Game Writing

Games journalism, as with most other types of media reviews, is an advertisement. A book reviewer tells you why (Or why not) you should buy that book, a restaurant critic will tell you where best to eat.

Game magazines are there to tell you what’s coming or, now that it’s here, what’s good. They’re essentially buying guides, meant to distil down the basic pros and cons of games and impart this on the reader in a way that will make you think ‘wow, I definitely need to buy this game, as opposed to that one’.

They are there in their purest form to compare, contrast and inform. Ideally they are there to give you a genuine assessment of coming releases.

Of course other things get in the way, and there are other things to consider when looking at the way games are written about; Sometimes the reviewer is there to sell a game, as an in-house game journalist would be – PlayStation has its own official magazine, as do all the other big hitters in the industry which is dedicated exclusively to showcasing the upcoming releases on their own consoles – the reporters there are not about to tear apart the game their own bosses made and tell you not to buy it even if it’s a complete turkey.

And third party magazines are not without their motives; as much as they want to write about games, they want to write about games that will sell their magazine and pay their wages and they want to do it quickly too; most game magazines are produced in nineteen days and in that time there’s not really much time to sit and contemplate your navel and think about these new releases in serious depth. They need to get it out there and they need to get it out there in a way that hits all the major points so their readers won’t go elsewhere.  So they use a ranking system. It’s easy enough to quantify a game into a set of values for certain things – difficulty, quality of graphics or storyline, how easy the controls are to understand – and it’s fast too, both for the reviewers who only need to jot down their scores as they go through, and the readers as well, who can compare one game to another based entirely on a set of numbers. Usually a score out of ten or a hundred makes it at least seem that the games are comparable. This is helpful to sales; people can’t buy everything and it leads to less frustration if you feel like you’ve informed your choice before you buy. The rating system and objectified reviews will help you make a decision where in the past you’d had to rely on what it said on the back of the box and hope they weren’t exaggerating too much.

However, personally I prefer a more subjective view on the whole thing; a set of numbers or an overall percentage value is all well and good but two completely different games stand a chance of getting identical values and it all depends on the reviewers tastes and opinions on whether something is a ‘ten’ or a ‘one’.  Before I purchase I’d like to know more about the story, the genre and the characters rather than if one person thinks they’re good, bad or indifferent. Metacritic goes some way towards fixing this; rather than one man reviewing; Metacritic gathers together reviews from across the board and creates an average. Still not a perfect way of doing it but at least I have multiple opinions coming together to advise me on the game.

And this is where New Game Journalism comes in. Keiron Gillan suggested that NGJ,

“- makes us Travel Journalists to Imaginary places. Our job is to describe what it’s like to visit a place that doesn’t exist…”

I like this idea; that a game journalist is not just there to tell you ‘this game’s controls could be better, but it’s pretty to look at.  You should buy it because it’s an accessible difficulty level.’ Personally I like to have background when I play games. I like to know someone has played it before me and has looked at the way it makes you feel.  Being someone who gets intensely attached to even the smallest characters, I like to know what kind of emotions tag along when playing a game and I like to know whether there’s something in there that I’ll enjoy (Sure I like an objective assessment of whether or not I’ll want to tear the console to shreds in five minutes because the A button is jump only when you’re on a blue coloured step in the month of June, or else you hold the left trigger and shake the controller violently and hope for the best) So I tend to look for the NGJ style of reports; rather than objectifying and comparing games, I look for the style of reports that read like an account of a journey and tell you what you’d expect to find there should you take the journey yourself.

I’ve always seen games as methods of escapism because you slip into being another person in another place at least for a little while. For me it makes sense to be told about the places and feelings you’ll be visiting, rather than the statistics and ratings of what makes it as it is.

It’s with this in mind that I take game reviews from other sources as well; bloggers and fans who write reviews purely because they enjoyed (And in some cases hated) a game or franchise tend towards the more emotive side of things. Certainly they’ll talk about how intuitive the controls might have been, or how hard it was to beat a certain boss, but they’ll talk about what made them really love the game and what made them take the time to slog through those undesirable bits of awkward controls and that’s time that professional reviewers might not have, and that’s the kind of review I prefer.

Therefore, my own writing tends to lean towards NGJ; rather than writing about specifications I’ll write like I’m actually in the place. My writing could definitely stand to be more objective; I tend to get caught up in my feelings about the characters (And in extreme cases, the places themselves – talk to me about Grand Chokmah) which means that I often forget to talk about the things outside of the game’s world.  However as this is the type of game writing I prefer to read, it does tend to colour my own writing.

