[From: William Huber (whuber@UCSD.edu)]
Dear Hardcore Gamer:
We love you, and often times we are you. But you have slowly ruined interesting dialog about games. You love them too much. It’s time to take a step back and think seriously about this relationship.
The 5th Wall seeks to publish writing about games for an audience wider than the academy, but more demanding and speculative than most game journalism has been to date. We aren’t just “intelligent” gamers – we want to place our experience and reception of games in the context of other cultural engagements: literature, film, philosophy, cultural history, politics, etc. We want hardcore ideas, not just hardcore gaming.
We plan to publish one major article a week, supplemented with a group blog. The format is open for discussion: we see this as a cooperative.
Gamer demographics have usually been divided between hardcore players whose commitment to gaming leaves them little time for reading or other modes of participation – and casual players, who do not engage deeply with games themselves, and whose play tends to be interstitial. We want to write from a different position: to put our play alongside our reading, our viewing, our activity in the world at large.
So put down the controller and ask yourself: do I really need that last achievement? Or is it time to get serious about gaming fun?
(At the moment, “we” are David Thomas, William Huber and Maggie Greene. We’d like to be more. Contact us and we’ll talk.)