This isn't really anything special, as a good rule of thumb is that if SomethingAwful is mocking your site, raging against it is probably pretty passe at best. I've recently gotten tired with Kotaku (especially with it recently trying to review games as dully as possible, and its entire week of salivating over Gearbox's guaranteed mediocre revival of Duke Nukem Forever), but I still will get excited when I see a new column up. There are currently four columnists in Kotaku, and each is a very distinct brand in varying degrees of not good. Each one is basically a cardinal point in the field of VIDEOOOOO GAAAAAAAAAME JOURNALISMMMMM, and demonstrates pretty well why no one besides basement dwellers is going to care about your Halo Feelings.
Brian Crecente, SOCIAL GAMES JOURNALISM
Does every games site have one of these people? I think Crecente is one of the head editors of Kotaku, and thus gets to have a column regardless of his writing ability (unsurprisingly pretty shitty). His column is entitled "Well Played" and involves "weekly news and opinion column about the big stories of the week in the gaming industry and its bigger impact on things to come." For those not exactly affluent in gamerese, this means trying to awkwardly combine mainstream journalism with stuff about video games. Well Played is full of stuff like "how do war veterans deal with violent war game videogames" or "hey blizzard is messing with online anonymity what does that mean for the INTERNET man." Translated another way, social games journalism is the kind of fluff piece on the intersection of video games and society that prime time news programs occasionally stuff on the tail-end (X:45-X:50, the final minutes are always pure human interest) of the news programs.
From a traditionalist standpoint, this is probably the least offensive branch of gaming journalism. Crecente's writing is a meandering tailspin of poor articulation, but I can reasonably imagine someone with basic English skills and an ingrained understanding that most people just don't give a fuck about Startropics's effect on island cultures being a non-ironic enjoyable read.
Of course, the weakness of this field is that it is always going to be related to a world where your average reader, at best, just wants to forget. Unsurprisingly, aside from hot button issues, relatively very few people read Well Played on Kotaku. The same cannot be said for
TIM ROGERS, NEW GAME JOURNALISM
If anyone actually liked by writing style, they would probably be salivating at the prospect of me eviscerating Tim Rogers. Well, bad news, while I hate Tim Rogers, so much has been said about him that it's honestly rather ridiculous to pile on. Don't worry, I am going to rage pretty shortly.
The best statement of Tim Rogers is that he's essentially Cargo Cult for gamers. While Well Played awkwardly tries to merge video games with real life topics, Tim Rogers boldly envisions a world where real life is totally bogus and the real intelligentsia is reserved for the video game club. Nothing is more dismaying than reading comment after comment in a Tim Rogers review proclaiming his ideas to be "thought-provoking" (actually, more dismaying are the equal comments of people terrified at possibly reading long text essays). Tim Rogers is essentially intellectual literature for people who have never read anything really intellectual (NEIL GAIMAN DOESN'T COUNT CUNTMONGS), but have just enough self-awareness to feel vaguely bad about this. Tim Rogers provides the answer with his columns, which are basically SRS GAMERZ ONLY clubhouses. The actual content of his columns can be divided in two camps:
1) Complete nonsense about game mechanics that when stripped of Tim's WACKY DEVIATIONS amount to completely banal and obvious ideas. Consider his article on "friction," which if reread was basically saying "slowdown and intentional jerkiness in movement provide great enjoyment in games." WHOA YOU JUST BLEW MY MIND GUY. Sometimes there's not even really an idea, just the wacky deviations (this is really common in his reviews, which commonly talk about the game in the last paragraph, like a fifth grader bloating up his book report with factoids tangentally related).
2) HEY LOOK AT MY LIFE. These have been worryingly more common for Tim, wherein he doesn't particularly discuss games, but instead presents himself as a proxy fantasy for Kotaku readers. Tim lives in Japan (in fact living there so long he even can complain about it), is in a (really terrible) noise rock band, and talk to girls. Still, I'll give the devil his due and admit it's hard to mock these columns since Tim has mastered the art of "not really ironic but actually ironic" writing. To wit, the tone of these columns is "I'm not cool, but I'm aware of this, so I act cool and that's cool in an uncool way." It creates such a perfect web around itself that your options in insulting it are either to try to mimic it and look like a total fool, or just go FUCK YOU TIM ROGERS and play Link to the Past or something.
