Culture Clash

(February 2005)

No, Seriously

I received a veritable avalanche of feedback regarding last month's column, and all but a few of the responses were quite supportive. It would seem that plenty of gamers, developers, and even members of the press are sick of unsophisticated reporting and childish behavior from major gaming periodicals. Aside from the occasional missive from those who seem to think that gaming should remain as puerile as possible, the response was good. Given the apparent level of interest, this month let's discuss how the maturity of the press is a prerequisite for the maturity of games.

One argument against change is that the existing shallow press gets more subscribers than the few intelligent periodicals. That's because gamers have been conditioned to believe that pictures of magazine staffers in gorilla suits somehow constitutes actual game reporting. But people are generally intelligent, and if the mainstream press were to get serious slowly, then their subscribers would slowly evolve. The big magazines can't change overnight, but an evolutionary process will work just as well. And keeping things as they are really isn't an option, because a jellybean press feeds into a much more serious problem: the thematic stagnation of games.

The press has a unique power over game developers, perhaps more than it realizes. It tells gamers what is good and bad, and can affect trends accordingly. If it refuses to take game journalism seriously, or acts childishly, then games will continue to be childish. Exactly how many busty girlfriends need we rescue before we decide the bachelor's life is for us? How many extradimensional menaces must we thwart before we lose interest? Year after year at the GDC and across assorted gaming columns by very intelligent and respected people, we bemoan the infantile banality of games. And yet nothing ever happens to change it. Why? Because publishers make decisions largely based on what the press says, and for years it's been saying that games are fine the way they are - or, rather, that the games of tomorrow should be exactly like the games of yesterday, because all they talk about is stuff they've already talked about. It's like a pixel-shaded Gormenghast. Journalists should use their influence to agitate for deeper, more meaningful game experiences. Deeper games means more respect for the medium as an art form.

Before everyone freaks out: no one, least of all me, wants games to become pretension on a disc, interactive foreign films that are mega-artsy but somnolent. Making games “deeper” will not cause that to happen. Having more powerful games doesn't mean that the fun will be surgically removed, and how you choose to experience it is still up to you.

Plenty of gamers saw Painkiller as just an ultraviolent romp through Demon Land, which is fine. But for those who care, it's also a stirring artistic reflection on the concept of death and the nature of the afterlife, reaching stratospheric heights of thematic sagacity in the mind-blowing final mission, when gamers looked around and collectively whispered, “this is exactly what Hell would be like.” It's weird to think of Painkiller as deep, but it is - if you want it to be. Not having much of a story, it also demonstrates that depth can be achieved in lots of ways. But the important thing to remember is that however you played it, however you saw it, it was a profound and powerful game. So yes, those games are still lots of fun, assuming they're good games.

An interesting look at trends in 2004 suggests that gamers might be ahead of the press, asking for some of that depth. There seems to be a growing interest among players for potent games with a more mature tone. The press would do well to take note of that trend and include more coverage of, and applause for, what's happening thematically in some games. This means longer reviews, deeper analysis, and more editorializing. There is a difference between game criticism, which we need, and game reviews, which we have.

The press is also our ambassador, often called upon to defend gaming from its detractors. It has a responsibility to comport itself in a certain manner, and some of the more childish antics, while amusing (if you're eleven), reflect poorly on the industry. By behaving like children, they encourage nongamers to treat us like children. This is terribly damaging for an emerging art form - to be perceived as depthless, puerile… insignificant.

It turns out that plenty of people know about Edge magazine, a really good UK publication quite aggressively dedicated to serious, intelligent discussion of games and gaming. Amusingly, Edge is from Future Networks, which is also responsible for several of the most juvenile publications out there. Edge doesn't have huge circulation, but they don't seem to be going out of business, either. This is exactly the kind of journalism that we need more of. It's not ponderously scholastic, nor is it geared toward bubbleheaded ludologists. It's just more mature and more intelligent. Online, plenty of websites have the same thorough, level reporting.

In fairness, some are better than others. Ziff-Davis is generally more mature than Future; PC magazines are generally more mature than console. But “better” is open to interpretation; the closest thing to criticism that we have now is Rob Coffey's Scorched Earth column in CGW, stuffed in at the back of the magazine like an embarrassing child. A move to serious intellectual reporting need not be an all-or-nothing change; there will still be plenty of room for fun and for depthless games, just as there are depthless movies. Every time the let's-have-deeper-games subject appears, Slashdot lights up with people saying that they'll miss their mindless games. Gaming is not a tangible space. It can't get full because we add something new. But without an energetic, insightful, and mature press to back us, we won't be adding anything at all.