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Games Entertainment

New Games Journalism: Ten Unmissable Articles 50

Posted by Zonk from the first-person-journalism dept.
The excellent gamesblog at the Guardian has been doing pieces of late on the phenomenon known as New Games Journalism (a topic we've mentioned here in the past). They have an article listing ten unmissable pieces of New Games Journalism, articles that help to define the genre. From the article: "This is a varied bunch, but I think what connects them is emotion, insight, and often a narrative rather than methodical structure. Whatever, just read and enjoy."
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New Games Journalism: Ten Unmissable Articles More

New Games Journalism: Ten Unmissable Articles

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  • It all a good idea as it helps gamers become more informed. If it keeps a few bucks in my pocket than I am a happy customer. I like to read most anything games-oriented so I say bring it on...
    • I am not sure that writing a story about a game constitutes journalism. I mean, sure, journalism is writing stories, but not all stories are journalism. To me a journalistic article has to present factual information. A story is just entertainment.

      Having said that I've certainly enjoyed many of these stories. I value them, but I also value "old" Gaming Journalism, the kind that presents facts and opinions in a structured format that's easily digestible and more, IMHO, credible.

      • Re:Good idea. (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Being a Dictionary.com whore, I looked up the definition of "journalism" and as far as I can tell the articles linked in the main story would certainly fall under it. While #3 matches your requirements of presenting factual information, the rest seem equally as legitimate.

        1. The collecting, writing, editing, and presenting of news or news articles in newspapers and magazines and in radio and television broadcasts.
        2. Material written for publication in a newspaper or magazine or for broadcast.
        3

  • The Great Scam (Score:3, Interesting)

    by knight37 ( 864173 ) on Thursday March 03, 2005 @04:30PM (#11837494) Homepage Journal
    I had just read The Great Scam [circa1984.com] the other day and was very entertained by it's great writing style. However, from talking to EVE Online players, I (like them) have come to believe that the piece is a total fabrication. That is not Journalism, that is just creative writing. Lets call a spade a spade.

    • Re:The Great Scam (Score:3, Interesting)

      by MMaestro ( 585010 )
      No offense (I haven't played EVE Online) but when you consider the huge sums of (virtual) money that was lost/stolen by so few people, chances are you'd be too embarassed or pissed off to report your loss publically. After all, its not like Microsoft or Apple like to come out and publically admit when they lost market share to the other. You keep quiet about it, hope the other side doesn't state it and if they do you play it down.

      It happens all the times in games, you get cheated a couple hundred (virtual)

      • I played EVE a few weeks ago, for just the length of a trial account.

        Starting from scratch without even understanding how you are supposed to play the game I could generate a million isk in 15 minutes transporting some crappy trading goods.

        The problem was it just isn't fun to click 'buy' type in a number, click 'set destination', drag something to you cargo hold, click 'launch', click 'autopilot', wait 15 minutes, click 'dock', drag something from your cargo hold, click 'sell'. And repeat.

        Playing 5c poke
    • I haven't played Eve Online and maybe I missed something (whether this is true or not) but scamming these people he only made 300 mil. I know he made closer to 500 mil but lost about 200 mil to a co-conspirator.

      The problem I have is that he said he was making like 30 mil in some situations and it would only take a little while to hit 300 mil and he wouldn't have to be an ass in the mean time.

      Maybe someone can clear this up if I'm wrong.

      • Re:The Great Scam (Score:2, Interesting)

        by MBraynard ( 653724 )
        No, he was never making 30 mil. He actually lost 30 mil + a 35 mil warship + a few mill on a trading vessel. And that's what set him on this course.

        He said it would take him 30 minutes to earn 500,000.

        Besides, this was an incredibly good piece of writing. It's not journalism - it's short fiction that is better than 95% of what you read in the years best Sci Fi anthologies. It was EXCELLENT. Some of the lines in there are ones I will remember forever - "They came like the Persions into thermopylea."

    • ex-frickin'-actly. this is a bunch of hippie lit majors who think gaming is some sort of spiritual experience. i enjoy inspired pieces of creative writing, but to call this "journalism" is a joke.

      they're essentially just writing about their gaming experiences from a first-person perspective, throwing in lots of imaginary detail.
      no, really. that's it. that's you're revolution in games "journalism".

      i miss the days when gaming was the province of computer nerds only. it was a dark day for our hobby when the
      • "New Games Journalism" does seem more like creative writing essays than anything else. You glean little to no information about a game. I enjoy the Always Black articles about anything more than everyday writing (AB is writing done extremely well).

        For example, 'Bow, Nigger' could be about him playing any game online and seeing the same thing that ocurred. It really isn't game specific, it's just another anecdote from a different persective.

        All this 'movement' really involves is good writers writing abo
    • The Great Scam doesn't even look like creative writing to me. Specifically, it looks like a slashdot rant. I quote,

      "You would then sell these pebbles for approximately the same price that an illiterate slave would have received for an ounce of cotton."

      Come on. I mean, I know about hyperbole, but this doesn't even make sense. At least slashsons check their idioms before they post, if only for fear of being ridiculed.

