COLUMN: Why We Play - 'Why We Write About Games'
[“Why We Play” is a weekly column by NYC freelance writer Chris Plante that discusses how videogames benefit us when we are away from them, in the real world, and what brings us back. This time he makes a call for more game bloggers .]
Two blogs are created each second, but how often does a blog - or more specifically a game blog - die?
If a Tree Falls in the Woods:
Everyone’s a writer. We all see movies, hear songs, and read articles and cannot help, but think to ourselves “I could do that.” “I could create the lyrics to ‘Nevermind;’ I could pen ‘Garden State;’ and I could definitely blog for Kotaku.” It’s a human nature to misunderstand when others make hard work look easy. We could call it the Guitar Hero Effect. The joys of guitar with one hundredth of the skill.
Truthfully, few of us are as talented as Kurt Cobain, Zach Braff, or even Brian Crecente. In January, my ex-roommate and I planned a videogame blog to help us develop our writing, promote our ideas, and make ourselves visible in the ever-crowded gamer community. Blogging looked so easy.
We dubbed our new digital home Hardcasual, a term coined by N’Gai Croal, “to represent the gamer who wants the hardcore experience - the graphics, story, and production values which go almost entirely into gore-heavy epics - to be married with the new casual paradigm - where we can throw a game in for half an hour and get an entirely satisfying experience.”
That’s our About section.
Genesis:
We quickly learned our first lesson: while anyone may create a blog, with no money for promotion or to finance the production of both quantity and quality content, few writers will attract readers. So, to hit the ground running, I pimped Hardcasual.net to every game writer or journalist with an e-mail address. N’Gai, flattered by our title, gave us our first hit count spike, and Leigh Alexander’s linkage gave us the next. Then Simon Carless. Then Maggie Greene.
To further expedite the process I took Leigh Alexander’s advice and I developed a weekly digest, chronicling the Hardcasual’s best posts from the previous week. Knowing most blogs slack off on the weekends (natch), I mailed the digest out Friday, hoping our blog would be cross-posted or linked on major sites on Saturday or Sunday. The advice worked.
Eventually, Hardcasual received the first sign of blogger success: comments. And like many bloggers, I began to check my Wordpress account religiously: Moderating comments, refreshing the hit count, trying to calculate the number of RSS subscribers. The readers had arrived.
Keep One Eye on the Road:
Yet, all this work promoting Hardcasual distracted me from creating actual content. After a few hours creating a digest or contacting journalists, I was burnt out. That’s when I began to commit a blogger sin; I posted for post’s sake. In these rushed posts, I would make big, broad statements that I did not have the time or energy to support. The promotion, which took me hours, went to waste on posts I wrote in minutes.
Blogger burn out had struck. But at least I wasn’t dead.
The Men in the Cafes:
Throughout history, great ideas have come from café communities. Groups of young people responding to restrictive societies and universities met at cafes to discuss art, politics, and science without restraint. They birthed movements like Nouvelle Vague, Absurdism, and, in many ways, the French Revolution.
These activists reacted to the happenings around them—stagnant creativity, domineering societies, war—by discussing and demanding change. They sought to secure and legitimize new ways to experience life, either through art or politics.
It should be no surprise that blog culture has taken shape during a similar period in American culture, one of intense political divide. And as publishers used journals to promote the best café activists’ ideas, super blogs like Kotaku and the Gamasutra network aggregate the best game theory, opinion, and news.
But that sounds so serious. Remember, the café activists were folks like you and me, and, like us, they weren’t afraid to make an ass of themselves. They were quick to fight and quicker to joke. Absurdists dealt with the grim world around them by finding a way to laugh. Today, as the blog community grows dreadfully serious, searching for legitimacy and critics to recognize our ‘art,’ we have the Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw’s and Owen Good’s to keep us grounded.
Even this site, GameSetWatch, offers a lighter, more human, less traditional scholarly look at games. As Simon said to me when I asked for this column, “ludology and narratology are phrases that can make me break out in hives.”
The Community:
My point in this unintentional love-letter to game journalists and bloggers is that we’ve found success in quantity over quality in a similar manner as these café activists. These super blogs, though we may disagree with them occasionally, offer promotion and readers for our opinions. Whether you want to write column or comment, they’re the modern day café and journals, changing the old videogame community into a new, fresh and determined mob, promoting, nay demanding change.
We demand to be recognized and heard; we want our art to be understood. We are game activists, and we excel via this group democracy where the opinions and topics that most interest readers find success, while the rest does not wholly disappear, rather it finds a smaller audience on personal blogs. It’s hard, almost impossible to be heard alone, but working together and under generous promoters solves many problems we face as one.
