New Year's resolution: learn from Electronic Gaming Monthly

The final issue of EGM will be distributed for free
online. 

"Cease to resist saying my goodbye"

- "Wave of Mutilation", from the Pixies album Doolittle

It's old news to most by now, but to those who've wandered onto this post through some non-gaming wormhole I'll be the one to tell you: this morning 1UP.com announced that they've been acquired by UGO Entertainment parent company Hearst Corporation. As the minutes ticked by, it became more and more clear that this wouldn't be a simple change in ownership. In short, the Ziff Davis signature style would be gone. In long, a majority of the editorial staff and long term 1UP personalities would be gone - and so would nearly 20 year old publication Electronic Gaming Monthly. 

Looking back, even former skeptics would have to notice the writing was on the wall.This comes just months after the close of Games for Windows Magazine (formerly Computer Gaming World), the PC-centric sister mag to EGM last spring, and former parent company Ziff-Davis' bankruptcy declaration last March. Internet communities even began joking about EGM's eventual end when the December 2008 issue sported a cover story on Watchmen: The End is Nigh, chuckling at a possible correspondence with the rumored buy-out.

There are countless other writers, forum posters, and "blogonauts" who have commented on these events. Some of them are irate at the loss of what was certainly a high-water mark in gaming journalism. Others took the opportunity to argue that the magazine and site were both appealing to an audience wasn't there, and in the process became pretentious and unnecessary. It should be unsurprising that even former CGW/GFW Editor-in-Chief Jeff Green took the opportunity to voice his opinion on the matter, he's always been outspoken after all.

And this is where I break from form to become more personal. Other people better skilled than me have written essays on their "first times" with EGM. They've said how flying out to San Francisco and writing for EGM would be their dream job. Some mentioned the long running EGM April Fools jokes, and other people wrote about listening to any of the great stable of podcasts that 1UP put out (all of which are still available.) I'm not linking to these things because, quite frankly there are too many and to just pick out a few would be a disservice. Spend an hour or two, and follow the links out there, you'll be surprised, maybe, about what a shared experience this has been for a lot of us. 

But I'm not going to write about these things. To some degree, it's because I don't trust my words to capture how I feel about this. It seems like it should be an intrinsically intellectual loss, like getting a math question wrong, but in fact there is an overwhelming emotional component here that is hard to deny. It's easy to make comparisons between the "death" of a publication and the death of a person, but I think it's a little bit different. Maybe this is what it's like to lose a good friend to prison for a crime they didn't commit. They exist, they aren't living the lives that they want to, and they didn't do anything wrong. Worse, they can't even really contribute to society anymore. But maybe the death metaphor has one strength this doesn't. When someone dies we instinctually retreat to a common phrase: "We should live to honor their memory."

And this is where I return to form, because these meanderings on my affections simply aren't practical. What is useful though, is to learn from EGM and 1UP. With that much-too-long introduction I present my new years resolution in standard top 5 form: I am resolved to learn from Electronic Gaming Monthly, 1UP.com, and the already defunct (but timeless) Computer Gaming World/Games for Windows Magazine.

#5 - Find your audience

This is the most cynical of the lessons learned. EGM's tone has changed greatly through the years. In a way, it matured along with its online presence, moving from their original nuke.com site in 1995 to Gamespot.com in 1996. Most readers might forget this, but for me and many others, this is why we read Gamespot in the late 90s. In 2003, EGM rebooted their online division as 1UP.com, and Gamespot was sold to CNET where it grew into a separate (but equally respected) source for news and reviews. 

Likewise, in the early to mid 1990s, EGM aimed for approximately the same audience as GamePro. They were effectively telling kids what games to ask their parents for come holiday time. 

The Gamespot years through the end of the 90s and into the early 2000s saw an adolescence for the site's editorial tone. We were still being told about what games were best to buy, but the idea of games journalism had changed a bit. The reviews weren't written in vacuums, recognizing and referencing the tropes and standards of a genre with ease, and accepting a common lexicon of terms that are used by nearly every gaming magazine through today. The news reporting remained playful, but they understood that in writing about games they stood watching a billion dollar behemoth emerging. 

