Tag: games press

I’m coming to the end of an era, and I feel both relief and sadness.

This week is my last week as Editor of Rice Digital, and it’s also my last week as part of the modern games press. I’m not ruling out occasionally writing something either here or on MoeGamer based on things that I’ve particularly enjoyed and want to share, but after this Friday, that’s the end for me on regular commitments to Writing Stuff.

It’s a bittersweet moment, but it’s a step I’ve chosen to take — and yes, just to reassure you, this is entirely my decision — for a variety of reasons. Today I’d like to talk about them a bit in what will likely be a bit of a lengthy post. But I feel like I need to… express some things, even if no-one else actually reads them.

Before we go on, I’ll clarify that my time with Rice coming to a close is because I’m going all-in on a project I absolutely believe in: the Evercade project, which I’ve been involved with for some time now, and which, from next week, I will be a completely full-time, 100% dedicated member of.

Anyway. Let’s start with a bit of Pete backstory for the benefit of those who are newer acquaintances, or who don’t know my full background.

As a child of the ’80s, I was there for the beginning of home computing. Our family were relatively early adopters of home micros, quickly gathering beneath Atari’s standard and remaining loyal to them right up until it simply became more practical to make the switch to IBM compatible PCs.

I don’t actually know the exact reason my family chose to go with Atari, or the circumstances that led to us acquiring our first computer, an Atari 400, as they happened before I was aware of pretty much anything that was going on. By the time I had a vague amount of consciousness and sentience, though, computing was already an important part of our day-to-day life — and that continued.

The early days of home computer culture sounded like they were exciting to be a part of. My Dad and brother would often attend a local “computer club” — inevitably returning with armfuls of pirated software — and my brother had a (relatively) nearby friend who also had Atari computers and was more than willing to share his software with us.

My Dad had been a subscriber to a magazine called “Page 6” since its first issue. This began its life as a newsletter for a Birmingham-based Atari users’ group known as BUG (Birmingham User Group) but the folks working on it decided that they could potentially make something more of it. As such, from the very first issue, they did their best to create something that would be of broad interest to Atari users nationwide, not just in Birmingham.

Page 6 was a great source of information on our computers. It was filled with interesting articles, tutorials and even programs that you could type in and save to disk or cassette. It helped emphasise the fact that a home computer was more than just a games machine, and that in the right hands, it could be a powerful creative tool and a real benefit to the household.

Indeed it was; our Atari computers were always more than just glorified games consoles. We played games, yes, but every member of my family used them for a variety of other reasons, too. My parents used them to help manage the household. My mother used them for creative writing. My father used them for music production. My brother used them for digital art. We all used them to create charming banners and cards with Broderbund’s Print Shop software. And me? I did a bit of everything.

One day, my Dad became fascinated with a new piece of software he’d acquired: Flight Simulator II by subLOGIC. As a lifelong aviation enthusiast, my Dad was incredibly impressed by the seeming accuracy of Flight Simulator II — even despite the technological limitations of the Atari 8-bit — and found himself compelled to pen an article for Page 6 about it. As an enthusiast publication, Page 6 relied on contributions from its readership — and as a longstanding reader, my Dad felt a good means of giving something back would be to tell the rest of the Atari 8-bit community about this remarkable piece of software.

The article was published in the following issue — even getting a bit of cover space — and thus began a long relationship between our family and Page 6. My Dad would continue to contribute pretty much right up until the magazine finally folded in the late ’90s, and my brother would kick off what has, to date, been a long and incredibly successful career in games-related media and surrounding environs by writing reviews of Atari ST games.

As an impressionable child, I was, of course, fascinated by all this — to such a degree that I’d often type up my own reviews of games in AtariWriter on the Atari 8-bit, print them out on our Star SG-10 dot matrix printer, then file them away in a ring binder. My parents would even go so far as to “edit” them for me — a fact that I feel probably played a significant role in my own fastidiousness when editing others’ work today, as well as maintaining my own work to a set of high standards.

Eventually, when I was in my early teens, I finally got the opportunity I’d been waiting for: my Dad had negotiated with Page 6’s editor Les Ellingham (who, incidentally, had remained in charge of the magazine from its very first issue to its absolute final moments) and agreed to let me pen a couple of short pieces for the following issue. It was nothing major — half-page reviews of two budget rereleases from Psygnosis’ “Sizzlers” label — but the feeling I got when I finally saw my words in print was like nothing else.

Over the years, I contributed to a number of other publications, including PC Zone and the Official UK Nintendo Magazine. It never got any less magical to see my words on the page of a magazine you could buy on the newsstands — and back in those days, freelance writer rates were very generous indeed, it has to be said, particularly compared to the pittance offered by most websites today.

Things were changing, though. Internet connectivity was becoming more and more the norm for everyone, and websites were becoming more complex and interactive. One which my brother helped launch was known as 1up.com, and it showed the massive potential there was in building a publication that didn’t just have a passive “writer -> reader” relationship, but rather building a community where not only could the regular staff pen their expert opinions, but community members could also publish their own stuff and discuss it with one another.

It was through 1up.com and the community I found there that I started to find myself seeing a much broader gaming landscape. No longer did I feel constrained to only seek out the games that got good reviews from monthly magazines; discussing things with friends and sharing experiences together helped show me that sometimes it was much more interesting to explore the quirky, weird or flawed games that didn’t get much love from the press — or which passed by completely ignored, in some instances.

Magazines, which were already starting to die off by this point, still held an appeal for me — but this brave new online world seemed fascinating; it looked like a bright future was ahead for video games and the discussion surrounding them.

Over the years, though, something has gone horribly, horribly wrong. We’ve gone from a world where enthusiastic, specialist, knowledgeable writers share their well-informed thoughts about a variety of interesting games to one where outlets are unironically advertising for someone to oversee an AI churning out 200-250 articles per week just for the sake of having “content” on the site.

We’ve gone from a world where a “big release” remains relevant and interesting for months at a time, to one where a title that should be absolutely huge is forgotten about by the afternoon of release day.

And we’ve gone from a world where folks like to share their experiences in the hopes of convincing others to join them on a magical journey, to one where cynicism, bitterness and needlessly aggressive confrontation rules the roost.

Over the last decade or so in particular, I’ve done what I can to try and remain a positive force, celebrating the games that I’ve found particularly fascinating along the way, and especially when they’ve either got a raw deal from the mainstream press or been ignored completely.

I’ve done this both on a personal, passion project basis with MoeGamer, and professionally over at Rice. And I stand behind each and every thing I’ve written.

But I’m exhausted. You know why? Because it feels like no-one gives a shit. I tell people enthusiastically about a relatively unknown game I’ve enjoyed recently, and I’m greeted with silence at best, cynical or outright dismissive responses at worst. Hell, at the best of times I can’t even get the slightest reaction out of people who are supposedly my closest friends when I share something I’ve written.

This is, I don’t mind admitting, deeply saddening, particularly as someone who spent a significant portion of his life desperately wanting to be part of the games media; desperately wanting to be someone who helped chronicle this fascinating creative medium and celebrate its weird and wonderful creativity.

