Mile Zero

Jun 06, 2005

Burning down the house

I just wrote 8k of text about the Carnival-CGOnline controversy. Then, because I'm a better editor than I am a writer, I realized I was even boring myself and set it aside. If anyone cares, they can e-mail me for the whole original post. Otherwise, you get the shorter Rude Edition below, where I ignore the rules of civility in favor of brevity and expressiveness.

• Matthew Gallant, a freelancer writing for Computer Games Magazine Online, reads the first Carnival of the Gamers entry and doesn't like the cut of PeterB's jib. Instead of reading the other entries or doing some research to establish that the Carnival is, in fact, unedited, he writes a stunningly vicious little link to the Carnival that completely misses the point. With discussion in comments, Gallant proves himself to be a bit of a creep in addition to being ethically challenged. No more need be said about him.
• In the resulting comments and e-mail exchange, Steve Bauman, editor of Computer Games Magazine, insists that his publication (unlike other game rags) is adult and mature. He agrees with Gallant both about the Carnival and the offending entry, taking the industry criticism close to his heart, like a wounded wallaby. Bauman notes in an unrelated Grumpy Gamer thread: "I've spent the last 12 years trying to create a game magazine for all of you 'older, more mature gamers.' You know what? You don't buy it."
• Feeling like I had wronged him somehow, I bought a copy of Computer Games Magazine at lunch. Bauman is a filthy, incompetent liar. CGM is better than most gaming publications, but it's still terrible. The format is uninteresting. They brought in Tom Chick and Henry Jenkins to write, and then neither one of them writes anything very interesting. Erik Wolpaw gets a sidebar, complete with awkwardly-phrased intro text, but not nearly enough room to be very funny. It's not revealed that Erik worked on Psychonauts, which is an advertiser. Speaking of which, there aren't many ads and most are clustered toward the front, but they're still pretty awful. There are a lot of them for anime and Asheron's Call 2, so I'm guessing it's not very expensive to place one.
• Actually, I'm sorry, Chick does write a moderately funny satire of game ratings on the back page. Still, it's not that funny, and it doesn't really hit any of the issues close to home. It's standard back-page tossaway.
• This highlights the primary reason that video game publications are awful--they're formatted like bad auto magazines, the ones with the bikini women on the front. Almost all of them read editorial, letters, previews, feature article (usually a big preview), reviews, tips and bad commentary, hardware, lame back page humor. The whole magazine is about what you should buy today, what you'll be able to buy tomorrow, and what you should have bought yesterday. It is a tribute, not to playing games, but to purchasing them. Add in the infusion of misogyny and poor layout, and you might as well be reading Muscle Car Digest.
• Why is it that I have to go someplace like Wired or a game blog to read about gaming culture, or tech stories that look at the big picture of gaming? Why isn't there a game magazine that looks like Bass Player, where there are a couple lengthy reviews and the rest of the articles are about the experience of playing bass? Where are the articles that personalize gaming, that make explore the people behind it and around it and in it? These topics are only covered online. Being a mature publication about gaming means answering these questions, not being able to say "fuck" in your GDC coverage. Until your gaming publication can answer the above to my satisfaction, I'm not going to be buying it, no matter how hurt you feel about it. That goes double for CGM.
• Further homework for you on this topic: Amit's series of great posts here, here, and here. PeterB's original article and his excellent response to Gallant. My own article on the Gamespy controversy. Cathode Tan's beautiful decapitation of the CGOnline link. And of course, the Buttonmashing retrospective that played host to the whole debate.

Links on the right to be updated this evening, as it has become increasingly evident that I've failed to link some great reads.

12:08 x Thomas x /gaming/media/print x link x 1 comment