Kill Screen and the Future of the Gaming Press

Note: This article was published on Kombo.com, where I work as a News Editor, on April 27, 2010. The article and video belong to them, but I’ve been given permission to post it here as well for the noble purpose of education.

This is a bad time for print.

Let’s begin with some statistics: according to Magazine Death Pool, by December 14 of last year, 367 print magazines had kicked the bucket in 2009 alone. The blog, which records the plights of “magazines which have outlived their purpose,” alleges that’s a victory for print, as the number is down from the 573 magazines closed in 2007. Newspaper Death Watch is a similar blog that chronicles “the decline of newspapers and the rebirth of journalism.” At least there’s a glimmer of hope in their mission statement.

Kill Screen on sale at the 2 Player Productions booth at PAX East (Click for Flickr slideshow)

Newspapers and magazines have been struggling to find their place in a world characterized by instant gratification and an information free-for-all. The popularity of e-readers like the Kindle and, more recently, the iPad, have made the future of print media uncertain. Even the New York Times, regarded by many as the backbone of American journalism, has struggled to develop a Web model that’s both attractive to readers and profitable. How can the video game magazines so many gamers know and love possibly have a future in such an unsympathetic climate?

Cue “The Death of Print,” a panel discussion at Boston’s PAX East gaming convention in March. Despite the panel’s macabre title, the discussion veered more toward the future of print than its demise. Panelist John Davison, the editor of GamePro and the catalyst behind its recent stylistic overhaul, said that to save GamePro the team had to “reinvent the brand, not just the magazine.” So far they’ve been successful, as many gamers are beginning to see GamePro in a new light; its future remains up in the air, however.

Chris Dahlen at The Death of Print

Davison was joined on the panel by freelancer Julian Murdoch, Electronic Arts’ Jeff Green, The Escapist’s editor in chief, Russ Pitts, and Chris Dahlen, the editorial director and one of the visionaries behind the experimental new gaming magazine Kill Screen. Dahlen and I spoke at length over the phone, and he had a lot to say about the future of print and the ideas behind Kill Screen.

Dahlen and several of his compatriots had been chewing over the idea of starting a new gaming magazine in 2009. “All of us were interested in the idea of writing about games as a form of pop culture, like movies or music, to be more thoughtful, and to write for a more mature audience,” he said. He described an environment in which gamers are shying away from the traditional, “immature gaming enthusiast press” in favor of “smart gaming blogs” like Michael Abbott’s The Brainy Gamer and The Borderhouse, “a blog that celebrates diversity in gaming from a wide variety of cultural angles.”

Kill Screen’s high-quality pages are filled with introspective essays, fascinating interviews, philosophical rhetoric and original art. Reviews, news and industry coverage are conspicuously absent. Dahlen and company have a noble vision for the gaming press; Jamin Brophy-Warren, another of Kill Screen’s founders, said to Gamasutra, “If we continue to buy into the delusion that games are merely software and should be evaluated solely on their graphical fidelity and feature set, then we cannot expect the medium to go forward.” On the phone, Dahlen elaborated on how exactly games should be evaluated.

“I don’t think enough people evaluate the theme of a game. They don’t spend enough time critiquing the representation of people as valid characters. That’s what I would like to see more of,” he said. “There are games like Portal that excel at both, where the theme is beautifully married to the mechanics, and they work together.

Portal is a game "where the theme is beautifully married to the mechanics," said Dahlen

“Most people only care about the mechanics, and they don’t think about the theme very much. People will just ignore it. I kind of understand that, because the mechanics are where it kind of breaks down. You can ship a game where the theme doesn’t make sense, but if the mechanics don’t make sense, then the game is broken,” Dahlen said. Several of the articles in Kill Screen’s inaugural issue focus heavily on the thematic elements of games like Resident Evil and The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

In addition to its editorial distinctions, Kill Screen differs greatly from other gaming magazines in its physical motifs. Its heavy matte pages are overtly free of ads, and screen shots are limited to those for games that are so far removed from mainstream gaming culture that “people would have no idea what they look like,” according to Dahlen.

“The goal there was to make it classier. We like fan art- if it’s good,” he said. “We didn’t want it to look like other gaming magazines, and that was made easier by the fact that we got a guy who hasn’t designed gaming magazines before.” Dahlen credits most of the Kill Screen’s visual sophistication to the discerning sensibilities of the magazine’s creative director, Anthony Smyrski of Smyrski Creative.

Dahlen said that initial reactions to Kill Screen have been positive. “People just believe in the idea of seeing a nice print magazine that takes the gaming industry as seriously as they do,” he said over the phone. Other gaming journalists, professional and amateur alike, have hope for the future of print, as well, though all agree that magazines are going to have to carve out a new niche in the industry.