But when it seems that people would rather read SEO-optimised garbage like “Wordle Solution #756” or “How to Beat the K’ok Piz Shrine in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom” than an in-depth analysis of how a narrative-centric game successfully delivers on the ambitious themes it attempts to tackle? It’s hard to drum up the motivation any more. I don’t feel that same pride I once did when I saw my work in print — because I know that these days anything I write is just destined to be lost in the never-ending online “content” noise.

“Content” is king. People don’t “read” any more, they “consume”. And part of the difference between those two verbs is the amount of attention you pay. If you’re reading, you’re actively engaging; you’re learning something; you take something away from it. If you’re consuming, you’re just skimming over something for the sake of it without really taking it in. It’s just another way to fill time, to make existence feel a little less meaningless.

It’s not just writing that this affects, either. Look at the shift towards short-form video that has been happening for the past few years. This is the result of people demanding more and more mindless content and less in the way of things that actually enrich their lives in some way.

People’s attention spans are so shot from garbage like TikTok these days that stand-up comedians are now posting their jokes as individual 2-5 minute YouTube videos rather than expecting people to sit through a 90-minute set. And longer videos are regarded as “good background noise” rather than something you might want to pay attention to.

I detest it. It makes me sad, not just for the folks who have, in the past, worked hard on producing quality creative works for people to enjoy, but also for the idea of “culture” in general. I feel like if we’re living in a world where a significant portion of the population would rather watch some “influencer” bellowing at the camera on TikTok than engage with a thought-provoking work of art, that we’ve gone terribly, terribly wrong somewhere along the line.

Perhaps I’m wrong. Perhaps I’m missing something. Perhaps I’m old now, and I’m just having that same moment previous generations had when things like television and video games came along for the first time.

But as someone who has long believed in the validity of the video games medium as a legitimate form of art and a formidably flexible creative medium, I can’t help but feel like we’re going through a bit of a cultural dark age.

And, having spent so much time trying to resist that tide to seemingly little effect, I’m sure you won’t blame me for wanting to step back and just enjoy things for myself while, through my work, attempting to do good things for the medium in a somewhat different manner.

I finally nuked my Twitter account completely.

There are a few main reasons for this, and I’d like to talk about them a bit today.

Firstly, Elon Musk’s idiotic changes to the terms of the Twitter API, which has priced literally everyone out of being able to use it, have made the platform next to useless as a means of automatically sharing your work to an audience that supposedly signed up to follow your updates. It’s both hilarious and tragic to see company after company sharing news posts that effectively say “lol, fuck Twitter”.

Secondly, my previous justification of keeping my Twitter account around for the sake of friends and contacts just doesn’t really feel like it’s… justification any more. The friends in question rarely bother to get in contact, and there are other means for professional contacts to get in touch.

Thirdly, I’m just fucking sick of the most likely response you get to posting literally anything on there being vitriol and hate.

On the latter point, I recently posted an article about my negative experiences trying Ubisoft’s Riders Republic via PlayStation Plus. The gist of the article, if you’re one of those Internet denizens whose attention span has been shot too much to bother clicking on a link, was that the game was designed in such a way that it is genuinely insulting to the intelligence of anyone over the age of about 12. It doesn’t let you just play; instead, you’re bombarded with hours of mandatory tutorials and obnoxious zoomer slang, and this was enough to make me not even want to bother seeing if the game “got good” later.

I think this is something worth talking about, because it’s the first time that I, as a 42 year old video game enthusiast who has been involved in the medium since the Atari days, felt completely alienated by a brand new, supposedly mainstream game. So I talked about it. Then I shared that article on Twitter.

One of the first responses I got was from someone who yelled at me, based entirely on the assumption that I’d said the exact opposite to what I’d actually written in the article. He’d obviously read the headline, made an assumption and then decided to shoot his dribbling, zit-encrusted mouth off at me, despite it taking nothing more than a single click and a minute or two of reading for anyone to see that he was talking complete horseshit. But you can bet anyone who “liked” his dumbshit comment wouldn’t go and check whether or not he was right.

I spent a few hours last night and this morning feeling stressed and anxious about this. But then it just sort of dawned on me: fuck it. Why the fuck should I care what some obnoxious cunt on the Internet thinks? Why the fuck should I let one idiot have such power over my mental wellbeing, based entirely on the fact he’s too much of a lazy shit to actually read something I wrote?

And the answer to that is that I shouldn’t care; I shouldn’t let one idiot do that. And since Twitter is the primary means of allowing idiots to do that, it needs to go. Completely. So it has.

On a related note, this news isn’t finalised or official as yet, but it’s pretty much confirmed that as of the beginning of July, I will be getting out of the professional “content creation” (ugh) game completely.

I won’t go into details for now because things are still being hammered out, but suffice to say for now that it’s nothing anyone needs to worry about — I’m simply changing my professional role in such a way that it means I can focus my attention entirely on the Evercade project, which I’m incredibly passionate about and is something where I feel genuinely valued by both my colleagues and by my “audience”, such as they are.

I’m both happy and sad about this. I’m happy because it means that I can focus my professional life on something that I love, and because it means my free time will genuinely, completely be my own again. No more will I find myself “having” to play something for the sake of timely coverage; instead, I can just enjoy things at my own pace, and I’m really looking forward to that.

I’m sad, however, because I spent so much of my early life desperately wanting to follow in my brother’s footsteps and be part of the games press — and yet by the time I actually managed to get there, it had changed irreversibly from what it used to be. And it only got worse from there.

Again, I won’t go into details for now, as that’s something to talk about in more detail once everything here has been finalised. But I’ll say again, it’s nothing to worry about — I’m proud of what I’ve worked on to date, will continue to work on things like this until the beginning of July, and this change is my decision rather than anyone else’s.

I’m just tired. So very tired of “content creation” being such a completely thankless task. The modern Internet has set up a completely adversarial relationship between writers and their audiences, exemplified by the Twitter exchange I described above, and that is emphatically not why I got into this.

I got into writing about games because I love them. I got into games writing because I think they’re culturally important. I got into games writing because I think despite that cultural importance, they’re not being written about and analysed in anywhere near the depth they deserve.

And I got into games writing because while the big, dumb, obnoxious games like the aforementioned Riders Republic get to ride the wave of commercial success regardless of how shit they are, there are myriad games released literally every day that run the risk of languishing in obscurity without people telling others about them.

The trouble is, I’ve discovered over the last decade and a half or so, is that no-one really seems to actually care. Online, “content” is piss in the wind. It’s only relevant for the day it’s posted — if you’re lucky enough to get anyone to notice it in the first place — and it’s fucking impossible to get people to give a shit about something after the fact, unless, as I’ve seen on MoeGamer, you’re literally the only person to have written something meaningful on a particular topic. (In my case, sex sim Honey Select Unlimited.)

Google is flooded by manipulative, exploitative, SEO-optimised sites posting vacuous individual “guide” articles for things they don’t care about for no other reason than it brings in the clicks. And no-one at any point in the process gives a shit; the average Internet user doesn’t have enough in the way of critical thinking skills to see the cynical way all this has been set up, and the writers at the sites themselves don’t give a toss as long as the numbers go up.

