Happy Holidays!

See you after the new year. Have fun!

Giving Credit Where It's Due

My Kotaku feature this month highlights a problem I hear of countless times in my conversations with game developers: The industry's problematic crediting practices. At a glance it may seem like an inside-baseball issue -- what difference does a game's credits list make to your experience as a player? -- but I hoped to try to illustrate the psychological and emotional impact these issues have on developers, surely with far-reaching implications on their investment in their work, in the sincerity and artistic generosity of their contributions, and in the future of games as a professional industry for creative people.

Give it a read if you have a chance. Being a game developer is grueling work and I don't envy it.

Gaming Club 2009!

I have not blogged much here about some of my over-arching thoughts (and questions) about the year we're about to leave behind, because I am lucky enough to have the singular opportunity to join Slate's Gaming Club discussion this year -- a feature I've admired from afar since it began in 2007!

Slate's Chris Suellentrop is wrangling me along with Mitch Krpata and Jamin Brophy-Warren for what we hope will be a good discussion. We're not even done yet, and I'm already so excited by all the differing perspectives. Please, please check it out now and in the week to come.

About That Article

I want to talk about this.

Before I do, though, I'd like to preface with a bit of fair business reality. The economics of online journalism and blogging are enormously challenging. Every site faces the challenge of balancing the desire to produce fair and valuable content with the need to drive ad revenue via web traffic. Writing provocative headlines that we online writers hope will entice you to click is part of the job. We aim for the luster of buzzworthiness without compromising our facts and our ethics. Games journalism may have a bit of work to do before it reaches parity with coverage of more established media, and because of that our audiences tend to be very demanding of our quality levels and ethics -- but this is one reality not unique to us.

We all want to publish work we can feel proud of and that you can feel proud to enjoy, but sometimes we have to compromise with, to be frank, the need to earn money. This means sites that would rather offer you something a little richer than litanies of picture-heavy Top 10 lists will offer you the lists because lists get traffic reliably. This means business sites will run sponsored content, where all we can do is ensure it's clearly marked as such and try to keep the company concerned from being unfairly self-laudatory.

This means websites like Kotaku have to publish articles about boobs.

All online websites try to balance the need to make money with the desire to offer audiences content they will enjoy. And often these are managerial decisions; you can blame the writers as much as you want, but these are things they have to do. If you want to blame anyone, blame the legions who click whenever they're promised anime panties after the jump.

Have a little sympathy. Since all of this "business reality" talk is preface to talk about Kotaku, let's just stick with Kotaku: I worked with that team for several months last year and to this day I've never seen folks work harder. The amount of knowledge and passion the entire staff has about video games was constantly intimidating to me. After a year of all their hard work, imagine how it must feel for Brian and his team to realize some of their most "successful" pieces of 2008, in business terms, were about Playboy models and cosplay cleavage shots?

I don't need to imagine. I've written many things at Kotaku I am proud of -- my coverage of EA's bid for Take-Two, or my interviews with the Blizzard team following the Diablo III announcement and ahead of Lich King come to mind. I worked my tail off at E3 as part of their team (and they proved to have far more stamina than I did). I still love the reception my monthly columns get there. Nonetheless, my most-read piece of work for the site remains my interview with Playboy "Cyber Girl of the Year" Jo Garcia.

Just wanted to remind everyone of how things work before people start roasting Kotaku all over the place because of this. As of the moment I hit publish on this blog post, it has over 43,000 views and 777 comments after just a few hours live, better than most of my features perform over their lifetimes.

Hokay. That being said, this article is abysmal to the point of inducing cringe -- but let's focus on the article itself for a while. Lest you think I'm about to pull out the girl card and decry the sexy pics and the porn industry, I'll get right to the point -- this article is more insulting to men than it is to women. Further, it's not even a gender issue in the end; it's insulting because it's a massive backward stride in the evolution of games as a healthy, valuable adult culture.

