Keep gaming reviews out of the mainstream. There is no need or reason why it should be. the best analyses are peer-to-peer reviews of them. In particular, I'd count LEt's Play videos on youtube. Just look at someone like Robbaz who can give great vicarious enjoyment of games while also commenting on the technical aspects of the games. These reviews capture games and gaming culture in a way that wouldn't fit in to a mainstream arts narrative (as you rightly suggested, they wouldn't be printed for general consumption). I for one, want it to remain that way. After all, gaming is the most avant, free-spirited, evolving, challenging and enlightening form of mass culture available. Movies these days are sequels and series; books are rehashes of the same surface lelve themes; and music at the mainstream level is simply mild narcotic for the wider public. Surely mainstream coverage and that type of critical language you talk about would cause a crash towards the middle. It's populism vs. creativity: give them what they need, not what they want.

One thing that's going on right now is that there are increasingly few outlets where critics can get paid to write. You think gaming has it bad? -- talk to anyone involved in classical music or jazz, and you'll learn how bad the state of criticism can get. Earnest amateurs are trying to fill the gap left by the paid critics, but basically the overall level of all criticism has been declining for several years now; indeed, the earnest amateurs are probably doing more harm than good by lowering the overall quality of criticism and making the rest of us less willing to read any criticism.

Another thing that's going on is that many people (including the critics) are still writing as if they can't decide if gaming is an art form or a hobby. This is similar to what happened in photography in the 1970s:-- a few serious critics started writing seriously about photography as an art form, but when photography fans and hobbyists tried to follow along they remained stuck in their fan or hobbyist viewpoint, and probably did more harm than good to their beloved art form. (It is worth mentioning that this article and most of the comments sound more like fan writing to me than thoughtful criticism, making me less likely to take the whole topic seriously.)

Finally, it's worth considering whether traditional linear text is a suitable format for writing video game criticism. Video games are basically a subset of hypertext (where "text" is interpreted very broadly to include any linked content, whether textual, visual, aural, etc.). Some hypertext theorists have concluded that if you're going to write critically hypertexts, your writing should be hypertext. I'm not entirely convinced by these theorists, but I do think it is worth considering whether gaming requires an entirely new (non-linear) form of criticism.

Hi Helen,

I have to say, I found this to be an extremely frustrating piece. At a professional level, when I write about games, I try to discuss the intersection of gameplay mechanics (what makes games games) with game presentation (visuals, audio, story, etc, that other media may have). I have a weekly column for Joystiq, a major game publication. Or take Kate Cox, who's replied to you here. She works at Kotaku, one of the most influential sites around. Eric (thegamecritique here) helps curate Critical Distance, which appears on Gamasutra, the most important industry professional site in gaming. Or take Tom Bissell, currently doing reviews at Grantland, who, when he's at his best, is better than anyone at describing what makes games work in accessible language. These aren't just "blogs" that happen to be doing good writing, they're widely read publications.

There are many, many people doing high-profile game writing that "(has) the conversations about them that I have about books or film or music. " And it feels like you've just hand-waved them--us--away because of Metacritic and IGN. This seems roughly akin to saying that there's no good discussion of film out there because of Entertainment Weekly and Rotten Tomatoes.

And I understand that part of your point is that this intelligent discussion isn't in the mainstream, but I don't really have expectations that intelligent discussion of any popular media is going to make it to the mainstream, and I'm surprised when it does (this may be in part a cultural difference between the US and UK). But here, for example, the New York Times published the two worst pieces of television criticism last year, including one where the writer praised The Killing for a resolution that didn't actually happen. While The LA Times and some other papers do have good TV criticism, the conversation is generally driven by publications like The AV Club, HitFix, and Vulture. Intelligent discourse on anything gets harder and harder to come by, the more "mainstream" you cast your net.

I just feel like you took a far too narrow view of games writing, then declared that narrow view to be the whole thing in a really negative fashion. If your goal was to say that the mainstream was lacking it, then providing examples of what was missing would have been helpful. What came across seemed to negate years of hard work and increasing acceptance of intelligent game discussion.

