PixelVixen707

A couple weeks ago Clive Thompson, who tweets as Pomeranian99, wrote this: “According to Google Docs, my prose scores 75.15 on the Flesch Reading Ease scale, and is suitable for students in grade 5.” Thompson is a well-regarded science journalist. In a field that brings you face to face with PhDs, technonerds and snobs of all stripes, you’d think that writing to a 5th grade level would embarrass him.

But Thompson was pleased. In a follow-up tweet, he explained why: this means he writes clearly. In addition to following the tech and science beat, Thompson also writes about games. And in a month when we’ve labored over what makes good gamewriting, we’ve spent little time studying one of the most successful - and most useful crits in our field. And I can single out exactly why we should study him: his clarity.

I’ve read Thompson’s writing on games since his column at Slate, and now at his column for Wired. Each time, Thompson finds an issue or an idea in gaming that would catch the eye of a wide audience; this month, it was the use of torture in World of Warcraft. He takes the issue and focuses on it mercilessly, eschewing all tangents and distractions no matter how tempting they may be. There is almost never too much in a Clive Thompson column, and most of them top out at about 1,000 words, long enough to tackle the issue but not so long that it starts to wander.

Thompson’s best columns send you off with one useful, potent and relevant concept that you find yourself inserting into conversation for years. The “uncanny valley” wasn’t his idea, but without his column, would we be using the term so freely? Sometimes these ideas come from observation - say, the observation that Mirror’s Edge makes him nauseous. (It’s proprioception. Which okay, is more like an 8th grade word.) But often, he draws on a study he’s read or some brainiac he’s interviewed. He pre-chews it all and hands it to us in writing that could reach a fifth grader.

And one more prop for Thompson: he hides his ego. I’m sure he enjoys his fan mail, and he probably likes to pat that little portrait on his column with his pinky. (Don’t we all?) But he doesn’t show it. He’s about the ideas, not the Clive, and he’s unnecessarily generous to up-and-comers. And one year into this blog, I’d have to say that of all the writers I’ve learned from, Thompson has had the biggest impact on the way I start and structure a piece - and his Canadian-accented voice is the one I hear every time a far-too-delicious tangent tries to derail me, and I need a voice of reason to send it away.

Thompson isn’t exactly a secret. But we seem to skid by him in our game crit scrums. Most of us aim for complexity, and length. We like to hunt whales, when we could be clubbing seals. The terms we work with are ugly and obtuse - “ludonarrative dissonance” is a non-favorite - whereas we could be coining phrases that roll off the tongue. I don’t oppose gonzo; when some of my favorite bloggers launch off on a tear, I’m giddy to see where they take it. But Thompson - and confab-master Michael Abbott reminds me of this - is more like the guy in the tribal circle who found a cool new gourd in the outback, and can’t wait to pass it around. Everyone gets a turn holding and smelling and feeling it, and everyone has so much fun, they forget who brought it to them in the first place.

Every so often, your friends in the game journalism community go through a fit of melodrama. Even though their job is pretty self-explanatory - play games, scribble something neat about them, and tell people whether to buy them - game journos, and even the best game journos, like to wring their hands and question their roles and try to set new standards for themselves. They go into bouts of ennui and wrap themselves in circular arguments over ethics and best practices. And everyone else just has to sit there and listen to it. (Or not.)

I won’t repeat or relink every facet of the latest debate, let alone all the Twittering, but much of the flare-up comes from a new Symposium run by Shawn Elliott. I took a look at the questions that launched the Symposium. I tried to answer them, like a few other bloggers have. But it made me dozy. Several questions discuss ratings for reviews, and I don’t give scores. Others worry about the influence of PR people and game companies and their intimate, spoonlike relationship with the press. That’s not an issue for me - I get my promos by raiding the mail bag in the arts department of the New York Journal-Ledger, and no publicist is offering me a beer. And I don’t even know if you’d call what I write “reviews” anymore, anyway.

But the Symposium scares me just a little, with its rigorous assessment of every step of a reviewer’s job - can you read advance press, can you watch a preview, what’s the difference between a 9.6 and a 9.7. We’re not judging show dogs. The whole thing tells me that game journos - all you beautiful, hard-working people with your snazzy ideas and rich prose and anal back-knowledge of Japanese import cartridges and every single flaw in Mirror’s Edge - well, you all work hard, and some of you write well, and yet you still feel like you need more structure, an official playbook, a board of approval somewhere to validate what you’re doing.

You guys need an editor.

Let’s pick at the carcass of the standardized game review. It was born in the dry, cash-corrupt dirt of the enthusiastic press. It grew into a bloated, overdetailed and understimulating monster via the web press, flirted with a patronizing respectability in the mainstream media, and lights up, here and there, in the blogosphere. If you had to make an anthology of great games writing - and I mean, an editor is holding a gun to your head, right now, and your grandmother’s too - you could find maybe ten or twenty pieces that will survive the ages. But your editor will run out of bullets before he gets anyone to read it.

Sound harsh? Well, there are good critics out there. They just happen to work in a stillborn format. I sense a consensus from some of gaming’s best writers that reviews aren’t cutting it. We hem and haw over their shortcomings - ethical, literary, and intellectual - and pick on little logistical problems, like how someone’s going to finish GTA IV on deadline and still have time to enjoy it. But nobody faces the problem head-on.

My personal edit-hero Simon Carless recently wrote that write-ups of experiences pose a strong alternative to the standard review. The gaming blogosphere prospers here - take Leigh Alexander’s write-up today about getting wrapped up in just the first section of Fallout 3. And if you scan my reviews for the past year, you’ll see me switch from straight-up reviews to, well, whatever I feel like. Without raising the dreaded “new games journalism,” people are looking for experiences and reactions rather than bullet-point assessments. They want us to treat games as architecture, restaurant, social space, fleeting spectacle. You don’t review a rave. You don’t review baseball.

Here’s my latest obsession: TwitterCrit.