Co-Op Critics | Games Writing

January 2, 2016 In Opinion

Brian’s Best in Games Journalism 2015–GameSpot’s “The Point”

This episode of GameSpot’s “The Point” from July 2015 is a fantastic piece of journalism by Danny O’Dwyer. In it, he explores the systems that hook players into Destiny, a game that many complain about while admitting they sink hundreds of hours into. It’s a very well-done piece, and just one of the many great episodes of the Point that you should check out on GameSpot’s YouTube channel.

It’s also my favorite piece of games journalism from 2015.

May 4, 2015 In News

Gaming News Sites Are an Endangered Species

You probably have a few gaming sites you visit at least three or four times a week to keep up on what’s happening in the industry, check out reviews and hopefully look for some interesting games discussion. I bounce between several, but I usually start my morning checking IGN and Polygon, as I know the latest press releases will be there. This is mainly out of habit, and if you visit those two sites regularly, then you may have noticed a couple of things. First, there’s a lot of the same stuff on both of them (although this is par for the course with regard to industry news). And second, there seems to be less and less gaming-related items on those sites than ever before.READ MORE

September 6, 2014 In Uncategorized

The Enthusaist Press Abandoned Its Freelancers During GamerGate

This has been without a doubt, the most depressing few weeks in gaming ever.

What’s broken about the games industry, gaming media and gaming fandom combined of form a super storm of negativity, hatred, harassment and ugliness over the past few weeks that has left a wake of carnage and destruction, primarily in the freelance community.

Rather than try to recap everything here, I’ll point you here and here for some recaps of what’s been going on. If you Google search GamerGate, you’ll find dozens more articles as well.

One of the biggest problems with trying to discuss issues this big on the internet is that it’s very easy to lose the human element and people tend to greatly over-generalize.

There are a million gaming blogs out there that will be doing autopsies on GamerGate for months (maybe years) to come. But one of the aspects of this that you probably won’t read about on the big enthusiast press sites is how while all of this was going down, they stood by and watched their freelancers get devoured by wolves.

The worst example is Jenn Frank, an award-winning writer who not only was one of my favorite people at 1UP back in the day, has written some amazing pieces about games and life over the past few years. Where were all of her colleagues, or the sites she’s written for when all of this was going down? Nowhere to be found. And the harassment was so bad it drove her away from writing about games.

There were other writers who decided to walk away as well, and a great many more that were caught in the wave of harassment and ugliness that has enveloped everything about GamerGate. These harassment campaigns tied to “ethics in journalism” were largely targeted at female freelancers, and the sites that they’ve done work for were almost completely silent while this was happening. Whatever their reasoning was, it sent a pretty strong message about how they value freelancers.

When the smoke clears, the people who led the campaigns of targeted harassment will be exposed. No one can deny that sexism and misogyny are part of the gaming culture when we all just saw how this whole GamerGate situation unfolded. No one can unsee what has happened.

But hopefully the enthusiast press has learned a few lessons here as well, and will think about how they conduct themselves with game developers, publishers, their audience and most importantly, the freelancers who help keep their sites alive and work for almost nothing (and in many cases actually nothing). There’s a lot of work to be done there.

May 21, 2014 In Uncategorized

USgamer Continues to Be a Bastion of Great Games Discussion

Today on USgamer’s site Editor in Chief Jeremy Parish outlined some changes that are taking place at USgamer. Former 1UP alums Kat Bailey and Bob Mackey are now full-time contributors and the site itself will be moving more toward features and reviews and away from news and previews. In short, they’ll be doing less of what everyone else is doing, and offering more in-depth coverage and discussion of games and gaming.

This makes me very happy. And let’s be clear, USgamer has been proving great games coverage since launching a year ago. But now they are focusing even more on the good stuff. I’ve written here before about my love for the way 1UP covered games, as well as the efforts to get back to that kind of coverage that Jeremy Parish made when he became the EIC over there. The spirit of in-depth games coverage and discussion is alive and well at USgamer, and it’s great to see the staff there getting the support from Gamer Network to focus on more feature-based content.

