Perspective is an funny thing. It makes small things seem big and vice versa; this time last year I was acting all out-of-sorts and claiming it was to do with a Big Change in my life. Now that change is long in the past and I can realise that, actually, I’m just perpetually out-of-sorts.

I’ve had plenty of big changes lately – leaving my full-time job to go freelance has been a fascinating and stressful ordeal, full of tax forms and late nights spent in the dark with my eyes wide open and the sheets drawn close.

Meanwhile, the biggest thing that happened to me last year actually felt small at the time – to the extent that, even though I’m aware of what happened, I get uncomfortable describing it. Basically, I think I saved someone’s life. A woman. I was coming out of Leyton tube station, a little bit tipsy after a few wheat beers and a Good Chat with a friend, and she was perched on the bridge railing overlooking the motorway. She was screaming at some guy, but whoever he was he didn’t seem to care.

Anyway, she tried to jump. Everyone else was just walking past her, except for this one old lady who was looking very concerned, so I stopped for a second. At which point she jumped and I just shoved my arms out, catching her as she started to fall down to the road. My arms jammed against the shoulder-high railing, which really hurt.

Then, because I was in for a penny, I had to go in for a pound too. I wrenched her back over the railing (which hurt even more) and let her go. That turned out to be a mistake, because she lunged out immediately, both at me and back towards the railing. The old lady screamed something about her jumping again, so I grabbed her wrist as she tried to climb the fence a second time. I basically then put her in an arm lock, twisting her so her right arm was straight, with my left palm pushing in her shoulder and my free hand turning her wrist so that she was pressed up against the barrier.

She wouldn’t stop thrashing, but I held her like that for about ten minutes. More people came along, including an older gentleman who took her other arm and her boyfriend, who’d she’d been yelling at. The older man spoke to the boyfriend, who waned between apathy and occasionally tell me to let her go. The older man started saying how he should leave the girl, in case she jumped and ended up framing him. Meanwhile, the old woman rang the police and the girl kept saying she had no reason to live and that she was going to kill herself whatever.

I basically shut up for the whole time and can remember thinking how incredibly boring it was. That seems weird because, reading this back now, it all sounds rather exciting! I wonder what happens next!

Turns out I went home as soon as I handed her over to the police, who thanked me and said they didn’t need I statement. I had a half-bottle of wine, then tried to sleep off the booze, but mostly just laid in thedark with my eyes open and the sheets drawn close. The next morning I put a tie on and we shot the subscriber cover for the last issue of Custom PC that I’d work on as full-time staff.

Anyway; perspective is a funny thing.

I’ve been working on a lot of new projects lately; some Product Management stuff with Dennis’ iPad development team, writing for a handful of sites and magazines that I hadn’t worked with before and even doing some game type stuff on top of all that in what little spare time I have. It’s been really interesting to learn to look at things in a new way; some of the reasoning that goes into User Interface and audio design in games is really fascinating when you get down into the nitty-gritty.

One thing in particular that seems to stand out is how UI design and documentation (including tutorials) for modern games differ from old ones. I can’t remember anything but the most token of tutorials or explanations in games like Doom or Day of the Tentacle, yet these days games like Modern Warfare and Fable are overflowing with tooltips and guided examples. It’s easy to shrug a lot of this off by saying that new games have much more complicated features – Doom didn’t have a crouch button, let alone grenades – but that’s a poor excuse and ignores the fact that MW can rely on common user assumptions more than Doom could have.

Monkey Island never had to explain ‘This is how you talk to people’, so why does Fable lecture me about being nice or nasty to people? It’s not because this is a deeper feature which requires explanation (we all know it pays to not be an asshole, right?), but because there’s a greater gap between what you do, how you do it and the level it’s been gamified to. What was important and simple in Monkey Island is important, more complex and worth points in Fable.

