A Plea to the Game Developer

I have a couple of points to make about David Jaffe’s now infamous 3am rant, “A Plea to the Game Journalist,” in which he chastises game writers for grouping themselves in with professional game creators, instead of positioning themselves as a separate journalistic entity.  Despite being roughly a year late in responding, here are my counterpoints to Jaffe’s criticisms.

My first point is that games journalists were not “real journalists” who spontaneously combusted into rabid game fanboys and fangirls overnight.  Try listening to National Public Radio’s coverage of World of Warcraft if you don’t believe me.  They cover it with roughly the same mentality as they might cover an undiscovered Martian colony.  Like most niche journalism, people who write about games came from two places – the industry and the fans.  First, like Jaffe, they emerged fully formed from the game industry itself.  Secondly, like me, they emerged from the enormous fan base of gamers.  Both of these factors contribute to the tendency of game writers to group themselves in the club including designers, players, and writers.  As gaming becomes more culturally acceptable this will change, with an influx of individuals who went to school to be “real journalists,” and pulled the gaming beat out of a hat.

My second point is that the gaming industry has evolved an aspect unique among all complex art.  Combine the technical expertise needed to get an early PC game to run with the inclusion of game creation tools in many early PC game releases and what do you get?  A community of technically adept hobbyists who were just as likely to create a new level for Doom II as they were to replay the game itself. 

This community of game modifiers exploded in modern times, and is currently capable of making games that add to, surpass, or even create entire new genres of play.  Currently we have this group of people in the gaming community who originally saw games as the most important thing to happen to art since the invention of paper, and have been bouncing around for decades, giddy as schoolgirls in love.  In fact, I would argue the average gamer is hundreds of times more likely to have tried their hand at scripting, level design, or even model making than the average movie fan is to have tried directing, acting or editing.  This effect goes double for game writers.  Imagine a world were DVDs come with the tools necessary to remix, rescore, or even retake scenes in a film.  Doesn’t work, not in a million years.  However, gamers are a niche community unique among niche communities.  The level of passion is there to spend a summer learning 3D-Studio while living in your big brother’s hallway, or coming home from working a line-cook job to tackle skyboxing in Unreal Tournament’s Editor. 

Now that those points are made, I also have to add that I agree with Jaffe on his final conclusion that games journalists aren’t doing enough to challenge developers and evolve into a fully formed science of professional criticism.  However, I would argue that this problem has nothing at all to do with our tendency to refer to the entire industry as our own.  We are, after all, in love.