A Golden Dawn

At its most basic level, gaming journalism is heavily rooted in consumerism. The very purpose behind an in-depth examination of the features and shortcomings of a game are suggestion; a suggestion to play, or a suggestion to not play. Although systems exist in which the trade and playing of games is not done through capital, a system of review nonetheless remains focused on the suggestion of playing or not playing above and beyond any other consideration. That is not to say that games cannot be viewed from a non-suggestive perspective - academics and authors of other studies are (hopefully) immune to such considerations.

The justification for this thesis of suggestion is that most, if not all, of gaming journalism is centered around the consumer in a marketplace of video games. Whether or not they have financial incentive to look favorably on one game or another is not particularly relevant - the gaming journalist that strives towards creating a service for consumers is equally as centered on suggestion as the gaming journalist that is paid by a parent company.

With this in mind, I believe that gaming journalism ought to be done under different guidelines than those of other journalists.

Most journalists I have encountered would argue that a lynchpin of their method is objectivity, or to be as objective towards their subject matter as possible. Whether or not pure objectivity is possible is a difficult question - but one that is not relevant for a gaming journalist. This is because any given gaming experience is, at its core, an experience - from the perspective of a player, from the perspective of the writer, and from the perspective of a journalist. In order to effectively characterize a game and draw conclusions from material presented inside of it, this experience cannot be extracted from the writing process lest a critical piece of the game be lost.

Is any given game merely the sum of its working parts? Would, for example, World of Warcraft be the same game if individual components were removed, or graphical representations significantly altered? Is World of Warcraft its user interface and sound presentation? Yes, to all of these questions; its also player interaction, exploring, killing monsters and so on. But is it more than these individual components stacked on top of each other?

In my obviously anecdotal experience, gamers that I am in communication with that have played World of Warcraft all share one thing in common: their experiences. For one player, it might be an incredible experience - banding together with 39 other friends and killing giant dragons and evil eyeballs. For another, this predominant experience might have been terrible - being repeatedly “farmed,” for example, by an enemy player for hours.

To be “farmed,” by the way, is to be repeatedly killed by an enemy in such a fashion that it prevents the player-being-slayed to do anything but be repeatedly slain.

If either of these players were asked what they thought about World of Warcraft, they would likely respond in, respectively, positive and negative fashions - but they would probably both explain why. “World of Warcraft was awesome - the game let me slay huge monsters and acquire great-looking armor,” the former might reply. And the latter? “World of Warcraft sucked, man - too many gankers.”

A “ganker” is one that engages in farming against another player. They are also known as griefers, and have been playing online games since their inception in millennia past.

These experiences - although made up by me - are fairly generic and common ones found among players of World of Warcraft. Although each individual player will have an individual, personalized experience, they will, I believe, all share the act of having an experience-in-general in common.

So - does a gaming journalist writing about a specific game also have these experiences?

If they aren’t, then they’re doing something wrong - and are in the business for the wrong reasons. These are clearly opinions and will be in no way supported further, but just the same - if a gamer isn’t actually getting the full experience out of the game, then how can they write on it and have an effective opinion about it? I do not believe they can - but I also do not believe critics and journalists somehow miss these experiences.

Yet gaming journalism, outside of a few notable authors in recent years, have failed to successfully integrate these experiences with their professional opinion of a game. So, in a sense, since they are failing to effectively understand or convey a game, then they are failing the primary function of their position: suggestion.

It is with this in mind that I turn towards subjective journalism, almost in the vein of Hunter S. Thompson - ‘Gonzo Gaming,’ perhaps - to illustrate the potential of a game to a potential player of the game. By permitting the writer to shed the entrapments of objectivity, it allows him to fully embrace not merely the game, but his experience with the game - and how to convey that to a reader. There are most assuredly consuming gamers that prefer the nitty-gritty of facts and charts to determine their game selections; this style of games writing will not be tailored to them in the same sense that Thompson’s style alienated many people.

But for many people, his style brought his subjects to life in a way that no other writer in the field was capable of. So, too, can this occur with games - by sharing individual experiences with their readers, writers demonstrate to readers just what it is that a given game is capable of. Did it allow for the writer - and, by the extension of possibility, the reader - to slay a giant dragon with 39 other comrades? Did it allow him to farm an enemy mercilessly?

_________

I recently made a post on my primary blog (here: http://www.40oz1game.com/2009/10/405/) about what amounts to a staged event on behalf of the Something Awful Goons in the new MMO, Champions Online. One of the most-espoused features of Champions Online is the character creation system; an evolution of the system found in (__that other superhero mmo - ack!__), it further expanded on the possibilities of the sort of avatar one could play, and was widely-praised for being far more customizable than anything else on the market. Early previews of the game, and even reviews, were awash with a staggering variety of player avatar designs - giant claw-head things, huge eyes, meathook-hands, and so on. But it all lacked context - sure, it was cool that you could do that.

But what the Goons did actually made me want to play the game. They more or less recreated, on a huge scale, the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers of Saturday morning cartoon fame (or maybe after school, depending on your age). While I detest the Power Rangers and most Jpanese pop-culture remnants along the same aesthetic lines, the Goons - in their absurd rainbow of power ranger costumes - made me want to be a part of Champions Online.

That was because, for the first time, I was able to see what sorts of experiences could be had in Champions Online. Even if I signed up this evening and had the game running tomorrow morning and played instead of going to video game class, I still could not be one of the pseudo-Power Rangers - this is because this experience is unique to them. But I could slowly build a gang of hook-headed creatures to fight alongside me, or build the security arm of a left-wing militant group: the possibilities are endless.

And it is these possibilities that made me want to play Champions Online - not the composite of its aesthetic values, not the vivid, cartoony realism (haha) of the sound effects, nor the towering and sometimes-ominous city-skylines - but the possibility of creating my own, engaging, and unique experience.

It strikes me that the greatest service that a gaming writer can perform lies in charting out these experiences; admitedly anecdotal and unlikely to be recreated by the player, they instead show the player what they /could/ do. Instead of explaining to the player that Red Faction: Guerilla has a series of enemy installations that must be destroyed to make progress, a writer could instead chronicle the campaign of increasingly-brutal insurgent activities against a fascist state and the constant use of fellow insurgents as little more than fodder and distractionary tools. Instead of explaining the charcoal and sooty landscapes of the UT:2004 mod Red Orchestra that is occasionally brought to life with the beauty of the occasional flower, a writer could rather wax and wane the philosophic after he stumbles across a lone flower in a harsh landscape when looking through the iron sights of his machine gun (http://www.gamesetwatch.com/2009/09/done_column_battle_klaxon_on_r.php)

Of course, a gaming journalist must not only elaborate on more abstract notions like “experience” and “possibility” - they must also address the structural pillars of the game, too, like sound, graphical presentation, and so on. But why must these be the focus of most review and criticism? Gaming as a medium is fundamentally about experiences and play - not the elegant arches of gun barrels or the fractal beauty of a fireball spell. These things are certainly a key part of the experience, and should be treated as such - but they should not sit atop the pedestal they currently reside on. Slightly further, it also strikes me that relying on these pillars to support writing is an easy way out - following a formula of “graphics/sound/gameplay/story/replayability/etc” is as boring as a formulaic novel or film is.

It’s a bright future we’re heading into - gaming is still a relatively new field, and the criticism and writings of it are even further nouveau. But here’s the question: do you want your future to be made of the cold steel of numbers, graphics scores, and clothing selection commentary, or a golden dawn made from the tapestries of stories, heroic exploits, and nefarious deeds of a camping griefer? It is in these experiences that suggestion will be best characterized with.

Camping, by the way, is just another term for griefing.