Is Kotaku actually read by a "healthy, valuable adult culture?" If not, should it aim to be? Good question. But I don't see how promoting destructive stereotypes of gamers playing Unreal Tournament "for 48 hours straight" with pizza and energy drinks within arm's reach is useful to anyone. Many of Kotaku's readers are boys who aren't even men yet -- is it fair to tell them that they ought to resign to the fact they're awkward shut-ins on a Bawls drip who can't talk to girls? Worse, to suggest they embrace it as an identity inextricable from their enjoyment of video games?

It does not necessarily matter that the writer of this article is a porn actress. It may seem very egalitarian to act unsurprised that an attractive woman who has sex on camera for a living is a self-described "huge sci-fi gadget and gaming fan" who spends hours "leveling her World of Warcraft characters", but get real -- it is surprising. I'd even go so far as to say it's interesting.

Or it could be, if she didn't employ her unusual status to condescend to the very gaming culture to which she claims to belong.

In games as anywhere else, a woman can succeed in a male-dominated field with one of two strategies: 1. Prove she's an equal or 2. Use her sex appeal. It's evident what Raven Alexis has chosen. That's an insult to gamers of either gender. And the latent disgust she feels for the "nerds" who buy into it is evident: "Remember your manners, and use a napkin, please," she advises primly, beneath a picture of herself somewhat suggestively cupping a Red Bull can. And if her tips don't help you meet girls, she says coyly, you can always go peruse her body of work and entertain yourself.

Misogyny continues to be an enormous, embarrassing stain on a culture I'm otherwise proud to serve as a writer. I have been able to understand, somewhat, the hostility that young male gamers have had toward women based on the fact that in the past, media messages about "nerds" have taught them that girls are an enemy who will either reject them or try to employ their sexuality to manipulate them.

We are growing out of this. There is more equality and respect in gamer culture with every passing year, and we are passionate about refusing to permit prejudices of race, gender and sexual orientation where we see them. We are coming to understand that for games to thrive and evolve, their audiences and their creators must be diverse.

But the only way to sweep out our lingering dark corners is to lead by example and stop drawing gender lines. That's one of the reasons I have desperately wanted to avoid taking the "GRRL GAMER" tack in my work, even though I know I'm an oddity, even though many women email me with criticism that I won't stand up and "represent" more forcefully. I am a woman; I can't have any other than a woman's perspective, and that's valuable to people sometimes. But more importantly, I'm a person. You're a person. We both like video games, and that's usually all that matters.

Alexis' fifth and most reasonable tip -- just go talk to a girl and try to find some common interests -- is delivered with a sincerity that marks a tonal shift from the rest of her piece. This is what leads me to hope, at least, that the entire thing is intended as a little bit of tongue-in-cheek humor.

If that's indeed the case, I'd be perfectly willing to admit that it's me who's condescending to Kotaku's audience by assuming they won't get the joke. But enough of you guys who follow me on Twitter -- many of whom are game developers and other quite sharp folk -- had a negative reaction that I'm sure I can't be alone in misinterpreting.

Humor or not, based on everything I've worked for and believe in, it still stings me to see such an antiquated representation of gamer culture and the dynamics of male and female gamers represented on a site that I write for, that my friends write for.

I know I sound stodgy, maybe even self-superior. Maybe not everything on a gaming blog has to be top shelf, sincere content all the time. Maybe we shouldn't take things so seriously. Maybe sometimes we do need to confront the fact that a huge portion of the readership is actually comprised of overweight geeks who never go outside and have no real relationships off the computer; maybe we need to make concessions for that, maybe we need to join them on their level sometimes. Maybe we should write not for what we want people to be, but for what they are.

It's just that that's not what I believe in, and the people who lead Kotaku, among others I am lucky to have called mentors, have played integral roles in shaping my beliefs.