All of this is the fault of everyone who has normalised the idea of “consuming content” rather than “reading interesting articles” and the like. You, collectively, have ruined both the games press specifically, and the broader Internet in general.

It’s demoralising and infuriating, and if you’ve been around all this for as long as I have, seeing the way things have been going, it should be no surprise that I very much feel like stepping down from it all.

And so that’s what I’m doing. From hereon, my professional work will be in something that actually matters, that I care about — and that other people actually care about, too. I suspect I’ll be a lot happier as a result, but I can’t help but feel a bit bad about that dream young me once had, and how it was never really possible.

2495: A Step in the Right Direction

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When I heard that VICE Gaming was rebranding to Waypoint, my reaction was a hearty “shrug and move on”. In the past, VICE Gaming has been responsible for some truly terrible articles about games many of my friends and I are interested in, most notably the Senran Kagura series. I won’t bring them up here, but suffice to say, I’ve written many angry words in the past on the subject.

Consequently, when I happened to see this tweet earlier, my immediate reaction was to predict yet another ill-informed, overly judgemental article about the prevalence of boobs in the game, without exploring any of the things that actually make it an interesting series. (Yes, yes, gratuitous plug for my own work there, but I’ve written a lot about Senran Kagura.)

Out of curiosity — or perhaps partly to vindicate what I will freely admit was prejudice — I clicked through to the article when someone else shared it and took a look.

Here it is.

My goodness me.

I was genuinely surprised to read not the usual screed about how it’s a piece of misogynist filth that everyone should feel ashamed of the mere existence of, but instead a good interview with series creator Kenichiro Takaki about his philosophy towards character design, sexualised content and all manner of other things. Even more notably, the article acknowledges that Senran Kagura games are actually damn fine brawlers in their own right, and far from being simple ecchi delivery vehicles.

I have to give some kudos to Waypoint for publishing this article, and to Patrick Klepek for writing it in the first place. I’ve had my differences of opinion with how Klepek covers things in the industry in recent years — like many other full-time games journos, he has often shown a significant lean towards the oft-irrational “social justice” side of the spectrum — but in this instance, he’s done what he was once known for back in what many regard as “the good old days”. It’s a solid piece of reporting with some interesting questions and no moral high-horsing. Klepek acknowledges that Senran Kagura’s sexualisation is not the sort of thing that generally appeals to him, but doesn’t put it down for that; moreover, he even says that he’s enjoyed playing the games after a few hours.

The article is just plain nice to read; a breath of fresh air in the current climate. Every interview I’ve read with Takaki in the past has shown him to be an incredibly enthusiastic creator with a clear vision; he’s someone who’s passionate about his work and utterly in love with the characters he and his team have created, and this absolutely comes across in Waypoint’s piece. It makes me happy. It makes me really happy to see this.

And when I’m happy to read something, I absolutely don’t mind sharing it with other people. You’ll notice that I’ve added a direct link to the article in this piece rather than using archive.is to deprive the site of ad impressions, and this is because I firmly believe that this is the sort of thing we need to see a lot more of in the future.

I’ve grown very tired of writing the same article about the shitty deal Japanese games get when it comes to the Western games press, and yet every time I see another ill-informed rant on anime girls, I feel I have to say something, because not enough other people are. I’m sure you can understand and appreciate how absolutely wonderful it is to be able to share a piece of writing about the games I enjoy so much that doesn’t tear them to shreds, that doesn’t brand anyone who enjoys them as some sort of sexual deviant, and that does allow a creator to celebrate both the success and popularity of their work while acknowledging that it may not be to everyone’s liking.

While VICE Gaming’s past misdeeds mean that Waypoint has a lot of work to do in order to gain my trust, this article is very much a step in the right direction, and I think everyone — particularly those who have been angry about poor coverage of Japanese games in the past — should acknowledge that; hell, celebrate it, even.

Let’s see more of this in the future, please, and less of the moral crusading. Games are fun; games are thing that people get great joy from; games cater to diverse interests and tastes. The games press of recent years seems to have forgotten that somewhat, despite regularly spouting buzzwords like “diversity” (when what they actually mean in most cases is “people who aren’t white” rather than true all-encompassing diversity). But seeing articles like this gives me a glimmer of hope that we might have turned a corner.

Now we just need to see other sites follow suit — and Waypoint to continue in this manner.

[EDIT: It did not. How naive I was.]

2493: Japan’s Great Games, and Their Lack of Coverage

This tweet from the Editor-in-Chief of gaming news site DualShockers caught my attention earlier tonight:

As regular readers will know, I’m a big fan of Japanese games and visual novels and will frequently wax lyrical at great length on the subject of my favourite titles. Hell, I even set up a whole new website — MoeGamer — to have a convenient place to put my more in-depth commentary on games that I’ve found particularly interesting.

Over the last couple of years — in particular since I started my JPgamer column on USgamer, and subsequently moved on to my MoeGamer project after I was laid off from the site — I’ve gotten to know a fair few “faraway friends” on the Internet thanks to a mutual love of games from Japan. And all of them — including me — feel the same way: it’s sad that almost the entirety of a whole country’s output gets thrown under the bus, usually in the name of “progressiveness”, and usually with woefully little understanding of the works they have cast aside.

Sure, the Final Fantasies (except XIV) and Souls games of the world still get plenty of column inches, but the rest, as Nelva points out in his tweet, is ignored at best, and treated appallingly at worst.

I found Nelva’s tweet noteworthy because it’s the first time I recall seeing a member of the games press (aside from me) come out with sentiments like this, outside of sites that specifically dedicate themselves to this sort of thing. As such, I thought it worth talking about a bit, and to draw particular attention to a number of noteworthy developers, publishers and series that are well-regarded and regularly praised among players, but which receive less than stellar treatment from the press.

Let’s talk about the Vita

Dear old PlayStation Vita. One of my favourite platforms of all time, and declared “dead” roughly every two months by some idiot who sees that there hasn’t been a Call of Duty game on it since the atrocious Call of Duty: Black Ops Declassified.

As a handheld gaming machine, Vita is never going to match the big boys in terms of power, and it doesn’t need to: when you’re playing something on the go, aspirations of being some grand cinematic masterpiece are largely wasted on a screen the size of an envelope. And this is why we don’t get any triple-A games on the platform.

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What we do get is an absolute shitload of Japanese games. What we do get is an absolute shitload of Japanese role-playing games — a genre frequently and erroneously declared “dead” alongside the Vita by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. What we also get is a bunch of visual novels and strategy games. And this is just Japan we’re talking about, remember; all this is on top of all the great indie titles we get from Western developers.

There are a number of developers out there who put out their games on Vita as their lead (or only!) platform. And if these games got any coverage, it would be plain as day to see that the Vita is far from dead; there are plenty of great new games coming out for it on a monthly basis, many of which hail from Japan.

Let’s talk about “progressiveness”

It’s the current fashion in the games press to be as “progressive” as possible. That is to say, it’s fashionable to berate any games that feature attractive women or any kind of provocative, adult-leaning content as “problematic”, in the hope that frequent use of that word will make these critics look somehow educated and intelligent. In practice, all it does is undermine the other big argument these people make, which is that “games need to grow up”. You can have one or the other. You can treat gamers as adults and trust them to handle provocative content, or you can sanitise the medium to such a degree that everything becomes generic, inoffensive waffle.