Spurred on by the latest issue of Kill Screen, I’ve also been reading a lot about audio design in games too lately – especially the composition and value of ambient music. I even took the theme tune from Lucasarts’ Sam and Max Hit the Road and slowed it down 6.4x just to get an idea of how the same melody can create and entirely different mood, which is what you can listen to above.

Creepy different, eh? Sadly, it’s one of the few games of that era that comes out well when slowed down, as there tends to be a lot of snare drum on the other Lucasart soundtracks – slow that down and it just sounds like white noise. The same holds true for the original Doom soundtrack. Grim Fandango, on the other hand, sounds great.

Listen to the original song here.

Joe, Out.

Something stupid that my Dad and I noticed over the Christmas period – Guybrush Threepwood watching over Finland. He supplied the idea, I supplied the shitty MS Paint work in between playing Bastion on Onlive, Limbo on PC and an as-yet-unreleased art game.

I thought it best that I didn’t continue the illustration below the waist, as the Gulf of Finland could be interpreted quite suggestively…

Joe, Out.

Until then, I am out. Out of London, out of sorts, going out of my mind, Out of Office.

Hi,

You’ve probably tried to reach me for something really important, but unfortunately I’m now out of the office for the Christmas period. I’ll be back at my desk on January 3rd, 2012 and will get back to you then.

If you are contacting me as a matter of urgency then I can be contacted at XXXXX@gmail.com, or through Twitter at @joethreepwood. You can also find me on LinkedIn.

I hope you have just as happy a holiday as I’m planning to have. Here’s a great recipe for a whisky Eggnog, to help you along: http://tinyurl.com/denniseggnog

Joe Martin
Games Editor
Custom PC Magazine & Bit-tech.net

What an appropriately named drink. I have the original recipe in my copy of David Embury’s The Fine Art of Mixing Drinks at home, but I couldn’t find a copy online – which is why that link takes you to an old newspaper scan. It was the only listing of the Pendennis Club Eggnog which I could find online. The Pendennis is meant to be one of the best whisky eggnogs.

Out, Joe

As I write this, I’ve literally just come back from the Games Media Awards 2011. I’m still quite drunk, but I’m cogent enough to be certain of the fact that as far as these awards go, the less you care, the more you’re worth. It’s probably worth clarifying that just because you don’t care doesn’t entitle you to be an ass, however – something Grainger Games don’t seem to have got their heads around as they booed and heckled through the entire ceremony.

The Care < Talent equation makes my own placement at the event kind of awkward, by the way – as I’m fairly certain I only got invited to the event because of the extent I was slagging it off on Twitter. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t the only one too, as there were other faces around who seemed mystified at their own presence. We claimed corruption, that we didn’t care…but we still got lured in by the promise of free booze or tiny, secret hopes.

I wasn’t nominated for any awards, despite a brief and not-to-be-repeated bid of encouraging Dennis staff to nominate me. Even though, I had a lot of people come up to me over the course of the show and, aware that I’m on the lookout for new projects, presented new ventures or insisted I couldn’t leave since I ‘still got a soul and stuff to say’.
It was nice to hear a lot of this stuff, even if it was mostly wrapped in alcohol and melodrama, but with the Care/Talent equation in mind even starting to believe this nonsense is risky. I have to keep reminding myself that, despite what everyone else says, pretty much anyone who can string a sentence can do my job. The competition for games journalists isn’t other publishing houses, it’s those who will write for free – and value is rapidly evaporating from the industry as a result.

People who write about games don’t do it for the money though – because there isn’t any. They do it for the love, which is why it’s to say that I’m not rubbishing the awards themselves, as there were some very deserving winners…it’s just that their reaction seemed to be one of genuine apathy. There was lots of talk about how last years awards had been thrown away and how unsuccessful candidates felt they’d dodged a bullet.

When you’re tolerating valueless competition, not great pay and a constant stream of readers who only want to tell you how wrong you are, it takes more than the praise of Grainger Games or The Guy From The Inbetweeners to validate you. Especially when the judges are probably as disapproving of the whole thing as you are.

