It looks like New Games Journalism wants to be real journalism when 'old' games journalism just wants to talk about games. Journalism is, at heart, to talk about something, but to talk about something isn't journalism. Otherwise bloggers would run for the Pullitzer. (Oh shit, they already did, didn't they?)
I never experience this NGJ dealie beforehand, but it seems to be in line with what the Escapist does. The Escapist does reviews, and they are reviews - they are 'oh, this is the game, this is what it plays like, this is what's awesome about it, this is what sucks the most about it. Three out of five shiny star shaped bangles.' And then there are articles, such as this one, and they have nothing to do with reviews, even if they happen to focus on a single game and discuss it at lenght. My point is, I guess, that NGJ sounds nice, but it feels like what he wanted to say is, 'there's more to this than reviews. Let's stop doing reviews and do other stuff.'
carpathic said:
I don't really think gamer culture exists in any meaningful way. We talk over the internet and do things together and then call one another "fag". While there are some literati or cogniscenti who try to meld it together into some coherent whole. The reality is, Gaming is FAR to corporate, it is necessary to rely solely on content from relatively few and extremely disparate sources and there are no major CREATOR personalities to worship (as compared to say writing where you have names like Tennyson etc).
Further, the majority of gamer culture uses one media to talk about another, I am not sure that this really works. A culture should really be using its own media to talk.
The cake is a lie.
The fact that you know what that sentence refers to, even if you don't like it, is evidence that you're wrong.
I'll grant that gaming is not a culture, though - I see 'gaming culture' as shorthand, since 'gaming subculture' just doesn't roll off the tongue the same way. But when there are a lot of people, in different parts of the world, can understand a subject in a similar way, discussing it in an advanced manner using insider lingo, it's definitively a kind of culture.
The thing about the lack of personalities... well, you see, books are usually made by one person, so of course there are personalities, you can look at a book and say 'this book is 100% Nabokov!' because even if a few editors worked on it, most of the work in the book comes from that one person. Conversely, a movie fan can say 'I hate Michael Bay movies' even though Michael Bay is a director and thus has very little to do with the final product, compared to an author and his book or a composer and his song. Thousands of people will work on a movie and it'll be a Michael Bay movie. Why? It may be because Michael Bay (or M. Night, or Spielberg, or Hitchcock, or what have you) has a distinct feel that makes their products recognizeable, or because if they're involved with a movie then it already had some qualities one expects of their work to begin with - but mostly it's because artistical enjoyment is quite subjective, and therefore people need to create entities to interact with them. So Michael Bay is the entity that his movies orbit around - if I don't like his movies it's because I don't like Michael Bay. (What - have you ever met him?) This does happens in games to a point - see anything Miyamoto makes, and there are people axiously waiting Epic Mickey because it's Warren Spector Presents Epic Mickey, but corporations do the job for gaming. I know you complained about the 'corporate feel' of gaming, but saying 'a Valve game' is the equivalent of saying 'a Michael Bay movie' - because gaming has fewer strong creators to orbit around, it instead turns corporations into them. If game makers were more of celebrities then it would be a lot like movies, whereas the opposite might happen if movie makers were less of celebrities and there was a definite difference between an Universal movie and a Warner movie. (Proof: a Pixar movie.)
As for the last sentence, I don't get it. You're obviously thinking of writers, and of course writers talk to each other in the medium of writing, because that's the medium humans use to talk to one another when they're out of shouting range. The writing community uses its own media to talk about it because it happens to be the media that's used to talking about things. Or do music enthusiasts talk about music by doing mad guitar riffs at each other? Do painters compare techniques by making tiny paintings and mailing them? I guess joining an international sculptors' society must come with some pretty heavy mailing fees.
That was a huge reply to a tiny post, but I guess I feel defensive about gaming (sub) culture. Now I'll try doing something worthwile.
