For those of you who haven’t heard N’Gai Croal is leaving Newsweek effective the end of the week and becoming a consultant for the games’ industry. You can read his final post and farewell here. For those of you now asking “who is he or why should I care,” then I responded “why are you reading this site?” And for those of you legitimately ignorant, but would like to educate themselves I’m sure there are better places to understand him. This podcast comes to mind. I’m not sure I’d be correct in saying he started the games’ criticism movement that we now see in certain blog circles, but I he was definitely an important figure into getting things moving. What he was most famous for, or should I say infamous was his inflammatory’ remarks about racism in the Resident Evil 5 trailer. But as to what he did overall I have to send you to Sexy Videogameland’s post.
He worked for a nationally recognized mainstream outlet and he spoke eloquently and critically about video games. And now he’s not. I think those two sentences sums up the transition best for those of us who are not N’Gai. He’s still going to post the same stuff on his new blog, ngaicroal.com, I hope. (Though it does mean I’ll have to fix the sidebar again.) But more importantly he’s going to get a voice into the industry. All the things we gaming public has been clamoring for on the outside, will now have a voice with the people who actually create them. That is a huge step forward for the medium. If a book ever gets written on how games rose to a new art form this will be more than a blurb, but now I’m just being starry eyed.
N’ Gai was a journalist, but he was more famous as a critic and commentator than a journalist. Really there are no games journalists. There are no investigative journalists at least. Most of them just print of the press releases or any tidbits about new games on the far distant horizon. Iroquois Pliskin at Versus CluClu Land had this to say on it. Here he does give two examples of people he thinks are doing it right, but I looked over some of the posts at The Cut Scene Blog and I wasn’t really impressed with what I saw. I don’t know how much of that is Ben Fritz being only held on retainer after losing his editorial position. And as for Gamasutra, years ago I followed them, but their e-mail updates were next to incomprehensible and were uninteresting. I went back lately and looked over some of their posts. Some of it is interesting, but other than the interviews I’m not sure I’d call what they do journalism either. Please send me links to prove me wrong. I like to be proven wrong when I’m all doom and gloom.
What’s my point in all of this? I’d say that to move forward in a medium you need two things: good criticism and good trade papers. Most of our focus for the past few months has been in trying to improve our criticism of video games. My opinion on this is the same as L.B. Jeffries, write the criticism first and we’ll see what works and what doesn’t. Either way we are getting the criticism thing down bit by bit, just look at my Game Critiquers sidebar or this blog list done by Alex Myers some time back. Neither is complete, but everyone on this list works hard at it. That’s a lot of people. But our trade papers consist of IGN, Gamespot and other like-minded sites that give out reviews, press releases and odd features that correlate to lists in most cases. It was said, and I wish I could find where (the first thing I don’t have a link for), Game Journalism is like if Woodsworth and Bernstein were told to follow the money and they only wrote about the existence of the money.
Here’s an example. Ubiosft recently announced that Assassin’s Creed 2 is coming out this fiscal year, meaning sometime before March 31st 2010. I am excited by this information, I will not call it news, but that’s all we got. How about you dig for more information? Of course they aren’t going to give up any about the game, but how about what studio is developing it, or who is heading the design and what they’ve done previously. With Sexy VideogameDevloperLand and IGN’s top 100 Game Creators showing off many of the people behind the games in the industry it’s not inconceivable that this could be done. It would even present the opportunity to do analysis based on their previous work. If they aren’t giving up the goods, then put the onus on them and represent that you’ve asked. It’s just an idea.
I have been thinking about games journalism quite a lot recently. I agree with your criticism of the current state of “journalism,” but I am having a hard time figuring out what to do about it.
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.
I completely forgot about the marrage aspects to present game journalism. It is a large setback. If, big if, all the publication stopped accepting “exclusives” then there would a more open atmosphere, but thats not going to happen. Actually N’Gai was in a perfect position to do real journalism. He worked for Newsweek, he had the benefits of not being married into the system and having the clout that Newsweek carries.
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.
Thanks for the shout-out man. I’ve been holding off on the Prince of Persia stuff but when I get around to playing the game I’ll check back on what you wrote.
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.