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Tim Rogers’ Action Button Video Games Videos

ZOK

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Nick R

Nick R

Posted
Posted
20 hours ago, ZOK said:

I seem to remember years and years ago there was a thread on here because Rogers had written an article about hanging out with the Metal Gear guy in a rock n roll stylee, or something…and I really don’t remember much about it other than he was wearing a cowboy hat I think, it caused loads of people on the internet to say ‘who is this dickhead anyway?!’ and I thought it was pretty funny.

 

Anyone know what I’m talking about?

 

This is a copy of his MGS2 essay, "Dreaming in an Empty Room":

https://aumaan.org/form1/tus1/features/dreaming1.htm

 

It concludes with this postscript about hanging out with Kojima:

 

Quote

Since writing this article, I have endured many long adventures, played a demo of Metal Gear Solid 3 , and met Hideo Kojima. I interviewed him for an article in Wired , a fine and noble magazine. The interview will be published within a few months of your reading or rereading this. Around the time of my interview with Mr. Kojima, I took this article down, fearing that he might read it. Maybe I was fearing having made a mistake of some sort. Well, I was able to present my ideas to Kojima, who confirmed that I am pretty much right about why he made Metal Gear Solid 2 . His goal was, as he explained to me, "To make a videogame that told a story that could only be told in a videogame." His first and foremost goal, he claims, was to "Use the medium," which is, as he put it, "inherently postmodern." The goal of the story the game sought to tell was to tell that story to the people of today, with no illusions of its surviving decades or centuries to leave an impact on a distant society. Even so, the gameplay, as he explains, becomes increasingly more challenging in such a way as to make the experience something round and fulfilling even to the player who skips all of the long, drawn-out dialogue sequences. The gameplay, says the man, was engaging merely because it could not be not engaging under his supervision. Kojima shared a few philosophies with me on what kinds of people make good game developers, and under his rubric, I am one of those people, which made me feel kind of nice.

 

Hideo Kojima claims to have never read Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World , though Japanese filmmaker Ryuhei Kitamura has been suggesting the book to Kojima since Metal Gear Solid 2 went on sale. Kojima himself likes to think that the game's was more inspired by Kobo Abe's Kangaroo Notebook than anything else. Which is funny, because I also mentioned a Japanese work of postmodern . . . artistic integrity with the word "Kangaroo" in its title in my original writing.

 

It made it into The Guardian's list of recommended examples of New Games Journalism (remember that?):

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2005/mar/03/tenunmissable

 

That prompted a thread here, in which Tim Rogers got mentioned a few times. For example this post:

 

 

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MK-1601

MK-1601

Posted
Posted
5 hours ago, robdood said:

 

Loooool.  To be fair I found him a bit difficult to 'get' until I watched him speak. 

 

17 years ago, Jesus.

 

I don't think it's a case of not getting him then, rather him earning his bullshit (and the bar for 'well written games criticism on the internet' rising massively) in the intervening time. Insert Credit's 'house style' (Brandon! Sheffield! Writing! Everything! Like! This!) was massively annoying.

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Festoon

Festoon

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Tim Rogers is a blessing. Can't wait for Season 2.

 

'New Games Journalism' was just Gillen desperate to be a leader of a movement, like popular music movements coined by NME and Melody Maker journalists. It existed before he identified it, and his named examples were largely shite.

 

Gillen was always the wordy, pretentious one in later Amiga Power, as opposed to the funny, witty, sharp writing of most of the rest - and J. Nash's mad rambling.

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Wiper

Wiper

Posted
Posted

Alternatively: Kieron Gillen was a great writer-about-games,* and Tim Rogers was and is great, and youse were all just grumpy old men who couldn't see it at the time :P

 

(and I don't think KG ever pretended to have invented the style of writing, just flagged it as an identifiably distinct approach to writing that he and e.g. Tim Rogers followed, vs. more proscriptive, 'objective' approaches to reviews and analysis)

 

*can't speak to how good teenage Gillen was in AP, but he was brilliant from his PCG era onwards, and I will never not be sad that he retired from the form to move onto comics

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Sarlaccfood

Sarlaccfood

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Oh yeah there’s big “you know, I’m something of a games journalist myself” energy to a lot of the negative comments way back when. A lot of people learnt to write in a certain style and felt very threatened when something else came along. Some of the aggression in the thread Zok linked to is insane. 
 