Here are just a few examples of the kind of coverage I’m talking about:

What I Like Most About Tropico by Kat Bailey

Super TIME Force Xbox One Review by Jeremy Parish

Kat’s Quest: Child of Light as the Quiet Successor to Grandia by Kat Bailey

Exploring Game Boy’s True Successor, Bandai WonderSwan by Jeremy Parish

As I have mentioned before, one of the reasons I started Co-Op Critics was a desire to have longer-form discussions on games than most gaming news sites are producing these days. 1UP was a huge influence on my decision to get into podcasting as well as my desire to write about games. I started the Secret Identity podcast in 2006 in part because of my love of the 1UP podcasts. I covered games for Comic Book Resources from 2008-2010, and tired to shape a good deal of that coverage to focus more on creator interviews than news and reviews, because that’s the kind of content I was enjoying from 1UP.

And while there are 1UP alumni scattered throughout the games industry and various gaming news sites, I have always appreciated the approach that Jeremy Parish has taken to games discussion, as well as the people he surrounds himself with whenever he gets the chance. I am very much looking forward to seeing what the future holds for USgamer, and I encourage you to support what they’re doing if you want to see more of it.

December 10, 2013 In Uncategorized

The Games Industry Really Has Become the WWE

Polygon’s Emily Gera wrote a brilliant post on her personal blog today about how the games industry has turned into a spectator sport akin to World Wrestling Entertainment. It’s a fantastic read, perhaps the most insightful post I’ve read about games this year. And it really hit home with how I’ve been feeling lately as a 39-year-old gamer who is just kind of sad about the state of the industry today.

First, go read the article on Emily’s blog.

I was actually having a conversation on Twitter with Co-Op contributor Dave Fetterman that directly relates to the sentiment expressed in Gera’s post. I was reflecting on the fact that as of late I find myself becoming part of the Nintendo Defense Force, feeling the need to reply to the constant negativity that seems to be aimed at the WiiU and Nintendo in general.

I’m a WiiU and 3DS owner and I have two kids, so for us Nintendo’s consoles are a constant source of fun and entertainment. I also have a Xbox 360, PS3 and a PC, so I play games wherever I can get them. In this last console generation, I’ve probably spent the most time on Xbox 360. Not that any of that matters, except to say that I don’t have a “console of choice” per se.

The thing that kills me is these narratives that are built up not just by the rabid fanbases of each console, but the games media as well. Over the past year, and into this holiday season, one of the biggest is that not only is the WiiU not a “next gen” console, but it’s already dead in the water. There is no reason to buy a WiiU, and there is no hope of it recovering from its slow start. Some are even calling for Nintendo to get out of consoles entirely, either moving exclusively to handhelds, or giving up hardware altogether and becoming the next SEGA.

Consider this: you can get a WiiU bundle for $299 right now that either comes with Wind Waker HD, Skylanders or two Super Mario games. Right now, the WiiU has a slew of great games to play: ZombiU, Pikmin 3, Nintendoland, Super Mario 3D World, Wonderful 101, Lego City Undercover and plenty more. And the console is backwards compatible, which means you have the entire Wii library as well. It’s a great value, especially as a family console. But that narrative is boring, right? Who wants to talk about what a fun experience the console can be when we can all hail its impending doom from the highest mountain, right?

When it comes to the PS4 and the XBox One, the ebb and flow of the narrative changes daily. The PS4 goes from being more powerful than the XBox One to having a worse launch lineup to being a better value to being inferior because it doesn’t let you control your living room in the same way XBox One does. On the flipside, XBox One had terrible party chat one day, a lack of free demos the next and then Kinect makes it better than the PS4 (despite the fact no one wanted it before launch and thought its addition was not worth the extra $100).