The ironic thing about ‘winning’ an invite from the organisers is that I’ve only just realised this, while before I took the view that winners were being modest. They aren’t. They either care and it’s a PR-supported ego-riot, or they’re genuinely worthy of the award and recognise it as being a too-late corporate circle-jerk.

Joe, Out.

I went to GamesCom in Cologne this year and was pleased to see it turn out better than my last two visits. This time I knew people, my way around and where all the good parties were. I had bookings back to back and they were all interesting. Best of all, I didn’t end up stranded in the same industrial wasteland I got stuck in two years ago – the one populated only by vodka and prostitutes.

One thing I did notice though was an abundance of unusually young people with press badges, often moving in groups of three as they nervously navigated the business centre. At first I thought I was just being getting old and judgemental; then I got chatting to one group and discovered that they were bloggers.

Bloggers was how they described themselves (in fractured English) and it was immediately clear before they explained further that they weren’t from Kotaku or Joystiq or anything of that scale. To be honest, I was a little stunned that they’d even been able to get themselves press passes, as they had the impression of not knowing what to do with what they had.

I’ll admit that a part of me bristled at the situation – I’ve been doing this job professionally for five years and yet this group had greater presence at the show than Dennis Publishing (or Future, by the looks of it) and were being taken with matching seriousness. I’ve tried to shove this bitterness aside however, as it’s unfair to judge without knowing more.

Instead, what interests me is the distinction between a ‘blogger’ and a ‘games journalist’ and the connotations each title has. To me ‘blogger’ implies an informal tone and approach, often to the extent that posts might not be spell-checked and that the content is tabloidesque; unresearched quote-grabs, for example. I imagine blogs as a detached limb of the marketing machine, flailing trailers and screenshots onto the internet for those who like their media with minimal commentary.

Games journalist implies the opposite; professional tone, standardised approach – someone who plays a long game, rather than grabbing at single chances. It implies a site with a very different presentation and a staff with a matching approach and wider considerations.

Drawing this distinction is snobby of me and is obviously inconsistent. There are sites which look like blogs but which have journalistic standards, just as there are professional sites with no standards whatsoever.

Take Gaming Daily and Kotaku, for example. Gaming Daily describes itself as a ‘PC Gaming Blog’ and the tone is definitely informal, but there’s no marketing fluff cluttering the pages. Founder Craig Lager is one of the most through writers I’ve worked with, demanding professionalism even though blogging is a side-project for him. Craig doesn’t describe himself as either a journalist or a blogger though, preferring to be regarded simply as a games critic.

Kotaku, on the other hand, has all the benefits of traditional journalism (budget, professional staff, offices, infrastructure) and comes from an established media company. It would seem like it is closer to traditional journalism, except the scope is poorly defined to the point that it sometimes seems more about Japan than games.

The current top article on Gaming Daily (the PC Gaming Blog) is a retrospective on Deus Ex: Invisible War. On Kotaku (the Gaming Guide run by a professional publisher)? ‘These Japanese Schoolgirls Hate Nuclear Power with a cute song‘.

There is something wrong here.

Personally, I’ve always described myself as a games journalist and I’ve done so because I feel it’s important to take my work seriously and to recognise the responsibilities of being a journalist. The specific and stated role of journalists is to provide reliable information and informed opinion or assessment to readers, while the role of a blogger is just to write whatever they feel like. I’ll still make jokes and don a shield of satire or anarchic wit when it’s suitable, but I’ll do so as a journalist – rather than using the phrase ‘I’m just a blogger‘ to weedle out of justified criticism.

While the streets of London have been filled with tracksuited twats stealing more tracksuits, I’ve been inside thinking about a different kind of looting – the consensual kind where companies allow fleets of barely-qualified journalists to turn up and make off with bags of swag.

