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I wasn’t at GDC. I’ve been too busy being lazy, adolescent and bad at writing. I, like the entirety of the game’s industry, am a bastard and don’t deserve even an ounce of respect for my leeching, degrading, derogatory, un-skilled and bias work. Read more →
In an interesting turn of events, N’Gai Croal has decided that he will be leaving his job of 14 years writing for Newsweek’s Level UP section. His final article has been posted.
In an interview with Kotaku, Mr. Croal expanded on where he’s planning on going after leaving journalism:
I want to do something more creative than when you are on the journalism side of things. I think it’s going to be a combination of things, I’m still in the process of figuring that out. There is some interest in me consulting on games, that’s something I’m interested in as well.
It’s good to see journalists moving forward into the game industry and I do think that they can bring new meat to the table, so to say. They know gamers pretty well and they know what works and what doesn’t for the most part.
My one thought is that, with journalists moving further into the development side, how will this affect game reporting? Is there a foreseeable future of just twitter updates for game reviews? Will underdog blogs move up into the limelight more?
It’s an interesting thought to have about the current state of game coverage media, but fans of N’Gai Croal shouldn’t be too sad about his departure. He will be continuing his monthly article in Edge Magazine as he transitions into a new part of his life.
I wish the best of luck to Mr. Croal.
As I said a few weeks ago, this Review Symposium will either be very important for videogame journalism, or a bit of a “self-obsessed literature fart”. So far, and we have only seen one topic discussed, it’s been around 50/50.
The first topic discussed was that of giving a numerical score to a review. I recapped all the interesting points I got from it in part 1 and part 2 earlier this week. In this final part of my report (I really need to think of better ways to break this down, “Part 3 of my Report on Part 1 of the Symposium” just doesn’t fit right) I’ll go into a little more depth on my reactions to what was said.
Reviews have scores, critiques do not.
The first thing I picked up on whilst reading the debate was that several writers don’t seem to understand who they are actually writing for or who their target audience is. Most reviews are not aimed at the wine drinking, game-theory learning, late-20-somethings who actually understand Braid. Reviews are aimed at the people who want to know about a game and the people most likely to buy it. For the most part, these people don’t care about what a game is about, just if it’s any good. They want to know if they will enjoy it. Read more →
This is Part 2 of my 3 part article on Shawn Elliot’s Review Symposium. In Part 1, I covered the off-topic ideas that were discussed in the first part of the symposium. In this part I will go over the main points raised regarding the actual scoring that more often that not accompanies reviews.
I won’t go into as much discussion behind my thoughts on the matter as that will be the focus of Part 3. Again, if you do find yourself interested in the ideas and topics, give the full symposium discussion a read. All of the quotes I have used have been taken from that debate.
Part 1 of Shawn Elliott’s review symposium has been available for a few days but as it’s around 3 miles long, it has taken an understandable number of hours for me to read through. To help you get the general ideas behind what was said, I’ve broken the whole thing into 3 separate posts.
In this first post, I will try to highlight all the off-topic, yet still very valuable things discussed. In part 2 I will go over the actually relevant areas of discussion (i.e. topics directly related to the idea of reviews having scores). In the final part I will try to respond to the on-topic questions and ideas raised, adding my own (completely correct and un-questionable) opinion to the mix.
As I said, this first part will cover all of the interesting parts I found in the symposium which are not directly related to the topic at hand. As with any attempt at re-wording and simplifying what other people have created, if you find yourself interested, you really should give the full symposium a read through.
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