Kill Screen contains few screen shots

Susan Arendt is the senior editor for The Escapist, a popular online video game magazine with rich feature and editorial content. When I caught up with her outside another panel about game journalism at PAX East, she told me she believes print is “on life support,” though she hopes gamers will find a place in their hearts (and their wallets) for print content in the future.

“I love print so much, I really, really do, it’s just- it’s tough, because I think that the audience, having been raised on online so much, doesn’t have the respect and love for print,” she told me. “I would love nothing more than to see a strong print presence come back, but I do think it’s going to have to change.”

Dustin Burg, formerly of game journalism blog Joystiq, spoke with me during PAX East in front of the booth of his current employers, indie developers Ska Studios. “I think there’s always going to be a need for newspapers, or some sort of print,” he said. “Physically holding stuff, I think, has value in it. But they’re going to have to change some things, their model, so to speak, because, heck, we all go online to get our news. There will be a market. Is it going to shrink and almost shrivel up and die? Probably. but I’m sure there’ll be something around.”

Matthew Hawkins, video game journalist, game designer, and publisher of FORT90ZINE, was manning the 2 Player Productions booth during the convention, where “issue no.0″ of Kill Screen was on sale for the first time. FORT90ZINE has, according to the site’s bio, been called “the publication that helped spark the video game zine renaissance currently in effect.” Hawkins told me he started the zine, which is “a print version of his blog,” to combat the impermanence of the web.

Kill Screen's website will feature more web friendly content in the future

“It’s a way for people to get back control of the information, make it permanent, be able to pass it along,” he said. “It can’t compete with the fast information sharing of the Internet, so what it has to do is concentrate on more niche, more introspective, opinion pieces.”

Chris Davidson, a student at UMass Amherst and frequent contributor to amateur game writing community Bitmob, is already subscribed to the newly reborn Electronic Gaming Monthly, which closed in early 2009 after more than 20 years of operation. While Davidson relishes the physicality of magazines, he thinks print publications should look to websites like Bitmob for ways to interact more with their communities.

“Right now, the way community works in a print magazine, other than their online sites, is they either have letters and e-mails from response to articles, or you can be in a stupid art contest where you draw a stupid Sephiroth with cat ears, and win a copy of Guitar Hero: Van Halen. That’s all there is. I think that they can go a lot further in building their communities,” he told me. “I think John Davison bringing articles from Bitmob once per month into GamePro, and publishing them, is a good step forward.”

Dahlen agrees that community is an important part of any publication, and he told me via e-mail that plans for Kill Screen’s community aspects are currently taking shape. “We definitely want to engage our community, and we’re still figuring out the best way to do that,” he wrote. “The magazine was made possible by all of the donors at Kickstarter, and without them, there would be no print product right now – and it’s critical that we keep their engagement and solicit their feedback. Beyond that, as we do more with the website, we will be making more avenues for readers to build a community, but I can’t say yet what shape that’ll take.”

left to right: John Davison, Julian Murdoch, Russ Pitts, Jeff Green, Chris Dahlen

There are other plans for the future of Kill Screen, as well. Dahlen told me on the phone that there will soon be more “Web friendly” content on the website. “We’re still kind of figuring that out right now. If we get, like, a 500 word piece for the magazine, it will stay in the magazine,” he said. “The print magazine will be kind of the flagship product.”

As the Internet has become increasingly elegant over the last several years, much of its content has grown more streamlined. “When I started writing online with Pitchfork in 2002, we would push content once a day, and most of the content was around 800 words long. It was almost like being at a newspaper,” Dahlen said. “Now you look at all the Gawker blogs, and that’s, like, 200-word posts, and they’re being updated every hour.”

A 24-hour information overload has taken shape around blogging and Twitter, but gamers are beginning to pine for the days when good pacing needed to apply to what we read as well as what we played. “Maybe I’m just old fashioned,” Dahlen told me. Far from it, though, he’s embracing the Internet as the valuable tool it is. “We’re a print journal that’s being made with the conveniences of the Internet,” he said. “If we were doing this fifty years ago, we would probably be selling it in one neighborhood in Brooklyn.”

Here’s a video in which I speak with writers, both professional and amateur, at Boston’s PAX East gaming convention in March about the future of the gaming press:

Guest Speaker: Dan Gregory

Dan Gregory, of Northeastern University’s School of Technological Entrepreneurship, came to Reinventing the News today to talk about Northeastern’s IDEA program and the merits of journalistic entrepreneurship.

Dan Gregory

IDEA, or “the Inter-Disciplinary Entrepreneurship Accelerator,” “is a student created and run University program at Northeastern that helps other students organically create, develop, and accelerate their own business objectives.”

Gregory spoke about “disruptive technologies” like Twitter, smart phones and other tools that have helped everyday citizens fill the roles of journalists, leading many to consider the job of the journalist obsolete.

