Why don't the mainstream media get video games?

Last week's issue of Time Magazine featured a piece on Halo as the lead story in its Arts section. I am not the first blogger, forum poster, or Halo fanboy to suggest that this woefully feeble and cliche'-ridden piece of cultural journalism failed on just about every possible level.  As the Guardian's game blog put it:

Hello, this is 1983, can we have our videogame article back?...The ironic thing is, Halo is hardly the standard bearer for the modern literate videogame. Compared to Bioshock it's a Commando comic with pretentions to become a Paul Verhoeven movie.

In the same week, the New York Times ran a story about real money trading in online virtual worlds, focusing solely on mainstream media darling Second Life, an online community that, on its best day, contains roughly a tenth the populations of either Habbo or MapleStory. Exasperated, Nabeel Hyatt raised an angry fist:

For the press to remain ignorant of this being an industry and not simply a single product is now journalistic irresponsibility and they should be ashamed. This is a member of the mainstream press that has not even managed to type "virtual goods" into Google.

Why don't mainstream media outlets like Time and the NYTimes get video games? Why do they so regularly and predictably fail to get beyond the worn out Pong / Pac-Man / Mario reference points?

I think it's because most of them rely on a 19th century model of journalism that continues to define what  the news looks like today. Journalists and editors tend to use three basic criteria when determining what they will deem "newsworthy" - conflict, novelty, and prominence. J-School 101 dictates that a story about a video game is worth writing only if it meets one or more of these standards. Time's dumbed down piece on Halo manages to achieve a perfect outmoded trifecta. It plays up the conflict between Sony and Microsoft:

Halo 3 is...Microsoft's weapon of choice in its struggle with Sony for supremacy...

Halo 3 will run only on Microsoft's Xbox 360 gaming console, lending the Xbox...huge credibility in its costly death match with Sony's PlayStation 3.

It's about driving sales of Xbox 360. Sony has no answer to that. We have a really big chance to put Sony back on its heels.

For novelty it relies on the threadbare but apparently still captivating image of the loner/nerd/fanatic:

There is an invisible subculture in America. Those who belong to it love it with a lonely, alienated, unironic passion.

The Bungies bring a grinding, jeweler's meticulousness to what most people consider an unhealthy amusement for children.

There's a foreign-legion quality to it, as if the company had been created as a refuge for smart people who wouldn't or couldn't fit into more conventional professions.

And for prominence, you can't beat big numbers and big business:

When Halo 2 came out in 2004, it did $125 million at retail in the first 24 hours. Since then, gamers have logged almost a billion person-hours playing Halo 2 online.

We're not just dealing with a game here...We're dealing with a great entertainment property, one that has the potential to be a cross-media property like a Harry Potter or a Star Wars.

People still thought, 'Ah, it's this thing for kids.' Now my partners are Pepsi, Burger King, Pontiac, Comcast. And it's not me selling them anymore." There's an opportunity, in other words, to decloak the Halo subculture, to turn it from invisible to visible.

21st century new media. 19th century journalism. The mainstream media doesn't get video games. Big surprise.

image courtesy of hierophant at DeviantArt