So here you are reading this hobby gaming column on a big, high-profile video games site. Maybe it’s the first time you’ve been made aware of the vast world of board, card, and miniature games beyond what you can pick up at a mass-market retailer or it could be the first time that you’ve encountered reviews and editorials about hobby games. It could be possible that you’ve never considered that a board game can be assessed and evaluated just like a video game, movie, book, or record. Or that this hobby has a history beyond the last year or so of releases, and that there are trends and issues that can be discussed. Or you might just be wondering why Gameshark is wasting bandwidth on something other than another review of POWERSUIT WARRIOR: DIRT BROWN EVERYTHING for one of the big consoles.

No matter how you are coming to Cracked LCD, even if you’re a hobby veteran, the fact remains that this column represents one of few English language journalistic outlets for hobby gaming discourse and critical review, and I think that is a damn shame. The internet has democratized criticism and diluted ideas such as authority and impartiality, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the ramshackle field of games journalism.

You can get a first-hand look at the lack of coherency and standards in hobby games journalism if you simply try to find a review online for a board game—hopefully to double check to see if I’m not full of crap here at Cracked LCD. Chances are you’ll dig up a number of them for any given title. But what are you really reading? Many reviews are little more than reiterations of the rulebook with little analysis, some are written by interested parties who have relationships with developers, designers, or publishers, and still others are written by first-time reviewers or armchair critics with no evidence of credibility or authority whatsoever. I’ve seen reviews from completely new gamers given the same level of credence as those from gamers with years of experience and authority. Either way, most reviews boil down to a simple “should you buy this game or not” ultimatum without any sense of actual critical appraisal or contextualization- something more like a product review at Amazon.com than a Roger Ebert piece. There are a lot of opinions out there, but not many writers.

It might be surprising, but there really aren’t very many magazines, books, or other publications about modern hobby gaming; you can probably find a magazine on spoon collecting or some sort of quarterly journal for the peanut butter aficionado, but there’s practically nothing on the newsstands about hobby games. The few magazines and other publications out there covering the hobby tend to either be focused entirely on military simulation wargames, not published in English, or they are publisher-specific such as Games Workshop’s White Dwarf or GMT’s C3I.

In the past, there have been magazines such as Counter, Space Gamer, Games International, and a few others with small to tiny publication numbers but most of those have vanished as the years roll on and hobby gaming shrinks more and more away from the mainstream. Even the old CCG magazines like Scrye and Inquest are either gone or limping along as the “print is dead” mantra consumes its casualties. The last attempt at a proper hobby games magazine was the ill-fated Knucklebones, which offered some incredibly fluffy, “nice guy” articles focused more on appeasing publishers than offering honest opinions and evaluation. Games Magazine covers a couple of board games a year and awards year-end accolades to a few, but does anybody but old folks still buy puzzle magazines over a copy of PROFESSOR LAYTON?

As for the internet, user-generated content overwhelmingly represents what goes on in terms of game review and discussion. Most writers, podcasters, bloggers, and so on that are working in the hobby are unpaid, even some of the more recognizable names and personalities known for their reviews and articles. The hobby games discussion that is online is almost strictly amateur, man-on-the-street level discourse. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, I value the opinion of the everyday consumer as much as anyone else and I’ve read unpaid reviews that were better than anything I’ve ever been paid to scrawl out here in the pages of Cracked LCD. And there are a few board gaming blogs and volunteer sites, such as the site I co-founded, FortressAT.com , where everyday users are putting forward some of the best-written and most insightful commentary about hobby games anywhere and not making a thin dime out of it. And sometimes I think it takes somebody who isn’t a writer working to put food on the table to cut right down to business and lay it all out, so to speak.

That all does beg the question: does hobby gaming need a professional press? I think it really does, because as much as I respect the blogged or posted opinions of my fellow gamers, I’m sort of old-fashioned in that I expect a paid, professional journalist to provide not only better writing but more authoritative, educated, and trusted content. Writers and content producers are selected because they fit into certain editorial styles or approaches, and when the whole thing is pretty much anything goes and Joe Monopoly’s review of a game or comments on the current state of gaming are considered equivalent to everything else out there, then I think a sense of established journalism and credentialing is inevitably lost.

Of course, the hobby gaming world is a much smaller one than video games, for example, so it stands to reason not only that amateur voices carry more weight but also that there are so few books, magazines, and other professional outlets for content. Of course, I can’t imagine a worse time in history to start up something like a printed board games magazine, but even online there’s nothing like a Gameshark.com with a distinct editorial policy, regularly compensated staff, and an acknowledgment that certain critical and journalistic standards are supported and promoted. I think that the lack of a professional hobby gaming press online or off is a woeful inadequacy that has resulted in some rather low expectations in terms of games writing, and I can’t help but wonder if paid, professional writers working to certain codified standards would help to support the argument that hobby gaming can be a competitive and distinguished alternative to more mainstream entertainment mediums. Doing it all out of love for the hobby is wonderful, but at some point the best-in-class examples of work deserve something beyond a friendly “great article!” forum response.