No Target?

Back in the autumn of 2006, I gathered together some friends to discuss the idea of putting together a videogame fanzine. It would be an A-Z of videogames, called No Target, with a couple of short commentary pieces or reviews for each letter of the alphabet, running from Advance Wars to Zelda. The plan was to persuade local independent retailers to stock a pile next to their till to give away for free, thus making ourselves local celebrities while also getting the chance to practice writing about videogames.

Who wouldn't want one?

The point was raised almost immediately that it could be done as a website or PDF, but that wasn’t what I wanted. Maybe I'm a nostalgic old fool, but I liked the idea of something people could hold in their hands, flick through casually for something that interested them, and maybe even pass on to their friends. I felt (and still feel) a little sad that the Internet has almost entirely killed the kind of badly photocopied, home-made publication that compensated for what it lacked in polish with integrity and honesty.

In the end however, our collective enthusiasm waned, and No Target never got much further beyond being halfway finished. It nags me to this day that the emphatic promise I made to my fellow contributors at our first meeting that, "it will get finished" turned out to be a lie; but the experience was nonetheless a useful one. Not only did I (hopefully) manage to write a couple of half-entertaining articles and laud my power as self-appointed Editor over my friends, it really got me thinking about the critical process, and the grounds on which people decide to trust the authority of the words they read.

As I see it, an under-addressed problem in videogame criticism is that it's impossible to have the same breadth of knowledge of the field as in film or music criticism. Listening to the fifty most popular albums, or watching the fifty most critically acclaimed films each year, would not be overwhelmingly time-consuming; and most professional critics would tell you it's important to listen to or watch a lot more than that. Doing the same for videogames is nigh-on impossible without being willing to turn yourself into the sort of nerd who twitches at exposure to direct sunlight and whose limited experience of the wider cultural world would have a severely detrimental effect on their value as a critic.

In a later post I may attempt to find an answer to this problem, but for now it's sufficient to say that it's what both draws me to, and repels me from, videogame criticism. This past year I've bought more videogames than in any other, and I can't help but feel that as a result I've neglected my appreciation of books, films, and music. 'Modern culture' (a horrible turn of phrase I promise never to use again) has grown into a multi-limbed leviathan of unprecedented scope and reach, and being the greedy parasite that I am, I want to taste as much of it as possible. As I sketch out in my head what I want this blog to be about, I know I don't want it to be a series of hysterical rants about videogame culture; but is it possible to be a critical 'jack-of-all-trades' and still have an opinion worth respecting? How can I prevent my blog becoming one of the "my taste is the best, listen to me!" type which the Internet is already over-burdened with?

The answer is almost certainly not to ask a series of boring rhetorical questions about how to write a good blog, but my hope is that in the coming months I may be able to find the pudding that provides a proof.