This is, I won't beat around the bush, disgusting. Tying pay to article performance is already a shitty thing to do, but to withhold pay completely based on view counts is outright exploitative. And it's not as if writers on Valnet sites are getting paid fairly anyway.

As several people replying to Luddy on that Bluesky thread pointed out, this has been a longstanding problem with online media in general. It should be the writers' responsibility to produce the material, and it should be the people running the website from a business perspective's responsibility to promote that material and ensure it gets read.

Unfortunately, for a long time now, writers have been forced into a position where they have to write provocative, baiting articles in the hope that they will get clicks, because the people running the sites seemingly just… don't do anything other than lay people off. And, of course, bring generative AI into the picture, because this type of Business Idiot has no understanding whatsoever of how the actual audience has zero desire to read AI-generated content, instead believing that because generative AI is fashionable and responsible for billions of dollars of imaginary money being thrown around, they might be able to get a piece of that pie by enshittifying their website.

And the really stupid thing is that you never can predict what is going to spread across the Web and "do well" if it's left up to the writers. There is no magic formula that says "IF you write an article like this, THEN it will always succeed". There are manipulative tactics — like clickbait and ragebait — that sometimes work, but more and more people are wise to them today, and refuse to share material that falls into that category. Video game enthusiasts are some of the most online-savvy people out there for the most part, so resorting to these tactics is declining in effectiveness as time goes on.

What does seem to work — to an extent, at least — is having someone who is responsible for making sure those articles get seen: advertising the website. Effective use of a dedicated social media manager is why longstanding sites like IGN and Eurogamer are still just about hanging in there, but they are the last few remaining holdouts of a once vibrant and thriving media sector — and they have their own issues. IGN, for example, is currently butting heads with its Creators' Guild union over fair pay rises in line with inflation, and Eurogamer cut its editorial staff considerably a while back.

Once again, I have to say that I am baffled by this. Video games, as a creative sector, are bigger than they have ever been, with a broader, more diverse range of releases than ever before. So why are we, collectively, apparently completely incapable of sustaining an enthusiast press?

Moreover, retro gaming is more accessible than ever before, too, meaning that there is a worthwhile place for some retro-centric sites to spring up and do a good job of covering classic gaming material — but so far, we've seen very few outlets even attempt to step into this space, with only Time Extension online and Retro Gamer in print coming to mind outside of the unpaid (or at least non-commercial) enthusiast blog sector.

The usual answer to this is "b-but YouTubers and streamers!" and I'm sorry, I don't buy it. YouTubers and streamers have a place in the modern media landscape, sure, but they fulfil a completely different function to a traditional press — and moreover, they demand a completely different sort of attention to written material. And if you've ever accused a traditional press outlet of "paid reviews", then I have some unfortunate news to tell you about a widespread concept known as "influencer marketing".

I am sad about all this! I spent a significant portion of my life looking at my brother with intense admiration for his role in helping to shape the games press in its prime, both in print and online, and hoping that I would one day be able to follow in his footsteps! And yet, by the time I did manage to get a meaningful foothold, things were already starting to collapse. I was, somehow, too late — and I am having great difficulty understanding why, because it's not as if video games have gone anywhere. One would think with the sheer number of the bloody things being released pretty much every day at this point, a functional games press would be a desirable thing to have. And by "functional", I mean "one with full-time employees who get paid a fair salary on which they can live, enjoy the medium that they have chosen to specialise in and be able to have a good work-life balance".

And yet here we are. I despair sometimes, I really do.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 715: Fuck Valnet appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

At this point, I'm not even surprised any more. The broad concept that is "the video games media" is almost completely gutted at this point, with only a few sites still holding on. IGN and Gamespot still exist; Polygon still (kind of) exists; smaller, platform-centric sites like Push Square and NintendoLife still exist; and Kotaku has come back from the "dead" more times than I can count at this point.

I find myself pondering a few things about the whole situation. First of all, given that gaming is bigger than ever, how on Earth are we unable to sustain a specialist media sector focusing on it? Someone on Bluesky suggested it was because a significant number of the people who "play games" are little more than "content consumers", just "consuming" the latest thing that comes along and then banishing it from their mind; not taking the medium seriously as an art form, in other words. There's certainly an element of that, but I don't buy that it's a satisfactory explanation for what has been going on with the media over the course of the last few years.

Perhaps it's some sites discovering that certain "types" of games journalism just don't work? Those of you of a certain age will probably remember discussions over "New Games Journalism" and the question of whether we would ever have a "Lester Bangs of Games Journalism". These discussions were happening back in the late '00s, and centred around the idea of games journalism and criticism in particular moving away from the bog-standard news, preview, review, guide format in favour of something that was more… experiential, I guess you'd call it. Treating games more akin to how literary and artistic criticism treats other, more well-established art forms. "Telling the stories of the people behind the games", all that sort of thing. Things that look like they might be admirable when you look at them as part of a mission statement.

Thing is, I'm not sure that's what the readers want. The one thing you might notice about all the sites that have managed to survive for decades at this point is that they are, for the most part, still beholden to the same old news, preview, review, guide cycle that has been in place since the days of print. And my theory is that this is, as stale as it might be, what people still want from games journalism. "The stories of the people behind your favourite games" can be interesting, but when all a lot of people want to know is whether or not Pragmata is any good, I feel like those articles — which often take a hell of a lot of research, networking and general access to their subjects — may not be entirely sustainable, particularly on a site that needs to keep the lights on through ad revenue.

I'm not saying this is a particularly desirable situation. The overreliance on ads has lead to the "guideslop" era we're in at the moment, where every game that looks even vaguely likely to attract a few clicks gets three thousand pieces of "guide content", each one focusing on a single hyper-specific thing about the game in question, rather than a single, quality, well-crafted walkthrough. This is a load of old shit; there are a lot of writers who could be doing much more interesting work stuck on the guides beat, and I'm very much willing to bet they are some of the hardest working but lowest paid people in the business.

But I think back to old games magazines and why I enjoy reading them, and it's because each of them captures a moment in time. Times when we were excited for games that we knew the name of, but very little else about besides a couple of tiny, fuzzy screenshots; I think some mags got pretty much a full year of news stories out of two "Zelda 64" screenshots back in the day. Times when we were excited for the new possibilities that seemingly mind-blowing new platforms would offer us — and then the crushing disappointment when they turned out to not be that good after all. (Philips CD-i and 3DO say hello.) Times when an amazing new game would be the cover star of a magazine and turn out to be even better than we had ever hoped for — or in some cases, catastrophically bad.

I'm not sure sites writing about labour conditions in the industry, unions and quarterly financial results are really what gaming enthusiasts want from the press that supposedly represents them. I know it's certainly not what I'm particularly interested in.

I don't really read any gaming sites any more, and I often ask myself why that is. There are still quite a few out there doing good work, and there's a decent amount of diversity in the types of coverage out there, still… at the moment, anyway. I'm just not sure some of it is sustainable in the long term, and I wonder if a desire to focus on that unsustainable stuff just because it seems like "the right thing to do" — which it very much is in many cases — is what has got the games media as a whole into the messy position it's in today.

So what's the answer? I have no idea, really. In my ideal world, we'd go back to reading magazines every month, but despite the fact some magazines do still exist in print — I recently resubscribed to Retro Gamer, for one — it seems that is perceived as even more unsustainable than everything I've described above.

As someone who, as a young 'un, wanted nothing more than to follow his brother's footsteps into video games media, it's extremely sad to see all this happen. But I'm also kind of glad that I'm no longer directly in that space, because it seems like a hell of a bad time to be a video game specialist writer right now.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 693: Another one bites the dust appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I don't know if I'm just in a bad mood right now or if there really has been a rise in clickbait headlines of late, but I feel like I'm noticing it a lot more of late. I'm talking about stuff like this:

That's a piece from Kotaku about LGR building himself a warehouse. I find it very difficult to believe that anyone reading Kotaku on a semi-regular basis does not know who LGR is, so to deliberately obfuscate his identity in the headline just feels like it's being annoying on purpose.

One could argue that this headline has been written appropriately, however; it gets the broader point across in a way that is accessible to all, regardless of whether or not they know who LGR is. So I will begrudgingly give it a pass.

I do not give the following (from GameSpot) a pass, particularly because they "spoil" it in the accompanying image:

Just say Hercules. We can see it's Hercules. Also I'm not 100% sure Hercules counts as one of Disney's more "iconic" movies. I guess it was in Kingdom Hearts.

GameSpot is very fond of this sort of shit right now:

Yeah, fuck off with that. Just tell me what it is.

Double fuck off for this being based on a "rumour", something which I was always discouraged from reporting on when I was working the news beat in the games press. If your headline has "could" in it, just stop.

But let's not pick exclusively on GameSpot.

Let's also pick on GameRant, which, to be fair, is part of the odious Valnet group. This headline can get right in the fucking bin. (It's Elder Scrolls Blades, if you gave a shit.)

This one can, too. (Horizon Chase Turbo in this case.)

Look, I get it. If you're on the endless churn and trying to juice your site's SEO results in order to maximise your KPIs for men in suits who don't know what video games actually are, it's easy to feel like it's necessary to pull this shit in order to "get people curious enough to click". But people are savvy to it now, to such a degree that it's a practice that gets routinely mocked.

Just say what the article is actually about rather than this bullshit playground teasing ("I know something you don't!") and if the story has any merit, people will click through to it anyway to find out more details. Those "more details" someone clicks through to find out more about should not, repeat, not be the name of the subject of the story.

This sort of thing is rarely the fault of the individual reporters — although I'm sure there are a few out there who love pulling this little stunt. No, it's inevitably an edict from on high for the reasons just stated. With the general health of video games media being deep within the "critical danger" territory, the suits want quick solutions that, in theory, get results.

Only I'm not convinced this sort of practice does get results any more. Like I say, people are wise to it now. I refuse to believe that I am the only one who simply won't click on an article whose headline is a deliberate cocktease.

Look at it this way: why should I give a shit that "a Switch game is being delisted on June 1"? There are thousands of the fucking things, many of which I don't care about. "The eShop is full of crap" is a meme for a reason. I do, however, own a copy of Horizon Chase Turbo, and thus would be interested in hearing why that specific game is being delisted. (It's stupid, by the way. And you can blame Epic for it.)

Anyway, that has been your nightly grump. Please write meaningful headlines, especially if you want the few remaining dregs of the video games press to be taken even a little bit seriously.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 660: This one particular type of headline is very annoying appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Now, I know there is plenty we can criticise Metacritic for, but to the site's credit, after being made aware of the situation, the review was not only pulled from Metacritic, but the site in question was blacklisted from being featured on there for future reviews, too.

The site in question was VideoGamer.com — not a site I ever particularly frequented, but one that has been around for many years, and one of many, many old games press brands that have been bought up by private equity and turned into sites filled with AI-generated drivel, usually in the form of undisclosed advertorial features pointing people towards shady gambling sites. VideoGamer is not the first site to fall in this way; previous victims have included AdventureGamers and The Escapist, and there are almost certainly countless more that we haven't found as yet.

My initial reaction to anything like this happening is to ask "why?"

Why are once-good sites being replaced with AI-generated drivel? Who do they think is reading this stuff? Why do the people in charge of these hollowed-out husks of websites think this is, in any way, a good idea?

The answer, of course, is that this is the natural endpoint of SEO-driven online writing. The sole reason these articles exist is to get people to click on them and generate advertising revenue for the site's owners. And if they can do that without having to do anything silly like pay actual people to write actual articles, so much the better! (Although the more astute among you out there may well point out that being an AI power user probably doesn't end up much cheaper than hiring an actual person — particularly in the games press, where, as Mat Jones of IGN put it earlier today, "games freelancers will turn in 2,000 words for an egg sandwich". I wish it wasn't true.)

Couple this with the news that Eurogamer and surrounding sites are suffering some considerable layoffs and things do not look altogether rosy. I also learned that VG247 is now little more than an SEO guideslop site; I never really liked that site all that much, but since most of my USgamer stuff ended up archived there after USgamer itself closed down, I do have a certain attachment to it.

The frustrating thing for me is that all this seems so unnecessary. Video games, as an industry, creative medium, art form, whatever you want to call them, are huge. One would assume that would mean they would need a specialist press around to cover them effectively, but given that so many sites have been gutted over the last few years — and, in many cases, replaced with AI slop — something doesn't quite seem to add up.

Sure, we've seen the rise of sites like Aftermath, who do good work, and it was gratifying to see Giant Bomb successfully extricate themselves from their former corporate overlords — full disclosure: I subscribe to both to support them — but neither of them quite take the place of what we used to have. And you can interpret that however you will, because the same is true if you think I'm referring to traditional "news, previews and reviews" websites, or if you think I'm referring to magazines. (Spoiler: I'm talking about both.)

Part of this feels like an extension of the whole "New Games Journalism" discussion we had in the latter-day 1up years. And while that discussion went to some odd places, I do acknowledge that there is some valuable work going on over at a number of worker-owned, reader-supported sites, particularly when it comes to telling the stories of people who work in games. But sometimes you just want to read something simple like what someone thought of a game you're interested in, y'know? And that side of things seems to very much be a dying breed.

One might argue that there's less need for that, what with social media, online discussion and "influencers" (you will never get me to not use scare quotes around that odious term) dominating the way games are promoted online these days. But I still like to read a straightforward review of something — and the continued existence of Metacritic, as flawed as it is as a concept, suggests that there's still a place for that sort of thing.

I can't help but wonder where all this will end up. With people starting to get interested in physical media once again, I would love to see proper magazines become a thing again. I suspect that won't happen, but we certainly can't go on like this. Can we? This feels like how you actually end up with a completely dead Internet.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 629: Another site falls to AI appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

There's been a lot of grumbling over a new game called Highguard just recently. I don't really know what Highguard is, which is part of the problem — apparently it was initially shown off at The Game Awards last year, then just went pretty much radio silent until its… launch? Now? Something like that?

From what I can make out, Highguard is a live service multiplzzzzzzzzzzz — ah, so that's why I haven't really been following it. But that's not precisely what I want to talk about today. I, instead, want to talk about the discussions that have been happening over the last few days on the subject of coverage of Highguard.

It started with an op-ed over on IGN written by Senior Editor Simon Cardy, whose article Can We Stop Dunking on Highguard Before It's Even Out, Please? is fairly self-explanatory in terms of its core thesis. Cardy argues that it's annoying when a game is seemingly randomly picked as a whipping-boy and becomes the butt of jokes before anyone has actually gone hands-on with it and is thus in a position to comment on it from an informed, experienced perspective.

I get this. I kind-of-sort-of agree with it. It is annoying when there's something you're interested in, and all you can find in terms of coverage is How Bad Does This Game Look?! clickbait. And it is a bit daft for people to be pre-judging Highguard based on a single trailer and a remarkably quiet marketing department.

At the same time, as this piece by Autumn Wright argues, there's a strong argument to be made that the press covering a particular medium is under no obligation to remain what they describe as "poptimistic". It is not the press' job to go to bat for a particular game or company — especially not ahead of its release — and there are a lot of things about Highguard that do warrant discussion. Exactly why has its marketing been so non-existent? Does the world really need yet another live service multiplzzzzzzzzz? I'm so uninterested in the game as a whole I can't even think of a third possible question, but I'm sure there's something else that needs asking.

The problem, as ever, is in how different people see the role of the enthusiast press.

Some see it as an extension of marketing — and indeed, there are plenty of outlets that operate like this. There are plenty of outlets that have since gone under that operate like this, and there will be more in the future. It's a bit of an occupational hazard; by engaging with the standard news-preview-review cycle, you are part of a Marketing Plan, whether you want to be or not. And that's always been the norm for the games press, dating right back to magazines. It was never really questioned all that much until relatively recently; people wanted to know what was coming up, and they wanted to know if the thing they had thought looked cool for the last six months actually ended up being any good or not.

Others see it as fulfilling a critical role — critical in the sense of "administering criticism", not as in "really important", though the people who feel this way would probably argue that also. People who feel this way are interested in the stories behind the games and how games can fit into broader cultural commentary. They ask what particular games can tell us about society, and what the artistic meaning behind a work — both intended by the author and perceived by the audience — might be.

The challenge, of course, is access. The former group gets access to games because they tacitly agree to being part of the Marketing Plan. They get invited to press events to try out a new game; they get sent preview and review codes early; they agree to embargoes so the publisher of a game, not the press outlet, remains in control of the coverage. The latter group, meanwhile, tends to have to fend for itself to a certain degree. This gives them a lot more freedom in terms of what they cover and how, of course, but they can't rely on having access — whether that means "getting an early copy of a game" or "being able to pick the lead writer's brain without a PR person breathing down their neck".

I don't really know what the answer is, or even if there is a satisfactory one. I don't quite fall into either of the above categories with what I do over on MoeGamer, but then that's a site by an individual run as a passion project, not a commercial venture. As such, I have the freedom to pick and choose what I cover, and to exclusively concentrate on things that I, personally, feel have some worth and value — or, at the very least, are interesting enough to want to talk about. That means my site skews positive, which is anathema to some people, but I'm not there to do a PR company's bidding — nor am I there out of any obligation to criticise things just because they "need criticising". I simply choose to focus all my attention on games that I think are worthwhile, and that I think more people should check out.

I hate to sound like I'm "both sides-ing" the issue, but the reality is, there are valid points from all angles here. It is silly to pre-judge Highguard with little to no information — or perhaps it's more accurate to say it's silly to make assumptions about what Highguard will be with little to no information. At the same time, though, outlets have no obligation to hype up a new release — and especially, one would argue, when the marketing department doesn't appear to have been doing its job at all.

This is, I can guarantee, the only thing I am going to write about Highguard. Because the one thing I have managed to glean from the discussion over it is that I don't really give a shit about it. So I'll just say I hope it's as good/bad as you were anticipating, and leave it at that.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 598: Poptimism appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It emerged today that the entire Features team of the gaming website TheGamer has been laid off, after owner Valnet decided that it likes money more than having actual employees who are capable of writing.

I'll admit that I was never a particular fan of TheGamer for a variety of reasons, but regardless of my own personal feelings about the site, this sucks. It's the latest instance of something that has continued to suck for a while now, with even big names of the games journalism industry — if such a thing even exists any more — suffering widespread layoffs, cutbacks and significant worsening of what they offer for their audiences. Enshittification, if you will. And yes, even longstanding behemoths like IGN and Eurogamer have been subject to this. According to VideoGamesChronicle and PressEngine, more than 1,200 journalists have left the business entirely in just the last two years — and that's not taking freelancers into account. (That puts the figure nearer 4,000.)

Honestly, seeing this happen to TheGamer isn't a surprise, though. This is just what the site's owner, Valnet, does. They buy up sites that were once successful, rip out everything that made them distinctive and unique — i.e. the people who worked hard on establishing the site's identity — then proceed to replace everything with slop. I would not be surprised at all if in short order we start seeing casino advertorials and AI-generated garbage on what remains of TheGamer.

Valnet and their big rival, Gamurs, are a scourge on what was once a thriving sector. They both take this model: they buy "verticals" (ugh) that they want to add to their portfolio, and then think that just because they now own, say, Polygon, that they have unlocked an infinite money glitch. But they have not — for a variety of reasons, not which is the model on which ad-supported commercial games journalism has been forced to operate for years now.

This article by Luke Plunkett of Aftermath sums it up nicely: these sites had been stuck in operating in the same way as 2000s-era Kotaku, which is to post as much as possible, as often as possible, and it didn't matter too much if nothing of any real substance was being said. It was all about the content.

I've been through this, too. During my time on both GamePro and USgamer, I was specifically hired to be someone who operated on a different time zone to the rest of the staff, with my responsibility being to ensure that there were things ready to read on the site by the time North America woke up. These typically end up being "news" posts, which, in the churn of having to produce so much content every day, often end up being little more than you could learn from just following a company's social media account or signing up to their mailing list.

"Guide content", that odious practice where every single site has to have 5,000 articles explaining every minutiae of every hot new game (and often badly, to boot), is also at play here, with the entire Internet gradually being flooded by "what is today's Wordle solution?" posts, individual articles explaining each and every shrine in The Legend of Zelda (often badly) and inconclusive, vapid answers to questions no-one was really asking with any great seriousness. It's all about the pursuit of endless, relentless content, and it doesn't matter if it's any good or not, it just has to be fresh, constantly updated and now.

And it sucks! It's not doing anyone any good! It's not making the writers on these sites look good, it doesn't make the games they're covering look good, it doesn't make the site look good, and it doesn't inform the readership of anything worthwhile. It just means those readers have something new to scroll through every time they refresh the page while they're staring, glassy-eyed, at their phone for the 14th consecutive hour that day.

It sucks that it has to be this way, too, because the presence of a specialist press is important. The idea that we might, one day, be completely without a games press altogether is absolutely baffling, but with every round of layoffs like the one we've seen today, we get closer to that dystopia.

Reader-supported sites such as Aftermath, 404 Media (not games, but relevant) and Giant Bomb are doing great work, but it remains to be seen how sustainable that model is — particularly as so many of the bloody things are starting to pop up that it is no longer possible or affordable for anyone to be "widely read" when it comes to good-quality games coverage. That's not necessarily a bad thing, given that back in the '80s and '90s we tended to be loyal to individual magazines rather than reading all of them, but it's a big shift in how the Internet has traditionally worked.

I don't even know what to think any more. It's bleak out there. And I wonder if it's ever going to get better again. I just want to have some fun websites to read again, by people who know their craft and are passionate about it. We used to have that — why can't we have that again? Why can't we have 1up.com again?

Those are rhetorical questions.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

If you want this nonsense in your inbox every day, please feel free to subscribe via email. Your email address won't be used for anything else.

