Damon's book blog

New video game/book blog

Sun, 04 Jun 2006 16:20:27 GMT

My previous video game/book blog has transfered over to my website, DamonBrown.net. I write about video games for Playboy, SPIN and Computer Games, and have a new book on Satellite Radio coming out in a few weeks. I will also be one of the moderators at next week's Sex in Video Games conference.

Feel free to swing by, read and comment.

Below is an RSS feed/syndication link so you can read it within LJ.
RSS feed

New York Times piece on the New Game Journalism

Sun, 03 Apr 2005 15:15:14 GMT

New Journalism, often associated with Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese and other journalists in the '60s and '70s, was a controversial style that used fiction writing techniques in nonfiction reporting. It made dry journalism more lively, but it was controversial because it often added an element of subjectivity to what was suppose to be an objective field. Hunter S. Thompson, who died about a month ago, is sometimes put in this category, which makes the timing of this New York Times piece on the New Video Game Journalism more interesting.

The stories they talk about have been posted on the web for a while (including here on livejournal), but it's good that video game journalism is even being recognized in the New York Times.

Here's the link for those with free New York Times accounts.

Notes On Halo

Others can read the story below.

Notes on Halo
MARK WALLACE

Most reviews of computer games cover only the bells and whistles: how quick was the action, how cool the villains, how original the story line. Over the last year, however, a handful of gaming writers have been bringing a more personal touch to their work, using a narrative, experiential approach that acknowledges the effect of the game on the player. Their young genre even has a name: New Games Journalism, after the New Journalism of the 1960's and 70's.

The seminal tract was an article by the 33-year-old Ian Shanahan, using his screen name, Always Black, in the February 2004 issue of the British magazine PC Gamer (which has been the house organ of New Games Journalism). "Bow, ..." - the second word of the title was a racial epithet - described the mechanics of the online game "Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast" (pictured at right), and also recounted how the epithet of the title, typed by an opponent many miles away, altered the course and meaning of a simple light-saber duel. That article inspired Kieron Gillen of Bristol, England, to write - after a long night at the pub with a few game-scribe friends - a blog post that has become known as the manifesto of New Games Journalism. While the genre takes games as its subject, Mr. Gillen wrote, "what it's really talking about is the human condition."

It manages to do that quite well. "Possessing Barbie," also by Mr. Shanahan (who is better known by his screen name, Always Black), describes a sexually charged encounter in the virtual world known as There, in which the author grapples with questions of virtual transgression and desire - and how they might affect his relationship with this real-life girlfriend, who's on her way up with the afternoon tea.

According to Mr. Gillen, 29, who has been a games journalist since he was 19, articles by writers like Mr. Shanahan, Jim Rossignol and Tom Chick (who writes for QuarterToThree.com and is one of the field's rare American practitioners), reflect how people experience games more accurately than the "previews" that are the meat and potatoes of the gaming press. "If you're telling your friends about getting blown away in a game, you don't say, 'My character died.' You say, 'I died,' " he said. "That's the weird magic of games. You do feel involved in something that's actually happening to you." MARK WALLACE

NEW GAMES JOURNALISM:

A READING LIST

"Bow, ..." by Always Black (PC Gamer, February 2004). www.alwaysblack.com

"The New Games Journalism Manifesto," by Kieron Gillen. www.alwaysblack.com/blackbox/ngj.html

"Possessing Barbie" by Always Black (PC Gamer, December 2004). www.alwaysblack.com/blackbox/possessingbarbie.html

"All About Eve" by Jim Rossignol (PC Gamer, October 2004). www.eve-online.com/files/pcgamer_eve.pdf

"Saving Private Donny" by Tom Chick. www.quartertothree.com/inhouse/columns/82/

Mario As Suge Knight

Sun, 06 Mar 2005 04:03:05 GMT

AAGamer, an African-American gamers website, just posted my latest essay on how video games have entered their own gangsta rap era. It's the most fun I've had with a piece in a while:

Mario As Suge Knight

Comments are appreciated.

My man died.

Mon, 21 Feb 2005 18:22:25 GMT

Hunter S. Thompson Kills Self

Rollin' rollin' rollin'

Sat, 19 Feb 2005 17:37:12 GMT

I've turned my attention to doing writing related to the book as opposed to working on the book itself, which is helping me work out some of the ideas (and helping keep money in the bank). I'll drop a line when some of these get published.

For now, you can catch me in the new issue of Sync Magazine, Feb/Mar, on page 55. I did a short piece on playing imported Japanese games.

