Old/New Games Journalism

In this lecture, we had to read an example of Old and New Games Journalism and decided which form of journalism was more interesting and/or useful for reviewing and discussing games.

Old Games Journalism focuses on a detailed description on the mechanics and technical side of the game, almost, if not completely, removing any personal experience of the game, and instead focusing on components like gameplay and graphics. These types of articles are commonly found on review websites for games, a good example being IGN. These reviews focus on telling the reader what to expect in the game, without giving too much away about the general plot or unlocks inside the game.

For New Games Journalism, i read the article always_black by Ian Shanahan (Sept 2003) “Bow, Nigger”.
In this article, Shanahan talks about  his experience in the MMORPG, Star Wars: Jedi Knight II. Rather than going into massive detail about the games mechanics and his thoughts on them, he goes more into his personal experience with the games dynamics and gameplay. He says that at the start of each duel, players bow to one another, like the old Jedi's themselves, even though the games creators did not make this a mechanic, the players adopted themselves. His accounts focuses on one particular duel where another player abuses this adopted system to score free hits on his character. Following this, he gets into a very passionate and emotional description of the following events, resulting in him winning the duel and saying that good won against evil.

Generally, while i find Old Games Journalism to be more useful to find out information about a game i potentially want to buy, New Games Journalism is certainly more interesting and engrossing to read as it provides a personal account rather than a impersonal one.