Insert Credit caught a lot of flak from whiny people for being pretentious, which it sometimes is. It is also sporadically updated and usually consists of a short-form blog posting links and news about obscure games (mostly Japanese). But every once in a while Insert Credit posts a longer article– sometimes very long– that intends to review a game and begins discussing something like the meaning of life. And there, I think, we find a seed of real game criticism.

Much of the best material on Insert Credit was written by Tim Rogers, who was once described to me by someone who was around him as “a really, really weird guy,” and who sometimes ends up talking more about himself than the game he is ostensibly reviewing. He once titled something he wrote “the greatest piece of videogame-related journalism ever written” with too few traces of a qualifying postmodern smirk; his stream-of-consciousness paragraphs often get hung up in pointless eddies and go nowhere; and he is overly subjective and guilty of loving certain titles only because they are obscure, or esoteric, or too Japanese to ever be translated. He is also occasionally just wrong.

But his articles are interesting, because he is genuine in them, and, unlike the anonymous game critic above, he is knowledgeable. Tim Rogers doesn’t just play the titles he reviews, he plays them to death; he loves them and tries to understand them and wants to somehow convey what it’s like to discover a hint of a profound revelation in something most of the world seems to have ignored. The intent behind the game, and whether or not the end product was successful at realizing it, doesn't seem very important to him: he talks about games as if they had sprung into existence fully-formed, and evaluates them exactly as they are— as if he was a travel writer describing encounters with a culture that both baffles and inspires respect.

Insert Credit has published less and less of these kinds of articles over the years. Perhaps the participants have moved onto bigger and better things. Lately I’ve noticed some of the people who used to contribute to or be associated with the site appearing in more well-known publications: Brandon Sheffield on Gamasutra.com, Chris Kohler in Wired, even the untamable Tim Rogers had something vaguely resembling a column for Next Generation (I am not sure it still continues). But now that these writers have become professionals after a fashion, I feel like the promise that Insert Credit once held has faded. We are back to the sales charts and the banal interviews and phrases like “the music is about what you would expect.”

How can we fix this? I will save that discussion for a future entry, but here’s a hint at my answer. As Steve Ballmer used to say, “developers, developers, developers, developers!”