As any freelancer will tell you, the oddest thing is how long it takes for work to come out. I actually did the Japanese gaming piece back in mid-Fall, and have since worked on dozens of pieces for other publications, some of which aren't coming out until the summer or later. There's a surreal time flux that happens because magazines have a long production cycle.

That's nothing compared to books, though: Even a rushed book takes at least a half year to hit the bookshelves. Blah.

But it's been nine months working on this book and I'm still passionate about it. I can wait another year or two.

Still bangin'

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 00:17:07 GMT

This morning, at around 2 a.m., I finished 1/3rd of my book! I celebrated by dancing around and calling my girlfriend (about 8 hours later).

To further celebrate today I did what I always do when I hit a milestone: I read one of the books that inspired me in the first place. Today it was Fast Food Nation. It can be a rough, occasionally masochistic process, comparing my work to some of the best literature I've read in my life. But, as my book comes together, it's slowly becoming less a measurement and more a guidepost. Today I read the first 50 pages of Fast Food Nation and got inspired to edit my chapters. I did some nice, albeit subtle changes.

On to the next chapter!

Songs of Experience

Wed, 09 Feb 2005 18:49:13 GMT

Here's a New York Observer story on one man's struggle to get his book published, something I can relate more to every day. The article is optimistic, frightning and, believe it or not, accurate as hell.

Favorite quote:
"What this experience did for me is allow me to free myself of some notion that there’s a certain kind of event that’s going to deliver me," Mr. Lipsyte said. "Or that even one’s day-to-day life will be eased financially, spiritually or emotionally by becoming a published author."

Beloved Home Land, But How to Sell Sam? He’s Cute, But Fuzzy
by Wesley Yang

"Publishing had its head up its ass!" said Gerald Howard, the tall, gray-haired executive editor at large of Doubleday/Broadway Books, nattily attired before a row of Chuck Close paintings. "Or at least, that’s how I felt in my angriest moments."

Maybe Mr. Howard was carried away by the antic mood that the novelist Sam Lipsyte had just unleashed in the shabbily genteel setting of the National Arts Club last month. Mr. Lipsyte read from his second novel, Home Land (published in January not by Mr. Howard’s Doubleday, but by Picador USA), and left much of the audience teary-eyed, giddy with the rush of his scabrous rhetoric. Pockets of others remained stony-faced. It was a familiarly divided response to Mr. Lipsyte’s combustible mixture of aphoristic wordplay and wild, explicit invective.

The novel is a series of painfully candid updates to a suburban New Jersey high-school alumni newsletter by a 33-year old man who "did not pan out." The New Yorker called it "hilarious and noble"; Vanity Fair called it "dizzying and hilarious"; Time magazine called it "a hilarious rant crackling with rueful truth," to lead a spate of mostly celebratory reviews. Home Land has exceeded its modest sales expectations six weeks into its launch, prompting Picador to reprint. And so there was cautious optimism and even a sense of vindication that night, because Home Land—and here’s what Mr. Howard was angry about—nearly became the tombstone of Mr. Lipsyte’s career two years ago when no publisher in the city would buy it at any price.

"I knew for a fact, insofar as these things can be facts, that this book was better than 95 percent of the fiction published in any given year," said Mr. Howard. "Why weren’t people picking up this tremendous book? What the hell was going on? It had me muttering to myself for a long time."

A question quickly sprang to mind: If Mr. Howard loved Home Land so much, why didn’t he publish it himself? His answers, and the answers of some other editors who also passed on Home Land—there were 30 in all, at 24 houses, a pretty remarkable number—helped to illuminate certain realities of the publishing business. There’s disagreement on whether or not these realities are new. But one thing is clear, according to Mr. Howard: "It just can’t be a good thing that a book this accomplished would find such a hard row to hoe."

"As a younger writer, you have this illusory sense that ‘as soon as I publish the book, it’ll be O.K.,’" Mr. Lipsyte said at the Comfort Diner on 23rd Street. Balding, bearish, gazing out from behind thick plastic-frame glasses, Mr. Lipsyte speaks in a lulling tone punctuated by bursts of self-deprecating irony. "And no, nothing’s O.K." Mr. Lipsyte speaks without bitterness about his initiation into what he might call "the cold soft facts"—a phrase from Home Land—of publishing. It’s a common enough fate, afflicting the gifted and mediocre alike: If your first book doesn’t sell, you may be out of luck. But it struck Mr. Lipsyte’s many admirers as a singular injustice.

Mr. Lipsyte has garnered a devoted cult following around this city ("He is, to some of us, a god figure," said the novelist Gary Shteyngart, author of The Russian Debutante’s Handbook) beginning with his first collection of short stories, Venus Drive, from the small press Open City Books. But his first novel, The Subject Steve, failed to achieve career-making breakout success. The book was released on Sept. 11, 2001, to mixed reviews and quickly sank from sight. Fewer than 5,000 of the 10,000 copies that Broadway Books printed sold, making for a tidy loss on Mr. Lipsyte’s $60,000 advance.

