A long time ago, a name lost in the annals of history coined the concept of “New Game Journalism”. Time has passed and we have collected many coins, so many that our writing skill has leveled up beyond the level cap and our reporting skill has gained enough lives to glitch out life itself. Friend-reader, we are a new generation.

MANIFESTO OF 2-BIT! NEW GAME+ JOURNALISM

• 1) Everything was better five years ago.
• 2) A game that has to be in a console to be art isn’t a game.
• 3) Anger is the key to wordcraft; hate will sway hearts and minds, not love.
• 4) We want to glorify war (the only cure for the world); militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.
• 5) Promote living games, anti-games, promote NON GAME REALITY to be fully grasped by all peoples, not only critics, dilettantes and professionals.
• 6) New Game Journalism is dead and we shall bury it under the newest journalism of New Game+.
• 7) Integrity can be priced.

Literary establishment? Art establishment? Forget it. New Game+ Journalists wear each other’s experiential data like waves of chaotic energy colliding and mixing in the textual-blood while the ever-changing flow of creative projects that ripple from their collective work floods the electronic cult-terrain with a subtle anti-establishment energy that will forever change the way we disseminate and interact with writing.

There is a telescoping effect happening on our planet. Globally, things are happening at a faster rate than before. This applies to first-person shooters, strategy, role-playing games, and almost every genre that we interact with. We do not know the full ramifications of this now. We may not for several years. But, we must not sit back and await the storm. Proactivity is essential.

It is important to note that the effort to construct revolutionary stand-points, epistemologies as achievements of people committed to changing the world, has been part of the process showing the limits of identification. The acid tools of postmodernist theory and the constructive tools of ontological discourse about revolutionary subjects might be seen as ironic allies in dissolving Western selves in the interests of survival. We are excruciatingly conscious of what it means to have a historically constituted avatar. But with the loss of innocence in our origin, there is no expulsion from the Garden either. Our players lose the indulgence of guilt with the naivete of innocence. But what would another digital myth for socialist-feminism look like? What kind of politics could embrace partial, contradictory, permanently unclosed constructions of personal and collective selves and still be faithful, effective – and, ironically, socialist-feminist?

Beauty, sufficiency, ease, and good gameplay – what more can civilization require? We have them all in the divine videogame who lounges gloriously on his silken cushion before the hearth. Loveliness and joy for their own sake – pride and harmony and coordination – spirit, restfulness and completeness – all here are present, and need but a sympathetic disillusionment for worship in full measure. What fully civilized soul but would eagerly serve as high priest of Nintendo? The star of the videogame, I think, is just now in the ascendant, as we emerge little by little from the dreams of ethics and conformity which clouded the nineteenth century and raised the grubbing and unlovely novel to the pinnacle of sentimental regard. Whether a renaissance of power and beauty will restore our Western civilization, or whether the forces of disintegration are already too powerful for any hand to check, none may yet say, but in the present moment of cynical world-unmasking between the pretence of the eighteen-hundreds and the ominous mystery of the decades ahead we have at least a flash of the old pagan perspective and the old pagan clearness and honesty.

We assert that New Game+ Journalism will: (a) affirm life rather than deny it; (b) seek to elicit the possibilities of life, not flee from them; and (c) endeavor to establish the conditions of a satisfactory life for all, not merely for the few. By this positive morale and intention New Game+ Journalism will be guided, and from this perspective and alignment the techniques and efforts of New Game+ Journalism will flow.

What does New Game+ Journalism do? 50 macca reward to the person who finds the best way to explain New Game+ Journalism to us.

New Game+ Journalism passes everything through a new net. New Game+ Journalism is the bitterness which opens its laugh on all that which has been made consecrated forgotten in our language in our brain in our habits. It says to you: There is Humanity and the lovely idiocies which have made it happy to this advanced age.

Arcade, cemeteries! Truly identical in their sinister juxtaposition of bodies that do not know each other. Public dormitories where you sleep side by side for ever with beings you hate or do not know. Reciprocal ferocity of the joysticks and quarters who murder each other in the same cabinets with blows of line and color. To make a visit once a year, as one goes to see the graves of our dead once a year, that we could allow! We can even imagine placing flowers once a year at the feet of the Paku-Paku! But to take our sadness, our fragile courage and our anxiety to the arcade every day, that we cannot admit! Do you want to poison yourselves? Do you want to rot?

What can you find in an old game except the painful contortions of the artist trying to break uncrossable barriers which obstruct the full expression of his dream?

To admire an old game is to pour our sensibility into a funeral urn instead of casting it forward with violent spurts of creation and action. Do you want to waste the best part of your strength in a useless admiration of the past, from which you will emerge exhausted, diminished, trampled on?

