A few days back, I was working on an Escapist piece about a humble, if predictably bizarre idea I’ve discussed here on the blog before, called Sexual New Games Journalism. In writing the piece, I did some reading up to refresh my memory on, well, normal New Games Journalism, a movement I personally found, in it’s more common forms, often irritating and juvenile. Along the way though, I discovered something that surprised me: What were people citing as a contemporary example of New Games Journalism but my very own Escapist?
Now, I get that The Escapist is a far cry from the boredom and lifelessness of so-called “old school” journalism, but, for me at least, calling it New Games Journalism (Yes, those are capital letters, ladies and gents.) implies something rather different, namely a strong emphasis on the personal experience of the authors. I also get that, sometimes, The Escapist does feature pieces of this nature, and respectable ones at that. But to stamp the whole publication with a big New Games Journalism label… It just doesn’t seem right.
Granted, maybe the problem is mine. A year ago, when the big clamor broke loose, I found the excitement and self-importance with which writers adopted the New Games Journalism slogan somewhat shallow, somewhat cocky. I felt — and still do — that works like My ‘Tiny Life, which became attached to the movement, were innovative outside of any catchy phrase, and that, in effect, all the followers of New Games Journalism were really achieving was an excuse to rant about themselves.
But it’s definitely possible that I’m alone on that front. And what I’m wondering, in April of 2006, is how other people feel about New Games Journalism? Does it make you feel all teary-eyed and patriotic for the world of video game writing? Does it make you want to stick out your tongue and scrunch up your eyes like you’ve eaten something sour and yucky? Could you even care less?
April 4th, 2006 at 11:15 pm
I try to take the “New” even further, make it gonzo. Basically I’m churning out four articles as a result of my GDC experiences, and while the gamasutra pieces won’t have my name in big emblazoned, interviewer letters, the Escapist piece willd definetly have my game design opinions at the forefront, circulated with other brillaint folks like Greg Costikyan and Jenova Chen, the designer of Cloud. Another peice, on in-game advertising, is going to be written directly from my experience talking with a Double Fusion exec and Ian Bogost, who had different views, and at the end I’m going to have an in-article ad for a game I want to make in the next few years which offers another perspective.
I think as long as you make something thats consumable, and delivers substantial content at the same time, it doesn’t matter whether its new or old.
The Escapist has been guilty of publishing a lot of fluffy tripe, but its better than a GamePro excersize in Halo 2 circle jerking.
April 5th, 2006 at 1:55 am
he Escapist has been guilty of publishing a lot of fluffy tripe.
I would be careful what you say around here about a publication you too work for ;-). The editors have been known to read Heroine Sheik, and I’ve gotten in trouble before…
Also, hey, how was GDC!?
April 5th, 2006 at 2:33 am
pretty much all of my pieces have been intensely personal, either overtly written first-person narratives or profiles of people i know. when i describe it to others, i tell them i write about Gamers instead of writing about Games. this, i think, encompasses the Escapist’s focus quite nicely, for the most part. it also allows for latitude between capital-letters New Games Journalism (as the writer is, presumably, also one who Games) and the stuff i’ve seen/written for the Escapist, which i wouldn’t characterize as NGJ so much as more traditional magazine journalism (character profiles, industry retrospectives/forecasts, more thematic writing). Tim Rogers, “Bow, Nigger”, all THAT is NGJ.
the one page that a bunch of escapist writers HAVE taken from NGJ is the willingness to implicate themselves, as a writer and as a gamer, in their pieces. the focus may not always be as egotistical as some NGJ pieces come off as, but the presence is still there. this i take as a good thing; i think the overt acknowledgement that the writing is filtered through the writer’s experiences is the first step away from pretending that we can be Objective about this.
April 5th, 2006 at 2:36 am
oh, and you might want to be reminded that the Escapist is published weekly with a demand for about 5-7 articles per week. i’ve never seen a website that aimed to publish that many fairly serious articles before, and i think it’s certainly a struggle at times for the body of “gaming journalists” to fill its pages when, at least to my knowledge, the community has never quite been tested like this before.
April 5th, 2006 at 4:12 am
This is something which have been bugging me in and out for some months. I think The Escapist is trying to be new game journalism, and quite often it succeeds without falling into New Game Journalism.
