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Gamers Kan Read. The weird, wonderful, exciting and quite under-rated world of videogames. Why you are here. Don’t cover games and wonder if you should Don’t cover games and wonder how to do it Do cover games and wonder if you are doing it well Do cover games and wonder if I am an ass.
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Gamers Kan Read The weird, wonderful, exciting and quite under-rated world of videogames
Why you are here • Don’t cover games and wonder if you should • Don’t cover games and wonder how to do it • Do cover games and wonder if you are doing it well • Do cover games and wonder if I am an ass
What’s Up? • The Problem • The Numbers • The Content • A Solution
Size of the Industry Movies Books Games Music Comics $ in Millions
Size of the Industry Lawns Speakers Iceland Games Mongolia $ in Millions
Demographics 30 Average age: 43 Percentage of women gamers: Percentage of regular gamers who read books and daily newspapers on a regular basis 93 Percentage of Americans who have purchased, or plan to purchase a game in 2005 47
Regulation or Censorship? "This is a silent epidemic of media desensitization that teaches kids it's okay to dis people because they are a woman, they're a different color or they're from a different place.”
A Solution Game Journalism as Arts Criticism
My framework • What is it? • Why do I like it? • What does it mean?
What is it? • Free roaming • Gritty urban crime story • Steal any car • Find lots of weapons
Why do I Iike it? • It’s not like other games I’ve played • You can match your play style and mood to the game • This game understands being bad is fun and I never get to be all that bad
What does it mean? • What does it mean to live in a world that has a game like this? • In a world dominated by conservative “do the right thing” rhetoric, is being bad a healthy transgressive practice? • Is this what we look like to the rest of the world?
So, how do you cover games? • Just like everything else • But you need to consider the medium, and open it up for writing about games, not just people who play games.
Contact • David Thomas • David@buzzcut.com • http://www.buzzcut.com • http://www.igja.org