Press Pass: August Roundup

8/28/2008 7:35 PM | 2 Comments | Page 1 of 3

August is usually a slow month in the gaming press, with journalists easing down from E3 and gearing up for the impending holiday season. That hasn't seemed true this year, with Leipzig's Games Convention, a slew of high-profile Xbox Live Arcade titles and the upcoming Penny Arcade Expo keeping gaming newsrooms humming. The introspective month of August has also been a busy time for game journalists talking about game journalism itself. Some highlights and commentary from around the Web:

Why game critics aren't elitist snobs (and why this is a bad thing)

Kieron Gillen (whom you may remember as the controversial coiner of the term New Games Journalism) has once again focused his critical eye on game journalism with a recent Rock Paper Shotgun piece on the march towards more "elitist critics" in the games press. Gillen argues that game criticism, where critics tend to heap praise on the most commercially successful products, differs from music and movie criticism, where critics are more likely to call attention to obscure but well-made works that are well outside the mainstream. While other media critics seem to revel in their eclectic tastes, game critics tend to mimic their audience's thirst for predictable, popular pablum.

Gillen sees this as a problem, but one that's beginning to change thanks to the increased accessibility of indie games (through direct downloads) and an increasing focus on a game's emotional impact among game critics. I agree that this problem exists, but I'm not as optimistic as Gillen regarding it getting solved any time soon. A lot of game critics, I feel, are perfectly fine with games that maintain the status quo. These critics got into the business because they had played a lot of very similar games and manage to avoid getting tired of them. This is good in a way -- you don't want someone who plays 100 games a year to get bored with of the medium -- but it's bad because it can lead to critics who are too set in their tastes and too satisfied with games that are just like what has come before. These are the critics who are ecstatic every time a new first-person shooter comes out with a few new weapons and a nice graphical sheen. Something that goes outside their nostalgic comfort zones is going to confuse and trouble these critics.

It's not solely the critics' fault, though. The audience for this kind of criticism has been trained by years of hype to reward outlets that give glowing praise to these more-of-the-same franchises, while heaping scorn on those who don't play along. Just witness the outrage that falls upon any outlet that deigns to give a big-name game a score less than 9.0. The result is a circular feedback loop between audience and critic that means the scores for most new games can be predicted even before the first preview is written. This may slowly be changing with a new generation of critics that aren't as easily satisfied, but I think it's going to take a good long while before the set of critically acclaimed games diverges wildly from the set of popular games.