“Banality of famelessness” - I’m not sure why she needs to use such phrases. I’d be pretty annoyed if everyone and his uncle drafted opinion pieces using rather uncommon turns of phrases because you’d spend every other second trying to parse what she’s trying to say.
Perhaps the target audience likes the wordiness but she looks like she’s writing a formal crit paper rather than a popular review.
Great! Now I have to bust out the dictionary!
While it may be the former, it isn’t meant to be the latter, so that’s not a fair criticism.
Can’t we have just a few literate writers, Mr. Buffa? There’s plenty of pre-digested crap out there for you to quickly read before flying out the door on your way to your press junkets with PR people whose breasts you will only casually, carelessly graze. (Note: they notice, and hate you.)
That’s not what I said. I said that both Schwarzman and Gleiberman are good writers. I agree that the intro to the Lady in the Water review is a bit tortured. But as you noted, the problem isn’t that she’s using words that would send anyone without an English degree scrambling for the dictionary.
I kind of like when a new or weird turn of phrase serves as a verbal speed bump (cf. pretty much anything written by Kelly Wand in CGM). But, yeah, “banality of famelessness” is a kind of ‘huh?’. I do know what the words mean, though.
-Tom
There’s a great Calvino piece (one of the Mr Palomar ones) where the author keeps walking back and forth in front of a nude bather so as to look at her attributes with the exactly correct level of benign disregard. On the fifth pass she, yes, storms off in a huff.
If you’re already a videogame journalist, and there was anything in Buffa’s article that you found useful or enlightening, then you have no business being a videogame journalist - or, indeed, any kind of journalist.
Or indeed, having a pulse.
WATCH IN AWE! As blatantly obvious statements like “If you want to be a good writer, learn to write,” are scattered around like candy!
CRINGE! At the thought that “Do your research” is considered insightful guidance!
WET YOUR PANTS! At a view of the industry so shallow, it would only half-fill a gnat’s bidet!
NOTE WITH AMAZEMENT! That the section ‘Keep flirting to a minimum!’ is twice the size of ‘Don’t be a sell-out whore for a T-Shirt and a free drink’!
Most videogame journalists are part of the problem, so don’t go to them for the solution.
Bitching about your peers. Easier than writing good copy since 1950.
There’s a very thin line between being clever and being pretentious (and maybe even a little overlap).
There is also the factor that the line isn’t in the same place for everyone, so someone with your comprehension or vocabulary would probably have no issue with the way she wrote the piece, but others may be annoyed.
The safest approach is always to use simple words, and short sentences, perhaps sacrificing a little style and personality for ease of reading and appealing to a wider section of the audience. However, I can see why this would not be a good compromise for someone trying to write a notable piece.
What’s the point of articles like this that don’t name names? These generic “Do it like this” pieces just seem like space-fillers in slow months. You can count on two or three of them every summer.
I can see Buffa’s point with Lisa Schwarzbaum, though. I like Owen Glieberman, but she always seems like she’s either trying to be too cute or is playing word games that really aren’t that much more erudite than the crap Gene Shalit comes up with on the Today Show. I mean, “starry Night”? Jesus.
That section Buffa excerpts is also ridiculously overwritten, and the first sentence packed with lame adjectives. “Shivery-good”? Okay. But what is the point of “bug-bitten,” “chilled,” and “warm”? They add nothing to that sentence but length. And like everyone else, I’m not quite sure what the hell “banality of famelessness” even means. Honestly, if I’d read that piece without attribution, I’d have assumed it came from a college paper, and was written by some undergrad chick still high on English 101.
Having a vocabulary that’d make Michael Crichton blush is no good if you’re writing for twelve year olds.
I’m not sure what this is supposed to mean. I’m sure Crichton has an excellent vocabulary compared to the general public but from his novels(I admit I haven’t read one in years) he writes very straight forward description. His characters tend to be scientist types and he writes about sciencey stuff so the dialogue uses some jargon but I’ve never felt lost reading one of his novels even when he gets technical. And Buffa’s usage of “blush” implies vulgarity(to me at least). If I had no idea who Crichton was and I read that sentence out of context I’d think he was famously blue, instead of (I think, and also allegedly) notably high-falutin’ with fancy wordplay.
Overusing ‘big words’ is garden variety bad writing, but far, far worse is the epidemic of tortured metaphor and analogy usage. Pwn3d by his own p3tard.
And people who talk about writing should probably think about venturing beyond two of the 5 or so most successful authors of the past quarter century. King and Crichton? Wow, Buffa is sure well-read. Planning on cracking open a few of those John Grisham novels next summer, Chris?
“If you want to be a good writer, learn to write good,” sounds like it would be a better fit for this guy.
“The banality of famelessness”? Somebody belongs in a different industry. And by “a different industry,” I mean doing those lame-ass spoken essays on NPR.
Everything about Buffa makes my head hurt.
I don’t understand why Game Daily publishes stuff like that from Buffa? It’s an inane article. I guess that is what is wrong with videogame journalism, that pieces like that make it through the vetting process.
No idea, but it reminds me of a list that I saw of the best movie review titles. Unfortunately I can’t find the list on google, but the good news is that I can remember the best one, for I am a Camera:
“Me no Leica”
I stopped reading the film reviews in EW well before I gave up on the magazine entirely, after being a day-one subscriber for years. To the extent LS and OG are “good writers,” in that they produce lively prose that amuses themselves and their ilk, so be it. However, it’s entirely possible to be a “good writer” and be completely full of shit, as both LS and OG are.
They are classic examples of the smug & overeducated school of writing. Honsetly, they seem to spend more time thinking up puns for their headlines than they do on honest film criticizm. What was really frustrating to me was that their reviews amounted to little more than the standard plot recitation with a lot of high-dollar words, hipster slang, and an excess of snark.
The word that keeps coming to my mind to describe their style (and OG is by far the worse offender) is masturbatory. It might be fun to do, but eventually the audience will get bored no matter how much style you’re showing.
I don’t have an issue with EW’s movie reviews. Like Tom, I tend to think of them as more high-brow and usually don’t even see them until after I’ve made up my mind about a flick from other sources.
The Buffa article was just a seething mass of irony and hypocrisy birthed from the womb of an ego bloated with it’s own self-importance. (heh, chew on them fancy pants words!) Classic “do as I say, not as I do” mentality. In the same article where he presumes to tell us what to avoid in game journalism, he’s guilty of making many of those very same mistakes. He cautions not to become too infatuated with yourself as a game journalist, yet refers in the next sentence to other game journalists as “the little guys”. The bit at the end about attractive PR people, flirting and dating, was surreal, like a glimpse into the sweaty and fevered fantasies Buffa harbors about some cute PR woman he met at the last E3. I felt dirty just reading it.
In short, I found the article to be little more than self-aggrandizing bullshit, and little actual help to someone looking to be a better game industry journalist.
Ed Wood seems like too obvious an answer, but there you go.