Anyone who's been a faithful reader of Level Up knows we have some pet themes to which we keep returning. Among them: games are not a fundamentally narrative medium; we all "see" games with our hands; we videogame journalists need to develop a critical vocabulary that will enable us to better explain the unique qualities of this art form. This week, we managed to smuggle some of that thinking into the pages of NEWSWEEK by means of a page-long essay on Grand Theft Auto IV, in which we wrote:

When I write a post about videogames on my NEWSWEEK.com blog, Level Up, my target audience is the sizable one that's already knowledgeable about the medium. The real challenge, however, comes when I return to the pages of the magazine. It's not easy to explain a game like Grand Theft Auto IV to an audience that's not native to this art form. Yes, I said art: to draw an analogy or three, Grand Theft Auto is to videogames what "The Sopranos" was to television--a sprawling, operatic crime series that has elevated the genre and made its creator very rich in the process (Rockstar Games took in more than $1 billion in the United States for the last three GTA games alone). But on the TV show, you only watch Tony and his minions kill their enemies. In Grand Theft Auto IV, you also direct and star in a story that unfolds over as many as 100 hours, depending on your skill as a gamer.

The experience is hard enough to sum up that I'm tempted to put novices at ease by writing something like this: a first-person, here's-what-I-did-in-the-game introduction, followed by a colorful précis of the Grand Theft Auto IV story and characters, then a recitation of the numerous landmarks and radio stations that give this skewed facsimile of New York City--called Liberty City in the game--its authentic flavor. The problem with this approach is that it doesn't begin to give you a feel for what it's actually like to play the game. Just as the majority of movie reviewers still struggle to find a meaningful critical and technical language with which to discuss actors' performances, we who write about videogames have yet to find a vocabulary that enables us to thoroughly engage the medium. One that will allow us to examine the mechanics, visuals, sounds and narrative elements of videogames not in isolation, but in concert.

When we wrote those two paragraphs, we did so specifically in response to several reviews of GTA IV that we'd read in the mainstream press, where the need to distill a game's essence for non-initiates is the most acute. Take, for instance, the ecstatic review that ran in the New York Times. Only two almost-throwaway sentences--"The point of the main plot is to guide Niko through the city’s criminal underworld. Gang leaders and thugs set missions for him to complete, and his success moves the story along toward a conclusion that seems as dark as its beginning"--describe the main thrust of the game. The rest of the review, though artfully written, starts with that "here's-some-of-what-I-did" intro we mentioned in our excerpt, and then follows it up with a laundry list of adjectives, characters, locations and narrative elements.

To read the rest of our post, click on the link below.

 

A journalist writes for the moment--the first draft of history, our profession has been called--and if the journalist is fortunate, his or her work will hold up in the years to come. Back in the fall of 2005, with the Xbox 360 on the verge of release and the Playstation 3, Wii and the event that would change the blogosphere forever Level Up still a year away, Rockstar Games released both The Warriors (for PlayStation 2 and Xbox) and Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories (for PlayStation Portable). We used the one-two punch to convince our editors to part with some precious space in the pages of NEWSWEEK, but with space at a premium, we had to find a way to make each word count. We decided to try to distill what makes Rockstar different from many of its peers; here's how we kicked off our story:

Videogame creators firmly believe that their work will someday become the dominant form of entertainment in the 21st century. So why isn't their message as original as their medium? The vast majority of story-oriented games shamelessly rip off the same set of sources as though they were the Gospels: "Aliens," "Saving Private Ryan," "Band of Brothers," "Black Hawk Down," "The Lord of the Rings" and Dungeons & Dragons. It's as if every Western game designer were cloned from the same DNA; indeed, a recent survey of game creators in English-speaking countries found that the overwhelming majority are straight white males (average age: 31).

The one company that consistently avoids this trap is Rockstar Games. Best known for its controversial hit franchise Grand Theft Auto, the New York City-based publisher is headed by a trio of British expatriates who draw inspiration not from the heroic side of Americana, but from its outlaw side--mob movies, pulp novels, gangsta rap, '80s cop shows and spaghetti Westerns. For its latest trick, Rockstar recently released The Warriors, based on the 1979 urban gang movie, and Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories, which brings its sprawling epic to Sony's PlayStation Portable. "I remember when Rockstar was nothing," says Andrew McNamara, editor in chief of Game Informer magazine. "They came to us and said, 'We're going to build a company around pop culture and youth culture.' We were like, 'Yeah, right.' And they went out and executed on every front."

