I seldom make any firm plans when it comes to events like E3 and San Diego Comic-Con. I tend to mill about, seeing stuff as I come to it, and more often than not planning things at the absolute last minute. It’s not a very efficient method of covering the event, but it feels much more organic.

With that in mind, I didn’t see much stuff today, but here are my thoughts of what I did experience.

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It’s not uncommon, when reading about games, to be told which games we’re supposed to be excited about. I think I was about half an hour into the demo for BioShock when I realized that I wasn’t actually excited about the game at all, rather that excitement had been artificially generated by the press coverage.

I still bought BioShock anyway because I rather enjoyed the demo, but game journalists have a habit of telling us to get incredibly excited over games that turn out to not really have been worth it in the end.

This is why I can’t really muster up the enthusiasm for Deus Ex: Human Revolution. I can’t do it. I can’t actually give a fuck. I’ve tried, Glod knows I’ve tried, but every time I think about it I am reminded of just how utterly soulcrushing an experience Deus Ex: Invisible War was, and how the press told us it was just as good if not better than the original, and I find myself thinking, y’know, sod that.

I’m inclined to blame the language game journalists use, at least partially. They deal in hyperbole and vague generalizations, which is why it’s hard to differentiate between reviews of Banjo-Kazooie and Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune. Most videogame critics don’t really know how to properly criticize the product they’re critiquing because, and I think this is an important distinction to bear in mind, they’re not critics. They’re not! They’re enthusiasts. They’re people who like games, and who thought it would be nice to write about games, and who SCENE MISSING, and now they’re writing about games for a living. It’s quite baffling.

Perhaps even more baffling is how these people continually allow themselves to be used by PR types who just want to plug their latest game by throwing them a nice juicy bribe in the form of Grand Theft Auto-branded laundry detergent or Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit boxing gloves, or how readily they’ll post tripe about how a game that a developer is working on is better than every other game ever made ever, despite the fact that they posted similar claims made by a different developer not two hours previously.

People have told me that I’m wasting my time, that there’s nothing wrong with game journalism, and that if I think there’s something wrong with the sites I’m reading then I should just stop reading them. The problem with that is if I stop reading these sites I stop finding out what’s going on in the industry because the alternatives - GamesIndustry.biz, Gamasutra, etc. - are so exceptionally dull and lifeless that I think I’d prefer to give up on technology entirely rather than try to parse their dry tone.

I acknowledge that what I want is a very specific thing, but I also believe it’s achievable.

Reader-submitted content follows. Ed comments are, as usual, from me. Obviously that’s not something I usually need to point out to my readers but there’s been rather a lot of silliness lately.

Proving that everyone makes mistakes, I came across this doozy while searching Japanese game news this morning. For those who don’t speak the language (or who don’t have a browser that can automatically translate the page for you - Ed.), I will explain:

Some Japanese person read this post at Gamasutra on the subject of Yakuza 4 and how there won’t be as many cuts this time around as compared to Yakuza 3. However, this mystery idiot completely misread it as “here are all the cuts for Yakuza 4” and reported as such. The story is now passing around the Japanese game-blogosphere with only an occasional protest from readers who speak enough English to tell that the whole story is wrong.

Lewie Procter returns to remind us that incompetence is slightly less endemic than people like me would have you believe.

Games really are huge. Trying to keep an absolute grasp of the ever changing Zeitgeist is an impossible task. So much is happening at once, that reviewers and gamers alike can’t ever see all the detail in all the games. Margaret Robertson, in a series of columns for Gamastura, is taking a microscope to five minutes of a game, discussing everything that happens. In her words:

The idea is to take five different minutes of a different game each time, and suck them dry. Sometimes it might be the first five minutes. Sometimes the last. Sometimes one iconic scene, sometimes something boringly representative, sometimes something wildly uncharacteristic. All that they’ll have in common is that interesting things lie within.

The first one is on Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2’s deadline mode. Not my favourite of the modes, but this article really captures why it works so well, and why Retro Evolved 2 is such a fantastic game.

I look forwards to the rest.

Via Simon Parkin

Remember to post any good examples of games journalism you see to Twitter with the tag #GJACD.

Lewie Procter runs the UK video games bargains site SavyGamer.co.uk, and you can follow him on the twitters here.

Edge got the story “mostly right” according to someone who’s emailed me a link to this Gamasutra story, also about the update, which suggests that Nintendo updated the Wii to System Menu 4.3U (note the additional character) on the 7th.

Go on then, help yourself to the second installment of the new weekly feature written by Lewie “LewieP” Procter.

Leigh Alexander, despite not having a penis, has somehow managed to put together an interesting article discussing why Activision are reluctant to produce games with female leads. In fact, it seems Activision would rather sabotage their own game design than risk making a game that they would be unable to sell because you are in control of a lady.

She spoke to former employees, designers, gamers and eventually Activision directly. It’s kind of unsatisfying, in that probably nothing will change any time soon. Kotick didn’t say anything himself, but he’s probably too busy settling his sexual harassment court case to comment on gender roles in games.

Remember to post any good examples of games journalism you see to Twitter with the tag #GJACD.

Lewie Procter runs the UK video games bargains site SavyGamer.co.uk, and you can follow him on the twitters here. 

What follows is a guest post by someone I’ve decided to name Synonymous Hipster, purely because it amuses me to do so. While I didn’t write it, it’s worth noting that I agree with more or less all of it.

