My experience of magazines for games has been mixed. On the one hand you get an idea of the setup of games and what to expect when/if you buy them. On the other hand the magazine often tells you what to think of them before you buy them anyway.
When I used to look at a magazine I, like many other people, often turned straight to the review score to see what the writer thought of the game in a detailed, decimal form. What does this number mean? I often used to buy Nintendo Official Magazine until I realised that the boasted fact that it is 100% official could mean that the reviews are slightly biased.
Now that I am slightly older, taller, wiser (big-headed) and understand the way the world works a bit better (I now look on everything with an distinctively adult sense of gloom), I start to think that review scores are not what counts. I now look to what the writer has to say about the actual gameplay, what his experiences of it were and how he felt along the way.
New Games Journalism (NGJ) does exactly this and recalls games and events surrounding the gameplay in a story like fashion. It focuses not just on the game world, but also on the person playing and their reaction to the game world. I think that this style of writing for games can show alot more to the reader but that it could prove dull after a while. I think that it has a distinct amount of charm because it is unusual.
I beleive that traditional writing for games will continue successfully. It fulfills a purpose and as gamers we are already following what everybody else is doing to see what all the fuss is about: if one more person tells us to play a game because it is "98% perfect" the fact that it is written down means that foolishly we fall for it as objective fact.
When I used to look at a magazine I, like many other people, often turned straight to the review score to see what the writer thought of the game in a detailed, decimal form. What does this number mean? I often used to buy Nintendo Official Magazine until I realised that the boasted fact that it is 100% official could mean that the reviews are slightly biased.
Now that I am slightly older, taller, wiser (big-headed) and understand the way the world works a bit better (I now look on everything with an distinctively adult sense of gloom), I start to think that review scores are not what counts. I now look to what the writer has to say about the actual gameplay, what his experiences of it were and how he felt along the way.
New Games Journalism (NGJ) does exactly this and recalls games and events surrounding the gameplay in a story like fashion. It focuses not just on the game world, but also on the person playing and their reaction to the game world. I think that this style of writing for games can show alot more to the reader but that it could prove dull after a while. I think that it has a distinct amount of charm because it is unusual.
I beleive that traditional writing for games will continue successfully. It fulfills a purpose and as gamers we are already following what everybody else is doing to see what all the fuss is about: if one more person tells us to play a game because it is "98% perfect" the fact that it is written down means that foolishly we fall for it as objective fact.
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