note: I took two quotes (“a widely applicable model,” and the one in the third paragraph) from Sarah Manguso’s book, The Two Kinds of Decay.

One self-made maxim I live by is “All men who hear the truth / Hear their own voice.” Writing for a site, like writing anything, is an act of buying your own bullshit, to believe that your within is “a widely applicable model” to the universe. At best it’s a delusional and, at worst, a fascist assumption about your place in the world.

That posture is a natural defense mechanism against the democratic anonymity we face. Floating in the web, surrounded by a talented and articulate mass will inflict anyone with a case of “I’m just one among many.” But the communities we surround ourselves in, and in my case, the conversations I participate in, are the remedies—I may be one among many, but the many give meaning to me.

I believe, like poet Sarah Manguso, that “to look at something carefully is to love everything.” I believe that criticism is a part of and apart from that love, which is to say even words of rebuke or disappointment or disagreement, however vehement, are methods to return the wrongs we perceive back to that love. Criticism gives the necessary autopsy that helps the world to parse the pretense from the source. It is the act of seeing through one’s own eyes, and hoping the world will see your own focus. I find that useful, just as I find all criticism necessary.

Which brings me to the first two Critical-Distance Podcasts. It’s a sincere and intellectually demanding session that, though touched slightly with that NPR crust of self-seriousness, I admire and recommend as I fall asleep. Using Clint Hocking’s post on ludonarrative dissonance, the participants did a reading of Gears of War 2. The result? A mixture of opinions, with the voices against Gears of War 2 coming out a little louder. One argument I have a problem with concerned the alleged ludonarrative dissonance with the characters’ movement—specifically, the dissonance created between the encumbered physical features of Marcus and the dexterity and agility with which he moves.

What Hocking proposed in his original post was simple: to find harmony between a game’s theme and the expression of that theme through the game’s mechanics. Ludonarrative dissonance occurs when a game’s theme (or story) and gameplay are at odds (Hocking seems to use the terms “narrative” and “story” interchangeably, though I see a difference between the two. That is a topic deserving of an article of its own).

I disagree that Gears of War 2 suffers from ludonarrative dissonance—the story and the expression through its mechanics (“the play”) are completely in sync. Furthermore, applying the principle to a subjective dissonance between the avatar’s physical appearance and its movement (which I don’t think is the case here) completely misses the point.

The story of the game is simple—fight off a horde of monsters to save humanity. Everything about the game, from mechanic to design, is created to satisfy that power fantasy. Your avatar is physically overpowering and mentally uncomplicated—bullets bounce off you (to an extent), you can shoot a shotgun without bruising your palm, and everything is black and white. Even the miscalculated execution of Dom’s wife fits into the be-or-be-killed internal logic of that world and its mechanics (though Epic wants the imposed “feeling” of that scene to floor the player, it only refuels the player’s need to chop down more enemies, and reiterates the power that your avatar holds to protect the weak and destroy the corrupted, no matter the form and person in which the corruption occurs).

I don’t think you can completely dismiss a game based on one element. Immersion must be determined by looking at the total package of the game. When I play Gears of War 2 I know that this is a fantasy where I relinquish my reality for the internal logic of a constructed world; and that internal logic of ex-professional athletes covered in armor and leaping over obstructions while carrying guns with chainsaw attachments is completely consistent with the “story” of the game. Every time the avatar falls into cover, you can feel the weight of his body as it slams against the walls, the dust kicking off the ground, the boom and the crack popping from the speakers, and the sharp zing of tracer rounds amplifying the imminence of death. The character movements feel properly sluggish and boorish; and the extra agility transforms our perceptions of reality and physical plausibility to the hyper-macho fantasy we love to play.

Sometimes, it’s ok to shoot, and not ask—especially when you’re wrong.

We here at No More Lives were working on our next posts, when we came across a misleading headline on Kotaku titled, How Dumbed Down Acting is Creating Dumbed Down Games. The post linked to the voice acting discussion over at Michael Abbot’s exceptional blog, The Brainy Gamer, and if you, like us, read the actual article you know how misrepresentative this headline is. The resulting summary, however, by Brian Crecente does a functional job of accurately explaining Michael’s piece, but it fails to mitigate the expectation the sensational headline casts on the entire post.

This incident, once again, highlights a real issue with Kotaku: a history of jumbled content, lack of consistent copy-editing, and a schizophrenic editorial stance. While it has become hip to sneer at Kotaku, there is a real soul searching issue at heart that is bigger than the site: the essential need for a legitimate news & criticism website aggregator for the gaming industry.

Whether you disagree with the business and journalism philosophy of Kotaku, they do deliver what they promise to deliver—a fast food tapas (or parasitic tonic, depending on who you ask) of game related news. Contrary to a general belief that linking away from one’s site is considered detrimental to one’s own traffic by shortening a reader’s engagement, Nielsen online ratings of major news sites have shown that news aggregation sites like The Drudge Report retain a readership that has twice the session numbers per user and almost twice the user time than any major news outlets. In short, aggregation pays.

With an estimated readership, depending on the source, of around 50,000 to 1.2 million, Kotaku has the base to establish itself as a legitimate and competent news and criticism aggregator—it has the power to educate and inform. Instead, among the stories and headlines it gets right, are frustratingly inconsistent posts ranging from cosplay cleavage, game reviews, and irrelevant personal missives. When good or well-intended posts or articles do appear, they get lost in the shuffle of the 60-plus daily posts. If you assume the role of a news aggegator, or make your revenue based on such activities, then you have a responsibility to provide clean, professional, and accurate summaries…. consistently. Furthermore, apart from content quality, Kotaku should know it has an ethical responsibility, as their part-time role as news aggregator, to make sure they get the summary right and tight—failure to do so demonstrates poor professional courtesy to the writers of the source material, and is misleading to its readers.

Kotaku appears to be undergoing some change in its editorial mission, and the content and ambition behind the virtual magazine, K (now on issue 3), has been seeing more in-depth features with interesting ideas, genuine curiosity, and shoe leather reportage. Brian Crecente deserves the respect for building a successful and influential website from scratch; and leading and managing an aggregation website can be a thankless job. But can you be a jumbled news aggregator and still pine for a place as a respectable journal? A great aggregator should only guide, refer, and expose—it has no business creating original content. Once the aggregator mixes the pot, there is a danger that readers will cease to perceive the difference between the created and aggregated content, and effectively blur the line between “referral” and “misappropriation.” However, and unfortunately, Kotaku has to continue with its quick-shot salvos of zero-content posts, as a necessity to maintain their revenue, and to support their substantive content.

This only emphasizes the reality that the gaming community needs a site that exclusively focuses on good, comprehensive news and criticism aggregation. The number of blogs with high-grade editorial content is staggering. Not everyone has the time and luxury to find the countless blogs full of fascinating and thoughtful posts. With a comprehensive and thorough website aggregator writers will no longer have to concentrate on website metrics, advertising dollars or low readership numbers . Writers will finally be free to write; and each one will raise the editorial bar, one post at a time.