Observations

   I haven’t actually been playing a lot of videogames lately, which is a pretty normal thing.
I’m still waiting to get a copy of Dark Souls II, and patiently waiting for next Tuesday’s release of
Drakengard 3 (the latter is a weird title to be anticipating so heavily)
   Recently, I’ve just moved to a new writing position at http://dccomicsnews.com
Where I’ll be (for now!) reviewing a handful of different titles every month.

Like this one! (Worlds Finest #23)

In writing about comics, I try to bring over what little I know about writing about videogames.
   Like anyone else who’s ever wanted to make their mark doing this, I got my start by just
noticing things about videogames. The whole critique of more than just concept like game mechanics
and graphical style hems from seeing that a lot of people consider reviews to be the most boring way to write about videogames.
   In a lot of ways, I agree that the straight up review format is mostly over-
utilized and there’s probably a better example of deciding whether or not a certain game is worth the
hours that you’d have to put into it.
   Nobody needs to be told that Comics, being a different medium, require a different type of criticism. In videogames, your enjoyment comes from the mechanics – the way the player interfaces with the game world, whatever thing you want to call what pushing a button and making someone reload a gun or vault over cover
   Comic Books are largely more cohesive than videogames (at least big budget games) appear as, becauseyour enjoyment is tied to the whole book. Clever dialogue and pacing can be ruined by an artist who can’t keep characters on model – or even worse doesn’t understand how to effectively structure a layout. So in focusing more on comics lately, I’ve been trying to figure out if there’s a line where critique of videogames and comic books can cross over. In a lot of ways, it’s a line I see as kind of needed – comic books are way, way older than videogames.
   Even the most genre based stories have roots in stories that go far deeper than any videogames do. Yet if you were to compare the cultures of criticism about the two – more interesting things have been said by creators and critics in positions where people can hear them in reference to videogames than a
medium that’s existed for over eighty years. Comics and Videogames aren’t really similar in other ways, too.
   Where there’s a burgeoning indie scene– and dozens of very vocal indie developers in the videogame world, it doesn’t seem like many wheelhouses have give independent creators a position to talk about how they feel about the market and be heard.
   Even some of the larger websites like Comic Book Resources are still dominated by a discourse that focuses on Superheroes and “The Big Two” even if they offer a small sliver of their website being dedicated to places like Image and Dynamite.

   This is in a contrast to videogame journalism where even the largest websites started to cover the “indie phenomenon” pretty early, coinciding with the release of games like Cave Story that were initially just free to play curiosities.
   When Koji Igarashi decided to leave Konami just a few months ago, almost every major news outlet covered it or had an interview with him. Likewise, when someone leaves a comic company like DC to launch something creator owned – you don’t often find out until the release of the first issue. Sometimes I wonder if this is because larger comic companies, especially now that Marvel is backed by the media giant Disney, have a lot more image control going on.
   “Image Control” is of course something game companies – luckily for players and consumers, don’t seem to have a lot of. Even when they do attempt to do any kind of image control, using the recent Sim City disaster as an example, it works out poorly in their favor. I say players benefit from that because a lack of image control lets consumers actually know what
they’re dealing with when they make a purchase, and that’s actually a good thing.
   If I was a corporate manager, I probably wouldn’t think so.
There’s also the bit where some of the heaviest hitters in the realm of comics journalism have very close ties to the industry.
   A lot of the contributors are comic writers or artist themselves and many of them work very close with the companies they follow. The criticism seems a lot more lax in that vein, when you look to amateur comics journalists, those traditionally outside of the market, the criticism is a lot more intellectual and more cynical too.
   What I’m kind of stumbling on here is that as much as Videogames can learn from the Comics industry, Comics can learn from Videogame Journalism.
In a perfect world I’d be able to handpick a group of game journalists to write about Comic Books.
Instead, I’ll have to continue to try and write about these things myself, because we don’t live in a
perfect world.