The post #oneaday Day 502: Another reminder that traditional games journalism is all but dead appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Earlier today, Dave Gilbert, renowned modern adventure game developer and publisher, happened to point out that Adventure Gamers, a website with a near 25-year history, had, at some point, sold out and become an online casino shilling site, leeching off the prior content — which, after 25 years, you can bet had some decent SEO juice, even with the myriad changes to such algorithms over the years — in order to hook people into shady gambling sites.

My immediate reaction to this was "ew, gross", shortly followed by "I bet I could make a really good adventure game site". Unfortunately, this thought was then almost immediately followed by "…but why should I bother?"

This isn't the first time I've thought something along these lines. The modern Web is killing, stifling any sense of ambition I might have once had. It's not one, single thing like generative AI causing me to feel this way — though you better believe the amount of AI slop out there is a big part of it — but rather a continual piling-up of little micro-enshittifications. Over the course of the last 10 years in particular, these micro-enshittifications have all accumulated into the garbage fire that is the Web of 2025: a place where it's hard to find reliable information, where it's even harder to verify whether what you're looking at is reliable information, and where the people with the power to make a difference don't seem to give a shit.

Let me tell you a little bit about myself, in case you've not been here on the previous occasions I've done so.

When I was a kid, I grew up surrounded by computers: specifically, the Atari 8-bit and ST, with MS-DOS and Windows PCs following along around the early '90s. For pretty much my entire childhood, my Dad and my brother were both regular contributors to an Atari magazine initially called Page 6 and later New Atari User, after it took over the name from a publication that was bowing out of the Atari 8-bit scene.

I loved getting a new issue of Page 6 every couple of months; I loved reading through all the features, even if I didn't understand all of them, and it gave me great pride to see my Dad and my brother's name in print pretty much every issue after a certain point. My Dad would cover flight simulators, productivity software and the use of music technology, while my brother would cover Atari ST games. We got a lot of free software out of this arrangement — much of which is now in my possession — and it's fair to say that this played an instrumental role in defining my interests and hobbies growing up.

When my brother left home, he had decided to forego university in favour of a staff writer position on a magazine called Games-X. This was a risky and ultimately unsuccessful venture on the part of publisher Hugh Gollner, but it was a nice idea: a weekly games magazine that covered new releases for the home computers and consoles that were around at the time — the tail end of the 8-bit era, the heyday of the ST and Amiga, and the days when the Mega Drive and SNES were just starting to get some attention.

I was immensely proud to have a family member in the games press, published every week in an actual magazine you could walk into a newsagent and buy. (Page 6 had a stint on newsstands, too, but it eventually went back to its roots as a subscription-only magazine, clinging on to dear life until 1998, impressively.) And my pride only continued after Games-X folded and my brother followed Gollner to the then-fledgling Maverick Magazines, where he initially worked as a staff writer on Mega Drive Advanced Gaming, while his girlfriend at the time held the same position on its Super NES counterpart Control.

It continued further still as he worked his way up the ranks, through several publications and publishing companies, until eventually he found himself in the United States working on the Official PlayStation Magazine and Electronic Gaming Monthly, and helping to launch the pioneering video game social networking site 1up.com — dearly missed.

Every step of the way, I followed his career with interest, conscious of the fact that I was 10 years younger than him, thinking "one day I'll get my chance; I really want to follow in his footsteps, and one day I'll have that opportunity if I just keep trying."

I did keep trying. I did some articles for Page 6, just as my brother had. I did some freelance contributions to PC Zone and the Official Nintendo Magazine, back in the days when one article would get you the money that two months' worth of news posts nets you today. I worked on some little sites, most of which have now disappeared, sadly, and I eventually had the opportunity to work on both GamePro and USgamer, two decent-sized but, admittedly, American sites.

For some reason I had found the UK games press perpetually impossible to crack after a certain point, and after attending a few PR events on behalf of both GamePro I understood why: there was very much a heavily cliquey, old boys' club thing going on, and as a socially awkward (and what I now know to be) autistic loser, that was not something I felt in any way able to crack my way into.

But still I wanted to believe. I wanted to believe that GamePro was the start of something big, until we were told via email one morning just before Christmas that none of us had jobs any more. I wanted to believe that USgamer was another opportunity for something big, until I found myself screwed over and, once again, informed via email, this time on my actual birthday, that I no longer had a job.

After that, I didn't seek any further positions in the games press. I'd taken too many beatings. But I didn't want to give up. That's when I started MoeGamer, which initially began as a means of continuing some of the work I'd done at USgamer covering Japanese games that other publications didn't give the time of day. This was work that people in both the industry and from the "public" side of things told me that they found valuable and helpful, because I wasn't just going "ew, anime art" and writing things off as "pandering" or whatever.

Long-term, I wanted to build MoeGamer into something that really stood by itself: a site where you could look up information on a wide variety of games and find some thoughtful, well-considered writing about it. And I think I have achieved that, even if I don't have the time or energy to update it as often as I'd like; the one positive about my previous job, which was beyond tedious, was that it gave me ample time and energy to write new articles and make new videos.

I still never really "made it", though. Few people online know who I am; even fewer go "oh, wow, a Pete Davison article, gotta read that" — although I do have a pleasingly enthusiastic following in the Evercade community, at least, thanks to my work on the official site — and I just find myself wondering… was all this for nothing? Is there even any point trying any more?

The Adventure Gamers thing stings, because were it 10-15 years ago, I'm pretty sure I could have put together a banger of an adventure game-centric website, developed a decent following and kept it up and running for 25+ years without selling out to online casino shills. But now, from every corner of the Web I read horror stories about sites struggling for discoverability, struggling to earn the money to keep the lights on and struggling to get anyone to give a shit about the written word. There are rare outliers, and the rise of worker-owned, reader-supported initiatives such as Aftermath and Giant Bomb is encouraging — but both of those (and others like them) already had ready-made, built-in audiences thanks to the people involved and their prior positions; how long would a brand-new website with a specialist focus even last these days, if it wasn't "the next project from [insert big name site] alumnus, [name]"?

I feel utterly demoralised. I feel like what was once my dream career just doesn't really exist any more. I recognise that I'm extraordinarily fortunate to have fallen into the position I'm in now, where I get to work on games that I care about, crafting written material to help people understand and appreciate quite why I love them so much — and hopefully help said readers learn to love them, too — but there are days of increasing frequency when I wonder if anyone really gives a toss. The days when I have people screeching obscenities at me on social media because they can't buy a cartridge that is out of print. The days when I have to deal with endless, mind-numbing, Queen's Duck-level "feedback" from people who absolutely don't care about the games I'm working on as much as I do. The days when I'm genuinely fearful for the history and legacy of the hobby I love so much, and where I weep for the traditional, written-word games press, a side of the industry which almost doesn't exist at all any more.

I was born 10 years too late. And believe me, it really sucks to have spent a significant portion of your life thinking "I really want to do that", only to find out, much too late, that "that" just isn't really a thing any more.

The obvious answer to all this is something I've thought of and felt before — that even if there doesn't seem to be a "place" for something, you should do it anyway, because someone, somewhere, will appreciate it. But with every site sold to private equity companies and gutted to turn into an AI slop factory, the motivation and ambition to do something significant and meaningful diminishes, bit by bit. What was once a roaring flame of determination is now little more than a flicker. And I hate that.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 376: The death of ambition appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Boy, it sure has been an… "interesting" time for the games media recently, as I've alluded to a few times recently. To catch you up: Valnet, the sweatshop of the media industry, has bought Polygon and laid off the vast majority of its staff, which, of course, suggests that Polygon is going to become yet another SEO slop factory where its writers are paid peanuts to produce nothing of any real cultural value.

For a time, it looked like the longstanding site Giant Bomb was going the same way, with upsets over "brand-friendly" (or, more accurately, "brand-unfriendly") shenanigans on streams causing a sudden halt to… seemingly everything the site was doing. Giant Bomb has changed hands numerous times over the years; until recently, it was in the hands of Fandom, the people who ruined Wikia with obnoxious autoplaying pop-over videos and links to "related content" that was not, in fact, related to the thing you were looking at in any way whatsoever.

You'll notice I say "until recently". That's because Giant Bomb is no longer under the Fandom umbrella; it was announced on a panel at PAX East yesterday that Fandom and the Giant Bomb staff reached an agreement for the latter to purchase the site and turn it into an employee-owned outlet, much like the growing number of other worker-owned arrangements that are really finding their feet these days.

This is excellent news. I must confess despite being in the official Final Fantasy XIV guild for Giant Bomb, I never really hung out there all that much, but I did know that Giant Bomb, for many folks, was all about the community — similar to the old 1up.com days. The site looking like it was going under thanks to corporate interference was really sad to see — and for once, the corporate interferers saw what was going on, had a seemingly genuine "oh, shit" moment and changed course. Strongly. You can criticise Fandom for many things, but the agreement they reached with the Giant Bomb staff is, to my knowledge, absolutely unprecedented in the online media biz.

I've decided to make an effort to join the Giant Bomb community a bit more. I've rescued my account that I apparently signed up for in 2010 (with a different email address that thankfully I still had access to) and pledged $10 a month to help the folks on the site out. I'm looking forward to seeing what it has to offer, getting to know the community and perhaps, hopefully, finally having a decent place to hang out and talk games.

What does this mean for all the other things I do online? Nothing. I'm still going to be blogging here, I'm still going to be writing about games on MoeGamer — it's just I might be posting a few more bits and pieces on Giant Bomb from hereon, in both the forums and using the site's blogging facility. If there's one thing I really miss from the Internet Gone By, it's 1up.com and its sense of community; I'm really interested to see if Giant Bomb can prove to be an adequate replacement, particularly for someone who is essentially "new" to proceedings over there. I'm intruding on 17 years of history (huh, the site is the same age as this blog) but the "Duders" are supposed to be thoroughly nice people, so we'll see.

Mostly I'm happy to see my pals Jeff Grubb and Mike "Tolkoto" Minotti back in action, because I know very well how hard those two chaps worked to claw their way up the mountain of shite that is the games media industry, and it was a massive bummer to see them seemingly kicked back to the ground. I've known both of 'em since the 1up.com, Bitmob and Squadron of Shame days, and it was wonderful to see that they'd made something of their passions — and that they will continue to be able to do that.

So yeah. Giant Bomb is back. Now, if we could just do something about the rancid degradation of everything else online…

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 338: Bomb Reignited appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

One thing that has been a constant in all the discussions over the death of Giant Bomb and Polygon yesterday is that we need to support independent creators. We need to support worker-owned organisations, we need to support publications that aren't corporate-owned, and perhaps most importantly, we need to support individual creators who, in many cases, do not have the backing of a corporation or even an organisation to help them out.

What this means in practical terms is that if you like something a particular creator or group of creators does, you should open your wallet and toss them a bit of change now and then. It doesn't have to be a regular pledge, it doesn't have to be a lot of money, but it's something we all need to get better at doing.

Of course, for those of limited means, ways of supporting creators that don't involve spending money are helpful, too. Telling others about the creators and their work; sharing links to ways people can support them; telling their own stories about why that creator and their work are important to them.

But there has to be a slightly mercenary element to this: there are people out there working hard who deserve to get paid for the work they put in — particularly if it is their actual job — and that payment shouldn't be contingent on SEO optimisation and ad revenue. The obsession with those to the exclusion of all else — including the quality of the work — is what has led us to a situation where almost the entirety of the traditional games press has collapsed, with the scraps being hoovered up by corporations that pay peanuts for absurdly unreasonable quantities of work. And when that happens, you get an Internet flooded with shite. And when there aren't workers to do that but the content still needs to flow, that's when you get an Internet flooded with AI-generated shite that is riddled with errors as well as being crap.

In many ways, the democratisation of information that the Internet has brought everyone is an amazing thing. There is no need to spend thousands of pounds on an Encyclopaedia Britannica because you have access to all that information and more via the Web. But the trouble is, this same democratisation of information has led everyone to expect everything for free. And that is simply not sustainable. People who make things as their job need to get paid. That money needs to come from somewhere. And we've proven pretty clearly beyond any shadow of a doubt that the ad-driven model is not a good way of doing things, for a variety of reasons: the workload it places on underpaid workers; the unreliability of it as an income stream; and the fact it encourages a race to the bottom in terms of content churn rather than the production of actually meaningful, worthwhile work.

So I say again: open your wallet. Think back to the days when if you wanted to read something about your hobby, you'd walk into Smiths and pick up a magazine, maybe flip through it a bit, then walk over to the counter and pay a few quid for it. You might do this multiple times a month for different aspects of your hobby, or, hell, for different hobbies altogether. You might even set up a subscription so you got the magazines sent straight to you. In doing that, you were supporting the people who made the magazines, the people who wrote the articles, and you were helping to ensure the continued existence of that magazine.

Sure, you could read the whole thing for free in Smiths if you wanted to, but I think most people were honest enough to actually pony up for a copy of a magazine if they had a quick flip through and saw one or two things they thought were worthwhile. More often than not, you'd find things you didn't expect to find interesting when you later perused the magazine in its entirety later in the day. And sometimes, you'd even return to that magazine years later and rediscover things you had forgotten about, or notice things you never saw first time around.

You can't easily do that with the churn of SEO optimised website content because of the sheer volume of it — and the inability to guarantee that the information will still be there [x] years down the line. Someone on Bluesky earlier noted that they were doing research for a video they were making and found a good article from 2014, but was unable to follow up on any of the sources that article cited because every link in it was broken.

So, I say again: open your wallet, if it is within your means to do so. Help writers produce fewer articles with more words that are better and which stick around for longer. Help video makers produce fewer videos that are better quality, more in-depth and completely devoid of SEO or ragebaiting.

And if anyone makes a new paper magazine about your passions, you throw those goddamn heroes a subscription.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 329: Open your wallet appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Well, another one bites the dust. Today, we learned that gaming site Polygon has been sold to Valnet, the sweatshop of online media, and that, as is standard practice in this situation, pretty much all the regular writing staff have been let go, to be replaced by contractors who will be paid absolute fucking peanuts to churn out SEO-baiting drivel and contribute nothing of any real value to the broader conversation about video games.

I was never a huge fan of Polygon, I'll confess. But this isn't about me. It's about yet another significant pillar of Video Games Journalism collapsing — because make no mistake, being sold to Valnet means that your brand is going to have very little value left afterwards — and the entire landscape of this section of the media getting just a little bit worse.

To make matters worse, it appears that Giant Bomb is circling the drain, too. I don't think anything "official" has been announced on that front yet, but from what some of the people involved have been saying publicly… yeah, that site isn't long for this world, either.

Why does this keep happening? Why are we allowing sites that are demonstrably good at what they do to get destroyed in this way? At this rate, we're going to have absolutely no "big names" in the games press left.

And perhaps that might, over the long-term, be a good thing. Because every time something like this happens, it feels like more and more worker/creator-owned outfits pop up and show that yes, it is possible to do things a bit differently; it is possible to put together an interesting and enjoyable site without resorting to SEO-baiting bilge and Guide Content; it is possible to build a sustainable publication that doesn't rely on ad-revenue and instead asks its most interested readers to pony up a couple of quid a month in exchange for stuff that is actually worth reading.

But will this successfully become the norm? We have to make that happen. We have to look beyond the search engine algorithms, start following the sites we actually care about… and support them. One of the worst things to ever happen to the press in general — not just in gaming — was to set the expectation that everything, everywhere, should be free, always. It's devalued the hard work of people working in the media, it's normalised paying people an absolute pittance for hard work, and it's actively making useful information and meaningful commentary harder to find. None of that seems the slightest bit desirable, but we keep heading down that path.

I already support a few folks I like via Patreon. I think it's probably about time I start ponying up for a subscription or two for sites I think are doing worthwhile work. Off the top of my head, I recommend Aftermath for gaming-related stuff, and 404 Media for tech journalism. Both are doing great work, and both are doing well through support from their audiences.

The issue, of course, is that if you end up supporting a lot of sites in this way, it can get pricy. But then think of it this way: did you buy every magazine that existed every month, or did you have a favourite? There you go. I guess the answer is to read fewer, better sites. And don't support the shittier behaviour of the sites that have already been fed to the Valnet monster, or which are in the process of sliding down that drain. You can solve today's Wordle by yourself, believe me. I believe in you!

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 328: Polygone appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

There was a good piece over on Aftermath today titled "Video game blogs from the 2000s were fast, reckless and very bad at news". The gist of the piece was that video game websites that adopted a continuously updating "blog" format, in contrast to the "magazine" approach many earlier gaming sites had used, inadvertently set in place a format for games journalism that isn't particularly helpful for readers, and is definitely not good for the writers.

The piece goes on to note that the pressure to have [x] number of articles per day, or the fact that many writers were paid (a pittance) by the article placed a great deal of pressure on the site's writers to make even the most mundane, pointless bullshit somehow "newsworthy". It is this, among other things, that led numerous websites to continuously and uncritically quote Wedbush Securities analyst Michael Pachter whenever he spouted off something that was either immensely obvious (the new Grand Theft Auto will probably sell well!) or so utterly vague as to be completely useless.

I wasn't involved in the biz at the start of this, but I definitely felt its effects. When I joined GamePro in 2011, the site was just starting to experiment with a new format for its news coverage. At the start of my shift each day, I was to dig up a bunch of stories and post them as just headlines and a brief summary on a front-page forum as a sort of "news briefing". Then, later in my shift, after the stories had all had a bit of time to percolate, I would write one or two up in further detail based on which of the posts had seemingly been the most popular, judged primarily by comments.

GamePro's readers initially fucking hated it, because the way it was implemented cluttered up the front page of the site's main forums, and I wasn't a huge fan of it, either, because it felt like the time I spent digging up those initial stories — which, more often than not, took the form of either another site having reported on something first, or a press release we'd received that morning — could have almost certainly been better used finding bigger stories to explore, or writing features, or reviews, or anything other than desperately, vainly scrabbling for just a scrap of news, please, guvnor.

That said, over time it did seem to settle down a bit, I broke a few genuine exclusives and provided some good editorial commentary on other stories that were happening, and I was told on multiple occasions that the work I was doing was playing a big role in giving the site a nice uptick in traffic.

Of course, even that uptick was all for naught when IDG Media unceremoniously closed the site and the magazine just before Christmas that year, meaning I woke up one morning all set to do work, only to find that not only was there no job to work any more, all the stuff I had written was about to become absolutely impossible to find due to the inexplicable decision to fold some (not all) of GamePro's material into the unrelated publication PC World. Good stuff. (If you dig deep enough into PC World's atrocious search function, you can still find the odd bit of my stuff, but it's not easy to find, which was great for building a portfolio, I can tell you.)

Something similar happened at USgamer, also. When we started the site, the intention was for the whole thing to be a return to something like the 1up.com days: a primarily personality-driven site, where each of the writers would have their own specialisms, and they would be free to write about whatever they wanted, developing their own little sub-communities in the process.

That went great for a while! I wrote about anime RPGs and visual novels, another chap wrote about racing sims, and all the other people on staff each had their own Things, too. Comments from the community were positive; I can't speak specifics to the other folks' work as I didn't tend to delve into their comment sections, but on my pieces, there was always a great deal of appreciation for my work making USgamer a site that was welcoming and inclusive to a portion of gaming that didn't always get a lot of love and respect from the mainstream sites. This was all pre-Gamergate, I'll add, so there was no culture war bullshit going on; it was just folks who liked anime-style games, including those with mildly provocative content (as there was a fair amount of in the mid-2010s) having an appreciation for a site that didn't just write their favourite games off as being for perverts or whatever.

That lasted for a few months, but then an edict came down from On High (in this case, USgamer's parent company Gamer Network) that we needed to juice the numbers. In other words, abandon everything we'd done to make the site unique and start the daily churn of news and guides that is so painfully familiar to this day. I went from being able to post whatever I wanted to having to get manual approval for each and every news story I wanted to post, and I was outright forbidden from covering certain games.

Eventually, when I was laid off from the site — again, through waking up one morning only to discover I didn't have a job any more — I was forced into spending the majority of my days rejigging and reposting "guide content" from Prima Games, which was also under the Gamer Network umbrella at the time. Out of spite, I stuck with several of my regular weekly columns even with this SEO-juicing bullshit I had been lumbered with, and it was that degree of spite for what the site had become that eventually led me to create MoeGamer: a site where I could play by my rule and cover whatever the fuck I wanted, and fuck traffic numbers.

MoeGamer itself has had a few evolutions over the years. Initially, it was an occasional blog where I basically continued writing my JPgamer column from USgamer — I'd just write about things that interested me, or which I'd happened to play recently, or which had been on my mind. Eventually, when I was working a series of very boring office jobs that had nothing to do with the games press, I launched my "Cover Game" feature, with a mind to giving underappreciated, oft-overlooked titles the level of detailed coverage that your average traffic-baiting triple-A title did. At the height of my boredom in the office, I was posting stuff on MoeGamer daily, including episodes in each multi-part Cover Game feature, plus shorter one-off articles about things that I found interesting, or had happened to collect back when CEX did free shipping (ahh, those heady days), or that I had always loved but never written about.

Today, I actually like my day job, so MoeGamer has had to take a bit of a back seat, but I'm still writing over there sporadically. It's nice to have a space that is for a specific subject, and a contrast from this general-purpose thought-dumping ground that is this blog. I don't have any intention of making MoeGamer "big" or "famous" or trying to make money from it; it's just my site about games I like, and over the last 10+ years I've filled it with a lot of work I'm very proud of. Today, I think I'm more proud of what I've built with MoeGamer than my all-too-brief time as part of the professional games press.

I've pretty much taken the MoeGamer approach with YouTube, too, albeit with more of a focus on retro games than RPGs and visual novels. And y'know what? While my channel hasn't exploded in terms of growth since I launched it (or since I started using it a bit more actively around 2018 or so), it has seen steady growth without me putting any effort whatsoever into either algorithm-baiting or SEO juicing. I have over three and a half thousand subscribers over there right now, and while that's a drop in the ocean compared to the Mr Beasts of this world, I feel creatively fulfilled and proud of what I've done, and am not an awful human being.

