Kyle Orland

The media tend to come at video games from a lot of different angles. Various stories might alternately treat gaming as a multibillion dollar business, a growing cultural phenomenon, an art form worthy of critique, or the leading edge of a technological revolution. But there’s another potential gaming angle that gets comparatively little coverage or respect from the press in general: gaming as professional sport.

This is slowly beginning to change, though, as more and more media outlets begin to take pro gaming seriously. CBS, Spike TV, USA, and DirectTV have all experimented with pro gaming broadcasts to various degrees, and G4 recently announced a deal to show Championship Gaming Series events on its network.

The entire pro gaming subculture is also the subject of a new book, Game Boys, a fascinating look at pro gaming’s efforts to gain respect and attention through the lens of two competitive Counter-Strike teams. I talked with Game Boys author Michael Kane about his experience writing the book, the current state of pro gaming on television, and whether or not video games could become the next great spectator sport.

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Most often, it takes years of work and hundreds of bylines for most game reviewers to reach the point where they even start to get noticed by the average gamer. British-born, Australia-residing author, humorist, and game designer Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw got there virtually overnight. Since launching the Web magazine The Escapist last August, his Zero Punctuation series of animated video reviews have gained a massive following for its rapid-fire deliver and razor-sharp send-ups of such games as Medal of Honor: Airborne, Halo 3, Guitar Hero III, and, most recently, Turok. He also runs his own blog, Fullyramblomatic.com
Last month, Croshaw’s celebrity was given official recognition at the 2008 Game Developers Conference. He was commissioned to do both a series of comedic shorts for the Game Developers Choice Awards and a typically motormouthed recap of BioShock for 2K Boston head Ken Levine’s keynote.

I chatted with Croshaw via e-mail about how he got start, his rise to fame, and what he thinks of the state of game journalism today.

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When you think about video games, ivy league institutions like Harvard don’t exactly spring to mind. That might start to change, though, with this recent creation of the Harvard Interactive Media Group. Part academic consortium, part gaming club, the group is part of a new wave of interest in organizing gamers on campuses nationwide. We talked to HIMG President and Harvard Senior Benjamin Decker about bringing together the Harvard gaming community.

(See EGM #222, pg. 36 for full article)

NPR’s News & Notes 

The Electronics Entertainment Expo is underway, and gaming industry heavyweights are showing off some brand new technology and software.

Pro gamers and expo attendees Ralph Cooper and Kyle Orland are co-hosts of the NPR podcast, Press Start.

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Kevin, Rebecca Swanner and Kyle Orland talk about how this year’s E3 is different from years past.

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Kevin, Kyle Orland and Steve Butts juxtapose the finer points of single player and multiplayer games.

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Charles Bellfield is the Vice President of Marketing at Capcom, USA. In this Gamasutra interview, freelance journalist Kyle Orland sits down with Bellfield to discuss Capcom’s stance on the Academy of Interactive Arts and Science’s ‘pay to play’ model, the success of downloadable console demos and the feedback loop it creates between developers and consumers, Eastern influences on Western games, Okami, Phoenix Wright, and more.

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For a gameplay movie to be flawless, it must be as fast as possible, it must not miss a shot, have no wasted efforts, and so on. Creating a such movie involves planning and carefulness.

The game is played at slow speed (the emulator slows the game down), doing small segments at time and optimizing then as well as possible, redoing until it goes well. The finished (and unfinished) product is reviewed many times, at full speed and at slow motion, to find things to improve and to invent new strategies and then played again.

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Colleen McGuinness is a Harvard-educated writer from Long Island, New York. Since graduating in 1999 she’s been a writer and director for a short film titled For Mature Audiences Only, a staff writer for NBC’s short-lived comedy Miss Match, and a story editor for the Fox series North Shore. She’s currently writing a screenplay for New Line Cinema called Baby Got Backhand.

So why are we interviewing her on a gaming site?

It turns out that Ms. McGuinness made her video-game-writing debut last month with Sprung, an odd little Nintendo DS game that simulates the world of dating. Players in Sprung have to navigate a maze of conversation paths to accomplish a variety of dating-related goals with their on-screen conversation partner.

GameSpot talked to Ms. McGuinness about writing, dating and, of course, video games.

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Brad King has burst onto the video game journalism in the past few years, jumping from a staff writer position at Wired to write Dungeons & Dreamers: Rise of Computer Game Culture from Geek to Chic and an accompanying blog (both with co-author John Borland). More information about King, including links to some of his clips, can be found on his web site, BradKing.org.

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