Pretentious Games Journalism (And Something About MCV)

There’s an excellent piece that’s gone up on Robson’s site nicely explaining why mirthless cunts like N’Gai Croal can fuck off. If you’re still unclear about the difference between Old and New Games Journalism, then you’re probably one of those wilfully ignorant self-deluding cockwits who’ll tell anyone that listens that NGJ is nothing to do with the ramblings of the pseuds, because you are one and you’re too embarrassed to admit it. If you’re not a pseud but genuinely don’t know what makes good games writing, then read Robson’s summary.

Also for today, here’s an email we received from an Anonymous Knight who’s got a thing or two to say about the way MCV chooses who gets positive coverage. Enjoy:

Dear RAM Raider,

Over the last few weeks I have become increasingly angry as I turn the pages of MCV and I have finally broken and can keep quiet no longer.

The dirty dish rag of a magazine has run several pieces recently like “30 under 30” and “Industry Dream Teams”. Each one is populated by a denizen of grinning golums who believe that firstly they have some influence over the world around them and secondly that anyone cares. Do none of these children realise that it is their brands and products that are successful and not them? As brand or account manager on “Call of Singstar 09” please don't confuse (convince) yourself that you have anything to do with its creation and or popularity. Anyway that's not my gripe so I will continue after the jump.

Why do these media sluts get to go into the magazines pages? Well, it is certainly not by virtue of their professionalism. As an example one of those so called “Fantasy Team” members (who was an average telesales executive at the time) once offered out carnal favours to anyone prepared to give her career a boot up. She now lives with her current boss.

No, the reason they are all there is simple: Stuart. Either he likes you or your company is prepared to pay him “advertising” money. In return for a large sum of money on an annual basis Mr D will not only refrain from giving you bad press but he will ensure your employees are held up as paragons of the business world. All dressed up as the legitimate business of advertising. This is a joke as an ad in MCV must have about as much impact on your target market as a fart in hurricane. I will call it by its real name for once; protection money.

I know for a fact that one very large publisher was having a sticky time with SD as they had stopped “advertising” a couple of years back. As a result MCV never published positive stories about them and also would go out of its way to slag them off in print and in person. Recently a marketing man was dispatched from the publisher to enquire of Stuart “how much will it cost to stop slagging us off?”. The answer, “£XXX,000 PA”. They negotiated him down to around £XXX,000 and the deal was done. This is why the company’s ads can now be seen all over MCV on a weekly basis and its employees faces regularly grin out at us whilst we go for our Friday morning dumps.

My word that feels better.

Regards,

Anon.

N’Gai Croal: An Academic Responds

We’ve never been accused of being the home of reasoned debate, but we received this response to N’Gai Croal’s Racist Evil 5 rant from an Anonymous Knight. It makes us sad to see that the internet’s so full of ignorance that anyone trying to argue that there’s not only another side to the argument, but that the other side doesn’t have to be racist, is instantly vilified. So we’ve put the whole piece here for you to make up your own mind:


“I never thought I’d live to see the day when the faux-intelligentsia of games journalism declared all out war on the common gamer. By the faux-intelligentsia, I am of course referring to all of those who have sat through a sixth-form philosophy class, or once read a whole book on politics, and like to drop what they remember into any discussion about gaming like bricks into a playpen. The kind of second-rate hack that’s so insecure about the legitimacy of gaming, they have to start flinging in giveaway words like “lifestyle”, “culture”, and “motif” to persuade fellow members of the faux-intelligentsia that the videogame they’re talking about is actually an allegory of a subject that’s of world importance. Dare to question the mutual respect of the faux-intelligentsia, and risk getting shouted down as an unenlightened halfwit.

So, N’Gai Croal, then. A games journalist of no great relevance nets himself an enormous amount of attention by accusing a large development team of being racist. The trailer in question is for the trashiest of big-name franchises, Resident Evil. The teaser in question is overblown and cheesy, even slightly embarrassing as it depicts the tight-topped Chris Redfield pacing into town and becoming embroiled in a host of clumsy firefights with zombies straight out of any Romero movie, replete with a dopey voice-over.

Everybody who has half a brain is aware of the world’s shameful history when it comes to matters of slavery, disregard of basic human rights and terrible treatment of black persons, amongst others. In a world where this kind of treatment was both commonplace and not considered at the time to be utterly wrong lends support to the argument that we should be reminded frequently about just how bad this situation used to be in order to avoid it happening again.

