In this post I’ll introduce a few of the sites I’m found useful for keeping track of goings-on in the world of computer gaming, or at least that side of that world that I’m interested in. It’s worth noting that this landscape is chaotic, and I’m probably ignorant of some really excellent resources. Consider this a sample.
I am aware that this is a Geeky, perhaps even a Nerdy, thing to do.
But first, an introduction: My gaming life goes way back. I think I saw my first Avalon Hill wargame (it was probably PanzerBlitz) around 1977 or 1978, when I was in third grade and my friend’s older brother tried to explain to us what all those hexes and counters were for. I became a gamer pretty rapidly after that, starting with lighter hex-based fare (e.g. Ogre) and then moving on to 1st edition AD&D (really, who starts with Basic?) and a whole world of complex and actually rather expensive products from Squad Leader and War of the Ring to Car Wars and StarFleet Battles. I am especially fond of large rulebooks.
Computer games paralleled these developments. By 1980 we had a TRS-80 in the house, then an Apple II, and it was all Moore’s Law after that. At another time I’ll attempt a personal history of computer gaming, but it’s enough here to say that the gaming genres I’ve loved on the tabletop are well-represented in pixels on screen. In this post I’ll point out some of the sites I’ve found to be good ongoing guides to these kinds of computer games. (Some other time, too, I’ll talk about genres.)
While large, magazine-style online gaming coverage does exist, my favorite sites for reviews and commentary are those hosted by one or just a few people given to thoughtful writing and criticism (in the evaluative sense, not the whiny one). If I’m going to visit a review site over time, I want to get a sense of who’s writing and what their tastes and interests are. Blogging has been a boon to reviewers; here are a few who’ve made the most of it:
I like James Allen’s reviews at his Out of Eight site. Unlike most reviewers, he posts no screenshots and relies entirely on words. This isn’t the easy route, and I’ve found that it sometimes produces a richer sense of a game’s virtues (if not its graphics).
Gamers with Jobs reminds me that I’m not the only grown-up in this crowd.
Rock, Paper, Shotgun manages to combine insightful reviews with what I assume must be a youthful, British kind of humor.
Troy Goodfellow’s Flash of Steel uses a very traditional blog format for well-done commentary and a long-running podcast series. The focus is on strategy gaming, both computer and tabletop.
Real and Simulated Wars focuses (hard) on military simulations and wargaming, with a certain amount of historical context thrown in.
Quarter to Three is an example of a blog format that has spawned a forum community with a life of its own. That forum community is known for being kind of a rough scene, actually. You’d be surprised how hard some people will fight about… games.
These, then, are just a few examples, all of them blog-scale and all of them doing something that really wasn’t possible before Web 2.0: building communities of interest made up of people hundreds and even thousands of miles apart. (New Zealanders appear to be over-represented in gaming culture. I don’t know why.) They’ve added hugely to what for me has been a life-long enjoyment. They’ve built casual, non-commercial comment and review into the heart of the hobby, and they’ve managed to make playing and talking with strangers a big part of the game.
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