Professional Games Bloggers: A Mixed Bag

The latest 1up Yours, while managing to shoehorn in a neat little quote from VM's little brother Monkey King, also runs the gamut from insightful discourse re: review scores to videogame violence (dropping the usual crap and examining the issue as a creative device). Both make some trenchant new points, and the only ball they drop is to neglect the obvious elephant in the room of videogame reviewing.

Fellas, I'll tell you right now why Roger Ebert can review anything but you have to find "an FPS guy" to review Halo 3; why it's not so easy to just say "this is one person's opinion and take from it what you will". It's because professional videogame reviewers, by their very nature, are reviewing games as a product to consider investment in, whereas professional film critics are able to review movies as a creative work with an afterthought as to whether the man on the street should consider the picture worth the price of admission. A film critic's job is to stimulate discourse on the creative merits of her subject; a game critic's job is to tell the kids where to spend a week's wages.

There are exceptions here, and of course an exceptional critic (like, say, 1up's own Jeremy Parish) is able to evaluate creative worth without losing sight of the work as product, but by and large, this is the bed games reviewers make for themselves, and for the most part consumers wouldn't have it any other way. But this is why the best part of an enjoyable, professional website like 1up is often the retrospectives, genre roundups etc: because this where informed columnists are able to evaluate games in an openly subjective format, freed from the mandate of having to rate a product's financial worth from one to ten.

From enjoyable banter to embarrassing reactionary blather: Should I just start running a "spectacularly dumb Kotaku post of the week" feature or something? How many times can I write "siege-mentality, intellectually-stunted, perpetually cottaged nerds" before I break my keyboard? Here's the Shame of the Gawker Network on Barack Obama:

'Obama's been using video games as a metaphor for underachievement throughout his campaign speeches... Many of his campaign speeches have contained advice for parents to get kids to "put away the video games." This isn't anything new, either. ... But it's scary when a potential leader of a country so passively attributes video games with failure. It sounds like yet another instance of a politician not fully understanding what he's talking about, and jumping on the bandwagon, proliferating the popular sentiment that "video games are evil."'

Look, fellas, here's the deal. If you bleat nonstop about all the reasons your hobby should be let into the mainstream media, you then look really stupid if you appoint yourself official apologist and defender against every single charge ever levelled against said hobby. Because in the real world, guy, people utilise all sorts of things as part of the discourse all the time, and it's not always "oh thank goodness for the shiny-eyed gamer and his playful abandon tempered with creative genius".

Kotaku's older, real-blogger cousins at Defamer and Idolator don't feel the need to run how-dare-they posts every time anyone says anything about movies or music. It's this kind of they're-out-to-get-us crap that stops me reading about games on the Internet, which may be why I'm so woefully uninformed about same.