The story is somewhat reductive, as such pieces must necessarily be. But our critique was pretty accurate then. How much have things changed since?

To read the rest of this post, click on the link below. 

 

 Life is complicated. I killed people, smuggled people, sold people. Perhaps here, things will be different.
--Niko Bellic, Grand Theft Auto IV

When Rockstar Games showed the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV, people marvelled over the detailed environments, thrilled to the series' return to Liberty City and speculated about just how next-gen Rockstar North's Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 debut would be. For us, our sense of anticipation was built around something entirely different: the prospect of an immigrant story. When MTV's Tracey John interviewed us for the Multiplayer blog, we spoke of ourselves as being liminal people, in the following exchange:

Multiplayer: Do you feel there are any advantages [to being black and covering videogames]? Do you feel you stand out more because of your race?

Croal: Well, there are relatively few of us. So I guess in that sense I stand out. But I think also I stand out because of my dreads. [laughs] I stand out because I work for Newsweek. … [Working for Newsweek] opened a lot of doors. I know that’s not really what you’re asking, but in terms of race I don’t think I found a particular advantage or disadvantage. Professionally I think there is a perspective I have but I wouldn’t attribute it solely to race. I would say that I’m--and I hate to use a big word--but I’d say that I’m a liminal person; people who exist along boundaries or lines sort of in between spaces.

My parents are from Guyana, South America. I was born in Canada. I lived a little bit of my life--when I was two to when I was five--in Guyana. I studied French for 10 years. I grew up in Canada. I moved to the United States for college. I’ve lived in California, D.C., and now in New York. I work at a mainstream magazine covering a niche subject within that magazine. So there’s a way in which I have all of these different perspectives. I’m a black, Canadian immigrant living in the United States of Guyanese descent, right? So there are all of these things that I’ve seen and done and by virtue of how I came into covering this, starting out writing about arts and entertainment, mostly movies, some music, some technology, and bringing that to covering games and being very inspired by everyone from Pauline Kael and John Simon and Stanley Kauffmann, Roger Ebert--to people who were writing for the Village Voice like Greg Tate and Lisa Jones and really strong cultural reporters who brought multiple perspectives to things. I try to bring that to games.

Now, we don't want to oversell the cultural differences between the English-speaking parts of Canada and the U.S.--let's face it, you export your Hollywood movies and rock/hip-hop while importing our comedians and news anchors, so pop culturally speaking, there are a lot of similarities--but take our word for it that being a double-immigrant has given us a unique-ish perspective on matters large and small. And because of that, we responded strongly to Niko Bellic in a way that certain others may have not.

We say this in search of a way to write thoughtfully about a subject that Rockstar Games is not yet allowing us to write about in any detail: the opening credits to Grand Theft Auto IV.

Rodin's "The Thinker." Courtesy of innoxiuss; edited by Level Up

The Idea: Do people who play a single game exclusively have the right, um, idea?

The Thinker: Chris Dahlen

The Source: GameSetWatch

The Quote: A $60 game purchase can either be the best value for your entertainment dollar, or the worst. On the one hand, we have games that are disposable entertainment - an experience that can be consumed in 8-10 hours and set aside.

While bonus achievements or a token multiplayer mode might extend the short lives of Dark Sector or Condemned 2: Bloodshot, you're really supposed to treat them like this week's Hollywood blockbuster: catch it on opening night, forget about it by the next morning. As a critic, I see plenty of these disposable games. Vampire Rain. Viking: Battle for Asgard. Bullet Witch. In the crit biz, we call these "rentals."

But let's look at the other extreme, where a new game isn't like a movie, but a sport. You can obsess over Rock Band or Warcraft the same way that a golfer keeps hitting the links. Yes, you're shelling out for the sequels, the expansions, the online fees and other add-ons, but at heart you could play the same game and stick with it for months - all while finding new partners and competitors to challenge and fuel your rise to dominance. Isn't that the mark of a great game?