And this stuff isn’t just message board or comment section chatter. These are storylines that all of the major gaming news sites are feeding into daily. Much of the chatter from gamers is happening in response to these stories. The gaming news sites are just as much the creators of these narratives as the fans. The same goes for the publishers and hardware makers themselves, and you don’t have to look any further than this year’s E3, when the mudslinging between Microsoft and Sony was on stage for all the world to see. Microsoft ended up changing their whole strategy for the console based on the narrative that games journalists helped create when they took fan reactions and jabs from Sony and ran with them relentlessly. Microsoft was the bad guy–they didn’t get it. Sony came out of E3 as the “winner,” the company that really understood what gamers wanted from the next generation. Nintendo wasn’t even allowed to be part of the discussion, as the media took Nintendo’s lack of a spectacle presentation as a reason to marginalize them completely and just focus on the narrative that the upcoming generation was a two-horse race.

All of this is where the spectator sport of the games industry comes in, and where Emily Gera’s analogy is so brilliant. There has to be Good Guys (Babyfaces) and Bad Guys (Heels) in order for anyone to care. Those Good Guys and Bad Guys will switch places when it suits the overall narrative, but there will always be someone to root for and against, and those creating the narrative get to decide what roles the actors are assigned to.

This whole spectator sport aspect of the industry takes the focus off of the games, off of the fun, and off of the escape that games offer me. It also devalues the exact type of writing that Emily Gera displayed in her brilliant post. Because if gamers would rather read about how many PS4’s failed over launch weekend or how dismal WiiU’s sales were this week than a feature on the design of Resogun, that’s what Emily and those who work for other gaming sites will be writing about. And that just feeds into the spectacle our hobby has become.

The absolute saddest thing about the current state of the industry is that some of the best writers out there, people who earn a living writing about games, have to turn to their personal blogs in order to post ideas that are not part of the larger narratives, part of the spectacle. If you think I’m exaggerating, look at how many current and former games journos have their own side blogs and podcasts, and look at what they produce for content. For most of them, those side projects are where they get to actually celebrate games and talk about the things they love.

Now, the state of the industry isn’t going to change anytime soon, although I hope articles like Emily Gera’s will at least get people to do some self-reflection. I would love to see something like Upworthy come along for the games industry. Some sort of aggregator for games writing that celebrates the hobby, where features about people’s experiences with games and what they love about them are shared and promoted, as opposed to the gladiator arena that currently dominates games media.

I’m rambling now, so I’m going to wrap this post up. But you really need to go and check out Emily Gera’s post, because she is dead on.

February 23, 2013 In Uncategorized

What 1UP Meant to Me

I was very saddened this week to hear that one of my all-time favorite gaming sites, 1UP, was shut down by it’s parent company, Ziff Davis. As I mentioned in some recent blogs, 1UP was one of the few sites out there that was providing unique discussions on gaming, as opposed to the press-release driven news cycle that a lot of other sites are stuck in. I feared that they wouldn’t be able to sustain their approach, and sadly I was right.

But rather than dwell on the fact that 1UP has come to end, I want to focus on their legacy. I am not at all exaggerating when I say that this blog, the Secret Identity podcast, and my own time as a gaming journalist would never have happened if it weren’t for 1UP. Allow me to explain.

I started Secret Identity with my podcast co-host Matt Herring in March of 2006. At that point in time, there were two podcasts that I listened to religiously–1UP Yours and This Week in Tech (TWiT). It was because of these two shows that I had been thinking for some time about starting a podcast of my own, and I eventually convinced Matt, who didn’t even know what a podcast was at the time) that we could start our own show focused around comics and other areas of our geeky hobbies. The driving factor for me was that I enjoyed listening to discussion about things I was passionate about. These kinds of discussion reminded me of the way I used to talk about games and comics with my friends at the arcade, the comic shop, the game store, etc. I wanted to create a podcast that felt to our listeners like they were hanging out with us every week at the comic shop. And so, Secret Identity was born. We will be recording our 500th episode next week, and we’ve been going strong for seven years.

