The past couple of weeks have been full of bad omens for the video game magazine. With news that Games For Windows would be ceasing publication (in print form) and confirmation of Dan Hsu's plans to leave Ziff-Davis more than a few furrowed brows have declared that video game magazines are doomed. It's true, the Internet is delivering comprehensive coverage in a more timely manner than print can ever hope to match. But magazines still have their uses. I read the May issue of EGM cover to cover on a cross-country flight last week, then returned home to find the May issue of Game Informer in my mailbox. Both magazines featured exclusive cover stories presenting previews of highly anticipated games. Despite flagging sales and shriveling ad revenues, these publications are still able to scoop their web-based brethren and do it with a certain amount of style.

For all of the Internet's ability to deliver streaming video, gigabytes of screenshots and all kinds of other multi-media fireworks, most websites still aren't all that much to look at. It could be bandwidth concerns or perhaps just the utilitarian demands of readers, but magazines still trump the web when it comes to making a page look pretty. Game Informer's 12-page Gears of War 2 preview is peppered liberally with concept art and screenshots. Weapons, vehicles and aliens punctuate the pages. At one point, the dangling payload of a poison grenade intrudes on a column of text, shoving a dent into an entire paragraph. The style of the layout isn't exactly Black Book material – it's all splattered red and torn paper edges with the Gears of War 2 logo looming in the background. But the game in question, still riffing on the heavy metal futurism of Quake and Doom isn't really paving new ground either.

EGM's approach to covering SOCOM: Confrontation is more clean and weblike – conforming to the magazine's now more-than-year-old redesign. They take the USA Today approach, presenting long shots of the PlayStation 3 game's maps with points of interest numbered and annotated. But what the page lacks in visual flourish is made up in Joe Rybicki's writing. He kicks the story off with a vivid first-person account of the game. Pinned down in a North African warzone he describes the fear a SOCOM: Confrontation player feels when they realize they have no chance to re-spawn. "I hear a chillingly recognizable 'clunk,'" he writes, "followed by the unmistakable sound of something roundish and metallic rolling across the dusty cobblestones." Things don't end well for Rybicki, but the intro segues nicely into discussion of how the game's physics will affect game play, right down to the bounce of grenades.

All sense of place ceases as the story goes about the business of relaying game features, multiplayer details and all the other mandatory essentials that game fans are eager to hear about. Both EGM and Game Informer are vigilant reporters of these facts, but Rybicki's tantalizing introduction makes the rest of the story seem that much less visceral. Game Informer's feature-length previews almost always tend toward the clinical. Their piece (not bylined as is the tradition in their magazine) starts with a paragraph-long, detail light treatise on the pitfalls of the sophomore slump – fairly inessential. But later the story digs deep into Gears of War lore, reporting on the setting and scenarios just as a newspaper journo would relay the details of a foreign war. "Increasing scores of surviving humans have been afflicted by a disease called Rust Lung, and the already fragile population is dwindling." Sounds like copy out of a 22nd century issue of The Economist.

Later Game Informer does give us a fairly descriptive walk-through of one of the game's underground, alien infested settings. But what neither magazine really accomplishes is setting a sense of place outside of the virtual worlds they're reporting in. In fact, they assume that the reader either already knows about the game designers or simply just doesn't care to know more about them. We never hear where these previews are being held or learn anything about the game designers besides their names and titles. Perhaps both publications are reluctant to let us see behind the curtain for fear of revealing that their moments with the game designers took place in boring hotel rooms during GDC. Or maybe they know their readers all too well, having fielded hundreds of letters demanding "just the facts."

Either way, with readers slowly slipping away maybe it's time to loosen up and let readers in a little more. Start making personalities out of the men and women who make video games. Cliff Blezinski's outsized personality isn't restrained by Game Informer's staid approach. His quotes telegraph his personality instantly. And while many readers know who Blezinski is, it wouldn't hurt to devote a line or two to his personality – a little something more than "lead designer." But what of senior producer Rod Ferguson? I can't say I know much of the guy after reading the story, though a lion's share of the quotes are attributed to him.

The personal profile is nearly a cliché in entertainment and music writing, but video game writers almost never adopt the approach. The stories, seen everywhere from Entertainment Weekly to Complex usually start with the writer in a hotel lobby or at a hip cafe waiting for their celebrity interview to arrive. Then in a puff of Hollywood pixie dust the subject of the article appears, flustered but still beautiful, occupied, gracious and generous. After a few humanizing moments, the story quickly shifts to the forthcoming album, movie, TV show or perfume at hand. Does that mean we ought to see Tetsuya Mizuguchi waltz into an interview with a Jamba Juice in hand, or hear of Denis Dyack rocking T.I. on his iPod before sitting down to talk about Too Human? Maybe not, but there's certainly a middle ground to be explored.

Maybe the New Yorker's approach to the subject of video games can be instructive. In his 10,000-word Will Wright profile writer John Seabrook boils down the experience of meeting the legendary game designer in a single smart sentence. "You don't really have a conversation with him; you mention an idea, and that triggers five or ten associations in Wright's mind, which he delivers in quick bursts of data that are strung together with 'um's." The story is heavy in history and takes time to describe where Wright works and how he dresses. Then it sets out to talk, at length about Spore. The 2006 article is, essentially, a super-long lead preview of the game. But it also stands on its own as a snapshot of a single moment in a famous game designer's life. The story also feels more evergreen because of the time it takes to lay foundations and explore histories.

A video game novice who reads Game Informer's Gears of War 2 feature might walk away more confused than they were when they opened the magazine. Sure they'd know more about the war against the Locust Horde and the technical advantages of ambient occlusion, but they may not have learned why they should care. In a moment when video game magazines desperately need more readers, it might be time to shift focus away from the needs of gamers who are already going elsewhere and start working to welcome newcomers who first need to know, "Just who is this Cliffy B guy, anyway?"