Now New Game Journalism is a good thing, but the change of focus from games to players represents only a minor fraction of what we’ll need to actually have new game journalism.
We ‘ll need the input of social studies. All of them. And, I think, what we will, first and foremost, need is critical tools allowing the co-existence in magazines of tests (they’ll always be needed) and real, constructive, even inspiring if we can manage, criticism (keeping in mind that this kind of criticism is rare even a tradition has been long established). We need that for a productive healthy relationship between game journalism and game developers/producers.
Anyway I think The Escapist is going in the right direction, and it’s been pushing the envellope ever since it started. It’s understandable that it would get mixed up with New Game Journalism, but that’s not all it does.
April 5th, 2006 at 8:05 am
I think that The Escapist publishes (or has published) enough NGJ articles to be branded as a NGJ “magazine”.
April 5th, 2006 at 8:26 am
the one page that a bunch of escapist writers HAVE taken from NGJ is the willingness to implicate themselves, as a writer and as a gamer, in their pieces.
I think you’re totally right. I just have a hard time, when it’s directly called NGJ, separating it out from the cockiness that comes with other NGJ publications.
oh, and you might want to be reminded that the Escapist is published weekly with a demand for about 5-7 articles per week.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t doubt the difficulty of what they do at all. My question isn’t one of judgement: just, simply, do people consider them NGJ or no - and what people even think of NGJ?
Now New Game Journalism is a good thing, but the change of focus from games to players represents only a minor fraction of what we'll need to actually have new game journalism.
I agree with you. I guess that’s one of the things that bugged me about it; that it labelled itself as the way of the future when it was only a step in that direction. And I think The Escapist does so much more, they shouldn’t be caught in that stagnant label either.
April 5th, 2006 at 8:32 am
I would have to agree with Bonnie in saying that I don’t think the term “New Games Journalism” necessarily denotes a good thing. While I’m all for creative journalism (and happen to like a lot of pieces which supposedly define NGJ), I feel that at the height of its popularity, the term NGJ was getting attached to any poorly written, self-indulgent video game article. There were a lot of people who thought NGJ just meant “talk about yourself,” and it’s honestly what scared me away from using the term.
The Escapist’s material is too varied to really even put it in one particular category. For that reason I believe it demeans The Escapist to be called an NGJ magazine, as it leaves no room for pieces like Bonnie’s, or Warren Spector’s, or Greg Costikyan’s. In fact, I would argue that the minority of Escapist articles could be classified as NGJ. It’s a very limiting term, and it carries too much baggage for my taste. -sj
April 5th, 2006 at 9:16 am
Kieron Gillen may have coined the term NGJ two years ago, but it’s clear the concept has spiraled far beyond his original intentions (as he himself has observed). Everyone seems to have their own idea of what NGJ is - running the gamut from “self-indulgent intellectually masturbatory navel-gazing tripe” to “insightful personal commentary” - with no one agreeing on any single definition, beyond agreeing to some of what it isn’t, namely a conventional review or preview.
Which is how it should be, to my mind.
Because what’s important about NGJ isn’t how you define it, but the conversation about gaming journalism it’s sparked. It’s caused a lot of people to spill a lot of digital ink, questioning just what we can and should be writing about games. People have asked, “Is there life beyond the conventional news / preview / review / interview cycle of gaming journalism?” People have looked towards conventional entertainment journalism and arts criticism and all kinds of publications and wondered if there are any lessons which can be applied to games. And in the process, we’ve had a lot of arguments about what games are and what they mean to us and how we should go about describing their significance - socially, culturally, economically, and personally.
This isn’t about some conveniently labelled subgenre of gaming journalism, which someone can then laud or malign. This is about a movement towards a broader notion of what writing about games should be about.
And that’s a good thing. Otherwise, Bonnie, you’d be out of a job. :-)
April 5th, 2006 at 9:26 am
Another thing: you usually judge a new artistic movement or critical theory by its standout works (if any), not by all its sucktastic adherents. We judge Impressionism by the works of Monet and Renoir, not every crappy artist who tried to imitate them. Likewise, the contributions of NGJ should be judged by those who do it well, not all the crappy writers who try to hop on the bandwagon. Dumping on all of NGJ because of all the crappy self-indulgent navel-gazing is like dumping on all of television based on Saved By the Bell or on blogging based on whiny LiveJournals. :-)
April 5th, 2006 at 10:14 am
Ferrous: Apologies if I’ve been less than clear. I’m not dumping on “New Games Journalism” (whatever it may be); I’m dumping on the term itself, and the need to dillineate a particular genre of journalism.