And what if the industry focused more on one-game players? Instead of jumping on the next big thing and finding out it's Heavenly Sword, or worshipping the graphics of an E3 demo only to find out you've been drooling over Assassin's Creed, or wasting even an inch of copy on the latest movie tie-in game--what if the biggest factor in how we judge a game was its durability?

The Reaction: First, let's do the math. $60 for 8-10 hours of gameplay equals $6.00-7.50 per hour. That's more expensive on a per-hour basis than a two-hour movie (but cheaper than, say, a Broadway show). Even worse, if you've spent $60 for the game, gotten a couple of hours in and determined that it's not as good as you'd hoped, your choices are to a) put it away and waste the money you've spent; b) play on, grimly, in an effort to wring the full value out of your expenditure (though as we've said previously, your playtime also has value); or c) trade it in to GameStop for some fraction of what you paid for it and use that store credit for something else. If, however, a game provides you with 80-100 hours of entertainment, you're looking at 60 to 75 cents per hour. That's a great value by any medium's standards.

To read the rest of today's installment of "The Big Idea," click on the link below.

 Rodin's "The Thinker." Courtesy of innoxiuss; edited by Level Up

The Idea: Who is this Adam Maxwell guy, and why the f--- is he saying that writers don't matter in videogames?

The Thinkers: Zach Schiff-Abrams

The Source: The Cut Scene

The Quote (from Zach Schiff-Abrams): As a film producer I have drawn and quartered many a writer so usually I leap at the chance to jump on any bandwagon that is founded on lynching the writing community. Unfortunately this retard doesn't know his ass from his elbow, so here's my 15 cents:

"When a writer sits down to build a story, they are usually building a plot." Here's what's inherently wrong with this moron's argument. Ask any self-respecting writer (and every f---ing last one of them motherf---ers are self-respecting) what they do when they sit down to build a story and they'll tell you the first thing (and the most important thing) they do is create characters. In fact, most good stories in any medium usually come from a landscape where the writer almost obsessively focuses on creating and developing characters in a vacuum that doesn't rely on any plot. There are no good f---ing plots, there are only interesting characters that inform a plot...

What I have been arguing for years upon years is that videogames desperately need more writing. And now we're finally at a level technologically speaking where we can actually integrate the creation of character into the very fabric of the gameplay experience. You still argue? You think GTA is a successful franchise?  Think how much more successful it would actually be if Alvin Sargent or Jonathan Lethem was taking seriously the creation of character in that world? Then you wouldn't have Fritzy writing about how videogames are challenging movies for the media dollar, then my nerdy friends, then there wouldn't be any more movies.

Instead you have this dweeb and unfortunately way too many of his kind running the videogame industry that think in way too small of a box.

The Reaction: We've been following Maxwell's blog since last year, which means we not only read his original post, but the two other posts he wrote on the subject here and here. The challenge with his series of posts on his topic is that the, ah, writing was not always as clear as it should have been.

To read the rest of today's installment of "The Big Idea," click here. 

 Rodin's "The Thinker." Courtesy of innoxiuss; edited by Level Up

The Idea: Gamers contain multitudes. Why doesn't our language reflect that?

The Thinker: Mitch Krpata

The Source: Insult Swordfighting

The Quote: The reason "hardcore" and "casual" fail as classifications for gamers is because each of those classifications contains contradictory meanings.

Essentially, when you call someone a hardcore gamer, you are saying nothing about what type of games they like to play, or the manner in which they like to play those games. You are simply saying that this guy seems to really like games. Is that helpful to anybody? If anything, it leads to the sorts of pissing matches that inevitably overwhelm online game discussion. That designation becomes a badge of honor to be defended instead of what it should be--a simple, objective term with no value judgments attached.

There's no reason a Tourist can't be "hardcore"--no reason he can't be the sort to simply rip through one game after another in search of unique experiences. No reason a Perfectionist can't be "casual," and simply try to master, say, Wii Carnival Games. A Wholesale Player may still want linear, narrative games like Okami, and a Premium Player might be getting his money's worth with quick sessions of the latest Tetris. Who in that group is the casual player? Who is the hardcore player?

