Disclaimer: The opinions expressed within this column are those of the participants and the moderator, and do not necessarily reflect those of the GIA. There is coarse language and potentially offensive material afoot. Why is everybody headed for Japan these days? Don't say we didn't warn you.

Followup to whoever was commenting on Yoko Shimomura's work Monday: I recently acquired the LoM OST and got a crash review in the work she did for the series... ye gods. I don't know if it's the cool, cloudy, somber weather we've had as of late or what, but this thing is stunning, maybe painfully so. Between rich instrumentals, nifty techno and a fight song or two that seems ripped straight off of a Mega Man X game, I love this thing. Forget the FF X OST, I want to hear what Kingdom Hearts is going to sound like.

Onward.

There's kind of a catch 22 with your request above - if anyone's interested in taking this position in the first place, they likely love to debate. And part of loving to debate is loving to win, which means it's awfully hard to let the other guy get the last word in, especially given the kind of setup power a DA has. Speaking for myself, I was always pretty satisfied if I could just get in a few letters that argued against my own viewpoint; that's about as impartial as you're likely to get when you've have a moderator who's not totally devoid of interest in the source material.

As for the FFX reviews, it's pretty simple: the game requires far more in the way of Japanese comprehension than previous games did. Voice acting is almost everywhere in the game, to an extent that people who might be able to stumble through a text-only Japanese import are sometimes left behind. The GIA has at least two staffers who have played the full version of the game that I know of, and both stopped after a few hours to wait for a more easily comprehensible US version, IIRC. (My apologize to the staffers concerned if I remember that wrong, send a correction this way if I am.)

Again, specialized interests are sort of a double-edged sword. I've tended to litter DA with obscure (and not so obscure) references over the years, and while I've gotten plenty of emails saying "You know about X? That's so cool!" I must have also left plenty of people scratching their heads in confusion about what I was talking about, some of whom may have just thrown up their hands in disgust over a DA who couldn't stop quoting sf novels nobody had ever heard of before.

I'm also reminded of something I was thinking earlier when looking at your "greatest games" comment. Strictly in the sense of having started out early, I'm a pretty serious old school gamer, as are many of the rest of the staff. On the other hand, I've had to endure plenty of letters accusing me of having started with Final Fantasy 7, and whoever gets the job next doubtless will undergo much the same. That being the case, I'm half tempted to ask why we don't just give the job to someone who did start gaming recently and be done with it. There are a ton of people out there who started gaming with FF7, although by this point they've likely got as much gaming experience under their belt as all the people who started with FFI did when FF7 came out. Why not let somebody who truly represents the new school take over, and see what they have to say?

It's just a thought, and likely won't happen, but it's an interesting notion to toy with.

Time flows, things change and change back again, and what was once may someday be again. Who knows, the next DA may be cut from the same sarcastic cloth as Drew Cosner (or even more sarcastic still, Allan Milligan) and if they do end up as such, more power to them. Meantime all I can do is give my personal philosophy on humor: it can strengthen, and even drive a letters column, but you always run the risk of driving away as many people as you bring in.

Think of it this way; someone who's considered really funny by one person may be considered really obnoxious by another, perhaps because there are some people who don't buy that particular brand of jocularity. Put that statement in the context of a letters column and you might get a situation where a hugely popular columnist brings in droves of readers with his personality... and drives away nearly as many. From my standpoint, a letters column at a gaming web site is supposed to be about games, so that's what I talk about; there are definitely people who stopped reading after I took over in disappointment that I wasn't the second coming of Jay Boor, but I also hope I've provided a place where people can come and read just about games, if that's what they're really interested in. More on this topic later.

Yep, the staff of the GIA does tend towards the US/Canadian white male nerd demographic, probably because that's who our primary audience tends to be. And there's a fair to middlin' possibility that you'll get your wish - there have been one or two good applications from would-be female DAs (although more are always welcome), and I for one can say that I wouldn't mind seeing a regular woman's perspective on things in the col. On the other hand, we've gotten some killer applications from guys too, and passing someone over just to get a girl as DA brings up a whole bunch of sticky questions... most of which we won't have to mess with, hopefully.

