New Games Journalism is an excellent thought piece on the state of video-game reviews. I found it so enthralling, in part, because, despite being a bit rambling, it does an excellent job of explaining my personal feelings on what a game review should do. It shouldn t be about scores and hardware, or whether you have lag or jaggies. A review should tell a story, and when you re done with it, you should know something about the game where that story was set. Think of it as Hemingway on games.

Kieron Gillen, who wrote the piece, points to Bow, Nigger as a prime example of this. While I think this review is a decent example, it s really a fledgling one. For the essence of New Game Journalism, check out some of the stuff written in Salon, Wired and the New York Times, before they got all crappy and full of themselve—which, I know, was a long time ago.

I try having my reviewers do this for RedAssedBaboon, but it s a heck of a lot harder than you would think. You don t just have to get them to look outside the box—you have to evict them and then burn it.

Editorial: The New Games Journalism [State]

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