Tim Rogers is a self important moron who has managed to create 80,000 words of drivel. I don't care about your sex life, and neither does anybody else. It's a sad man's ramble.

ah, the inevitable hater post!

MAN TIM ROGERS IS COOL BUT I REALLY WISH HE WOULD COME TO MY PARTIES

Did you really have to post one of his pictures? I mean.. really? At least you didn't post one of them where he's trying too hard to pout his lips, looking like a complete douchebag.

I still say he's videogames journalism's Richard Meltzer.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Meltzer

KG

i had no idea richard meltzer was in smegma.

thank you wikipedia!

"the inevitable hater post"? Of course it's inevitable when you post about a self-involved "writer" whose only notable characteristics are his inability to edit himself and his assumption that writing 79000 words about pointless shit from his weeaboo life and 1000 about any actual games constitutes genius journalism. If he's our Lester Bangs, we're fucked.

Here is the complete summary of Tim Rogers' entire Dead Rising review:

Tim Rogers thought Dead Rising was fun. He thought that Capcom should have given it a bigger budget. He thinks that it can be fun when a game gives you goals to accomplish within a time limit.

Three sentences, and that's being generous. Despite all this endless summarization of plot elements and gameplay mechanics (plus irrelevant anecdotes,) he never comes up with a genuine argument for that last point.

I think he tries, but when he tries, it looks like this:

"There, I believe we've used the term "sandbox game" enough to qualify this as significant text."

He puts this in-between two paragraph breaks and writes the phrase "significant text" in bold type. Maybe this is some kind of ironic joke that went over my head, but it looks like he tried to use special formatting to make a meaningless sentence somehow mean something.

The paragraph right below that plays off the dual meanings of "sandbox" in this context to no effect. The term "guns," likewise, seem to be literal one minute (as literal you get when you're talking about fake things that exist in video games,) figurative the next. What are these "pieces of guns?" What is "leaving the sandbox?" These terms won't be defined and the metaphor won't be revisited. However, many paragraphs down, you get this:

"The secret of Dead Rising is that it is actually more of a sandbox than Grand Theft Auto, because it takes place in a relatively close environment. I don't know what kind of sandbox the people who originally called Grand Theft Auto a "sandbox" were playing in. Maybe a sandbox with a TV and a PlayStation 2 in it? Dead Rising's sandbox has a few shovels and a few buckets; with a little fortitude, you can grasp the concept and make a pretty awesome sand castle: this is because the designers have chosen the shapes of the buckets with great care and cleverness."

You can probably guess that Rogers isn't interested in explaining what the "sand castle," "bucket," or "shovel" are meant to represent. He avoids specifics and goes into the vaguest generalizations whenever he can; the only real reason for the quote above to exist is to once again engage in this wordplay and point out that "sandbox" gameplay does not actually involve a literal sandbox. He wraps half-formed ideas in half-formed symbols and metaphors over and over again. He's either trying to talk around something he doesn't have the ability to describe or he's trying to hide the fact that he's really got nothing to say.

Skim down to the part about Metal Gear Solid:

"This is liberty, not freedom"

Rogers makes a big deal about this because it relates to something a celebrity allegedly said to him once. He starts out by trying to loosely define "liberty" as: "when the game doesn't let you do whatever you want, whenever you want." I guess you're meant to assume that games built around "freedom," like GTA, are just the opposite because the gameplay is entirely unrestricted. Anyone who's played GTA has seen the MISSION FAILED or BUSTED or WASTED text. These are the notices that appear when you're doing something that the game restricts you from doing. What, then, is the distinction between "liberty" and "freedom" in video games? Rogers' celebrity acquaintance is quoted saying:

"If you're going to set a game in a real-like world, you should ideally design it with real-like rules."

For example:

"when you die, you should be forced to start the entire game over."

Just like in the real world, right?

Rogers won't let this "liberty vs freedom" idea go, and he ultimately can't define it outside of directly contrasting two things he thinks represent "liberty" and "freedom:" Dead Rising and GTA. Dead Rising represents "liberty" because it is not like GTA. GTA does not represent "liberty" because it is not like Dead Rising.