The chances of getting someone who's not American or Canadian, while not completely impossible, aren't as good, unfortunately, mostly because the site's readership is composed of people who speak English as their native language. Still, we'll see what we can see.

And it's too far off to talk about getting a new weekend DA, but it's not impossible either. Nich and Drew are kickass in the position, of course, but it's always possible that school or work pressures would make one or both have to drop out, and if we do need a new full time weekend DA, it won't be me: I enjoy my days off too much.

What's to argue with here? Not much, from my standpoint; while I won't presume to say this is the kind of column I've been running, I can say it's the kind of column I've tried to run.

Still, perverse SOB that I am, I can argue some drawbacks to this. If you're a big fan of games - I hesitate to use the phrase "hard core", but certainly someone who has gaming as a big part of their lives - then the above column may hold some interest to you. The problem is, even if you really like games, it's easy to fall behind on the latest releases and let a few weeks or months go by without being absolutely up to date on the latest and greatest. And then if you come back cold to a column like Double Agent, you're liable to be left behind completely, and start wondering if gaming, for you, is still all it was.

The main workaround for something like that, I think, is to have a columnist who's really invigorating and provides insight into why games are so cool in the first place. Not someone who debates the minutia of how game X compares to the classics, but someone who often evokes why gaming was so cool to get into in the first place, and what makes it still worthwhile. Believe me, if we could hire somebody like that, I could retire a very happy DA.

Tch... I'm letting it go this one time because it is (somewhat) relevant to the point you're making, but in general you don't do yourself any favors by using your letter to badmouth one DA to another. I think Nich's work is great, as do a lot of other people who I respect a heck of a lot more than some guy who won't even sign his real name to his letter, and Nich is a great guy to boot. Hope that settles that argument.

Then again, your request for somebody who tends more towards "fun" than "serious" was echoed in a lot of the letters I got. A lot of people will point out that the two aren't mutually exclusive, and they're right, but it's often the case that you'll get different candidates who drift more towards one side than the other, which makes it a worthwhile point of debate.

I've already given my own personal philosophy on humor above, so let's talk a bit about how humor can work in a gaming context. Gaming's a great hobby: obviously we like it, or you wouldn't be reading this column and I wouldn't be writing it. But at the same time it's a hobby that's often begging to be made fun of, both in terms of the games themselves and the people who enjoy them. The right joke in the right place can cause people to remember how ultimately inconsequential FF vs. DQ really is, or how ludicrous it is to have a giant pink furball crucified on a giant 'T' in the middle of a gripping sci-fi/religious drama. (Ok, that last one's been overdone, but you get the point.)

Of course, it's not easy to make that kind of joke on demand, but nobody ever said being a really great DA was easy, did they?

Strangely enough, what you're asking for may be even more difficult than well done humor. Guilty confession time: I don't know if even I'd read this column day in, day out, if I was reading my own work. Writing DA is always interesting, because you never know what's coming next and most good letters will bring up a gut response - all you have to do is write it down. But in truth, one of the big reasons I'm retiring is that I've run out of gut responses that haven't been said a dozen times before. Somebody who was really good at this job would always be able to come up with something new and interesting to say about gaming, because gaming is (almost) always new and interesting itself. Will we be able to find that kind of DA the next time around? With a little bit of luck, yeah, hopefully so.

Er, yeah. That was... interesting...

All I can really say is I wish this had come in yesterday, in advance of the actual topic, so you guys could have responded wether you wanted a DA who'd print relatively oddball stuff like this, skillfully done though it may be.

On the other hand, if I've got people sending me stuff like this (that last stanza aside), I must not have done too badly here, eh?

Closing Comments:

Free topic day tomorrow, so feel free to send in whatever, including any additional commentary you might have about any of the topics we've covered this past week. And as an aside, I may run a repeat of today's topic for Nich on Saturday, on the off chance there was anything about today's topic you didn't feel you could send in with me behind the wheel. See you Friday.

-Chris Jones, wants to bear Yoko Shimomura's love child... or vice versa