The “New Games Journalism” and the mainstream
While I rarely (if ever) use this forum for editorializing—preferring instead to overwhelm you with Internet snippets—there’s something lately that’s been bugging me a bit and I feel like carping about it. If your eyes glaze over on this sort of nonsense, feel free to scroll up or down and look at the pretty pictures instead—chances are, that’s what I’d do myself.
In any case, the issue that has been concerning me of late is the loosely agglomerated cadre of games bloggers who are boldly attempting to forge a new sort of videogame criticism, upping the level of writing about the art and trying to bring a higher level of perspective to looking at the medium. This is all well and good, of course, and many of these people are doing solid work in advancing their craft beyond what has been done before. And yet, when you go through a lot of these blogs regularly one has to wonder about the mainstream that they almost always stay in—they’ll break down all sorts of works that land solidly in the big corporate AAA space so you get rafts of verbiage spilled out on the latest from Nintendo and Bioware and Valve. But mostly, beyond the occasional breakout smaller product like World of Goo or Zeno Clash it is exceedingly rare for these blogs to turn their eye towards anything that doesn’t come out of the big corporate sector. (Aside: but oh wow, please don’t dare imply that any in this group are beholden to the big corporate marketing machine—nothing ruffles those feathers more than challenging liberal bona fides).
The main issue for me here is in wondering just what sort of a well rounded critical outlook can be evinced when many of the key players seem to be so hermetically sealed into the corporate wonderland of the 60$ game. Is this not much like being a film critic who rarely goes beyond the Hollywood megaplex while ignoring that there are state of the art works being done in the European and Asian cinema, not to mention occasional American projects done mostly outside the studio foundation? Isn’t this exactly akin to an art criticism that slavishly devotes its outlook to the big works of the western canon while turning a blind eye to the wealth of brilliant creators whose work exists outside of that mainstream tradition?
While to be sure there are occasional exceptions to this rule—the great Rock, Paper, Shotgun especially seems keen on keeping up with oddball products and innovative mechanics from across the spectrum, and some other individuals at times do bust out of the megacorporation space—it seems to me that many of the gaming bloggers who so confidently feel that they are forging ahead with their words might do well to once in awhile try to turn their eyes to products that are not the latest offering from EA or Activision. There are rivulets beyond number out there for your perusal and that beg for examination—so why does your critical boat do little but course down the same mainstream that Kotaku and 1Up float on?