  • Well here they are: (Score:5, Informative)

    by NEOtaku17 ( 679902 ) on Thursday March 03, 2005 @04:31PM (#11837509) Homepage

    A Rape in Cyberspace [juliandibbell.com]

    Possessing Barbie [alwaysblack.com]

    Dreaming in an empty room: a defense of Metal Gear Solid 2 [insertcredit.com]

    Shoot Club: Saving Private Donny [quartertothree.com]

    ZangbandTK: Confessions of a Dungeon Hack [alwaysblack.com]

    The Great Scam [circa1984.com]

    Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time [edge-online.co.uk]

    Going Planetside [cream.org]

    Red Eye #114 [thetriforce.com]

    Sex in Games: Rez + Vibrator [gamegirladvance.com]
    • Here's a list of each article and the exact sentence that made want to stop reading. Just for reference, I tried reading these as if I was reading any other piece of journalism or opinion in a paper or online publication, and yes, I am an English major.

      From A Rape in Cyberspace
      "A good many months ago -- let's say about halfway between the first time you heard the words information superhighway and the first time you wished you never had --"

      I stuttered before I even finished this sentence, as, for o
      • Your points are great. The more disturbing fact is that they are heralding these articles are 'defining' the genres. That grates against me quite a bit as I credit the coders and creators of the games as the definers of the genre. This is a classic case of cart before the horse.
        • Yeah, I hate lists like this too...

          But on the other hand, this is the first I've heard of Ian Shanahan's, work. I'm glad to have seen their links to his two stories, because they were both terrific.

  • "unmissable"? (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    That's not even in the dictionary.

  • insert credit (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bskin ( 35954 ) <bentomb@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Thursday March 03, 2005 @04:37PM (#11837572)
    I personally think this [insertcredit.com] review of Katamari Damacy over at insert credit is one of the best reviews of a video game I've ever seen. It really cuts to the heart of what games are all about and why this silly little game is so fun. Made more of an impression on me than most of the reviews linked from this article. I ran into it by accident on Google one day, and now I read the site pretty regularly. Was very impressed.

  • Is there really anything new here? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by JackBuckley ( 696547 ) on Thursday March 03, 2005 @04:45PM (#11837655) Homepage
    I just read a few of these articles and I have to say that they are, mostly, quite good. My question to the gaming community on /. is: Is this a new form of (gaming) journalism/criticism or is it just that most of the game commentary and criticism out there is either bought-and-paid-for, payola-style gaming press reviews or else fanboy blogger types telling us how DoA rulez over Tekken?

    I mean, are these article and the rest of the "new" gaming literature really great, or just great by comparison? And will game criticism and reviews ever get a forum like the New York Review of Books or the prestigious film commentary journals?

    • these are good stories, NOT good journalism. believe me when i say that we do not want games criticism to fall into the deep intellectual abyss that is literary criticism and art criticism. i love the idea of serious academics taking on games as a medium and publishing their work in prestigous journals, but these New Games Journalism people are NOT those academics (they're not even worthy of the term academic). they are more akin to the stuffy, tweed-clad "theorists" lampooned in such movies as Good Will Hu
      • I'm still waiting for Rainboy Six 9. But more to the point, you're right in your argument that these people are literary hacks.

        I read a couple of them and I was left thinking about stuff outside of the game. Stuff like morals, reality vs. perception, online personas, and all that sort of stuff.

        **RANT TO BEGIN**
        This sort of "journalism" is useless. These stories would better serve as posts on a website as part of a conversation rather than a serious discussion about philosophical aspects of a game. If
  • It'll be interesting to see what effect this NGJ has on the gaming media and media in general. There are clearly some talented people out there who we might never have heard from previously. Of course, there's a lot of junk too! In any case, here's a tool I whipped up using Yahoo's Search API for doing video game news searches which NGJs might find useful. I built it to help me find interesting things to write about and to help see developing patterns or trends.

    http://www.proliphus.com/yws/peywsnews.php [proliphus.com]

  • If you want a short poor attempt injecting some NGJ into a review, try Zonk's review of Burnout 3 [slashdot.org].

    At the time, I thought the paragraph about the crash was a cringe-worthy attempt at NGJ. After re-reading it, I still do.

  • Good journalism or not, Metal Gear Solid 2 is not a good game. It may be art but is definitely wasn't fun, and I know because I forced myself to finish it after paying 50 bucks for it. I remember hearing someone describe it as "a soap opera with a dart gun." If you want to piss off your target audience, that's the kind of game to make.

  • Tim Rogers (Score:2, Interesting)

    by An'Desha Danin ( 666568 )
    I was quite happy to see that dreaming in an empty room: a defense of metal gear solid 2 [insertcredit.com] made the list, for two reasons.

    For one, the article single-handedly convinced me to play through MGS2 in its entirety, looking at what I originally considered to be a hopelessly mangled story from a fresh perspective, and it instantly went from being one of my least favorite games to my second favorite game of all time (right behind the absolutely uparalleled ICO).

    Second, the article introduced me to Tim Rogers, who

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • The point(s) brought up in Possessing Barbie, as far as There goes, are pretty obvious and not too interestingly written either. It seems to me that the fact that this subject matter is being written in a narrative format is the only reason that it's being deamed fresh and/or "unmissable."

    A much better article on There is available here [neonowl.net], though it has been featured on Slashdot in the past [slashdot.org].
  • Bow, Nigger, Possessing Barbie, or Game Girl Advance's much-linked-to Rez piece really helped me consider games as something more than just products again.

    Some of these articles seemed* marred by overly confusing writing, some were a wee bit too self-indulgent (I don't really want to hear all about your living situation, and maybe I don't fully understand how gaming can be a lifestyle), but I do like the idea: depict one possible narrative out of the many that a game might provide in cooperation with its

  • Here's another interesting take on dungeon hacking. This one's based on nethack.

    You have a sad feeling for a moment, then it passes [everything2.com]

    You'll laugh. You'll cry. It's (arguably) postmodern. And it's only one page long.

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