You can take my thesis statement with a grain of salt, but it’s true. We have, today, the biggest, most diverse, and most interesting Gaming Journalism we’ve ever had. Whether that’s good enough, I leave as an exercise to the reader. I suspect that many readers, particularly GGers would think not, and to be honest, I think that most developers, including many of us who challenge #Gamergate on many points, would actually agree. As a matter of fact, at the end of the infamous Milo post, I gave several examples of things that merit actual investigation rather than crappy indie fundraisers and feminists who go mostly ignored anyway.
Big league games like Destiny and GTAV cost more than 9 figures, and a third of that at LEAST is usually earmarked to marketing. Is anyone following that money? Some years ago, a Gamespot journalist was fired right after giving a bad review to a AAA game. Games from big studios seem to rarely get reviews below 70%, but indie devs who can’t afford to advertise routinely do. Some companies have been caught giving payola to Youtube streamers . Companies routinely fly press around the country and wine and dine the journalists that will review them. Here’s a story about a company who hired a reviewer to do a mock review, solely so he couldn’t legally write the bad review they thought he’d give them.
Here’s the thing. We used to have a smaller, more focused games media. It was sharp. It was glossy. It printed just the previews, and once the game came out, it printed just the reviews. It was the amazing world of Print Media: PC Games, PC Gamer, Computer Gaming World, Nintendo Power, EGM and NextGen magazine. Let ol’ cranky grandpa developer tell you about it.
It was fucking DREADFUL.
I know its hard to imagine a time before there was a high speed internet connection attached to every device in the house, including nowadays some refrigerators. Back then, Internet was something that you only got if you happened to go to college, or connected at a rip-roaring 28.8K. The internet was too slow for rich images, and so if you wanted a screenshot of the hot new, utterly mindblowing ‘Tomb Raider’ where Lara Croft had tits the size of traffic cones made out of 5 polygons each, you had to haul your ass down to Kroger’s and buy a magazine.
And boy, was this content terrible. Every single fucking magazine would get their information from the same incredibly staged fucking E3 demo, and present the same information, complete with the same jokes so awful only a producer would laugh at it, to everyone. We’d also give all the magazines the same screenshots, so in this case, the best articles were almost literally the people who could arrange the same images on a page in the most attractive way while most artistically inserting the words ‘awesome’ and ‘extreme’ in the tritest, blandest of text. Oh, PC Accelerator came along, and tried to shake things up by adding tits, but it was lame, PG13 level Maxim stuff so no one cared. It didn’t really matter, though, since people chose which magazine they were going to buy based on the demo disc anyway.
The lead times of these print magazines were months, which means that every review that you saw was on a build that was old. As day one patches became more normal, the disparity between what you played and what the reviewer played became bigger. There are a few stories of reviewers being told “Don’t complain about the crippling framerate! It’s fixed in the version we sent to duplication!” I mean, seriously fucking bullshit.
And the difference between previews and reviews would also give you serious whiplash. Magazines spent 7 years telling us how Daikatana was going to be so awesome that the CD would actually fellate you, and then, two months later, give a review that called the game crushingly awful, a disappointment from start to finish. And then give a 70%, because that’s as low as reviews would go for major developers.
Why? Because revenues from selling magazines weren’t enough to sustain a magazine – the most important revenue came from advertisers. Since there were so few magazines doing ratings, getting a single bad rating was disastrous. So every magazine editor from that period of time has stories of creepy, roundabout threats. “That’s a nice advertising stream you got there. Shame if something bad were to happen to it. What say I take you to a strip club and explain to you why Mega Blood N Guts deserves at least a 70%.”
You’re an indie developer with no ad budget, though? Fuck you, you get a 36%.
And Then Things Changed
The rise of the Internet has made it vastly harder for all print media to stick around, with even venerable magazines like Newsweek struggling. But with games media, the inevitable was even more obvious. First and foremost, high speed connections – and then connected consoles – made the demo disk obsolete. Secondly, if all you’re going to do is to shove publisher talking points so far up the ass of the consumer that he can’t walk straight, it’s pretty easy just to cut and paste that shit straight into HTML. I remember two kinds of sites being in vogue back then. There were the aggregators, like Blues News and Evil Avatar, which would pretty much post press releases, maybe with one line of commentary. And then there were the sites attempting to replicate old-school ‘Extreme!’ style previews and reviews, with IGN (PCGamer’s web presence) and Gamespot leading the way.
The Internet changed some other things too. In particular, these sites needed daily news in order to get people to come back and visit them. On the other hand, publishing the same review isn’t going to get you noticed. As a result, you saw a sharp decrease in xeroxed previews, and a noticeable rise in more gossipy stories, or stories that can sustain interest for days? Something like UO getting sued in its early days might be a tiny blurb in PCGamer. In the online world, though, that’s a daily gravity well pulling players back to your site. For weeks. It was huge. It was also, to developers, an incredible pain in the ass.
