About a year ago, when Western Homes was in its awkward infancy, I wrote a meandering piece about the barriers to entry in the video game journalism business. At the time the piece was intended to serve as an excuse, going forward, for reviews of games that weren't particularly new to the market that I was theoretically going to be writing in due time. As it turns out, I've barely touched the video game scene on this page.

Why is that? Well, I haven't stopped gaming, but the function that the hobby serves for me has inverted from what it was when I was younger. I used to play pretty much exclusively single-player games, geeking out on them to a degree that would seem excessive to the unitiated -- spending 80 to 100 hours maxing out the stats of my party members in role-playing games, or playing through 20 or 30 full seasons in the franchise modes of sports titles. When I was in high school or later on in my nightmarish postcollegiate cubicle job, gaming was the precise opposite of all the awful interactions with non-simulated people through which I had to suffer each day. Nowadays, when I'm alone I'm pretty much either working, practicing an instrument, or sleeping; video games are something I do almost exclusively socially. On the rare occasion that I set aside some time in the evening to play games when I don't have company, it's because I'm signing on to XBox Live to reconnect with a friend living elsewhere in the country. What games are played, who wins, and whether every last mode, camera angle, hidden unlockable bonus character, and cheat code are exploited is completely immaterial. I haven't gotten 100% completion in a game in ages, and I've finally reached the point where this doesn't eat away at my self-esteem as a human being. (Were my 17-year-old self to fall through a time warp and read that sentence, he would likely think I had either been brainwashed or replaced by a replicant.)

Anyone who's gamed even a little must recognize the difference between the single-player experience and the divided focus involved in playing with your friends. Truth is for most of the titles I have stacked on the entertainment unit at this particular moment I've never gone much deeper than the multiplayer quickplay mode. And that's fine -- they're products I paid for, and I can choose to use them however I like (even if it makes no sense, like how my weird friend Ken insisted on watching through all of the special features on the Bender's Big Score DVD, including the tedious "science lecture" and the entire "Everybody Loves Hypnotoad" episode," before watching the film proper). However, in the same manner that I would never write a review of a book I didn't finish, a CD to which I only listened once, or a film of which I missed the first fifteen minutes, I don't think it's fair to critique games that I've only ever engaged on a relatively shallow level.

So I haven't done any video game writing at all in the past year, for that reason and also for the reason I alluded to in that old essay -- I don't really stand to benefit any. While people have come across my blogs and offered me work doing music writing, television criticism, book reviews, and (rather to my surprise) political analysis, no one has come forth offering to pay me to write about video games, and even if I dedicated three meticulously constructed posts a week to the subject, I highly doubt that anyone would.

The keepers of the keys to the video game "journalism" world are in fact the marketing departments of the very publishing companies producing the products that game magazine and website writers are supposed to be critiquing objectively. This is something that's been quietly understood in the community for several years now, but overdue outrage has finally bubbled forth this week as one publisher finally went too far -- or, more accurately, one publisher finally got caught going too far.

If you follow the electronic gaming business at all, you're probably aware that a variety of factors have led to this holiday season arriving as a perfect storm of frantic competition between the major game companies. For arguably the first time since the early 80's, there are three consoles with legitimate designs on the title of industry leader. This puts pressure on publishers to deliver three versions of every game, which with the wildly divergent engineering and control systems of the Nintendo Wii, XBox 360, and Playstation 3 is rendered almost as complex as making three entirely distinct pieces of software. With Halo 3 bowing earlier this year and Grand Theft Auto IV delayed into 2008, no surefire hits were scheduled for this November. Game companies have invested very many millions of dollars in expensive, AAA cross-platform titles featuring entirely new intellectual properties. Not all of them will succeed. Some people are going to get extremely rich, and others will lose their jobs, and it's as unclear as it has ever been in the industry who falls into which column.

It's important to understand just how much pressure is on the marketers of these games -- otherwise the outright despicable behavior of Eidos Interactive, publishers of the new action/adventure title Kane & Lynch: Dead Men, seems as ridiculous as the Patriots needing to cheat to win football games. After investing some $100,000 (possibly much more) in advertising for their big holiday release on the popular news and review site GameSpot, Eidos was apparently quite displeased with the 6.0-scored review written by editorial director Jeff Gerstmann. Gerstmann called the game "ugly" and described the control scheme as unworthy for such a high-profile title. In about as much time as it takes to say "There goes the last shred of credibility the entire game journalism community had," Gerstmann was fired.

It's not entirely clear whether the immediate agent of Gerstmann's summary dismissal was Eidos itself or the advertising department at GameSpot -- but of course, with so much of the site's revenue flowing from that one single source, the two amount to the same thing. I'm no muckraker and don't have any particular interest in doing the Williams/Fainaru-Wada thing and tracking down the precise ballistics of the smoking gun, so let me give you a couple of quick links and then we'll move on to the larger point I wish to draw from this debacle.