Swag is one of those weird topics in games journalism; one that everyone is involved in but few want to talk about. Some sites, like Kotaku and Destructoid will openly boast about the exorbitant or rare items that are thrust upon them at press events, albeit under claims of transparency for the the latter. Other publications frown on even mentioning it within the office. Nearly everyone takes the loot though  – I know only one person that claims not to and even then it’s a claim I doubt.

Some people even view the swag as a reason to get into the business – the kind of people who value material goods over all else, evidenced by the way they label games journalism as ‘getting free games’ rather than ‘playing games all day’.

In the interest of transparency, I’ll say that my own attitude is one of up-front British awkwardness and delayed utilitarianism. If a bag of goodies is thrust upon me at a press event, I’ll accept it if because it’s rude not to. Later I’ll go through the contents and redistribute items that aren’t of guaranteed use to me. A few weeks ago I won an Android phone at an Nvidia event and immediately tried to give it to either of the bartenders. It was only at the fierce insistence of others I kept it long enough to try it out.

The reason that most journalists are a little unsure about discussing the topic is, I think, because it’s pretty clear that this swag isn’t swag at all; it’s really a low-level bribe. I’ve only just mentioned that Nvidia gave me a phone and you’re probably already wondering how it’s swayed my opinion. Luckily, I don’t write about graphic cards.

The shame is even evidenced in the language we use – the implied illcitness of ‘swag’ and ‘loot’ – or the greedy eyes that search for waiting goody bags when leaving an event.

The issue is softened somewhat by the general scale of the goods on offer though – Android phones aren’t handed out often, after all. It’s more usual to get a free T-shirt or soundtrack stuffed in an envelope, at which point it becomes a lot harder to think about it as any sort of bribe or persuasion. It’s just a nicety, or excess marketing materials being disposed of.

To be honest, I don’t really have an issue most swag anyway. If Harry gets a free copy of The Zombie Survival Guide when he previews Dead Island, I don’t fret that he’s going to be influenced by that at all. I trust the writers I work with and read. There are ones I don’t trust – generally the ones who parade their prizes in public or who get targeted goods – but I’m happy to vote with my clicks and rants.

I don’t even think the games journalists need to practice total transparency either. I asked fellow journalists what swag they’d had over the years and, unsurprisingly, the knowledge that Dan has a 4ft Two Worlds-themed sword was as useful as a fart in a teapot. There’s a level at which transparency becomes a necessity for trust, but I don’t think many games journalists ever see it – Richard got some PopCap desk toys, so what?.

Instead, the issue I take with the topic is exactly that which I started by explaining – the silence and reluctance of otherwise good games journalists to discuss the problem. I trust the writers I read because I know from personal experience that they’ll have considered their biases before they write, just as I do. If they aren’t sharing their ponderings, however, then the next generation will only have the bragging of Kotaku et al. to go on – and may therefore assume that this is the only response the topic requires.

One thing I learned very early on about games journalism is that it’s an incredibly incestuous business; oddly closed and reliant on the swapping of favours. It’s cliquey, with writers who ‘come up together’ often remaining so and PRs, who constantly shuffle from one allegiance to another, carrying their bonds with them when they go. Worse, some journalists then jump to PR and complicate things a whole lot more.

I’m not having a cry about this; I realise it’s an essential part of an industry where people move around a lot and I’ve never heard of these cliques being juvenilely enforced in the ‘You’re a Future writer, you can’t talk to us!’ kind of way. Still, the Future writers do tend to band together, as do Imagine’s and so on. Sometimes they’re easy to spot, like the Official Console writers, who seem to radiate their own kind of party-hard vibe, or those I think of as The Next Generation, who form a welcoming, laughing huddle at all the launch events. Loosely and with acknowledgement to the foggy boundaries, these cliques exist and that’s not an unexpected or bad thing.

I didn’t always used to think that way, however. Back in the days of Ye Olde Bit-tech we worked in a tiny office in Bracknell, isolated from the main hubs of activity (London, Bath, Brighton and Bournemouth) and, by extension, my peers. New to the job, I had no PR contacts and was working on a site with no established gaming presence – which I thought gave me a visible stigma at the few events I managed to attend. I loved the job, but I grew bitter at always feeling like an outsider and it took me a long time to recognise that the problem was partly that I cared too much about being included and partly that I was excluding myself.