Modern day society has little time for outmoded and flawed theories of the black man being inferior to the white; the positivistic studies which pushed entire nations towards thinking that, in criminological terms, races can be cleansed by the genetically superior super-beings to eradicate the pollution of their own race and discard the criminal element in a Darwinistic fight for the survival of the fittest. Yet Charles Murray, the US right-wing social theorist, still argues that the “underclasses”, particularly black persons, are of lower than average intelligence. Until the 1970s, the state of Virginia was actively sterilising those found to be “feebleminded”. Whilst it’s easy to point the finger at Hitler’s Germany taking ethnic cleansing to tragic levels, it is uncomfortable to recall that Churchill’s pre-war view and social policies took on a lower level support for such theories.

A thankfully low minority (although any number is still too many) will fail to acknowledge that the historical episodes Croal refers to, amongst many others, were far from the finest hours of the nations involved, whether the United States, the British Empire, or otherwise.

I wonder, then, how many of this majority – the decent gamer who despises racism – were amongst those who disagreed with Croal’s comments, only to be shouted down in an abusive manner by other commentators. Many of the issues that have been raised by these gamers have been absolutely valid, yet have not been greeted with the courtesy of a reasoned response.

Croal has made a serious allegation. Whilst it is likely that the development team at Capcom responsible for producing and designing Resident Evil 5 predominantly (if not entirely) consists of Japanese males, one still has to feel sorry for them as the sudden accusation of racism is thrust at them. As far as can be seen from the brief trailer (and that is all that these comments are based upon), Capcom have done no more or no less than any number of developers. Whether pitching the gamer against a glut of Germans, mowing them down indiscriminately without stopping to question their views on the party some have been made to fight for, or even asking the gamer to become the Nazis fighting against the Allied forces – the practice is commonplace.

Some argue that intention is not a relevant factor, but this is quite simply not true. There wasn’t an eyelid batted when GTA: San Andreas arrived, despite the potential for its black central protagonist to be mistaken for the stereotypical rap-loving, gang-raping, drug-dealing “gangsta” worrying the good multicultural folk going about their daily business. That’s because that character was merely that: a character, placed in a scenario for the purpose of narrative in an open-ended games world, where you could indiscriminately murder any nationality you wish.

To take a game where the zombies are black and the protagonist is white for reasons of narrative and accuse it of being a racist premise is to do a great many injustices. It cheapens the issue of racism, which is dangerous. It alienates the audience you’re supposed to be writing for, to be supporting, by telling them that their right to enjoy a simple videogame is contested. Any commentator who has pig-ignorantly attacked these people for stating their views on the matter, to question their moral fortitude for simply arguing that they don’t see the game as racist, is beyond contempt.

And worst of all from Croal’s perspective, he’s shown himself up as a charlatan. By throwing around serious allegations in the same casual manner that MP Keith Vaz wrongly associates videogames with the murder of one of his constituents, and that Jack Thompson wrongly associates videogames with just about everything that’s broken in the world, he’s destroyed his own credibility. The real tragedy is that he’s taken down with him the thin veneer of maturity the games industry has been trying to build up for itself for so long.

For the sake of some cheap column inches, N’Gai Croal has hurt much of what he purports to love. I hope his new-found notoriety was worth it.”

Antipathy Under Fire

In the 18 months this blog has been running, we’ve taken abuse from all sorts. It’s understandable – human nature means anyone who disagrees with a viewpoint will always be much more likely to bother to respond than if they agree. We learnt that when we disappeared for three months and previously silent supporters e-mailed us until we came back.

Most of the flack we’ve taken has been from certain types of people. Someone we’ve criticised directly or disagreed with their viewpoint, or one of their friends or colleagues. Sometimes fans of a company or writer will jump in to defend their idol. Fair enough, but it’s always weird when someone who’s completely unrelated to the industry pipes up and joins with the nay-sayers, but there’s usually a motive.

If you read MCV or follow the blog, you’ll know about a recent article David McCarthy wrote about new games journalism and the letter we wrote in response. It was standard fare for us. There was nothing new in our arguments, we were just taking the opportunity to put them in print and in context with the views of another writer. And so it took us by surprise when we opened the next week’s issue (29/9) to find two-thirds of the letters page had been dedicated to us.

