Zine Review: Cultured

I don’t know Michael R. Brown, but for some reason, I know like half the people he talked about in issue one of his new zine, Cultured, which focuses on videogames this issue with overviews of Capybara games, Double Fine, Tell Tale, and The GDC. There are also personal profiles/interviews with Nathan Vella, Zack Karllson, and the design director of Tell Tale.

Anyway, I love the fact that there is a free digital edition and a paid print edition. I’ve been meaning to put the print editions of Incredibly Strange Games up here for free, but my computer with the issues on it is like way over there, so, it’s taking a while.

The design was solid overall, although I wasn’t wild about the type choices, and there was a slight feeling of “InDesign Default Settings” about some of the pages. Also, there’s white space between each paragraph, which I love, but also indentation, which you don’t need if there’s white space between paragraphs. The worst crime against design though, was the hyphenation in the pull quotes. I love pull quotes, like, a lot. They break up the page, yet also draw readers in. But hyphenation in pull quotes is dreadful. It looks awful, and it draws attention to the (broken) mechanics of the design, not the content of the pull quote. I swear maybe he never heard about shift-return…

But, whatever, that’s a minor complaint (although it grated on me!). Overall, this is a very thoughtful, well written and well done zine that suffers from none of the cynicism or overly self-referential preciousness of some other current “pro-style” fanzines. Instead, I’d class it with .exp, The Controller, and Raina Lee’s late lamented 1-UP as a unique and valuable take on games.

It’s written for a general audience, not gamers, so it may be a bit simple to those saturated in game culture (I found the GDC piece suffered from this the most), but it is much harder to write for a general audience than a clued-in one. I applaud the effort, because the result is something that I haven’t seen before in games journalism. Even good mainstream journalism about games is usually filled with dreadful shorthand and wild, out-of-date inaccuracies, so to see something I could show my mom to explain what I do, but that I could also give to a co-worker without cringing is impressive.

Anyway, he did an extremely good job capturing the spirit of the people I know. The people I saw on the page were the people I know in real life. That’s pretty cool. Overall a sweet first effort. I’m curious to see if issue 2 stays on games or veers into other areas of culture.

You can check it out yourself (.pdf or print) here.