Click here to read Part I, on what makes a videogame a videogame.
New Games Journalism (NGJ) is primarily concerned with writing about subjective experiences in games in a narrative style. Showing how you were able to craft an incredible story from an experience within a game – even if it wasn’t part of the game’s intended structure and narrative.
Kieron Gillen is the games journo that coined the term and wrote up a brief manifesto detailing the mandate and purpose of NGJ.
NGJ is a “confessional” mode of writing that puts your personal response to a gaming experience on display. Gillen highlights the fascinating article “Bow, Nigger” by Always Black as good example to follow (easier to enjoy if, like me, you’ve played Jedi Knight II online extensively). To put it simply, as Gillen does, “you have to make people understand what it felt like to be there when it happened” – “It” being your experience in a game.
Where NGJ falters in doing this is that it accurately describes the “process of composition” rather than the “structure of the thing composed”, quoting Cleanth Brooks’ 1951 essay “The Formalist Critics”.
Gillen describes the job of New Games Journalists as being “Travel Journalists to Imaginary Places.” Such a style of writing has its obvious appeal. It feels “human”, and we’re human, so it gives us a sense of being on the same page. NGJ is bright, as opposed to a drab and clinical critical analysis – making it more appealing to a wider audience of readers.
Alongside Gillen, Jim Rossignol is another games writer who has written in such a style.
In his discourse about “Going Planetside“, Rossignol writes like the “college lecturer of infectious enthusiasm” that Brooks jokes of in his article – talking in the same eager tones as someone who has spent a month playing World of Warcraft and is eager to share his new experiences with people he thinks will care.
All of this being said, I really do enjoy all such articles by Gillen and Rossignol (check out his great book This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities), like I’ve also enjoyed video game writing by Tom Chick and Ste Curran. These are all fantastic writers – possibly my favourite in the industry. And perhaps that’s part of the problem.
Such creative imaginations are capable of weaving the most intricate and interesting stories from the experiences they get out of games. The Great Scam by Nightfreeze is a great example of this – it reads as a captivating cyberpunk thriller, a real page turner.
Likely, the author really did experience a rollercoaster of emotions as he played through the game. But is this narrative style actually accurate to the game itself, to what the game has concretely achieved based in its design? Having played both Planetside and Eve Online myself, I found both experiences to be rather dry and boring. They enjoyed the games in their subjectivity, while I disliked them. Whose opinion do you trust more? It doesn’t matter. It was a matter of a taste and emotional response – not criticism.
What can be offered, in terms of opinion, is whether or not the critic feels that “work has succeeded or failed” (Brooks 25). But the objective structure of the work alone carries the work’s meaning – New Games Journalists commit an “affective fallacy” by letting analysis take the back seat to emotional response. By putting the entertainment value of reading the article on a pedestal (thus encouraging readers to buy magazines), genuine intellectual discussion of games suffers.
The same articles could have been about a text-based truck simulator – with one person having a captivating personal experience, and the other getting nothing out of it. Regardless of the quality of the work, such a description deals more with the realms of psychology and human taste than actually doing a “close reading”, if you will, of a game. NGJ is supposed to be about the gamer, rather than the game – and this is its central problem.
Such dependency on pure subjective experience ultimately disenfranchises the usefulness of games criticism, negating an actual analysis of the game’s quality in craftsmanship.
What NGJ has achieved is creating a style of writing that makes for very entertaining articles. It provides an apt account for the effect that games have on gamers. But it does not explore succinctly the meaning that a game carries, that which is carried within the intended objective structure of the craft.
Ultimately, advocates of NGJ shouldn’t feel like they’ve established a critical analysis of videogames as an art form. Videogame criticism is still very much in its infancy. NGJ is a couple hundred years behind the progress of literary study. Of course, no foul to Gillen – who only really touched on NGJ years ago and has since co-founded the fantastic Rock, Paper, Shotgun with Rossignol (as well as fellow game journalists John Walker and Alec Meer).
To end all of this, Brooks sum up my feelings nicely:
“The critic may enjoy certain works very much and may be indeed intensely moved by them. I am, and I have no embarrassment in admitting the fact; but a detailed description of my emotional state on reading certain works has little to do with indicating to an interested reader what the work is and how the parts of it are related.” (24)
Or, as The Artful Gamer puts it, “We now consume game writing in the same way we consume games.”
Disclaimer: I write this with little to no experience in the games journalism industry, with the sole purpose of creating some dialogue. In reality, I don’t have much against NGJ at all – it provides some purposeful tenets to follow, which is more than most games writing does. Moreover, it gets closer to understanding the “language” that games use to speak to us – something very personal, that attains a direct connection in terms of perspective. Importantly, it makes games writing more appealing for people who don’t understand games. Ultimately though, I do feel that there is value in separating emotional response from critical analysis. While there is much emotive interest and entertainment in reading about emotional responses in a subjective state, it shouldn’t be the main mode of games journalism.
3 Comments
I totally agree with what you’ve written here. Some game reviews just read like overexcited fanfics or something rather than actual intelligent critical analysis, and that kind of writing might contribute to the state of disconnection between something like video games and something like literature. People make a distinction between high and low art, and I don’t think it has to be that way. This is a step in the right direction.
I disagree, and largely for the reason that RPS posted next to the link to this post, but for a few ideas I’ll outline here.
The problem with video games more over any other type of media is that it involves the player. By removing the player from the writing, you are only looking at a game in a very robotic, anal way.
How do you answer the question, “How is the gameplay?” But even further, how do you critique it without involving your own playstyle? Plainly put, you can’t. You cannot critique gameplay without the player and their innate quirks.
Look at Deus Ex. If you were to criticize the way the game plays then you’d have to mention how you personally played the game – any other way is disservice to the game and your readers. If I were to say that I ran through gung-ho style, that makes my perspective very different from someone who didn’t kill a single enemy.
Besides, just because nobody has used new games journalism to criticize a piece doesn’t mean it can’t happen. Think of the safari or travel journal through a game, analyzing why the game doesn’t live up to the concept it presents. But, again, this must involve the player.
The strict Consumer Reports style gaming journalism is largely pointless for writers who are discussing mostly good games. If you’re like rock Papar Shotgun and can choose your topics, omitting the crap, then what’s the point in discussing a game in terms of a “product?” It’s such a lame and shallow way to consider games when they’re so much more than that.
Nob’dy is right that we can only access games through our own subjective experiences, and this constrains what we can write about them. But it’s wrong to conclude that we can therefore only write personal narratives. The dichotomy between purely solipsistic personal narrative and a “consumer reports”-style outside view is a false one. I can use my personal experience to answer “how is the gameplay,” just like I can use my personal experiences as a human being to describe the objective world around me. It works because we have a common intersubjective vocabulary that lets us bridge the gap of differing experiences.
In my own writing, I try to use personal experience to advertise and illustrate critical points, which I frame in relatively objective terms because I take them to be real facts about the games at issue. It’s a compromise I haven’t perfected, but it’s possible in principle and indeed I think most games writers use an approach like it.
Examples / shameless plugs:
On the in-game meaning of “Game Over,” with personal discussion of Chrono Trigger
On moral experiences without choice in games, with personal discussion of Shadow of the Colossus
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