Game History: And then there's me

As a child, I played next to no video games. I spent most of my time wading about in the river by my house or collecting large sticks in an almost pathological fashion. Whilst I watched a fair amount of television, I had an electric mini-scooter that went a whole eight miles an hour at top speed and by best friend only lived a street away and she had a dog. These things considered, video games didn’t appeal to me enough to ask for one of my own and therefore a long time the only real contact I had with video games was through Ben – a fellow avid stick collector – who would, at a pinch, allow me access to his Nintendo (Under strict instructions not to save over his game) provided I was prepared to reimburse him with Jaffa cakes.

Then my Uncle introduced me to Sims –during the summer holidays, on a trip to visit my Aunt and Uncle in London that he booted up Sims on his PC and let me play. After playing it every evening for the remaining evenings of the holiday and some initial concerns that it was not suitable for my age (I was nine) He bought it for me the following Christmas when I turned ten. I cannot imagine how much time I spent on that game, but let’s just say I had every expansion pack barring Hot Date – deemed inappropriate for a ten-year-old – for the original game, and I’ve done my damndest to keep up with the other series as well.

The first game console I considered to be a ‘real’ game console that I owned would have been the Game Boy Advanced SP and I bought it to play Pokémon Fire Red (Which gives you an idea of what time I started playing games that weren’t Sims). With Pokémon I also had a couple of Dragonball Z games and Minority Report which to this day I have never gotten out of the first level of because even for me – a fan of dull adaptation games – I found it monumentally dull. I also had Shrek 2.

I replaced the SP with a Nintento DS in when the DS came out in 2005. I bought one that was bundled with the Nintendogs game and since I wanted the game that had a Husky in it, I had to get a pink one. Since then I’ve amassed twenty three DS games, including blockbuster titles like the Fullmetal Alchemist Trading Card Game, Lost in Blue and every game adaptation of Bleach that I can get my hands on (Have I mentioned I like some weird games?). Aside from those though, I’ve played Castlevania: Portrait of Ruin, Pokemon Soul Silver and most of the Professor Layton games with varying degrees of skill.  Then when it came out in 2011 I bought a 3DS and played Ocarina of Time like there’s no tomorrow. The only other title I’ve bought for the 3DS was Tales of the Abyss, which personally I adore but there you go; I think those games where you roam about with a party of people with a conveniently concise skill set, who tolerate each other in order to save the world are marvellous.

The first non-handheld console I owned was a Wii, which I used to play yet more adaptations of films and animes along with Legend of Zelda – Twilight Princess and Skyward Sword. As well as games like No More Heroes and I like the freeroaming nature of these games and that’s probably what lead me to get a playstation. Most recently I’ve been playing Portal 2 (Probably my favourite game thanks to GLaDOS) and Skyrim, but finding it really hard to get on with what I’m meant to be doing because I keep poking around in odd corners to see what I can make happen. Thinking back to my first computer game, it’s pretty amazing to think how much it’s come on since then – wandering around in Shrek 2 for the GBA the chances of seeing some kind of Easter egg in the background would be slim to none, but now you can walk around Skyrim and just the graphics involved with the scenery are enough to keep you entertained for hours – Me and my horse go for walks.

Nowadays we see hyper realistic, cinematic games with realistic sounds and physics. We’ve come a long way from OXO and Starwar! with our open maps and hours upon hours of gameplay, but I don’t think we’re done progressing yet; though it’d hard to tell where we can go from here, I’d like to see even more emersive games. As processors become more powerful, special effects and graphics quality can only go up, but it’d be nice to see a console that would really emerse the player. We have glasses-less 3D now, so lets try head mounted displays or something. Like .HACK.

Game History: The 2000s

The 2000s were a decade of evolution; after the innovations of the previous decades developers and companies sought to distinguish themselves from each other and evolve to meet the changing lifestyles and technologies of the modern age.

