If that's my weakness, then I'm in the right field. In games journalism, vague words like "gameplay" and "mechanic" are commonplace, generally meaningless adjectives like "compelling" are abused to excess, and we use genre descriptors even though our genres have evolved so as to make delineations confusing at best, useless at worst.
This makes it increasingly difficult to talk about games with one another, let alone with non-gamers. When I edit my own work, I slice out entire paragraphs that portray vague sentiment, but tell readers nothing. And when I try to talk about games with my friends, I sound like a babbling idiot.
Thus, my latest Kotaku feature was born. Yeah, yeah, this is the one from like two weeks ago, but I'm getting caught up all in here, alright? If you haven't seen it yet, have a read! It's on how, as someone who purports to have built her career around ambassadorship for meaning in games, I feel I'm falling short. I also try to illustrate why it's important we all do better.
The funniest part is the commenters. Many respond to my frustration at being unable to explain games to non-gamers in a way that explains why the games are good -- by offering their own equally obtuse and inadequate explanations and presuming they suffice. The takeaway from that, for me, is that we're so entrenched in our personal relationships with games and our insular culture; we're so dependent on shorthand that's understandable to only us that we can't even see it.
[Today's Good Song: 'Chinatown', Wild Nothing]