Here we go:

The thing about Leigh Alexander is that she says she wants to be a better journalist on her personal blog, yet takes no measures to really do so. Then she wonders why she has to be classified as an incompetent fuckwit. It has nothing to do with her being a woman, I must add. However, being a woman doesn’t mean she should be treated any less harshly for being an incompetent fuckwit, and if she can’t handle it she probably shouldn’t be posting on the Internet.

She writes for Kotaku, and certainly that should have been your first clue, but to give her the benefit of the doubt she does try to stimulate some sort of higher thinking about what we go through in games. However, she can’t take criticism, to the extent she started the #saveleighalexander hash tag on Twitter after another drunken GiantBombcast which attracted some admittedly loud, and obnoxious comments.

(A quick search on Twitter reveals that a lot of the #saveleighalexander tweets don’t seem to exist anymore, or maybe Twitter is just glitching out. I submit to you instead this cached page from Twitter-Quotes.com taken on June 21st, which is decidedly more populated than the page looks now. - Ed.)

Recently, she wrote an article called “Who Cheers for War?” for Kotaku, claiming that players want a realistic simulation of war, that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is another step towards trivializing war, and this is a bad thing. Of course, Leigh Alexander spends most of her time writing about video games, or getting drunk and partying in New York, which is a pampered, dream life that many of us live or wish to live, and we can thank our United States Military for helping keep that dream alive.

However, to claim Modern Warfare 2 is anything like real war is a complete and total insult to our men and women who serve, and have served. Modern Warfare 2 is a interactive Michael Bay snuff film with obvious references to his films, and is completely over the top. It is nothing like the trauma and horrors of real war.  Leigh believes, and would want you to believe that gamers, you guys, want to experience the thrill of killing actual people. However, at no point does she directly reference anything in Modern Warfare 2 besides the reveal trailer.

Here’s a thought: maybe Leigh Alexander never fucking played Modern Warfare 2, at least for a substantial amount to understand it, has no real understanding of actual war other than watching the Shock and Awe event back in 2003, and is basing her opinion from the same people who cry violent video games cause school shootings.

In the Giant Bombcast of June 18, 2010, Leigh Alexander proceeds to say in a discussion about feeling bad for Treyarch and feeling bad for them (making shooters with poor level design and a gimmick that gets old really fast) that “I don’t play first person shooters,” and doesn’t explain this statement further. However, if she played World at War and Call of Duty 3 she would most likely understand why Treyarch has such a bad rap in the shadow of Infinity Ward. While this is mainly the fault of Activision and Bobby Kotick trying to maintain income off of the Call of Duty franchise name, this doesn’t mean Treyarch is free from criticism. It’s for their own good, of course.

That’s fine, but since when did that become a legitimate basis for going on to say gamers’ “most popular way to play together” is somehow similar to something that actually happened in an actual war overseas? Play implies game. Game implies rules. Mechanics. Things that make said game fun, and not a realistic, horrifying simulation of something actually happening.

Of course, within about a good hour or two of playing Modern Warfare 2 you would get the understanding that it is very far, and distant from real war, at least with a basic understanding of it. So, one would presume that Leigh Alexander hasn’t played Modern Warfare 2, is speaking from an outsider’s perspective, and doesn’t really understand what she’s talking about.

In response when asked if she had actually played Modern Warfare 2, Leigh Alexander writes on twitter on June 30th:

i ‘play’ everything. i’m a game journalist, you know. when i say i don’t play them i mean i don’t personally seek them. [source]

and even if i didn’t ever touch a single one, i’m explaining to you why in that article, so. [source]

Play is in quotation marks. What “play” means to her is never explained. Regardless, she directly contradicts her earlier statement on June 18th.  Because, you know, she’s a “game journalist.” She plays everything. Just like Sarah Palin, when asked what newspapers she reads, goes on to say, “all of them.”

Game journalist. As if that fucking means anything these days. Her statement “even if I didn’t touch a single one” supports the notion that she never really sat down with Modern Warfare 2, which is also illustrated by she never makes any direct comment on the content within the game, only the early reveal trailer and how well it sold. She says she explains why in her article, so really, she doesn’t have a personal preference for shooters, and this is her basis of gamers as immature people who have been desensitized to real world conflict thanks to video games.

The real twist of the knife brings us back to the start of her article - that watching Shock and Awe on television back in 2003 implies you have some sense of what those people went through, on all sides of that conflict, that seeing bits and pieces cut together and edited, broadcasted to your living room, is basis enough to understand military conflict enough to say video games are anywhere close to it. 

Leigh also wrote on Twitter her personal blog followers would get an opportunity to discuss this issue further at a later date. Well, as of July 1st:

And finally, since I’ve gotten some email about it — yes, comments are disabled for the time being on my blog, because I don’t feel like subjecting you guys to some of the harshness I’ve attracted lately. The ShoutMix board you guys used to use is gone for the same reason. When I have to take measures like these, can you blame me for wondering whether our core culture is sane, balanced and healthy?

You heard it here first, Leigh Alexander has to “take measures” because she has attracted “harshness” for writing about things she clearly doesn’t understand in any sense, and never took a bother to fully understand, before blathering her mouth about it foolishly. Then wonders why people call her out on it. Then again, this is Kotaku, which has a reputation of posting whatever stupid shit pops in the staff’s brains.