Introducing: Demos

Eleven Names and my campus' newspaper occupy a strange place in my head. Both are repositories for my coalesced thoughts on a given issue, and frequently, they overlap. I could publish something on Eleven Names before it goes to the newspaper, but when it was originally written for the newspaper, it feels a little bit like cheating.

In fact, I wrote something that was originally written for the school paper, but I published it here when I realized that it would be a month or so before it was published in the school. That gave me an idea that I sat on for a couple issues. The editors tend to screw up the column when they don't check what they're putting on the page, which made me think, I'll take my own mistakes so long as I can do the final spell check. My columns will be be great!

So, I'll publish my first drafts here, a couple hours after they appear in the campus' paper to be digested. I hope this is a fairly stable new feature, where you all will get the demo version, what I sent to the paper for them to supposedly improve, and in fact, foul up with not catching the notes on the edits they were making.

Enjoy!

I wrote in recently about videogames and about the ease that journalists can dismiss them. But now I’d like to focus on why, with a couple reasons stolen outright from Wired’s Clive Thompson.

Why don’t videogames have the same kind of in depth discussion associated with them that recordings or movies do? First and foremost, I would imagine is because they simply aren’t good material for a daily feature or column. Just speaking about the time invested in (or expected from) a video game, the sweet spot being anywhere between 20 and 40 hours, depending on the kind of game, there’s no way that columnists could play a third as many videogames a year as they write columns or articles and expect to maintain a readership. They wouldn’t be saying anything useful. To make a quick comparison: If my college’s DJs had to sit through 3 10 hour CDs a week, they’d give up.

That is one of the primary reasons why videogames as a medium and form of communication do not get attention or care from newspaper media, the investment of time is too great as compared to other forms of communication and entertainment. In other words: Videogames take too long to digest for effective daily or weekly publishing material.

There’s also the monetary cost. Keeping up with the latest videogames is expensive, since the technology shifts every so often (PCs and consoles), in addition, the games themselves usually cost between $50 and $60 before tax. Unless, of course, you’re still playing last generation systems, in which case, it just isn’t newsworthy enough for further explanation in a paper or professional magazine.

Right now, video games occupy the same position that the “God-forsaken rock and roll noise” and “that awful rap garbage” did years ago, as the corrupter of children. How were those art forms absolved of their blame for being the worst thing to happen to morality since Original Sin? It was only through exposure to the music and an in depth discussion of the themes contained in the words that the form was acknowledged as legitimate and not as some kind of artless, puerile endeavor.

Pioneering political and social artists Public Enemy and NWA were bitter pills to swallow for Tipper Gore and Co., this is true, but almost two decades worth of distance from the outbreak of hip-hop music from racial boundaries, most serious critics acknowledge, at the very least, that those artists were writing about what they knew. (For that matter, “Fear of a Black Planet” was inducted into the Library of Congress in 2004 alongside the Beach Boys and Dizzie Gillespie.)

The easy comparisons end there. Because video games today combine text, audio and an interactive portion with a controller or mouse and keyboard, games are judged in terms of a seamless interactive experience, which must be intimidating to players who don’t understand the vernacular.

With Grand Theft Auto IV coming out this year, gamers of all stripes can expect a storm of faux-controversy and hours of babbling from ignorant commentators who don’t know the vocabulary, but have no trouble proclaiming it as another murder simulator, peddled underhandedly to mentally unstable, titillated, teenage boys with predilections for school shootings.

Hopefully, you’ll know better.