With the move to 1UP.com, and especially in the last two to three years 1UP and its magazines found an adult audience looking for an adult voice.  They wanted to read more than just product evaluations, they wanted features, in depth interviews, and honest previews as well. The only problem? That audience wasn't exactly breaking down the door. Both John Davison and Dan "Shoe" Hsu, previous editorial directors of the site, and current head-man Sam Kennedy encouraged great new content.

 But as the months went on it was clear that there was pressure to at least present that material safely. Whether it was in the form of a weekly top 5 or exclusive set of online previews, 1UP tried to walk the line between academia and mass market and in the end seemed unable to find enough people to keep them afloat, especially in these rough times. 

While newsblogs like Kotaku and Destructoid might be tightening their belts, they aren't shutting down or anticipating mass-firings because they've found a clear editorial tone. 

The big problem? I think that 1UP found the tone that would serve gaming best. More on this later...

#4 - Remember your roots, but never fear progress

Just before becoming Games for Windows Magazine two years ago, CGW's staff decided to get rid of review scores all together. There was something of an outcry among the readership. People wrote in saying that they read to see the scores, and they wanted to see scores because that's how they knew what games to buy. CGW EiC Jeff Green and his staff didn't fold: they argued that it was the content of the paragraphs that mattered, not the number at the top of the page. While some people might be fine with that (myself included), the fact is that they forgot their roots in this decisions. Over years the magazine (and entertainment critique as a whole) has cultivated a culture of scoring. Having a clear scoring system was a required feature of reviews for fans. To not have one would be like having a car without wheels. Sure, the car is there, but it sure isn't doing what they want a car to do. In the end, CGW became GFW and went back to a scoring system

In comparison, when EGM and 1UP decided to change up their grading process they did it in two steps, and never removed scoring entirely. First, they became the first of the major publications to claim use of the "full" ten point scale. The thought behind it was that most gaming sites leaned heavily on the 7 - 10 end of the scale, effectively leaving the bottom two thirds of scores for games that were awful, and not simply mediocre. By using a rating of 5 as a truly "average" experience, they freed up the top half of the scale to be more precise in scoring. Later, in April of 2008, 1UP and EGM switched from a numeric system to one based around a grade F to A alphabetical system, similar to the one used in most American schools. This allowed new readers to intuitively understand what the reviewer thought of a game while remaining free of the pre-conditioning that came about when using a ten point scale.

Likewise, as games writers we need to remember what we've been in the past before we make jumps to the future. If we move forward without looking backwards first, we're liable to lose our audience in the shuffle towards progress.

#3 - Don't be afraid to tackle any subject

"Well why not?" asked former senior executive editor of GFW Shawn Elliot when he was told on the very popular GFW Radio podcast that the magazine would not be reviewing the Left Behind RTS that they'd received. The answer given, "For fear of offending anyone, Christian or otherwise" just wasn't satisfactory for Elliot. What followed was a twenty minute discussion about how to handle the situation. Best of all? Not only did the conversation include a well analyzed position on how to tackle situations like this (at one point suggesting to take a similarly nuanced stance as a non-christian film critic might in a review of Mel Gibson's The Passion of Christ,) but it then included a hilarious and critical overview of some of the highs and lows of the game's instruction manual and marketing material. The crew was able to inoffensively perform a sort of Derridean deconstruction of the game and reveal some of the assumptions and presuppositions set up by the game, making for an enjoyable listen.

The team at 1UP had an intense dedication to good honest reporting and to well reasoned critique. In 2005, then EGM EiC Dan Hsu wrote an editorial about a major game publisher buying ad space in return for review scores, a topic brought to full public attention in 2007's "Gerstmann-gate." That was soon followed by Hsu admitting in an EGM Editorial that due to the publishers being unhappy with review scores, they'd no longer be receiving review copies of Mortal Kombat games, Sony Sports titles, or any Ubisoft products. They even practiced this devotion to full reporting in the small things, like a fact check of last year's great documentary The King of Kongs.

We are writers who happen to be in the gaming enthusiast press. We owe it to our readership and to ourselves to leave no stone unturned and no subject taboo. We don't need to be tim rogers, but we should all be willing to impart a full, personal opinion when it comes to our reviews. Most of all we have to be willing to think about things in new and different ways.