In 2008, my love of 1UP had been at a fever pitch for years. In addition to the stellar 1UP Yours podcast, I was listening to CGW/GFW weekly as well, and devouring the 1UP Show videos that are still today considered the standard for visual discussions on gaming. I wanted to try my hand at being a game journalist, as I was exploring different avenues to take with my writing. Through a friend I had made through Secret Identity (Dan Evans), I reached out to Jonah Weiland at Comic Book Resources, arguably the most respected comic news site on the web, and pitched the idea of covering comic-related games to him. He accepted, and what followed was a two-year stint as the coordinator and primary content creator of gaming coverage for CBR. That was a once in a lifetime opportunity, as I was given freedoms at CBR in terms of our approach that I never would have had as a freelancer for a gaming-centirc site. Getting to cover some of today’s major franchises like Dead Space and Batman: Arkham Asylum from both gaming and comic perspectives was exactly the kind of coverage I wanted to be a part of. When I left in 2010, it was for no other reason than I simply could no longer keep working for CBR in addition to some of the other commitments in my life. I still hope to return someday.

Which brings us to Co-Op Critics. It’s no secret (no pun intended) that I would love to do more gaming coverage on Secret Identity, but our audience is largely comic readers, and a good portion of them aren’t gamers. So, I decided to start doing “special episodes” of the podcast dedicated to gaming, where those who were interested could enjoy them, but those who just wanted comics could listen to the regular weekly shows. Because the Co-Op Critics podcasts are infrequent though, I was still itching for more games discussion, and so the blog was born. And although it’s taken a good year to really get up and running, I am loving where Co-Op Critics is at right now. The discussions are exactly what I hoped they would be–about our experiences with the games we put so much time into. Old games, new games, console games, mobile games–it doesn’t matter. Whatever we’re playing, if we have something to share about it, we can do that here. This approach is both in response to what I don’t like about a lot of current games coverage, as well as inspiration I took from the recent incarnation of 1UP, and their wonderful Cover Stories series.

Which is why it’s such a bummer that 1UP is closing its doors. I fear for the direction that game journalism and gaming sites are heading right now, and every time we lose a unique voice, it makes me a little more afraid. However, all I have to do is look at the legacy and the years worth of content that 1UP leaves behind to be reminded of what great games discussion looks and sounds like. I hope that in the wake of 1UP’s closure, people start going back and revisiting what came out of that site, and that what they learn helps shape what we see moving forward.

It may be cliche, but it fits–1UP, you are gone, but not forgotten. Thanks for the memories, the inspiration, and the countless hours of enjoyment you’ve provided me over the past several years.

NOTE: I’m not sure how much longer the content on the 1UP site will be available, so you might want to download whatever content you plan on checking out ASAP.

February 20, 2013 In Uncategorized

I’m Not the Gamer I Used to Be

I will preface this entire post by admitting that I am about to state the obvious.

This past weekend, I came to a realization. Quite simply, I no longer have the money or the time in my life to be the gamer I used to be. In my head, I want to keep up with the hobby that I love–the new game releases, the industry news, the reviews, and all of the discussion of games that is constantly happening on Twitter and other places on the internet. But my life no longer allows for that kind of dedication.

In some ways, I am still that gamer in my mind, as I do spend an awful lot of time thinking about games throughout the course of any given day. Games I’m playing, games I want to play, things I want to write about games–these thoughts are constantly swimming around in my head.

But when it comes down to it, I’m lucky if I have a few hours a week to dedicate to actually playing games. Sure, there are some rare occasions when I get a free weekend day to myself and put several hours into a game (that happened recently with ZombiU), but most of my gaming time is spent in one-hour long increments, after my kids go to bed, or in a two-hour chunk of time on a Friday night. For the past six months, I would say I’ve spent less than five hours a week gaming on average. I don’t see that number increasing dramatically in the near future, either.