So if there is no easy or quick way to combine these questions of taste and value, maybe that's a blessing in disguise. Maybe that means we can stop stereotyping ourselves and broaden the conversation. We gamers contain multitudes. It's time we realized it.

The Reaction: We thought we had made a genuine contribution to the never-ending discussion of videogames when we coined the term "hardcasual." But Krpata goes much, much further. In 11 brief, provocative posts collected under the heading "A New Taxonomy of Gamers," he eloquently argues that we should unpack the assumptions built into the overly broad terms "hardcore" and "casual." Instead, he says, we need to evaluate our tastes in videogames along multiple axes that are more precise, such as:

To read the rest of today's installment of "The Big Idea," click on the link below.

 Rodin's "The Thinker." Courtesy of innoxiuss; edited by Level Up

The Idea: It's time to destroy the "cult" of gamers--starting with the term "gamer"

The Thinker: Douglas Wilson, game developer

The Source: GameSetWatch

The Quote: The Church of Gamers is not only morally problematic; it also ends up working against innovation in the medium. Imagine, for example, how ridiculous it would be if all television watchers identified as their own "Tubers" subculture. It’s a humorous hypothetical precisely because a vast majority of first-world citizens watch television, from the romantics who tune in for soap operas and sports fans who catch game highlights over breakfast, to the sci-fi fans addicted to the latest Joss Whedon serial and insomniacs who watch old game show reruns.

To read the rest of this introductory installment of "The Big Idea," click on the link below.

 The song list menu for Rock Band PS3 

Despite the PlayStation 2's utter dominance during the previous console cycle, we began to notice a trend emerging from casual conversations with developers: many of them were doing the bulk of their gaming on the Xbox. When asked, said game makers cited a variety of reasons, including better graphics, a wider selection of first-person shooters, and, of course, the superior online functionality of Xbox Live. This developer gap has only become more pronounced with the Xbox 360's yearlong head start and Sony's shockingly un-integrated Playstation Network feature set. We've spoken with a number of developers who don't even own PS3s; among those who do, several use it as nothing more than a Blu-Ray player. What's more, we've been to countless press events where third-party publishers are demonstrating their multiplatform games with nary a PS3 in the house. And when inquiries are made about its absence, we're greeted with a look that's either sheepish or knowing, as if it's now simply taken for granted that the PS3 version is of course lagging behind its Xbox 360 counterpart. Such is the state of PS3 development among third parties today.

We bring this up because, in our persistent state of naivete, we made yesterday what we thought was a simple request of Harmonix's PR firm.

To read the rest of this post, and to see the remainder of the screenshots for the PS3 version of Rock Band's in-game store, click on the link below.

 A cover for the comic book "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Kevin O'Neill

In Part I of our critique of level designer and blogger Steve Gaynor's assertion that "video games will never become a significant form of cultural discourse the way that novels and film have," we talked about how any medium requires a certain amount of learning in order for it to be approached and engaged. We also suggested that as more people grow up playing videogames, even conventional controllers like those of the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 become far less of a barrier to entry, to say nothing of newer interfaces such as the Wii. But Gaynor believes that there's something even more essential, even more fundamental about videogames that will forever wall the medium off from truly widespread participation:

[T]he very nature of interactive games bars them from ever truly gaining mass acceptance, and therefore mass cultural relevance. The strength of video games, what makes them unique, interesting, and affecting, is that they engage in a dialogue with each individual player. They ask you to invest yourself in the experience, to explore and understand the logic of their gameworld, and to activate the experience by doing. Video games require you to be involved, to take responsibility for your actions onscreen. They expect more out of you than film, television, the internet or a book does. You get from video games what you're willing to put in. The audience at large only wants to take.