Then they all got the rug pulled out from them when youtubers and steamers came along anyway.

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Festoon

Festoon

Posted
Posted
7 hours ago, Wiper said:

Alternatively: Kieron Gillen was a great writer-about-games,* and Tim Rogers was and is great, and youse were all just grumpy old men who couldn't see it at the time :P

 

(and I don't think KG ever pretended to have invented the style of writing, just flagged it as an identifiably distinct approach to writing that he and e.g. Tim Rogers followed, vs. more proscriptive, 'objective' approaches to reviews and analysis)

 

*can't speak to how good teenage Gillen was in AP, but he was brilliant from his PCG era onwards, and I will never not be sad that he retired from the form to move onto comics

 

Yeah, I always just found Gillen's writing a bit po-faced for AP. He always seemed to take being a 'gamer' very seriously, which I never liked. I much preferred the breezier, more fun style of the other writers, 'concept' reviews, and so on, as opposed to the slighly confessional style of Gillen.

 

I never read his PCG stuff and from his comics I've only read Phonogram - which was a very complicated way of telling people that he liked his own taste in music. 

 

Edit: Rogers is in a different league, to me. To wit:

 

https://medium.com/@108/a-friendly-letter-to-everyone-60f96320e98d

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Cheeko

Cheeko

Posted
Posted
19 hours ago, ZOK said:

I just started doing a search for Tim Rogers on here and going back as far as I can.

 

This isn’t it, but the people getting annoyed at Tim Rogers are hilarious! Unfortunately the Tim Rogers article that kicked the whole thing off is now consigned to 404ville, but people had plenty to say about Tim Rogers, that’s for sure. And not all of it was in praise of Tim Rogers.

 

 

 Wayback Machine Archived version.

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ZOK

ZOK

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17 hours ago, Nick R said:

 

This is a copy of his MGS2 essay, "Dreaming in an Empty Room":

https://aumaan.org/form1/tus1/features/dreaming1.htm

 

It concludes with this postscript about hanging out with Kojima:

 

 

It made it into The Guardian's list of recommended examples of New Games Journalism (remember that?):

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/gamesblog/2005/mar/03/tenunmissable

 

That prompted a thread here, in which Tim Rogers got mentioned a few times. For example this post:

 

 


Every link in that Guardian piece is dead now, except for the GameGirlAdvance Rez Trance Vibrator piece, remember that?

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Wiper

Wiper

Posted
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I've got to say, having someone link people to a deeply personal essay in which the writer notes that 

Quote

She used death to tell me with a scientific certainty that I will never, under any circumstances, be better than literally anyone in the world, even the worst person

in order to demonstrate that said writer is, er, better than another, is one of the most on the nose examples of death of the author that I've ever come across.

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Festoon

Festoon

Posted
Posted
42 minutes ago, Wiper said:

I've got to say, having someone link people to a deeply personal essay in which the writer notes that 

in order to demonstrate that said writer is, er, better than another, is one of the most on the nose examples of death of the author that I've ever come across.

 

I'd like to read Barthes interpretation on wanking off to Rez.

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Djx

Djx

Posted
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His Kotaku articles are pretty great too. For those that haven't read them, here's a selection of his work -

 

https://kotaku.com/stop-telling-me-what-to-do-5354035

 

https://kotaku.com/japan-its-not-funny-anymore-5484581

 

https://kotaku.com/the-life-of-game-why-i-live-in-japan-5516355

 

https://kotaku.com/i-got-my-fashion-sense-from-video-games-and-you-can-t-5843886

 

https://kotaku.com/the-16-games-that-consumed-311-hours-of-my-2013-1491264377

 

https://kotaku.com/growing-up-sixty-four-1644419166

 

https://kotaku.com/metal-wolf-chaos-xd-the-kotaku-review-1837041135

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matt0

matt0

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Quote

Somewhere around 1998, Final Fantasy games stopped being about labyrinthine Dickensian plots and started being about hair which you the player will feel the urge to eat.

 

:lol:

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Quest

Quest

Posted
Posted

Just a note to say that the Susan album that appears for about a second in this review is a great pop oddity with every member of YMO contributing to varying degrees, though I think her song 'My Love' that appeared a year later is her best.

 

 

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