Dude check out how sweet this N fanart is. Click for the deviant art.

N and Super Meat Boy are, basically, the same game. They’re both a single concept dragged out as far as it will go and styled with simple graphics and a retro feel that appeals to the inner gamer. They’re easy to learn and impossible to master, eagerly gobbling up hours and hours of your time as you fight desperately to clear one more level, grab another collectible or climb one tantalising step on the online leaderboard.

N and Super Meat Boy are entirely different games. The very basics are undeniably different and effect them in significant ways. N’s grounding in flash technology, allowing it to be played on anything from a web browser to a Nintendo DS, prevents any more complicated visuals or levels than single screen gray-scales with flashes of colour for significant elements. Super Meat Boy, meanwhile, relies on it’s visual style to deliver it’s experience – there’s much less variance in SMB’s early levels, but their size and beauty make up for it. Where N has pure game, Super Meat Boy adds (dare I say it) art.

However, they’re /essentially/ the same. They both hate you and want you to suffer. They both laugh mercilessly as you bang your head against the brick wall of their difficulty curves and respond to every triumph with some new endlessly repeated horror. They’re adversaries few men can claim victory over and even once they’re conquered spit out further challenges – time trials and community content flowing out into infinity. They’ll fill a void whether it’s visual accompaniment to your latest audiobook or the latest fix for your inner completionist.

They aren’t the same.

At all.

In fact, N and Super Meat Boy epitomise the changes in gaming over the last twenty years so perfectly one wouldn’t be blamed for suspecting this microcosm was deliberately constructed by some gaming deity to get the point across. N is the stumbling, unsure child. It represents the lucky accomplishments of the bedroom coder. It lacks flair, passion or style, relying on it’s simplistic charm and jump-in jump-out gameplay to keep the player entertained. It isn’t worried about guiding you by the hand, or tutorial levels, or starting out easy. It’s not worried about review scores or sales or boxart.

Super Meat Boy is more refined. It’s polised. It’s got a plot and an art team. It’s got cinematics and unlockable characters, a hero with a face and a point to all the jumping and collecting. When starting a level of Super Meat Boy, you can imagine it as a real place in the crazy, fucked up universe that’s been created. N is just another room full of robots and mines. Super Meat Boy has modernised the retro-platformer genre.

How crazy does that sound? It’s the same story as has been told across any number of genres since gaming’s origin though. Compare Crysis to Doom or StarCraft II to Dune – in-game storytelling, prettier graphics and more and more extravagant ways to play evolving out of pure gameplay.

This isn’t a preach-post designed to get you to renounce your Call of Duty and Halo ways and join me in the glory of the days of Hard Reset-alikes and twelve-unit selection groups. I really enjoy new games and think, on the whole, video games are better now than they’ve ever been before. However, this was a starker contrast between two sides of gaming (and two sides of a war raging on message boards and in comment threads to this very day) than I have seen elsewhere.

Perhaps the best way to end is to say that I prefer N to play but SMB to experience.

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Except for that fucking “use a controller” bullshit at the beginning, that can fuck off, maybe if your default controls weren’t such a massive pile of ass you wouldn’t think they were bad, hmm?  Also, editing an ini file to change my controls, that’s a taste of the retro I didn’t need, thanks.

So here’s a piece that’ll hopefully generate a little discussion.

A few months back gaming news blog Joystiq were hiring for a few online staff positions. Naturally I (along with what is known in the business as a “shittonne” of others) applied, a web-based writing job being exactly what I’m after right now. I wasn’t successful, but that isn’t what I really took away from the whole process. During it conversations spread among various journalists on twitter about the sameyness of a lot of the applications that had been received and how, according to hiring-man Justin McElroy, this was due to too many wannabes spending too much time focusing on gaming news rather than reading books, listening to music, watching films and so forth. This proved a popular point. Many popped up to say how they wanted to see more non-gaming witticisms, references and cultural knowledge in the upcoming generation of writers and that capturing this was a surefire way to impress.

These weren’t statements isolated to this incident and, frankly, the standpoint they come from is not wrong. A person who’s only cultural reference point is video games has a limited outlook on life and will be missing out on some of the more important works of the last year, decade, century or whatever time frame you wish to mention. Obviously the more knowledge one has, the better one’s writing becomes as ideas, influence and inspiration come from more directions. Moreover, absorbing more mediums of entertainment simply makes you a more varied and interesting person.

However, something grated with me about the idea of saying to people “stop talking about games so much in your games writing.” It isn’t necessarily an awful thing, but 100% reduction isn’t a good idea either. Obviously, the call isn’t for a total removal, but the enthusiasm and totality with which it was delivered worried me. Surely it is the logical thing to do to talk about games when writing about games? Surely the more knowledge I have on games (and am expressing through my writing) the better that writing is? Surely the sameyness comes not from unoriginality but simply because it is the most logical route to take for the many, many aspiring writers out there? I hope to show a few of the reasons why I, and presumedly others, use gaming knowledge first and foremost in our writing and why this still has some value.

