Going along with some of our recent discussions on game reviews and game reviewers, I've got one more question to ask you guys. It's a simple one: what do you want, what do you need, and what do you expect from the games press?Both colleagues inside my field of work and game community members outside the media often complain that game journalism is "broken." As some of the readers here have pointed out in recent discussion, covering game journalism as a broader entertainment medium is a fairly nascent idea to begin with -- someone said, I think, that none of us have been at this long enough, nor have games been a part of our larger culture to the degree that they are just becoming, to examine it on level with the criticism of books and film. Moreover, there are plenty of individuals I've spoken with who feel that games and game writing shouldn't be on that level -- that games are for playing, and people like me take them too seriously.
I tend to think that at some point, if it hasn't already begun, the game audience will continue to stratify to a finer degree. The idea, for example, of "hardcore" gamers is a fairly new one that did not emerge until we had fans of "casual" games to contrast them against. Despite my occasional griping about the Wii and Nintendo's stubborn focus on the same few IPs, the company and its cute white box have changed the landscape of gaming in a far-reaching way. Right now, we're starting to see so much divergence in the kinds of games there are that it's becoming less and less relevant to define them by genres like RPG, FPS, or puzzler. What kind of game is Portal? Mass Effect? Is Team Fortress 2 a "hardcore" game or a "social" game? Is Xbox 360 really a "hardcore" console, when you can download Carcassonne and Hexic?
Especially with the mass marketing of virtual worlds and MMOs, it's becoming more common to define a game by its audience -- but even then, more and more, there are people with one foot in many spheres. You could call EVE Online a more hardcore MMO, but it shares elements and key psychological game mechanics with, say, Gaia Online, which generally has a completely different audience.
Anyway, you get the point. I set out to become a game journalist because I saw an opportunity to explore the deeper issues of why we play and what it means to us as people -- more importantly than that, I saw I had the ability to explain it to others. The reason I do Aberrant Gamer, or one of the reasons, is to take concepts that are unusual, uncomfortable or difficult to define and explain why they make sense, to pin down certain undefinables in words so that we can see what they say about us. With that in mind, part of the value, I think, of the games media at this point in the industry's development is to help the community sort of parse itself out; I see my role as provoking thought and discussion on what gaming is (and can become) to some people versus what it is to others, at least partly.
Of course, coming back to our original discussion trend this week, a lot of people do turn to games media to help them decide where they stand -- this can be simply assisting in the decision to buy or not to buy a particular title, to report on trends, stuff like that. But I've also heard a lot of talk here and there over the past several months about whether it's even necessary to have a body of game journalists talking about these things, in the age of user-generated content and the internets and all of that.
So, along with all this, I return to my original question: What do you want from game journalism; why do you read game articles? Aside from straight reporting -- i.e, "X developer is making Y game, X event will feature Z exhibitors, A game is good, B game is problematic" -- what do you think our purpose is? Is game media generally meeting or not meeting your needs? If it's not, what can we do? What can I do?
