The Alphaville Herald

Op/Ed: “Bow, wanker” – Old Games Journalism Raises Its Fist

by Alphaville Herald on 14/03/05 at 1:51 am

Fernando Martinez: “A real man needs more than one thing in life, you know what I’m saying here? The heart and the loins both on fire… groaning and straining and making hot dirty passionate encounters with the secretaries, while the wife she sleeps at home…”

By Neal Stewart

I’m clearly ‘a bit of a wanker’.

There’s a copy of Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and a stack of David Lynch DVD’s beside my monitor.

These are akin to a Hooters magazine and a bottle of hand lotion.

At least they would be if I were to call on these items in a game review. This is according to the guys at ‘UK Resistance’. Their brief article, ‘New Games Journalism — Our Seven-Point Manifesto On Why It’s Shit’ is a scathing laugh-out-loud attack on NGJ ‘wankers’ (‘wanky’, ‘wanking’, ‘wanks’): “Games journalism is about saying if a game is worth £40 or not. It is not about referencing the works of Jean-Paul Satre when reviewing Need for Speed Underground 2.”

[This is the second in a two-part Op/Ed series on Games Journalism Old and New. See Part I, by Herald Editorial Director Walker Spaight]

Sure it’s a tongue-in-cheek piece but, as the UKR clarifies, they are serious and, as a wanker, I have an imaginary responsibility to get all serious and researchy and have a big 2600-word wank about it.

So, the battle-lines are drawn. Apparently it’s Old Games Journalism versus New Games Journalism, with the UKR’s seven-point manifesto giving props to OGJ and taking a baseball bat to the New. This has got nothing to do with Space Invaders vs Freelancer or Castle Wolfenstein vs Half Life 2. The debate is about old games-journalism not old-games journalism, if that makes any sense. OGJ is the traditional, or old-skool, style of journalism and NGJ is the latest – it’s where all the alleged wanking happens. So, what’s the difference? Have a look at these two examples, from two different authors, writing about Jedi Knight 2:

Example of Old Games Journalism

"...With more options and tweaks than you could shake a lightsaber at, Jedi Outcast’s multiplayer component offers a fairly healthy amount of gameplay for those who have already saved the galaxy in their single-player outing. Aspiring Jedi can duke it out through seven Force-flavored modes, which range from the standard Capture the Flag and Free For All, to the more inventive Capture the Ysalamiri, in which flag bearers are immune to and incapable of Force Powers. To emphasize Star Wars’ unique appeal, there are even modes like Jedi Master, where only the one who finds and bears the lightsaber may use the Force, and Duel, a tournament-style mode in which two players go head-to-head with – what else? -- lightsabers..."
http://www.avault.com/reviews/review_temp.asp?game=jkout&page=3


Example of New Games Journalism

"...You see what this has become? It's not just a trivial game to be played in an idle moment, this is a genuine battle of good versus evil. It has nothing to do with Star Wars or Jedi Knights or any of the fluff that surrounds the game's mechanics. I played by the 'rules' and he didn't, that makes me the 'good' guy and him the 'baddie', but this is real, in the sense that there's no telling who's going to win out here. There's no script or plot to determine the eventual triumph of the good guy (that's me, five health), there's no 'natural order' of a fictional universe or any question of an apocryphal ultimate 'balance'. There's just me and him, light and dark, in a genuine contest between the two..."
http://www.alwaysblack.com/blackbox/bownigger.html


See the difference? The second piece is one of the most widely-recognized examples of NGJ. It’s written by a man named Ian Shanahan and it’s called ‘Bow, Nigger’.

‘Bow, Nigger’ is a 2300-word essay on a 5-minute lightsabre duel in Jedi Knight II. The single encounter, vividly described in first-person perspective, is punctuated with insightful commentary on the game’s mechanics, the Star Wars movies, the Jedi code of honour, virtual roleplay, ethics and the battle of good versus evil. As a whole, though, it amounts to a commentary on gaming and gamers in general. It is a style of commentary that the authors of the anti-NGJ Seven-Point Manifesto would like to see less of.

But why?

New Games Journalism

NGJ has been described as ‘a highly subjective approach to videogame writing in which the player’s own experiences within the game environment are brought to the fore’. The NGJ term has it’s origin in the openly-biased ‘new journalism’ of writers like Tom Wolfe and the recently-departed Hunter S Thompson. The Wikipedia entry on ‘New Journalism’ identifies 3 key features of the style:

1. stream of consciousness (“Stupid? Yeah … What to do? … Vulnerable … Shit … Blammo … And SLASH. Bastard.”)
2. conversational speech (rather than quotations and statements)
3. writer’s opinions, thoughts and feelings (as opposed only to corroborated facts)

Old Games Journalism

Old Games Journalism, as the UKR sees it, is really just about game reviews. According to their manifesto, the OGJ style has about 4 primary features. An OGJ article:

