Gaming for those who care to think.
Sly reporter infuriates gamers by questioning their literacy
There’s a new grand offense by the mainstream media to gamers, and by mainstream I mean NPR. So, yeah, not so much. Anyway, reporter Chana Joffe-Walt has someone found the gall to question the stories of games. I know, how dare she?
The thing is, Joffe-Walt’s NPR piece (note, no reading required for gamers) is actually a sly publicity piece for Bungie’s line of Halo novels. Sure, she comes off a bit tounge-in-cheek at points, but really, how many stories have you heard anywhere else on gaming literature? Joffe-Walt serves as the outsider’s lens into gaming culture, and she asks the questions many outsiders have. For a moment understand that to many non-gamers there is little perceptible difference between Doom and Bioshock. Both appear to be first-person-shooters down dimly lit hallways with monsters jumping out at you, and in fact both are. The difference comes in Bioshock’s presentation. It feels more like a movie whereas the original Doom, at best, feels like a Saturday morning cartoon.
This is often the same tact taken by the media to explore issues of fine art or classical music. You can’t really jump in expecting your audience to know much, and therefore you have to take a bit of the, “Educate me, please,” tact with interviews. The worst question asked in the entire piece is, “Do gamers read?” Joffe-Walt even acknowledges this as a dumb question to some degree, but then again, perhaps she has been browsing some gaming message boards lately and just wanted to check.
Gamers have got to get over their geek-street-cred issues. If they truly want their hobby accepted alongside more mainstream media, then they need to accept that not everyone coming to the party will be hip to Mega Man and Zero’s relationship. They may not even care. As Stuart Smalley would say, “And that’s, okay.”
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