The "no cheering in the press box" rule was introduced to me in a sports journalism course taught at Stanford University. The rule is also the title of a book of essays from famous sports journalists who wrote during the golden age of sports between World War I and World War II. The writers in that book were obviously sports fans and very passionate about the games and athletes they chronicled -- read Grantland Rice's New York Sun article "" if you don't believe me -- but eulogies and poems aside, sports writers in the early 20th Century followed the same no cheering in the press box rule as the professional sports writers of today. Having read that book and taken that course, I believe games journalists should, too.

To be fair, sports journalism and games journalism aren't perfect parallels. The form of entertainment a sports writer most often covers is an isolated game between two teams in which there will be one victor and one loser. A game journalist meanwhile is looking at a game that could we be tied to other games or consumable media, and when writing about it, cannot boil down its essence to, "Well -- who won?"

More importantly, though, a sports journalist is usually in a stadium with thousands of fans cheering the game. By not cheering, they're setting themselves apart from the audience and can turn their journalistic skills to the spectacle as a whole instead of just to the scoreboard. In the video games industry, though, journalists are often the only audience members a developer gets at massive events like E3 or seasonal preview showcases---- and for many reasons, we don't have as clear-cut a separation between being a fan and being a journalist.

Cheering is common in video games journalism, but it's become unhealthy. By behaving like fans at press events, we invite the developers and publicists to treat us as fans and not as professionals. Take Microsoft's this year, for example. Everyone -- every reporter, every analyst, and every industry professional in attendance -- had to wear those weird white space ponchos and actively participate in the spectacle. There was no sitting back, no observing. Not even any real reporting at the event because attendees were banned from liveblogging to Twittering (although plenty broke the rule).

I didn't feel like a professional journalist at that event -- I felt like a partygoer at Carnival, sans the booze. I wanted to be there for the information, I would've liked to sit back and watch the crowd's reaction to the games, but I was too busy trying not to trip over Cirque du Soleil performers while jockeying for a better view of the stage where we thought there'd be games. Turned out with each of the games listed and they wound up with more information than any of the reporters that actually attended the event. Oh, and the event was televised -- so technically, we journalists weren't even partygoers, we were stage props.