1. “tells you what the game’s features are and ‘if they’re good or not”
2. “‘really succeeds in telling you what this game is worth out of ten”
3. “‘will help you decide whether to buy the game or not”
4. “the author can do all of the above ‘without meandering off into details of his personal life [Shanahan for example mentions his mortgage and two cats in 'Bow, Nigger'] or having imaginary 15,000-word conversations with characters from the game”

A defense of New Games Journalism

New Games Journalism is often characterized by a lot of sentences that contain the word “I”. This article you’re reading now opens with an “I” statement. So it should come as no surprise that, as an amateur monkey-spanker, I must crack my RSI-recovering knuckles and rise to defend New Games Journalists and their epic wanking.

Pin trash and poetry treasures

Since I’m not reviewing Need for Speed Underground 2, apparently I’m allowed to quote a philosopher: Jeremy Bentham once said that ‘All things being equal, pushpin is as good as poetry’. Now, what the hell does that mean? ‘Pushpin’ is an Old Game played with pins. ‘Poetry’ is what you’d call some New Games Journalism. What Bentham is saying is that ‘one man’s trash is another man’s treasure’. So ergo, visa-vi, concordance, OGJ can be ‘as good as’ NGJ. And vice versa.

NGJ is self-absorbed masturbation, you might argue, whereas OGJ is practical – it’s about trying to decide whether or not you should fork out 80 bucks for a game. Ok, but then what? Is the game itself a practical item? Hell no. What is it? It’s a buzz. It’s a self-involved 4am jerk-off session with cramped neck, bloodshot eyes and D-pad thumb-blisters. And if you’re getting your buzz from actually sitting there playing the game, would you deny the same to people who might also enjoy just writing about it? What do you care if some guy tugs his nipple and blogs pretentiously about a Katamari Damacy game while his girlfriend reads ‘Being and nothingness’ in his ear? Change the channel. It’s not like you’re out 10 bucks for the cost of a magazine. Most NGJ pieces are web-only or blog posts anyway – as UKR themselves points out.

Old Games vs The New: Disco Duck [left] and Taliban Bijou [right]

Sleeping with the enemy

Of course, the UKR weren’t the first to draft a ‘manifesto’. Theres’ is a response to the NGJ manifesto written in March of 2004 by Kieron Gillen (although the NGJ style, nameless, has been around for some time). More recently, Gillen teamed up with other writers in a Guardian article that presented ‘Ten unmissable examples of New Games Journalism’.

The UKR has it’s own 10 examples of classic OGJ pieces, in their manifesto. There’s a bit of a slip-up with one of the examples though. It’s an X-Box review of ‘Brothers in Arms’ which they praise as ‘classic’ OGJ because, among other reasons, “At no point does he [the author] pretend to be a soldier in World War II for 15,000 words”. This is true, but what’s interesting is that the review opens with a decidely NGJ passage: “War is hell. We’ve heard this adage with just about every war-themed film or documentary release, but the truth is most of us will never experience the ravages first-hand, God willing.” It goes on to ask, “So why would we want to relive the trying times of WWII in a videogame?” True, the author isn’t pretending he’s in WWII but he’s clearly joined the wankers a bit there with an interesting question about what WWII should mean to gamers today. On the net you’ll find other examples of OGJ that nonetheless make the same brief forays into wankerdom. This OGJ review of Vietcong walks both sides of the fence with: “There were moments when I knew what it must have felt like to be alone in the jungle, pinned down behind a rotten log with a half dozen NVA (North Vietnamese Army) circling you. Then there are other times when Vietcong feels like just another shooter, with contrived situations that undermine the realism.”

In the same way, you will find OGJ elements in NGJ. And rightly so. Bow, Nigger comments briefly on JKII’s sound and graphics quality, the types of lightsabre combat-moves, chat-mode, macro scripting and the Quake III engine on which the game is based. Indeed it would be impossible to present most NGJ pieces without explaining these sorts of features.

So, it’s important to note that the distinction between OGJ and NGJ is not always clear-cut. It’s often a sliding scale. So criticism of either genre must be appropriately … uh… slidey.

Pussyweed, philosophy and anti-intellectualism

To be fair, I don’t think the UKR manifesto is intended as a genuine attack on all NGJ – just some of the wanky quasi-LiveJournal post-modernist rantage that is undoubtedly out there at the extreme end of the scale. I mean, how many gamers can find fault with this unmissable example of NGJ – Shoot Club: Saving Private Donny? It is awesome. Read it. You would have to be an absolute pussyweed to call the author of that column a wanker.

But even if the manifesto is not a blanket attack on all NGJ, it can still be read as something of an attack on the more cerebral and intellectual aspects of game-reviews in general.