The ironic thing about the supposed “progressive” arguments against these games — particularly against the ones that feature attractive women — is that they completely fail to explore the game on anything other than the most superficial level. It is, quite simply, “this game has women in short skirts with big boobs, so it’s bad”. This isn’t an exaggeration; this is a paraphrase of several Senran Kagura articles I’ve read from “progressive” games journalists.

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As I’ve written at great length over on MoeGamer, I find it interesting that a lot of these games from Japan actually handle some pretty weighty themes throughout, and do so sensitively and enjoyably. In some cases, games, much like anime, allow creators to explore aspects of society that are still somewhat “taboo” in parts of Japan, such as homosexual relationships.

Others set a great example by having an all-female cast, often with no mention of men or romantic entanglements whatsoever.

Others still have a point to make with their erotic or quasi-erotic content; a while back, for example, I wrote a lengthy piece about how Criminal Girls uses its S&M-themed ecchi content to reinforce the narrative’s key message about trust. Or there are works like visual novel The Fruit of Grisaia, in which its erotic content is used as part of the characterisation process, particularly when it comes to the character Amane, who is an aggressively sexual individual for reasons that become apparent later in her narrative arc.

In damning the majority of Japan’s cultural output on the grounds of “progressiveness”, the self-proclaimed “progressives” are ironically missing out on some of the most progressive games out there.

Let’s talk about Falcom

Let’s talk a bit about Falcom first of all. Falcom is a developer who has been around since pretty much the dawn of gaming, with its long-running Ys series arguably playing a defining role in the modern action RPG.

Of perhaps even greater note, meanwhile, the most recent installments in the Legend of Heroes series — Trails in the Sky and Trails of Cold Steel — are absolute masterworks in how to blend the best bits of Western and Eastern RPGs. They’re well-written with excellent characterisation (though admittedly too wordy for some), they have some of the most astonishingly detailed worldbuilding I’ve ever seen in a game through a combination of their visuals and their texts, and they’re simply great games, to boot. And yet, it’s rare to hear them mentioned, even by self-professed JRPG enthusiasts in the press.

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Why? Well, at least partly because they were on PSP and Vita as their lead platforms, though Trails in the Sky’s two currently available localised chapters have made the jump to PC since then. It goes back to what we said about the Vita before; it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you don’t cover the games, the platform withers, though at least in the case of the Trails series, there’s the formidable combination of XSEED’s enthusiastic social media team and plenty of fans who are more than happy to promote the series via word of mouth.

But it saddens me that there are probably a whole lot of people out there who have no idea that these games exist, or have no idea quite how good they are. That, surely, is the press doing these games a great disservice.

Let’s talk about Neptunia

And Idea Factory in general, while we’re on.

Idea Factory and its label Compile Heart have been very prolific over the last few years, and it’s fair to say that in the twilight of the PS3 era it took a while for them to find their feet. Titles such as Trinity Universe and Hyperdimension Neptunia were very much inferior to much of the platform’s other fare in technical terms, though those who played them will happily attest that they are both overflowing with charm to more than make up for their technological shortcomings.

Unfortunately, some people have never got past a bad experience they had with a game a few years back, and seemingly outright refuse to cover new titles from a company that has grown astronomically in popularity over the last few years — and, moreover, a company that has clearly learned from its mistakes, with each new game being better than the last by a considerable margin.

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This is most clearly demonstrated by the Neptunia series, which has gone from unknown niche-interest JRPG to full-on cultural phenomenon over the course of the last six years or so. People online love Neptunia. There’s fan art everywhere, there are role-players on Twitter, there are mods for popular Steam games to insert the characters, there are people using Source Filmmaker to create their own Neptunia dioramas and videos — and, of course, there are the games, which tend to enjoy solid sales on console platforms (typically Vita, though the most recent mainline installment jumped to PS4) and then again a few months down the line when they hit PC.

Neptunia games still aren’t the most technologically advanced games on the market, but what they have always had since day one is an absolute ton of soul — not to mention the aforementioned progressiveness thanks to homosexual characters and a strongly capable all-female main cast — and something which is very much underexplored in gaming as a whole: satirical humour. Their developers know what the players want from a Neptunia game, and they provide it. And they are widely loved as a result.

Coverage? Some idiot on Kotaku writing about how the animated Live2D character sprites in the dialogue sequences freak them out. And little else.

I love Neptunia, as you know. But even if I didn’t, it would seem very strange to me not to acknowledge something that is so popular on the Internet at large that it’s frequent meme fodder. And yet that’s exactly what happens with today’s games press: it doesn’t fit the unwritten criteria, so it doesn’t get explored.

Let’s talk about overlooked games

I played through the visual novel Root Letter recently and had a great time with it. I only knew about it because it happened to catch my eye one day when I was browsing the publisher’s other works. I’ve barely seen a peep about it on other websites. I, meanwhile, wrote a bunch about it here.

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In the case of Root Letter, the press can’t even play the progressive booby card to refuse to cover it: Root Letter has no ecchi content whatsoever, instead adopting an art style that features hand-drawn characters and “painted” backdrops of real locations in Japan. On top of looking beautiful, it’s the start of a new series from a fairly major publisher in Japan (Kadokawa) and, judging by the speed we got an English version over here, it looks likely that we’re going to see the other installments shortly after their native versions, too. Not only that, it’s noteworthy in that it focuses not on a group of teenagers as many other Japanese works do, but instead on a group of 33-year olds.

Let’s talk about why this happens

We all know why this happens: clicks. What games critic has time to cover obscure Japanese games when they could be raking in the clicks by posting meaningless, needless “guide content” for Watch Dogs 2 or Call of Duty? I know, I’ve been there, done that.

The thing is, this approach to content strategy becomes a vicious cycle. These games remain popular at least partly because they’re always plastered all over the major gaming sites, and the relentless pursuit of This Tuesday’s Article On The Big Game That Came Out Last Week does damage to gaming criticism as a whole because it gives needless amounts of attention to titles that already have a ton of attention on them thanks to their astronomical marketing budgets.

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What I’d really like to see is more sites making a specific effort to go out of their way to cover games that are a little more off the beaten track, but which still have cultural significance of some sort — whether it’s the popularity of something like Neptunia, or the self-conscious maturity of Root Letter — and helping to broaden the medium for everyone. Some sites already make an effort to cover Western indie games in this regard, and while there are occasionally some questions to be asked over whether certain games would be covered if the developer and the writer weren’t friends with one another, I feel it’s more important to note that this is a start.

While we’re on, what I’d also like to see is a complete end to the mockery of Japanese games in the press, particularly by those who clearly have no intention of attempting to engage with a game. No-one should be mocking anyone else’s taste — particularly those in positions of power as “tastemakers”; live and let live.

The insufferable “progressive” crowd are always going on about “diversity”, so what I would very much like to see is an acknowledgement of Japan in 2016 as part of that diversity. There’s still a rich flow of quality games coming out of that country on a monthly basis, and as Nelva noted in that tweet that sparked off this whole entry, very few of them that don’t have Souls or Fantasy in their title get a look-in. Wouldn’t it be great to see that change?