I prefaced this post with a reminder of the business realities major blog networks face because I find it hard to believe that Brian, who taught me quite a great deal about going the extra mile on news reporting -- because our audience deserves the whole truth -- would thumbs-up a porn star's "celebrity" advice column unless it were part of a larger and necessary Gawker initiative (I wonder what sister site Jezebel thinks of it). I find it hard to believe that Stephen Totilo, who never settles for anything less than my best work on my monthly features even when "good enough" would be good enough, would not strenuously object.

Their content decisions are their business, and I have no inside knowledge of them nor do I feel I have the right to ask. But I have to assume that these odd celebrity columns lately are not necessarily what they would have chosen for Kotaku.

Either way, rather than get up in arms complaining about blogs, game journalism, Kotaku or anything else, I hope those angered or offended can focus on what we don't like about this article and react simply by continuing to be the best examples we can of the culture we want to have.

Lisztomania!!

Well! I'm certainly busy due to year end-ness, hence the lack of blogging -- I'm working on a few different retrospectives, a feature, an editorial and some reviews. Can 2009 be over yet?

Sincerely, I actually have a lot of fun closing out the year and parsing out the key takeaways, and rest assured you'll see more on this from me soon -- for now, have you been following Gamasutra's Best of 2009? We're doing the same kinds of individual lists that we did last year. Today, Christian Nutt rounds up the year's top business trends -- social games and digital distribution rising, music games declining, and devs getting wiser on how to succeed on iPhone, among others.

Speaking of iPhone, here are the year's top 5 iPhone games as chosen by our mobile editor Danny Cowan. Of the games here, Eliss is actually the only one I've got; I'm such a DS fanatic (whoa, DS beat PS2 in UK, by the way) that I rarely play games on the iPhone. Trism, one of the earliest titles for the platform, is still one of my all-time favorites, and I've gotten my nongamer friends hooked on the colored triangles too.

The only things I play on PC are Flash titles, indie games and interactive fiction -- and on the IF front, the annual IF Comp has chosen its winners, so I know what I'm gonna be doing on my long-awaited holiday break. Fortunately Gamasutra's Chris Remo exists to be our resident PC guru, and he has selected a detailed and well-thought top 10.

From me, the year's top 5 controversies, the news stories that set our tongues wagging the most this year, and that prompted the most discussion and debate. Irony of the year: The commenter who says the controversy over Orson Scott Card's involvement in Shadow Complex doesn't belong on the list -- and then drags out an argument against what he calls the "gay mafia" for some 83 comments. Nope, no controversy there. Silly me!

Incidentally, my pals at the AV Club and I recently assembled a "Top 15 Games of the Decade" list together, by committee. Temporally-congruent installments of my pet franchises -- Metal Gear and Silent Hill -- may be absent, but I think it's a solid list overall. One item with which I'm particularly pleased: I, along with the always-impressive Gus Mastrapa, championed for the inclusion of Vice City as the quintessential Grand Theft Auto, and I explained why:

The Grand Theft Auto series is known for masking clever satires of American culture with gleeful violence, and Vice City, a parody of 1980s Miami, makes the ideal setting for the decadence the series simultaneously idealizes and lampoons. Mafioso in Hawaiian shirts, polyester-clad cocaine lords, and petty moguls form the cast of caricatures the series does so well, populating a world where the excesses of its crime-spree gameplay feel appropriate. GTA’s intelligence is often lost in the hullabaloo over its violence, but Vice City simply asks players to be as absurd as the characters around them, creating a plausible, neon-soaked fiction that’s as funny as it is canny. Rockstar burdened San Andreas with too many disparate activities and rendered GTA IV with inappropriate gravitas, making Vice City the best whole-package showcase of the series’ brilliance.

Anyhow, I've been up to these things and lots more, and hopefully I grab time to keep you guys filled in as it all unfolds. More interesting is the question: Do you really care about year-end lists? Are they fun or annoying?

[header post is the title of a song by Phoenix you can hear here; not coincidentally most music outlets seem to think the 'Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix' album is one of 2009's best.]