Welcome to the Highbrow Gamer!

Once I started seriously writing game reviews, I realized I had a lot more ideas than I would want to or even could put in a review. So the purpose of this blog is both to elaborate on my reviews published in The Eagle, American University's campus newspaper, and comment on gaming in general as an artistic medium.

I should say a word about my review philosophy. I have a very specific idea of what a game review should be. First, it should explain clearly why you may or may not want to spend your money on the game. Second, it should give an interesting commentary of some kind that makes the review interesting or amusing to read. A review also has to strike a balance between telling technical details of a game and explaining the experience as a whole. While I find Seth Scheisel's New York Times reviews to be maddeningly abstract (like most of the Times' reviewers, he takes every review as an opportunity to show off how brilliant he thinks he is), I find reviews by major internet publications like Gamespot and IGN to explain technical details too much at the expense of concision. I find print magazines to strike the best balance (but I don't necessarily try to emulate these reviews either).

In any case, my editor at The Eagle, Donny Sheldon (the man), also has a very specific idea of what a game review should be: 500 to 650 words. It's been a challenge as a writer to accomodate this, but I'm also immensely thankful for it because I've learned alot about concision from this process. But this means I've had to sacrifice some of my more penetrating commentary on certain games in favor of better telling the reader whether or not it's worth their money.

The purpose of this blog is to unleash that commentary for anyone who liked my reviews in the first place. In that sense, yes, this blog is for my own smug self-indulgence. But come on, what blog isn't?

Lastly, as I believe that video games are just as legitimate an artistic, literary medium as movies and television, I intend to write analytical pieces that treat them as such. As a college freshmen, I'm just learning about this stuff now, but I've yet to find mush serious academic study of modern games. This is something I'm seriously interested in.

Quick disclaimer: I own an Xbox, Xbox 360, and a gaming PC. FPS's are my favorite games, followed by RTS's and more accessible RPG's (like Oblivion or KOTOR). I consider myself really a single-player gamer, but I loves me some online Halo 3 any day. So from this you can probably tell where I'm coming from with my writing.

So, yeah. Comments on any of my posts would be appreciated, as long as they're intelligent. If it looks like it might fit on a GameFAQs forum, don't submit it (not that I don't love GameFAQs). If you want to email me, you can reach me at mc0497a@student.american.edu.

Now and always, thanks for reading!