I’m a really big fan of Inverted Castle, and I think we share a lot of the same sensibilities, so I was dissapointed to read this article on Chuck Klosterman’s article on Lester Bangs and video game journalists today; later on, I happened to read something similar on Joystiq. My reasons for my dissapointment are twofold, and are (of course) rooted in the fact that while I am an opinionated douchebag about video games, I am possibly even moreso about music.¹ The arguments concerning Klosterman’s piece seem to fall in one of two categories; either the response is, “No, there is no Lester Bangs of video game journalism, and we don’t need one,” or it’s “Yes, there is a Lester Bangs of video game journalism, and it’s Tim Rogers.²” The thing is: Both of these arguments are foundless arguments. They are, essentially, incorrect, and while I’m rarely one to be so staunch on any topic, I think Klosterman is making a very salient point about the video game community in general, and to reject his article wholesale on unfounded claims is pretty damaging. I don’t think he’s right either, but I think his question raises other, better questions, which we all need to be asking ourselves (although by “we” I guess I really mean “game developers”).

Let’s start with the second response I noted; the one that attempts to compare Tim Rogers with Lester Bangs. I’ve done my homework on both of these people, and I will say this: Tim Rogers is nothing like Lester Bangs. They both write themselves into their reviews, but Bangs was much more concerned with getting across the sensation of experiencing the music he was listening to; of letting you in on what it did to him. There’s a fine line between describing what a record contains and what a record does, but it’s an essential fine line, since without it, every band that any reviewer has ever liked sounds like the best band on earth, whether they’re Mountain or Strike Anywhere or Manu Chao or Wolf Eyes. What makes Bangs so great — and what makes Klosterman wish he had an analogous figure in video game journalism — is that he was able to express to you why, at that moment in time, the band he was writing about was the best, or the worst, in the world. This is what Klosterman is getting at; not that he wants someone who’s mainlining cat tranqs while screaming at Yoichi Wada over his Sidekick and chum-fucking a pillow with the Radiant Silvergun box art silkscreened onto it — but that he wants someone who can transmute the joy of playing a wonderful game, or the misery of playing a terrible one, into words understandable by everyone. Much as the review of, like, the Gnarls Barkley LP in the New York Times isn’t going to reference Y Pants and Endless Boogie (not that it would have any cause to, I know, but –), Klosterman’s figurative writer would need, in order to be published in any publication with a wide audience, to avoid esoteric references.³

In fact, if I had to tie Tim Rogers to any rock critic, it would probably be Brent DiCrescenzo; both of them are equally content to dance around the content of the record, or game, in order to paint an abstract portrait of what the content represents, without a justification of why. Comparing a Metallica album to a death camp is a pretty funny comedic riff for people who patently hate Metallica, but anyone who’s on the fence about the band, or the album, itself isn’t going to find any information there to unpack, other than “Brent DiCrescenzo did not like this album.” Tim Rogers’ interminable mini-essay about sleeping on trains in Japan, which itself purports to be a review of a video game (and yet barely mentions video games at all, much less the one in question), is much more similar to this than to, say, Bangs’ review of Lick My Decals Off, Baby. And, to be frank, only one of these three critical evaluations gave me any sense of what the material in question was like.

The other tack people have taken concerning this article, of course, is to say that new-media video game journalism is already an active beast, and that it’s presumptuous of Klosterman to say there isn’t because he doesn’t read the internet or the right magazines. But you know what? All of this journalism is going on in what amounts to hobbyist’s literature. You can pick up the New Yorker and read a Sasha-Frere Jones piece on a band you’ve never heard of and learn something interesting; you cannot have the same experience with someone known for writing about video games. You can go to 1up and read a Jeremy Parish piece on something and have a similar experience, but to do so, you first have to want to read about video games first. I want to read the New Yorker for the reason that it has interesting articles. This is the conundrum that Klosterman is talking about, people. To claim that there are no good game journalists is like claiming there are no good model train set construction journalists. Of course there are; you just have no cause to read them.

