There are few things in entertainment that cause more hand wringing than review scores. Just hear that a prominent critic banished your favorite video game or movie to the realm where one star failures go to die and you can feel the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end. How dare that monster be so callous, so blind! Under the Skin is a masterpiece!
Sorry, I’m getting off track here. Caro and I spent almost an hour (much longer than we planned) talking about this very topic. We figure about the good aspects of review scores, because we’re so fair and balanced, but delve into the bad side of assigning art a numeric value as well.
And if you want a solution to this whole situation? Well, if you listen to the end, you may be disappointed, because we don’t know. But the journey is more important the destination anyway. Who wants to go to Disneyland when you can just drive on the beautiful 101?
How does Martin Luther King Jr. relate to video games? Not at all! But Brendan and I still used his holiday as a jumping off point for the dreams we want to be realized in video games. Just like the good doctor must have envisioned.
Brendan wants nothing more than for the artistic side of the industry to become more prominent compared to the dominant consumer product side, which is a worthy enough dream. I, on the other hand, want equality! And, no, I’m not pandering; this is for purely selfish reasons.
How many hours did you spend watching the Awesome Games Done Quick livestream? If you’re like me, it was more hours than an unemployed (though aspiring writer) should have spent watching others play video games. If you’re like Brendan, you were puzzled by the basic appeal of the thing.
Well, now you can hear our thoughts about the whole shebang. Don’t worry, we aren’t going to rehash the Animal Crossing speedrun (as much as I’d want to). Instead, we’re going to talk about the elements that make AGDQ possible. For instance, why are we so quick to condemn glitches in current releases but are awed by them in classics? And do modern games work as well when speed is your main goal?
Then we move on to hype. Namely, why does hype seem to dictate Game of the Year and Most Anticipated Games lists? Shouldn’t we be able to see past marketing forces to reward the games that are really worth knowing about?
All that and more (though in much less time than last week’s episode) in the latest The Crockpot.
Guess what? I’m doing another podcast! This one is completely different from The Crockpot even though half the cast is the same. In this show that still needs a real name, Carolyn Petit and I take one aspect of entertainment and dissect it as much as we can. Sound intrigued? I sure hope you are.
In our debut episode, we talk about spoilers for more than a half hour. Crazy! People are downright obsessed with spoilers. That may seem like a gross generalization, but think about your own reaction when a key plot detail of something you adore is revealed. Did your chest tighten? I know it did?
Caro and I want to figure out why we have such strong reactions. Do spoilers matter? And what’s made this stuff so darn important anyway?
Thank you to my friend Andy Sommerville for creating the opening and closing theme.
For the past six months or so, I had been thinking about how to start a podcast. Not the logistics (though I am still a little lost in that regard), but rather a show that I would not only enjoy recording, but listening to as well. My podcast rotation is dominated by so many NPR and NPR-like shows that I had it ingrained in my head that I needed a storytelling/investigative slant, or else my words would be lost in the morass of internet chatter.
I was stuck searching for perfection while doing nothing, which is a theme of my life. So I scrapped my high ambitions for something a little more attainable. Brendan Sinclair and I decided to start up another podcast where two people spout their opinions. It’s called The Crockpot because we’re self-deprecating, and it’s not that different from The Hotspot we used to record.
Is it any good? Well, I sure think so, but you should probably judge for yourself. I do apologize for the audio quality. That should improve as we record more podcasts. Oh, and thank you to Brendan’s brother’s band, the Eskimos, for providing the soundtrack.
The expression “actions speak louder than words” seems less and less relevant as our society hurls itself toward a purgatory of Sisyphean debates. Words have become everything. There has been no point in human history in which we’ve so easily shared our must mundane thoughts, and this has created a tide pool of endless bickering where there are so many words being spouted that none of them matter. Is that a sad portrait of modern life? Well, one could certainly feel overwhelmed by the deluge of inane chatter, but instead of being mired by that toneless echo, we should instead embrace the antithesis of this ideal. Namely, the silent protagonist.
For years I’ve viewed a mute hero as one who was a poor cypher for the player’s own inner monologue. Link is no more than a shell of an idea. We say that he is brave, courageous, and oh so smart at block-pushing puzzles because that’s how we view ourselves while standing in his elfin shoes. The weight of his narrative growth was placed firmly on our shoulders. Link is our digital doppelganger, and so we imbued him with our fantastic vision of our hidden selves.
