There's nothing like a good rant to kick off the day, here's one from an email sent me by Playboy senior editor Scott Alexander expressing his own opinions on the very rant-worthy New Games Journalism.

Pardon the rant, but this has been stuck in my craw for weeks and yesterday's Times thing (and your post about it today) took me over the top...

I've been ticked about the friggin' NGJ thing ever since those boneheads coined the word.

Journalism is journalism. There's good journalism and bad journalism. There's long-form journalism and short-form journalism. There are reviews and there are features. When you look at food, say, there's recipe journalism in the paper and Year In Provence journalism in book form.

Videogames, as some people seem to have forgotten, have been around for slightly less time than food, so the journalism that chronicles it is less advanced.

There have been several long-form pieces that have been quite good, such as A Rape In Cyberspace, Bow Nigger, and the Order of Light story in Esquire last year (which doesn't seem to get any love in all these lists I've been seeing, btw). However, just because something is written from an in-game experience does not entitle it to special status as a new goddamn school. It's journalism, just like all the other journalism.

Is gaming a fertile new area for journalists to explore? Undoubtedly. Is gaming unfairly under-recognized/underreported/narrowly defined? Most definitely. Does it make you a good writer if you go over 2000 words and talk about how the game made you feel? Afraid not.

The vast majority of the "new game journalism" articles I've read (or stopped reading) have been utterly abysmal. Good, affecting journalism is an unfortunately rare thing, no matter what the subject matter.

I learned a long time ago that having strong opinions does not make you a great journalist (which is why I'm an editor and not a freelancer). It's a hard lesson, and one the legion of swollen-headed protesting-too-much NGJers out there apparently have yet to learn.

Gaming is young, and most of its poets are yet to be born. If we get one decent long-form piece of gaming-oriented journalism a year I'm going to be happy. Oh, and you can't start a revolution being this self-conscious (not to mention that revolting against game reviews for being boring is like revolting against water for being bland). Tell the story, don't tell me why the story you're going to tell is so goddamn important. If it's important I'll know. And I'll tell everyone I meet.

s

Amen

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