“What I want to do is really think about the role of talent in disruptive technologies,” he told the class. How much talent does it take for a “citizen journalist” to update his or her Twitter? On the other side of that coin, what can journalists with real journalistic ability do with these tools? What are the best ways to utilize them?

Gregory encouraged us to embark on our own ventures and play to our talents, which I think is solid advice.

Should news sites allow anonymous comments?

This is a very complex issue, and there is honestly no correct answer.

On one hand, everything on the internet is anonymous. I can say I’m whoever the hell I want to be, and in many cases it’s very hard to prove otherwise. Most sites, even when that require registration, allow users to invent whatever fancy user name comes to mind (like Rogue Cheddar, for example). Many people create an online identity completely separate from their real life ones, and why shouldn’t they, when it’s within their rights and they’re not harming anybody?

Using your daughter as a scapegoat is real classy, by the way.

On the other hand, when someone like that nutter Judge Strickland-Saffold starts posting ridiculous things on the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s articles using a variety of pseudonyms, the public has a right to know. Why? Because Strickland-Saffold is a public figure, whose role it is to serve public needs, not comment inappropriately, on cases she had presided over, on the site of a respectable news organization.

So should news sites ban comments altogether, require real names, or deal with these instances on a case-by-case basis? Banning comments altogether is probably the most realistic answer, as it’s not like the internet is currently experiencing a dearth of other outlets through which to express oneself. Requiring real names would be nice, but tricky to enforce. The more visitors a site has, the harder it would be to vet all the commenters, and the more crazies would slip through the cracks.

Guest Speaker: Matt Carroll from the Globe

The Boston Globe’s Matt Carroll stopped by Northeastern on Wednesday to tell my Reinventing the News class about “database journalism.” Carroll uses databases and spreadsheets to “show the trend in something,” “get the numbers to back something up” and “basically write the nut graf of a story.”

Matt Carroll practices database journalism at the Boston Globe

“It changed the way I look at the world,” he told the class.

He said database journalism is hugely underutilized. Writers tend to shy away from math, and journalists who can crunch some numbers can add a lot to a story.

“What I quickly realized was that hardly any journalists do this stuff,” he said. “It’s a great thing to have in your resume.”

He showed us some examples using gun ownership information and a site called many eyes. The site uses custom or preexisting data sets to create easily interpreted graphics that can be used to discover trends or supplement a story.

Carroll graduated from Northeastern in 1979 and has been working at the Globe since 1987.

Twitter is for winners

A lot of people get down on Twitter, because they “don’t care what people ate for lunch,” or “already have a Facebook,” or any other number of excuses. Everybody who knows what’s up, though, knows that Twitter is a great tool for making contacts, following trends in your industry, and finding out about breaking news before all the non-tweeters.

Advertise yourself on Twitter to get hits on your blog or website, and link it to your Facebook so they share updates to save you time

If there’s a popular news site or blog you love to read but don’t always have the time, chances are they have a Twitter that you can follow to receive all the best updates in micro form. I follow GamePro, Joystiq, Destructoid, Kotaku, GamePolitics, and X-Play for my gaming news.

Take that a step further and you can follow your favorite journalists and editors, like Blake Patterson of touchArcade, Brian Crecente and Stephen Totilo of Kotaku, Thierry Nguyen of 1Up, Rey Gutierrez of Destructoid, and Ryan O’Donnell of Area 5.

Developers are tweeting too, and making Twitters for specific games, like Lionhead Studios, Casey Malone from Harmonix, and EA Redwood Shores’s Dead Space 2.

Twitter is a great place to find out about deals and sales, too. Cheap Ass Gamer, GamerHotLine, and GamerDeals.net all tweet daily about the latest and best gaming steals.

Of course, Twitter is also good for pure humor or entertainment. Overheard Newsroom and Fake AP Stylebook will tickle any journalists. Author Arjun Basu, inventor of the “Twister”, a 140-character short story, tweets several new ones a day. They’re often funny, touching or sad, and best of all, they’re short.

Finally, members of Team Coco had better be following the Golden Giant’s Twitter. Despite creating his account less than a month ago, Conan has almost 700,000 followers. True fans (like myself) can also follow his beard, squirrel, monkey, Ford Taurus, sharpie, liquor filled beach, and his one and only “Twitter pal“.

Now follow me!

Northeastern University Gamers Profile

I interviewed students at Northeastern University to find out what games they care about, what systems they play on, and what games they’re looking forward to playing in 2010. While you probably won’t be surprised by the answers I received from the fellas, the tiny sample of lady gamers I spoke with preferred one game, and one game only. All three major consoles received some love, but handheld gamers were seriously underrepresented. Finally, the most anticipated game of 2010 may just fulfill our “final fantasies” sometime next week. Chuckle. Check out the video:

I worked really hard on it, so maybe you could even leave a comment too! Thanks!

