For the most part, a person writing a serious story about video games will have of a less impact than a writer like Bob Woodward writing a piece about The White House. Or a famous author writing a story about a serious thing even in Hollywood. Video games still have a way to go before people and society takes us all more seriously. The fact that WayPoint gets crapped on the way it does proves my point. WayPoint is trying to exist to cover games, but in a different way. They want to cover games from a cultural standpoint and blur the lines between just "games" and how the gaming industry relates to our every day lives. And so many of us gamers don't want them to do that. We want them all to just cover it like IGN from 15 years ago.
I don't agree with this in the slightest.
People have been writing profound, impactful pieces about entertainment and media for decades. Generations, even. The idea that for some ill-defined reason, video games are exempt from that is strange, and speaks more to your personal expectations and appraisal of the medium than any universal rule around the subjects that are matched well to power in writing and journalism.
Perhaps the reason that 'people and society' haven't taken 'us' more seriously is that they have been given absolutely no reason to, considering the shoddy state of video game journalism, and the medium's inability to see itself as worthy of very serious, rigorous, and sophisticated discussion.
The basic idea of Waypoint is great. A site for 'serious' discussion of gaming, which dips in and out of various bits of social, critical, and cultural theory. The problem is in the execution, and in the people behind it. Austin Walker is a seriously mediocre academic talent (at least in his public writing), offering generic, unexciting, cliched analysis of the medium. Patrick Klepek is, and always has been, a non-event - and is more interested in manipulating his audience as instruments of political change, and when challenged, he plays his ultimate get out of jail free card: 'all art is political'. That kind of dunderheaded sloganeering is a beautifully rendered example of the inexperience of these people.
Here's an example of what I mean.
This is Nick Kent writing about Syd Barrett in 1973. It's a stunning, beautiful piece of work - lyrical, and mournful, and troubling, and evocative of a time and place. Really moving stuff.
Think about Matthew Smith, the designer of one of the first big computer platform games - Manic Miner, and the sequel, Jet Set Willy. Similarly, Matthew Smith created two masterpieces, before burning out in a haze of drugs and unrealised ambition and mental illness and stress. He disappeared for years, and nobody knew where he was. He was very much the Crazy Diamond of the early 8-bit computer era. It's a really sad story, if you can piece it together, and even when he re-emerged, there was something in there about lost opportunity, and right place/wrong time, and how talent and madness sometimes are twins.
Where's Matt Smith's equivalent of the Nick Kent piece? There's a perfect example of the kind of powerful writing that
could exist around video games - which is very much tied to the kind of writing that used to exist on film, or music, or art, or politics. It doesn't exist, though. It's a very human, very mournful story which provides a compelling backdrop of how the medium was created - and by who. But, it's just not
there.
Here's what I do know though. We're not going to get there when the overwhelming focus of games journalism rests on commanding your audience to 'do better', while screeching at them about how Daniel Vavra triggered a writer by wearing a homemade t-shirt, or by having Abby Russell end a conversation with 'I don't fucking care'.
You know what I mean?