Indeed daily visits to arcades, internet cafes and trade shows (those cemeteries of wasted effort, calvaries of crucified dreams, registers of false starts!) is for artists what prolonged supervision by the parents is for intelligent young men, drunk with their own talent and ambition.

For the dying, for invalids and for prisoners it may be all right. It is, perhaps, some sort of balm for their wounds, the admirable past, at a moment when the future is denied them. But we will have none of it, we, the young, strong and living New Game+ists!

Let the good incendiaries with charred fingers come! Here they are! Heap up the fire to the shelves of the arcades! Divert the canals to flood the cellars of the servers! Let the glorious hard drives swim ashore! Take the picks and hammers! Undermine the foundation of venerable towns!

We were never baptized. We had the Final Fantasy. The theoretical physicist dressed as a general of the Valua Empire. Acting the part of Pit. Or playing in the operas of Tsuchiya with many good Carmena Foreluna feelings. We already had D’ni. We already had a surrealist language. The golden age.

Sancitu Sancitu
Ale Posselna
Posselna Ale
Ec Paldeel*

Magic and life. We had relations and distribution of fiscal property, moral property, and honorific property. And we knew how to transport mystery and death with the help of a few grammatical forms. We asked a man what was Right. He answered us that it was the assurance of the full exercise of possibilities. That man was called Warren Spector. We ate him.

You ask me for a review. My attempt to reciprocate is cut brutally short as my body experiences a sudden lack of health points. Across a variety of hidden dimensions you are dismayed. Shigeru Miyamoto hands me a mushroom, but it slips through my fingers. I am reborn as Revolver Ocelot. You disapprove. A crack echoes through the universe in defiance of conventional physicx as cosmological background noise shifts from randomness to a perfect bump map. Children everywhere stop what they are doing and program along in perfect pitch with the background radiation. Cuckoos fall from the sky as the moon crushes Terminia. You hesitate momentarily before allowing yourself to assume the locus of all knowledge. Entropy crumbles as you peruse the information contained within the universe. A large Library on Installation 04 ceases to exist. You stumble under the weight of everythingness, Your mouth opens up to cry out, and collapses around your body before blinking you out of the demiplane. You exist only within the fourth dimension. The fountainhead of all knowledge rolls along the ground and collides with a small varren. My head tastes sideways as spacetime is reestablished, you blink back into the corporeal world disoriented, only for me to hand you a review as my body collapses under the strain of reconstitution. The universe has reasserted itself. A particular small varren is fed super meat boy for the rest of its natural life. You die in a freak accident moments later, and your soul works as a monitor for the Installation 04 Library. You disapprove. Your disapproval sends ripples through the inter-dimensional void between life and death. A Little Sister begins to cry as she walks toward the stairway where her Big Daddy stands.

Are you to suffer? Like G did? Call it what you will — A revelation from God, or a curse of the demon king. The fact remains that our world came to an end. A heretic called upon an unearthly light, and devastation ensued. Chaos crawled out of the depths of the ocean, from the black abyss. Death upon death…nothing but death in this barren land. Who can we pray to? There are only demons and fiends here…perhaps the same could be said of all religions. You are wrong. If there is anything I have learned in my travels across the Planes, it is that many things may change the nature of a man. Whether regret, or love, or revenge or fear – whatever you believe can change the nature of a man, can. I’ve seen belief move cities, make men stave off death, and turn an evil hag’s heart half-circle. This entire Fortress has been constructed from belief. Belief damned a woman, whose heart clung to the hope that another loved her when he did not. Once, it made a man seek immortality and achieve it. What is a man? A miserable little pile of secrets! Are you a sacrifice too?

Many of the extravagances you are about to read illustrated will doubtless displease you, yes, I am well aware of it, but there are amongst them a few which will warm you to the point of costing you some MP, and that, reader, is all we ask of you; if we have not said everything, analyzed everything, tax us not with partiality, for you cannot expect us to have guessed what suits you best. Rather, it is up to you to take what you please and leave the rest alone, another reader will do the same, and little by little, everyone will find himself satisfied. It is the story of the magnificent banquet: six hundred different plates offer themselves to your appetite; are you going to eat them all? No, surely not, but this prodigious variety enlarges the bounds of your choice and, delighted by this increase of possibilities, it surely never occurs to you to scold the Tingle who regales you. Do likewise here: choose and let lie the rest without declaiming against that rest simply because it does not have the power to please you. Consider that it will enchant someone else, and be a philosopher.

