I’ve been kicking around a response to the uproar that was Chuck Klosterman’s article, “The Lester Bangs of Video Games“. Poor Chuck. He was misunderstood. All he wanted to do was jump on the video game criticism bandwagon. Hell, if Hillary Clinton can put it on her agenda, and with legislators carrying out their witch hunt against Take-Two and the ESRB, he just didn’t want to miss out on some free publicity.

And publicity he got. Kind of like shaking a bee’s nest, because the people who picked up this story were the journalists themselves. That’s kind of like Mike Ditka making a speech at the NBA All-Star game about the lack of fundamentals with today’s basketball professionals.

There are basically two types of game journalists today. There are the Enthusiasts, like Kotaku and Joystiq, which are sprout from blogs and report with an opinionated, fanboy-ish slant. The Enthusiasts took offense to the story because unlike their professional brethren they are the ones trying to break the mold of traditional journalism, providing commentary on the gaming industry in an unorthodox, mostly satirical way.

Then there are the Professionals, like Gamespot and 1UP, which are more objective and unbiased. Of course they had to comment on the story because it was news, and that is what they do. They merely reported on the reaction among the media, and probably cried a little inside at the realization their years of work really haven’t amounted to anything meaningful. I must give credit to 1UP for at least trying to do something different in their approach, but the end result of their attempt at gonzo is the appearance that the inmates are running the prison.

Why, Chuck, if you’ve found such a void in video game journalism, don’t you just fill it yourself? Probably because you can barely spell Xbox, let alone play games on it. No, instead you are merely raking the coals of the latest hot topic to appear to be “with it”. But I don’t want to pick on just you, I want to pick on the media themselves for not being able to retort with a quick, intelligent response. Please, let me have the honor.

The fact is, the video game media does have a Lester Bangs. Many of them, in fact, who are even more emotionally invested in the industry than anyone realizes. See, for those who aren’t sick of hearing the biography of Lester Bangs as told by Cameron Crowe, he was someone who understood music because he was integrated with its creation. There was Bangs, hanging out in the Bowery, drinking and smoking with the kids who would eventually save the world (or something like that). He heard the jams-in-progress, saw the same psychedelics as the musicians themselves. He was one of them.

Greg Kasavin or Dan Hsu are very much veterans of the video game media, but they are not one of them like Bangs was. Certainly it isn’t someone who writes about the feeling they get while playing Jaws Unleashed. They can act profound and say they want video games to make them cry, but they really don’t know what that means.

Cliff Bleszinski does. David Jaffe does. So does Warren Spector. So does Chris Crawford. God forbid, so does John Romero. See, the music industry had Lester Bangs, essentially a groupie, writing tales from the inside. But I don’t think someone like Keith Richards was ever sober enough to talk about the Beatles. Hell, we can barely make sense of musicians when they wax on about their political beliefs. The game industry is different in that it has an ever-expanding group of outspoken innovators and creators who not only critique the work of their peers, but also try to advance their craft by educating and stimulating the gaming populous with their blogs and journals about what it really means to make and play video games. They are one of them, very literally.

So I guess that means Chuck was right. The video game media doesn’t have a Lester Bangs. Nor will it ever, because to be able to critique at that level one would need a deep understanding of what it takes to make games at an emotional level. And if they had that, they wouldn’t be writing for 1UP or Gamespot anymore, they would be the ones actually making the games. But maybe since they didn’t know how to point Chuck in the right direction in the first place, perhaps they would be better suited playing the games rather than writing about them.