I admit that I’m bringing my own personal distaste of genre labels into this argument, but I see genre’s as an excuse to seek out derivatives, and accuse certain things of being like other things. Yes, both “Bow, Nigger” and “A Rape in Cyberspace” use personal pronouns, and talk about video games, but they’re vastly different texts which accomplish vastly different goals.
Actually, I feel that the most clearly identifiable kind of “New Games Journalism” is the shit kind. It’s BillyMcSelfimportant writing about how high he was when he first played Katamari, or Jenny O’Lookatme starting her review of Metal Gear Solid by describing how difficult it was for her to start her review of Metal Gear Solid. Sometimes I think genre labels should only be used to identify the worst in a medium. Everything else should just be classified as “good.” -sj
April 5th, 2006 at 10:37 am
Scott, just to reiterate my points:
NGJ, as a term, doesn’t mean much right now, because there is no commonly accepted definition for what it is. There’s a general sense about it being more (overtly) subjective and opinionated than, say, a standard review, but that’s about it. Thus, any conversation about NGJ right now typically devolves into an argument about defining it, in much the same way that arguments about “are games art?” often devolve into arguments about defining art.
That said, I don’t care how one personally defines NGJ, I care about the discussions it’s sparked about gaming journalism in general; and in the process, what it reveals about how different gamers perceive gaming and how they want to talk about it. Eventually, I expect we’ll hash out a notion of NGJ most of us can live with…or we may decide it was just a stepping stone to a wider understanding of what gaming journalism can be.
And once we do have a clear, commonly accepted definition of NGJ - the way we define “Impressionism” or “deconstructionism” - chances are we’ll find both good and bad examples of it. And sure, it’s fun to mock the bad examples, but it’s the good ones which contribute to the overall discourse.
So if you want to dismiss or malign or mock NGJ based on all the crappy examples of it out there, hey, that’s your call. But to my mind, that’s the same mindset of people who look at a handful of crappy games, then deem the entire field of gaming devoid of merit.
April 5th, 2006 at 10:59 am
Again, I’m not mocking texts which can be considered NGJ, as much as I’m mocking the term itself. It’s debatable whether the coining of the term has actually contributed to insightful games journalism; the best examples of “NGJ” still precede Gillen’s coining the term.
Do I want to debate that here? Not particulary. If you’d like to continue our discussion I’d be happy to do so via e-mail. Just please understand that I, for the most part, agree with you. Just like games themselves, any new trends in game journalism can only help to broaden the possibilities for the medium. I just dislike that it needs a flashy catchphrase in order to be official. -sj
April 5th, 2006 at 5:42 pm
To be fair, 30 to 40% of the stuff published in The Escapist is really good, and Pat Miller, Joe Blancato write consistently good stuff. Bonnie, Allen Varney, Mark Wallace and most of the other regulars usually have around a 60% hit rate. Since I’ve only gotten 3 things published and “An Exit” and “Reimagining Challenge” weren’t quite hits, I’d say I fall into the same range of success to fluff ratio. I concede Pat’s point that nothing like this has been done before and the filtering process is untests.
My next article will be kindof like NGJ, except it’ll be more my ego and intelligence and whatnot in the arena with other egos and intelligences, so it’ll be more like New Games Interviewing. The rest of the stuff I come up with probably wouldn’t classify, its more theory and analysis. Once I start getting my game projects underway as the year goes on, I’ll probably write about them, and you’ll see some stuff from me that might qualify as NGJ, except its written by a designer.
I agree with the rest that the Escapist’s diversity allows it to transcend NGJ.
My GDC was amazing, I met all kinds of great people, ran a great round table, got wasted and stuff, oh yeah, and as a result of a programmer I met I’m now designing a game for the DS. You can pick up the details on my blog.
April 5th, 2006 at 5:54 pm
NGJ is not journalism because it breaks this simple rule: The reporter is not the story.
