It's been 33 years since Nolan Bushnell debuted Pong, the first commercially successful video game, and in spite of the predictions, society has not collapsed. In fact, video games have become a fact of everyday life. The video-game industry has continued to grow, becoming as viable and pervasive an entertainment habit as music or movies.
With these words, The Onion A.V. Club announced its coverage of video games today. I've always thought game reviews would go well with the A.V. Club's disaffected, ultra-hip style, and their first two game reviews seem to show I was right. A.V. Club reviews almost assume a deep understanding of the medium, diving into minute details, obscure comparisons and broad generalizations from the first sentence. The result is a quick, pithy overview that gives you a good impression of the work, without all the padding that goes into most other newspaper reviews. This stuff is definitely not meant for the mainstream.
The A.V. Club also has an interview with Will Wright and Howard Scott Warshaw. This is a pretty safe pair to start off with -- no matter how bad your questions are (and the Onion's are mixed, in my opinion), guys like these are going to give long, interesting answers that make the reader think. The A.V. Club also jumps on the retro-chic games bandwagon with a classic games appreciation column called The Games of Our Lives, written by none other than TV's Wil Wheaton. Wil's first piece, on the Atari 2600 game Gunslinger, manages to sneak as many sarcastic jabs as it can into what amounts to a cute, quick retrospective.
All in all, I have high hopes for the A.V. Club's video game coverage. Their unique style is a welcome change from the bland uninformed coverage in the mainstream press and the jargony, technical coverage in the specialist press.
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It's telling that an offshoot of a parody site can provide better reviews and interviews than magazines explicitly designed for game reviewing.
ReplyDelete"It's telling that an offshoot of a parody site can provide better reviews and interviews than magazines explicitly designed for game reviewing."
ReplyDeleteFirst off, the Onion AV Club has had consistently high-quality editorial for years. It's some of the best movie and music reviews anywhere, in my view.
Second, this really diminishes the skill of the writers for The Onion. A better question is why wouldn't they be able to produce high-quality material?
Third, if the people who write for The Onion offered to write for game magazines, maybe the writing in the latter would be better. A publication is only as good as its writers, and as long as the best choose not to write for game magazines, they're sorta screwed.
There's no reason the A.V. Club writers wouldn't be able to produce high-quality material. The irony is that many people do not take the Onion itself seriously because it is a parody site, yet an offshoot of that site produces some of the best, most serious art criticism out there.
ReplyDeleteAs for getting writers like this on game magazines, it's kind of a two-sided problem. These writers won't write for these types of magazines because they don't want to be stifled by the limiting style and focus they have. The magazines themselves don't look for broader writers because the narrow focus they have currently works, to an extent.
All in all, it's a matter of different audiences. I don't begrudge most game magazines for having theirs, but I'm glad to see the A.V. Club offering an alternaive for those who want a different style.
"These writers won't write for these types of magazines because they don't want to be stifled by the limiting style and focus they have."
ReplyDeleteIf they don't pitch the articles, they won't know if the magazine is willing to change at all.
Most magazines just want to pay for good content. If writers would pitch more features to magazines, they'd listen. But any writer knows it's a lot easier to knock out a simple preview than generate a terrific feature.
"The magazines themselves don't look for broader writers because the narrow focus they have currently works, to an extent."
How do you know this?
You know how hard it is to find writers? Writers are supposed to find the magazines. I can't possibly run around all day looking for the best and brightest writers. Those guys should be hitting me up; there's more of them than there are magazines.