Evan, I think it's quite okay that you don't do straight consumer-facing material. I feel as though Bitmob was founded, in part, to get away from the news/reviews/previews cycle, as we can get this content from any of a dozen other places.

Anyway, I got my start here on Bitmob back in April and now I'm being paid to write about video games, so consider that testimony as to the part that Bitmob can play in getting new writers started. Hell, I like this place so much that I write a weekly column for free here! And all I require for my services is the occasional attention of an editor who is very patient with me. :P

Go read some mainstream news coverage of video games. You'll read statements that are clearly wrong, and so often the writers just come off sounding like squares. It would be really funny if it wasn't sad.

@ Gerren - I blogged about this on punchingsnakes last night, but reviewers, critics, and columnists are also journalists. Roger Ebert is technically a journalist. Dan Savage is technically a journalist. IMHO part of what makes someone a journalist is sticking to facts, and that doesn't just mean reporting on them. It means being fair in analysis. It means not misleading people. Being a journalist is as much about adhereing to a suite of ethics as it is a description of the actual content produced.

@ tate - You also demonstrate nicely why this conversation is important to have. The one thing you don't address is plagiarism. No credible journalist commits that sin, in part I think because journalists understand that the written word is their product. It's how they earn their living - so they have respect for the work someone else does in producing those words. The second you steal content, you cease to be a journalist, end of story.

I don't know where you get the idea that it's unprofessional for a member of a profession to disqualify someone else from the title if it's appropriate. Is it unprofessional when medical boards yank a doctor's license?

Also, Tate, if you haven't read my column last week, you need to do so. Williams admits to threatening to beat someone up and to stealing content. This isn't hearsay, it's on the record, straight from Williams' mouth.

And I loved what you did with moving the explanatory text to the bottom - I just wanted to make it clear from the outset that this was a community-written column, not something endorsed by the BM staff, which is why I had it at the beginning.

"Perhaps having a silent protagonist used to shave off a few dollars or save crucial disc space, but nowadays, developers use it as cheap excuse to artificially inject interactivity by "letting the player be the hero." It doesn't work. It achieves the exact opposite of its intended goal and results in more distance between the player and the story."

When you make this statement, Joel, I wonder if you either didn't actually play the same Half-Life 2 that I did.  When you say "most people end up jumping around the room to see if they can make it to Eli Vance's head from the chair in the corner" I wonder who your research sample was, and/or whether they were really paying attention to the game.

The reason why Gordon Freeman is silent is very simple: the game is subtle. The narrative of Half Life 2 is told in propaganda broadcasts, in throwaway lines from supporting characters, and in other aspects of the textured sound design. It is told in mood, and set design, and scoring, and expressivity of characters that modern first person shooters still don't touch. The body language and facial expressions of the characters in Half-Life 2 are still amazing five years later...why haven't other studios been able to reach up to the same bar in all this time?

Sure, if a player is not in the mood for a game that asks him to pay attention to the details and check his expectations of a shooter at the door, perhaps they don't have the patience for Half-Life 2 and that's no crime...but that player also is likely not going to appreciate what makes the game so brilliant independent of whether that's anyone's cup of tea. There's gaming for entertainment, and there's also gaming for critical analysis. Half-Life 2 serves both masters, which is what the best games *ought* to do.

Gordon Freeman doesn't speak because it would distract from the narrative. It could be argued that having Freeman speak would actually have been the lazy choice, *not* vice versa. You don't have to make the environment nearly as engaging if the player is focused instead on constant barrages of dialogue.

I feel that by including Half Life 2 in this article, you're displaying a deep misunderstanding of precisely what made the game brilliant, and that's the sort of thing I think anyone writing about videogames needs to acknowledge, so that we can hold future FPS titles accountable to what's possible in the genre space. Otherwise, we wind up devolving into meathead shooters which artistically or narratively aren't going to advance anything. These Tom Clancy-esque Call of Duty plotlines may be fun, but they're also extremely silly, and with Black Ops are getting more than a little tired, IMHO.

And I personally found Nathan Drake stereotypical, a cardboard hero cutout, and therefore could have done without his supposed-to-be-clever quips. They didn't bother me, per se, but let's not hold Nathan Drake up as some paragon of what a video game protagonist ought to be. I think we should aim a little higher than that when it comes to doling out our praise.