So much about the modern Internet sucks, and as Ed Zitron frequently notes, so much of it is about the growth-at-all-costs mindset. It's not just business that this "rot economy" infests; it's creative pursuits, hobbies, specialist fields. So many people are desperate to monetise everything they put online that the actual value for the people looking at the articles, videos and suchlike is diminishing — and the conditions for those producing the work are becoming increasingly intolerable. Throw AI garbage into the mix — and the fuckers who are now flooding YouTube and social media apps with AI-generated bilge that they pump out all day every day — and you have a real melting pot of absolutely rancid filth.

It's definitely a good idea for people who are Into Things to retreat into their own little specialised corners of the Internet, rather than the whole Internet being treated as some great Marketplace of Shit. This is happening to a certain degree, with many communities forming on Discord these days — though Discord itself isn't immune to enshittification, and I suspect we'll all have to find a new home before long — but I do miss the glory days of forums. I really do. I know a few forums still exist, but the 1up.com Radio Boards days are long gone, and every day I miss them a little more.

This has been quite the ramble, and I'm not sure I made a specific point along the way, but hopefully you understand what I was waffling on about. I am grateful to Past Me for setting up spaces like this blog and MoeGamer for me to continue to express myself, and as time goes on I feel personal spaces like these are going to once again become an important part of life online. Because the alternative is wading out into the mires of advertising-laden shit that is the rest of the Internet, and that gets less appealing day after day.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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The post #oneaday Day 314: The news churn appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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.

The post I'm coming to the end of an era, and I feel both relief and sadness. appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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.

The post I finally nuked my Twitter account completely. appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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.]

The post 2495: A Step in the Right Direction appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The post 2493: Japan's Great Games, and Their Lack of Coverage appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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

The post 2461: Gratuitous Self-Promotion appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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.

The post 2446: We've Reached Peak Idiot appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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.

The post 2318: Rebooting in Progress appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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.

The post 2303: Review in Progress appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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.

The post 2263: Fuck This Culture War; Everyone Needs to Rebuild appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

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.

The post 2257: Rebooting MoeGamer appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Earlier today, a rumour broke that Nintendo would supposedly be stopping Wii U production by the end of this year. Nintendo subsequently denied this, of course — even if it turns out to be true, Nintendo keeps an Apple-esque veil of secrecy over all its upcoming plans and doesn't tend to comment on rumours and speculation.

Predictably, as soon as the first report was published, everyone was all over the news like vultures circling a still-warm corpse. The Wii U is arguably tied with the Vita as the gaming industry's favourite whipping-boy, and it honestly makes me feel a little disgusted at the amount of glee some people seemed to be directing at the prospect of what is a very good console — albeit less powerful than its Sony and Microsoft counterparts in this generation — going the way of the Dreamcast.

Nintendo aren't particularly popular with certain groups of gamers at the moment, largely due to the controversy surrounding the English localisations of Fire Emblem Fates and Bravely Second due to perceived unwelcome pressure from sociopolitical groups. Regardless of whether or not the decisions made for those games were mistakes or not — and sales figures for Fire Emblem certainly seem to suggest that there are a lot of people who aren't particularly bothered — Nintendo is still in a unique position in the business, however: they have a console platform that is completely separate from its competitors, which is the only place to play certain games, and which is still the only place to play first-party Nintendo games.

Platform exclusives might not be as much of a big deal as they used to be — both Sony and Microsoft's first-party work in recent years has been a little lacklustre for the most part — but they're still Nintendo's bread and butter. Super Mario, Mario Kart, Super Smash Bros. and Zelda are all staples of any Nintendo platform, and with the Wii and Wii U generations we've added Splatoon and the Xenoblade series to that list. All very strong, polished games; all games that make the Wii U a unique console with a ton of its own character.

This is what bugs me, y'see: the most important thing about a games console is the software library that runs on it — the games. And the Wii U, despite not being the most technologically advanced system on the market, has some of the very best games in recent years available for it. Not only that, but it continues to fly the flag for family-friendly gaming while Sony and Microsoft primarily court the gritty realism of modern triple-A titles. Wii U games, for the most part, are awash with primary colours, cheerful music and the clear self-awareness that they are games; they're not trying to be movies, or works of art, or anything like that: they're just trying to be a ton of fun for their audience — and succeeding.

But despite that strong (albeit small) library of games for the system, it's everything else about Nintendo's system that gets criticised: so much so that the worthwhile achievements of the games — and make no mistake, there are enough good games available for Wii U to make purchasing one worthwhile — get overshadowed. Their online system sucks! (Except all these bits that don't!) Their marketing is rubbish! (You're not helping!) The controller is weird! (Play Splatoon with it, then tell me that's not infinitely better than playing an FPS/TPS with a regular gamepad!) You can't buy new GamePads! (Then don't break it!) Their downloadable games are too expensive! (Then don't buy them!)

I'm being facetious to an extent — there are valid criticisms to be made of much of what Nintendo has done in recent years, but there's also a lot to praise. And when it comes down to it, none of these criticisms are particularly important to the Wii U doing what it is primarily designed to do: to play games.

Which is why I get so frustrated when I see people who don't own Wii U's revelling in its "failure". And why I get so frustrated with a media who will post 57 articles about the latest mediocre triple-A blockbuster game to be released on Xbox One and PlayStation 4, yet barely mention the incredible technical achievement of something like Xenoblade Chronicles X. It's part of an increasingly overwhelming culture of gleeful negativity in all aspects of society: schadenfreude has always been a thing, of course, but there seems to be an increasing number of people out there who do nothing but piss, moan and complain about absolutely everything rather than finding something they do like and enjoying it — either quietly or, as I tend to do, as loudly as possible so other people might be able to discover and enjoy the things I've grown to love.

Still. If the Wii U does fail and does cease production this year, it's all but assured a place in gaming's Valhalla alongside Sega's Dreamcast: consoles dead before their time, with libraries of great games that only a few people played when they first came out, and that more and more people regret getting rid of when they become super-rare a few years down the line. Yep, I'll be holding on to mine for sure; I may not have a ton of games for it, but those that I do have are among my favourites in my game collection.

And no, you may not borrow Xenoblade Chronicles X in five years' time.

The post 2254: The Irritating Trend of Gleeful Negativity appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I made a mistake last night; actually, I made two. I read a Kotaku article, and then I commented on it.

The article in question was Mike Fahey's "Let's See How Long it Takes Senran Kagura to Make You Uncomfortable", which took the form of a Let's Play of the first half an hour of the game — well, the first half an hour of story, to be precise, up to the opening credits — and which was written in an obnoxiously holier-than-thou tone, with Fahey claiming that he is okay with fanservice, but then going on to completely contradict himself by not engaging with latest Senran Kagura game Estival Versus on anything more than the most superficial level.

I'm not going to take that article apart piece by piece because I already did that in my comment, which, within two replies, had me being accused of being a paedophile — how predictable thou art, Internet — but instead I want to talk a bit more broadly about what I think the issue is with coverage of popular but niche-interest titles such as Senran Kagura and Japanese games in general.

Sex.

Not the presence of sexual, titillating, provocative, ecchi or even hentai content; I'm all for that, and happy whenever games feature it in an unabashed manner. But the fact that whenever mainstream games writers come across one of these games, that is all they can fucking talk about.

Let's focus specifically on Senran Kagura for a moment. As legend has it, Senran Kagura as a series exists because creator Kenichiro Takaki wanted to see boobs popping out of the Nintendo 3DS' stereoscopic 3D screen. A shallow inspiration, for sure, and if he'd left it at that — if Senran Kagura had been nothing but pretty girls thrusting their boobs in your face — then the series would have sunk without trace before it even became a series. Instead, we're now confronted with Estival Versus, which is the sixth game in a series that has only been around since 2011 — a series which shows no sign of slowing down and, rather, much like fellow beloved niche series Neptunia, continues to go from strength to strength with each installment.

Surely "3D boobs" aren't enough to carry six games' worth of content, though, I hear you say, and you'd be absolutely right. The reason why Senran Kagura is so popular, and why it now spans four different platforms (Vita, PS4, 3DS and mobile) is because for all Takaki's bluster about "tits are life, ass is hometown", it is extremely, painfully obvious throughout every installment of the series that both Takaki and the people he works with absolutely adore these characters and want to tell interesting, enjoyable, emotional and thought-provoking stories with them. They also want to tell silly, funny, self-parodying stories with them. And they want us to watch these girls grow up, both as young women and as trainee shinobi. In other words, they want us to think of the complete Senran Kagura cast as, effectively, a set of "virtual actors" who can come back time and time again in different games, and fans will follow because they want to see what their favourite characters are up to, not because they want to see 3D boobs.

This is the frustrating thing that pieces such as Fahey's nonsense completely fails to take into account. Sexuality is part of Senran Kagura's aesthetic and appeal, sure, but it's not the main point. There are far more interesting things to talk about, such as the relationships between the girls, the nature of good and evil, the series' extensive use of Japanese mythology (specifically the subject of youma), the juxtaposition between the narratives' slice of life elements and the more fantastical shinobi elements, and how each and every one of those characters has gone on a significant personal, emotional journey since their first appearance in their respective games. (Mobile game New Wave is arguably the exception to this, being your bog-standard Mobage virtual collectible card game with non-existent gameplay, but, what with it being a mobile game, I don't really take it particularly seriously anyway.)

To put it another way, when writing about Senran Kagura — or indeed any other Japanese game that decides to make use of a provocative art style or aesthetic — focusing entirely on the sexual elements and how "weird" they are or how "uncomfortable" they make you feel is doing both the game and the audience an enormous disservice. The majority of the games' audience know what they're getting into with regard to the fanservice, so they probably want to hear more about what makes each particular installment unique; what the most interesting parts of the narrative are; whether they stand by themselves or fit into a larger narrative — that sort of thing. Focusing on sexuality and how "problematic" this sort of thing is is nothing but lazy writing that requires little to no research; indeed, when Senran Kagura 2 came out last year, there was at least one review that proudly stated it was based on less than half an hour of playtime, and I'm honestly surprised we haven't seen more Estival Versus bullshit. The European release isn't until Friday, so perhaps there will be some more then — or perhaps I'll be pleasantly surprised. I'm not holding my breath.

What I want to see, then, is someone covering a title like Senran Kagura and treating the sexy stuff as just what it is: part of how the game looks, but not the point. I'd even like to see someone challenge themselves to write about it without mentioning the sexy stuff at all if they didn't think it was directly relevant to what they found interesting. I want to see someone engaging with it on a personal, emotional level: how did the story make them feel? Which characters did they relate to? Were they particularly attached to any specific pairings of characters? Which characters did they enjoy playing as, and did that match up with the characters they liked as people? Did they learn anything from the experience? Did they come away from the experience feeling like they had taken something away from it, either emotionally or in terms of knowledge or skills?

These sorts of things are surely basic questions when it comes to criticism of creative works, but it seems they're too far beyond your average games journalist in 2016, who would rather post animated GIFs, talk about how jiggly boobies make his swimsuit area feel a bit funny and make implicit assumptions about people who do like this sort of thing — assumptions that are further reinforced by the attitudes of people in the comments section, who make people with differing viewpoints afraid to speak their mind for fear of being branded as something extremely unpleasant.#

The sad thing is that something like Senran Kagura ticks a whole lot of boxes that these hand-wringing idiots claim to want from their games: powerful, non-submissive women in lead roles; the presence of "people of colour" (God how I hate that fucking phrase); stories that acknowledge the complexity of emotions within the human heart and mind; gameplay that reflects the narrative themes; sensitive treatment of distinctly "adult" concepts, including trauma… the list goes on.

And yet because boobs, they either fail to see — or deliberately ignore — the presence of all these things. That's just sad; not (just) because I'm fed up of reading this sort of spastic dribbling on wannabe tabloid sites (not to mention feeling the need to write my own spastic dribbling in response) but because there are a lot of people out there who are deliberately, willfully depriving themselves of some excellent, intriguing, engaging and emotional gaming experiences, all because they can't look past something a bit sexy.

As I said on Twitter earlier today: thank heavens for social media and personal blogs, at least, where people who are actually into this sort of thing can find one another and enthuse about the things they love at great length without worrying about offending the always-offended. I just wish we hadn't been so let down by the media.

The post 2248: Pinning Down the Problem with Coverage of Niche Games Like Senran Kagura appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

While browsing Twitter yesterday, I happened to notice a piece from my former place of employment USgamer pondering that age-old question "which Zelda game is best?" — presumably to tie in with the recent release of Twilight Princess HD on Wii U. (EDIT: I've just noticed that to add further clickbait to injury, it was split into three completely separate articles, one covering 25-18, another covering 17-11, and a final one covering the top 10.)

Now, "which Zelda game is best?" is a reasonable question to ask — I've asked it myself, back when I was getting back into the series a month or two ago — but it is a question that has been answered many hundreds of times already, both by gaming websites ("professionals") and the general public, too and, to be frank, we haven't had a genuinely new Zelda game for quite a while. Moreover, it's not a question that there is a definitive answer to; the entirely subjective stuff of playground arguments and, indeed, Internet arguments.

I found myself getting a bit annoyed at the sight of this article, though, because it just felt like such a lazy, obviously clickbaity attempt to cash in on the recent Zelda release, and just a lazy idea for an article in general. As I say, it's an article that has been written many times before by numerous different websites, and one that really didn't need to be written again. It is far from the only example of this sort of ever-present non-discussion coming up in games journalism as a side-effect of clickbait culture, though, and it's frustrating to see; when there are thousands and thousands of great, interesting, remarkable, unusual, weird games out there that these writers could be covering and they instead post the same article that they themselves have probably written before for a different site, they are doing a bad job writing about games.

With that in mind, here is a list of game articles I would like to never, ever see ever again on any website, not because they're necessarily bad ideas for articles, but because they've been done many, many, many times before. Use your imagination. Write something new.

• Which Zelda Game is Best?
• Those Zelda CD-i Games Sure Were Shit
• Which Mario Game is Best?
• Which Metroid Game is Best?
• Which Nintendo First-Party Franchise is Best?
• Gosh, Dark Souls is Hard
• Dark Souls isn't Hard, You Just Have to Learn How to Play
• [obscure indie game] is the Dark Souls of [unrelated genre]
• Goodness Gracious, Battletoads was Hard
• That One Level in Battletoads was Really Hard, Even Compared to the Rest of the Game
• Which Final Fantasy Game is Best?
• Where Did Final Fantasy Lose its Way?
• Player Makes Thing in Minecraft
• The Ten Best Xbox One/Xbox 360/PlayStation 3/PlayStation 4/Wii U/3DS/Vita Games
• PlayStation 2 Classics That Deserve a Re-Release (actually, you can have this one if you pick something that isn't immediately obvious to everyone who ever owned a PS2)
• The HD Remasters We Really Want (see above)
• Ubisoft is Releasing an Open-World Game
• Activision is Releasing a Call of Duty Game
• Mobile Games Make Lots of Money
• There Aren't Enough Women in Games (bonus points if you cry "sexism" on a game that actually has excellent female characters)
• There Are Still People Playing World of Warcraft
• I'm Scared of Boobs
• Gamers are Horrible People
• Anita Sarkeesian Says Something
• Vita Games Don't Sell Many Copies
• Vita is Dead
• PlayStation 4 Has No Games
• Xbox One Has No Games
• Wii U Has No Games
• Wii U is Dead
• Nintendo is Dead
• Hah, That Super Mario Bros. Movie was Rubbish, Wasn't It?
• [Franchise] [vaguely related verb] onto [platform], e.g. Ridge Racer Screams onto PlayStation. (You can have this if you deliberately make the verb a completely inappropriate non-sequitur. Ridge Racer Masticates onto PlayStation)
• Here's a Weird Thing from Japan, Judge It
• Can Games Be Art?
• Sonic the Hedgehog Used to Be Good
• What's Next for [annualised series]?
• Michael Pachter Says Something Blindingly Obvious
• [popular annualised franchise] Sells [large number] of Copies
• A Movie that People Who Like Games Might Like Came Out Recently, It Has Nothing to Do with Games but We Think You Want to Hear About It Anyway
• Look, Star Wars

Ugh. It's depressing writing this list and realising how many times I've seen most of these on several different sites. We all know exactly why it happens, of course; these are the sorts of articles that either provoke an emotional response (and, consequently, clicks through to the comment section) or that are likely to be ranked highly on Google for unimaginative people searching for information.

In an ideal world, writing about games should be about the love of games, and the authors' passion for the things they're writing about should come through in their writing. Sometimes it does, but it happens a lot less frequently than it used to, and that's really sad.

At least I try and do my bit to show my passion for the things I love. I suggest you do too; if the press aren't going to provide, it's up to the public to provide the more valuable insights.

The post 2246: Games Journalists, Please Think of Something More Imaginative Than These Articles appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Hello! I'm rather pleased to announce that, as the header says, the second edition of the Digitally Downloaded magazine, put together by me and Mr Matt Sainsbury (from the site of the same name), is now available. You can read it here, or hopefully it will embed correctly below.

The topic is "fanservice", but we're not limiting ourselves to the tits and ass variety of fanservice; no, we take on fanservice in all its forms, including life and hometown as a deliberate aesthetic choice, continuity fanservice, plain ol' titillation and fanservice as characterisation.

The specific games we cover in the magazine range from Senran Kagura to Hatsune Miku: Project Diva F via Final Fantasy XIV and Sonic and Sega All-Stars Racing Transformed — quite an eclectic mix of games to cover, I think you'll agree. There's also an interesting interview with some Aussie developers who are making their own take on the Zero Escape/Danganronpa formula and deliberately incorporating fanservice for an authentically Japanese-style feel, plus some lovely pictures of Digitally Downloaded mascot Danica "DeeDee" Dee.

I'm really pleased with how this project is coming together, and response to the magazine so far has been good. With each issue, we'll try something new, and hopefully we'll be able to make this a long-running feature. I'm certainly having a blast doing games writing the way it used to be done… or rather, a distinctly 21st century take on print format games writing.

Next issue we'll be covering the thorny topic of "not-games" — those experiences that critics are quick to (often unreasonably) brand "not a game" for not falling into neat genre categories, or perhaps not incorporating traditional "gameplay" in the way you might expect. Yes, we'll be exploring the walking simulators, software toys, visual novels and other interesting interactive entertainment experiences of the world in an attempt to figure out why these titles "not being games" bothers some people quite so much.

Matt and I hope you enjoy the magazine; please share it around and let people know about it! If you like what you see, please consider throwing us a few quid via Patreon; you can find Matt's page here, and mine here.

The post 2243: Issue 2 of the Digitally Downloaded Magazine is Now Available appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

A videogame called Unravel will be released tomorrow. It may be a good game, and it is certainly a good-looking one, with a soft focus and hazy depth of field; tree leaves rustle convincingly and thick snowflakes pile up as the camera pans ever right-ward. It appears to make use of this tactile world for a series of physics-based puzzles, like moving rocks to get up on ledges and creating makeshift vines with which to soar across little ponds. These may be very clever puzzles, building toward a resolution that is very satisfying, but I will never know, because I will never play Unravel, and that is because its protagonist, a little red yarn-man named Yarny, can go fuck himself.

This was the opening to an article from Kill Screen, a site that originally positioned itself at the very spearhead of "new games journalism", boasting both a print magazine and an online component that would offer something a little different from the usual consumer advice/PR/news, previews, reviews cycle that most games-focused sites had provided up until that point.

I remember Kill Screen launching; it was actually at the first PAX I went to — I even still have a copy of their "Issue Zero" that I picked up at the show somewhere. It looked like it was going to be a great read, and a bold new frontier for games criticism.

Look at that opening paragraph again. Look at the last half of the last sentence.

"I will never play Unravel, and that is because its protagonist, a little red yarn-man named Yarny, can go fuck himself."

Needless to say, I do not feel the same way about Kill Screen as I did when it was first launched. I hadn't felt the same way for quite some time, to be honest, since its take on intelligent criticism had started to veer rather too heavily in favour of heavily ideological-based arguments rather than actual analysis of the art on its own merits — a scourge that the entire games press has been afflicted with for the past few years — but this article today has cemented my feelings.

What I did want to talk about, though, is the staggering hypocrisy of some people — within and outside games journalism — when censuring this article, and it most certainly has received almost universal censure from all angles. Deservedly so.

The key thrust of the article is that the author has no plants to play Unravel because he doesn't like the look of it. He doesn't like the look of the protagonist, and he doesn't like the fact that the game looks like it's going to be a narrative-centric, emotional experience that emphasises artistry (in the traditional sense) over game design.

You know what? Those are perfectly valid reasons to not want to play a game. There are lots of games I don't want to play because I don't like the look of them, because I don't like that type of game, because the subject matter doesn't appeal or because I know people I don't like love them. Rational or not, pretty much any reason you can think of not to play a game is an absolutely valid one from your own personal perspective: we're already living in an age where it's literally impossible to play every single game out there, even if all you did all day every day was play games, so everyone, consciously or not, has their own set of selection criteria for what they put on their plate at any given moment.

What isn't okay, though, is then picking on something that 1) you confess doesn't appeal to you and 2) you admit you have no intention of playing (and therefore speaking from a position of authority on) anyway — and then writing a critical article about how it's symptomatic of everything wrong with modern gaming. The author has some fair points — that some developers believe emotional manipulation of the player is an end unto itself, and that this isn't the same as creating something truly artistic — but they are completely invalidated by the position of ignorance from which he is speaking: he's criticising Unravel and games like it without any knowledge of what they're actually like — he's speaking on the basis of assumptions, not taking the time to research it for himself.

