Games critic is shifting Gears Games critic Tom Bissell has crossed the floor and co-written the new Gears of War game. Picture: Epic Games Source: Supplied GAMES critics usually write about games, not for them. But Tom Bissell, games critic for publications like Grantland and The New Yorker, has crossed the floor. And in no small way, either. Mr Bissell, along with co-writer Rob Auten, has penned the script for Gears of War: Judgment, the prequel to Epic Games' blockbuster Gears of War trilogy. It's a science-fiction epic which sees man and monster locked into a gritty and endless conflict, and whose instalments have been the flagship games for Microsoft's Xbox 360 console. "Gears of War is this incredibly fun-to-play, gripping, explosively violent, but also really thoughtful game, about this other planet inhabited by humans and inhabited by monsters," said Mr Bissell in an interview with news.com.au. They've been locked in this battle in the previous games for a long time - and we've never really seen how this fight between them started. Our game goes back to the very beginning of when these monsters fought people, and it takes you right back to the beginning of the story. But how does someone who's spent a great chunk of their life telling developers what's wrong with their games actually end up working on one? It all started in 2008, when Mr Bissell wrote a feature on Epic Games and Gears of War 2 for the New Yorker and got to know Cliff Bleszinski, the game's design director. And as for why, Tom says it all stems from his deep love of video games. It's a surprisingly uncomplicated journey, in that I started out writing games criticism because I loved video games. As a player I'm interested in the emotional experience that a game tries to give me. I'm not compelled by the technical side of game design. I try to ground all of my criticism in a very personal response to something. The more personal someone's response to a creative work the better, and that's what all good criticism is. One mind bouncing off a creative work. And one of the lessons he's learned from his criticism is that when it comes to shooters, the story should be kept simple. There's a limited amount of things you can do within a shooter, and to me, the elegant shooters know exactly what to do and how to do it. A shooter story is inherently limited, for the best, and I really believe that one of the big problems with shooter storytelling is that it's way too complicated with absolutely no payoff to the player. So we tried to keep it really simple. We tried to tell the absolute best, most rollicking, riveting shooter story that we could. Although he's made the leap from critic to creator, Tom Bissell is going to keep on writing about video games, but he says he may not be so harsh. "I have a lot more sympathy now for certain developers than I used to," he says. The experience of making this game that really has softened me, it stripped away my tendency to pounce on a lot of things. Now that I know what a production cycle looks like, it's much easier to imagine why really smart people can wind up with an objectively bad result. "Throw-away lines of dialogue like "let's get out of here', I used to hear that in games and think "that's so boring and unimaginative, you could do something so much better than that', and I eventually realised that sometimes "let's get out of here' is exactly the right thing for someone to say." Gears of War: Judgment hits stores today, and gamers everywhere will soon be coming to grips with it, but how does Mr Bissell think his colleagues in the gaming press will receive it? I've had more than one mildly sleepless night thinking about it. I have no way of knowing, but I hope they'll think it's a smart, exciting, terrific action-shooter. I've been really nervous, I feel like I have a book coming out, which is absurd because a hundred other people made this game with us, but I feel really attached to it and I hope people like it. And what of writing for games in future? Does the world's most literate games critic have a dream game? I don't even know what that would look like, but it would probably be more of an open world thing, because I'm fascinated by open world games. But now that I know the amount of writing that even a fairly linear shooter requires, the thought of working on an open world game kind of makes my hair turn prematurely grey. But if Tom Bissell never makes another game, what advice does he have for the industry from his new point of view as someone who has played on both sides of the fence? What should games developers be focusing on? "Better graphics," he jokes, "No, no, no. To me it's about abandoning these industrial Hollywood ideas of "good storytelling.' Move away from that. It's done games pretty well but I think it's also imprisoned them into a lot of storytelling methodologies that make no sense in an interactive medium. And they waste a lot of people's time. They try to generate this very specific type of drama that makes sense sitting in a theatre, and makes a lot less sense when you have a continually riveted audience staring at a silver screen for two hours straight without interruption. Gears of War: Judgment is available now for Xbox 360.