Again, Tim Rogers is awful, but the scary thing is that he's not actually my least favorite Kotaku writer.
LISA FOILES: "SOCIAL" GAME JOURNALISM
FUCK THIS BITCH.
For those whose brain were slightly triggered by that name, Lisa was a cast member on Nickelodeon's ALL THAT, a pretty lame sketch comedy for people whose dad was not forcing them to watch reruns of In Living Color and MAR'IIIN (mar'iiiin). At some point, I guess she started realizing that a minor interest in video games could translate into niche fame.
Again giving Tim Rogers some credit, the dude clearly likes video games, and has spent alot of his life at least trying to think outside the box for ideas about how games should work. Reading Lisa's columns gives the impression that Lisa treats video games as a sort of vague side-hobby timesink, or that she is actually kind of retarded. Reading a Tim Rogers column at least stimulates my brain into coming up with counterpoints and an occasional "wait what." Lisa's columns are literally amazing in their emptiness.
The vast majority of her columns can be summarized pretty accurately as "I am a hot girl, here is an anecdote where I was in the situation of a normal person but famous and I like video games! ^_^" Whatever game discussion in the columns is so uncannily elementary that I think she's working the same angle as Tim Rogers, albeit in the opposite direction: instead of a illusion that the reader is capable of intelligent thought, Foiles creates an illusion that gamers are capable of seeing simple elegant truths.
Foiles's strength is that she is not scared to slut it up for nerds. I don't know if it's a learned or natural trait, but she is that type of female that has learned to say exactly that sort of thing that simultaneously appeals to both the man-child and sexual predator side of the average Kotaku reader. For examples, these are all just from ONE COLUMN:
When I wasn't washing green slime out of every crevice of my body,
Whenever a customer recognized me, they would immediately ask why I went from humiliating myself on television to humiliating myself at a game store. The answer was simple: It was a block away from my condo.
…Which segued into my REAL answer: I am infatuated with video games.
Finishing Odin Sphere after over seventy hours of gameplay, and realizing my adventure with the amazing characters was over, left me with an empty feeling. From this perspective, video game characters connect better with humans than those in movies.
On the other hand, the remembrance of your long journey may not necessarily be a positive one. An extended meet-and-greet with characters in games may cause your mind to associate negative traits with these heroes. For example, sure, the Prince from Prince of Persia 4 had some incredible moves and fought like a badass, but why did he have to communicate like every arrogant frat boy I've ever met and immediately wanted to punch in the mouth? (Okay, that's from a chick's perspective. Get off me.)
When I was thirteen, my acting coach refused to give me comedic scenes to perform because they were too easy for me. She'd give me scenes where I'd have to cry. I struggled for months, and even tried cheating by pinching the crap out of my eyelids when my coach turned her back. Turns out she could see the pinch marks. (GOOD IDEA, THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD LISA.)
Combine these with the fact that every one of her columns has at least one photo of her in a TOTALLY APPROACHABLE HEY DO YOU LIKE BUBBLE BOBBLE pose, and it's no question why her columns are quickly being read more than Tim Rogers. I'm partially keeping up with Kotaku in the hopes of eventually reading a clash between Rogers and Foiles, of crystal irony versus murky sexiness. Prediction: At some point Tim will write a heavily prepared flirt/burn that will implode in his face. And then I will marry Tim.
But seriously, it's clearly an uneasy marriage between Foiles and Kotaku. Kotaku has to be aware that she's using the site as a means of self-promotion and basically contributing shit to actual gaming news and idea, but as long as mongs keep logging in to imagine Foiles blowing them for saving her from HALO JERKS, I guess it's a winning combination for both.
oh yeah and her handle is "darth chix0r" god people are filth.
LEIGH ALEXANDER- Who?
Seriously, her site photo is totally a fat girl angle shot that makes her look like Artemis from Always Sunny, big deal
(I actually don't mind her columns, in that the ideas within are usually a little more interesting than Tim Rogers's concept, and unlike Lisa Foiles, I don't feel like I'm seeing subliminal panty shots. Of course, on the other hand, thought-provoking video game journalism is still thought-provoking video game journalism)