Where else have we seen this happen? Oh, right, with pretty much every niche-interest Japanese game released over the last few years. We've seen series like Senran Kagura berated for having boobs in them, but little to no discussion of their more progressive aspects such as homosexuality, sexual kinks, forming friendships across ideological barriers and accepting people for who they are. We've seen my longstanding favourite Hyperdimension Neptunia all but rejected from any cultural significance for being "hypersexualised" and having characters that both possess breasts and breathe, with little to no mention of the series' perpetually on-point satire of games and game culture, excellent writing and characters strong enough to carry games in a wide variety of styles. We've even seen people branding the "Amie" feature from the Japanese version of Fire Emblem Fates as "creepy" and expressing pleasure that it had been removed, despite displaying no understanding of its context, either in-game or within the Japanese cultural context of "skinship" or "naked association". And I could go on. For pages.

Sound familiar? Why, yes, in all the above cases, the critics of these titles were speaking from spectacularly ill-informed, ignorant positions — in some cases not even playing the games, or barely playing them for more than a few minutes in the instances where they did bother to boot them up at all — and, thus, were speaking from a position where they were unqualified to offer meaningful, trustworthy criticism of these games. And yet because games journalism is very much a cult of personality, people who didn't know about these games already take these critics' words at face value — assuming they're a high-profile critic like Jim Sterling, or at least from a site seen as "reputable" (i.e. big) by the masses — and don't bother to question them. And this leads to these games being pushed further into the niches they're already in, and to a lot of people missing out on experiences that they may well find themselves pleasantly surprised by.

The worst thing it does is contribute to the overwhelming air of negativity and cynicism that pervades modern games writing. Many members of the press are extremely burned out on the increasingly penny-pinching tactics of triple-A publishers — day-one DLC, preorder incentives, platform-exclusive content, betas-that-are-not-betas-they're-demos-that-you-can-only-play-if-you-preorder — and this causes the exhaustion and cynicism to infect their explorations of anything that might be just slightly outside the norm. Oh, sure, there's plenty of indie darlings that get elevated to "gaming Messiah" status — Undertale, The Witness and Firewatch all spring to mind in recent months — but poor old Japan repeatedly gets shafted by people who, like the author of the Kill Screen piece, have no intention of exploring them in sufficient detail to provide adequate comment and criticism on them.

Life is too short — and there are too many games out there — to waste time on negative articles about "why I don't like this" or "why I don't want to play this" or "why this doesn't appeal to me". So why does it keep happening? I'd much rather read a games press that is more positive in tone: willing to criticise where appropriate, but where the thing first and foremost in every critic's mind is the celebration of this amazing, growing, constantly changing medium that shatters cultural borders into something the whole world can truly understand and enjoy together.

You don't have to love everything. I certainly don't. But how about we think about keeping our mouths shut about the things we hate, let the people who do love them enjoy them, and we focus on the things that we love, too. Doesn't that sound much nicer than "I have no intention of playing this game because I don't like the look of the protagonist"?

(Oh, and for the record, I have no interest in playing Unravel either; Braid and Limbo were enough to put me off arty platformers for quite some time. I would not, however, dream of attempting to offer criticism on it having not played it — and I wouldn't even feel comfortable commenting on Braid and Limbo because I don't feel I played them enough to be well-informed before tiring of them. Now, I'm off to go and play some disgusting degenerate pervert Japanese role-playing games and probably fap myself into a frenzy in the process. Or perhaps just enjoy the things I love rather than bitching about things I hate and have no intention of trying to enjoy.)

The post 2211: On "Burn in Hell, Yarny" appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Ladies and gents, I'm pleased to announce the very first issue of Digitally Downloaded: The Magazine, put together as a collaborative effort between me and Matt Sainsbury, head honcho of the site of the same name.

You can read the issue here for free, or hopefully it will embed below if the magic of the Internet does its thing properly:

The magazine is something Matt and I have been kicking around for a while now. We both have a background in print publications, and both have a strong preference towards the sort of long-form pieces you get in magazines. This kind of format is something which clickbait sites tend to discourage these days unless they're being particularly provocative with the things they're saying at length, so really starting this magazine was an opportunity for us to create something that we would want to read.

The broad intention behind the magazine is to "theme" each issue around a particular subject, then focus in on that subject with a main feature and a series of articles about games that typify the subject. In the inaugural issue, we went for the concept of the unreliable narrator: an established trope in literature, but one that games are just starting to get to grips with. Our investigations took us across the world, from Japanese visual novel Steins;Gate to "walking simulator" Everybody's Gone to the Rapture via the chaotic genius of Deadly Premonition.

There are doubtless some kinks to work out (most notably the fact that the web-based reader appears to inexplicably cut some of the letters off on some of the page footers, seemingly at random, despite the source PDF looking just fine) but we're planning on making this a regular — hopefully monthly — thing going forward, and we hope you'll support and enjoy it.

A pre-emptive thank you for taking the time to read through our hard work, then, and we look forward to having more to share with you in the near future!

The post 2207: Proudly Flying the Flag for the Magazine Format appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Yesterday, a new Kickstarter launched. This is nothing unusual in itself, particularly in the video games space, but the subject matter of the Kickstarter was. Specifically, it was a Kickstarter to localise Muv-Luv, a popular Japanese series of visual novels that originally appeared in 2003 and subsequently spawned a number of sequels, manga and anime spinoffs as well as a ton of merchandise.

Since its original release, Muv-Luv in its various incarnations has been extremely well-regarded, and it's probably not unfair to say the series as a whole is an influential, culturally significant work; some even credit it with the creation of the popular "Moe Military" trend most recently seen in shows like Girls und Panzer and Kantai Collection.

The localisation of Muv-Luv  is Kind of a Big Deal, then, particularly as it's gone un-localised for so long — officially, anyway; fan translations have been around for a while, but the legality of these is always questionable, particularly as enthusiasts sometimes turn to piracy in order to acquire the game in order to patch it, and in some cases the fan-translated version is even illegally distributed with the original game files included. The launch of this Kickstarter is significant in that it aims to bring a well-established, important series to the West officially and with the full cooperation of the original development team.

What's even more significant about the Kickstarter is that approximately six hours after it launched yesterday, it had already smashed through its initial $250,000 funding goal. At the time of writing, still less than 24 hours since the campaign launched, it's sitting at $313,571: well on the way to its first stretch goal of new CGs, music and unlockable content at $400,000, and putting Android and Vita ports within reach at $500,000. There are 39 days still to go on the campaign, and the excitement of enthusiasts is palpable.

And yet…

Nothing about this on Kotaku, a gaming site that has "otaku" as part of its name.

Nothing on Gamespot, one of the biggest gaming sites in the world, either; the site's last use of the word "luv" was for a Nintendo 64 game. That's three console generations ago.

The only mentions of it on Eurogamer are forum threads about the Japanese charts.

No mention of it at all on USgamer, even with their supposed experts on Japanese games and visual novels in residence.

And nothing on the behemoth that is IGN.

This isn't to say that Muv-Luv's Kickstarter success hasn't been reported anywhere, of course; specialist Japanese sites such as Siliconera, Gematsu and Crunchyroll have all posted stories about the campaign, and social media has been abuzz with talk of the series, too.

But, as we've seen above, nothing at all on the biggest, most recognisable sites in the world — even those known to have writers on staff who are interested in Japanese games.

There's an argument, of course, that Muv-Luv is niche interest and consequently not worth covering on these sites because there wouldn't be significant interest. To that I would point out that on the front page of Eurogamer there is currently a story about a showering simulator getting banned from Twitch, on Kotaku there is a story about a Steam game called The Flame in the Flood that you probably haven't heard of… IGN, meanwhile, has a story about a spoon that can take selfies... a story that turns out to be a video, as is so frequently and frustratingly the case these days.

In other words, "niche interest" shouldn't be a barrier to coverage if that sort of stuff gets written about. And it could be argued without too much difficulty that Muv-Luv is of greater "importance" to the interactive entertainment medium as a whole than some showering simulator. (Seriously?)

Unfortunately, this is pretty much par for the course, it seems. Here's what, by way of example, Kotaku had to say about previous culturally significant visual novel localisation projects The Fruit of Grisaia ($475,255 raised via Kickstarter, plus subsequent sales on Steam and Denpasoft) and Clannad ($541,161 raised via Kickstarter):

Yep, sweet FA aside from a couple of offhand mentions of their anime adaptations.

I know exactly why this is, of course: Muv-Luv, Clannad and The Fruit of Grisaia are all seen as "too small" to be of interest to the broad, general audience of a site like Kotaku or Gamespot, and perhaps there's a point there: Muv-Luv has reportedly sold approximately half a million copies to date in Japan (plus over three million pieces of merchandise), which is small fry compared to today's heavy-hitters. And yet there's a bit of a paradox here: these sites have the reach and influence to make more people aware of these works — which are well-established as being of particularly high quality as well as culturally significant on their home turf — but instead they choose to focus on other things, be it predictable clickbait articles about whichever big-budget game has come out this week, or pieces about whatever the current indie gaming flavour of the month is.

Even so, and even taking into account the limited amount of time a games journalist has to report on the news each day — something which I know about first-hand, remember — it's kind of a shame that the impressive success of this campaign and others like it haven't even been acknowledged by the bigger, more mainstream sites. And yet they'll take the time to complain about the Sorceress' tits in Dragon's Crown, or how Omega Labyrinth only appeals to kiddy-fiddlers, or how Senran Kagura is a game about nothing but breasts.

It's little wonder that fans of Japanese games — and many gamers in general, for that matter — are turning their back on the games press of today.

The post 2075: Where's the Luv for Muv-Luv? appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Hi critics of the world. I'm going to try and keep my anger in check today, but I'm making no promises, because this heap of crap from (once?) respected critic Jim Sterling was brought to my attention earlier today.

I don't want to dwell on Sterling's piece specifically too much because, to be honest, there's even less substance there than there was in this piece for Vice UK a little while back. Instead I want to talk about a more general philosophy that I think would be of benefit to everyone: critics involved in the industry, PR representatives whose job it is to get the word out about their clients' games, the developers and publishers of said games and, of course, the various audiences who are interested in all the different types of games out there.

It's actually a pretty simple philosophy, and it would go a long way towards preventing me from ever having to write another post like this, which, to be perfectly honest, I would be very happy about.

It goes like this: if you're not going to give something a chance, I'd rather you simply didn't cover it at all than spew ill-informed nonsense.

It makes perfect sense, surely: you don't have to write about something you personally find repugnant/offensive/boring/unengaging/rubbish; PR representatives don't have to look at the pipes in their ceiling and wonder if they can support the weight of a dangling human body; developers and publishers get their creative efforts into the hands of people who will actually respect their work, even if it's not "flawless" (and nothing is flawless); and audiences aren't belittled by people branding things they enjoy with pejorative statements.

You'd think it'd be that simple. You'd think that, with all the diversity in the modern gaming landscape, that supposedly respected critics like Jim Sterling and Mike Diver would recognise that something like Senran Kagura 2 is not going to interest them in the slightest, and, rather than posting provocative nonsense on the Internet about them, which only has the effect of riling fans up and cementing the attitudes of the prejudiced, they would simply move on to something that they are willing to engage with, that they are willing to explore in detail, that they are willing to do justice to.

Because coverage such as the pieces from Sterling and Diver recently — and God knows, there's a bunch more of crap like this out there — helps no-one, not even the critics themselves. In demonstrating a clear unwillingness to even attempt to engage with a work they find personally objectionable, they undermine their credibility in the eyes of people who are interested in it. Note: this doesn't necessarily mean that the people who are interested in it like it — there are plenty of Senran Kagura fans out there who prefer the Vita and PS4 games to the 3DS installments, for example — but rather, it just means that the critics in question become someone whom those audience members will not trust the opinions of in future.

As I say, this is easy to do. I don't like Call of Duty and Battlefield, so you know what? I don't talk about them at all, except on the occasions where I've decided to give them a try just to ensure that I really do dislike them and I'm not just against them because they're popular. I don't understand in-depth strategy games — I wouldn't say I dislike them, because I'm often enamoured with the concepts, I just don't "get" them — so, you know what? I don't talk about them, either, because I can't do justice to them. I don't like Dota 2, so you know what? Of course you do by now.

The only reason that critics like this put out pieces like they have done recently is to get a reaction. And it pisses me off that it works. In an ideal world, we would be able to ignore this sort of thing, and I would love to do that, but as I've commented previously, the world we live in right now means that it's important to call attention to bad practice like this, because there's not enough in the way of high-profile good practice to counteract the damage that bad critics like this are doing. Sure, there are sites like Niche Gamer, Operation Rainfall and the like who give this sort of thing a fair chance — as well as following the eminently sensible idea of having specialist writers rather than generalists attempting to cover everything and doing justice to nothing — but their reach is still limited compared to more well-established, profitable, commercial sites like Vice and high-profile Patreon beneficiaries like Sterling.

As I said before, it's important to fight. I'd love to see outlets like Niche Gamer and OpRainfall grow into sites that can truly compete with the big boys, but I can't help thinking before that happens there really needs to be a dramatic shift in how content is produced for the Web, and how people pay for it. Because it all comes down to clickbait; Sterling's piece today is provocative nonsense, pure and simple, designed to rile up the Senran Kagura fanbase and allow those who dislike Senran Kagura the opportunity to laugh at their expense. And the only reason he felt it was appropriate to publish this — much as Vice thought it was appropriate to publish that pile of crap the other day — is because it would get people to click on it. Well, great job at being a critic. Ebert would be proud.

To summarise: if you don't think you can do justice to something, or feel unwilling to put in the effort to engage with something on anything more than a superficial level, do us all a favour and don't cover it. There's plenty of other stuff out there that needs your attention, so rather than wasting everyone's time — including your own — how about putting your critical faculties to use on something you're actually interested in?

Just a thought.

The post 2065: Some Thoughts for Critics appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I grew up with computer and video games journalism all around me.

I mean that literally: while I was growing up, both my father and my brother wrote for a newsstand magazine initially called Page 6, then subsequently New Atari User once it merged with another publication called, unsurprisingly, Atari User. My father regularly wrote about flight simulators and making music with computers and MIDI instruments, and my then-teenage brother had a steady stream of incoming Atari ST games which he would play, explore and then write about in chunks of anywhere between 250 and 1,000 words according to how much discussion the game in question warranted. Pretty much our entire collection of Atari ST games was made up of review copies; I think I remember purchasing a grand total of about four or five games altogether during the 16-bit era.

I was both fascinated by and proud of the work my father and brother did at the time — so much so that, in that way that kids do, I tried to imitate them. I would fire up AtariWriter on the Atari 8-bit — for some reason I always enjoyed using the 8-bit computers just that little bit more than the 16-bit ST — and write my own reviews of things that I'd played, trying my best to imitate the style and structure of my father's and brother's work. I would then print them out on our noisy Epson-compatible dot matrix printer and file them away in a blue binder that had come home from my father's day job at some point — it once housed the IBM "Manager of Managers Programme" material, and I have no idea why I remember that — and pretend that I, too, was a published writer.

Some years later, I had the opportunity to follow in my family's footsteps and provide my own contributions to New Atari User, and I took to this with great enthusiasm, reviewing games such as Psyclapse's Defender-alike Anarchy and taking an in-depth look at Atari's revolutionary but regrettably flawed forays into the handheld and home console markets, the Lynx and Jaguar. Meanwhile, by this point, my brother was getting ready to finish his school career and contemplate his future, whether that be heading off to university or jumping straight into a job.

He chose the latter option, finding himself working for Europress up in Macclesfield on a revolutionary new games magazine called Games-X. Games-X was remarkable for one main reason: rather than being monthly, as most magazines were at the time, it was published weekly. This meant that it had the opportunity to be a whole lot more timely with the things it was writing about, and essentially acted as a precursor to the immediacy of Internet writing we have today. It ran for a decent number of issues before it folded, too, and was a pleasure to read, combining a somewhat irreverent, humorous editorial voice with authoritative, knowledgeable content from staffers who knew their stuff about gaming.

I followed my brother's career with great interest and pride as it developed through a series of further magazines on which he took increasing levels of responsibility — among them Mega Drive Advanced Gaming (whose speculative feature about what Sonic 2 might be like from well before any details were actually revealed to the world remains one of my favourite video game magazine articles of all time, alongside its Super Mario 5 counterpart in its sister publication Control) and the deliciously classy PC Player — before eventually hitting what can arguably be called "the big time" in the games magazine industry of the late '90s by landing the role of Editor on PC Zone.

Such was my interest in the games press and pride in my brother's career that when it came time for my Year 10 Work Experience placement at school, I chose to take the awkward route and refuse any of the convenient positions my school would have been able to arrange for me, instead opting to spend a couple of weeks down in London with my brother helping out in the PC Zone offices. I spent a lot of time making tea and being mothered by art editor Thea, but I also had the opportunity to write a full review of the non-3D accelerated version of Virtua Fighter and write the captions for some screenshots in a number of different articles.

I was sold. This was what I wanted to do, and I was good at it. In the subsequent years, I found myself freelancing both for PC Zone — both during and after the time my brother was in charge, and in all honesty, even when he was editor, he wouldn't have allowed me to contribute if he didn't have faith in my abilities, so this certainly wasn't a nepotism situation — and the Official UK Nintendo Magazine. Most of the time I found myself writing walkthroughs, which were things that no-one else really wanted to do, but which I enjoyed doing because it gave me an excuse to play through some favourite games in great detail while writing about them. (I liked it less when my preview copy of Turok 2 on N64 crashed on the last boss and I had to play the whole thing through again on a retail copy just to get a single screenshot, but thankfully this only happened once.) I even found myself writing a whole book on Carmageddon which was subsequently included in the Virgin Megastores special edition of the game one Christmas, and which can now be found as a .PDF e-book included with GOG.com's rerelease of the game.

It would be a number of years before I'd have the opportunity to do some more work in the games press. I went to university, I trained as a teacher, I did some teaching work, I had a nervous breakdown, I did some other work. Eventually I found myself working alongside some friends I'd met on 1up.com — a site that my brother had taken charge of, initially as an extension of the magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly, but which subsequently became very much its own thing — on a site called Kombo. Kombo wasn't a particularly big site, nor did it pay especially well, but during an extremely rough period of my life — shortly after my first wife had left me and I knew that I was going to end up having to move back home — it provided me with a connection to some other human beings as well as a trickle of income and a reason to get up in the morning. I proved myself to be pretty good at the whole news reporting thing, picking out interesting stories and presenting entertaining editorial spins on them where appropriate.

Kombo, unfortunately, folded after a while, and eventually I found myself living back at home again. After a period of unsuccessfully looking for work that I wanted to do, I stumbled into an opportunity to write some freelance articles for GamePro, yet another publication which my brother had worked on but had subsequently moved on from. I wrote the articles, they turned out well, and eventually found myself with a regular position on the site's staff, covering the news shift on UK time so the site would have plenty of content by the time its native North America woke up. Again, I made a point of picking out interesting stories that other sites weren't necessarily covering, and this helped to make GamePro a distinctive publication rather than one of the many identikit blogs out there. My contributions were effective, too; on a number of occasions, I was responsible for some significant traffic spikes to the site thanks to the interesting articles I'd written — though ultimately, sadly, it was all for naught as the publication folded, with most of its online content lost and the rest devoured by its sister site PC World.

A few years later, I was contacted by Jaz Rignall, with whom I'd previously worked at GamePro. Jaz was working on a new project that was hush-hush at the time, but he wanted me on board. Said project turned out to be USgamer, a North American counterpart to the popular Eurogamer. My job would be both to cover the news shift on USgamer, much as I had done on GamePro, as well as "localising" Eurogamer articles and republishing them on USgamer to give them a wider audience. Initially, we were given almost total editorial freedom with USgamer, with each of the writers contributing articles in their own particular areas of expertise and interest, and this made for a site with a very distinctive editorial voice that reminded me of 1up.com back in the glory days. Unfortunately, however, this proved too good to be true, and in the interests of that ol' bugbear of online publications, traffic, we all ended up having to rein it in a bit and taking a more structured approach to "content strategy".

It was during my GamePro-USgamer years that I first became conscious of something I hadn't seen before in the games press: an apparently growing level of hostility towards the audience. This was at its clearest when Mass Effect 3 was released and the player base objected to what they felt was a poor ending to the series as well as EA's increasingly exploitative DLC strategy, which in this case even went as far as to excise a whole playable character from the game if you didn't purchase a particular edition. Suddenly, the press turned on gamers as a whole, declaring them "entitled" and claiming that they didn't have a right to complain at BioWare choosing to end their series in that way. There's an element of truth in there, of course — a work of art is its creator's responsibility, not its audience's — but the wilfully aggressive manner in which this argument was presented just didn't sit right with me at all.

Around the same time, we started to get a lot more in the way of sociopolitical commentary in gaming. My friend Jeff Grubb, with whom I'd previously worked on Kombo, found himself on the receiving end of an Internet dogpile after reporting on some off-colour comments that Twisted Metal and God of War creator David Jaffe had made, but without editorialising on them or condemning them as being "wrong". Such was the ferocity of attacks he suffered from supposedly respected critics such as Brendan Keogh and Justin McElroy that he had to retreat from Twitter for a while, and I became genuinely concerned for his safety. Thankfully he was all right, and was eventually able to dismiss the whole situation — though when the GamerGate thing broke last year, he once again came under attack for not condemning the people hurling abuse at Zoe Quinn and instead just reporting on the facts.

I was starting to feel a little uncomfortable about this. This was not the games press which I had admired from afar and eventually from within as I was growing up. I wasn't sure what was happening, but I sure as hell didn't like it.

Things came to a personal head for me when USgamer published a review of Hatsune Miku Project Diva F for PlayStation 3 in which the reviewer Dustin Quillen repeatedly referred to the game as "creepy" and "voyeuristic" and, in an earlier draft which was thankfully edited out, referred to people who might enjoy the game as "degenerates". Both I and my colleague Cassandra Khaw took great exception to this, particularly as prior to this, we had both made USgamer a site that was inherently friendly to fans of Japanese games — an aspect of gaming which most modern gaming publications were, by this point, either ignoring completely or devoting a disproportionately small amount of their attention and effort towards. We made our feelings known, and, after a bit of arguing, this situation eventually resulted in the creation of my weekly JPgamer column for USgamer, a feature through which I made a number of very good friends, and which my audience seemed to appreciate very much indeed.