Well for you folks that consider yourselves currently "non gamers", it's
just another media form you've not discovered yet. It's not always about
actual physical skill or reflexes. Though there are of course, some genres
of it reliant on co-ordination or reflexes. But it's a broader church than
perhaps many realise, it is not all first person shooting or Grand Theft
Auto.

But i do not consider it a passive thing like i do television, there is an
inherent interactivity with any type of game.

These days a lot of games work all the harder on the business of the story
itself. Many in fact challenge just as much in terms of moral questions, the
effects of those choices often driving later parts of the story. The excellent
Walking Dead series being a fantastic example. But if i am honest story
telling is still not quite up to the level we deserve, but it's getting there.

As a 'non-gamer' the reason why I would find it hard to talk about a video game in any real way is that it doesn't exist as a single item. That may sound a bit odd but if you think about a book, or film, or a piece of art there's generally just 'one' of them and though each person will take from it very different things, if you assumed that the book/film/art's audience can see, hear, read, then they're going to experience the same object, even if their interpretations of it are different.

Video games, however, are experienced depending on how skilled you are at the thing. In fact, they rely on you getting more and more skilled in order to be able to do more things in it that would be enjoyable (in the challenge=enjoyable sense). To use a very basic analogy: If you never get past level 1 in Mario you might be right in thinking it's a fairly inane game, but if you make it all the way to the end you will have a wider variety of experiences that make you think it was a well-written computer game. How good you are at it means you will experience an entirely different game. So there isn't 'one' of it - and this is problematic if you are trying to have a conversation with a broad audience who, frankly, if they turned the game on probably wouldn't get past the inane.

Another analogy would be why is that we never really hear people talking about the time they spend playing soccer with their mates? Power leagues are big business, thousands of people take part in them, but when was the last time people in a generalist magazine got into the detail of quality 5-a-side pitches? If videogames had leagues that people could watch (a bit like in Gamesmaster), if there were some way of watching computer games as a spectator sport, then there would be a single shared thing to talk about. This is one of the reasons why people spend a lot more time talking about Premier League soccer than their own soccer outings. In fact, it's for this same reason that I think people liked GamesMaster more than they would have done of a 30-minute computer show - you were watching two people go at something, and be good at it, and you could share that experience with other people in the room even if personally you would have sucked at the game. That's why X-Factor is uniting whereas a show that got you thinking about the consequences of vocal layering techniques in audio production probably wouldn't be.

Gotta say, I think its still early days. Video gaming has lots of different hues to its spectrum, which are also proliferating outward in terms of design for narrower and narrower demographic subsets (casual gamers who game on the move between 5pm and 6.30pm!). My own preferences vary some way from the default, to the point where THE game non-pareil hasnt emerged from the head of the designer-massmind - although Bioshock was a pleasure and a delight, and am awaiting Bioshock Infinite with anticipation. I reckon we'll see more games/adventures/FPS's with player-interactive appearances and player-derived vocal delivery.

Honestly, I think this whole NGJ 'thing' came from the journalists themselves, trying to strive for some kind of self-validation, that they're not just people reviewing games, but they can be intellectual with it!

I don't see book or movie reviewers having such an existential crisis regarding their worth in the grand scheme of things, in the same way that some games reviewers appear to have. There has always been scope for interesting articles regarding various genres, or even longform post-mortem reviews of particular games.

And sure, it's a big industry, but doesn't appear to get the same respect as other mediums, but that's very likely because it hasn't progressed in any meaningful way - the 'interesting' games on the consoles are the exception, not the rule. These games don't sell in vast quantities, so noone really cares, and the really interesting stuff (IMHO anyway) such as, say, the HL2 mod, 'The Stanley Parable' aren't even games anyway - TSP in particular is notable for basically being a big old pisstake at the expense of a whole genre.

tl;dr: gaming gets exactly the amount of respect it deserves.