PixelVixen707

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.