Joe Martin – Product Marketing for Startups

Anyone who knows me even a little can probably anticipate that I don’t have a great opinion of games journalism. There’s a lot of good stuff and I certainly don’t want to detract from that, but by and large the output is terrible. Even the best writers consistently prioritise style over substance, while there’s only very few who have the understanding of ludological principles that might give the work any real import. We are shockingly bad at our jobs, all of us. Something needs to be done.

But that’s a discussion for another time. Friends have advised against publishing my grand and angry Anti-Games Manifesto and that’s undoubtedly where this moaning would lead.

In July though I decided I should do something, so I started collecting a list of the best journalism I’d read this year – some of it gaming, but most of it not. I thought it would be interesting to compare them later even if not all of it was necessarily written this year. Over time it grew to include more than just conventional journalism and eventually it morphed into just a ‘Things I Like’ list, rather than a template for the future. You’ll find the full list below regardless.

If you’re looking for a short list, I’ve emboldened the ones I consider to be the cream of the crop.

• ‘I Was Gutted To Have Been A Coward’ – Guardian, Various Authors
• Design Reboot: A Lecture – Youtube, Jon Blow
• Videogames And The Human Condition – Youtube, Jon Blow
• Warren Spector on Power Fantasies – Critical Path, Various Authors
• The Rise and Collapse of Yoshinori Ono – Eurogamer, Simon Parkin
• A Horse Named Gizmondo – Eurogamer, Ellie Gibson
• Forever Young – Kill Screen: Issue Six, Jason Johnson
• Thank You For The Day Zero – RPS, Jim Rossignol
• I Was A Warehouse Wage Slave – Mother Jones, Mac McClelland
• We Snuck Into The Olympic Arena – Vice, Graham Johnson

• Galloping Gertie – 99 Percent Invisible, Roman Mars
• What Happened At Dos Erres – This American Life, Ira Glass
• The Self, Presence and Storytelling – Frictional Games, Tom Grip
• Growing Up With Page Three – The Flick, Sam Carelse
• The Sinister Campaign Against Page Three – New Statesman, Martin Robbins
• Sites That Charge For Reviews – AppyNation, Andrew Smith
• The Craigslist Job Experiment – Thought Catalog, Eric Auld
• Designing To Reveal The Nature Of The Universe – Personal Blog, Marc Ten Bosch
• Do Schools Kill Creativity? – Ken Robinson, TED

• Abortion Clinic Harassment Experience – The Rochester Ladygarden
• I Am Spartacus: Of Booth Babes – Electronic Theatre, Chet Roivas
• Unmasking Reddit’s Violentacrez – Gawker, Adrian Chen
• Unmasking Dishonored’s Harvey Smith – RPS, Nathan Grayson
• Night And The City – Eurogamer, Christian Donlan
• The XCOM Review That Took 18 Years To Write – Quarter to Three, Tom Chick
• Everyone Wants New Yorker Style Content, But… – Pando Daily, Sarah Lacy
• The Perception of Corruption – Personal Blog, John Walker

• How To Apologise – Personal Blog, Dan Griliopoulos
• Fear And Loathing In Athens – Guardian, Maria Margaronis
• Games Journalism And Ethics – Beefjack, Lewis Denby
• The World’s Fastest Number Game – Guardian, Alex Bellos
• The Crispy Crimes of Guy Fieri – The New York Observer, Joshua Stein
• What Does It Feel Like To Murder Someone? – Quora, Tom Winfrey
• What Is The Most Profound Joke? – Quora, Andrew Udell
• I Couldn’t Change The World As A Journalist – Guardian, Lucy Mathen
• Heat Maps, Point Clouds and Big Data – Personal Blog, Jim Blackhearst
• How To Be A Game Journalist – Personal Blog, Leigh Alexander

• The Media Mix-Up That Ruined My Life – BBC News, Neda Soltani
• Teller Reveals His Secrets – The Smithsonian Magazine, Teller
• Finding Passion Changes Everything – Brain Pickings, Ken Robinson
• The Julie Project – Personal Blog, Darcy Padilla
• Bad Linking, Plagarism and Rewrites – The PA Report, Ben Kuchera
• Minecon 2012: What I Learned Making Gunpoint – Youtube, Tom Francis
• Cybernetics for the Masses – Youtube, CCCen
• The Making of Prince of Persia – Personal Blog, Jordan Mechner

I also thought I’d take the opportunity to link to the stuff I wrote this year which I’m most proud of, though I don’t consider them to be ‘Must Read’ things at all. If I’m to say games journalism is in dire straits then I have to at least acknowledge that I swim in those waters too, so these are just to be left here so I can remind myself that I did some stuff this year that maybe wasn’t totally crap.

• The Financial Frontier, Continue Magazine
• The First MMO: Habitat, Eurogamer
• Half-Life 2: Missing Information, RPS
• Hotline Miami Review – Bit-tech.net
• Unlimited Hyperbole S1E3 – Personal Blog

That’s it.