Games don’t see much coverage in the mainstream press. Most newspapers and magazines have at least one writer who covers videogames – either in an occasional review, or maybe in a blog – but for the most part, they don’t treat videogames with the same consistency, pleasure, or heft that they give to popular music, movies, etc. etc. etc.
This is a common gripe among gamers. But the mainstream press has also produced some of the best stories on games that you’ll ever read. When you get a serious magazine writer to take the subject seriously, you get stories like John Seabrook’s profile of Will Wright, or Elizabeth Kolbert on Ultima Online, or Tom Bissell profiling Jennifer Hale. Jonah Weiner started with just about the most inaccessible game in the world and told a compelling and sympathetic story about the guys who created it. Ian Bogost ran a terrific critique of Journey in The Atlantic. Radiolab had that incredible episode on games (nondigital but still, check it out!). And so on.
But when the folks who love games knock the mainstream media, it’s usually because of articles like Sam Anderson’s cover story in the New York Times Magazine, which talks about the latest wave of casual and mobile games in a way that’s shallow and disrespectful. Anderson makes up a new label for the genre – “stupid games” – and he slaps it on a wide swath of titles, from Angry Birds to Farmville to Tetris to chess. He makes fun of his interviewees, including the NYU Game Center’s Frank Lantz, whose job he belittles early on: “Game-studies scholars (there are such things) … “. And after spending time with game designer Zach Gage, he still lumps Gage’s work into the “stupid games” category. He also compares Gage to a character in an Ayn Rand novel for (maybe?) sounding grandiose about interface design.
Set all that aside, and it’s not a bad article. Anderson leans on personal experience instead of talking to more game designers – if Angry Birds is such a big game in the story, why not give Rovio a call? – but I understand why he keeps the focus on himself: he’s making an article that’s relatable to his audience, who find themselves spending an unexpected amount of time playing little games on their phone, and who want someone to tell them to stop. I like to think of casual $1 iOS games as the gateway to bigger and better games; someone who never thought of themselves as a gamer might start playing Angry Birds on the subway, and then they’ll move on to something better. I’m guessing Anderson feels the opposite: these things are a bad habit, and it sounds like we should break it.
When mainstream pubs criticize games, they usually argue that they’re a waste of time. Because outside of maybe killing someone, what’s worse than wasting your time on unproductive activity? I’ve never liked that argument, because when you start making fun of how people spend their leisure time, you’re on a slippery slope. How many hours in a year does a serious baseball fan spend watching games? You don’t even get to pick up a bat and play!
Still, Anderson has every right to criticize games. My big gripe about the article is that he insulted the people who shared their time with him, more or less to their faces, and that he found it easy to do because after all, this is just a story about stupid videogames. It came off as mean-spirited, discrediting, and maybe self-conscious – and it blinded me to went well in the piece. For what it’s worth, Tom Bissell, who has also played the role of “mainstream journo who explains this stuff to non-gamers,” has a much better approach: he may make fun of how much time he spends with videogames, but he’s always making fun of himself more than anyone else. He’ll laugh at himself for spending hundreds of hours on Oblivion, but I’ve never seen him make fun of Bethesda for making the game.
Anderson’s story is also the opposite of what the mainstream press can do very well: talk to the people who make games, and find out what makes them tick. In all of the stories I linked to above – from Seabrook, Bissell, etc. – a serious journalist spends time with a game creator to learn why and how they do their work. We learn about their creative process, the way they live, the tools they use, the context in which their work belongs. They tell us stories about people first, and games along the way. And they’re inquisitive, sympathetic, and in the most basic way, respectful. And this is where the press could improve and advance the games biz, instead of having a laugh and moving on.
What I think is really interesting about this particular behavior you’ve described is that it’s more than just in the media. I find myself in situations (at school and work) where I’m the one being belittled because I play games; prejudice by association? It’s the same argument about ‘they’re stupid, waste of time, unproductive, etc.’ yet these people fully enjoy spending 2-3hours watching a movie, religiously following Dancing with the Stars, reading books, or spending hours on Facebook.
The ignorance about the quality and content of games is based on the media only ever showing the killing games (GTA) or the CoDs or the bro-Maddens, never the rewarding story titles that tell engaging stories, elicit genuine emotional responses or the innovative puzzlers that really test your wits. It’s almost to the point where I don’t discuss my passion for gaming because of the prejudice/stereotypes out there.
Fortunately as the tech age progresses you’re finding more and more people who are getting into games (casual/iphone) and who, once comfortable, begin to seek to expand their tastes and experiences with more elaborate/complicated titles. Our day will come.
Great article and great site, only just found it but I’m definitely going to be sticking around.
Chris, I think you misinterpreted the article. I don’t think Sam was making fun of us. From the start of the article, which opens with Tetris, through the references to Chess, it’s clear that “stupid” is being used in a semi-ironic way to refer to mean “abstract”. In other words, games without stories, messages, or explicit themes, ie. all the “smart” trappings.
I actually thought the article was thoughtful and, by and large, very insightful. That he remains skeptical of the value of these games while considering how they might have larger meanings is to his credit. It’s not an easy question and I think he deals with it in good faith.
In an era of pompous, overblown, middlebrow “smart” games, I’m happy to be lumped in with Chess and Tetris in the stoopid end of the pool. I think the gist of the article is that it could deeper here than you think.
Frank – I appreciate the insight and I’ll take your word for it re: his intentions. The article was full of good material, and I can see how “stupid games” could be meant ironically – certainly calling something “smart” can be perjorative too. But I have a hard time believing that his readers, or a majority anyway, will see “stupid games” as meaning anything but “stupid games.” For example: what if I had written a story on composer Morton Feldman, whose works could run 4+ hours in length, and I decided to label it as “boring music”? I couldn’t count on everyone seeing the irony. They’d probably just take my cue and belittle the composer for writing such gargantuan stuff.
I had several problems with the story, but I was probably also rolling it in with the Slate article that I linked to above, as well as all my concerns about whether the mainstream press or the “smarter” (there we go again) games press can convince non-gamers to take games seriously. So I’ll admit I bring my own baggage here … but I still would have edited this piece a little differently.
you are a moron
Although I didn’t Anderson’s artical demeaning to gaming in general. I did find that he had share misinformation and didn’t truly do his homework in writing his article. For instance he make it sound that rovio the creator of angry birds “inventented” these type of gravity games, when in fact ‘crush the castle’ and over countless flash games came before it.