Video Game Journalism

And Gerstmanngate. Don't forget about that.

Yeah, that's what it is for me, I can say that much. When I first heard about it, I was "yeah, I can believe it" and was annoyed and disgruntled by what was going on, but I was prepared to simply continue being disgruntled about the situation in peace and mostly keep my disillusionment about the Video Game industry and its Journalism connection to myself.

But then when I looked into it more and learned that people were trying to hide what was going on and people weren't being allowed to say anything about it on various sites and getting banned for even discussing it, let alone not getting in line with the 'official story'; suddenly I got a lot more ticked off, have taken to paying a lot more attention to the story, and gotten a lot more vocal about it than I would have otherwise.

edited 24th Aug '14 11:51:36 PM by TheSpaceJawa

I have a question. In recent years, we've seen a lot more of a disconnect between journalism and gamers. Following the phenomenon of gamer entitlement, journalists view their audience with contempt nowadays and give audiences a bollocking when they refuse to do as they say, and sometimes even when they do.

For example, the shitstorm over the Devil May Cry reboot, in which Ninja Theory never stopped insulting the old games and their fans, critics took Ninja Theory's side and decided overnight that the old games were now shit despite them being considered great before, and any and all complaints about the game, legitimate or not, were strawmanned into "fanboys whining about Dante's hair". Critics gave the game rave reviews (I suspect at least a few were done to spite gamers, since they just had to put in a Take That! or two at the reader's expense, while any faults they found were dismissed or downplayed as unimportant) and they said "If you don't like it, don't buy it. Vote with your wallet." So gamers did. Dm C bombed and people bought Metal Gear Rising instead, because Konami didn't insult their audience every chance they got. Then critics had a go at gamers for following the critics' advice and voting with their wallets, again using the "fanboys whining about Dante's hair" strawman.

So my question is this. Is the open war between gamers and gaming journalists a new thing of the seventh and eighth generations, or have gaming journalists always held gamers in contempt, with the only change being that they've stopped hiding it now?

As someone who did journalism ethics in college it is absolutely stunning how badly every everyone is making themselves look in light of this. I should pretend to be surprised but honestly I'm laughing my ass off at it

It's like watching a car wreck, Pass the Popcorn some one?

^^ hard to say. Depends how much distinction you make between a game journalist and a games reviewer.

edited 25th Aug '14 7:44:23 AM by joeyjojo

Its pretty fucking obvious that game journalists hate gamers (not that a good number of vocal gamers make it easy to do so.)

But the disconnect is hilarious. The "swag" gifts that Journalists get for reviews and the free trips in "review rooms" make it hard for gamers to not see journalists as just advertisement.

Great article by Erik Kain. Its 2 years old but still relevant.

Gamers simply don't trust journalists.

edited 25th Aug '14 8:16:59 AM by Thorn14

I don't know if it's been discussed here, but I saw a video that brought up an incredibly good point.

Video game Journalism is becoming an archaic fossil of itself within the industry. I remember just about a decade and a half to two decades ago, the only real place you could learn about video games was through commercials, video game magazines, or simple word of mouth. Oh, sometimes it would slip onto the internet, but in news websites that were nichy at best. You didn't have a clue what was going on at E3 or whatever new thing was gonna come out, except when maybe G 4 TV (remember when that was a thing?) talked about it. It was either the journalists or the rumor mill, those were your only real options to learn about the latest thing in gaming. Once in a blue moon, you had like a demo disk, but you usually needed a magazine subscription to get one of those.

But now? You have information coming out the wazoo, usually from the devs themselves. They have podcasts, they have streams showing off their games, they have twitter and tumblr and whatever the newest form of social media is, they have let's players showing off previews of the game and giving their thoughts. Heck, if you're patient enough you can just wait until the game comes out, go right up on youtube, search for a let's play or walkthrough of whatever video game sounded interesting to you, and judge for yourself. Smash Bros Brawl practically perfected the art of hype with its near-perfect scheduled release of information. And now Nintendo Direct's managed to cut out the middleman completely with Nintendo handing you direct footage and news of their games on a silver platter.

So what've the journos got left to talk about? They can run interviews, yeah. Maybe give opinion pieces. But that's about it. Unless they have some sort of insider secret, most of them don't have much more to say than what their sponsors tell them to. Most of their revenue comes from the ads, and people either install adblock or just ignore them completely. So guys at Kotaku and shit just went for the lowest hanging fruit by report on and sometimes create their own controversies to get the readers pouring in. Because everyone loves controversy and clickbait. This recent debacle on the Quinnspiracy shows that pretty damn well.

And the giant silence now is because they've realized they really touched a nerve and realized just how precarious a position they might be in. And I doubt anyone's gonna allow them to keep their eyes and ears shut from the hole they're digging themselves into by trying to dismiss it.

TL;DR I think by now "traditional" game journalism's essentially outlived itself, and they need a better direction to go in than this controversy bullshit if they really give a damn about their jobs and the industry.

edited 25th Aug '14 9:40:54 AM by Raidouthe21st

If you've hadn't seen it yet, here's Boogie's thoughts on the whole thing.

Games journalism doesn't really make sense anyway . . . Compared to vehicles, and guns, and other things that get dedicated news (Besides books, which I also don't read more than the cover blurbs for), games are fucking CHEAP. 60 bucks? That's nothing compared to the hundreds or thousands you'd lay down on a firearm or a new motorcycle. Which means if you have close friends who game, you can pool your resources, buy a bunch of different games, and swap them back and forth. Who the fuck needs a middleman?