One of the letters was by Stuart Campbell. We won’t bother typing it here as it wasn’t one of his better pieces of work, (feel free to stick a link to a scan in the comments section if you like though) as despite claiming to be addressing our rants about NGJ, he was really just having another moan about us being anonymous.

“Why doesn’t he say so using his real name (or even just ‘Bill Smith’ or whatever), instead of cultivating the (cough) mysterious ‘RAM Raider’ persona?”

What difference would using “Bill Smith” instead of “RAM Raider” make? Oh well, moving on…

The letter which really caught our eye was by a certain John N Sutherland who is a self-professed “Senior Lecturer in Video Games” for the University of Paisley (funny they only offer courses on computer games technology and art – not quite the same thing, is it?). If it was April, we’d have thought he was having a laugh. In fact we still thought it was someone having a laugh, but this guy really exists. Here’s his largely incomprehensible letter:


“RAM Raider descends in the lowest form of naff media-ism. It’s the kind of laugh, grunt and burp school of boys drinking their first beer from a bottle. What form of mass entertainment other than games would consider taking his (I assume Ram is a him) approach to critical enquiry into the medium? (The kind of industry which rates Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter the BAFTA-winning game of the year seeing as you’re asking.)

Indeed, what, when and how he says what he says is itself a text to be duly analysed. He is part of the message that games put out: a sniggering in darkened rooms at block graphics, of body parts coming apart in mock gore, tempting the Daily Mail to mock schlock horror. (Yes readers, he’s subjecting a rant-blog to an NGJ-style analytical deconstruction. You couldn’t make this shit up.)

There is another possibility, which is the one used in the critical analysis of movies, television, music, drama, books, painting, clothing, language, form, etc. It is to ask the question: what is going on here? Video games are not a unique medium never seen before; they are simply another mass entertainment medium as capable of being subject to deep questioning as any other form of human activity.

From where he stands, Ram Raider is quite possibly, as he admits, incapable of understanding this ‘crap’: the analyses, concepts and sentences used by such critical analysis. But, with a little more education I’m sure he could.

There are probably a range of courses on textual criticism available at his local universities. For one, he needs to realise that objectivity is not an absolute. For example, the meaning of a word such as ‘fun’, which is core the video gaming [sic], is almost entirely subjective. I too play games that I enjoy playing. The question is: why?”


Yes – why? Why talk a load of fucking bollocks about games when you’re supposed to be entertaining and informing your readers – that’s what I’ve been banging on about for so long now.

Perhaps Sutherland should take his own advice on reading up on how to write a legible piece, as responses from friends and colleagues we showed this to ranged from “Is it meant to be a poem? The structure’s all fucked, he’s trying to make it into a poem” to “He’s taking the piss – he must be.”

The best response was from a veteran games journalist who wrote for the mags in the 8-bit glory days of the C64 and Spectrum. Being away from the industry and games journalism for so long, he was completely baffled by it all.

“None of this shit went on in my day. I mean, who the fuck cares? We just had to load up the tape and write some shit about whether it was worth buying. It’s like these people are writing in a different language now – how is that helping? Jesus Christ, I’m pleased I got out of this lark. What a load of bollocks.”

Amen. Anyway, our response was published the following week (6/10):


“My goodness, it looks like I’ve got some thanking to do. After Stuart Campbell pitched up last week asking why I moan about NGJ (although he seemed far more perturbed by my anonymity), along comes Mr. Sutherland to answer the question for me.

From a ‘senior lecturer in video games’ (suddenly ‘Games Journalist’ doesn’t look so bad on the old CV), Sutherland’s letter is a living and breathing embodiment of exactly the kind of nonsense that needs to be kept out of games journalism.

In a series of disjointed and unrelated paragraphs which appear to be making points but, upon closer inspection, aren’t actually saying anything, Mr. Sutherland suggests I’m too thick to understand the needless deconstruction of the magic of gaming.

I’ll be sure to sign up to his three year degree course in video games at the earliest opportunity to rectify this, and get to know the three people in the UK who failed their A-levels whilst I’m learning a whole new art.

