You may have noticed me trying something a bit new over on Rice Digital for the last few days, and this experiment is going to continue for at least a little while. It's called Attack the Backlog, and it's something of a different approach to writing about games that I think might turn out quite interesting.
The current model of writing about games is that you play a game, you write something, then that thing that has been written becomes your "definitive word" about it. You might revisit the game at some point — perhaps for a Game of the Year retrospective or something — but more often than not, once a game is written about, that's it.
What I'm experimenting with through the Attack the Backlog feature is something that has been discussed a few times in games journalism circles over the course of… probably the last 20 years or so, and that is a more "experiential" approach to writing about games. Rather than approaching the prospect of writing about a game as a singular assignment, it's an attempt to immerse oneself a little more thoroughly in it and perhaps chart changes in opinion and outlook as your time with the game continues.
After all, some games take a while to truly "click", while others reveal hidden depths over time. And so by continually revisiting them over a period of time, it becomes possible to find out more and more about them. This is a real strength of video — particularly Let's Plays — because on video you can see and hear how people's reactions change over time, but it's not something that is really experimented with all that much in writing. There's no reason why it shouldn't work though, hence why I'm giving it a shot.
Plus from a purely personal perspective, it gives me reason to get a whole bunch of unplayed games down from my shelf, actually play them and be able to call it work.
So far I've started digging into Idea Factory, Gust and Nippon Ichi's Trinity Universe, which I'm enjoying a lot so far, but rather than focus exclusively on that I'm going to continue revisiting that over time and punctuate it with some other stuff — perhaps some shorter fare. This evening I recorded an hour of footage of Double Dragon Neon with the intention of writing about it on Friday (I'm off tomorrow for Thanksgiving) and I'll do at least a couple of features on that, then there's a bunch of Inti Creates stuff for which this approach will probably work well, too.
The beauty of it is that I can set aside maybe an hour or so a day to play the game I'm featuring and not feeling that I'm having to turn my back on the "main" things I'm playing. In the process, I get a wider range of experiences, the audience hopefully gets some interesting things to read and some gameplay videos to watch, and I always have something to write about.
We'll see how practical it is in the long term, but I'm enjoying trying this approach out for now.
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