You see: I’m not much of a people person. It takes me a long time to get comfortable and my default behaviour at any press event is to either get out as soon as possible or drink enough alcohol that I overcome my recalcitrance. I like emails and social networks, not phone calls or surprise visits.

This often causes people to get the wrong impression about me. Kieron Gillen told me recently that he used to think I hated him, when actually that’s far from the truth. I’m just a socially awkward fuckwit.

I’m not alone in this either, judging by the number of nervous glances and shuffling feet you see quietly milling around some press events. It’s an obvious stereotype, but the people who like to lock themselves inside and write about computer games often aren’t the Life Of The Party. Which means the problem is, to a degree, endemic to the industry.

I’ve only once been asked how I became a games journalist. The question was about what qualifications and courses would be most useful to someone wanting to get into the field. I said I had no idea if any courses would be useful, but that Creative Writing courses certainly weren’t – you can either write or you can’t and no amount of weekly circle-jerks is going to change that.

Looking back, I probably should have said something about the value of assertiveness training, because as someone who still gets a bit nervous when going along to preview events with people I’ve known for years, self-confidence is the trait I envy most in my colleagues.

I had a disagreement about a score recently. I wrote two reviews for a game, one for Bit-Gamer and one for Custom PC Magazine, and in the process of formalising my thoughts I scored 95 per cent for one review, 99 per cent for the other. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe I just had a better day when I wrote the second review, or had just done particularly well in the lunchtime game of Call of Duty 2. Either way, a 4 per cent discrepancy showed up and I wanted to stand by both scores equally.

In the end, I was rightly told to reconcile the reviews to a single, consistent figure across the brand. The game scored 95 per cent, remained excellent and I moved on to the next project – but not before I’d had several interesting discussions with other journalists about their views on scoring systems.

The idea which seemed to stick in most people’s craw was that you cannot ever score something 100 per cent and that there is no such thing as perfection. 10/10 was alright, some people said, because it’s less granular – a 96 per cent game would be 10/10 without having to be perfect, for example. 100 per cent, however? Get out of town.

There’s lots of discussion over the average of game scores – big sites like GameSpot effectively use 70 per cent as an erroneous average, when really sense dictates that 50 per cent should be the norm – but little talk about the upper end of the scale. My own view simply comes down to the fact that it’s not a percentage if you don’t use the whole range.

To be clear, I’m not saying that you should use 100 per cent scores, merely that you should be prepared to use one if it becomes appropriate. The issue of ‘perfection’ doesn’t even enter into the argument for me: those who refuse to give 100s because there is no perfect game still use 99 to mark the ludicrous concept of ‘perfection minus one’. The stupidity of that is enough to demolish their arguments, if you ask me.

A 100 per cent score does not have to be used to label perfection, it can be used merely to signify an unmatched level of quality for what is tries to be at the time. You could take Baldur’s Gate 2: Shadows of Amn (for example) and wish that it were 3D and that would be a legitimate desire, but it doesn’t affect the reality. Games should be scored on how closely they achieve their aims, not merely how close they come to an unattainable idea of perfection.

If there’s no such thing as a perfect game then that alone is a reason not to use perfection as part of your frame of reference, because while there are no games that are always perfect for everyone, there are those that come really fucking close.

The same holds true at the other end of the scale, by the way; you’ve got to be willing to go to the extreme 1 per cent scores for something other than comic effect. You’ve got to clarify what that would mean somewhere in your scoring system and it can’t be something as simple as ‘the game doesn’t work’, because if it doesn’t work then you’ve not played it. So, why are you reviewing it?

At least, that’s what I think.