First let’s talk about the most important part of writing: the reader. An obscenely large percentage of the people reading any gaming-related article, be it the front page of your favourite website or some no-namer’s blog, are going to be gamers themselves. This only increases if you ignore the mainstream press (newspapers, the BBC), whom most gaming journalists do not write for in any regular capacity. What do these reader-gamers know about? Games. What appeals to them? Games. If I know what they like, I want to have as much of that in my writing as possible so they keep reading. This gives an enormity of depth. As I progress with a piece I can use my assumption that the people reading my work are gamers and further conclude that they are interested in the genre, series or even developer I am discussing if they have kept reading past the opening paragraph or so, thus allowing me to talk about related items with ease and little fear of misunderstanding.

This isn’t rocket science. However, it simply isn’t true of any other cultural reference you might make. What kind of music does a Call of Duty player like? Which of Shakespeare’s works are StarCraft gamers particularly familiar with? Is there a certain kind of TV show that really just clicks with fans of Paradox Interactive? Nothing is more infuriating in a piece of writing than some joke or point that goes over your head because it’s out of your sphere of interest. Moreover, finding out that part of your audience simply didn’t understand what you thought to be a particularly funny or brilliant line is disheartening.

When you consider the demographics of gamers, ensuring understanding becomes only more vital. Many will be teenagers or lower, and won’t get your obscure early 00s pop band humour, but will have played Deus Ex. In addition, at least in my experience, younger people are much more likely to close your tab or put your magazine down than they are to find out what the hell “Red Dwarf” or “Scrapheap Challenge” are. Even the 20-25 age bracket is now filled with folk such as myself who’ve never had a lot of interest in late 80s television but have played The Secret of Monkey Island and Doom, games as old and older than them. Even beyond age, consider the massive reach of the internet. How many American readers are likely to know of the two shows I just mentioned? How many of your British viewers are guaranteed to know what a corn dog is? Are any eastern europeans going to be aware of the current state of English Parliament?

This can be expanded in a slightly different direction: using gaming examples in my work shows that I have a knowledge on games to a certain degree. This is vastly important for two key groups. Firstly, readers are going to have a lot more respect for someone who clearly knows what he’s talking about when it comes to games. I like to know what Richard Cobbett or John Walker think of an adventure game because they’ve shown time and again to be ridiculously knowledgable on the subject. Equally I’m aware Tom Francis will know a good Deus Ex mod (or game, natch) when he sees one because he’s spent a lot of time writing about and playing the original. I want my readers to look at my stuff and go “this bloke knows what he’s talking about, he’s clearly played these other titles, I can trust him when he says the lacklustre gameplay of Duke Nukem Forever is a downside and I would be better off playing Bulletstorm for similar thrills and humour”

The second and arguably more important group is potential employers. It’s not as simple as me wanting them to understand I’m knowledgable about games, I need them to. They’re not going to mind if I’ve never gotten around to seeing The Godfather or reading Hamlet, but they might have an objection if I can’t think of an FPS to compare my example review of Bulletstorm to, or if I’ve never played a Blizzard title. Certainly, that is what I would most want to know from an application: can I trust this guy to speak fairly on a wide variety of gaming topics thanks to multiple reference points in his experiences? Has he played enough different genres that whatever I give him to review he’ll understand the concept of and not spend half his time complaining about the over-complexity and user-unfriendliness of a flight sim?

On that note, even moreso than with a generic reader, the idea of something I’d written being too obscure for a commissioning editor reading my pitch to understand is a horrifying thought. Great piece, unfortunately they gave up a few lines in because it was a long day, they were on a deadline and they didn’t have time to decipher my joke comparing Bethesda voice-acting to the plot of Flash Forward (inconsistent: half-woeful, half-highly-paid-brilliance). I want that job you’re offering, I’m not going to scupper my own chances by hoping we’re both interested in mediocre sci-fi.

My next point might leave a few shaking their heads in tab-closing disgust, but that doesn’t make it any less true. Referencing games is simply easier. There, I said it. No, come back, I’m going to explain! It’s easier because (as you might have guessed, what with wanting to be a games journalist and all) I’ve played more games than I’ve done anything else. I can therefore much more quickly come up with video game based comparisons or arguments that express my point succintly. This is as important when writing a hot off the newsreel post for the front page of your website as it is trying to make that deadline in an hour when I only finished the game twenty minutes ago.