#2 - Treat games like any other artistic medium

Picking up on hints of it throughout the above, I'm sure that you were wondering when I'd turn towards the actual content of now defunct EGM and staff-gutted 1UP.com. Well, here it goes. The thing that I think that both publications (and GFW/CGW) contributed most of all was the introduction of a new type of gaming press. 

For a long time entertainment reviewers have been split in (at least) three camps. One one end lie the broadest, most populist outlets (Entertainment Weekly), on the other industry insider or academic journals (The Journal of Film and Video), and somewhere in between lies a middle ground which while enhanced by intimate knowledge of the topic, is accessible to everyone who understands the most basic industry terms (most of Roger Ebert's writing.)

You can make this three pronged chart with every entertainment medium (and I don't mean to insist that there are only these three divisions, simply that they are good markers.) You can file into place Rolling Stone and the New Yorker and Time and The Economist. But before the modern form of 1UP, EGM, and GFW/CGW you couldn't do the same (at least not so cleanly) with gaming.

We have mass market covered, that's for sure. Between still-running Gamepro (who have at least once argued on G4 that their position is that games are play things, and shouldn't be handled like they're art) and Gamestop backed Game Informer the gaming consumer doesn't have to go far to find what amounts to a consumer reviews magazine. This is where you'll find those phrases that we've been taught to expect: "tight controls," "Crisp sound," "compelling gameplay."

We also have insider sites like Gamasutra, intellectual writers like N'Gai Croal, and magazines like Edge, which provide in depth post-mortems, industry business news, and occasionally a feature which aims to redefine what we mean when we say "game."

Sometime in the last 3 years, the 1UP group decided to find their place in between. Editors like Ryan Scott and Shane Bettenhausen demanded that those aforementioned classic gaming cliches be tossed to the way side. After all, isn't saying that a game responds when you press a button the equivalent of saying "The film maker remembered to take the lens cap off the camera" or "the author didn't once start suddenly writing in a different language"? 

More than that, though, they did what the middle ground does in other entertainment fields. They began making theses in their reviews. They played with the form and structure of the traditional templates. Forget calling games art, they began to treat them as such. They still do the typical (and necessary, for their market segment) explanation of what a game is, but then they do more than tell you what anyone who's played it can observe. Maybe Nick Suttner makes the case that a game's aesthetic style is hamstrung by its primitive gameplay, or Tom Chick cuts off his paragraphs arbitrarily to give the reader the same feeling that he got while he was reviewing the title.

And the best thing? You can find that sort of great writing here on Examiner.com now too. While the audience isn't as big as the one that only needs to know that the game that sounds cool has a high enough score to warrant a purchase, it is steadily growing. By laying the seeds and introducing this sort of middle-of-the-road writing, they've assured that people like me can write to people like you about games in a satisfying way. 

#1 - Keep Writing

The key, of course, is that we do it. Hearing this news this morning was a little bit disheartening, but not nearly as much as it was motivating. In the gaming press it's very easy to feel overshadowed. "Who cares about my opinions on game reviews when a dozen of the greatest minds in the industry today are already conducting a symposium on it! I mean, they're even calling it a Symposium! Who the hell am I in comparison?"

And the answer is: One more voice. That's what everyone at EGM and 1UP and GFW/CGW has taught me not only in their roles while with those publications, but also in their actions after their tenure was up. Even if it's "just for fun" Crispin Boyer and Dan Hsu have continued to write about games in their blog Sore Thumbs. Shawn Elliot and Jeff Green have continued to write in their own personal blogs. Most encouraging of all? Young talent Nick Suttner, Phil Kolar, and Anthony Gallegos have promised to continue their much loved podcast in some other more independent forum. 

Write about games. Even if I disagree with you, write to me about them. Tell people why you hate them or why you like them. Tell them why you think the hardcore gaming is ending, or why you think that it can't ever really end, only change. Get hyped about things. Get disappointed. Even if you know your magazine is shutting down. Write. Just keep writing. 

We all have those days when some songs just feel right to listen to. For some reason The Pixies kept coming up on my playlist today, and I was reminded of a quote about the Pixies (thought really about the Velvet Underground). Says Gary Smith, who produced the Pixies' debut album:

"... while not a lot of people bought their albums, everyone who did started a band..."

I know what he means.