When Mr. Lipsyte sent out Home Land in early 2003, it went to Mr. Howard first. But though he tried to buy it, others prevented him. Home Land didn’t find favor with some readers at the house who supported The Subject Steve. "In combination with his sales record, I was left with very little or no hand to play," said Mr. Howard.

Mr. Lipsyte then entered the limbo of the mid-career writer, seeking his third publisher for his third book. Long after other agents would have moved on to easier sales, his agent, Ira Silverberg, persisted. He sold the book in England, where it came out in February 2004 to rave reviews. Mr. Silverberg’s crusading zeal was about more than what promised to be a rather meager commission. (The book sold for $15,000.) Mr. Silverberg had something he wanted to prove. "There’s nothing wrong with the book," Mr. Silverberg apostrophized, thinking of the editors that turned it down. "There’s something wrong with you! And to the powers that be that didn’t find this book funny, to them we say now: Ha, ha. Because a lot of others did." (Mr. Silverberg was referring to the positive reviews. Though far from a best-seller, Home Land is selling at a decent clip—more than 2,000 copies in its first six weeks, and at an accelerating pace.)

One editor who tried to buy it, only to have his editor in chief kill the sale, argued that the decision-making by editorial committee at most major houses around the city "tends to flatten out the aesthetic," which hurt Home Land’s chances. "When you have a really good satire, you’re not going to get everyone in the room to agree it’s fantastic. Some people aren’t going to think its funny; some people are going to be offended. And if you need a complete consensus on a book like this, it’ll never be published."

But there are factors other than taste that determine a novel’s fate. Morgan Entrekin, the publisher of Grove/Atlantic Books—who liked Home Land, but not enough to buy it—spelled out some of the realities impinging on writers like Mr. Lipsyte. "Historically, first books were the hardest ones to launch: You’d always expect that you weren’t going to make any money for the first several books," he said. "Now, the reverse is true. The media has this voracious hunger for the new next thing. It’s much easier to sell that. That’s just a reality of today."

Mr. Entrekin continued: "The toughest cases are when you have these serious writers whose critical acclaim and the quality of their work hasn’t translated into sales. Everybody sort of gives you one shot. Everyone needs that immediate hit right away, and if it’s not happening, it’s very hard to stay the course."

Michael Pietsch, senior vice president and publisher at Little, Brown, disputed the suggestion that the hunger for novelty is new. "That seems to me to be a timeless thing. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Norman Mailer—these were all youthful sensations."

What has changed, he said, is the scope of the success possible when you do manage to hit with a new writer. Huge bookstore chains on every highway, Internet retailers, blogs, book clubs and other tools of publicity have changed the scale of the business. The incentives for finding the hot young writers are just stronger than ever; Mr. Pietsch pointed out that each of the last four years, a debut novelist has sold more than 100,000 copies. E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime was the top-selling book of 1974, with 200,000 copies sold, he noted. More than 50 books topped that figure in 2004. "We’re putting out and selling more books than ever before," said Mr. Pietsch.

The search for the hot new thing leads to bidding wars for first short-story collections, piles of money thrown at first-time novelists that haven’t sold a short story, frenetic media blitzes for neophytes in their 20’s. The eventual long-term consequences of this model for literature is less clear. It is perhaps significant that Mr. Pietsch cited three of the kind of novelists that come along once or twice a generation, while now publishers launch a new round of debut heroes at us each year.

There’s a little less wiggle room for a writer like Mr. Lipsyte and others with the bad luck to find themselves cast adrift from their first house and seeking anchorage elsewhere. Mr. Lipsyte would’ve been best served if Broadway Books had been willing to stay the course with him. However, new computerized inventory systems give retailers and publishers alike access to an author’s sales record.

"The sales record just makes the nature of your challenge absolutely clear from the start," said Mr. Pietsch. It was a challenge that no one, for more than a year, was prepared to take.

"I’ve got a lot of my own guys struggling to keep publishing. And to take on one more that you know is going to be a struggle—that’s a tough thing," Mr. Entrekin said.

Mr. Lipsyte eventually found his devoted partisan in Farrar, Straus and Giroux editor Lorin Stein, who worked out a special arrangement whereby Mr. Stein edited the book and F.S.G. partner Picador USA put it out over here. "This was, for many of us, our favorite book," he said. "We just could not understand what was happening."