The decade began with Sega pulling out of the console wars; The Dreamcast wasn’t as much of a success as they had hoped (The Saturn didn’t inspire much confidence and hey! The Playstation two was going to be released soon) and they ultimately decided that it was time to go back to just creating software, ceasing production of the Dreamcast in 2001. The Playstation 2 had a 294-MHz processor, the ability to play DVD films and also the Playstation one’s range of games. Third party games like Final Fantasy X and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City helped make it the best-selling game console in history. Microsoft then released the Xbox -  three days before Microsoft released the game cube - who’s built in hard drive and Internet Ethernet port made it as much like a computer as a game console. Xbox came with the first well received first-person-shooter, the Launch title Halo: Combat evolved This made the Xbox a serious competitor in the console wars and established them as a gaming household name. Meanwhile Nintendo released the GameCube (A personal favourite console) which, without the ability to play DVDs and it’s focus on the game play it was outsold by the Xbox and the Playstation 2. In 2002 Xbox live was launched and the previous decade’s shift to online gaming became commercially viable and downloadable content via a broadband connection was a huge success.

The console wars between Nintendo and Sega were pretty serious business. No seriously, they’re even making an anime about it.

In 2005 and 2006, the Xbox 360, Wii and the Playstation 3 were released and we enter an even more familiar, modern age of generation seven games consoles where internet connectivity and 3D graphics became the accepted norm. This is a time of movement sensitive gaming things like the Wii, and the Playstation Move made gaming through movement possible and enjoyable. And as games became more costly to make, crossplatforming became a thing; rather than cut out an area of the market, a game would be released on all consoles (made easier by the use of 3D modelling and textures as well as music, text and voice clips which made programming easier as reusable objects) in an attempt to maximise the amount of people who would buy the game.

Alongside these consoles, handhelds were really taking off; after the introduction of Game Boys as a serious hand-held console, Nintendo lead the way with handhelds with very little serious competition, Nintendo released the Game Boy advanced (The first Game Boy I had a proper go at playing) to succeed the Game Boy colour and the Game boy Advanced SP (First one I owned) in it’s hinged design as a redesigned version that included a back-lit screen for ease of use.

With Sony planning a handheld, Nintendo decided to take a sideways step rather than improve on the existing games console; The Nintendo DS was the first console I was desperate to buy (Something about a game where you could buy and care for dogs) and it drastically changed the ways in which games were played with it’s two screens and touch screen. This console brought Nintendo into internet gaming as well, with the Nintendo Wi-Fi connection (I could never get it to work on mine though) and with it’s redesigns of the  DS Lite it is immensely popular. The Playstation Portable from Sony was outsold by Nintendo’s handheld, however with it’s high-quality graphics and film and music playback features it is a viable Rival to Nintendo’s console.

For more casual gamers, mobile gaming took off in this period as PC gaming declined in status due to the fact that consoles (Even phones could produce PS-level graphics at this state) graphics and effects began to match those found on the computer.

However, this leap towards realism was not entirely smooth sailing and much controversy arose around it’s increasingly realistic portrayals of violence and sex, coming not only from outside the industry; parents and watchdogs becoming increasingly worried that such scenes would instil similar natures into people playing the game, but also from those inside the industry (And the culture surrounding it) who claim that overly sexualised scenes are causing shifts in the way the culture is viewed – and not in a terribly positive way. Though a large part of the problem stems from a belief that video games are firmly in the ‘children’s toys’ camp, which is by no means true and honestly if you look back at it the history of games; from scientists demonstrating what they can do with their machines for university guests, through technology students seeing how far they can push their hardware all the way to developers today, telling stories on an epic scale it’s never been just for kids.

Now, pressures surrounding the mounting costs of producing blockbuster games (Pacman cost around $100,000 but nowadays it costs around $15million to create an average PS3 title) and the instability that many game companies finances face – a particularly bad Christmas season of sales can put a company firmly into bankruptcy all at once – mean that the video game industry isn’t exactly in a brighter place than it was in it’s infancy, or during it’s boom and bust periods, but it is still an interesting and innovative area, constantly changing and growing in unexpected areas.

Game History: Eighties to the Nineties

The Eighties and Nineties saw major developments in the game industries; where there had once been small developers and students sneaking into the computer labs at lunchtime to program their favourite sci-fi TV shows onto the big expensive university machines there was now legitimate publishing companies. Some of these were truly long-lasting, like Electronic Arts which are still around today. Despite some enterprises that produced low-quality games this was an age of plenty for the video game industry; relatively low costs for production meant that it was possible to explore this new genre to its upmost, creating unique and captivating games alongside the more standard, home releases of existing popular arcade games.

