WAR's Creative Director waxes nostalgic about games journalism

by Akela Talamasca on Jun 26th 2008 1:00PM

Culture, Interviews, Warhammer Online, Opinion, Massively Meta

The interview between Rock, Paper, Shotgun's Kieron Gillen and EA Mythic's Paul Barnett is a bit of meta-ness that doesn't bear directly on MMO news, but it's an interesting look into the mind of one of the architects behind the upcoming Warhammer Online.

The take-away from the interview is that games journalism can be played many different ways, but in Barnett's mind it ought to stand for critical examination, the way movie critics write. Part of this means a no-bias account, and part of it means offering alternatives to gameplay that the writer feels doesn't work. We bloggers here at Massively do our best to provide our readers with the straight stuff, and we hope that comes through.

The interview is merely the first in a series, with much more content from that evening's get-together on its way. We'll keep our eyes out for interesting tidbits.

Source

Tags: ea-mythic, games-journalism, interview, kieron-gillen, paul-barnett, rock-paper-shotgun, warhammer-online

Reader Comments (2)

All of his jokes aside this is why the Zero Punctuation reviews rock so much.

-His biases are obvious (you can't be 100% unbiased so this is the best you can do).

-He is overly critical (as a critic should be)

-He isn't swooned by hype/marketing and is not afraid to give a game that's regarded as strong a poor review (see MGS4 and SSBB).

I agree. I listened to the interview that someone here at Massively had with Paul, on a podcast, and it was great. He's very intelligent, and just listening to how smart these guys at Mythic are, gives real hope for the future of WAR. They don't come off like pompous asshats like Funcom does, but like really great game designers who know what they are talking about and doing.

I agree that too much of the gaming media is just a bunch of PR puppets. But when you have companies like Ubisoft and many others who shit on media who gives their games negative reviews or comments, it's hard to trust any media. The game companies are just too closely linked to the gaming media in general, that it's all very biased and slantly and not very accurate.

Yahtzee is one of few who is honest in his comments, and those others who would like to be honest, are often held back for fear of the wrath they will endure from gaming companies (i.e. Ubisoft's bullshit they pull).