Chana Joffe-Walt, a National Public Radio journalist, recently had an interview with Halo: Contact Harvest author, Joseph Staten, and gave the best example to date as to why journalists who don’t play games shouldn’t be allowed to write about them.

Joffe-Walk visited Staten at Bungie Studios, and her first complaint is that the meeting room is full of Xbox 360s. I’m not too sure what she was expecting from the producers of one of the most important, and arguably one of the greatest, videogame franchises of this generation. In the short interview with Staten, Joffe-Walt asks some very deep and poignant questions, such as:

“Isn’t gaming all just shoot’em up? Why do you need story?”

To which Staten replied quite correctly:

“I think to understand why stories are important in games, you need to actually play them.”

From just this snippet alone, you can get a pretty good feel for how the rest of the interview goes. I challenge anyone to have a listen to it without screaming or crying in despair. I lasted until the following before keeling over and exploding:

Staten: “You’re dealing with an internet connection, high savvy audience.”
Joffe-Walt: “Geeks, you’re dealing with geeks.”

Halo: Contact Harvest is a New York Times best seller, and I would recommend buying it, if just to prove you know what a book is — Geek.

Source: npr.org