I recently had a chance to attend an awards ceremony that was not specifically meant for games. People who had dedicated their lives to their craft, the history of which dates back more than a century and a half, had gathered in an elaborate dining hall to celebrate their society’s annual recognition of the best they had produced. As with most award shows, the attitude was clubby; there was much assumed knowledge and inside joking. They all knew each other, and we knew many of them.

An opposite problem of bad writing about games in the enthusiast world is when people in the real world try to write about games for people who don’t get them and overreach, trying to impress the audience with how artistic and literary and important and serious games really are. Last year, Lev Grossman in Time magazine wrote that the towering alien architecture in Halo “recalls Piranesi,” prompting a colleague of mine to roll his eyes and say “okay, we get it, you went to college!” And now Tom Bissell, who is also a respected writer with good credentials in “real” journalism as well as a working knowledge in the culture of video games, has produced an article for The New Yorker about Cliff Bleszinski and the Gears of War series which seems so reductive and fawning that I’d be surprised if the piece wasn’t at least partially the result of a plot hatched by Edelman, the public relations firm for all of Microsoft including its games division.

“While never quite proving itself as the penultimate virtual rock experience, Guitar Hero: World Tour is a blast in its own right...”

– GamePro on Guitar Hero World Tour.

Thanks due to Mitch Krpata for the link.