I’d also like to thank Mr. Sutherland for putting me straight on a few things that I’d so foolishly been mistaken on. Objectivity is a relatively recent concept apparently – and there was me thinking it had been around as long as subjectivity. Aren’t I silly!

And ‘fun’ is also actually almost entirely subjective, which makes virtually unanimous praise of excellent games such as Half-Life and Elite nothing but a hilarious coincidence. What a fool I’ve been all this time!

Thank you, Mr. Sutherland. Thank you for proving my point about why over-analysis of video games should stay well away from the realm of games journalism.

And thank you for making me quite literally laugh my grunting, burping backside right off.

‘Bill Smith’
RAM Raider Towers
ramraider.blogspot.com”

In Defence Of Old Games Journalism

Dave McCarthy (Taurus from the Triforce) interviewed Gillen a couple of weeks ago about NGJ for MCV. McCarthy was irreverent, but Gillen in between his pretend (we think) pretentiousness threw in a few snipes at OGJ including “there were only three things you could write about games: a review, a preview or a tips guide” and “The best Games Journalism now is better than it’s ever been. We probably should be grateful.” It angered Dave Perry who vented on the Triforum and mentioned his viewpoint in a letter to MCV last week, but the main defence of OGJ was left to us. So here it is, how they printed it:


“Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. That describes Kieron Gillen’s take on NGJ and his opinion in last week’s article by cheeky Garry Bushell impersonator Dave McCarthy (‘Games Journalism RIP?’, MCV 8/9). I’ve not got much space, so I’ll keep this brief.

On Gillen’s Definition: For someone who sneers at NGJ’s detractors for not having read his ridiculous article about it, he needs to get his opinions straight. One minute it’s ‘travel journalism to imaginary places’ (puke), the next it’s ‘anecdote based writing’. Make up your mind, because the difference is quite important, you know.

On NGJ: Why does it exist? Gillen thinks there’s an audience for subjective journalism. You know, like when one of those terrified kids sat there during Bad Influence droning in a monotone, “I like playing Altered Beast because I like playing it.”

Sure, it sums up what that reviewer’s feeling. But isn’s [NOTE TO MCV’S SUB-ED: READ THIS] games journalism there to tell gamers what they might like to buy? And doesn’t that mean you have to be just a tiny bit objective?

On Gillen’s Opinion: Gillen not only thinks there’s a market for this crap, but that it’s overtaken Old Games Journalism in terms of quality. Of course, Jaz Rignall, Stuart Campbell, Gary Penn and Dave Perry only used to be able to write reviews, previews and tips guides back then.

Now we can discuss the existential ramifications of post-feministic perspectives on the use of the silencer in Counter-Strike as a symbol of phallic rape. Wow, I’m so grateful games journalism is so bloody great now.

New Games Journalism is the mother of all misnomers. It’s not ‘new’. And it’s got more to do with the faceless boring writer than the ‘games’. Writing ‘my monitor and me: a pretentious autobiographical account’ will never qualify as journalism.

You want to know what NGJ really is? Old Writer Narcissism.

RAM Raider
ramraider.blogspot.com”

Losing Neverland

We’re in danger of losing something very special. It’s movie quote time again, this time taken from a conversation between J.M. Barrie and Charles Frohman after Barrie’s latest play had just been over-analysed to death:

Barrie: “It was never meant to be taken seriously.”

Frohman: “You know what happened, James? They changed it.”

Barrie: “They changed what?”

Frohman: “The critics. They made it important. Hmm? What’s it called? What’s it called?”

Barrie: “Play.”

Frohman: “Play.”


We play games. “Games”. An amusement or pastime, and a recreational activity according to Google (and who are we to argue). Pieces of software put together so we can enjoy ourselves.

Games like chess. Noughts and crosses. Tennis. Badminton. Battleships. Connect 4. They’re invented, and people play them. For fun.

But “they” are trying to change this. “They” think games are art. “They” think games are there to be analysed, attached to everyday real life or the human psyche. “They” are trying to make games important.

Games are only important in being an excellent way to have fun by yourself, with friends, or with paedophiles you meet on Xbox Live. Games don’t need to be analysed, just reviewed so the folks at home know what to pay for or spend time downloading on Bit Torrent.