Take a look at the Half Life 2 review that was given the thumbs up from the UKR. Apparently you’re allowed to mention the ‘big brother’ architecture and the ‘Blade Runner’ ‘vision of the future’, but it would be forbidden to talk about how the ideas of George Orwell and Philip Dick are explored or relevant to the game.

On the other hand, maybe that’s fair enough. Is it absolutely necessary to mention philosophy or literature? For some games, certainly not. But others it’s unavoidable. Can you seriously review Metal Gear Solid 2 without talking about narrative? If you don’t, and many didn’t, you’re only telling half the story. Furthermore, if games reviewers shade their eyes from all the ‘my brain hurts’ stuff, there are games that can’t really be reviewed at all. If you wanted to look at Second Life, for example, you would be well-screwed. A review of SL that made no mention of any of The Big 4 P’s – Psychology, Philosophy, Politics, and uh… Phinance – would be hideously incomplete. And what would you have left after you strip those? 60% of the game’s ‘features’ aren’t even game-features at all. They’re resident-features!

Part of the NGJ criticism seems to come from the “It’s just a game!” crowd but they’re really fighting a losing battle. Games are getting more serious. They’re becoming more and more like films and more and more like real life. There are hundreds of games that themselves actually contain real full-length movies. If you have to get all pretentious and wanky and talk about Nietzsche to review 2001: A Space Odyssey, you’re not going to be able to avoid it when you’re reviewing interactive Space Odysseys that are 100 hours+. And what about the game censorship debate? Grand Theft Auto or Manhunt? The outcome will decide what games you can buy in stores. Try and have an opinion there without calling on philosophy.

Games are a part of the real world. And as Karl Marx once said, “Philosophy is to the real world as masturbation is to sex.” It’s blatantly obvious what Marx is saying here.

Masturbation and sex are both really great. Sex is exactly like philosophy.

“There aren’t many games that make you consider the duality of heroism and terrorism, raise the issue of youth combatants and, in a nod to “The Matrix,” suggest that the hero himself may be trapped within a virtual-reality game. Kojima attempts to do all this and then some, and succeeds more often than he fails…”" — MSNBC profile on Hideo Kojima

Who is wanking behind the green curtain?

If there are wankers out there, they’re not just New Games Journalists. They’re the games creators as well. All the big guys wax philosophical on a regular basis and then form that wax into a candle. The candle is then expresed in code and set on fire using electrons. These are your favourite games. That’s right. Metal Gear Solid‘s Hideo Kojima – wanker. Civilization‘s Sid Meier – wanker. Rockstar, LucasArts, Blizzard. All habitual wankers. And dare I say it? The Wizard of Oz himself?

Philip Linden.

Yup. Total wanker.

That’s right, I went there.

I mean, look at this. NGJ! This is going on my fridge door.

Ham and eggs

The most obvious problem with the UKR manifesto however is that they have presented what wankers call a ‘false dichotomy’. UKR suggests that the choice is one or the other – OGJ or NGJ. Furthermore, their definition of ‘journalism’, as it relates to OGJ, is ‘game reviews’. A column like ‘Shoot Club: Saving Private Donny’ is clearly not intended as a game review. Nor is ‘Bow, Nigger’. To compare them to games reviews is to compare apples and oranges. But the two styles are clearly compatible. They’re ham and eggs! You know more about JKII from reading both the OGJ and the NGJ piece than you do from reading just one of them.

There are a lot of really helpful OGJ game reviews. They’re great. If I want to know what the multiplayer limitations are for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, I’d look for a OGJ review or a FAQ. But I wouldn’t flame someone who wrote semi-fan-fiction or a social studies blog post on gangster language-patterns in the game.

Game-feature facts aside (weapons-types, levels, frames per second), when it comes to the actual opinion part of the reviews, the OGJ and the NGJ guys are drinking at the same pub. But some of the OG Journalists will nonetheless try to avoid NGJ’s tell-tale I’s. The (lone) author of this great Half-Life 2 article, for example, never once says ‘I’. But he says ‘we’ 52 times. “We’re presented with a black screen,” he writes.

So I picture him and his mates crammed into a single office-chair.

But seriously, behind the author with his labcoat-costume and his Royal ‘we’s', there’s a gamer. He is a beautiful and unique snowflake that sees games in a biased, personal and subjective way. And some of us gamers do give a shit about his mortgage, his ex-girlfriend and his two cats. So maybe he could write another Half Life article that mentions those as well?

Clearly, the term ‘new game journalism’ is problematic. As others have argued, better than I, the idea of NGJ is now seen as ‘pretentious’ because it has been heralded as an elitist ‘new movement’ with some special status. It’s also been pointed out that a more useful term would be ‘literary games journalism’.

I don’t know. To be honest, I don’t really care what it’s called.

Only wankers go on about that stuff.