Things proceeded comfortably for some months from here, though I was conscious that the sociopolitical commentary surrounding gaming — particularly with regard to the treatment of women, spurred in part by Anita Sarkeesian's high-profile Kickstarter campaign, and with regard to representation of people outside the heterosexual cissexual majority — was ramping up. This was particularly apparent on sites like Polygon, which appeared to have interpreted its original mission of "reinventing games journalism" as "posting as much inflammatory nonsense under the pretense of 'progressiveness' to blow things out of proportion as possible", which, to be fair, is something Kotaku had been doing for years and still continues to this day.

Now, I've commented a number of times with regard to my feelings about this, but I'll reiterate them here: I have absolutely no objection with people using theoretical frameworks such as feminism to talk about games — they're a mature art form and means of creative expression by now, and as such it is absolutely possible to analyse them in these terms. Where the problem comes is when only a single ideology — in this case modern, borderline radical "third wave" feminism — becomes completely dominant to the exclusion of all others, and where any attempt to question, challenge or refute the claims made by this ideology is met by ridicule at best, harassment and abuse at worst.

This problem only gets worse when writers with no background in artistic criticism try to jump on board the feminist bandwagon by throwing in terms like "problematic", "sexist" and "misogynist" at every opportunity, often without backing up their assertions with evidence or explanations of why they feel [x] is problematic, sexist and/or misogynist. This is high-school English stuff; even at the age of 34, I remember my English teacher Ms Derbyshire encouraging us to "PEE all over our work" by making a Point, giving an Example and Explaining its context and relevance, but this simply doesn't happen a lot of the time; "sexist" and "misogynist" in particular are used as catch-all terms to look "progressive", but because of the amount of power these words have managed to attain over the last few years, we've reached a situation where mainstream journalists now seemingly feel that they don't have to back them up with evidence, explanations or theoretical context.

Which — finally — brings us to yesterday's Senran Kagura 2 article, why it's unacceptable and why it's worth criticising rather than ignoring. That Senran Kagura 2 piece was the perfect example of what I've just described: he refers to the game as "unapologetically sexist" without giving any evidence other than the fact that the girls have big breasts and some of the art is sexualised. Pro-tip: "sexualised" or "sexy" is not the same as "sexist".

The reason the author doesn't give any evidence is that, despite appearances, Senran Kagura is not sexist. Senran Kagura as a series features an increasingly large cast of capable female protagonists who don't need men to help them out, save them or tell them what to do. They're comfortable with their bodies (for the most part — characters like Mirai are an exception, but this is used as one of the aspects of her overall character development) and many of them take ownership of their sexuality, with characters such as Katsuragi, Ryouna and Haruka being pretty up-front about their tastes and fetishes. Each game passes the Bechdel Test, as flawed and stupid as it is, with flying colours, and the overall story and lore of the Senran Kagura world is fleshed out to a surprisingly comprehensive degree, repeatedly refuting the author's shallow assertion that "it's about breasts".

Now, the reason why we shouldn't stand for this, why we should criticise this and why we shouldn't ignore it should be clear: passivity simply sends the message that it's okay to carry on like this. Passivity is why things have gotten to the situation they are now; people haven't been willing enough to stick up for themselves and demand better from the press that is supposed to be representing them. The perpetually offended outrage brigade already have the press on their side, whereas fans of games like Senran Kagura and its ilk only have each other to turn to. The "feminism as default" ideology adopted by most of the mainstream press these days means that there is absolutely no way that games such as Senran Kagura will ever get a fair shot at coverage and criticism because of an overwhelming unwillingness to engage with them on anything more than the most superficial level possible. And that's unfair both to fans of the games, and to the people who make, publish and localise them for the fans.

Let me close with a few relevant quotes from the SPJ Code of Ethics, and how they relate in particular to the Senran Kagura piece but also to games journalism as a whole.

Journalists should:

– Take responsibility for the accuracy of their work. Verify information before releasing it. Use original sources whenever possible.

– Remember that neither speed nor format excuses inaccuracy.

– Provide context. Take special care not to misrepresent or oversimplify in promoting, previewing or summarizing a story.

– Gather, update and correct information throughout the life of a news story.

That piece breaks all of these principles. It is inaccurate, it does not verify its information, and it does not provide any sources. It outright boasts about its lack of context, misrepresents and oversimplifies the subject and, following its publication, the author has proven that he is unwilling to "gather, update and correct information" regarding the game. It may not be a "news story" as such, but it should still be held accountable, and the audience should demand better.

Journalists should:

– Balance the public’s need for information against potential harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance or undue intrusiveness.

– Show compassion for those who may be affected by news coverage. Use heightened sensitivity when dealing with juveniles, victims of sex crimes, and sources or subjects who are inexperienced or unable to give consent. Consider cultural differences in approach and treatment.

[…]

– Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity, even if others do.

[…]

– Consider the long-term implications of the extended reach and permanence of publication. Provide updated and more complete information as appropriate.

That piece has the potential to cause if not outright harm then certainly discomfort. Consider if someone who knew nothing about Senran Kagura read nothing but that post, then met another person who told them that they were a huge Senran Kagura fan. What impact would the author's piece have on the first person's perception of the second? I'd like to think that the first person would have enough in the way of critical faculties to realise that the second person probably isn't a sex offender, but as human beings we are inherently judgemental creatures, and there will be at least a hint of negative prejudice there.

Not only that, but the piece shows woeful insensitivity towards a variety of people, including victims of sex crimes. He also shows a complete lack of consideration for "cultural differences in approach and treatment" with regard to Japanese games, in the process pandering to "lurid curiosity" by giving woefully ill-informed impressions of a creative work he spent no more than an hour with in total.

And on top of that, there is no consideration for the long-term implications of the extended reach and permanence of publication. Consider an extreme case, if you will: a lonely, depressed individual who finds great comfort in video games and who draws strength and courage from the things they enjoy, particularly if they're as rich in story and characterisation as Senran Kagura is. Now consider how that lonely, depressed individual might react to reading that piece, with its dismissal of the thing that is so important to them and its implication that enjoying it makes them a deviant at best and a criminal at worst. The potential consequences aren't pretty — granted, as previously noted, this is an extreme example, but you need to take these things into account.

The final thing I want to address is why we should give pieces like that any attention in the first place instead of just ignoring them: the argument runs that giving them attention just "gives them what they want", and falls into the trap of clicking on clickbait.

Well, aside from the fact that not criticising these severe lapses in judgement sends the implicit message that It's Okay To Keep Doing That, we live in an age where it is almost painfully easy to completely nullify clickbait through the use of archive sites and adblockers. In doing so, we are able to acknowledge, discuss and criticise bad and potentially harmful examples of writing without providing any benefit to the outlet on which they are published. Some may see that as a low blow, but it's the Internet equivalent of "voting with your wallet", and it's important to do so.

Why? Because as is so often said that it's become a running joke now, games journalism is broken. Completely broken. Until we get that message across, sites like Vice are going to continue doing a disservice to significant proportions of their audience — and that, to me, is completely unacceptable. So let's do something about it.

TL;DR: I used to love games journalism, now I hate it, because it hates me for the things I love.

The post 2059: Why I Care, and Why It's Important to Fight appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Had some exciting conversations today, and I think it's probably all right if I tease a few details of what I've been up to… and what I'm going to be up to.

After my post the other day regarding game criticism, the modern games press and ways that we might all do things a bit better, I got to talking with a few people, one of whom was Mr Matt Sainsbury over at Digitally Downloaded. Matt and I have been trying to find an opportunity to work together for quite some time, but the whole thing of there really not being much money in the enthusiast press scene made me hesitant. I didn't want to get myself into a situation where I was working my ass off and creating work I was really pleased with and not being able to be appropriately compensated for it, in other words. (This isn't anything against Matt or Digitally Downloaded, I might add; rare indeed is the enthusiast gaming site that actually pulls in enough money to pay its staff, which is one of the big problems with the ad-based revenue model I talked about.)

Anyway, long story short: our conversations about magazines attracted a decent amount of interest, and so we decided to discuss things further. And then we decided to act on these discussions by attempting to put together an honest-to-goodness magazine about games, providing the sort of coverage that we want to read, and covering the sorts of games that could really do with a bit more love from the press in general.

Our approach is going to be to take a different "topic" or "genre" (the latter inspired by literary criticism rather than game mechanics) for each issue, and then focus the whole issue around it. We're nailing down the specifics of the complete format, but this will allow us the flexibility to write some long-form essays about topics that interest us, as well as shorter reviews for games that fit in with the topic. Crucially, going with a topic-based approach rather than keeping things tied to whatever has come out recently means that each issue can effectively be "timeless" and collectible, remaining constantly relevant rather than only being relevant for the month of release. The traditional periodical model of games magazines is of no use whatsoever in the age of instant information on the Internet, so it's much better to use the print medium for things it's particularly suited for — in this case, long-form writing presented in a visually attractive manner. (Hopefully, anyway; it'll be my first time flexing my DTP muscles for quite some time!)

Here's a couple of cover mockups I and another Digitally Downloaded staffer put together earlier; that should give you a nice little teaser!

If you think all this sounds quite similar to what we were doing with the Squadron of Shame SquadCast during the period where we experimented with topic-based shows, you'd be absolutely right — though the nature of print means that the approach is somewhat different. Regrettably, we've really struggled to get people together and/or fired up for recording further podcasts, so that's been on the back-burner for a while. In the meantime, then, there is this project, and I'm really excited about it.

I've written a lot of things over the past few years — not just on this blog, but professionally, and in other personal places, too — but there's something that will always be magical and wonderful about print media to me. The prospect of being involved in print media always makes me far more excited than the possibility of getting my words on a website — and always has done. I think it's to do with the potential for having a tangible, physical object in your hands at the end of it all as the fruits of your labours rather than "just" words on a website. I mean, in both cases the important thing is still the words that you've written, but there's something I just love about being able to hold something I've written, pick it up, show it to people, read it on the toilet and whatever.

So yes. That's what I'm going to be up to alongside the other work I'm doing at the moment. We're aiming for our first issue to release around the end of next month (probably just digitally initially, we'll look at genuine physical print options later), so please watch out for it and consider grabbing a copy! Also, if you're interested in participating and contributing, let me know, privately if need be!

The post 2008: The Wheels Are in Motion appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The article makes a lot of good points, but the one which stood out most strikingly to me was the suggestion that "via clickbait, many companies believe they can do away with the concept of demographic". And it's absolutely true: the concept of a "target demographic" when it comes to Internet-based publications is fast becoming a thing of the past in favour of casting a wide net in the hopes of snagging as many people as possible.

It feels like it's getting more and more transparent, too; I don't know if this is simply because I'm aware of it from the inside — during my latter days at USgamer, I spent a lot of time publishing walkthroughs for new games to draw in the clicks, so believe me, I know clickbait — or whether outlets really are getting more and more transparent. But when, for example, sites like Forbes Games (games, note) are publishing articles about something that happened in last night's Game of Thrones (a TV show), or sites like Polygon and Kotaku are trying their level best to relate real-world events to video games in as ham-fisted a manner as possible, something is very, very wrong.

I've mentioned before that I very much miss the "golden age" of magazines in the mid-to-late '90s. Magazines each had a distinctive voice, style and target audience. Some, like the Official Nintendo Magazine, were aimed at kids, and used layout, language and presentation to match. Others, like Zero, were aimed at slightly older people who enjoyed a bit of irreverent humour. Others still, like ACE, were aimed at the general games enthusiast, not someone loyal to a particular platform. And others still, like Page 6/New Atari User, which my father, my brother and I all used to contribute to, had a tightly focused target audience of platform enthusiasts who were into more than just games.

While certain sites do still have "voices" to an extent thanks to well-known writers, there's less and less to distinguish between them, particularly as the default "thing to care about" for these publications these days appears to be Social Issues like sexism and racism. But I find it hard to take these articles seriously when they clearly very much fall into the clickbait category — Polygon's recent piece on The Witcher 3 maybe possibly probably being racist was a double whammy, in fact, combining two pieces of bait: the name of a popular current release, and an accusation that said popular current release is, in some way, bad and wrong. Whether or not it's "right" to read the piece in that way — or in a manner which suggests If You Like The Witcher You're Okay With Racism — is kind of besides the point; people do read it that way, and they quite understandably take umbrage with the implications suggested by articles like this. Same with Kollar's piece on Dungeon Travelers 2 from a while back, though in that case the game was largely unknown and it was the publisher Atlus that was the "household name" to draw people in and then slap people around the face with a bit of This Is Problematic bullshit.

I remember before this dark period of games journalism started when a lot of people were attacking Kotaku for different reasons to today. In fact, there's a relevant entry on this very blog from that very period, in which I explored the possibility that Kotaku might have actually been doing what I'm arguing for here: pursuing a specific demographic.

Targeting a specific demographic isn't a negative thing, and we need to stop thinking that it is, because if you spread yourself too thin, you don't serve any of your audience to their satisfaction. One size does not fit all, and not everyone wants to read about the same things. And that's fine! What we need is more diversity of opinion and more places for people to go and get different viewpoints. And that's something we're not getting at the moment — at least not from the commercial sites. It's pretty telling that the small, independent sites out there are doing a far better job of this than the big names — and it's absolutely criminal that sites like this are, at present, unable to make money thanks to the business' continued reliance on the clickbait model rather than something more fair and less manipulative.

Ultimately it's best to find places you enjoy reading that you feel "speak" to you, but if I may give a recommendation to those of you who are into similar sorts of games to me: do check out Digitally Downloaded; editor-in-chief Matt Sainsbury and his team work hard to provide interesting, thought-provoking and well-written pieces of criticism about a diverse array of games as well as anime, manga, film and literature. They manage to produce pieces of relevant social and cultural commentary and criticism and relate them to games without pointing fingers or pandering to anyone; its writers are passionate and believe in the things they write, and the result is a site I continue to enjoy and respect even as I've switched off from reading most of the mainstream games media these days. It'd be great to see sites like this grow, and the industry as a whole evolve.

Will it happen? Well, that's partly up to you, isn't it?

The post 1966: Yes, Please Kill Clickbait appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Sony's handheld is a wonderful platform. It's arguably the most distinctive of all the currently available platforms — with the possible exception of Nintendo's 3DS — thanks to its unique library of titles, and it's very much carved out its own niche.

By virtue of this, however, the platform is, by definition, not ideal for everyone. Despite originally being marketed as the most powerful handheld on the market — and I don't have the tech specs to hand, but certainly from casual observation I don't doubt that claim — Vita is not a platform on which you should expect to play a lot of "triple-A" games. And this is what has led some people to regard it as a "failure"; a seeming lack of the big hitter franchises like Call of Duty, Assassin's Creed and Battlefield on the platform coupled with the apparent lack of support from both triple-A studios and, at times, Sony itself doesn't paint a particularly rosy picture.

But here's the thing: it doesn't matter. It may not be entirely what Vita was originally positioned as, but Vita's niche serves a passionate market. Several passionate markets, in fact: specifically, the market that enjoys localised Japanese games (or, indeed, those who like to import, since Vita is region-free, unlike the 3DS) and the market that enjoys interesting, creative and/or experimental independently developed Western games. Between those two niches — which have a certain degree of crossover — Vita has an astonishing library of quality games, even without the heavy hitters of the industry.

And who wants to play visually spectacular triple-A games on a tiny screen, anyway? Triple-A isn't playing to the platform's strengths at all, which explains why since an initial few attempts — most notably an Uncharted game that apparently wasn't all that bad but not as good as the PS3 installments, and an absolutely terrible Call of Duty spinoff — triple-A developers are paying the console little to no mind. (Ubisoft is something of an exception to this, though their smaller titles are very much designed with an "indie" philosophy in keeping with the Vita anyhow.)

Vita's strength is its portability, and its best games are those that cater both to short play sessions and longer marathons. The many, many quality role-playing games that grace the platform are testament to this: although RPGs are typically regarded as somewhat slow-moving, in most cases those that have been designed specifically for Vita have been put together in such a way that you can fire them up for a few battles and still feel like you've had a worthwhile experience. The Neptunia games are a good example; their dungeons are short and their battles super-quick, but if you want to sit down with them for a few hours at a time as opposed to a few minutes, there's plenty of depth to explore there, too.

So what's my point? Well, mostly bafflement, as expressed by a number of us Vita enthusiasts on Twitter earlier today when we saw yet another article snippet berating the handheld for no particularly good reason. We found ourselves questioning exactly why it's treated this way, and why it's still regarded as a "failure" or "dead". The misinterpretation of Sony's recent "legacy platform" comments certainly didn't help, though one can lay at least part of the blame at the feet of the press for that one for poor reporting.

Another possible perspective is to do with what I've just talked about: the niches that Vita serves. A while back, Polygon's Phil Kollar — a supposed JRPG expert and enthusiast — posted a particularly obnoxious article berating Atlus for localising Dungeon Travelers 2, a dungeon-crawling RPG starring a cast of cute girls that has a lineage which can be slightly indirectly traced back to an eroge called To Heart 2. (Read my response here, if you're bored.) Kollar lambasted the game while clearly having little to no knowledge of it whatsoever and no desire to explore or investigate it, and he's not the only one to post such a piece. In other words, it's little surprise that popular perception of Vita suffers when it's typically ignored in favour of the big-budget PC and console triple-A flavours of the month — except, of course, when something "problematic" rears its head and gets all the "progressive" types in a tizzy.

It's probably a gross oversimplification to consider that Vita might be suffering at the hands of the press because many of its games don't fit neatly in with the "progressive" ideology that most mainstream gaming sites are presently trying to peddle — this viewpoint ignores the numerous successful Western indie games, including the more experimental, arty end of the spectrum, for example — but I can't help but feel there's a bit of truth in there. To return to Neptunia, for example, we're talking about a series of games that has grown from very humble beginnings in 2010 into one of the most popular, recognisable, prolific and varied series in the whole Japanese niche gaming market, but is it ever acknowledged by the big sites? Is it bollocks.

Anyway, fortunately, despite the perpetuation of the "Vita has no games, Vita is dying/dead" narrative, the platform is very much alive, well and beloved by those who have taken the time to understand what it's doing and engage with it. I have a healthy collection of Vita games in both physical and digital format; a somewhat more dedicated friend on Twitter has over a hundred games for his Vita in both physical and digital format, and the new releases out of Japan don't look like slowing down any time soon.

One thing that's become increasingly clear to me as the years have passed is that the press is rapidly losing relevance, and the numerous "social commentary" pieces that regularly rear their ugly heads are an attempt to move with the times and evolve. Fair enough, but that's not what I want to read in most cases; meanwhile, that which I used to get from games magazines and websites — enthusiastic discussion of games I've played, and recommendations of games I might like to play — I now get from social media, via personal interactions with the people who actually matter when it comes to this sort of thing: the people who are actually playing them.

As a former member of the games press, it's a slightly frustrating and disheartening situation to see. But so long as Vita keeps coming out with great games that I want to play — and two new ones arrived just this week (Moe Chronicle and Operation Abyss), so I don't think that will be a problem — I'll keep talking about it, and I'm far from the only one who feels this way, thankfully. It's just a pity it's so hard to make people outside our circle of enthusiasts listen.

The post 1965: Some More Words About Vita appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

There's a joyful cheer from the crowd; a roar of approval and a vibrant expression of intense approval. But I can't join in; I know it's not real.

It's literally not real. It's a virtual crowd in a virtual stadium, applauding, cheering and yelling in delight at a goal that didn't happen. But that doesn't stop some of the other real people who are nearby joining in with their own whoops, hollers, shouts and cries.

I'm at Wembley Stadium in London, spiritual home of football — at least in the United Kingdom. Some of my companions clearly feel that coming here is like having the opportunity to visit the Holy Land, particularly as we're in one of the mysterious event rooms that the public don't usually get to see. Even those who aren't looking at the screen seem excited; they're pointing at pictures on the walls, and at the view through the window out onto the pitch.

I envy them a little as I stand back, sipping my fizzy water and munching on a canape, wishing desperately that there was someone else here who wanted to have an open and frank discussion about the situation in Syria. But there isn't. I'm alone; so very alone, even though this room is full of people. I'd find it distressing if I weren't so used to it, but this is my life thanks to the choices I've made: doomed to forever operate on the fringe of events like this, unable to participate or even put up a convincing facade of excitement at the abject tedium I so despise unfolding on the screen in front of me.

The virtual crowd cheers again, and there's a roar of approval from my assembled colleagues; apparently whoever it is that has the controller right now has scored an impressive goal against the carefully selected PR person: I'm guessing they play well enough to show the game at its best, while simultaneously being able to let my peers win and give them a sense of satisfaction and send them away with a positive impression of this dreadful, interminable, never-changing series of awful games.

But do any games truly change? After all, we're still shooting people of colour in obviously Middle Eastern allegories. We're still relentlessly collecting objects in what is clearly a potent metaphor for capitalism that shoots straight over the head of most people. We're still upholding traditional gender roles and tacitly encouraging the approval of the patriarchal status quo — a status quo that objectifies and exploits women — over more progressive attitudes. And we're still playing the same old sports; outlets for attitudes of toxic masculinity that are only distinguishable from the never-ending stream of games allowing testosterone-fuelled men to indulge their wildest, most perverse of rape culture fantasies by the fact that they are slightly less violent than Call of Duty and Destiny.

There are women in FIFA 16, which I suppose is worthy of some praise, and football games by their very nature include a healthy number of people of colour. But the outcry from the vast majority of the Internet over the inclusion of women's teams in this installment indicates that the world of sports games is still very much a man's world — but only if you're the right kind of man, of course. I'm not the right kind of man, it seems; I'm happy to see women included in the game as a step forward for progressiveness rather than, as some particularly obnoxious Facebook comments had it, the chance to "combine boobs and football".