He also implies that Dead Rising better represents "liberty" than GTA because Dead Rising is less about "immediate satisfaction." He tries for an emotional appeal to illustrate how "immediate satisfaction" is contemptible when compared to the benefits of his "liberty" (it involves a giant, condescending block of text about soup) and then presents more important terms that he can't successfully define (though he notes their importance with bold type.)

If Tim Rogers is a "disruptive iconoclast," it's because of his persistent exhibitionism and his willingness to pander to an audience who, likewise, fetishize all things Japanese. He does not write criticism. He writes opinion pieces that are engineered for entertainment value, at best.

I didn't read your comment. It was too long.

You need to learn to edit yourself.

Why oh why did I click on those links and ruin my day?

No no no, he's not the Lester Bangs, he's the Ernest muthafuckin Hemmingway.

http://www.invertedcastle.com/archives/2007/02/03/for-whom-the-chip-tunes/

People seem to hate Rogers because they assume him writing 80,000 words means he expects people to /read/ 80,000 words. And that means he must think he's great, and his words are awesome.

The people who like Tim, however, like him because they assume him writing 80,000 words means he loves games. A lot. And people who love games to the tune of 80,000 words are awesome.

|LOL NERDY TIM

KG

If I had a choice, I'd like to be the Charles Bukowski of games, only I'd be fucking busty Japanese gravure models instead of bloated, predatory middle-aged whores who live a floor below me.

But the important thing here is that someone wrote 80,000 words. That's a new high score, you see.

Because game journalism is still a game.

I would be proud of having scored 80,000 at Journalism: The Gaming (part of the Simple 2000 series, of course), but that's the sort of thing game fetishists do. You know who game fetishists are. They'll score around 40,000 by writing about their favorite arcade shooters and their saucer-eyed, nigh-fuckable anime heroines and the bonus body pillows, and then they'll whine to god-fucking heaven when someone scores twice that by discussing both games and things that aren't games.

The horror of it all.

You know what? If you managed to read every one of those 80,000 words, you deserve a high score. Not the same type as mine, though. We're playing different games, and I, Tim Fucking Rogers, do not share my games.

But you may send me yours, if you like. I still want to try Cima: The Enemy.

I also just stuck my penis between Yoko Matsugane's magically huge tits and worked it around until we arrived at the only sort of Timsplosion(c) anyone should ever write about.

Kidding, of course.

I think.

You hope.

-tim fucking rogers, current high-score champion of game journalism

Actually, the above post isn't me.

who would take the time to make a fake post pretending to be tim rogers? I guess that's a true fetishist!

the INTERNET makes me SO ANGRY RAAAAAAAAAA

So the guy who writes Insert Credit is supposed to be some kind of neo-games journalism auteur? That's bullshit. That site is always about Japanese games I have no interest in.

note to maxathon: several people "write insert credit".

p.s. in space no-one can hear you internet.

lets face it, if his words were worth anything then he would be writing them about something that has genuine cultural worth (only a small group of people in the journalism failure pit that is the blogsphere think they are) and in print. Not just about games on the internet.

"who would take the time to make a fake post pretending to be tim rogers? I guess that's a true fetishist!"

I think the real joke is that the loser himself came here to tell everyone that it wasn't really him in that post.

Who?

(reads article)

What?

When Lester Bangs went off on 4,000-word essays on an album and filled it with personal stories, at least they were 1.) connected to what he was reviewing, and 2.) interesting stories. This is neither, which is astonishing as it's also 20 times longer.

Who's the "Hunter S. Thompson of Videogames"? Can I read some of that, and will it be as disappointing?

It's true that Tim needs an editor. The little GamesTM colums are better than anything else he puts out.

Hey, what's going on here guys?

Two things:

It's ten articles, not one, and they were written over the course of two years.

Second, I edit the gamesTM articles myself, because, well, there's money involved.

I don't think anyone is going to read this post :(

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I read the post too.

Damn, I need to go to sleep.