Not that I’m wholly behind a per cent scoring system anyway though – there’s too much granularity for anyone to possibly be able to score that accurately. That’s why game reviews at Bit-Gamer work on intervals of 5 per cent, rather than using every figure in the range. You can’t tell the difference between a 55 per cent score and a 56 per cent score, not really.

Personally, I’ve always favoured scoring out of 10 or 20, which is what we’ve effectively got at the moment at Bit-Gamer. The idea of dropping scores completely also holds some appeal and one I’m very interested in, but when you’re working closely with a hardware team then it’s just not viable for political and technical reasons. You need a score.

I give this blog post 7/10.

I’ve been reading Kill Screen lately, which is a new American games magazine that’s currently working towards its fourth issue. I’ve already subscribed to the mag (which costs a pretty penny when you factor in shipping), but it’s important to note that ‘magazine’ isn’t really the correct word. It’s more like a periodical or multi-author novella.

Structurally, the first thing that sets Kill Screen apart is that there are no adverts in it. In fact, there’s very little in the way of pictures at all and what few are there are usually illustrations or brief photo-articles in their own right. This alone sets it apart from the increasingly flashy magazines that spatter across newsagent shelves – most magazines like pictures because they grab the attention of customers and are far cheaper than paying writers. Once a magazine has more pictures than words, it’s usually a bad sign.

Kill Screen does a few other things I like too, but it’s important to note that much of this is only possible because it doesn’t really care about the recent trends or news. Each issue has a central theme, which is decided far in advance and which all the writers discuss in their own way. There are no reviews and no news pieces – just a topic and the guiding tone, which can admittedly get pretty pretentious. New Games Journalism and its approximates are out in full force.

Kill Screen has a website too, by the way, but like me they don’t like to repeat content from the magazine on the site. I’ve been forced to do that occasionally (usually because of interfering deadlines or because we’ve had an article that I think needs repeating). Other than that, nearly all games content for Custom PC is either unique or rewritten.

Mainly though, what I like about Kill Screen is that it’s different. In the publishing industry there are still plenty of folk going over the same arguments that we’ve been having for years – what do we do when print dies and internet advertising finally bottoms out? At the moment the focus is on tablet devices and Social Media, because that’s all anyone ever talks about. Those things will doubtless be important, but as the primary form of publishing? I’m not convinced.

Even when I see a really good product released on a tablet, it’s usually hounded by indecision when it comes to the pricing model. Free with ads? Premium? Tiered? Microtransactions? Sponsored? It’s further proof that nobody really knows the way forwards.

Everyone is looking for a fit-all solution, when what they should really be considering is what they can offer that’s bespoke. People aren’t leaving magazines because they don’t like magazines or because the same content is available online for free; people will pay if they think they are getting value or unique content. Some – enough – of them, anyway. People leave magazines when they don’t offer content which is sufficiently different or sufficiently better than other, free sources.

Difference, uniqueness, the ability to appeal to niches are what I think will define the future of publishing. The replacement for print and online isn’t going to be something simple – Tablets! Facebook feeds! ­– it’ll be a smorgasbord of product types that are distinct from each other and which thrive only under the leadership of those who understand that difference. Kill Screen, with its complex writing guidelines, art store and highbrow focus, characterises that perfectly.

There are problems, however. Is your niche big enough and can the leaders get it to market without making too many compromises? Can you sustain whatever makes you distinct in the face of financial pressure? This last point is the most interesting to me, as I recently noticed I’ve spent more time trawling through RPS’ old posts than I have reading new ones. Here was a site that started off thriving and getting a lot of attention because the writers had an approach that was missing from the industry – long form, NGJ, retrospectives, analysis and interviews with creative forces. Nowadays, while RPS is still excellent, it feels like it’s increasingly posting trailers and news bits from other sites.

Not that I’ve offered up anything different, mind.

Maintaining focus is hard, because it essentially means staying small. The moment you start chasing numbers, you start to lose your focus – that was one of the first things Tim Smalley told me when I started at Bit-tech and it remains one of the most valuable lessons I’ve learned about online journalism.