And with game devs using social media, as was said, there's really no point to there even being dedicated news centers. You want commentary? Get a youtube channel and earn some god damned respect for your opinions and the way you present them. Don't fall down the advertisement rabbit hole of working for a soulless company.

$60 may be cheap to you but for some people that's nothing to sneeze at. There does need to be some way of informing yourself before making that purchase.

The thing is that these days we have so many ways of getting such information that professional journalists have essentially been reduced to sideshows where people don't go to them for information but rather to see their own, already established, opinion of a game get reaffirmed or to tell the journalists how full of shit they are if they disagree with that opinion.

There's only two reasons to waste 60 bucks on a game to start with: 1. You like the franchise and want to support it so you continue to get more games in that franchise. 2. You want to keep up with the Joneses and be part of the conversation when everyone else is talking about it.

That first one I can see no matter what, but the second can be worked around by having good friends who share your interest.

If neither of those factors even applies to you, and you don't live in some godawful corrupt shithole where sin taxes shut down game sales, you can just wait a year or two and buy games on sale for a third or less of the cost.

ETA: The majority of my collection cost me less than 10 bucks a pop, bought over the course of the past eight years. Quite a bit of it was less than 5. The only bits of "journalism" I used for deciding what games to get? Steam blurbs and the pages on this very site.

edited 25th Aug '14 11:09:00 AM by Journeyman

Compared to similar forms of entertainment (books, film, music) $60 is pretty expensive. DVD box sets for a TV show can get close, but that's generally for TV shows that have been successful enough to go for several seasons. By contrast, most non-independently developed games cost around the same relatively high amount, so there's no guarantee that shiny new game you just bought isn't riddled with bugs and bad design unless you do some research first.

Also, while renting would normally be a viable option, now that places like Blockbuster are or have already gone out of business, and places like Gamestop don't seem interested in allowing you to rent games, it's not as easy as it used to be. Off the top of my head, I can only think of two ways to rent a game: Redbox (which requires you to have a kiosk near you and only carries a limited selection) and Gamefly (which mails you your games, so you may have to wait a few days before you can play).

edited 25th Aug '14 11:16:02 AM by IrishZombie

Blockbusters went bust not that long ago over here, so rental of games is not an option for me anymore. And there's no way I'm spending sixty pounds (thanks to the pound dollar parity thingy we have going on over here in Treasure Island) on any video game unless it's extremely good. I will trade in or wait til the price drops.

Some would say that that was caused more by the fanbase's sensitive overreaction to some out of context quotes the devs and publisher said, rather than the devs/publisher actively antagonizing them from the start. I mean, who in their right minds would actively do something like that when their main reason for making the reboot is to appeal to a larger audience? Right?

Have you met the games industry at all? That's pretty much par for the course. Which is why Syndicate came back as a shootah, instead of as a really kick ass strategy/tactics hybrid.

Arrogant fuckwits would do that and the games industry is sadly crawling with them.

Same thing when the Mass Effect 3 ending controversy was at it's biggest. Overblown or not, Game Critics in droves started defending Bioware, with IGN in particular being the loudest when it came to strawmanning anyone who was critical of the ending.

Stephen Totilo of Kotaku and Polygon released statements reaffirming their "ethics". And this Reddit post shows the conflict of interest there from both Kotaku and Polygon.

Damn, can they just try and tell the truth about this, and be transparent to us for once?

That would require that they do one of the hardest things a human being can possibly do:

Admit they were wrong.

EDIT: UGH! UGH! A million times UGH!

Things have hit a new low - Zoe and her supporters have degraded to associating people who aren't on their side with terrorists and - get this - calling them worse than ISIS.

I've heard word that apparently there was a "just joking" justification thrown around, but the fact that said joke was made in the first place speaks volumes, especially considering how seriously people are taking this situation and - more importantly - the seriousness of the ISIS situation.

edited 25th Aug '14 11:10:59 PM by TheSpaceJawa

If only there was a way to make video games more mainstream. That way video game journalism could get revenue from another source besides video games, and then maybe it wouldn't be so corrupt. You never heard of anyone thinking Siskel & Ebert were on the take.

I think video games are as mainstream as they can get by this point. Unless there's an even bigger cultural shift where video games are taken as seriously as books or movies, no normal person is ever going to give two figs about video games. Everyone's mom plays Candy Crush or Angry Birds casually, but at least in the US video games are still "lol silly nerds" niche territory at best. And I doubt that's going to change for a while while the video game community is unable to promote itself better considering how divided and toxic it's being kept.

These "journalists" need more accountability and scrutiny certainly, but being mainstream isn't any more likely to get them to shape up.

edited 26th Aug '14 7:12:02 AM by Raidouthe21st

I thought this discussion was about video game journalism, not about the Quinnspiracy. While her attempts to quash things spectacularly bungled, it's definitely exploded a lot more than it should have, but a lot more people should be focusing on the journalists, not Quinn's life herself, which this thread has been doing a good job of.

Video Game journalists are among her supporters, and have been doing a lot of the heavy lifting in the effort to make people who are upset with what's going on look like nothing more than angry, raging "mysoginists".

It's a systemic thing. The majority of Americans work grueling hours and don't have the time or energy for stuff like games. Add in family life, and what time's not spent on work tends to get sucked away. All that's left is the meager time that games like Angry Birds fill. Now, the housespouse demographic doesn't necessarily have that problem, but there's a slew of others. One of which is embodied by the saying "A clean house is a sign of a bored wife."

edited 26th Aug '14 8:19:53 AM by Journeyman

Isn't ISIS just a bunch of teenagers who wanted to play Call of Duty in real life that use religion to convince themselves that what they are doing is ok? Damn harsh comparison.