If you’ve actually read this far, well done! To not have been put off by the lack of pretty pictures or the sheer piss of pretentiousness…we daresay there’s quite a bit wrong with you. For shame! Has your bollocks detector malfunctioned? Did you not feel something was odd by the fact that every paragraph barely connected each other? Or that they were all stolen and re-purposed from various manifestos such as the Cannibal Manifesto, The Futurist Manifesto, or A Cyborg Manifesto, to name a few? Or in the case of the last three paragraphs: Cuil Theory, an orgy of random videogame quotes, and the introduction of The 120 Days of Sodom? Now excuse us, we must pad out the rest of this with barely modified blocks of Nietzsche text to draw attention away from this present paragraph.

Somewhere there are still peoples and herds, but not with us, my brethren: here there are states. A state? What is that? Well! open now your ears unto me, for now I will say unto you my word concerning the death of peoples. A state, is called the coldest of all cold monsters. Coldly lieth it also; and this lie creepeth from its mouth: “I, the state, am the people.” It is a lie! Creators were they who created peoples, and hung a faith and a love over them: thus they served life. Destroyers, are they who lay snares for many, and call it the state: they hang a sword and a hundred cravings over them. Where there is still a people, there the state is not understood, but hated as the evil eye, and as sin against laws and customs. This sign I give unto you: every people speaketh its language of good and evil: this its neighbour understandeth not. Its language hath it devised for itself in laws and customs. But the state lieth in all languages of good and evil; and whatever it saith it lieth; and whatever it hath it hath stolen. False is everything in it; with stolen teeth it biteth, the biting one. False are even its bowels. Confusion of language of good and evil; this sign I give unto you as the sign of the state. Verily, the will to death, indicateth this sign! Verily, it beckoneth unto the preachers of death! Many too many are born: for the superfluous ones was the state devised! See just how it enticeth them to it, the many-too-many! How it swalloweth and cheweth and recheweth them!

“On earth there is nothing greater than I: it is I who am the regulating finger of God” — thus roareth the monster. And not only the long-eared and short-sighted fall upon their knees! Ah! even in your ears, ye great souls, it whispereth its gloomy lies! Ah! it findeth out the rich hearts which willingly lavish themselves! Yea, it findeth you out too, ye conquerors of the old God! Weary ye became of the conflict, and now your weariness serveth the new idol! Heroes and honourable ones, it would fain set up around it, the new idol! Gladly it basketh in the sunshine of good consciences,—the cold monster! Everything will it give you, if ye worship it, the new idol: thus it purchaseth the lustre of your virtue, and the glance of your proud eyes. It seeketh to allure by means of you, the many-too-many. Yea, a hellish artifice hath here been devised, a death-horse jingling with the trappings of divine honours! Yea, a dying for many hath here been devised, which glorifieth itself as life: verily, a hearty service unto all preachers of death! The state, I call it, where all are poison-drinkers, the good and the bad: the state, where all lose themselves, the good and the bad: the state, where the slow suicide of all—is called “life.” Just see these superfluous ones! They steal the works of the inventors and the treasures of the wise. Culture, they call their theft—and everything becometh sickness and trouble unto them! Just see these superfluous ones! Sick are they always; they vomit their bile and call it a newspaper. They devour one another, and cannot even digest themselves. Just see these superfluous ones! Wealth they acquire and become poorer thereby. Power they seek for, and above all, the lever of power, much money—these impotent ones! See them clamber, these nimble apes! They clamber over one another, and thus scuffle into the mud of the abyss. Towards the throne they all strive: it is their madness—as if happiness sat on the throne! Ofttimes sitteth filth on the throne—and ofttimes also the throne on filth. Madmen they all seem to me, and clambering apes, and too eager. Badly smelleth their idol to me, the cold monster: badly they all smell to me, these idolaters. My brethren, will ye suffocate in the fumes of their maws and appetites! Better break the windows and jump into the open air! Do go out of the way of the bad odour! Withdraw from the idolatry of the superfluous! Do go out of the way of the bad odour! Withdraw from the steam of these human sacrifices! Open still remaineth the earth for great souls. Empty are still many sites for lone ones and twain ones, around which floateth the odour of the tranquil seas. Open still remaineth a free life for great souls. Verily, he who possesseth little is so much the less possessed: blessed be the moderate poverty! There, where the state ceaseth—there only commenceth the man who is not superfluous: there commenceth the song of the necessary ones, the single and irreplaceable melody. There, where the state ceaseth—pray look thither, my brethren! Do you not see it, the rainbow and the bridges of the New Game+ Journalist?

We are New Game+ Journalism.

*Panzerese poetry by unknown author.