Another Game Club
Short on the heels of Kotaku’s thing, it looks like The Escapist is starting a game club too. Their first game is Psychonauts.
I kind of loathe The Escapist but this is potentially a good step. However, the intent of the discussion here doesn’t seem as high-minded as Kotaku’s — here the goal just seems to be to talk about stuff, rather than important stuff. Well, we will see how it goes. It will probably take a while for either or both of these clubs to mature into a steady state (if they don’t die out prematurely!)
August 6th, 2007 at 5:27 pm
Apologies for my low-minded curiosity, but what about The Escapist do you loathe? I don’t know the site well, having only ever read there a couple articles by Allen Varney.
August 7th, 2007 at 8:00 am
I’d like to know as well, though I do have my own reasons for disliking them.
August 7th, 2007 at 6:35 pm
Stephen Totilo just did an email interview with me, where some of my anti-Escapist comments came out… that should be online within a couple of days, and I will post a link to it here. Then I will fill in whatever gaps.
I started out disliking the Escapist because of its name, and the print-ish format they weirdly adhered to (recently abandoned). Then at one point I read a completely ridiculous article by one of the site’s principal authors — it was just way sillier and checked-out-of-reality than most Escapist articles I had seen. So I got into an email discussion with the author about his article, and he just kept defending it with ever-more ridiculous, ever-more fabricated points. And I realized that his goal was just to write what he wanted to write, without regard to whether it was true, or even defensible.
And that’s how I feel about the magazine now — they will print pretty much anything, and in fact, have an active bias toward topics that are lame. Once in a while I go look at their table of contents and skim a few articles, but nothing seems to have changed.
When I want to read relatively thoughtful and well-considered ideas about games, I will usually turn to private mailing lists, or ActionButton.net, or sometimes the qt3 forums.
August 8th, 2007 at 8:49 am
So, this post on the Multiplayer Blog contains the rest of my Escapist rant.