But “they” aren’t happy with reviewing games. “They” have to make themselves feel important, and pretend their degrees in art & sociology weren’t a waste of their time and money. “They” think their personal experiences of a game are more important to mankind than the game itself.

This kind of shit has no place in games journalism. The critics are there to keep the makers in line. When something’s shit, we’ll say it’s shit. When something’s great, we’ll say it’s great. But who the fuck is interested in some random guy’s views about the time he was playing a game released 5 years ago when he was so bored by the game itself, he had to start deconstructing the level design or the plot or the characters or the colour of the fucking logo?

Games are great because they’re fun, because they offer a Neverland for us to escape into. Us. Not “them”. We don’t give a fuck about “them”. If “they” keep over-analysing and essay-writing and deconstructing and talking bollocks about games, the Neverland will disappear, and all the decent games journalists will become the lost boys.

If the Captain Hooks amongst you want to wank over yourselves wanking over games, or compare OGJ versus NGJ to Peter Pan versus the real world (sorry), keep it restricted to your personal blogs. Stop wasting the pages in magazines. Stop trying to compete with what’s great about gaming. Stop trying to make out it’s all so life-changing and important. Stop fighting the lost boys and destroying the magic.

For fuck’s sake – nobody ever saw the need to write an essay about the motivations of the Hungry Hippos…

NGJ In A Single Quote

You should know now that we hate New Games Journalism. We’ve spent many posts trying to explain exactly what it is we loathe about this pretentious form of masturbation dressed up as journalism, an excuse for the writer to talk about themselves instead of telling the reader about the game, but we’ve found something that does the job much better than we can.

We were watching a film today about a journalist who likes to write about herself in her articles, just like the NGJ elitorati. When she met the subject of her latest article for the first time, he pulled her up on her love of talking about herself and, accidentally, brilliantly summed up everything that’s so wrong about NGJ from the reader’s point of view:


“Whenever I read one of these interviews where the writer says, ‘This is how I felt the morning I woke up to meet the pope. This is how I felt when the pope greeted me and how the pope reminded me so much of my very best friend Mike’, I always think ‘Who the fuck is Mike?’. So who are you?”


This is the best passage from a film we’ve ever heard.

Back in the glory days of Your Sinclair, Zzap! and, later, Amiga Power, the games industry was full of writers with character. If you were dedicated, (and most games mag readers were back then, as casual gamers were unheard of) you could often tell who was the author of a review without checking the name at the end. Stuart Campbell, Jaz Rignall, Dave Perry, Matt Bielby, and countless others we could mention, all had a style so unique they couldn’t disguise their identities if they tried. This was great because they all had their own favourite genres, and different ideas about what made a game worth playing. Perry loved his 2D beat-em-ups, and Campbell would rip the beating heart from anything that was slightly less than perfect. The reader could relate to the writers. They could tell who liked the kind of games they liked, and follow their opinions.

In short, reviewers could get away with and had every right to refer to each other in their reviews. Now, this does not work.

Several mags and websites are guilty of self-reference to the point of self-worship. Lines like “Craig’s moaning as usual” or “Neville’s up to his usual tricks” might be highly amusing to anyone who knows who Craig or Neville are and what they’re like, but in reality a huge percentage of the readers haven’t got a fucking clue. We don’t like picking on people (actually, that’s a lie) but the unreliable Eurogamer is a perfect example, with its stack of reviewers constantly name-checking each other. It reads like a giant in-joke and alienates anyone who isn’t a games writer, or a reader so infatuated with games reviewers that they practically stalk them. In other words, over 99% of the readers are being made to feel left out by this needless and pathetic mutual backslapping by games journos.

There’s a place for this kind of thing – blogs. Reviews are for talking about gameplay and cracking a few funnies along the way, not for using as an excuse to inflict a page of someone’s tragic autobiography onto readers who just want to know what a game’s like and be entertained.

To go back to that most excellent of quotes, the message is simple. Games reviewers need to stop talking about themselves and their “very best friend Mike”. The majority of games reviewers aren’t interesting or high-profile enough for most readers to know who the fuck they are, never mind their very best friend Mike. We know who they are, and who their very best friend Mike is, and it bores the tits off of us, so we pity the poor readers who have to wade through this drivel without that knowledge.