Call them what they are: Op/Ed pieces.
It also doesn’t help that so much of NGJ is precisely "self-indulgent intellectually masturbatory navel-gazing tripe;” it’s the photo-negative of breathless, uncritical fanboy hype and just as useless.
April 6th, 2006 at 5:12 am
re: Mr. Dugan: Oh, you flatterer. If only the readers were so kind.
re: Brummbar: You reminded me of another distinction I wanted to make.
What we refer to as “New Games Journalism” is usually kind of a misnomer because the NGJ-typical inclusion of the author is applied to Game Criticism more often than Game Journalism. It’s been my experience, anyway, that most NGJ, good or bad, is (to varying degrees) a reshaping of a game review. They are personal essays that use their own experiences with a game to describe the game.
This is journalism in the same sense that Roger Ebert’s work is journalism; which is to say, it is a critical piece, and the parameters of a story are broadened a little bit. Whether you want to call this journalism or not, I don’t really care. I prefer to call it criticism, because, well, the journalistic “story” behind any movie review is basically “Roger Ebert watched this movie!”. So the Journalism bit of NGJ may be somewhat inaccurate, but to be fair, it’s just as inaccurate as calling probably 90% of the game-related content out there “journalism” as most of it ends up being more closely related in focus and aim to Black Belt Magazine than the New York Times.
For game criticism, NGJ is a natural fit, I think, because many experienced game reviewers are fairly conscious about how much their personalities and other external individual factors inform their reviews, and so writing a more overtly personal piece can feel much more honest than camoflauging their subjectivity in mechanical pseudo-objective language. For game _JOURNALISM_, however, in the all-caps sense of the word, I don’t have a lot to say, because frankly, I haven’t seen a whole lot of it out there.
April 6th, 2006 at 12:41 pm
Brummbar & pat: all news reporters are journalists, however not all journalists are news reporters. One definition of journalism is simply “writing for a periodical publication:” it does not need to be “news reporting” as we traditionally understand it. And it is this broader definition of journalism which is usually applied to gaming journalism (and to newspapers in general).
In short: news reporting is merely a subset of journalism. OP/ED pieces are journalism too - as are food and movie reviews, art critiques, travel guides, and a lot of other non-news pieces - simply by virtue of the fact they are published in a newspaper. What they are not is news articles, but “journalism != news reporting.”
Furthermore, NGJ is based quite explicitly on New Journalism, which Websters defines as “journalism that features the author’s subjective responses to people and events and that often includes fictional elements meant to illuminate and dramatize those responses.” [Emphasis mine] So if anyone thinks NJ/NGJ don’t deserve to be considered “true” journalism because they are subjective and/or makes the reporter the focus, take it up with Websters…and Zombie Hunter S. Thompson while you’re at it. :-)
Again, when discussing NGJ, I don’t see the point in bringing up all the bad examples of it, any more than I would bother discussing terrible blogs when talking about blogging, or all the bad videogames out there when talking about the gaming industry. I’m interested in the potential of NGJ, blogging, and videogames, as well as standout examples of each. I don’t see the value in dregging up the drek, unless maybe it’s to make a point about common mistakes and how to avoid them.
April 6th, 2006 at 5:47 pm
Just thought you might be interested by this one.
http://www.joystiq.com/2006/04/06/booth-babe-gamer-tells-her-tale/
April 6th, 2006 at 5:48 pm
RE: FerrousB: Just to clear up any confusion, I agree with much of what you’re saying. The point I was trying to make was that I haven’t seen much NGJ that exists OUTSIDE the realm of game criticism. So I grant you that maybe calling it New Games Journalism is less of a stretch than I had initially thought, but still, it seems kind of misleading to call the entire body NGJ when we haven’t seen much New-ness outside of game criticism. Or at least, I haven’t.
April 7th, 2006 at 2:33 am
Bonnie, Allen Varney, Mark Wallace and most of the other regulars usually have around a 60% hit rate.
Ah, Patrick, Patrick…
Just thought you might be interested by this one.
I am so there :-).
Because what's important about NGJ isn't how you define it, but the conversation about gaming journalism it's sparked. It's caused a lot of people to spill a lot of digital ink, questioning just what we can and should be writing about games.
I think we can all agree about that!