The very thing Gaynor decries--a lack of willingness among the audience to work for their entertainment--isn't inherent in to this medium. It's almost intractable among mass audiences no matter what the medium. Popular fiction generally outsells literary fiction. Summer blockbusters generally out-gross arthouse films. Is this any different from, say, Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat out-NPD-ing BioShock last year, or Madden doing the same to Shadow of the Colossus in 2005? Does it truly matter that in aggregate television is more mass a mass medium than videogames, when on an individual level, its practitioners are faced with the same challenges that plague those who work in other media? The creator of "The Wire," David Simon, in explaining the advantages of working on TV shows for premium cable described the problem as follows:

 A cover of the acclaimed comic book "Planetary." Written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by John Cassaday

The babe in his cradle is closing his eyes
The blossom embraces the bee
But soon says a whisper, arise, arise
Tomorrow belongs to me
--"Tomorrow Belongs to Me" from the musical "Cabaret," music and lyrics by John Kander and Fred Ebb

A bet is a type of game, one with which we here at Level Up have become intimately familiar. So when we got wind of a brand new wager of sorts, between bloggers Borut Pfeifer (at The Plush Apocalypse) and Steve Gaynor (over at Fullbright), our antennae perked up immediately. And what was it that prompted this bout of gambling? It was level designer Gaynor's admittedly pessimistic assertion that "...I'll bet you that video games will never become a significant form of cultural discourse the way that novels and film have. I'll bet you that fifty years from now they'll be just as mature and well-respected as comic books are today." To which the more optimistic Pfeifer, who's working on one of Electronic Arts' Steven Spielberg games, replied, "I’ve certainly had days where I’d agree with most everything he says. I get where it’s coming from. Whether it was a frustrating day at work, or sometimes just going to a particularly rough GDC, I am not immune to that brand of despair. But, overall, I gotta say, games still have much more to achieve as a medium--if I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t be working on them."

One sees the glass as half-empty, the other sees the glass as half-full. But both are largely proceeding from the same set of assumptions when they subject videogames to a close examination--in terms of their accessibility; required level of engagement; maturity of subject matter; visual realism--and find them wanting. Take the issue of accessibility, of which Gaynor says:

Video games are hard for people to get into. The barrier for entry is higher than perhaps any other popular entertainment medium. To read a book, all you need to do is go to a library, pick one up, and start reading (which isn't usually an obstacle considering the high literacy rate in the modern world.) At the advent of popular film, you only needed to walk to a movie theatre and pay your nickel (or nowadays, ten bucks) to see the latest release. Processing the experience isn't an issue: sit, watch, and you've received an experience equal to anyone else in the audience....

Over time, the technical and systemic complexity of video games have increased, while the barriers to entry have largely remained undamaged. Taking inflation into account, the cost of a home console unit has stayed largely constant since the mid-80's (and the price of a competent gaming PC has similarly kept pace;) controllers have sprouted more buttons, gyroscopes, and analogue sticks than ever; and it's still extremely common for games of high quality to be too difficult for a non-gamer to play effectively.

 Mass Effect, developed by BioWare and published by Microsoft

Ever since we first saw the train wreck that was Fox's coverage of its hyped up "SeXbox" controversy surrounding a love scene in the RPG Mass Effect--redeemed only by Gametrailers TV host Geoff Keighley's withering rebuttal--followed by Electronic Arts vice president Jeff Brown's forceful defense of his company's studio, we've had a nagging question in the back of our minds: why didn't BioWare founders Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk or Mass Effect project director Casey Hudson lead the charge on behalf of their artistic creation? Yes, Keighley and Brown did a more-than-admirable job cutting through the ignorance and explaining the facts, much to the joy of videogame enthusiasts tired of seeing their medium of choice dragged through the mud. But at the end of the day, Keighley is a journalist, and Brown is a publicist. Shouldn't the artists be the ones issuing a full-throated, unrelenting defense of their art?

There are certainly some game developers who wouldn't be able to make a strong case for their work under the hot lights in a TV studio; live television can be a white-knuckle exercise that isn't for everyone. But in our experience, the BioWare founders in particular are not only whip-smart, but highly prepared. When we moderated a panel at the 2007 Game Developers Conference on "Early Lessons In Digital Distribution," not only did Muzyka turn up with a sheaf of documents that he periodically referred to throughout the discussion, he also took copious notes as other panelists spoke, then proceeded to deliver focused, penetrating remarks when it came his turn to speak. Surely he or one of his colleagues could have faced off against the self-admittedly uninformed child expert Cooper Lawrence on Fox News; penned a point-by-point rebuttal in lieu of EA's Brown; or published a statement and/or video response on the Mass Effect community site, rather than the single quote from Muzyka that appeared in the New York Times.