Film reviewers don’t talk about themselves and their friends. TV reviewers don’t talk about themselves and their friends. Tech reviewers don’t talk about themselves and their friends. Newspaper reporters don’t talk about themselves and their friends. Games reviewers need to stop talking about themselves and their friends because they’re just not interesting enough. Make yourselves interesting, and maybe you’ll get away with it again. That’s too tall an order though, and we all know it.

“I always think ‘Who the fuck is Mike?’. So who are you?”

Another Awful Review, And A Press Release

Our readers have been on top form this week, alerting us to two points of ridicule. The first follows last week’s report on PC Gamer’s wank-stained review of Oblivion. Tom Francis’ hopeless attempt at padding / NGJ / whatever-excuse-him-and-his-mates-are-using can’t even claim to be original, as a hawk-eyed reader spotted the unreliable Eurogamer.net had beaten him to it with its review of Animal Crossing: Wild World.

Written by some guy called Mathew Kumar, (if this was Harry Hill’s TV Burp, the audience would be unfunnily shouting out “who?” – he's a freelancer for places like InsertCredit) the 2344 word review is peppered with exactly the same brand of jizz. Here’s the intro:

“The first thing I remember is waking up in the back of a warm taxi cab, speeding through the driving rain. The driver, a frog, introduces himself as the Kapp'n, and asks me a variety of questions to find out who I am - secretly it helps me ascertain that very thing myself. It turns out my name is Mathew. I'm heading to the town of NewGenki, a small town populated by animals, and I have no money to pay the fare.”

No Mathew, you’re having a bad trip.

Over a third of the text is taken up by this meaningless drivel, making it a 1500 word review (complete with typos – well done EG’s sub-eds) padded to the ends of the earth. Check this out for a finale:

“In the middle of the night I awaken, and look over at her, sleeping peacefully in her little bed fit for one. Some nights I could just watch her sleep. I put on my goggles, an awesome purchase from the Mabel sisters that makes me look super cool, even with a bee sting, and walk out into the empty streets, heading for the museum's observatory. The lyrics of Aerogramme's 'In Gratitude' run through my head - "I wanted to show you the stars... I wanted to show you the stars.”

I inscribe her name into the heavens and send her a letter, those lyrics the only content.”

Man alive, we couldn’t make this shit up.

And now back to the world of PR, courtesy of another reader who sent us a press release from RR favourite Crazy Frazer Nash. Headed “Teenage Goth-Metal girl designs extreme metal racing video game based in Hell”, the release is a load of empty platitudes about a racing game nobody has heard of, or ever will. Cue Frazer:

“Frazer Nash of Frazer Nash Communications describes how his daughter created the game during work experience at developer, DDI: “Sky, then just 15, was given a huge responsibility to design her own (tongue in cheek) game. By the end of the first week, she had created a Gothic-looking game, complete with drafted levels and an awesome soundtrack. 12 months on and with professional development courtesy of Sam King and Mike Rooker (art), Mark Gemmell (production), Karl White and Julian Salter (Programming) at DDI. (Looks like you forgot to finish your sentence there, Frazer - RR) Aimed to appeal to Goth / Rock music fans the world over, Metro 3D have created EARACHE EXTREME METAL RACING - a monster of a game.””

Stop the presses – it’s a racing game set to rock music. With bands like Linea 77 and, umm, Akercocke, a new dawn for gaming has been heralded. And you heard it here first.

Anatomy Of A Poor Review

When a big release comes along, Future decides which of its mags will get the exclusive. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion is one of the biggest releases this year, so they gave it to their best selling PC games mag, PC Gamer. But after allocating EIGHT pages for the review, reviewer Tom Francis has managed to fuck it up. Considering he had EIGHT pages to fill, you can’t blame the guy for having trouble finding stuff to waffle on about, but resorting to padding it with NGJ is inexcusable.

The shit starts on the second page of writing where the review suddenly stops, and Francis starts blathering on like he’s a character in the game:

“I dismount a good distance from the entrance and creep the rest of the way. Stealth, my friends. The cave floor’s wet inside, but a master like me is still near-silent when – aaaarrghh!”

We were wondering whether that last bit was where the sub-editor had committed suicide, but it goes on. And on. And on, taking up three-quarters of the page. Then another “story” begins on the next page taking up half the page, until by the end you’ve been subjected to four of them.