The first thing that you should read is N'Gai Croal's marvelous reflection on the scandal for Newsweek.com; Croal approaches the problem from many different and thought-provoking angles. Ultimately, though, he arrives at a somewhat pessimistic and vaguely self-serving conclusion: the "enthusiast press" will forever be compromised, and only game writers working for mainstream media outlets can be trusted. Of course, that is precisely what Croal is. A nice bit of detective work at joystiq.com reveals a number of fundamental changes made to the original Gerstmann piece shortly after the writer's firing. And it would be remiss not to mention the savagely funny Penny Arcade strip that brought this whole story to my attention in the first place.

A video review removed from GameSpot but preserved (of course) on YouTube was of particular interest to me -- even within the confines of the brief running time, Gerstmann immediately stands out as a particular kind of gamer than others of the breed will recognize immediately. The dude is old-school -- he doesn't seem to care one whit about full-motion video or Hollywood-quality voice acting. When he's allowed to speak in his own voice, it's easy to detect what his biases are. He didn't like the game because it didn't control as smoothly as Ninja Gaiden and the graphics weren't as flawless as BioShock's. People who play games with different priorities could easily watch this review and come away from it thinking that the game's premise and characters looked cool and they could deal with some subpar controls and a few dropped frames from the graphics engine.

I didn't really have any interest in playing Kane & Lynch, before or after this news broke, but I don't like shooters in general, and I can easily think of an alternate example that I'm playing right now -- The Simpsons Game. The reviews for that title were generally lukewarm, noting that the gameplay was pretty shaky but the writing and visual style were solid. I bought the game with that in mind, and although the imprecise jumping and the PS1-level stupidity of the hovering camera have hampered my good time a little bit, for the most part playing through the best simulation yet of an interactive "Simpsons" episode has been totally worth the time and money I've spent on it. Likewise, every review I read of Guitar Hero III for the XBox 360 said that the new Les Paul-shaped controller ate the lunch of the old X-Plorer one that came with GHII. You know what? I've played them both, and I like the X-Plorer. Critics are not gods. If I was a big fan of the successful Hitman series, which has very similar pros and cons to those attributed to Kane & Lynch, I would probably go ahead and get the game even based on Gerstmann's pan job.

So let's go back again to that piece I wrote last year for a second:

The true sign of a good critic to me is not unlike that of a good artist: a defined aesthetic. Sometimes [Roger] Ebert can utterly pan a movie but I can come away from reading his review with a pretty good feeling that I will enjoy it. It's for this very same reason that I trust the Penny Arcade guys' opinions the most when I am on the fence about what game to get.... I know what they like. I know what we have in common and where we disagree. When they rave about a sleeper game like Apex or Katamari Damacy and I go out on a limb and buy it, I am seldom if ever disappointed. Isn't the ultimate function of the critic to represent to you whether or not your money will be well-spent on whichever entertainment product it is in which they are theoretically expert?

Gerstmann, although I was not familiar with his work before he became a martyr, seems to fit this description. His success and popularity (message board geeks are outraged out of all proportion to reality, perhaps worse than I've seen since all those people who became Rockies fans on September 19th of this year went on the Denver Post boards a month later to bitch and moan about how the franchise screwed them out of the World Series tickets that they as diehard thick-and-thin supporters were entitled to) stemmed from the fact that he was one of the very few guys in the whole business who didn't use the gutless mediated language of most game criticism. Ironically, and brutally, GameSpot management is now using this very rationale to build a flimsy case that Gerstmann wasn't fired just for the Kane & Lynch piece but rather for an ongoing problem with "tone." Isn't "tone" just marketingspeak for "style?" If Gerstmann wanted to set himself up as the Stephen A. Smith of game reviewing, shouldn't his employer's response have been "more power to you?"

Well, no, because ultimately as Croal writes the publishers, and the console manufacturers, and even the guys over in ad sales, have no respect for game writers and they never have. And, honestly, I have to ask myself -- why should they? Just look at this wishy-washy response to the controversy from one of the parade o' hacks over at GameSpy. There couldn't possibly be a clearer divide in the online responses to this situation. The non-moneymaking, lo-fi fan sites are digging for the facts and sounding the trumpets, and the big guys -- IGN, GameSpy, GameSpot itself -- are sticking to their stories the way Bush stuck to that WMD bill of sale. "Our responsibility is to our readers and nobody else and we attempt to act in your interests by asking the questions that we think you want asked and posting the information that will benefit you," writes Gabe Graziani. You're a lying weasel, writes Mark T.R. Donohue.

I danced around the issue a little more delicately the last time this topic came up, but the gloves are off now. Video game "writers," you should all be ashamed of yourself. You allowed this to happen by making guys with style and verve and a distinct viewpoint the exception rather than the rule. You started letting marketing departments write your preview copy for you. You've completely confirmed my worst suspicions about the vast majority of people working for game sites and game magazines -- that they're all a bunch of maladjusted obsessive losers who were too lazy or stupid to hack it as programmers and now do what they do just so they can play video games all the time, not caring a whit about the quality of their writing or their integrity as journalists.

You know, it's almost enough to leave the whole hobby behind, only... well, Psychonauts is coming out for XBox Live Arcade this month, and Mass Effect is supposed to be rad. My goodness, it's like the Sosa-McGwire home run chase all over again.