But here’s the thing, and here’s why Klosterman’s call for a nerd Bangs isn’t as easy as I’d like it to be⁴: That’s how rock criticism was in 1967. Rolling Stone is available in my high school’s library right now — they’re even archiving it — but in 1967, that wasn’t the case. Hell, Rolling Stone was founded the previous year. It took years for it, along with Creem and Crawdaddy and whatever else, to gain the sort of cultural currency it now enjoys (with the added bonus of now sucking fifty balls), and to spawn a music-literature industry which eventually validated reviews of rock albums in the New York Times. It’s an uphill road, and getting there isn’t going to be as simple as finding a good journalist; it’s going to be the validation of video games as a whole, and the gradual sea change in public opinion of video games, and probably some changes within the video game industry as well, like an impossible Escherian cherry on top.

One particular pothole on this road will almost certainly have to be the final resolution of the interminable — and, frankly, boring — debate as to whether video games constitute an art form. I want to be nowhere near this discussion when it happens, preferably in a steel bunker miles below the Earth, full of dehydrated food and good liquor, where I can blissfully ignore it until its painful death. The graphic novel has been trying to achieve this sort of universal recognition since its inception, and despite Maus having won a Pulitzer Prize and the industry having produced a million critically-acclaimed, heartbreaking works, it’s still nearly impossible to read an article in a newspaper about graphic novels without it starting out with “BIFF! POW! ZAP!” or “Comic books aren’t just for kids anymore!”⁵ Can you imagine how awful it’s going to be to have this debate with the same media that contains Irritating Stick?

Klosterman attempts to solve the games-as-art problem by claiming that they’re analogous to films or books with a certain amount of interactivity. It’s a great point, and it’s hard to defend against, assuming that video games have an interesting plot into which to inject interactivity. Of course, they don’t. None of them do. Maybe Suikoden II, a little bit, in some places. But that’s it. I can think of one game with a plot that didn’t, at some point, make me want to shit hate out of my neck. Did Final Fantasy X make me cry at the end? Oh, you bet it did. I cried like an infant, and I went around the rest of the day depressed. But before that, I had to wade through sixty hours of a furry blue monster with a complex about what essentially amounts to a tiny dick, and a woman who can walk on water but can’t self-actualize without a boyfriend, and then that boyfriend, that awful jock man-child who I wanted to club in the mouth with a brick, who attempts to solve every problem like he might a raincloud at a tailgating party, none of which is to say anything about the goth whose entire existence was predicated on, once every six minutes, showing us her tits. And yet, whenever anyone asks me about good RPGs for the PS2, I invariably mention this one first, because the game mechanics themselves are really great, and the sphere grid rules ass, and for a story in a video game, it’s comparatively brilliant. This is it; this is what we have. Pale Fire it ain’t.

The interactivity he touts is also incredibly limited, and is nothing like the plot-altering dynamic he describes, in which Gone With The Wind could have two wildly different plots. The games which have fully modular plots are probably countable on one hand; I know better than to claim I know how many there are, but I’m also not going to stoop to counting things like Fable, which had exactly two plots, neither of which was engaging whatsoever. What we’ve got are, essentially, a small collection of games which allow you to “unlock” different endings based on how you play the game, rather than a story which arises, organically, from the choices the player makes. We’re only seeing things like radiant AI, which could theoretically lead to something akin to what Klosterman imagines, in the very recent past. Plus, you know, even if you gussy up a turd with interactivity, and give it a robotic skeleton and wheels, and mount a Quickcam on top, it’s still going to be a turd. So everyone’s got work to do.

Atop all this is the true fact that video games, despite their players’ median age, are widely regarded as toys for children, and violent, awful toys as well. This is something else that graphic novels and comic books have in common with video games; I’m certainly not going to recap the entire saga here, but the story of the implementation of the Comics Code Authority is really fascinating, and bears mentioning whenever something is blamed on corrupting the youth of America.⁶ I’m not sure when this happened, exactly; Pong was first introduced to bars as the next generation of pinball machines, and early arcade-game advertising was aimed at the young adults who could go into a bar and play them.⁷ But now they are kids’ games, and the market certainly reflects that: Much as comic books in the fifties had large swaths of titles devoted to horror and violent science-fiction and crime drama, video games have a whole mess of exploding spines and rifle shots to groins.