The same could be said of Gordon Freeman, Crono, and countless other silent protagonists. And though there is worth in letting us create our own stories without the encumbrance of a talkative fool as our avatar, the tools in which we can communicate as these characters are so stunted as to make it impossible to create a distinct and memorable existence. Gordon can do nothing more than fire a gun, swing a crowbar, and make a ruckus in the laboratory when Eli Vance is talking. Non-playable characters so rarely react to your actions that it’s as if you’re nothing more than a ghost passing through the mortal realm.
What we end up with are not characters at all. The aforementioned franchises are among my favorites, but I cannot remember ever pushing toward fighting Lavos because I wanted to learn more about Cronos. That’s not why these games exist. Silent protagonists are placeholders for great ideas, and though the games they exist in can be extraordinarily well-crafted, there is that pointless cardboard cutout standing dumbly by where a proper, personality-rich hero should rightly be.
Which brings me to a game that has had less impact than a butterfly flapping its wings in Tanzania. Roundabout is one of those indie games that appears on Steam with a quiet whimper, gathers a little attention from those who inhale every new release, and then slinks into the ether when something more enticing catches our eye. There are just seven professional reviews of Roundabout, and even though it’s been warmly received, well, seven is just not that many. No one cares. And that bums me out because it handled the silent protagonist as well as I’ve ever seen.
Here’s a quick rundown for those who are scratching their heads. Roundabout is a top-down action game in which you drive passengers in the back of your limousine wherever they want to go. The twist (literally!) is that your limo continually spins in a circle, making it challenging to navigate even the widest of roads. It’s a ridiculous concept that works because the action fits warmly in the heart of anyone who craves arcade hijinks. Roundabout is fun, but I wouldn’t be writing about it if it weren’t for its exceptional storytelling.
First, it should be noted that the story is all live action. So even though the writing is (deliberately?) clumsy, the actors are so hilarious and sincere that it doesn’t matter.
The story is Georgio Manos’ quest to find herself as both a chauffeur and a person. People climb into the back of her limo, chatter on about whatever it is people chatter about, and you drive them off to some far-flung locale. The beauty is in how these dialogue sequences are delivered. Georgio does no more than glance backward to communicate her thoughts. Although she is silent, she has a lot to say, and it’s amazing to see such complexity in a character who never utters a word.
We see the first hint of this when Beth–one of your many repeat passengers–needs to be hurried off to a nearby wedding. Beth is an open book filled with excitement and anticipation. And maybe it’s just the aroma of love that’s in the air, but she takes an immediate interest in Georgio. These two characters meet throughout the story, and we see Georgio’s fondness for Beth, her sadness when they’re separated, and happiness when they once more come together, and she communicates everything with the look in her eyes when she turns backward in her seat.
It’s a brilliant way to craft a character. We don’t need to hear her inner monologue to know who she is, we just need to see the hint of a smile on her lips or the doubt that wrinkles her forehead. It’s a beautifully concise way to document a character’s growth, and when the story finally wrapped up, I found that I knew her better than many other protagonists who prattled on endlessly and forgettably. It’s as if most heroes are made for the connected world we live, in which every pointless thought is thrust onto the public, while Georgio says so much more without ever opening her mouth.
The sarcasm bleeds through the screen. Someone out there doesn’t think a particular writer is worthy of being called a journalist, and so they clamp quotation marks around the title so as to dismiss everything that critic worked so hard to achieve. “Journalist.” It rolls off the tongue with raw contempt. As someone who studied journalism in college, who takes pride in the role the forth estate plays in a functioning society, waving away my efforts so cavalierly would hurt. There’s no comeback to those dreaded quotation marks other than “Uh uh!” and it would derail my thoughts ever so briefly before I shrugged it off. “What do they know?” I would mumble to myself. “I’m a good journalist.”
My dream job has always been to write about video games, and when, as a boy, I imagined what it would be like to earn a living by doing what I’m most passionate about, I pictured long days in front of a television with a controller in my hand. It was the fun that took center stage in my mind, the joy of venturing forth in the Mushroom Kingdom or Hyrule, embodying Samus Aran or Simon Belmont. The reality of the job contains much of my simple ideas, but being a video game journalist goes far beyond saying whether the latest game is good or not. That part is easy. It’s those other topics, the darker topics, that are hard, but they’re what makes this job important.