The variance in those comparisons and references will be vast – one week will see a piece of news about the latest DLC on Steam in which I need to make note of the various successes or failures of DLC in the past, while the next week I’ll be able to name entirely different examples in the follow-up post. The speed, accuracy and ease of explanation will not be matched elsewhere.

There’s also one very, very important thing to note about why so many journos-in-training make the ‘mistake’ of too much game-focus: we’re new at this. Hell, compared to you Mr. Editor Man, I’m awful at this. But, I want you to know that I’ve got potential, that I’m skilled in my writing. I’m so eager to impress you that I’m going to cram every single god damn piece of gaming knowledge I have into that woefully small (and rightfully so) word count you gave me for the application. It stands repeating: do you really need me to have seen classic movies if I can’t name some of the most influential gaming masterpieces of all time? When sending my application, am I going to emulate game writing I’ve seen in the past, knowing that it was good enough to get published, or take the risk of something more unorthodox?

It may have sounded like I am making a push to eliminate all culture from games writing, to put it into a stale, safe environment where everyone understands everything that everyone else says because they’ve all seen, heard and read it a hundred times before. Clearly, that isn’t what I’m after. I just want to express my belief that there is value in writing about what you know and what your readers know. That in the end it’s better to write passionately about a subject, even to the point of over-emphasising it, than trying to relate to mediums that simply don’t express a point as well. I agree that being able to reference outside of gaming is the sign of a good writer, but a better writer plays both extremes.

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I’ve already received some private feedback on this and have debated a number of ways to respond.  Some parts of the piece were editted, but I also wanted to give some footnotes/afterword to make sure I’m being clear without diluting the piece itself.

• I am not calling anyone out.  While Justin McElroy started the discussion this time, I’ve seen a number of other people talk about it over the last few years.  It was simply his that lead to me finally actually writing down what I thought.
• I am arguing one side of “games or everything else” because there’s an incredible amount of “everything else” support.  As I said in the last paragraph, both is much, much better than either.  I didn’t want to spend the whole article going “again, I’m not saying 100% in the opposite direction” because its already got enough scene setting at the start before getting into the meat.
• It was pointed out that the number of responses to Justin’s statement show that gamers are very interested in a “wide-ranging cultural brief” (so very well put by the individual that a quote seems appropriate).  This is true and I agree.  However, see above for why I do not mention this in the original text.

Yeah, that got your attention. Today’s mini-post is a meta-rant on the “maturity” of the gaming community and why everyone else is wrong.

I’d like you to take a look at a Dragon Age trailer. It’s “that” one, entitled “Sex and Violence” by some:

Now, this trailer is from E3, where Dragon Age was infamously shown to be entirely about pointless sex and outrageous violence (see the actual presentation here). There was a bit of a complaint about this, in that it seemed the game had “sold out” to the lowest common denominator. And what I have to say is: “So?” and “Shut up”.

Let’s get one thing clear, that first trailer is ridiculously cool. It manages to go past the standard Tolkinien setting into something altogether darker, more violent, more brutal. Is it loud, raucous and altogether silly? Yes. Is it brilliant, new and exactly what the fantasy RPG genre needs? Damn right it is. Its got mass battles, inspiring speeches, shouty men, blood, death, impressive one-liners – I’ll stop before you get tired, but all it needs is robots and laser beams to be a classic.

My point being: it doesn’t have robots and laser beams, its got dragons and fire breathing. No laser swords, just swords. Magical armour and fireballs instead of psychic powers and energy shields. It’s all the best bits of sci-fi firmly slammed into a fantasy universe.

Alright, moving on to the meaningless sex and hilariously easy librarians. So it’s tactless, unreal, stupid – we’re talking about a universe where people get away with what Morrigan is wearing there! Of course it’s silly, but have you played The Witcher? I’m thinking a more refined version of that, perhaps with slightly less collectible card games.

Gotta catch em' all

But honestly, I don’t see the problem – for an obviously too short-trailer trying to show off as much of the game as possible to garner positive reviews, I think the presenter did remarkably well. There was even a glimpse of some kind of moral repercussions (still, after all these years, a buzzfeature) to getting off with everything in si- LOOK, THE GUY JUMPS ON A DRAGON AND STABS IT IN THE HEAD!

An old woman turns into a dragon when you hunt her down under the power of some tempting seductress! Characters turn into giant infected spiders! Manly main characters survive being thrown around by demon beasts! Hordes of demons attack fleeing, helpless peasants! Are we so bitter and worn we don’t see awesome any more? I say, bring on the rock music and slaughtering Bioware, I’ve been waiting for proper action fantasy for years.

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A little shorter than I was thinking but it really was just an excuse for me to preview Dragon Age and say I’m excited. Also that as an 18 year old I approve whole-heartedly of fake sex and pretend violence. Yeah.