The story of the New Games Journalist, as well as the story of the New Games Journalist-wannabe (which is what every professional games writer is nowadays) is the story of a man-child who has grown older in body but not in spirit. Imagine a person who has grown up on games and game magazines, and stuff like comics, anime, sci-fi novels, etc. Everyone around him is growing up, getting jobs, growing more serious, starting families, etc., whereas he still spends most of his time on games -- he may be a games journalist, or he may be working in the games industry, or he may simply be a salaryman whose recreation consists almost exclusively of videogames (and stuff like anime, etc.) People like that end up going through life with a bad conscience ("Conscience is the instinct of the herd in the individual", Nietzsche had said). What these people end up wondering sooner or later is this: "If everyone else is getting more serious," they ask themselves, "shouldn't I be doing the same as well? And if my chosen job and/or recreation is videogames, doesn't that mean that
they should be getting more serious as well? Deeper, more meaningful and more profound? More "
artistic"?
Enough! Whether videogames are really growing deeper, more meaningful and more profound is irrelevant to these people -- they
must and
will be shown to be doing so in order to assuage the bad conscience of these men-children! These people have at last come to crave some degree of seriousness and profundity in their lives, some depth of feeling, some measure of spirituality; as human beings it is almost a biological necessity for them, and definitely a sociological one (this is the origin of their bad conscience -- the pressure to "grow up"), and since they have not bothered at any point to take an interest in, say, history, literature or philosophy -- fields of human endeavor which would have quenched the thirst for depth and spirituality of even the most spiritually thirsty human being, leaving him now with the
opposite need, a need for frivolity, shallowness, playfulness, in short, a need for
games -- the only place they can look for spirituality now is in the only place they know. And if they can't find it there, if it turns out that it simply doesn't exist there, that will in no way prevent them from miraculously discovering it -- by inventing it.