I finish my fizzy water and head for the table to pour another. I feel a touch on my shoulder and turn around to see who is trying to attract my attention. It's the PR person who was playing the game a moment ago — I think her name was Ashleigh — and she's giving me a gentle smile.

"You don't look like you're having a good time," she says.

"No," I say. "I'm not."

I want to elaborate, to tell her that attending this event is a living hell for me, that there is literally anything I would rather be doing than taking a look at a game I have no interest in that represents a sport that I despise with absolute passion owing to its use for continuing the dominance of the prevalent toxic patriarchal attitudes in society. But I don't. After my admission, I simply take another sip of water.

"You should give the game a try," she says, still smiling — though I have a feeling that it's changed from a genuinely warm smile to a false one. She proffers a DualShock 4 controller; I contemplate it for a moment, its wonderful ergonomic curves bringing to mind the body shape of a beautiful woman who cares not for whether she's "beach body ready", but then I shake such borderline misogynistic thoughts from my mind lest Ashleigh can see the beast of suppressed lust in my eyes and dismisses me as yet another perpetuator of rape culture rather than the progressive feminist that I actually am. "You might enjoy it."

"I don't think I will," I say, giving her a smile of my own. Then I put down my unfinished glass of fizzy water, head for the door and don't look back.

It's raining outside. The black clouds overhead mirror the darkness in my soul. There's a flash of light and a clap of thunder, and I realise, as if given a message from a non-specific divine entity, that I am wasting my life.

(Disclosure: This article is a parody of this monstrosity that hit the Interwebs yesterday to much well-deserved derision.)

The post 1960: Preview a Game Like Polygon appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The games press used to be the very definition of "enthusiast", in that it was, well, enthusiastic. Upcoming new games were anticipated with excitement, unexpectedly brilliant games were celebrated, legendarily awful games became famous in their own right. In most cases, coverage was handled in a light-hearted, humorous and often irreverent manner, not afraid to crack politically incorrect jokes and generally seem like the people responsible for it were actually having a good time.

These days, I go to a site like Polygon and often come away feeling like its writers actively hate the medium they claim to specialise in. It seems like every other week there's a new big controversy of some description, and these sites seem to take it upon themselves to take a Firm Moral Standpoint on such issues, usually with the strong implications that If You Don't Agree With This, You Are An Awful Shit and Should Probably Be Killed.

Sometimes these controversies become justifiably big deals — although, to be honest, it's getting harder and harder to think of genuine examples, simply because of the amount of noise spouted on a daily basis. It's the "Boy Who Cried Wolf" syndrome; the more you shout and scream and rave about How Awful Everything Is, Oh My! *faints* the less likely people are to take you seriously. Particularly when it's just so incongruous; I can't quite work out if the abrupt gear-change into "by the way, this is misogynist and probably racist too" in Polygon's otherwise very positive review of The Witcher 3 is hilarious or tragic, but either way, I can't take it seriously any more, because it's just parroting the same points I've seen over and over again, without any real consideration of context.

I think back to the days when I used to read games magazines before the Internet came along and ruined that industry. I think back with fond memories on the specific magazines I used to read — mostly the ones my brother worked on, for obvious reasons — and can actually remember a lot about them: the articles therein, the games covered, the reasons I liked taking them into the toilet to read while I was having a shit even if I'd already read them from cover to cover multiple times. Advanced Computer Entertainment (aka ACE); Zero; Mega Drive Advanced Gaming; Control (later Super Control); ST Action; Atari User; Page 6; The Official Nintendo Magazine; N64 Magazine; PSM; GamesTM; PC Player; PC Zone; EGM; OPM; and doubtless some others I've forgotten — I don't remember any of these magazines ever taking a Firm Moral Standpoint on controversial issues, and I certainly don't ever remember them directly attacking either portions of or their whole audience. (Well, except for Charlie Brooker's "Sick Notes" section in latter-day PC Zone, in which people wrote in to him specifically to get insulted.)

Meanwhile, today, we have a far more fast-moving games press in which articles are generally disposable, forgettable, designed to get quick, immediate clicks right now and, for the most part, not remain "evergreen" and stand the test of time. That means a rise in tabloid-style controversy and moral panics, and a decline in writers having the opportunity to express their own specific, creative voices or specialisms. And that's really sad.

One positive thing that is coming of the growing sense of dissatisfaction a lot of people like myself feel with the big gaming sites is the fact that smaller sites are on the rise, and doing a good job from a content perspective of catering to niches that are typically underserved by the mainstream publications. The situation isn't ideal as yet — most of these outlets aren't able to pay their staff, since making money from writing words on the Internet is harder than it's ever been, given people's reluctance to pay for things online, and even greater reluctance to allow themselves to be advertised at — but it is undergoing a change.

I'm glad to see that, in some respects, but sad in others; as time goes on, we move further and further away from what I now recognise, with the rose-tinted spectacles of +1 nostalgia, as the Golden Age of Games Magazines. Fashions come and go, of course, but with the way the media has been advancing over the course of the last ten or twenty years, I don't see us returning to anything like it any time soon.

The post 1941: What Happened to the Games Press? appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Bloodborne is a big release for Sony's PlayStation 4 platform and the latest unofficial installment in the notorious "Souls" series that previously brought us Demon's Souls, Dark Souls and Dark Souls II. (And, if you're a From software purist, the King's Field series, too.)

The Souls series is one that I have tried on a couple of occasions to get into, but never really managed to click with. I played a bit of Demon's Souls when it came out after I heard a friend enthusing about it — I was particularly enamoured with its creative online features — but set it aside quickly after I became frustrated at having to repeat the same 30 minutes of gameplay over and over and over again just for, in some cases, taking a wrong turning and running into an enemy that is, I later learned, intended to act as a signal that You Should Not Be Going This Way. I tried it again recently and got a little further, but didn't really feel much in the way of incentive to go back — it's very light on explicit narrative (although very strong on implied narrative), and I'm someone who pretty much needs an explicit narrative push as an incentive to continue playing something — so I'm probably going to call it a day where I am. I decided to give the series another go when Dark Souls first appeared on PS3 and Xbox 360, but found myself similarly frustrated and not really enjoying myself, and consequently I haven't touched Dark Souls II and have no intention of ever playing Bloodborne.

All this is a little besides the point I want to talk about today, but I just thought I'd slot it in anyway for context. The short version is that while I respect the Souls series for what it's doing, I don't really personally enjoy it. And that's fine; I don't expect everyone to enjoy every game out there, but at least to give things a chance before writing them off. And, for me, the Souls series has had its chance, but I certainly don't begrudge anyone who does enjoy it their enjoyment.

Instead, what I did want to talk about today relates tangentially to the Souls series — and specifically Bloodborne — right now, but is a fairly widespread issue at any given point. And that's the fact that, given the majority of the Internet's continued reliance on ad-based revenue models, if something is the latest hotness, then that thing needs to have the absolute shit covered out of it to ensure people keep coming back day after day to, in theory anyway, devour every little piece of Bloodborne (or whatever the latest greatness is at the time you're reading this if it's far in the future) information that there is out there… even if said information isn't particularly interesting or adds anything meaningful to broader gaming discussion.

The reason I bring this up is today I saw a headline on one site that simply read something along the lines of "You can complete Bloodborne even if you've never beaten a Souls game". Now, that may be true — I can't comment with any authority on whether Bloodborne is more or less accessible than the Souls games — but frankly, I'm not sure I really care, and thus I don't really know who this article is for. The people who like Souls games are probably on board with Bloodborne already, while the people who don't like Souls games — like me — have had three games (plus DLC) to try and learn to love them; in other words, if they're not already on that train, they're probably not taking that trip.

Again, though, the amorphous audience that article is for is besides the point: it's a symptom of the aforementioned issue where whatever is "big" at any given moment has to have hundreds of articles written about it at every opportunity, even if said articles don't really add anything to broader gaming discussion. And the sole reason is to try and attract people to the page and consequently earn some ad revenue. It is, in theory, providing people with the content they "want" to read, but in fact it's more focused on the potential revenue that can be brought in by the eyes on the page.

Clickbait, in other words, though perhaps not in quite such a hyperbolic manner as sites like Buzzfeed and its ilk employ.

For a business, it is, of course, important to try and make money through appropriate means. But in doing this, the online press — and the games press in particular — does a disservice to its audience, because unfortunately when you're writing informative articles or criticism, you can't simply ignore your audience and focus on the bottom line, because otherwise you'll end up without an audience. And it may be the case that the audiences for a lot of sites really are lapping up anything Bloodborne-related with aplomb, however vapid it might be. But I know I'd much rather see two things than the situation we have at the moment, where every major site's front page is practically interchangeable with one another: I'd like to see different sites covering different games at different times, and I'd like to see much broader coverage of the medium as a whole, perhaps with more sites specialising in particular genres, subject matter, types of game or even theoretical/ideological viewpoints.

In order for that to happen, though, we need a fundamental rethink of how we consume content on the Web, and a fundamental rethink of how content creators can make money from that content. Because as wonderful as it is for people to do things "for the love", it would be even more wonderful for people to be able to make a living out of doing the things that they enjoy — and that they're good at. At the moment, people who are writing for sites are mostly slaves to the SEO stats, with occasional exceptions, and that's a real shame.

We are starting to see steps in the right direction, at least. Services such as Patreon, IndieGogo and Kickstarter provide alternative means for people and companies to get some money coming in. Several sites have experimented with subscription models, with varying rates of success. And the audience's growing dissatisfaction with the big names in the business over the course of the last couple of years has encouraged smaller sites to take some bold steps to distinguish themselves and make themselves unique: specialising and declaring that they're going to focus on a particular type of content; listening to what the audience says it wants (and, importantly, doesn't want!) and providing that rather than relying on provocative clickbait or predictable coverage of The Latest Big Releases; exploring alternative revenue streams other than just ads; and giving voices to people — and viewpoints — outside the sometimes rather incestuous-seeming echo chamber that is the inner circle of professional games journalism.

We're certainly a far cry from the golden age of newsstand games magazines, where individual publications had very distinctive voices, styles and ways of covering games. I don't know if we'll ever be able to go back to something along those lines, but I'd much prefer it to what we have today.

The post 1905: Gr8 B8 M8 appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I'll kick off with an immediately contentious statement: I completely understand why the term "social justice warrior" is used as a pejorative.

I will immediately qualify this by saying that I do not think the concept of social justice is unimportant, nor that it is something that should be swept under the carpet and ignored. There are still problems with attitudes towards marginalised groups in society. There are still groups out there whose sole reason for existence is an irrational, burning hatred of certain people. There are subsets of passionate fans in all interest groups — be it video games, sports, movies, books, anything — who do not have a positive influence on the community as a whole.

However, I believe that for the most part, human beings are fundamentally decent people. I've met my share of assholes, sure, and seen evidence of people being mistreated, insulted and even threatened online — although, on that note, I will also say that we're collectively a little hasty to jump to the descriptor "death threat" when it isn't always particularly accurate. But I've also met enough decent people in my time in this world and on the Internet to find it difficult to believe that the world is the seething morass of hatred and prejudice that the most passionate advocates of social justice — the aforementioned "social justice warriors" — believe it is.

Let me clarify my earlier statement. The term "social justice warrior", as I see it — and as many others see it, too — does not simply apply to anyone who believes in social justice, otherwise there would be no need for it; it would simply be a means of describing pretty much everyone who isn't an asshole. Rather, it describes, as noted above, a particularly passionate and outspoken advocate for social justice — and someone who is not above using particularly unpleasant tactics to try and get their point across. Tactics like public shaming; insulting; "othering"; discrimination; ignoring opinions based on socioeconomic, ethnic, gender or sexuality groups; dogpiling… the list goes on, and, you'll notice, these are all things that anyone who truly stands for social justice should really be against the use of, regardless of who they're aimed at. A "social justice warrior" would discount my opinion on all this, for example, because I'm a white, straight, heterosexual, cissexual male: the very definition of the concept of "male privilege" that many of them cling to so very desperately.

Why is this a problem, though? It's easy enough to ignore and filter out other bile-spewing groups based on hatred — when was the last time you accidentally stumbled across neo-Nazi ravings without deliberately going looking for them, for example? — so why not just tune out these people? Well, the answer to that is simple: unlike other hate-spewing groups, these loudmouths are increasingly infiltrating mainstream popular culture having positioned their approach as being "correct" from a moral perspective. My experience of them has largely been in the video games sector, but from what I understand, they've had a fair crack at numerous other communities over the last few years, too.

Let me explain why they bother me so much, and hopefully, my dislike of their tactics will become a little clearer.

A few years back, a games journo friend of mine — Jeff Grubb of GamesBeat — wrote a news story. I forget the exact details of the story (and can't seem to find the original since GamesBeat's numerous refreshes over the last few years), but it involved, as I recall, Twisted Metal creator David Jaffe making some contentious statements that involved the hypothetical punching of a woman in the face. Jaffe wasn't advocating for violence against women, of course; doing something like that directly would be tantamount to career suicide; if I remember correctly, the context was something to do with playing multiplayer games and reactions to winning and losing. The details of the story itself are somewhat unimportant, anyway; what I'm really concerned with here is the reaction to it.

Jeff wrote the piece on Jaffe's statements from a factual perspective — as a reporter, without editorialising. Different publications approach this sort of thing in different ways: more blog-style sites like Kotaku have no problem with their authors saying exactly what they think about a particular issue, whereas GamesBeat's parent site VentureBeat is more of a business-centric publication that is less concerned with drama and more with simply reporting what has been going on.

Because Jeff didn't condemn Jaffe's statements in the article, however, he attracted the ire of an early incarnation of the "social justice warriors". The situation became worse as he attempted to defend himself on Twitter; as time passed, more and more people, including high-profile games journalists with large followings, started attacking him — rather than Jaffe, who arguably should have been the subject of their ire, though even that's debatable, given what I recall of the context surrounding his comments — and publicly shaming him, denouncing him as an "example of white male privilege" and effectively setting hordes of followers on him. I became seriously worried for his safety and wellbeing while this was going on.

This wasn't an isolated incident, either. Numerous times over the last few years we've seen outspoken members of the industry with social justice leanings adopt the tactic of publicly shaming and bullying, even going so far as to threaten people with ending their career. Most recently, we've seen Polygon's Ben Kuchera attacking a member of EA's customer engagement team over the latter's concern over community-made Twitter "blacklists"; in previous months we've seen the widely celebrated writer Leigh Alexander threatening to end people's careers, feminist critic Mattie Brice throwing a hissy fit when someone called her out on a sexist joke and all manner of other atrocious behaviour. It simply isn't acceptable.

All this isn't to say that these people can't voice their concerns. What I do find myself violently disliking about this culture of public shaming that has been growing over the last few years, however, is that there's little to no "right of reply" in most cases. Once someone is branded as a misogynist, sexist, transphobe, racist or whatever by these self-appointed crusaders of morality, there's no recovery from it. They have no opportunity to say "well, hang on a minute, here's why you're not quite right there…" and no opportunity to criticise the arguments being levelled against them. More often than not, critics of Kuchera, Alexander et al are swiftly blocked, silenced and/or mocked, simply because the "social justice warrior" position has been successfully positioned as the "correct" attitude. The same thing happens when anyone attempts to start a conversation surrounding feminist critic Anita Sarkeesian's Tropes vs Women video series; while she does attract plenty of hate-filled bile — and that, let's be clear, is always unacceptable — she and her team appear unwilling to engage with or discuss legitimate criticisms of her work, and often post deliberately provocative statements seemingly with the sole intention of drawing the trolls out to point and laugh at them.

Now, I've been standing on the sidelines throughout all of this. I have, thankfully, never been attacked by these people, even when I was working in the mainstream games press on GamePro and USgamer, even when I was writing about notoriously provocative and controversial games such as Senran Kagura and other titles from Japan. Perhaps I was just too small fry for industry "megaphones" (as Alexander calls herself) to bother with, and I'm not complaining; the fact I made a point of remaining positive while acknowledging these titles weren't for everyone helped me build up a decent audience who appreciated the work I did, particularly as it was in stark contrast to the majority of other sites out there.

So why does all this bother me so much? Well, because it's deeply, deeply frustrating, and because the culture of fear that these people are perpetuating online makes me very nervous about speaking on certain topics for fear of being ostracised. More important than that, however, is the feeling that it's driven a wedge between me and a number of friends whom I no longer feel particularly comfortable talking to because I know they've drifted more towards the social justice side of the fence — or, in some cases, become outright zealots. I miss those friends greatly, and it makes me extremely sad that I can't talk to them any more simply because I don't share their ideological viewpoint — or, rather, I do, but I fundamentally disagree with the methods through which they go about expressing that viewpoint.

What should people do instead? Simple. Champion the things that you're fond of and believe in, without putting down other people for what they enjoy. Diversity isn't just about creating experiences that "everyone" can enjoy, though that's part of it. Diversity is also about creating experiences that appeal to specific audiences. There's nothing wrong with that; in fact, it makes for more interesting, more focused pieces of entertainment that feel personal and relatable. Cater to men, women, heterosexual people, homosexual people, cissexual people, transgender or transsexual people, white people, black people, Asian people, anyone you like. Accept that some things are not "for" you — though that doesn't need to stop you from finding enjoyment in them, as the number of otome games I've enjoyed over the last few years will attest — and celebrate the things that are. If you believe that there aren't enough works catering to the groups you consider yourself to fall into, throw your support behind those that do or even make your own. Just, for God's sake, don't ever position yourself as The One Correct Attitude and point the finger of shame at anyone who doesn't fall within your own specific worldview, because that's where the majority of this nonsense is coming from.

I'm not a misogynist. I'm not a sexist. I'm not a racist. I'm not a transphobe. I'm not even an anti-feminist or a men's rights advocate. I just want these "social justice warriors" to understand that what they are doing is not, in fact, championing diversity; it's stifling conversation and creating a culture of mistrust between developers, players and press — and between friends.

I hate it. And I wish it would go away. And I want my friends back.

The post 1883: Social Justice, Public Shaming and Why I Want My Friends Back appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

"If you're a writer writing about video games, I recommend you get your face in front of a camera to prepare for the future."

My initial reaction to this was a fairly straightforward "fuck that", but then I contemplated it a bit further.

I still don't agree with the premise. The written word is a powerful medium and to unequivocally declare, as some people do, that its days are very much numbered is to show that you're extremely blinkered. Yes, there is a large audience out there who enjoy video-based content, but they're just one group who occupy the somewhat younger end of the spectrum. And while this is an important group to court — particularly as they're one of the key demographics for the video game industry — this doesn't somehow mean that all the 30-40 year olds who have grown up with computer and video games since their inception are immediately irrelevant. What it should really mean is that content should be provided to cater to these different audiences, who have very different wants, needs and expectations from media relating to their favourite things.

I'm not sure how representative an example of a 33-year old gamer I am, but personally speaking, I'm not a big fan of video-based content for the most part. I can't stand Let's Plays, for example — I'd rather play the game myself, and there's no way I'm going to watch someone play The Binding of Isaac or Minecraft for literally hundreds of episodes — and I'm not a fan of the numerous variations on the "angry dude shouting about something" formula that proves quite popular.

Exceptions for me are things like TotalBiscuit's "WTF Is…" series, in which he spends 20-30 minutes giving a good overview of a diverse array of PC games, including everything from the options available in the menu to how the game itself actually works; Yahtzee's "Zero Punctuation" series, which doesn't rely on game footage at all and is instead actually more of a well-written comedy series that happens to explore specific games as its central premise; and Extra Credits' (usually) intelligent discussions of all manners of game culture. These are all carried by strong personalities and well-written content, and for me represent the best that video game videos (you heard) have to offer.

Thing is, though, I'm not always in the mood to sit down and watch a video — particularly longer stuff like TotalBiscuit's 20-30-minute affairs. I'm not always in a particularly ideal situation to watch a video, either; perhaps I'm on my phone in an area of poor signal or in an environment where I can't put sound on — in both those cases, this makes video almost completely useless as a medium of delivery, whereas text is absolutely fine in both scenarios.

Despite all this, though, I can sort of see why more and more people are turning to these video content producers. The overall quality of video games writing is rapidly going down the pan, to my eyes, and it's at least partly due to the continuing reliance on the clickbait advertising model. The need for page views has lead to many individual writers (and even publications) jumping aboard the insidious and obnoxious "social justice" train, stirring up pointless Daily Mail-style moral panics and controversies at every turn under the guise of cultural criticism. Long-form pieces such as those that Polygon used to be renowned for clearly don't draw in readers in the same numbers as a table-thumping opinion piece about how terrible it is that you can kill prostitutes in Grand Theft Auto V — and, by the way, let's just recall that the games press a few years ago was quick to quite rightly point and laugh at any mainstream publications that pulled this still exceedingly stupid line of criticism — and thus we get more and more of these perpetually outraged pieces driving frustrated readers away from sites and towards personalities who don't subscribe to these ridiculous, borderline hysterical viewpoints.

But it shouldn't have to be a case of one or the other. There should be a range of different opinions and writing styles; those of us who enjoy the written word shouldn't be pushed away from it in the direction of video by the fact that all these issues are only ever explored from one single sociopolitical perspective. That's what's happening, though, and unfortunately I don't see it getting any better any time soon.

I'm glad I got out of the games press when I did. I don't want to sit in front of a camera — I don't look good on camera: I'm fat, I have bad hair, I'm perpetually unkempt (even when I try to be… kempt), I have terrible dress sense, I have dry skin on my face that flares up when I'm stressed and, moreover, I find it terribly difficult to act naturally when being stared down by a camera — and, on the writing side, I have absolutely no desire to become a source of further moral panics or fuel the perpetual outrage machine. So there doesn't really feel like there's a place for me anyway.