Mr. Stein suggested that the governing aesthetic of some editors might have damaged the reception of Home Land. "It seems like there are a lot of editors who are acquiring things that sort of … flatter their idea of what their houses should be putting out—things that resemble some preconceived, essentially nostalgic idea of what a ‘realistic novel’ is supposed to look like," said Mr. Stein. "And in many cases, these books tend to be kind of dull, sort of ersatz. It’s like what Ralph Lauren is to real clothing designers."

Salon book critic Laura Miller argued that Mr. Lipsyte’s troubles finding a publisher were more localized. "This is the kind of book that cries out ‘voice of a generation.’ It’s something a 26-year-old is going read and say, ‘This is my life,’" she said. "But when you write that kind of book, you have to be marketable in that role. And when you have someone that isn’t so young, and it’s not their first book, it’s harder to market it as being totally new."

Mr. Lipsyte recounted a conversation with the marketing department of a house that was mulling over whether or not to buy Home Land. "They said, ‘How would you market yourself?’ I hemmed and hawed for about an hour. They stopped me: ‘No, really—how would you market Sam Lipsyte?’

"I said, ‘I dunno—the New Dark Funny Guy?’ They said: ‘Well, we’ll let the critics be the judge of that.’"

They passed.

"What this experience did for me is allow me to free myself of some notion that there’s a certain kind of event that’s going to deliver me," Mr. Lipsyte said. "Or that even one’s day-to-day life will be eased financially, spiritually or emotionally by becoming a published author."

Mr. Lipsyte never expected or aspired to be a famous author. ("Yeah," he deadpans, "I’m all about the bling.") But he did think he’d be able to write fiction without having a day job—a pipe dream for Mr. Lipsyte, as for so many others. Mr. Stein said he’d like to make a home for Mr. Lipsyte at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. "That would be great," said Mr. Lipsyte. But he remains cautious. He knows that in your career as a writer, anything can happen—or fail to.

Mr. Lipsyte emphasizes his last-hour reprieve rather than his protracted trial. He knows that many others will never get a second chance. At 25, Mr. Lipsyte, the son of New York Times writer Robert Lipsyte, left an abortive rock project and the dissipations of the road to care for his dying mother. The last two years spent caught in the sometimes cruel vise of the art of literature and the business of publishing have been eventful in other ways. He got married two years ago and had a son seven months ago, whom he helps to care for while working on his next collection of short stories in Astoria, Queens. His future career path is clear—to pay the bills in any way he can (he teaches writing at Columbia) while pursuing his art without thought of worldly success.

"Things turned out well for this novel," he went on. "It was published, and some people are getting to read it. That was my goal. I just get a little worried for the next person who doesn’t fit neatly into a slot, whose work resists obvious marketing strategies."

Talk like sex

Fri, 04 Feb 2005 19:54:17 GMT

I don't know what to do with this.

In other news, I had a cool interview with Chris Kohler, author of the Japanese games book "Power Up". I read it over Thanksgiving and got more insight into Japan than I bargained for. If my book is for the masses, his book is for the otaku, as it's a pretty intense study into why the Japanese make games the way that they do. No other American book - I've probably read most of them by now! - has looked at video games from this perspective before, and that alone makes the book worthwhile.

When I first started writing The Dirty Dozen last spring, I had no role models for what I wanted to do, at least not within the video game field. Clive Thompson, whom I had been reading since the tech magazine Shift was still around, and a few other journalists were totally killing it - and I mean that in a good way. WIRED's special issue on Japan (Called "Japan Rocks") back in 2001 or so blew my mind, as did Elizabeth Kolbert's The New Yorker piece on Ultima Online - I still have both somewhere on my shelf. But I hadn't read any books that set the pace for what I wanted to do. So, I started looking outside of video games.

They say that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Last summer I was talking excitedly (as if there's any other way) about my book to one of my good friends, a movie buff. She lit up and recommended - no, told me to go buy Peter Biskind's "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls", a look at the personalities behind '70s renegade cinema. I got it immediately and fell in love with the structure, and the writing was colorful and interesting as well. It became my role model and, by doing the comparison ("Easy Riders, Raging Bulls" for video games), it helped other people see my vision, though I knew I didn't want my book to be half as gossip-heavy or, frankly, as intense as his. I just liked how he took in ALL of the world and presented it through cinema.

Then, last Friday, I received the latest issue of VIBE. It usually has three or four articles a year I keep and save, but otherwise I just move on. However, I read an excerpt of Jeff Chang's history of hip hop book, Can't Stop Won't Stop.