I’m not going to hold my breath, mind you. In the meantime, well, I’ll do what I can with MoeGamer — so please, show your support if you like what you see.

2461: Gratuitous Self-Promotion

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Hey, you. If you’re reading this, chances are you know me in some capacity or another, either online, offline or perhaps both. You may even follow this blog on a semi-regular basis, in which case thank you very much for enduring my directionless rambling.

Some of you may not be aware that I have another site, however; one with a bit more “structure” to its content, but also with a regular posting schedule. Some of you may already be aware of it, but perhaps haven’t checked it out for a while. And some of you may already be loyal readers, in which case, again, thank you very much.

My other site is called MoeGamer and you can find it at http://moegamer.net.

MoeGamer has a pretty straightforward mission: to provide detailed and in-depth coverage of Japanese and Japanese-inspired games that often don’t get the attention they deserve in the mainstream press — or, in the worst cases, get written off for one reason or another, usually on the grounds that they’re “pervy”.

I started it as a continuation of a regular, weekly column I had when I worked as USgamer; dubbed JPgamer, the column built up an audience of regular readers who appreciated what I did for these games, which was something that many other sites didn’t bother with, particularly in this age of growing and obnoxious political correctness that seems inclined to brand anything with pretty girls in as “problematic”. After I was laid off from USgamer, I decided to start MoeGamer simply to continue what I was doing with JPgamer, but over the course of the last few months I’ve been building it into something bigger.

Back in March of this year, I decided to reboot MoeGamer into something with a bit more structure; prior to this point, I had simply posted content on it whenever I felt like it and about whatever topics I saw fit. This meant that there were often long periods of time when I didn’t post anything, and I wasn’t happy with that.

As such, my reboot of the site sees me posting on a weekly basis, with a specific focus on a “cover game” for a month-long period. Over the course of four articles, I explore these cover games from a variety of perspectives: a look at their historical context; an exploration of their mechanics; a deep-dive into their narrative, themes and characterisation; and a look at their audio-visual aesthetics. This has proven to be a good way for me to talk about each of these games in as much detail as I’d like without overwhelming readers with a single, insanely long article. (Make no mistake, this is still long-form writing, however, because I believe there’s plenty of people out there still hungry for detailed writing even as the collective attention span of Internet denizens has gone right down the toilet in the last few years.)

MoeGamer is primarily intended for existing enthusiasts of Japanese (and Japan-inspired) gaming and entertainment, but I make a conscious effort with each piece to keep things accessible to everyone without any assumed knowledge. The order in which I chose to post the articles about each “cover game” was deliberate, too: talking about a game’s history gives you the opportunity to introduce it in general terms to those who aren’t familiar with it, then a discussion of its mechanics gives most people an idea of whether they’d enjoy playing it. After that, an analysis of its narrative is “taking things to the next level”, as it were, and finally exploring its audio-visual aesthetic provides a good opportunity to provide “further reading” with regard to its art, music and inspirations.

In other words, don’t feel like there’s nothing for you on MoeGamer if you’re not an existing fan of Japanese popular entertainment. I strive to make the site an informative, knowledgeable resource about some of the most interesting and underappreciated games on the market, from both yesterday and today, and hope that over the course of my articles, I can do my part to help dispel some of the unhelpful preconceptions that mainstream media perpetuates with regard to Japanese popular entertainment.

I’m doing this as a passion project at present, but a number of readers have been generous enough to pledge their support to my work via Patreon. At present, it’s a much-appreciated trickle of money each month that perhaps pays for a new game or piece of equipment, but it would be a dream come true to make enough money from MoeGamer to call it an actual job. I’m skeptical as to whether that will ever happen, but in the meantime I’m eternally grateful for each and every person who has shown their support to the site. If you like the sound of what I’m doing, please do consider pledging a small amount per month and help me keep doing what I love doing — you can do so here.

If you can’t spare any cash, that’s fine, too; you can also show your support by paying the site a visit and sharing the articles you particularly enjoy with friends and family on social media. MoeGamer is not ad-supported (any ads which do appear are WordPress’ work, not mine) and so remains clickbait-free, 100% guaranteed — share with confidence!

Thanks for your time and support. I hope you enjoy the content currently on MoeGamer, and which I’ve got planned for the coming months.

Here are some quick links you might be interested in:

October 2016’s Cover Game: Gal*Gun Double Peace

Previous Cover Games

One Way Heroics (September 2016)
RPG Maker MV (August 2016)
Ys (July 2016)
Dungeon Travelers 2 (June 2016)
Megadimension Neptunia V-II (May 2016)
Senran Kagura Estival Versus (April 2016)

All games covered by MoeGamer to date (including one-off articles and content from before the revamp)

More about MoeGamer

Moe 101: the beginner’s guide

2446: We’ve Reached Peak Idiot

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At least, I hope this is peak idiot: I present to you an actual article that appeared in the actual business section of the Washington Post, which sported the headline “Is your dog’s Halloween costume sexist?”

No. No, your dog’s Halloween costume is not sexist. It is a costume for a dog.

Between this and Vice’s recent monstrosity of an article about Forza Horizon 3, in which the writer proceeds to spend 1,500 words using the Australian setting of Forza Horizon 3 (a game about nothing more than driving pretty cars very fast around pretty scenery) as an excuse to go off on a tirade against Australian politics in general (actual specific references to the game come in just two out of the article’s 13 paragraphs), it’s hard to imagine if online journalism can get any worse. It’s even harder to imagine exactly why there are people out there who still defend this kind of garbage.

I’ve been continuing to read old back issues of Page 6, Atari User, ANALOG, Antic and ACE recently, and one thing that repeatedly strikes me whenever I read any of these magazines is that the writers know their audience because they are part of that audience. And in the case of all those magazines, that audience is computer enthusiasts; who better to write for them than fellow enthusiasts? Should be a no-brainer, surely.

Nope; instead we get dross that reads like it was written by a recent Social Sciences graduate and which inevitably takes a negative tone of some description — usually of the “Here Are All The Reasons You Should Feel Bad for Liking the Things You Do” variety — rather than performing what, I believe, is a much more valuable function: bringing people together under the banner of the things they love, celebrating those things and perhaps teaching them some intricate, specialist details.

Take the old Atari magazines. Every single one of these, without fail, opened its first issue with a comment from the editor about how Atari computers are far more than just the games machines that people at the time apparently assumed they were. The stated aim of Page 6, ANALOG, Antic and Atari User alike was to explore the length and breadth of titles available for the Atari computer, teaching enthusiasts new things along the way. These old magazines had type-in BASIC listings with full breakdowns of what was happening where in the program, memory maps of the computers so you could learn to program in machine code, special techniques that could elevate your programming from “eh” to “wow!” and all manner of other stuff.

The most negative things ever got was in the editorial section, where editors would occasionally vent their spleen about Atari’s repeated failures to market their own products, or about how they had been let down by industry contacts. This was always framed as an explanation of why, say, the issue didn’t have a feature that readers might expect, rather than being the sole point of the article. The articles themselves were all positive in tone, often educational and far less frustrating to read than the daily garbage modern online journalists seem to be expected to churn out to order.

