It's the first installment of my new series of articles at PCGamesN! This installment, we take a look at what may have been the first PC game to truly justify the medium: Civilization.
I ALWAYS welcome discussion of my ideas. So, please - agree with me, disagree with me...whatever you wish!
I like good games journalism but there isn't much out there. I was a fan of GFW back in the day and pretty much only read RPS now a days. Your piece is solid and informative but it reads a little bit like a book report. Here are a few things I like in games journalism. I like hearing about the authors experience with the game. Did you play Civ back in the day? Are you a 4x fan? Can you crank it up now and give the readers a feel for it? You are pretty much invisible in the piece, sharing your experience with a game or what it means to you, even if you aren't a fan gives the work a voice. Can the reader play it now and how? Even if it's just a brief bit about digging through your bottom drawer to find a copy and how you picked a DOS emulator. A little bit of levity helps the writing go down. I'm not saying you have to Jim Sterling but if a reader gets a chuckle every few paragraphs they are much more likely to read the whole piece. I read more than a few articles about games I'd never play because the author combined keen analysis with a bit of humor. Direct quotes from the people who made the game or from developers who were heavily influenced by the game are great. I'm sure I could think of a few other things but the essential thing getting a voice into a piece that is memorable and personal. If I like a piece of writing for the way it's written there is a much greater chance I'll read more works from that person on any game or subject in the future.
I think you would have loved the original draft, then. The series was originally pitched as "The Great Games of Yore: A Personal History," and indeed did include my personal stories about what it was like to play the game (and I remember quite well walking in on my brother as he played the original Civilization and being told that Gandhi had just nuked all of his cities). When it went through editing, the editor at PCGamesN wanted it to fit in better with the style of the rest of the site, and so it became much more informational and a bit more academic. And, I think this really works for it - a number of times in the earlier draft, the anecdotal elements sometimes clashed with the historical exploration, so the flow wasn't quite as smooth as it could have been. If you would like a more personal writing style, you might want to check out my revived Garwulf's Corner column that ran on The Escapist from March 2015-March 2016 (and it is coming out on October 15th as a book titled An Odyssey into Video Games and Pop Culture).