Observations and lessons from two decades of writing about video games

Halo 5 featured perhaps the series' most confounding campaign yet... but the online multiplayer still ruled. (credit: Microsoft / 343) The following excerpts come from The Game Beat, a new book examining the whos, hows, and whys of the game journalists covering the young but growing game industry. The collection of more than 80 columns from the last 15+ years pulls from dozens of writers past and present on everything from the near-death of print gaming magazines to the ethics of attending paid junkets to how much review scores really matter, and much more. The two excerpts below examine the relative impact (or lack thereof) a game's storyline can have on its critical reception and the somewhat surreal critical experience of playing a game in a critical 'bubble' before the general public.


Tell Me a Story
(Or “The Play’s the Thing,” originally published in The Game Beat newsletter, April 28, 2017.)
If you are connected to video games professionally, you probably heard some sort of discussion over Ian Bogost’s provocatively headlined Atlantic piece 'Video Games Are Better Without Stories.' The actual piece is a bit more restrained than the headline implies, more arguing that games should get past the “cinema envy” that is driving a lot of linear character vignettes these days. The argument nonetheless got a bit of pushback from across the industry.
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