1. Gamers Kan Read The weird, wonderful, exciting and quite under-rated world of videogames

2. Why you are here Don’t cover games and wonder if you should Don’t cover games and wonder how to do it Do cover games and wonder if you are doing it well Do cover games and wonder if I am an ass

3. What’s Up? The Problem The Numbers The Content A Solution

4. The Problem

5. Why Not?

6. Where is the Lester Bangs of game journalism?

7. Supply or Demand?

8. The Numbers

9. Size of the Industry Games Comics Music Books Movies $ in Millions

10. Size of the Industry Games Mongolia Iceland Speakers Lawns $ in Millions

11. Mr. Hollywood

12. Demographics Average age: 30 43 93 47 Percentage of women gamers: Percentage of regular gamers who read books and daily newspapers on a regular basis Percentage of Americans who have purchased, or plan to purchase a game in 2005

13. Who is playing online? Table 1 Online Gaming Demographics National adult sample, respondents who answered yes to “ ever play a game online? ” All users37% Men37% Women38% Whites34% Blacks48% Hispanics54% 18-2952% 30-4934% 50-6428% 65+38% Note. Data were collected by the Pew Internet and American Life Project in June and July, 2002.

14. Trends

15. Entertainment spending

16. Regulation or Censorship? "This is a silent epidemic of media desensitization that teaches kids it's okay to dis people because they are a woman, they're a different color or they're from a different place. ”

17. Censorship

18. The Content

19. Nintendogs

20. Meet Phinn

21. America’s Army

22. Dean’s violence piece

23. New Games Journalism

24. Reaching Readers

25. Games or People?

26. A Solution Game Journalism as Arts Criticism

27. My framework What is it? Why do I like it? What does it mean?

28. What is it? Free roaming Gritty urban crime story Steal any car Find lots of weapons

29. Why do I Iike it? It’s not like other games I’ve played You can match your play style and mood to the game This game understands being bad is fun and I never get to be all that bad

30. What does it mean? What does it mean to live in a world that has a game like this? In a world dominated by conservative “do the right thing” rhetoric, is being bad a healthy transgressive practice? Is this what we look like to the rest of the world?

31. Raph Koster

32. Manhunt

33. Matteo Bittanti

34. So, how do you cover games? Just like everything else But you need to consider the medium, and open it up for writing about games, not just people who play games.

35. What to expect

36. The Future

37. Contact David Thomas David@buzzcut.com http://www.buzzcut.com http://www.igja.org