What’s worse than taking up a third of the review with that shit is the justification he gives for it:

“It would be more informative – and more importantly, fun for me – to recount some of my adventures…”

There you go folks – it’s there in black and white. It’s much more important for a review to be fun for the reviewer to indulge himself with writing tedious bollocks than it is to be informative.

To give Francis credit, the proper OGJ review parts aren’t bad, but why give the reviewer EIGHT pages when he can’t fill them without resorting to padding? Perhaps he struggled to meet his word count because he had to drag himself to Take 2’s offices to play through their code (which went gold after the magazine had gone to print) whilst a PR husk was perched on his shoulder. He says in the review that he spent at least 30 hours playing it, but that would have meant going down there every day, 9am-5pm, for a whole week. [EDIT: OK, we've got reliable information from Gillen that he did, but our criticisms stand]

Reviewing pre-gold code in the publisher’s office isn’t good practice, but it’s not uncommon. PC Gamer’s bitch PC Zone did the same for Oblivion, and all Future’s mags do the same for big releases. Reviewers had to fly overseas to review Half-Life 2, but the reviewer-to-magazine ratio meant some of them had to write the review more than once so different versions (by the same reviewer) could appear in different mags.

We’re going to get rounded on now by PC Gamer’s brigade for daring to criticise them, but we’ve got no problem with the rest of the mag. They just fucked up their review of one of the biggest releases of the year because Future would rather send reviewers to PR offices to play pre-gold code than wait for finalised code for the reviewer to play through properly. You can judge for yourself when the mag’s in the shops on Thursday, and tell us what you think.

A Review Of A Review – NGJ ALERT

The RAM Raider jumps on the NGJ bandwagon for a review of an NGJ review.


I took a deep breath in the blistering heat. The aroma of sweat, dust and overpowering perfume filled my lungs. Approaching the desk, passport in hand and fighting my way through a crowd speaking in an unfamiliar dialect, I asked where I could find what I was looking for. The checkout assistant pointed me towards the sorry selection of games magazines, and looked baffled when spotting the passport. I ventured over to the magazines. Between Microsoft and Sony’s manifestos and collections of press releases masquerading as journalism, I dodged the comics and picked up something with a glossy cover. My journey into another world had begun.

I’ve had an extraordinary life. At any one time, there are thousands of twee anecdotes ready to be unleashed upon anyone brave enough to commission me. There’s one that immediately springs to mind when reading this review. I’m two paragraphs in, and have learnt about a free trip abroad lavished upon the author, paid for by the game’s marketers. Suddenly, the memories of these futile and pointless trips that I have been subjected to – personally, and through reading the accounts of reviewers – flood into my mind. It dawns on me that the second paragraph has finished, and nothing of any relevance to the game has been mentioned.

Where do anecdotes end, and autobiographies begin? If readers want to know about the achingly cosmopolitan lifestyle reviewers would like their readers to think they have, they would buy books (“My Life Travelling Through The Virtual World” by M.Y. Egotrip), or read their blogs. God forbid they should restrict their fictionalised lives to those mediums though – why not just serialise them in their reviews.

Reaching the end now, and I’m feeling elation. Elation that the review will be over soon, and the manager will stop looking at me in that way. Shuffling my weight to the other foot, I pick up an aside about how the reviewer has personal issues with the type of game he’s reviewing. His editor must be a genius.

Closing the magazine, a haze of mediocrity washes over my mind as I’m dragged from the shop by security. The manager reminds me that it’s not a library, and counters my protest that I’m researching NGJ with the revelation that I should fuck off to an Internet café. Of course! There’ll be plenty more there. On the way I stroll into GAME, and hiss at the zitty lowlife who thinks about telling me to buy Fifa. As I approach the game I was thinking about buying, I realise that I still know nothing about it. After three pages, and over one thousand words, I still don’t actually know what the game is about. Its genre. How to play it. Whether it’s worth buying.

I could read the back of the box or pick up an official magazine. Both results would be the same. Alternatively, I could carry on making a point to avoid NGJ, because it’s self-indulgent shit that’s subjective to the point of lunacy, boring and uninformative. A blog in disguise. This is where our journey in the games industry is going. I don’t want to know when we’re going to get there, I just know I don’t want to be there.

Never again will I write in the style of NGJ. The risk of getting fashionably emo and killing myself is too high...