Times have changed, of course. Magazines used to be published monthly or, in some cases, bi-monthly. Internet publications are expected to be updated on a daily basis, otherwise they are seen as “irrelevant” and “not up to date”. With the amount of pressure on Internet writers, it’s little surprise that they pluck something out of their arse that they know will “get people talking” (i.e. is contentious for one reason or another) rather than spending the time to do proper research or to enthuse about the things they are passionate about.

There’s too much negativity in the world as it is, and it’s coming from all angles: both traditional media and social media. Negativity begets negativity, and the longer it goes on, the more cynical we get. We’re at a stage now where many people simply don’t trust the online press to cover things as an enthusiast would, and that’s going to be hard to recover from. Meanwhile, the Men In Suits see outrage-bait like the articles linked above as “successes” because they bring in the clicks and consequent advertising revenue.

Advertising impressions lie, however. An impression on an article in the commercial press doesn’t mean someone liked what the author had to say. More often than not, it’s the result of someone having a look at an article out of sheer disbelief that someone really wrote an article about dogs’ Halloween costumes being sexist, or about how Forza Horizon 3 depicts a “better Australia than [Australians] deserve”.

I wish it were possible to just make this mess stop, and for us all to go back to a world where enthusiasts write about the things they are knowledgeable about rather than everyone, everywhere trying to make everything somehow “political”. There’s a time and a place for politics, and, unless you are reviewing a game that deals with political issues — either through its narrative or its mechanics — then that place is emphatically not in the games press. Certainly not in an article about a driving game; and certainly not in an article about a driving game that exists solely to revel in the sheer joy of driving.

Also, you can dress your dog up however the fuck you like so long as you’re not hurting it. Make it extra slutty, take loads of photos for Facebook and immediately unfriend anyone who whines about sexism. You don’t need dickholes like that in your life.

2318: Rebooting in Progress

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You may recall a while back I decided to reboot my “sister site” to this blog, MoeGamer. Having now spent two months with my new format, I thought I’d revisit the idea here for the benefit of those who haven’t checked in on it recently.

Essentially, my thinking behind MoeGamer’s new format was to forgo the scattershot approach that games journalism and criticism today typically follows, and instead have a laser-sharp focus each month: a single game, or perhaps a series of games. Over the course of that month, I’d post a series of in-depth articles, each of which focused on a specific aspect of the game or series. By the time the month was up, there’d be a complete, substantial amount of writing about the game in question for readers to enjoy at their leisure, with the content remaining relevant long after it was written.

This is part of the problem with modern games journalism and criticism, and part of the reason it’s so trapped in the clickbait quagmire that ruins it so much. The ever-present need to produce timely content to meet embargoes and line up with release dates means that games that often deserve better don’t get the attention they deserve, and some games, as we’ve seen in the past, get a writeup of no value whatsoever, consisting entirely of the writer in question doing nothing but mocking the game and the people who like it without demonstrating any real evidence that they’ve bothered to try and engage with it on anything more than the most superficial level.

As I noted in my previous piece, though, because MoeGamer is a personal site that I write as a passion project, I’m not beholden to the fickle whims of advertising revenue and I have no obligation to bait people in with provocative headlines and articles about the creator of Minecraft calling someone a cunt (which, for what it’s worth, he was perfectly within his rights to do, as the person whingeing at him was being a cunt). Instead, I can explore games that have proven meaningful or interesting to me; games that are worthy of discussion. I can be positive about them, too, highlighting the things they do differently or particularly well and giving people reasons to check them out rather than, as so often happens with reviews today, reasons to avoid them.

The positivity thing in particular is something I feel strongly about. There seems to be a perception in a lot of modern criticism that you’re not doing your job properly if you’re not tearing something apart or telling it things it should do better. While there is value in this sort of criticism at times, it’s very easy to start reaching for things that are of little relevance to the work as a whole. Polygon’s infamous review of The Witcher 3 that complained about the lack of black people in a world inspired by Eastern European folklore is a good example, as is any writeup that bleats about sexism in an anime-style game without demonstrating any evidence of having explored the characters’ backgrounds.

Personally speaking, the kind of writing about games that I like to read is positive in nature. Games that changed your life, games that had personal meaning, games that elicited emotional responses, games that people haven’t heard of but should absolutely definitely positively check out. It is eminently possible to remain positive about things and still write interesting, compelling content, and it has the pleasant side-effect of creating a positive atmosphere around the articles, too, which encourages discussion and anecdotes of what the work in question means to other people. (There are exceptions, of course, as with most things on the Internet, but most people I know seem to respond far better to positive, enthusiastic writeups than ill-informed, poorly researched pieces that tear things apart unfairly.)

So that’s what I’m doing with MoeGamer. So far I’ve covered Senran Kagura Estival Versus and Megadimension Neptunia V-II. Next month I’ll be tackling Dungeon Travelers 2. Beyond that, I have a whole shelf full of games that I’m very interested in exploring in this level of depth, and I hope at least some of you enjoy reading my thoughts on them.

2303: Review in Progress

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I’ve noticed a lot of gaming sites posting “review in progress” articles for new releases recently. And while there is a time and a place for this sort of thing — most notably in the case of massively multiplayer online games, or multiplayer-centric titles that are dependent on their communities — I don’t think it’s a particularly appropriate way to handle single-player games.

The idea of a “review in progress” is for the author of the article to post their thoughts and opinions about the game as they’re playing it, updating it over time before coming to a final judgement and a score, assuming the publication in question does scores. This does kind of make sense in a way, because some games are slow burners that take a while to learn, and it can be interesting to see how someone’s reactions and feelings change over time. But at the same time, I find myself asking why the author didn’t just hold fire until they’d beaten the whole thing, then talk about their complete “journey” all in one go. That makes for an interesting structure for an article; in the case of games with strong emergent narratives but challenging mechanics — something like a Paradox strategy game, for example — it can even provide the basis for a compelling “story” of how the reviewer learned how to manage their empire more effectively after their incompetent beginnings.

The reason why “reviews in progress” exist should be obvious by now, though: they’re there to hoover up some of those sweet, sweet clicks from people Googling, say, “valkyria chronicles remastered review” or “overwatch review” or whatever else the latest hotness might be. Because the word “review” is in there, these half-finished articles show up in search results (assuming the tech guys at the sites in question have done their SEO homework) when what people are really looking for is detailed, authoritative, helpful and knowledgeable information on games they’re interested in. It’s one of many examples we have today of the inner machinations of the press being self-serving rather than in service of their readership.

More than that, though, as someone who’s floated in and out of the games press since he was a teenager, I find the idea of a “review in progress” somewhat objectionable on another level. When I took on my first ever writing assignments, I did so on the understanding that you should finish the game you’re writing about before putting pen to paper in order to be able to give a complete, in-depth appraisal of everything it had to offer. Granted, this was in the magazine age, when publications had rather more time to assemble their articles, and also in an age where there weren’t nearly as many games released every week as there are today — not to mention an age where 100-hour games were pretty much unheard of — but still, I think it’s a good goal to aspire to.