It's sad, really; there's a clear gap in the market here for some old-school media — magazines! — of the ilk we had in the '80s, '90s and early '00s, but no-one seems to actually want to fill it. I can't be the only one hungry for this sort of thing, can I?

The post 1791: Future Press appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

My statement is simple: If you're that cynical about video games, find something else — anything — to write about.

I say this after a day in which not one but two utterly dreadful articles were brought to my attention — I'm not going to link to either; you can seek them out yourself if you're that interested.

First up was the review of Fairy Fencer F over on my former stomping grounds of USgamer. After witnessing… the reviewer in question's review style on a couple of other Japanese role-playing game titles — most notably the actually rather excellent Tales of Xillia 2, which he panned — and the fact that, back when I was still on the staff, he wouldn't review Atelier Rorona Plus on the grounds that a Google Image Search for the game looked "creepy", I wasn't altogether surprised to see that he tore this title to shreds, also. And he did so in such a way that told me three things: 1) he had a pre-existing dislike of the company that produced the game (Compile Heart) 2) he hadn't taken the time to engage with the game on anything more than the most superficial level and 3) he simply didn't give a shit about JRPGs as they exist in 2014.

I haven't yet played Fairy Fencer F, but given the way in which the review in question was expressed — telling people who might actually be interested in the game absolutely nothing about the game, its story or its characters and instead bashing Compile Heart and its parent company Idea Factory, bemoaning easily ignored technical issues and generally looking down its nose at people who might want to play it — I don't have much faith in it as a whole. I intend to give the game a fair shot myself once I have time to settle down with it, and when I do I intend to provide some detailed thoughts on the subject over at MoeGamer, much as I did with Tales of Xillia 2 recently.

Now, games journos will often point out how stupid it is to disagree with a review, which is, after all, a subjective opinion. And it kind of is; if you like something which someone else hates, then great; more power to you. But what we had here was more than that — it was an outright unhelpful review, instead more concerned with scrawling "I Hate Compile Heart" over everything than actually providing any sort of interesting, helpful analysis or criticism. It actually felt borderline insulting at times — though thankfully not so much as the site's notorious Hatsune Miku Project Diva F review, which was so offensive to fans of Japanese games that emphatic complaints from me and my then-colleague Cassandra led to the formation of my JPgamer column.

If this was a one-off, I wouldn't mind so much, but the reviewer in question has now done this several times — leading me to question the motivations for assigning him (or him stepping forward; I don't know which way round it was) to these titles in the first place. As the former staffer who single-handedly built up a ton of goodwill with fans of niche titles that get ignored at best, marginalised or even ridiculed at worst by other sites, I can't deny that it smarts a little to see all that goodwill getting well and truly pissed up the wall by giving the sort of games that I would have been all over — and that my fellow enthusiasts would have loved to hear more about — to someone who clearly and obviously hates them. Something that helped make USgamer unique has been lost; now it's just another site with a predictable "loljapan" attitude about it. I would rather the site simply didn't review these titles at all than let this joyless arse anywhere near one ever again, but sadly it's not up to me. How very disappointing.

But let's not get too hung up on Fairy Fencer F because this was, surprisingly, not the most stupid thing posted today. No, that honour goes to the epic-length editorial over on Polygon about finding the tutorial to the new Lord of the Rings game troubling. Why? Because at one point, you sneak up on your wife and kiss her, using the same control scheme and animations as you use later in the game to assassinate people and monsters. Somehow this bizarre objection was spun out to somewhere in the region of 1,500 words — an impressive achievement on the part of the author to take that long to say absolutely nothing, I must admit. (Although frankly, given the state of some of the entries on this blog, I'm probably not one to talk. But eh; there's a difference between a professional, commercial games site and a personal blog I use as an outlet for mental detritus.)

Polygon has been going down the toilet for a long time; I can't say I've ever been a particular fan of their uniquely pretentious brand of games journalism, nor the sanctimonious attitude of several of its staff writers, but since ditching their features staff a while back — the one part of the site that actually had anything meaningful or interesting to say — it really has been circling the drain. I wasn't surprised or angry to read this article today after someone pointed me in its direction earlier; my only real reaction was a sigh and a shake of the head. Games journalism in 2014, ladies and gentlemen; better to say 1,500 words of nothing at all about the week's big release than, you know, say nothing at all. Because if you make people angry you'll at least get some page hits as people share it indignantly.

Today has been one of numerous days that I've looked back on my time with the games press and thought "That was fun while it lasted, but I don't want to go anywhere near that ever again." If a prerequisite for being a member of the games press of 2014 is being a joyless wanker who can't find the fun in anything, then count me out. Give me a call when you ditch the clickbait business model, fire all these miserable tossers and start bringing on board people who are actually enthusiastic — even passionate — about this exciting medium. I won't be sitting by the phone waiting for your call, however; I've got better things to do.

You know, like playing games… and actually enjoying them.

The post 1718: The Joyless Wankers of the Games Press appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

And the simple answer is that I, well, don't.

I had a feeling that this was the case. Being involved in the endless hype cycle for games that really don't need any more hyping up was starting to make me cynical even back in the GamePro days — hence my conscious decision to focus on unconventional, interesting and quirky stories rather than endless retreads of press releases from Activision, EA and Ubisoft. It was a decision that paid off in the short term — people started coming to GamePro to get away from the identikit coverage from other sites, and my stories contributed to a significant growth in traffic… right before the site folded, leaving us all out of a job. Bah.

On USgamer, aside from the news coverage — which I found increasingly hard to care about, particularly as we started having to refocus our efforts on covering the things that would definitely pull in traffic (i.e. the "big name" games of the moment: the aforementioned games that don't really need any more coverage and hype) rather than the interesting, unusual and underexplored areas of the business — I was fortunate enough to have a certain degree of leeway to write the sort of things that I'd want to read from a games site. Thus the JPgamer and BOARDgamer columns were born, providing specialist coverage on niche subjects — while neither of these would be likely to bring in readers by the millions, they were both the sort of things that would keep people coming back week after week, and judging by both the regular commenters and the disappointment expressed by readers when my departure was announced, they were successful in maintaining a solid, specialist audience.

Looking around at the other big sites, though, I'm seeing very little that makes me want to hang my hat on that community and call it my own. I'm seeing lots of very similar stories about how amazing No Man's Sky is supposedly going to be, or how awesome Destiny is supposedly going to be, or "everything we know" about Mass Effect 4/Dragon Age: Inquisition/Halo 5/whatever for the umpteenth time. I'm seeing very little stuff to read with any real meat on the bones, in other words — and with Polygon, the site that was supposed to reinvent games journalism, laying off the majority of its features team, it seems that interesting, long-form critiques and other, non-review, non-preview, non-news pieces are rapidly going out of the window.

And when sites do attempt to try something a bit different, it's inevitably on the increasingly tedious subject of sexism. This isn't to deny that there's plenty to talk about and criticise here, but the majority of articles on this subject are so blitheringly ill-informed with their GCSE Sociology-level critiquing of a subsection of the business as a whole — frequently completely ignoring parts that don't fit their ham-fisted, half-baked theories — that they're just painful to read, particularly when the author becomes so enormously defensive that they start insulting their readership rather than acknowledging the actually quite valid criticisms that come up in the comments section.

Or video. Fuck video. But that's a rant for another day.

Instead of professional games coverage, then, I instead tend to look to my friends. I discuss what I'm playing on Twitter, on Google Hangouts and on the new Squadron of Shame forums. Impassioned reports — positive or negative — from people I know and trust is infinitely more interesting than a carefully PR-orchestrated preview of a game that will inevitably be at least a little bit disappointing when it finally releases. I'd rather hear about something that's out now — that people have actually played, that I can track down a copy of and play should I like the sound of it — than something that, in many cases, is a year or more away. I'd rather hear about amazing discoveries that were released five or six years ago and sank without trace than something I can't install and play right now. And I'd rather share my stories and join the conversation than be preached to.

Essentially, then, I think I've come to the conclusion that I don't really give a shit about the modern games press in its current form. And I'm quite possibly not alone.

Which might explain why I'm in the situation I'm in now. Hmm.

The post 1633: Newshound At Rest appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Since this is largely, then, the end of my career in the games press, I feel it's probably an appropriate time to reflect back on my time doing it and what, if anything, I've gained from it.

Let me preface this by saying that working in the games press was something of a lifelong dream for me, ever since I grew up with both my father and brother working for Atari magazines. My brother John, when he left home, began working on various magazines over the years and built a career for himself that eventually culminated in high-profile positions at 1up and Gamespot as well as the launch of his own site, the sadly defunct What They Play. His career was an inspiration to me that I hoped, one day, to be lucky enough to follow in the footsteps of. Because, frankly, there's a significant amount of luck involved in getting anywhere in the games biz… much as there's a significant amount of luck involved in not suddenly finding yourself without a place of work.

I contributed a number of pieces to various publications over the years as I proceeded through school and on to university. I wrote reviews and articles for the same Atari magazine my father and brother did; I wrote reviews and walkthroughs for UK games magazine PC Zone (may it rest in peace); I wrote tips books and guides for The Official UK Nintendo Magazine, in the years before… well, let's just say we don't see eye to eye. But I didn't seriously pursue a full-time career in the business — it didn't seem like something feasible, and in the meantime I was at university studying and trying to work out what I was going to do with my life. (I opted for teaching, which turned out to be a Bad Choice from a mental health perspective.)

Whizz forward a number of years and I'm in a bad place. My wife has left me and I'm staring down the oblivion of my life as I knew it. But there was a small glimmer of hope — I was writing for a small site named Kombo. Kombo didn't pay particularly well — certainly not enough to live on — but it was something. I was writing professionally, gaining some important and helpful experience and getting great feedback. It was a start.

Eventually, Kombo folded and, through various combinations of circumstances, I found myself working for GamePro, a site and magazine that my brother had been in charge of previously, but had since moved on to pastures new. My work for GamePro was initially sporadic and occasional, but over time it grew to a proper part-time gig and eventually a full-time position on a wage I could actually live on.

I had to make a choice partway through my time with GamePro, though. I had an interview with a software company in London, who actually offered me the job. At the same time, GamePro offered me the full-time position. The wages were similar, but the software company required me to move to London (expensive, plus not exactly friendly to my then-burgeoning relationship with Andie, with whom I now own a house) whereas the GamePro gig allowed me to work from home.

It seemed like a simple choice. I turned down the software company and told GamePro I'd continue working for them full-time. Eventually, I got to a position financially where it was practical for me to leave home again and start living with Andie.

All appeared to be going well for a while, until the collapse of GamePro one December. It was a quiet death; I came down to start work one morning, checked my email and discovered a message thread already in progress with everyone seemingly panicking about what was going on. The site was closing, it seemed, and so was the magazine. Everyone was being laid off. There was nothing we could do.

Thankfully, a former colleague at GamePro was working for a business-facing site that focused on mobile and social games, and she offered me regular work for a very generous pay package indeed. Mobile and social are two of the most objectionable parts of the video games industry for numerous reasons, but work was work and the pay was great for what I had to do, so I sucked it up and continued, happy that I had the opportunity to write and still leave myself time to pursue other interests.

But it didn't last.

I realised something was wrong with the site when all my colleagues suddenly announced their departure within a day or two of one another. The new management who had taken on the site were… not great, to say the least, and it was looking very likely that the generous pay packet I'd become accustomed to every month was soon to shrink to literally less than a tenth of its size.

I jumped ship. Fortunately, around the same time this was all happening, a former colleague from GamePro got in touch about USgamer and, well, you know the rest. Now, almost exactly a year after the site officially launched, I'm staring down unemployment, again through no fault of my own, but due to a shift in the way the site is doing business.

I've worked hard for every outlet I've had the privilege to work for professionally. I've graciously accepted feedback to improve my work — a particular shout-out to Mr Jason Wilson (formerly of GamePro, now of VentureBeat) here, whose copy-editing skills helped me refine my craft in a way no other editor had done in the past — and made an effort to improve and challenge myself as and when I can.

And yet even with a work ethic like that, there's no guarantee of a stable job. Each time a site folded or restructured and left me without a position, I've effectively had to start again from scratch, often with a big gap of unemployment leaving an unsightly hole on my CV in the meantime.

For me, this isn't an acceptable or desirable way to live. I cannot, in good conscience, look for another job in the games press knowing the inherent instability and volatility of the business, particularly now I'm a homeowner and having no money has even more severe consequences than in the past. My dream is crumbling into dust, but it's been crumbling that way for a while now; what I really wanted to do, it turns out, was to write for magazines, but that hasn't been an especially viable option for many years now, thanks to the Internet and the way in which we consume media these days.

More importantly, the way in which outlets make money — you know, with which to pay their staff — has changed. Readers on the Web expect their content for free — attempting to get people to pay money for text is a losing battle. As such, there just isn't the same amount of cashflow coming in as when a magazine is pulling in money from every sale from the newsstands. It also leads to "clickbait" articles, whether these are top 10 lists designed to encourage readers to read, agree and/or disagree, or provocative, inflammatory op-eds about whatever social justice issue is on the Tumblr sociologists' radar this week. Overall quality of content suffers as a result, and good quality writing about specific subjects goes all but ignored, leaving the games press a shadow of what it could be, and all outlets looking like slightly reskinned versions of each other.

And then there's the growth of video to consider, too, but that's probably a matter to discuss another day.

In other words, then, a career in the games press is simply not a viable option for me any more. Eternal respect and well-wishes to my peers out there who can make it work — whether on a salaried or freelance basis — but I simply can't do it any more with my current life situation. It's sad, but oddly I'm less cut up about the death of my dream than I thought I would be; it's become increasingly apparent over the course of the last four years that the games press I've been working in is not the same games press that I wanted so desperately to be a part of for so long. That games press is long-dead, replaced by something very different that I'm not entirely sure is sustainable in its current form.

But it's not my problem any more. I wash my hands of it all. I'll continue to write about games on my own time, for the love of it, and if I can make a bit of money off it, so much the better. But career-wise? I'm looking elsewhere. And I'm not looking back.

The post 1619: Reflections on Working in the Games Press appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The angle on display in the piece is that press should pay more attention to the sort of things that were exhibited at IndiE3, an alternative presentation put on by the independent developer community during E3 — which is, as you may know, the busiest time of the year for both the mainstream games press and mainstream games publishers.

The games on display at IndiE3, judging by the description in the article linked above, were all highly unusual, creative games — often lumped together as "art games" — and, for sure, their existence is worth exploring and celebrating. They're often very personal works put together by small teams — even individuals in some cases — and, in many ways, they're probably the closest we have to true "works of art" in the medium in the traditional sense.

But I kind of have to disagree with the assertion that they're the ones suffering the most from the mainstream press' obsession with whatever the Top Three Triple-A Titles Right Now are at any given moment. In recent years, we've started to see the phenomenon of the "indie darling", for example, whereby mainstream press and gamers alike suddenly all jump aboard the same small-scale title and champion it until they're blue in the face. Not only that, but we've seen a significant growth in indie-specialist sites in the last couple of years; whether or not those sites make any money or not is another matter altogether, but they exist, and those are the places that are celebrating these highly creative, original and often very affecting titles — far better than the broad brush-strokes of the mainstream outlets can.

No; the field that is suffering the most from the mainstream press' attention deficit disorder is that of mid-tier games. Barely acknowledged at the best of times and sort of waved away with a dismissive air of "this doesn't really need to be explored in detail" at others, mid-tier games are often where the most interesting, accessible work is going on in the video games business. In contrast to the often self-consciously "arty" world of the aforementioned indie games — a style of development that makes them less accessible to those who prefer somewhat more "conventional" (for want of a better word) titles — mid-tier games often make use of recognisable gameplay tropes and conventions and marry them to subject matter that is more creative, inventive and risk-taking than that seen by big publishers. It's mid-tier games that gave us titles like Deadly Premonition, the Twin Peaks game that never was. It's mid-tier games that gave us series like Atelier, an unconventional take on role-playing games that requires a different way of thinking and which is still, to date, something of a trailblazer in its prominent use of female protagonists. It's mid-tier games that gave us titles like Murdered: Soul Suspect, a game that was actually a whole lot more compelling and interesting than its mediocre reviews made out. I could go on all day.

These are the games that the mainstream press is truly neglecting. But with the ever-increasing focus on clickbait and ad revenue — both GameTrailers and Polygon, both high-profile online outlets, let a number of people go in the last couple of weeks, not to mention my own redundancy a short while back — this is a situation that's only going to continue to get worse, until all big-scale games sites are going to be identikit news feeds with slightly different CSS.

That's not an acceptable means of celebrating a medium with as much diversity as video games. That's not an acceptable way to treat the talent in the industry, both on the development and press sides. That's not a sustainable way for the business to continue to operate, surely. Surely?

The post 1611: Look in the Middle appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

What I do want to talk about is the fact that said job isn't involved in the games press, or indeed anywhere in the games industry. It is in something completely unrelated that just happens to use my skills at using content management systems for editing digital content in a productive manner. It's for a large company and would involve me working at the site for said company rather than at home, so all around it will be a fairly significant change to how my life and career have been unfolding for the past four or five years.

So why am I leaving the games press behind, when those of you who know me well will know it's something I wanted to do for most of my life? Well, the chief reason is that the games press of 2014 is not the same as the games press I initially gazed at with admiration back in the '80s and '90s. The industry has moved almost entirely to the Internet, for one thing — a few magazines do still exist, but their relevance is declining — and, as such, so has the way of working.

The rise of the Internet has led to an explosion of games press outlets. Because it's so easy to get a website up and running, pretty much anyone can open a games site if they want to; whether or not it will become successful is another matter entirely, but the sheer volume of people writing about games on the Internet is ridiculous.

And yet I don't feel like there's anything near the diversity of character that the old magazines had. When I think back to the edgy humour of Atari ST magazine Zero; the informative multi-format coverage of Advanced Computer Entertainment; the distinctly "British-feeling" PC Zone, I don't feel like we have anything quite like that in the modern games press. There are individual personalities who people like to follow around the Internet, for sure, but when was the last time you read something like Charlie Brooker's contributions to PC Zone, one notable example of which was an entire preview written in third-person perspective Franglais? (Fade to Black, as I recall.) When was the last time you read a boxout on a site about the fact they don't have Teletext in America? (Found on an Alpha Centauri preview, if I remember correctly.) If Half-Life 3 came out tomorrow, how many sites would devote a few words to a boxout listing "other famous Gordons" as PC Zone did with its review of the original?

I feel a lot of that character has been lost. The modern games press is probably more "professional" (for want of a better word) but it's also become a whole lot more boring and predictable. The big sites, these days, are all but interchangeable in terms of what games get covered when; thanks to press embargoes on previews and reviews, everyone publishes their thoughts on particular games at the same time, meaning there's often relatively little reason to look at more than one place, whereas seeing different magazines' approaches to games coverage used to be a real joy.

The chief reason I'm in no hurry to go back, though, is the volatility of the industry. Over the course of the past four years, I've worked for a number of different outlets, some of which you may have heard of, some of which you might not have — Kombo, Daily Joypad, Good Old Games, IGN, GamePro, Inside Network and, most recently, USgamer. In each of those positions there wasn't a whole lot of progression or advancement opportunities; games press positions are like gold dust, so a lot of people tend to stay where they are for as long as possible unless a significantly better offer comes along, which leads to a lot of positions stagnating somewhat. On top of all that, the aforementioned volatility of the industry meant that sometimes you come downstairs to start work only to discover an email announcing that the site you've been working on is to close, and that you'll be out of a job — or that you're surplus to requirements and no longer needed. (Yes, I am speaking from personal experience on both counts.)

This has happened several times throughout my career, each time through no fault of my own — and I really mean that; I'm a hard, dedicated worker, and any of my past employers would happily back me up on that. Every time it's happened it's meant that I've effectively had to start again from scratch — because I held one position for some time at the previous post, that's what I'd end up doing at the next, and so the whole lack of progression thing perpetuated itself somewhat, because by the time I thought I should be advancing — and probably would have been advancing in a "normal" (i.e. stable) job — I was, instead, scouring the Help Wanted ads for where I'd be going next.

I've been speaking selfishly so far, but I'm far from the only one affected by this sort of thing. Just today, for example, the day after E3 — the biggest event in the games industry calendar — GameTrailers, one of the biggest video game video sites in the world, laid off a whole bunch of staff. How is that happening in an industry that, in money terms, is taking on movies and winning? How is it that one of the biggest creative mediums in the world right now can't provide job security for anyone involved in it — whether you're a member of the press, a developer, an artist or anyone else?

I'm tired of it, to be perfectly blunt. I've bought a house with Andie, and I want to be able to live my life without having to worry about whether I'll still have a pay packet at the end of each month. I want to be able to have a job that I can build into a career; a position where I can learn new things, advance, take on new responsibilities and, most importantly, come home at the end of the day and forget all about until I go back the next day. Video games, as much as I love them and as big a part of my life as they will always be, are not providing that right now, so it is time for me to look elsewhere.

I worry that these feelings are coming too late. At 33 years of age, I'm no longer a fresh-out-of-university graduate, and I worry that prospective employers will see my fragmented work history and wonder what I've been playing at for the past 10+ years. Still, you can't turn back the clock, so all I can do is try my best and see where life takes me next.

The post 1607: Future Unwritten appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

I mention this amid the news that Future, one of the biggest publishing companies in the UK that has been around for as long as I can remember, is having severe difficulties. Difficulties that are serious enough to see it considering the closure of CVG (aka Computer and Video Games), one of the longest-running brands in the games press. Future's woes aren't solely to do with the games press side of its operation, of course — indeed, it is apparently intending to keep PC Gamer, Gamesradar and the new (somewhat redundant) Kotaku UK up and running regardless of what else happens — but the company's situation, particularly with regard to the games press, is not at all unusual. I was let go from my position at USgamer recently, as you'll know if you've been keeping up to date with this blog, and I believe Destructoid also lost some people recently, too.