PC Zone To Become The New PC Gamer?

The RAM Raider has heard a rumour that the reason Jamie Sefton has been installed as acting editor of PC Zone magazine over at Future Publishing’s London office is that editor Dave Woods is working fulltime on a total redesign of the magazine, presumably in an effort to halt its declining sales.

PC Zone still has a fearsomely loyal fanbase from its heyday, which is sadly long gone. For a long time now, it’s not so much been a magazine with attitude as a games comic, but will this be rectified?

Dave Woods has always been a vocal critic of PC Gamer’s stupid and largely pointless Extra Life section, but is ironically planning a section called “Freeplay” that’ll basically emulate Gamer’s pages of glorified look-at-me filling. Only time will tell whether the Zone team can prevent Freeplay from turning into yet another desperate source of irrelevant commentary – has nobody learnt anything from the NGJ debacle?

Sod New Games Journalism - What's Wrong With Old Games Journalism?

The RAM Raider is sure he's not the only one that’s absolutely sick of this whole bucket of fuck-all that’s calling itself New Games Journalism. The fuss is centred around an entry in the blog of ex-PC Gamer staff writer Kieron Gillen, who now makes a living freelancing for PC Gamer, PC Format and, erm, Eurogamer.net. There are two things in particular that irk about the whole situation – one is that the original piece was originally written over a year ago and was only recently dug up in a Guardian blog, the other is that there’s sod-all to it, other than being overly wordy.

The principle is that an NGJ article should centre around the writer and his experience. Taken at face value, this sounds quite sensible. Unfortunately, applied to an industry full of giant egos, this has resulted in a breed of articles that are more about the writer telling the world about himself.

Gillen himself is playing it pretty cool, claiming that the whole NGJ manifesto thing has been blown out of proportion. While he does tend to take himself a little too seriously (a quick look at his blog will confirm that one), Gillen’s not a bad guy when you meet him in the flesh, and it’s a shame to see his name brought to prominence with an issue that we can already see the community lashing out at.

A perfect example of so-called NGJ at its worst is PC Gamer’s Extra Life section. Usually consisting of a miserable mixture of pointless “this is me playing a game” bits and ten page articles on specific game levels (ten fucking pages – I don’t know whether to laugh or cry), the only entertainment that can possibly be derived from it is from attempting to find something interesting to read amongst it all. How fucking pointless can you get?

Applying NGJ to reviews is an even bigger nightmare, positively inviting the egos with typewriters to wank themselves silly while forgetting what the main purposes of these articles actually are. You basically need three things for a successful review: i) to describe the game (and you’d be surprised at the amount of reviews out there that don’t), ii) to describe what it’s like to play, and iii) to bolt those two ingredients together in an entertaining fashion.

Crash and Zzap are legendary thanks to their abilities to hit the exact balance in getting their views across while making the reader feel included, and this tradition was later mastered by Amiga Power. When they fired off a concept review, it not only worked, but the industry took notice. In a good way.

NGJ is little more than an excuse for the writer to talk about themselves first, and let everything and everyone else be damned. There are so many reviewers who talk constantly about their own sad lives, but this is completely the wrong track – you have to be talking about yourself as the reader, who is the potential player of the game. This applies equally to feature pieces and opinion articles – if you write about yourself, you’ll alienate your readers and end up as one of the bunch of self-deluded pricks who waffle on about fuck-all in shite like Edge.

Perhaps the worst thing about the whole sorry debacle is that the world’s gaming press is having a good laugh at the expense of us – the British gaming press – for being deluded enough to believe that NGJ was some revolutionary concept in the art of writing. The real guilty party is The Guardian’s blog for publishing their pretentious and pathetic list of NGJ crap in the first place.

As for Gillen, he’s probably getting the rawest deal in that he’s getting quite heavily slagged off by anyone with enough common sense to see that NGJ is complete nonsense, but let’s not forget that he, like practically every journalist, is a different person in his writing than he is in real life. The RAM Raider is sure Gillen’s unphased by the whole situation anyway – after all, it’s better to be a laughing stock than ignored. And we should know.

In the name of all that is good, let’s all just stick with old games journalism from now on. Clever. Witty. Incisive. Funny. Informative. And, crucially, not pretending to be something that it isn’t.