If you’re a professional critic, regardless of what you think the “purpose” of game reviews are, people are going to come to you on the assumption that you know what you are talking about, and that your articles will be well-researched, informative and helpful for making a purchase decision, or simply to find out more about a game. If you’re not doing your job properly — in other words, if you’re posting garbage like this or this, to give two extreme examples — then you shouldn’t be at all surprised when you become the object of ridicule that the average modern games journalist is today.

In other words, the games press would be a whole lot better — and more helpful to its readers — if it stopped worrying about churning out articles to release dead on embargo time, and instead only post pieces when the author in question actually has a full, complete and knowledgeable understanding of the thing they are commenting on.

Sadly, I don’t see this happening any time soon.

2263: Fuck This Culture War; Everyone Needs to Rebuild

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This is the “earliest” I’ve ever posted on here, at 12:22AM (edit: now 1:19AM, it’s taken an hour to write all this crap), and since I haven’t been to bed yet it’s technically still “yesterday” so far as the original rules of #oneaday go, but I wanted to address this subject immediately while it was fresh in my mind, so here I go breaking with convention somewhat.

Today, Alison Rapp got fired from Nintendo. If you don’t know who Alison Rapp is or why she got fired, I’d urge you not to look into it; it’s a complicated, messy situation that everyone involved could have probably handled better — but it also, after a certain point, became a bit of an inevitable outcome to just one of many shitstorms the games industry has already endured in just the first three months of this year.

The matter of Rapp is a symptom of a much larger problem that has been rumbling away for the last few years now: a so-called “culture war” between two somewhat ill-defined sides whose edges have a tendency to blur into one another somewhat. It’s a whole world of hypocrisy, kneejerk overreactions, dogpiling and public shaming, and it’s made the Internet an altogether far more unpleasant place to be than the “global village” it was once positioned as.

The culture war in question is broader than the field of games, but it’s in gaming that it’s perhaps most clear to see. Described by commentators via the gross (and erroneous) oversimplification that it is a battle between “GamerGate” and “SJWs”, the conflict is primarily between people who claim to be in favour of free speech, against censorship and against public shaming of politically incorrect viewpoints, humour or creative material, and people who claim to be in favour of increased diversity in culture, improving the representation of women, homosexual people, transgender people, people from non-white, non-English-speaking cultures and any number of other minorities you might care to mention.

Fundamentally, both “sides” have good points, and both sides actually also have a lot in common. The “free speech” side are all in favour of diversity — they just don’t want it to come at the expense of the ability for traditionally privileged groups to be able to speak their mind as well, which is perhaps a valid concern, given the number of people on the “diversity” side who will explicitly state that they reject the opinions of white men, regardless of how much merit they might have. Conversely, the “diversity” side are also in favour of free speech — that’s the core of the diversity they’re fighting for, in fact: the ability for everyone, regardless of social, cultural, sexual, gender…al background, to be able to speak their mind, make the creative works they want to make and celebrate them.

Unfortunately, something went wrong somewhere along the line. The origins of the GamerGate controversy amid the tell-all blogpost of relatively unknown indie developer Zoe Quinn’s ex-boyfriend — as well as accusations that aspects of her personal life had given her TWINE game Depression Quest rather more favourable coverage than it would have otherwise garnered — gave the “diversity” crowd a considerable amount of what they saw as ammunition to prove that “gamers” — inasmuch as that is a coherent group, which it absolutely 100% isn’t — were misogynistic harassers keen to drive women out of gaming, which was something they’d been trying to argue for a couple of years already. “Gamers”, meanwhile, hit back, quite rightly resenting the implications that they were a bunch of woman-hating fuckheads who wanted to play nothing but brown guntastic dudebro sims where people say “bitch” a lot.

No-one came out of this looking good. Quinn’s name was dragged through the mud — whether it was justifiably so or not, I can’t say for sure, though I must admit my few sightings of her on social media had always rubbed me up the wrong way — but at the same time, an entire group of people whose only common factor was a shared hobby that they all loved — and yes, that group includes men, women, straight people, gay people, cis people, trans people, black people, white people, Asian people, Latino people and any other arbitrary denominations you’d care to come up with — came under attack from people who decided that they knew better, and that they knew how the world should behave. And the conflict then proceeded to escalate, and now it’s been going on for several years — and yes, this nonsense did start before “GamerGate” ever became a thing… remember the Mass Effect 3 controversy?

There’s a lot more to it than all this, but I don’t want to get bogged down in details, largely because I’ve only really casually observed from the sidelines while all this has been going down and can’t speak with any great authority on what’s been going on in either camp.

What I can talk about, however, is the overwhelmingly negative effect that the last few years has had on gaming culture as a whole, because it fucking sucks. It really does. As someone who loves games, and has done since he was a small boy; as someone who loves talking about games, and writing about games, and telling all his friends about games they’ve never heard of… it really, really fucking sucks.

This “culture war” we’re living is not conducive to social progress, nor is it in any way making the games industry a better place for anyone. Why? Because both sides want it their way and no other way. Compromise is off the table, and opinions are firmly entrenched. GamerGate bad, progressiveness good. Unless you’re involved in GamerGate, in which case GamerGate good-but-misunderstood, SJWs bad. Proceed to yelling at one another, making unpleasant attacks on each other and, if you’re Graham Linehan, trawling through a young man’s Facebook photos to find a picture of him with his mother to ask him if “she would be proud” of how he behaves online, simply because they are on opposing “sides” of this nonsense. (Yes, this really happened.)

There’s no nuance in this discussion. No acknowledgement that both sides have good points — the progressives take things too far with their claims of “diversity” inevitably just veering into overcompensating “oppression of the privileged” territory while crying “GamerGate did it!” any time something bad happens; the free speechers are a little too resistant to things outside their comfort zone, consistently refusing to accept games like Gone Home as “real games” because they don’t conform to arbitrary guidelines of what is acceptable in the medium — and no attempts to understand one another. Battle lines are drawn. Weapons of choice are snarky comments fired from deep in the trenches of the Internet, escalating to insults and name-calling, and in some cases even to having tangible effects on aspects of people’s “real” lives, like their jobs and family.

And no-one will admit that this “culture war” is all a big steaming pile of shit that is just causing culture as a whole to stagnate. All we’re achieving is making individual subcultures within the “gamer” umbrella become more and more isolated and insular from one another, when what we should be doing is encouraging cross-pollination and exploration of games from outside your comfort zone.

And make no mistake, no-one is blameless in this. The whiny channer who bitches about “walking simulators” and how they’re bullshit is no better than the whiny Kotaku writer who bitches about how Senran Kagura’s boobies make him feel uncomfortable. The Redditor who cries “censorship!” over changes to a game’s script in localisation is no better than the forum poster who complains to Blizzard that he’s upset he has to see a lady’s bottom in tight pants. The feminist who claims everyone against her opinions is an “MRA” is no better than the actual MRAs who believe in feminist conspiracies. Get it? Fuck all of this conflict; none of it achieves anything whatsoever except making the people who just want to get on with their lives and enjoy the things they love completely and utterly fucking miserable.