It's getting beyond a joke now. The video games industry is one of the most lively, vibrant and exciting creative sectors right now; a business that nowadays regularly puts the amount of money thrown about in movies and music to shame. Over the course of the last 30+ years, it's grown from something that nerds do alone in their bedroom — an activity to be ashamed of — to something that absolutely anyone can engage with on one level or another. Thanks to the rise of smartphones and tablets, there are more "gamers" out there than ever before, but even not taking this rapidly growing market into account, computers, consoles and handhelds are providing more diverse, more interesting, more creative experiences than at any other time in the history of interactive entertainment.

So why is the games press a business that seemingly finds it impossible to remain stable for more than a year or two at a time? Why is the games press such a volatile sector that hard-working individuals (like me, the CVG lot whose jobs are at risk, and any number of other people who have lost their jobs recently) regularly have to effectively start their career over again time after time? How are people who have given up a lot to be a part of this business that they feel so strongly about supposed to build a career and progress?

Part of the reason is the very nature of the Web. People aren't accustomed to paying for content, so they won't pay for it. This means that sites have to rely on lowest-common-denominator ad-based revenue, which in turn leads to a decline in the overall quality of content as producing work that shows up high in the search engine rankings or which provides answers to the most vapid of questions becomes a priority for sites. There are rare exceptions — a well-written piece from an established writer can attract a goodly degree of traffic and, consequently, revenue, as can something controversial or which exploits the hot-button topics of the day — but they're just that: exceptions. For the most part, it's all about the daily churn: getting as much content as possible out as quickly as possible; a far cry, to be sure, from the magazine model of the pre-Internet days.

And you know what? I'm getting to the stage where I feel like I'm done. I love writing about games. Love it. But it doesn't feel like it's possible to make it into a career any more, and it certainly doesn't feel like it's possible to make a career out of writing about the most interesting niches of the industry. I've been doing the same thing in the business for four years now, largely because I've had to reboot my career and start over several times. I'm 33 years old; I can't keep doing that, and I can't go back to begging for scraps on a freelance basis, no disrespect intended to anyone who does successfully manage to draw a living wage through that way of working.

And so, I find myself increasingly wondering whether or not if, should a fantastic-sounding job offer for a video games site find itself in my inbox tonight or tomorrow, I would take it. At this exact moment — 22:42 on a Thursday night in May 2014 — I'm erring towards "no". It would be wonderful to have the guarantee of a new job in this sector that I love, but I'd constantly be wondering if, a year or two down the line, I'd be in the exact same position I am now: never advancing; never progressing; never learning anything new.

A career in video games sounds like a dream come true to most people who grew up with them. But I can tell you, it's not everything you might hope. In fact, there are a lot of times when it really, really sucks, and it seems like the spring of 2014 is one of those times.

My best wishes to everyone who, like me, is going through a tough time right now. May we all land on our feet and find ourselves doing something where our skills are truly valued and appropriately compensated.

The post 1578: Games Journalism is Broken appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

What particularly caught my attention recently was a section called "Sick Notes". This was one of the many different things the magazine did with its last page before the back cover — over time, this included a regular column by "Mr Cursor", a look back on the month's gaming and what one of the editorial staff had been up to, and numerous other things.

Sick Notes was the brainchild of Charlie Brooker — yes, that Charlie Brooker — and was intended as a complement to the magazine's other letters pages. PC Zone at this point had several different "reader input" pages, including a traditional "letters to the editor" page, a "Watch Dogs" letters page where readers could write and complain about service they'd received from hardware and software manufacturers, and a "Troubleshooter" letters page where they could ask technical queries about PC problems.

Sick Notes, meanwhile, was marketed as "The Place to Write for Abuse" so you knew what you were getting when you wrote in — and you had to write specifically to Sick Notes. It certainly lived up to its name. Here's one memorable example that won the monthly £50 "Loser of the Month" prize, with Brooker's response in bold beneath.

I see that in issue 67 of your "magazine" you asked us to send in a game idea. How's this then: You start off in a primary school where all goes well and you please the teachers. You then progress to secondary education and achieve above average results and so decide to sit A-levels in your local college and finally, after four years in university, end up with an honours degree in English language and English literature.

AND THEN YOU END UP WRITING YOUR PATHETIC [swearword] PIECE OF [swearword] PAGE-FILLING SO-CALLED COLUMN.

Mark Richardson

There was a boy called Mark Richardson at my school. Everyone called him 'skids' because once, in the PE changing rooms, somebody noticed that he had huge brown skidmarks in his underpants. Not that this inability to tackle basic personal hygiene was restricted just to poor wiping skills. He smelled bad pretty much all the time. He was a mess. His face was permanently coated with a faintly shiny film of sweat and grime, his hair so caked in grease it recalled television footage of unfortunate seabirds in the aftermath of the Exxon Valdez oil slick. His clothing was dirty. To use the Whizzer and Chips terminology of the day, it 'ponged'.

But the worst thing about Skids was the way he picked his nose. He was always at it, plugging a finger in as far as he could, corkscrewing it around inside the nasal cavity, unhooking entire strata of half-dried mucus, drawing out measureless strings of oleaginous grey-green slime. Then he'd take them to his mouth, puckering his lips as if sampling some exotic delicacy. Skids devoured snot. He relished it. Guzzled it. Chewed it up and swallowed it whole, then painted his finger clean with his pink, stubby tongue. Made you sick just to watch him do that.

Anyway, sorry, what were you saying?

This was pretty much par for the course back around the time of PC Zone issue 70 (December 1998) but looking back on it now it's hard to believe that this existed. And don't worry, I'm not about to go off on a whole big "This Is Not Okay" social justice rant here; quite the opposite, in fact. I find it a bit sad that people who write for a living — usually for websites rather than magazines these days, though print is still hanging on in there — don't really have the freedom to express this side of themselves any more; the means for some much-needed stress relief, and for the readers to try their luck against one of the most notoriously acerbic wits in the business.

I mean, sure, these days we have the people who have made a name for themselves with strong opinion pieces — people like Ben Kuchera and Jim Sterling spring to mind immediately, and there are others, too — but it's not the same thing at all. Brooker didn't just blindly insult people in Sick Notes — though he always did so with carefully-considered barbs rather than mindless abuse on that page — he also wrote witty, creative, unconventional articles that were entertaining to read far ahead of fulfilling some sort of amorphous "obligation". And he wasn't alone, either; the writers of Zone, among them, did all sorts of things with even their most mundane articles, with particularly memorable examples including entire reviews written as movie scripts, a "Franglais" preview of Flashback follow-up Fade to Black written from the perspective of its protagonist Conrad Hart, and countless others I've doubtless forgotten.

What's my point? I'm not quite sure, really, but I think it's that people who wrote about games used to seem like they were having more fun with it. This isn't to say that there aren't great, entertaining writers out there whose work is a pleasure to read, but rather there seems to be something of an unspoken rule that things need to be taken very seriously these days. You've got to get that SEO; you've got to get those clicks; you've got to capitalise on the popular things of the time; you've got to be seen to be criticising the things other people are criticising.

Cynical? Perhaps, but it's why things like Goat Simulator feel so obnoxiously forced; what should be a silly little game that people stumble across organically and then tell their friends about has become something heavily promoted and treated with, in a number of cases, considerably more respect than I think even its creators intended. Fair play to them for successfully capturing the imagination of the press and the public, I guess, but it's just not the same as the magic I feel reading an old PC Zone and comparing it to its rivals PC Format and PC Gamer as well as multiformat magazines, each of which had their own distinctive tone about them.

We can't go back now, though; the world expects daily updates as things happen these days, rather than a monthly digest of things the editorial team thought were interesting, intriguing or just amusing. And the world certainly doesn't expect a member of a site's staff to hurl such an amazing torrent of intelligent abuse at them as Brooker did to Mark Richardson above; these days, treating your readership with such contempt is probably a firing offence.

Which is kind of weird, when you think about it; websites deal with reader numbers that magazines, even in their heyday, could only dream of, while for a magazine like PC Zone, every reader counted and thus you'd think posting something like Brooker's response would be taking something of a big risk.

Maybe it was too much of a risk. Maybe that's why PC Zone doesn't exist any more. But I'll be honest with you; I miss those days. I'd much rather be working on a monthly magazine than a constantly-updated website, but this is 2014; that's the way things are, so I must, as the saying goes, "deal with it".

The post 1544: Sick Notes appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

Taking video games magazines specifically, I particularly enjoy the completely different approach to games criticism seen in the mid- to late '90s. Because reviews came out on a magazine's street date rather than under the carefully-timed embargo of a PR department, you could generally feel pretty secure that the writers in question had spent a healthy proportion of the preceding month with the game, and that you knew they would have explored it inside out in most cases rather than rushing through. Consequently, we got a lot of reviews that were more like multi-page features, filled with big images, annotated screenshots, quotes from the developer and all manner of other things. Sometimes you even got reviews in a completely different format — PC Zone magazine, which I was loyal to initially because I liked it and later because my brother became the big boss man over there (also I wrote a number of articles for it), liked to experiment with short-form quick reviews for budget or crap games, and also held regular "Supertests", in which they took a variety of different games in the same genre (often flight sims of various descriptions) and compared them directly to each other to determine which one was "best".

You know what the absolute best thing was, though? No comments sections. I must confess that when reading a 1998 copy of PC Zone on the toilet the other day, I instinctively found myself glancing at the end of a somewhat contentious article (written by none other than Charlie Brooker, who used to be a regular for Zone, believe it or not) to see the ranty comments. I had already flipped the pages to the end of the piece before I realised I was holding a magazine in my hands, and that its content was static and non-interactive. It was probably for the best; Brooker's article was a candid exploration of "why girls don't like games" which was very, very amusing, very, very irreverent and would not have got within a mile of today's Misogyny Police before being torn to shreds — despite the fact that it had a wealth of valid points and was clearly intended to take the piss out of anyone who believed that games were solely "boys' toys". But I digress. The point was, there was no opportunity to respond immediately to an article and belch forth the first opinionated effluvia that came into your head; if you wanted to respond, you had to damn well write a letter (or, later — much later — an email) and hope it got published in the following issue. PC Zone engaged in what is surely one of the first acts of trolling their comments sections on a number of occasions, tasking Brooker with responding to the most offensive, rude and generally disrespectful messages on a special "Sick Notes" page. Hilarity inevitably ensued, usually at the expense of the person who had written in.

I kind of feel like there was a lot more character about the old magazines in general. I read PC Zone primarily because I enjoyed the writers' work and knew their tastes and senses of humour; I knew that David McCandless was obsessed with Doom and Quake (particularly multiplayer); I knew that Chris Anderson loved X-Com; I knew that you could count on Brooker for an irreverent, hilarious article — his Fade to Black preview written entirely as a short story about "Monsieur Conrad 'Art" in Franglais was a particularly memorable example.

Different magazines had their own distinctive personalities, too — I contributed walkthroughs and tips books to the Official UK Nintendo Magazine for a while and was obliged to write using a particularly loathsome house style that effectively required me to write like a chav. Lots of "ya"s and "yer"s, and Mario was perpetually referred to as "Mazza". It was a magazine primarily aimed at children, of course, so this style was understandable, of course — looking back on it, though, it's more than a little cringeworthy.

I sort of miss magazines, then — I know they're still around and all that, but the magic just isn't there any more when you can get access to high-quality writing for free at your fingertips thanks to the Internet. That's sort of sad, really; while you can take an iPad into the toilet with you and browse your favourite sites, it's still not quite the same as having a proper magazine to leaf through at your leisure.

The post 1102: The Golden Age of Magazines appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

This is a pretty well-established fact by now, I would have thought, but the issue rears its ugly head any time something interesting but flawed such as Papo & Yo shows up and is, overall, worthy of praise but riddled with technical issues.

Let's stay with Papo & Yo for a moment to illustrate my point. (I won't be spoiling the game here, so read without fear.)

Papo & Yo is, technically and objectively speaking, filled with flaws. The frame rate is pretty poor at times, there's a lot of screen tearing and the collision detection is occasionally a bit off.

Does this make it a bad game, though?

No.

Does it prevent it doing what it sets out to do?

No.

This is ultimately all that should matter. And yet IGN notes that "poor design outweighs any interesting concepts", ultimately concluding that the game is "bad".

Well, yes, if judged next to something that is longer, more polished and designed primarily as a "game", I guess Papo & Yo is "bad". The problem comes when you consider the fact that all games are not created equal. Papo & Yo was put together by an extremely small team who did not have the budget to do more than they did. It succeeds admirably in telling its powerful, emotional story despite its technical flaws, which cease to matter almost immediately after starting to play. It was also not designed to be a "good game" — it was designed to be a vehicle for telling its story.

I'm reminded of a post I wrote a while back concerning visual novels and interactive movies. Back in the dawn of the CD-ROM era, if anyone dared to release a title like this that focused on the story at the expense of what would be traditionally called "gameplay," it was slated without mercy. The mantras of the day were "gameplay is king" and "graphics do not make the game".

To be fair, a lot of these "interactive movies" were simply poor stories, too, largely proving that (at the time) game studios simply did not have the budgets to compete with Hollywood. But some were enjoyable, and I can't help feeling that some of them may have had a better response had they been released today with better technology and storage capacities.

You see, gameplay isn't king. Not all the time, anyway. In something like Geometry Wars, sure, gameplay most certainly is king, though the beautiful neon presentation certainly doesn't hurt. But in something like School Days HQ or Papo & Yo, gameplay is not king. Gameplay is not even in the king's court. Story is king. And alongside this comes the necessity to judge a game based on how well it is achieving its objectives rather than how "good" it is compared to all other games. In no other medium do we judge individual creative works against everything else ever created in the same medium. No; we judge bestsellers against bestsellers; literature against literature; arthouse movies against arthouse movies; blockbuster against blockbuster.

Both School Days and Papo & Yo are "bad" if we're to judge them against other, more "gamey" experiences. In School Days all you do is watch animé sequences for 20 minutes and then occasionally get to pick between two options. In Papo & Yo all you have to do is navigate the environment and solve some fairly simple puzzles. But neither game is setting out to be a "fun" game. Both of them are setting out to do one thing and one thing only: tell a story. They accomplish this in completely different ways. And they both succeed admirably, regardless of their game mechanics and regardless of any technical issues.

Most gamers I speak to on a regular basis seem to recognise this fact. So why, exactly, do we persist in judging all games to the same standards? This isn't about giving a "free pass" to "art games", as I have seen a few commentators remark in the last few days. It's about judging a game on just one thing: how well it achieves its goal. Screen tearing (which, let's not forget, blighted the original Uncharted to a very noticeable degree) does not affect how well Papo & Yo spins its tale just as, to flip the argument around, the stupid, nonsensical story doesn't affect the fun factor of Call of Duty.

As always, then, the best way to judge whether or not a game is something you want to play is simply to try it for yourself — or at the very least discuss it with your friends and get the opinions of people you trust. "Good" and "Bad" are relative, arbitrary and ultimately quite useless descriptors when referring to creative works, and so I firmly believe the sooner we get out of the habit of judging all games against some ill-defined "canon of greatness", the better.

The post #oneaday Day 945: Reviewing is Broken, August 2012 Edition appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

The "dream team" assembled for the new venture has the potential to provide a serious shakeup to video game news and journalism if handled correctly. All hail from some of the most popular, well-known sites in the oversaturated field of games writing, and all will have their own take on how to push the medium forward. Hopefully Vox Games, or whatever it ends up being called, will prove to be a site that dares to be different.

But what does that mean? What could a "different" games site look like? Let's brainstorm.

For starters, the idea of "consensus" among the media needs to go out of the window. Jeff Rivera wrote a good piece on this subject over at Gamer Theory recently, and he's on the money. All too often we see outlets appearing to predetermine which games are going to be the hotness of the season, sometimes offering review scores which don't necessarily match up with the words being written. Battlefield 3, for example, was almost universally lambasted for its (apparently — I haven't played it) woeful single player campaign, but that didn't stop it picking up a ton of perfect scores and awards. In some cases, this is likely something of a hangover from Gerstmanngate, as outlets don't want to piss off their advertisers by rating the game that is on the background of every single page of the site less than a 9 out of 10.

Alongside this, the audience needs to be re-educated away from thinking that anything under a 9 isn't worth bothering with. Eurogamer ran afoul of commenters on several occasions last year by daring to rate big releases with an 8. They weren't wrong to do so, but commenters were wrong to assume that 8 meant "bad". This is a hole we've dug for ourselves over the years, and it's going to be very difficult to get away from. It's tied in to the "consensus" thinking, though — it's entirely possible that those reviewing a game for a particular outlet might feel the desire to see what other places have rated it, and, whether consciously or subconsciously, seeing these other scores can colour the writer's judgement.

Which is ridiculous, of course, because scores are completely arbitrary and borderline meaningless. There's no way to quantify "how good" a game is. There's no universal measure of "quality" because everyone's tastes are so different. Some people might think Modern Warfare 3 is game of the year, while I might think it's the most insulting game I've ever played. (I do, incidentally.)

But the review scores debate is well-worn, so I'll step away from it at this point and consider some other ways in which game journalism can evolve and develop.

Chief among one of the things which needs to adapt is the relationship between developer, publisher, PR and press. At present, publishers and PR hold all the power. Developers are muzzled from talking about their game if it doesn't fit into the publisher and PR teams' tightly-controlled marketing plan. We get press releases announcing when trailers will be released. We get countdowns to countdowns to exclusive reveals of some stupid thing on YouTube which they hope will go viral but won't because it's trying too hard. Many newshounds in the industry get reduced to little more than PR mouthpieces, frantically rewriting the press releases that flood their inboxes on a daily basis rather than going in search of the "real story". And why? Because uncovering a "real story" might compromise a relationship between an outlet and a publisher/PR team.

This isn't an anti-PR rant, of course. Many PR types do a fantastic job of facilitating communication between different branches of the industry, acting as a "gobetween" or "messenger" rather than an impenetrable wall through which information cannot pass. Aubrey "Chupacaubrey" Norris (Deep Silver), Tom "Evolve PR" Ohle (CD Projekt, Larian Studios and numerous others) and Jeff Green (PopCap) spring immediately to mind here, and are certainly a far cry from the PR teams from certain large publishers who take days to reply — and don't even bother at all sometimes. For the industry as a whole to evolve, we need more people like this who are willing to work with the press rather than, as sometimes seems, against them.

And what can the writers in this brave new world do, besides not feeling obliged to fit in with the consensus of the rest of the industry? Branch out. Explore. Raise the profile of small-scale projects and the underdogs of the industry. Review the crap games as well as the awesome ones. Provide something unique — truly unique, rather than the press release meaning of "unique" — as opposed to what many other sites offer, which is an interchangeable retread of the exact same story also posted on all of the other outlets. Different sites should have their own "voice" — and this doesn't necessarily mean being snarky, which is a somewhat overused form of humor in the industry today. What I mean, rather, is that different outlets should have their own take on events that are transpiring — editorials, comments, analysis, rather than the same dry old press release facts and improbable quotes from CEOs and VPs of Five Different Capitalised Titles.

Will Vox Games be the outlet to give the industry a good shakeup? I certainly hope so, and should the opportunity ever arise to become a part of it, I'll be sure to do my bit, too.

The post #oneaday Day 716: Games Media Shakeup appeared first on I'm Not Doctor Who.

It's obvious why publishers insist on this sort of behaviour: it allows them to control how and when information gets released. This means that they can effectively control the press to release the information that the company wants talked about at a specific time, ensuring that it doesn't "clash" with anything else and get upstaged by something cooler.

Still, when something gets embargoed until a particular time, you'd expect the information that was being held back to be complete, wouldn't you? Not so in the case of today's Call of Duty Elite announcement, which explained what the service would be but failed to mention anything useful like how much the premium option would cost and indeed what the premium service actually offered, compared to what free members would get.

The practice of embargoes seems to be a relatively recent one. I don't remember them being mentioned all that often before a couple of years back — but then, I wasn't involved in the games press full-time at that point, so this sort of nonsense may well have been going on for years.

The thing is, though, it ultimately hurts everyone. People tease embargo reveals all day, then EVERY FUCKING SITE UNDER THE SUN releases the same information at the same time when the embargo expires, and then I don't read any of it. If you follow games sites on Twitter and you do happen to be interested in the coverage, you'll probably only click on the first link you see. This means it becomes a race for whichever outlet can get the content live and tweet it first. Sensible outlets will have prepared the material well in advance, of course, but sometimes that doesn't happen and you end up with sloppy, rushed reporting.

Then sometimes you wonder why on Earth certain pieces of information are embargoed. I had a press release from NVidia earlier today talking about their new pair of wired 3D glasses for 3D Vision-equipped PCs. It was embargoed until 5pm Pacific on the Sunday just gone. It's a pair of 3D glasses — not the most exciting thing in the world, even if they are under $100 for once. Why did that need to have a timed reveal?

As with most things in the industry, if one person does it, everyone has to do it. Gone are the days* when a developer could just go "Yeah, I'm experimenting with a thing. It's pretty cool. Might not go anywhere though." No, now it has to be a countdown to an announcement of a teaser trailer which leads to a countdown to an announcement of an exclusive reveal of the first gameplay footage which will coincide with an exclusive reveal of one little piece of information that no-one gives a shit about. (OMG! The main character's eyes are directly scanned from an actor/rapper no-one's heard of! Fuck off.)

I've never worked in the music, film or "general" journalism industries so I can't say for certain whether this sort of thing goes on in them. But somehow I doubt it's quite so tightly controlled as the ever-peculiar games industry.

* The exception to this is, of course, the indie development industry, who rarely, if ever, use embargoes and are usually pretty candid and open about the projects they're working on. And all credit to them — honesty gets them far more respect from me than an intricately-planned campaign which drives journalists and consumers alike utterly crazy.

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