A great, nearly-unintelligible review of Halo 3 from Yahtzee on The Escapist, an online mag I’m really growing to love. I don’t subscribe to this guy’s particular way of making his argument (I’ll always view a lot of gamer slang as offensive, regardless of intent), but I do love the argument he’s making. I’ve seen some of Halo 3 being played, and it looks utterly unspectacular and uninteresting to me. Am I missing something?

I’m thinking of writing a very long piece for the blog called “Why I Am Not a Gamer,” but have yet to figure out exactly the right tone to strike. This Halo 3 review reminds me that not only do I find myself increasingly uninterested in playing most games, but increasingly alienated from the prevailing social discourse around games… even from those “gamers” whose criticisms I would normally agree with. Halo 3, for all its hype, appears to be another one of those games that I just can’t understand the appeal of, and which makes me wonder if I can fully understand why it’s appealing to “gamers.”

At what point must someone who studies videogames and virtual worlds actually be “a gamer,” and at what point is it okay to study the media “from the outside”? Does studying videogames necessarily mean condoning (and thus reifying) the kinds of unsavory discourse that exists around games? I’ll try to explore these ideas eventually, as I run into them quite a bit.