The decade began with massive popularity  of systems like Atari and in the US alone it was a $5 billion industry and video game’s influence ranged far beyond the console and the arcade (The number of which doubled between 1980 and 1982). This golden age of video games had a massive effect on popular culture and games like PAC-MAN, heraded by the Guinness World Records as the Most successful coin operated Arcade game, got music in the top popular music charts – the single Pac-man fever from the album of the same name got to number nine in the top charts and sold a total of 2.5 million copies. Pac-Man and Mrs. Pac Man were heavily merchandiced and immensely popular, making the jump to cartoons in 1982 with a cartoon series that lasted for two years (You probably know the Pac-Man ghosts have names, well they also have specific personalities which dictate how they chase you and therefore how much of a threat they are during gameplay). And the Film TRON which depicts a hacker being sucked into a computer and forced to play games with the programs, became a cult sensation which sparked several games and was actually inspired by a video game itself - specifically Pong from Atari.

However we do not see universal success in the industry; the industry took a hit when third party developers (Some of which had come from Atari after quitting because Atari refused to grant them royalties or Authorial credit) These third party developers who and shoddy products began to flood the market. This lead to oversaturation of the market in 1983 which caused drastic drops in prices which in turn threatened the already established company’s abilities to survive. This period saw Atari lose $536 million and though the PC market actually did well; Microsoft released the MS-DOS in 1981 and this Operating system was popular for playing games, which made PCs a viable alternative to console gaiming. The bubble of console gaming in North America burst and was laid low for two years.

Eventually it was stimulus from outside the west that got gaming back on it’s feet; Masayuki Uemura’s 8-bit cartridge console the Famicom sold a whopping 2.5 consoles in Japan by 1984, so he decided to rename it the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) and release it in Europe and the US. It was an immense success.

The NES brought with it a wealth of fascinating stories and safeguards and regulations to prevent a second such crash – Nintendo placed systems in games to prevent reverse engineering and conventions that means the developer would face the problems if a game was a flop, rather than the provider.

It’s now we see many iconic franchises and names in games taking off – Super Mario Bros., Legend of Zelda, Prince of Persia and Metal Gear all emerged in this era of revival and we see a diverse range of genres appear. Racing games, Action-adventure games, simulations and survival horrors are all genres we recognise today and they all grew up around this time in gaming.

The 1990s saw innovation in video games; now that the foundations had been laid for the medium it was up to the industry to build on it. This was the decade when we moved into 3D environments, with the introductions of polygons and 3D environments game artists really came into their own and now we see the creation of the part of the industry I’m interested in!  Games like Ultima Underworld from Looking glass studios and Nintendo’s Super Mario 64 were the pioneers of 3D graphics where a player no longer had just the options of left, right, up and down any more – the world was opened up to 360 degree views and this called for more specialised labor – the artists were called in to help the programmers develop their games.

Optical discs began to replace ROM cartridges in major home consoles after the Nintendo 64. These CDs were more capable of storing the increasingly large amounts of data for games where ROM cartridges would have failed. This limitation on cartridges caused a shift; developers began to look at the Playstation instead of the Nintendo 64 as a better, more flexible platform for their games. The Playstation also introduced the memory card to gaming to store saved game information.

Other innovations of this time included changing controller designs; we’d begin to see the curvy shape we recognise as a controller today, as well as including analogue sticks –first on the Nintendo 64, forced feedback in the form of rumble strips first found as an optional extra in the Nintendo 64, then as the DualShock controller for the Playstation. And pressure sensitive buttons (Seen first on the Sega DreamCast in 1999) Late in the 1990s we see consoles start to shift towards online gaming, a realm previously only inhabited by PC gamers. When the DreamCast came out with it’s built in modem and internet browsing software, others were quick to follow and almost all consoles since have been capable of connecting to the internet.

At the end of this period we’ve seen a significant shift from the arcade to the home as personal computers and games systems become more affordable, as well as massive developments in content and graphics; what once was the realm of only programmers is now opened up to more artistic avenues.  Better processors and more available memory meant a serious story and narrative were becoming increasingly attainable and we see an explosion in the quality and diversity of genres.

As demand for better in-game graphics increased, artists began to collonise the industry proper, rather than just being needed as illustrators for box art or promotional material. In this era we shifted from pixel sprites and text adventures to 3D models and textures which will only keep developing as we progress.

http://www.pokemongame.co/pokemon-red-gameboy/

Oh, and we got POKéMON in 1996 after the first Gameboy was released in 1989/90!