Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

This week’s Escapist focuses on game journalism, and it’s pretty good – but I have fatigue from going over and over the same points about why game journalism isn’t smarter, gutsier, and more compelling.

So rather than do that thumbsucker myself blog-style, I thought I’d jot some notes on what I’ve learned as Games Editor for Paste Magazine. As always, this stuff is worth what you’re paying for it.

Paste Magazine has been a challenging and sometimes frustrating gig, for one simple reason: we’re selling steaks to vegans. Our readers largely doesn’t play games. Many readers probably think of games as a kind of narcotic brain rot for tweeners and basement-confined idiots. We can’t afford to be lazy. So we set out to get much better game reviews, from the best writers, for an audience that doesn’t necessarily care. This is a section that converts people, using small chunks of text. People don’t care about the combo moves. They don’t want to read a review that starts, “The name is Bond. James … well, you know the rest.” They want ideas.

(All the daily papers and glossy magazines that are trying to get into the game crit biz would do well to follow this mindset, and stop hiring writers that sound like somebody’s nephew.)

It’s hard to find writers who can go there, or who even want to. Not easy to find readers, either – but they’re starting to find their way in. The idea is to find the things that elevate games from sport to culture. The common elements or challenges that any intelligent person can latch onto. It’s not easy to make the reviews “relatable” – although I think Jason Killingsworth’s first hand account of slaying at a live Guitar Hero II match had a lot of everyman hooks. But you’re trying to cough up some brain food. I don’t know anything about dance, but I sat through and enjoyed Swan Lake a few years ago. Gears of War is the same deal. Humans are curious. Give them something to chew on.

k, so here’s a list of …

DO’s:
- Write like you give a damn. (We all forget to do this.)

- In a blurb, you can’t talk about everything – so focus on what you actually care about. XGau is the master of this, as well as the master of cramming more information and stronger arguments than anyone would expect into a less-than-150 word space. But XGau doesn’t have a checklist saying, “Make sure to mention if the bass player’s any good.” And so you shouldn’t have a checklist saying, “Gotta talk about the control scheme,” or even, “Gotta compare this to the last three games in the series,” or “Gotta address how disgustingly violent it is,” or “Gotta acknowledge how well they did the backgrounds.” Only write about the stuff that bolsters your argument.

- Make a more interesting argument than, “This is good,” or, “This is bad.”

- Don’t be scared to go out on a limb, ever. It’s easier for an editor to pull you back in than to push you to do something more interesting.

- Find an angle beyond the game. Does it have something to do with real life (politics, religion, whatever)? Can you even just pretend that it does, to highlight something important about the game?

- And last – and really, I’m practically giving away my Onion secret weapon here – but find games that nobody has heard of and give us a reason to care. I don’t know why more people don’t seek out the Eets and Jets ‘N’ Guns GOLD-type games of the world, as opposed to the twelfth movie tie-in of the year. Unsung games are more interesting, they have stories, you can easily talk to the developers, and some of them are really good.

Why don’t more journos flock to this stuff? I promise you, if I got a new mp3 by a Finnish-Japanese teen starlet who was hot in Helsinki and lining up remixes, and I dropped it sound-unheard in a room full of music bloggers? Blood would drain under the doorways. But stick pre-XBox Eets in front of professional game journalists and they’ll go back to wondering when Assassin’s Creed will drop. Lame.

DON’T’s:
- Hand in a crappy review and then tell me how glad you were to have gotten that over with

- Talk about game mechanics unless it’s absolutely essential. The fact that you can take cover in Gears of War is not interesting; the fact that the mechanic makes the game slower, more cautious and more like paintball than the unrealistic “run around and shoot people in the face” dynamic of Halo 2 could be more interesting, if you describe it more compellingly than I just did.

- We need more verbs and adjectives in this biz. Music has its list of cliches (”groove,” “angular,” “glitchy”); someone should draft one for game reviews. We can do better. ActionButton.net is fond of using the term “crunchy physics” – I like that – it’s vivid and accurate. But think about, say, people who write about what it’s like to cruise down the highway on a motorcycle – game journos should try to capture that same language, that same excitement. When they do, I feel like they often pause or act embarrassed, because they don’t think a computer game measures up to intense real life experiences. So find that thing in the game that gives you that thrill – and learn to believe in it. And write like hell about it.

- Don’t feel like your hands are tied by anything but the need to hand in a great piece of writing. If you let the game justify the writing, you’ll hand in the same story as all the other people who want to review Halo 3. Let the writing justify the game.

After close to two years with Paste, we’ve raised the bar for ourselves incredibly and almost impossibly high in terms of how far on a limb the writers have to go before they file a review. I wish I had more examples, but we only just started posting to the web – yeah, I know, I know – but when I look at each issue, I’m just astounded by how hard everyone’s working and how talented they are.

One last “Do”: editing other people – good writers and newer ones – is a great way to learn to write. So if you ever get the chance, do it!