Merry Belated Christmas
Not much more to say. Just wanted to say it. 
I'm still very new at this electronica thing, but I thought to mark the occasion even if it's rather late. By eight hours or so, anyway.
Defining games journalism
I don't have the definition locked down yet, but give me a few years and I'll have the entire video game media broken down into its component parts, with titles and labels for everyone, and then we'll have our shit straight and that will be that. Okay, maybe not...but these are the sorts of questions we need to ask more often, and I tried to spark a conversation about what being a "games journalist" really means in this week's First Person column.
I'd like to say I have a concrete answer, but I think the conversation is along the lines of how I advise single friends to find mates: don't look for what you want, just stay away from what you don't want. Figure out what makes someone not a journalist, and then perhaps whoever's left actually is one.
Inspiring Discussion
After my profile on Gerard Williams, a.k.a. the HipHopGamer, was published on Bitmob last week, it inspired a flurry of discussion with some of the professional videogame journalists I'm acquainted with. One person in particular simply could not figure out why I was giving Williams a pass on some of his antics that are extremely antithetical to what journalism is supposed to be, and the accepted ethics of the profession.
I imagine it may be different once I'm making my full time living as a videogame journalist, but I don't think so. Gerard isn't actually part of videogame journalism in my eyes, and he doesn't get in the way of anything I do, so I can afford to ignore much of what he does that I find personally distasteful. I just don't read his website.
There is, however, an issue I feel obligated to address, and that will be the subject of tomorrow's First Person column on Bitmob.
It's almost 10:00 p.m. and I haven't played any games in two days. Time to go rectify that with some Fallout: New Vegas. I can't get enough of that game. I think it may be superior to Fallout 3, but more on that sometime in the future.
Spinning out of control
This blog is my one-stop research station for when I feel like reading the videogame news, but it all began with this blog. I never did get the art done.
I published what was intended to be a profile piece on Gerard Williams, a.k.a. The HipHopGamer. To have my and the New Yorker's name mentioned in the same sentence has to mean something, in terms of making efforts to break in, even if only a little.
In all seriousness, I did work harder on that piece, I think, than anything else I've done. In terms of pure craft, anyway. I'm a very lazy writer, my wife likes to remind me. I think editors are like midwives. I enjoy working with them, and Brett has been a very cool guy. I hope that he'll edit all my First Person columns.
Oh, and here's an icon my wife made for to attach to the column if I wanted, but I think it just works better as a link:
The Limping Dead
This weekend, I need to get my wife caught up with The Walking Dead so that perhaps we can watch the season finale together, but I don't have my hopes up. Robert Kirkman said that the show would be making divergences from the comic in order to keep fans of the comic guessing, but I have to ask the same question I ask whenever I see an adaptation diverge from its source material: For the love of God, why?
If a story is good enough to warrant translation from one form into another, the ONLY changes one should make ought to be demanded by the transition. Maybe you can't accomplish a certain panel in a comic book on film because the audience simply can't perceive the level of detail in a shot, even a long, static shot, that an artist can draw into a splash page, so you change things a little to use the tools film gives us to try and accomplish the same aim as the splash page.
But what's this with the CDC? I can't imagine they are going to explain the plague...so why this interlude? Would it have been possible to move Rick and crew out of Atlanta by Episode 3 such that we could have had the events at the gated community in Issues 7 and 8, I think it was, in Episode 4 of the television series? TWD the comic is constructed in six-issue narrative arcs, but if television has to stretch six episodes with plodding pace and narrative tedium in order to stick to the same structure and produce six episodes, THAT is the kind of change one can justify making to the original story!
But why the hospital? Why the CDC? Why Merl and his brother? Who gives a damn whether the comic book audience knows what's going to happen or not...is this series really for them, or for them AND the people who don't read comics but who might respond to the story presented in a different form? So just give them the same story, altered only as much as the form requires...and I can't explain some of these changes as requirements of television.
I was more than a little disappointed when Rick Grimes, this character who in the comics has turned into this rugged survivor and leader of men, sounded like a desperate, whining adolescent at the end of the Episode 5 when he is begging to be let into the CDC building. That was decidedly NOT the Rick Grimes I've come to know in the pages of The Walking Dead.
The most frustrating thing about this only being a six-episode season is that there's only one chance for the series to show me why it made the choices it made, to wrap up this arc and make me realize that I was being too harsh in my judgments, that maybe I should trust the show and the changes it's making...which means now my expectations of Episode 6 are getting very high. I hope I'm not setting myself up for a fall.