Indie Devs vs New Games Journalism [Feedback Loop]

The last year has seen the rise of the independent developer as hero. Does this growing consideration of the developer challenge an eight-year-running trend in game journalism?

The explosion of commercially accessible independent games on platforms like Steam or XBLA have introduced us to a new successful and far more accessible generation of game developers. These new indie game dev stars have induced a change in the approach of some game reviewers. A change brought to the forefront in Walter Garrett Mitchell’s piece on The Escapist, “Alfred Hitchcock Would Make Good Games.”

Mitchell’s focus on the developer is entirely unlike the experience-focused New Games Journalism style proposed in 2004 by Kieron Gillen. That experiential style has more recently been popularized by Zero Punctuation, the rest of The Escapist, @Play, and a variety of other reviews that approached games based on how they played, instead of how people created them.

A lot of videogames really are dumb, but not all of them have to be

Taylor Clark doesn’t think there are many intelligent videogames. Or, as he put it in his recent profile of Jonathan Blow, “Video games, with very few exceptions, are dumb.” Here we go again. Another “respected” media outlet taking shots at

Jonathan Blow Discusses His Thoughts on Open-World Games

Jonathan Blow was recently interviewed by Edge magazine to talk about his new game, The Witness, and he expressed his thoughts on open world games. “I think games tend to try and tightly control what the player sees and does.

The Neverending Road

A factor in many reviewers’ judgment of any given game is the length of time it takes for them to complete it. However, the focus often seems to be on the amount of the content rather than the quality of