However, it took Senate subcommittee meetings and the needless regulation of an entire industry for comic books to figure out that they didn’t have to be violent; they just could be, when they needed to. And so you now have Preacher, which at one point almost made me throw up (I am a wuss, yes), but you also have Scott Pilgrim, which is just as great, but which is amazing for a thousand reasons, and which contains no gore⁸. Video games, on the other hand: Uh. There’s an old Geek on Stun article that more or less summarizes my feelings on the matter — the winner of a 2005 “Video Game Designer For A Day” competition was a 14 year-old kid who, essentially, wrote down the plot of Grand Theft Auto on a piece of paper and changed all the various crime syndicates into rival gangs (or, more specifically, what a 14 year-old kid from Britain would imagine New York City gangs to be like⁹). You know what the really fucked thing is? One of my friends’ exes worked for a video game company and brought in an idea for a game during a planning session, and his higher-ups liked it and greenlit it, but quietly edit-mangled it until it had become exactly the same game the 14-year old British kid made. The former game is already out; I don’t know about the other.

And believe me when I tell you that I am fully aware that the market supports more than just this. You’d better believe that I spend most of my nerd life looking for more things like Loco Roco or Cave Story or Animal Crossing, and that I will defend the production of games like this with my hot heart until it is broken by whichever fucking faceless WWII simulator/drive-cars-and-shoot-people game/horrible quasi-goth kickfest it finally ends up being that is the last straw on my back. But that’s just it: I know that they’re out there. You do, too. BUT: Concerned parents in Poughkeepsie probably do not. And neither do senators or professors or cab drivers or scientists or authors or any of the millions of people who make up the rest of our world. And there’s the rub: Before we have a Lester Bangs, we’re going to have to have the games-as-art argument, which means we’re going to have to get past the games-as-filth stereotype, which means that the industry has to stop pumping out games with so many tits and guns, or at least get better press for the games that don’t.

So, sure, I would love for there to be a gaming Lester Bangs. I would love to read Harper’s and come across an article about the Wii, and I would love to have a conversation about the PS3 price point with another human being who I don’t have to type at. But for that to happen, the entire industry needs to be in a different place than it is now, and the rest of the world needs to finally figure out what it is we’re all so pumped up about. Until then, we all have to dance with the industry we came with, and that industry is the same industry that developed a breast-jiggle engine. You guys: We have so, so far to go.

¹ This, obviously, makes me a hit at every party I have ever attended, which is why the last time I engaged in a debate with someone at a social gathering, the person in question threw rocks at me. Yes, really.

² Also: Is Tim Rogers the only person anyone could think of? The guy I reflexively thought of was the Geek on Stun guy; I figured he’d be far more likely to end up dead at 32, full of Darvon (and I mean that in the best possible way).

³ And I don’t envy this figurative author one bit for their notional job of feeling out which games are in the public’s collective conscious, or aren’t. Is Katamari Damacy? Is Gunstar Heroes? Is Samba de Amigo? Is Typing of the Dead?

⁴ …because, obviously, I would love to be the person to answer that call. Ha ha (SUDDEN FLOOD OF WET TEARS/HEAVING SOBS)

⁵ One of the best college courses I ever took — among the top three, easily — was a course in the graphic novel. Our professor, who seemed to be friends with everybody important (or awesome) in the universe of the comic book, would bring in articles whenever they popped up, and read them to us. For a full semester, we didn’t find a single article that wasn’t, in some way, condescending or dismissive of the art form. This was two years ago. Just some perspective.

⁶ For the perversely interested: Matt and I actually wrote a rock opera about this in college. Listening to things can be easier than reading, so if your eyes are as tired as my hands after this screed, you can cue that up instead. BONUS FACT: The song “Trial” is influenced by the music of the courtroom scene in Chrono Trigger, although I forget by how much.

⁷ That being said: Putting video games in bars is the best fucking idea in the world, and the amazing time I had at Barcade in the Wiliamsburg section of Brooklyn a month or so ago is my proof. There is nothing in the universe like hanging out with attractive people your age, getting loaded on microbrew beer, and playing Rampage. As I put it that night before we left: “I think I just experienced the first really good justification for adulthood: Being able to put as many quarters into an arcade game as I want.”

⁸ I’ll be writing about Scott Pilgrim in a later article, and specifically about how it intertwines video game logic and real-life logic to enhance the story and make it nine million times better. Also I’m pretty sure I caught an extended reference to Space Channel 5 and a nod to Parodius in the middle of the whole thing, which, uh, awesome.

⁹ I can’t knock the kid too much for this, since I have personally spent as much time with a Crip or a Blood as that dude probably has, but come on: At least I read the Wu-Tang Manual.