2254: The Irritating Trend of Gleeful Negativity

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.

2248: Pinning Down the Problem with Coverage of Niche Games Like Senran Kagura

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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.

2246: Games Journalists, Please Think of Something More Imaginative Than These Articles

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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.

2243: Issue 2 of the Digitally Downloaded Magazine is Now Available

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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.

2211: On “Burn in Hell, Yarny”

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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.)

2207: Proudly Flying the Flag for the Magazine Format

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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!

2075: Where’s the Luv for Muv-Luv?

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.

2065: Some Thoughts for Critics

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 Mike Diver’s 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 Sterling and Diver 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 Diver thought it was appropriate to publish his 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.

2059: Why I Care, and Why It’s Important to Fight

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. Diver’s 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 Diver 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 Diver’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.

Diver’s 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, Diver 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.

Diver’s 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 Diver’s post, then met another person who told them that they were a huge Senran Kagura fan. What impact would Diver’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 Diver’s 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 Diver’s 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 Diver’s 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.

2008: The Wheels Are in Motion

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!