After reading the first paragraph, I knew I had to read the rest of the book. After reading the first magazine page, I knew I had to rethink my own shit. Brilliant. I love hip-hop, and this book makes me feel like hip-hop matters: It is political, it is exploitative, it is always representative of the times. It is not disposable. I feel that way about video games. I want others to feel that way about video games. I want to do for us what Jeff Chang did for hip-hop.

Keeping with that analogy, I'm realizing that my title isn't the average book, not so much one long song, one long narrative with facts aligned in concert like the Philharmonic Orchestra, but it's becoming more like a Brooklyn mix-tape, the kind with the homemade cover and "TDK CD-RW" written all over it, not clean and pristine, but jagged and intense. You can taste New York when you hear it. That's what I want, a veritable dirty sponge of racism and sexism and freedom and hate, a blend of American anger and Japanese creativity spread under the guise of entertainment. A crystal using video games as a prism for us to break down our solid defenses into clear lines of history.

That's all.

Gamewood

Thu, 03 Feb 2005 15:53:41 GMT

I skimmed this Yahoo! article on Hollywood and video games first thing this morning, and then read it again after rous posted it on the girl_gamers. Initially I was going to add a comment to the already lively conversation, but my tirade became so long, I figured I should post about it, too.

The problems with the story? As rous pointed out, it assumes that the Hollywood/video game "synergy" is new, though people who did even a "I'm Feeling Lucky" Google search on Hollywood and video games would get a reference to 1982's Atari 2600/E.T. fiasco. In short, Atari paid millions to Speilberg for the movie license and, because it wanted it out by the time the movie hit theaters, it gave one of its programmers about a month to make the game from start to finish. Which was a mistake. The game was so bad (I know... I bought it), gamers started demanding returns and, myth has it, Atari buried millions of unsold E.T. cartridges ($29.95 a pop!) in an undisclosed New Mexico desert location for tax purposes. Um, how could the reporter miss this?

Secondly, and perhaps most bothersome, he makes up a term called "Gamewood". I don't know what that is. Video game culturists have a 40-year-old lexicon. Maybe you should use it.

I usually don't go off on a tangent (yeah, right), but this is frustrating as hell.

As a video game journalist with traditional journalism training, I can tell you that the average mainstream reporter that covers games also covers movies, books and the current "it" girl. Most are dubbed Entertainment Reporters, and video games are low on the totem pole, especially when compared to the new Jennifer Garner movie.

This article is just a reminder to me of how flippant video game coverage can be, hopefully something that my book and others work will help change, and until actual gamers - not people that just started playing when their frat buddies bought Halo, but people who grew up humming the Zelda theme song, or wanted to be game designers as a kid - become the reporters, video games will always be looked at as a disposable art, only important when attatched to something else.

A new year, a new blog

Mon, 31 Jan 2005 23:49:42 GMT

I'm excited that I finally started a blog to discuss my first book but, of course, I have no idea what to say now. Twelve years as a writer doesn't help with that, I guess.

Perhaps about the process. My main goal is to use video games as a tool to understand the changes America has gone through as a culture, particularly sexually, over the past 25 years. For instance, it is no coincidence that as Survivor, Big Brother and other reality shows became the water cooler topic, The Sims was becoming one of the most popular games in our short history. It's easy to dismiss pop culture and mainstream ideas, to subscribe to the "all TV is crap" philosophy, but even the most crass artistic medium represents our collective conscious.

So my goal is to understand the flavor of the time by watching movies, reading books, interviewing people and, of course, playing games that best reflect the twelve featured games. In short, I've become a media whore. For your benefit, of course.

All in all, it's been about 36 books, most cover to cover, on sex, video games and pop culture, and I expect to read at least another 50 or so before I'm through. Though it hasn't been the cheapest endevour, it has been by far the most fun I've had in my journalism career (next to interviewing Shigeru Miyamoto. Hai!). Getting (eventually) paid to understand Japanese porn, read Chuck Klosterman's essays on The Sims, and to play Leisure Suit Larry hours on end is a fucking blessing.

I just hope the book reflects my nebulous mass of pop culture knowledge.

And there's the rub. One book - no book, I dare say - can capture all that the author has learned. Perhaps that's why I created this blog, as even with the hundreds of pages I am writing (only 60,000 words to go!), I might not be able to fit in games like Frisky Tom or Strip Fighter.

So here, I hope to:
*Give a little insight into the process of writing a book, which, no matter how much passion you have, should be taken as a business
*Discuss and share oddities I find on this adventure
*Keep you posted on how things are progressing on the book itself
*Tell you where my fabolous book release parties will be (the most fun part, I'm thinking)

Also, if you're interested in getting an email update about once every two months instead, just visit the book website and enter in your email.