Special thanks to Kevin Kelly Kenkel for helping out so much with the filming, too!

Gamepolitics.com and the politics of games

Gamepolitics.com is the closest thing to a political blog that I will ever regularly read. There is a surprising amount of legislation all over the world, and especially in the US, that affects the game industry and, more importantly, gamers themselves.

where politics and video games collide

Take Australia, for example. In Australia, there is no video game rating higher than MA15+. Many games that earn a Mature rating in the US, the equivalent of an R movie, are denied classification in Australia, and are therefore banned from being sold by retailers. South Australian Attorney-General Michael Atkinson has been preventing a new rating from being established for years. Using the topic tracking drop-down menu near the top of Gamepolitics, I can read all posts pertaining to Australia, Michael Atkinson or games ratings in general.

Another neat tool is the Legislation Tracker, which displays a map of the US and Canada and highlights which states and provinces currently have video game legislation, either in the works, established or already defeated. This is a quick way to check if you should be writing any letters or even if there’s an upcoming vote in your state that might affect your gaming freedoms.

When the blog was acquired in 2006 by the Entertainment Consumers Association (ECA), a non-profit that represents entertainment consumers, the content stayed the same, and the man behind it- journalist Dennis McCauley- is a super nice guy (I interviewed him in 2008 about the Little Big Planet recall for my Journalism 2 final). In a world where video games are more often than not given the short end of the stick by society at large, Gamepolitics often helps bring things into perspective.

Guest Speaker: Steve Garfield

One of the first hot nuggets of wisdom Steve Garfield (of SteveGarfield.com) served the students of my Reinventing the News class involved the importance of our names.

Dan Kennedy (seated) with Steve Garfield of SteveGarfield.com

“Own your name!” He proclaimed, suggesting we use our names on all our sites and even secure our own personal URLs. That should be easy enough for us, as most of us only have one site. Garfield, however, has 33.

After working as a morning radio show producer and in the marketing department of a computer distributor for a number of years, Garfield started what he claims was the first video blog in 2004- months before the launch of Youtube in 2005.

Now he does speaking engagements, and his first book, Get Seen: Online Video Secrets To Building Your Business, has just been released. He stopped by Professor Kennedy’s classroom to talk to us about vlogging our personal brands of journalism.

He showed us an example of live video blogging, using his phone and qik.com to broadcast a video of the class instantly to his blog. It was actually extremely cool, and also rather startling.

He also showed us a few examples of his own video journalism, including a live video of the presidential vote in Jamaica Plain and an interview that was rudely interrupted by a disturbed and/or drunk woman, who proved surprisingly insightful.

When asked how we can make vlogging into a career, Garfield replied that we should use these tools more to extend our reach in the world of web journalism.

“Get a job that pays you money,” he said. “This is your passion, that you should pursue in addition to that thing.”

Journalistic Mapping Technology

Mapping as a form of journalism is very interesting. Check out this site. The maps appear stranger and stranger as you scroll down the page, starting out with the “cartogram,” which makes California and Rhode Island gigantic and Wyoming tiny by sizing the states based on population rather than actual area.

A map of the 2008 presidential election, color-coded and "cartogrammed" by the population of every county

As the map goes down to the county level (rather than the state level) and then to a cartogram of the counties, it starts to look like something I’d like to hang on my wall. Finally, the striated cartograms that use shades of purple to show percentage of votes in every county look like true works of art.

The multiple, extremely different ways of representing what is essentially the same information make mapping as a form of journalism a dangerous tool. Much like polling data, the results can be misrepresented by news outlets with an agenda, and the general public is, as usual, none the wiser. On the other hand, an honest journalist can give an educated audience a large amount of information quickly and in an easily digestible, visual format using mapping technology.

The Gloucester Street Landing

The location I’ve chosen for the Newcomer’s Guide to NU map is known as the Gloucester Street Landing. It’s a small dock just to the east of the Harvard/Mass Ave. bridge, and is simply a nice place to have a picnic or watch the sunset. A series of ramps at the Boston end of the bridge lead to a path for bikes and joggers, and the Landing is not far from there.

The Gloucester Street Landing was restored and repaired in August 2003 by the Esplanade Association (TEA), with the help of the state and private partners, adding another ten years of life to the dock, according to the TEA website.

the Gloucester Landing, as seen from one of the Esplanade's 6 miles of paths

Hours of operation are whenever to whenever, and it is not handicap accessible, although the esplanade itself is. The Esplanade is a 3 mile parkland that stretches along the Boston side of the Charles. It includes 6 miles of paths, 6 wooden docks, 2 playgrounds, 3 softball fields, 5 soccer fields, 10 statues and memorials and more.

the dock is a peaceful place to relax