We asked Muzyka about this during last night's D.I.C.E. Summit cocktail party.

 Qwizdom Q2 Remote

Writing about games as frequently as we do has certainly made the staff of Level Up open to the applications of videogames in a variety of areas. That said, there's nothing like a story about games being used in the educational arena to get our knees jerking furiously in protest. The latest such article to trigger our inner curmudgeon is a New York Times story titled "Students Click, and a Quiz Becomes a Game," about the proliferation of game show-style clickers as a teaching aid throughout U.S. schools.

The games had begun. In a darkened classroom at Great Neck South High School on a recent afternoon, the Advanced Placement physics students sped through a pop quiz, furiously pressing keys on hand-held clickers. A projection screen tracked their responses in real time, showing who knew what through an animated display of spaceships--individually numbered for each student--that blasted off or fell by the wayside with each right or wrong answer.

The students were not competing for grades (it was only a practice quiz), but they certainly acted as if they were.

“Let’s go, let’s go!” yelled a boy from the back of the class. “What’s the next question?” The Great Neck district has been introducing the clickers in an effort to liven up traditional classroom teaching with a more interactive approach. After a successful test at one of its high schools, Great Neck expanded the technology to other schools.

To read the rest of this post, click on the link below.

We've long been fans of the site The Smoking Gun, with its troves of mug shots, celebrity riders and other documents of the famous and infamous behaving badly. So it might seem a bit strange for us to accuse these purveyors of sensationalism of being, well, sensationalistic, but that's what we're going to do. A few minutes ago, while scanning the list of stories on The Drudge Report, we came across the following headline "Online shooting game lets kids target presidential candidates..." Intrigued, we clicked on the link, which brought us to The Smoking Gun and the headline "Hey Kids, Shoot Your Favorite Candidate!
Clinton, Obama pace gunners in "Presidential Paintball" online game." The site went on to describe the game as follows:

For the aspiring young assassin, a popular online games site offers kids the opportunity to assume the identity of a leading presidential contender and then shoot their political opponents in a series of armed confrontations in the White House. While the ammo is paintball, the game on the hugely popular miniclip.com site allows kids to train a rifle scope on six presidential aspirants and squeeze off a hail of shots (which are accompanied with a rat-a-tat sound). The game, "Presidential Paintball," features six candidates in the crosshairs: Barack Obama; Hillary Clinton; John Edwards; Mitt Romney; John McCain; and Rudy Giuliani (it seems the game was developed before the ascension of Mike Huckabee). If a candidate wins a head-to-head confrontation, he/she advances to a new shootout, which occurs in various White House settings, including outside the Oval Office. When a candidate gets blown away, bloodlessly, a screen appears noting that they have been "eliminated," not killed. To better direct a fusillade, young gunmen can use their computer's mouse to place a crosshairs on a candidate's head or body. Of course, the imagery of Obama and Clinton, both of whom have been the target of threats and receive Secret Service protection, being targeted in such a manner-by children, no less-might be seen as troubling in some quarters.

Sounds disgusting, doesn't it? Well, we clicked on the link for Presidential Paintball, selected Barack Obama--the candidate and the Level Up staff are both fans of Omar Little on "The Wire," so perhaps our mutual gangsta might give us an edge--and fired up the game.

Regular readers of our daily High Score posts know that GameSetWatch is a blog that we here at Level Up very much enjoy. So it is with something approaching great reluctance that we take issue with its January 2nd post, titled "GameSetChat: How Do Wii Judge Fun For Mainstream Gamers?" In it, site editor and man-of-many-hats Simon Carless (who also serves as the publisher of both Game Developer and Gamasutra, chairman of the Independent Games Festival and organizer of the Independent Games Summit at the Game Developers Conference) shared an IM exchange with Joel Reed Parker of Game Of The Blog discussing the quality of Wii software and the perceived inability of game reviewers to distinguish between good and bad casual games. Here's a snippet of what they said:

Joel Reed Parker: Man, Wii third-party software really is bad...a friend got a Wii and was asking me for advice about party games and good games and such. According to the aggregate scores sites, not much.

Simon Carless: But I will say that conventional reviewers do a poor job of differentiating fun casual games from bad casual games--or just bad games, in my opinion.