Yes, I am talking about myself here. I have friends on both “sides” of this debacle, and I’m terrified of them interacting with one another, or of any of them believing me to be one “side” or the other for fear of being ostracised. I’m already a bit of a hermit; I don’t need to lose friends over something that I really don’t want to get involved in. But I am losing friends; there are people I don’t feel comfortable talking to online any more because I know that they’d believe my opinions to be “wrong” in comparison to them, and there are people I just don’t want to associate with any more because they appear to have turned into dribbling, rabid, irrational psychopaths who simply won’t listen to reason.

All I want — and I realise saying this here is just pissing in the wind, but regardless — is for people to accept one another for who they are, and what they like.

No shaming people who enjoy Japanese games for being “paedophiles”.

No shaming people who enjoy “walking simulators” for liking “not-games”.

No shaming men for enjoying attractive women in their games.

No shaming creative independent developers for using gaming as an interactive medium for creating works of art.

No shaming writers for depicting things that they don’t necessarily agree with, but want to show.

In fact, no more shaming, full-stop. No more blanket accusations. No more assumptions. Just acceptance. It doesn’t even have to be understanding — I don’t expect everyone I know to understand exactly why titles like the Neptunia series and Senran Kagura mean so much to me, so long as they respect that I feel that way, and don’t call me and the things I love “skeezy” or “gross” or whatever 12 year old girl’s words they’re using this week. I certainly don’t understand why people love, say, The Witness or Crusader Kings 2, but I’m certainly not about to start shaming the people who do, because I’m glad they have those things that they can enjoy while I have things that I can enjoy.

That’s diversity, right there: everyone having something that is “for them”. And the only way to make it better is to make more of everything for everyone — and accept that not every individual thing is aimed at every single individual person. And to accept that this is fine. And perhaps even to occasionally take a look at things you wouldn’t normally consider just out of curiosity — all in the name of understanding.

Culture becomes richer and more interesting when its smaller subdivisions are able to go off and do their own thing in peace, occasionally crossing boundaries and drawing influences from one another, or at least recognising, contrasting and celebrating the things we do similarly and differently from one another. That’s the exact opposite of what we have right now; currently, our smaller subdivisions in culture are erecting 30-foot tall barbed wire fences and firing artillery shells full of shit over the top of them.

So fuck this culture war. Fuck all the arguments I’m seeing on Twitter right now. Fuck the people who think that yelling “GamerGate did it!” or “SJWs did it!” is more important than enjoying this hobby that we all supposedly love so much. I want to go back to a time where anyone can post something about a cool new game they’ve tried out, and not have to worry about someone, somewhere getting offended or insulting them for it. I want to go back to a time when the press didn’t hate its readers, and the readers didn’t distrust the press. I want to go back to a time when Japan’s weirdness was regarded as something people wanted to explore and find out more about, rather than get skeeved out by. I want to go back to a time when weird, experimental games were cool and exciting rather than “blargh, not another pretentious indie game”.

Basically I think I probably want early ’00s-era 1up.com back.

But sadly, I’m not sure we’re ever going to get days like that back.

Oh well, all I can attempt to do, at least, is attempt to be the change I want to see in the world. Hopefully a little positivity will go a long way.

Now I’m going to bed. Please be a better place in the morning, world.

2257: Rebooting MoeGamer

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I’ve already written a substantial post over on my other site MoeGamer about a new plan I have to start writing more hefty long-form pieces on a regular basis, but I figured I’d write something here too. And, since I’m the sort of person who will happily write the same thing in two different ways because he enjoys the act of writing itself, I’m not just copying and pasting the text over, oh dear me no.

I’m rebooting MoeGamer. It’s not a drastic reboot, change of theme, change of layout or anything like that: it’s changing the way I’m thinking about it. To date (well, until last August) I posted on MoeGamer as and when I felt like it: when I particularly wanted to write about a favourite game, or when I particularly wanted to refute something stupid I’d seen from the mainstream press. (“There haven’t been any good RPGs since Final Fantasy VII” was a good example; “Dungeon Travelers 2 is a creepy, porn-lite dungeon crawler” was another.) I made an effort to post pieces of several thousand words in length, much as if I’d be writing a feature article on a regular games site.

And that was fine, apart from a couple of issues, the major one being that it’s very difficult to stay up to date on things to write about if you set yourself even quite a conservative schedule of posting. Eventually, the prospect of running out of things to write about became a bit demoralising, so I stopped to have a think and reflect on what I wanted to do with the site, if anything.

Today, Destructoid published a review of Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 which attracted some attention. Not only was it written by a writer with a lengthy track record of baiting the outrage brigade at every opportunity, said writer took the opportunity to insult both the game and the people who might be interested in it over the course of his article. And, once again, I was reminded of the woeful inadequacy of the mainstream games press when covering more specialist titles such as modern Japanese games.

As foul a taste as the review left in my mouth, it gave me an idea. Why not try doing something completely different? By not being beholden to advertising revenue, I have the freedom to wax lyrical about games I find interesting or noteworthy as much as I want. And in-depth analysis is what these games in particular are sorely lacking. Now, I’m not particularly saying Dead or Alive Xtreme 3 is necessarily worth some in-depth analysis — although I haven’t played it yet, so couldn’t say for sure — but there are plenty of games out there which are being done an enormous disservice by games journalists who either don’t have the time to invest in 100+ hour RPGs, or who feel “this game is about boobs” is somehow sufficient to describe Senran Kagura.

Much of the problems with modern games criticism come from the twin pressures of time and performance. Everything posted on a site has to perform well, and it has to be timely, otherwise the ad revenue will be shit and no-one will get paid. Unfortunately, this leads to clickbait of various forms — most commonly of the outrage variety these days. I don’t necessarily blame the games journos themselves for this — though there are certain writers, whom I shall refrain from naming for the moment, who can eat a thousand dicks over their incompetent coverage of games that deserve better — because I know from experience they quite simply don’t have the time to explore a game fully in the same way a regular ol’ player will.

But I do. Because I’m a regular ol’ player. So why not leverage that fact and take an extremely in-depth look at a game after the fact, pick apart why it’s noteworthy (or not) from several different angles, and ultimately build up a library of deep, interesting analyses of games that don’t get the time of day from the mainstream games media?

The plan’s pretty simple. Pick a game each month, focus exclusively on that. Write about its mechanics, narrative, aesthetics and context — going into a full article’s worth of detail on each rather than trying to cram everything into a single “review”. Add additional detail as appropriate. Move on to something new the following month. Repeat.

This approach gives me time to work my way through substantial games such as JRPGs and visual novels and complete them to my satisfaction, then write about them in detail. It provides a suitable structure for me to post content regularly. And it provides a variety of perspectives for people who are interested in games for different reasons — not everyone’s as much of a narrative junkie as I am!

I’m sure it’ll be a challenge and I’ll doubtless run into some hurdles along the way. But while I have the time to pursue various creative endeavours, it’s probably best I do that rather than sitting at home twiddling my thumbs and occasionally bursting into tears at the fact I still don’t have an actual job.

I’ll be kicking off this new-style MoeGamer at the beginning of April with coverage of the recently released Senran Kagura Estival Versus, and taking things from there. I’m looking forward to this new challenge, and I hope you’ll be interested to read my work.