Even though I just had my epiphany the other day, the more I thought about it, the more I realized my approach to gaming as a hobby has been profoundly changing over the last year or so. Gone are the days when I pick up every major release on the day it comes out. In the past year, I believe Halo 4 was the only one I picked up on day one (although I could be wrong–I’m getting old). Not only do I not have the funds to keep up with new releases, but my biggest challenge is finding the time to spend on them.

Nowadays, I pick up one game at a time, and I try to squeeze every bit of the experience out of it. I’ve spent more time with Halo 4 than any of the previous Halo games. I just finished ZombiU and wrote twelve blog posts about it. I’m still playing Left 4 Dead 2 as my go-to multiplayer game. And Super Mario 3D World has been stuck in my 3DS for ages, getting completed one level at a time.

And here’s the thing–I am actually enjoying playing games more than I have in a long time. By spending more time on each game, I’m having a deeper experience with each one. I’m writing more about the games I play, because I’m spending more time with them.

But there’s still a part of me that thinks like the gamer I used to be, the one that had the time and money to play almost everything that came out, when it came out. I miss that guy sometimes, and those days are pretty much gone forever. But, in some ways my relationship with gaming is better than ever, and I need to remind myself about that, as it’s one of the reasons I started this blog–to keep connected to the hobby I love.

February 14, 2013 In Uncategorized

Celebrate Valentine’s Day With an Extra-Large Episode of Co-Op Critics!

In this marathon episode of Co-Op Critics, Brian and Dan are joined by Christina Grenhart and Erik Haltson to talk about the current culture of gaming, from online interactions to how games are covered by the enthusiast press.

You can either listen to the episode here on the enbedded player to the right, or download it here.

You can follow Brian on Twitter @BrianLeTendre and check out his blog at www.seebrianwrite.com.

Dan Evans can be found on Twitter @Sk8j

You can find Christina’s amazing blog “Bioware According to Mom” at biowareaccordingtomom.tumblr.com, and you can follow her on twitter at @clgrenhart

You can find Erik Haltson on Twitter @Erik_Haltson, and he will also be posting on Co-Op Critics blog in the future.

For more gaming discussion, head over to www.co-opcritics.com!

January 30, 2013 In Uncategorized

Worth Reading: 1UP’s Marty Sliva on Atari Box Art

We recently recorded an episode of Co-Op Critics about gaming culture (that will air the week of 2/14), and one of the topics of discussion was games journalism and how games are covered right now. We bemoaned a lot of what we currently see on mainstream gaming sites, and talked about the types of coverage we’d like to see.

We also talked a bit about the fact that there is some great stuff out there, but it’s often lost in the shuffle of the PR-driven “game of the moment” coverage that defines most gaming outlets.

One of the things I need to do more of here, on twitter and on the podcasts is give shout outs to interesting articles and games discussion that I’d like to see more of.

Today, I was reading through some of 1UP’s Cover Stories from the past several weeks, and stumbled across a fun article from Marty Sliva called “The Deceptive Beauty of Atari Box Art.” The article pointed out some examples of creative marketing with 2600 games and the box art, and there are some pretty insightful comments on the article from members of the 1UP community as well.

I grew up on the Atari 2600, I always approached the box art the same way I approached the cover art for all my Dungeons & Dragons books–as a starting point for my imagination. Things are different now, as the games we get to play can visually represent the ideas of the creators in a much more accurate way. Back then, you were getting a glimpse of the creators’ vision through the box art, and your imagination had to map that to what you were actually seeing. In that way, I think a lot of the early games were more participatory, as they required you to imagine as you played. Maybe that’s why I gravitate much more toward RPGs now, as it’s one of the last bastions of required imagination in gaming.

Anyway, props to Marty Sliva for a fun post that inspired some great discussion and a bit of nostalgia.