When I was at GameSpot, I wrote editorials that I knew would be hated by much of my audience. How did I know? Because many of my colleagues would hiss at my latest work. I received internal backlash when I argued that excessive violence is damaging, and if we want outsiders to respect games, developer and players alike have to turn their backs on unnecessary bloodshed. It would have caused me much less stress to make a video celebrating Kratos’ most gruesome executions, but it’s not the job of a journalist to feed into the marketing hype of our corporate overlords. A journalist has to write about what they believe in their hearts, examine the events that affect our lives, and ask the tough questions.
It seemed as though every couple weeks I would find myself in hot water. I traded verbal blows with Electronic Arts’ Greg Goodrich, questioning the authenticity of his war game that glamorized combat, making war look like a fun pastime. I examined the place of video games in a culture that trivializes the humanity of women, forcing them to be little more than prizes that can be won. Such stories led to sleepless nights and anxious days, but I knew that it was necessary to talk about these issues. Whether you agreed with me or not didn’t matter; I wanted people to think about games in ways that are uncomfortable, instead of just swallowing whatever publishers are feeding us. That’s what a journalist is supposed to do.
And now we have GamerGate. A movement has formed that has a stated goal that I can stand strongly behind. People want ethical practices in gaming journalism. Who wouldn’t want this? I firmly believe in complete transparency. If you’re hiding something–anything!–from your audience, you need to reconsider what you’re doing. A journalist’s work should be an open book. Anything they do while at the job should be above board, and if they cross into shady territory, the public has a right to know that. So, yes, that part of GamerGate, the part that deals with ethics, is a good thing. It’s something I continually talked about behind the scenes, so I have no problems with the audience demanding it as well.
Unfortunately, demanding ethical standards is just the shield that GamerGate hides behind. The movement’s true goal is to shut up anyone who dares to speak against the games that the members hold so dear. People who dare to argue for equality are shunned, harassed, and tormented. The status quo must be upheld, no matter the cost, so anyone who falls outside of the popular discourse must be targeted. It’s a disgusting situation. Women have been victimized in ways that should not be legal. Three women have already been forced from their homes after vicious verbal attacks, and the movement seems to be gaining steam as more and more lives are wrecked. It’s the awful stereotype of gamers brought to reality: Misogynistic loners who care more about their precious games than people’s lives.
And standing idly by while all of this is happening are video game “journalists.” I never thought that I too would have to use those dreaded quotation marks, but times have changed. Too many sites have ignored this issue entirely. There are cowards running the show, people too terrified to speak out against the harassment mob for fear that it would negatively affect their hits. People making decisions to ignore GamerGate are not journalists. It’s an honor to practice journalism, to speak the hard truths no matter how much it hurts you to do so. How can you possibly expect the audience to respect you when you don’t even respect yourselves? It’s a sickening display of gutlessness. The silence of the major sites is a tacit agreement with all of the horrible practices of GamerGate.
You can’t be neutral on a moving train. If you’re journalist, prove it by covering this situation. Any site who doesn’t proves that they’re just corporate puppets.
[Editor’s Note: I don’t want people to think that everyone was against me at GameSpot. Far from it. Without the support of many on the team, I wouldn’t have had the guts to write controversial pieces in the first place.]
Two months have passed since I wrote last my last piece for GameSpot. On the day that I was let go, I consoled myself and others by saying that my departure was for the best, that my plunge into my next endeavor would be better in the long term for my career success and happiness. Two months have passed, with days spent willing human resource departments to be struck by my resume, with endless hours of walking my dog and watching television series, without anything solid for me to latch on to, to say, “This is why I was so positive two months earlier.”
Was my optimism unfounded? No, not even close. The problem lies in my own reluctance to move forward. My plan was to sustain myself with steady freelance work until I landed something more concrete. And though I have had intermittent success in that area–getting pieces on US Gamer and IGN–I have no confidence in turning that into a worthwhile financial stopgap. Freelance work is not how I’m conditioned. The stories I’ve published thus far have been interviews, of which I love writing, but are but one small part of what I am comfortable and excited to talk about in gaming coverage.
This blog is a way to appease the part of my mind that I’ve been ignoring since I was laid off. When I worked at GameSpot, I would show up without any clue of what I was going to work on, and then conjure an idea from scratch once I walked in the door. That was thrilling and empowering, and so I want to continue to do that kind of writing, even if I have no idea how to market such pieces to websites. And when I do have ideas that are easier to pitch–such as in-depth interviews–I’ll poke the established websites, to see if I can land a bigger audience and some spare cash.
In a way, this blog is me admitting that my dreams are not as easily realized as I once thought. But that’s alright. I still do have big plans, and now I have a sounding board for when inspiration hits and I don’t want to deal with the song and dance of pitches.