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.