping it up a notch in the coming months for that bit of real estate. It oughta breed some healthy arguments and rivalries in the scene. Probably gonna be hectic though.

Leigh Alexander has the right idea for the first step. The people have to know who is making their games. We all know the big ones, Myamoto, Kojima, Shafer, Ancel and now Levine, CliffyB and others are starting to get their names out there. IGN’s feature of top 100 creators, regardless of ranking, I never heard of most of them, but then I look at the games they made and I almost feel ashamed for not knowing them. I didn’t know who Greg Zeschuk or Ray Muzyka were. They are the creators to my all time favorite game Baldur’s Gate.

After that first step is taken then there can be an advance in the information we get. The job of PR people is give us the press release and then say whatever the company’s version of no comment is. The developers are artists. They want to talk about their work. Even if it isn’t hard facts like release dates or price its still got to be more interesting.

The first step is to open the lines of communication.

I marvel at just how married the “journalists” and publishers still are. Despite the supposed transparency fostered by social media, the news is still driven by alliances between the big sites and the gaming publishers. A good example of this is the last “Listen Up” (formerly 1up Yours from 1up.com) in which Garnett Lee announced that he was glad that LittleBigPlanet PSP had been announced, as he had known for months and was sworn to secrecy. Someone who is ostensibly a newsman is really just playing along with publishers, rather than investigating the game’s production. When the leader of a site that gets thousands, if not millions of hits on a weekly basis is basically a mouthpiece for marketing, it is a Bad Thing.

But how will we go about fixing this problem? I would love to see (or even do) investigative games journalism, but the system is stacked against those who would not supplicate themselves to the publishing media machine. Journalism requires time and connections, and if no one is paying you to do it, then it’s hard to be a reporter and still have 9-5er. Also, the kinds of connections needed for scoops are currently controlled by those who we would be analyzing in said scoops. If we allow publishers to continue their monopoly over information, we’ll just be hamsters in a wheel.

On the criticism side, I was always happy to have N’Gai as a leader of sorts. Losing him is disheartening, but it is probably the kick in the pants we need to going with some innovative criticism. Jorge and I are getting ready to premiere some new features on the blog in hopes of finding something that sticks, something that will help push game analysis forward, even if it is just a modest push.

I’m a bit frightened by what the future holds for journalism and criticism, but I think L.B. is right to say that we need to try, fully expecting some of our attempts to fail. The biggest failure would be to allow the status quo to persist.