JRP: I agree wholeheartedly. Same goes for kids' games also.

SC: Like Mario Party 8 has a 62 average on Metacritic's Wii chart, and so does...Heatseeker? Blimey. OK, we definitely need write something about this.

JRP: I didn't even seen the Rayman Raving Rabbids games as high as I thought they would be. It's all the predictable stuff--Mario, Metroid, Zelda.

SC: There's definitely a problem here--Elebits, Korinrinpa, and Dewy's Adventure are all worth checking out, and are lost in terms of scoring with markedly inferior games--even/especially from a 'mainstream' gamer perspective.

It's understandable that in an IM chat, Carless and Parker would use Metacritic averages as evidence of a disconnect between reviewers and consumers when it comes to non-core games. But how truly make a case without examining the text of the reviews? By our lights, the text of a review is where a writer should, in part, attempt to weigh his or her own experience against that of the game's intended audience, be it tween girls or military shooter fanatics. The score, on the other hand, should measure the game against both others of its ilk and against games in general.

Carless and Parker, however, appear to have assumed that the consumer guide aspect of a review (what does the writer believe a typical player might think of this game?) is more important--or somehow separable--from the critical assessment aspect of a review (what does the writer himself or herself think of this game?) when it comes to casual games.

Lester Bangs: Aw, man. You made friends with them. See, friendship is the booze they feed you. They want you to get drunk on feeling like you belong.
William Miller: Well, it was...fun.
Bangs: They make you feel cool. And hey, I met you. You are not cool.
Miller: I know. Even when I thought I was, I knew I wasn't.
Bangs: That's because we are uncool. And while women will always be a problem for guys like us, most of the great art in the world is about that very problem. I mean, good-looking people, they got no spine. Their art never lasts. They may get the girls, but we're smarter.
Miller: Yeah, I can really see that now.
Bangs: Yeah, 'cause that's what great art is about: conflict and pain and guilt and longing and love disguised as sex, and sex disguised as love...and hey, let's face it, you got a big head start.
Miller: I'm glad you were home.
Bangs: I'm always home. I'm uncool.
Miller: Me too.
Bangs: You're doing great. The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool. Listen, my advice to you--and I know you think those guys are your friends--if you want to be a true friend to them, be honest, and unmerciful.
--William Miller and Lester Bangs in "Almost Famous"

It is the international system of currency which determines the vitality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today. And you have meddled with the primal forces of nature. And You. Will. Atone. Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale?
--Arthur Jensen to Howard Beale in "Network"

The first time we realized the profound contempt with which videogame publishers regard the enthusiast press came in early in this millennium. We had noticed that over the course of several issues, a certain publication had repeatedly taken shots at several of a single company's titles--all of which had been very well received--in its short pieces and its reviews. Now no outlet is forced to like any particular game or games, but it had gotten to the point where we'd take a look at this publication and, like clockwork, a game from this publisher was being eviscerated. In the course of a conversation with a senior publicist with whom we were and remain friendly, we asked them whether they'd noticed this trend. No, but I'll look into it, we were told.

Not long thereafter, the publicist told us that they'd informed their marketing department of the offending copy; marketing then immediately pulled its advertising from the outlet in question, forcefully demonstrating that the publisher would not allow itself to be treated in this manner. From that point on, our close reading of the publication's contents showed that the reprisal had had the desired effect, because the relentless jabs at the company's games immediately ceased. And after several months, the publisher once again began running its ads therein, its point having been made loud and clear.

We'd be lying to you if we said that we immediately recognized this episode as a demonstration of the contempt publishers have for the enthusiast press. After all, we'd only been covering videogames seriously for a couple of years at the time. So while we certainly recognized that our employers at Newsweek wouldn't have the same vulnerability to videogame publishers as would enthusiast magazines, the matter-of-fact way in which the publicist shared the details of their company's scorched earth retaliation led us to presume that this was considered an acceptable way to deal with the specialist press, in a way it would not be with the mainstream media.

We've been thinking back to that incident a lot recently in the wake of the news of GameSpot editorial director Jeff Gerstmann's termination, allegedly over parent company C|Net's concern with publisher discontent over the substance, tone and scores in GameSpot's review of Eidos' Kane & Lynch.