So, I ask more readers to plug in their keyboard and write. Often I see poignant or funny opinions in the comment sections on GameSetWatch, Kotaku, or LevelUp, only to be disappointed by no link to the author’s personal blog. The more we participate in the gaming community the stronger it will become. No opinion will hurt the community. And while it may be hard to promote a personal blog by yourself, it’s never too hard to send a fellow blogger an e-mail asking for a link or some support. Speak up. We’re all writers.
[Chris Plante is a freelance writer living the post-collegiate pauper life in New York City. By night, you can find him at HardCasual.net. By day, he produces theatre and television.]
Comments
there's enough wankery here to fill several beakers
Posted by: moozles | May 28, 2008 11:14 AM
Let a guy write some optimistic fluff every so often. Honestly, I think many of us could step away from bashing the videogame target audience, and, instead, in courage the audience to be proactive. What a terrible thing to imagine.
But if it's bashing you want, that's fine. Tell me more about your expertise on wanking.
Posted by: chris plante | May 28, 2008 11:27 AM
What is this dangerous democratization of content of which you speak? How did you con me into helping you with this? Leave the writing to the real writers.
....Totally kidding. Nice work.
Posted by: Leigh Alexander | May 28, 2008 12:27 PM
It's an ideal image, readers plugging in their keyboards and contributing to the discourse. The problem is that the gaming community won't necessarily become stronger through it.
Anybody can blog. There are no tests to pass, no quality-assurance processes to go through before posting, and really, no rules. There's so much channel noise as a result that it's hard to get noticed, let alone make a living from blogging or writing about games.
Maybe I'm just getting cynical in my old age, but I don't think that blogging is the key to a steady career that it may have been at one time. It's an extremely competitive market right now, and while I love hearing new and interesting takes on different subjects, there's little room for new indie blogs. The blogosphere is growing, but not in proportion to the number of people who enter it every day. More writers doesn't necessarily mean a better level of quality and a higher sense of community, as much as I'd like it to.
Posted by: Violent Mike | May 28, 2008 12:42 PM
Admit it, this was just a veiled attempt to plug Hardcasual, wasn't it? :)
Posted by: Tim | May 28, 2008 3:23 PM
I dunno. There wasn't anything particularly veiled about it.
Posted by: Jenn | May 28, 2008 7:20 PM
I wish I was that smart, but I haven't had time (graduation, moving, long hours) to blog on Hardcasual for a month, so... I really wasted the plug, I guess?
Posted by: chris plante | May 28, 2008 7:39 PM
Someone blogged a well-written blog post about blogging. This will of course attract critics.
However, notice that these emoting critics are the only ones who aren't truly desiring to participate in the dialogue (note the lack of URL on both). I recommend ignoring them; don't let 'em get to you.
Having said that, it's nice to meet you; I can see we have much in common.
Posted by: Michael Walbridge | May 28, 2008 9:56 PM
"Truthfully, few of us are as talented as...Zach Braff,"
For sure, empty introspection is tremendously difficult.
I'm with Mike, dilettantism in unison is not preferred.
Posted by: CZ | May 28, 2008 10:49 PM
As someone that is going through the same up and down balancing act of running a blog I found this article pretty motivating so thanks for sharing it with us.
Daniel
Posted by: Daniel Primed | May 29, 2008 7:13 PM
I've never thought about comparing bloggers to the classic cafe culture that springs up so much fantastic art and commentary throughout history. That's a really great point.
I've recently experienced major blogger burnout, especially with the state of the industry as it is these days. There's very little investigative journalism or insight in gaming blogs, most of it is press release copy-pasting or echo chamber reposting. It's as hard to read as it is to write, so I just don't.
Posted by: chris furniss | May 30, 2008 2:58 PM
Your comparison of cafe activism to blogging is inspiring and a point I had never considered.
The problem is that so many coffee shop revolutionaries didn't end up doing much more than navel gaze in between their pensive sips of their soy macchiato garnished with green tea dust.
Similarly, the writing much of us do in our blogs has become a fresh form of online masturbation and press release barf back and it has become a practice entirely different
from the writing we do outside of the blogosphere. Posting/Commenting is great fun but we shouldn't get too caught up in the quantity issue. Quality control will determine its shelf life. We should still push boundaries with blog posts and not fall victim to burnout. Use your time in between to make a hit game or two...
Chris, you've found a good balance thus far. Keep up the good work. Let's create some blogging morals.
Posted by: Billy "the child" Striebe | June 3, 2008 4:08 PM