In a similar arc, these sites also began to move to kill Strategy Guides. I remember working on UO and discovering that Stratics was a better source of information than anything we had in Origin, much less than whatever partial ball of stats we handed to the Prima Strategy Guide guy that became obsolete in patch 1.
In this time, there was an EXPLOSION of online gaming media. It was rough going. It turns out that its pretty easy to set up a website. It’s pretty hard to come up with a reason why people should visit your site when IGN and Gamespot exist. On the flip side, you’re STILL probably doing better than the print media, most of which by this time had gone the way of the Dodo and the 8-track tape.
And then things changed again
Around this time, things changed again. First off, the game companies discovered that they DIDN’T REALLY NEED THE PRESS. We could set up our own web sites, and there we could be sure our manufactured, glossy, marketing approved buzzwordolicious bullshit press releases were fully, 100% in our control. If you wanted to copy that information, the fans would CALL YOU OUT if you tried to deviate from whatever wording we’d sprinkled holy water.
Secondly, Twitter, Reddit and Facebook happened, which were largescale social networks that rewarded the quick dissemination of information and exciting news (which we learned to milk: “Exciting news! We’ll announce some exciting news on Tuesday!”). Which means that, if you’re one of the big sites who can get early info or exclusives by promising a large audience, your market dominance gets reinforced. If you’re a small site that can’t get that kind of content, though, you’re going to fall further behind, because you’re just hotlinking to content someone else wrote up, either a publisher or a big zine. Why the fuck do you exist? And so these smaller sites tried to answer that question.
The answer? Find a niche. Find something, some ANGLE that you can cover the games industry with so that people have a reason to choose you over Gamespot. The Escapist was the first that I know that I felt really succeeded at this angle – they basically positioned themselves as wanting to examine games as a cultural force. A little highbrow, really, and a mission statement that’s changed somewhat.
By now, the Games Industry is so large and so successful that it is completely possible for more niches to happen, and they did. Polygon focused more on social issues. Rock Paper Scissors is my favorite reporting of the indie scene. Kotaku traffics in gossipy stories and weird japanese shit I don’t understand. They start to tailor their content TO their audiences – and some of those audiences turned out to be NOT SMALL. Polygon has enjoyed massive success by exploring this otherwise ignored side of game coverage. Which is to say, the fact that Polygon’s coverage of things differs from Gamespot’s is a feature, not a bug. They have different audiences. Those audiences have different priorities. If Polygon moved to be more of a carbon copy of gamespot, there would be no reason for them to exist. They HAVE to own their niche. The people hoping they somehow stop writing stories that audience cares about are EXACTLY WRONG.
It’s kind of like if the readers of CNN got mad that DailyKos or National Review didn’t report politics exactly like they saw on CNN. Fuck that. You like CNN, read CNN. You think Huffington Post is the right place to get your news? I think you’re fucking wrong (I’m a liberal, and the site STILL makes me want to put an axe through my computer), but why the fuck should I care?
Advertisers will go where the audiences are. Each of these sites has a unique community around it. DailyKos doesn’t care if people from RedState think it’s the worst site ever. They only care if their community starts to think so. Funny thing, though. When you yell at a tribe that they’re wrong, you tend to bond them, not break them apart.
Oh, and one more thing: by now there were so many web magazines doing reviews that getting one bad magazine review no longer matters. I see people complaining that Gamespot gave Dead Rising 3 a bad review because of SJW bullshit. Who gives a shit? Game devs no longer care what Gamespot says. Game devs care what Metacritic says, and metacritic has taken all the reviews, averaged them together and given them a 71. Outlier reviews are just washed away. As for that SJW bullshit argument? None of that keeps good games from getting good reviews, as shown by GTA V’s 97%.
But Wait – It’s Changing Again: Streamers
One of the most underappreciated angles of the GamerGate event is that it really is the story of a new media form, youtube personalities and streamers, coming of age, and engaging in pretty much open revolt against the established order of web journalism. But that’s really happening here. Basically, the YouTube guys are pointing at the web guys and saying “YOU DON’T KNOW AND REPRESENT GAMERS LIKE WE DO.” And they’re right.
The old sites are reluctant to talk about #Gamergate because they don’t know how. It’s been framed as a story about them. They feel the need to recuse themselves, that anything they write will be seen as inherently slanted. The streamers don’t seem to have that problem. In fact, I’d daresay that from where I sit, it seems like MOST of the daily ‘press’ about Gamergate nowadays seems to come from this new, increasingly important form of video games criticism. And humorously enough, where just ten years ago paper media seemed positively quaint in relation to the emerging web media, nowadays the same can be true for web media in the face of the streamers.
There are so many things about the Streamers that make sense for games criticism. First off, they show games in motion, which shows the user the game much better than any screenshot could. Second, they incorporate a personality, hopefully a fun and engaging one. When you watch a streamer play a game, if he has any positive reaction at all, it feels like an endorsement. Also, the very nature of the commentary makes it very hard for streamers to simply cut and paste publisher talking points the way the web so often does. The streamer has to put these things into his own words, or he becomes inauthentic.
Oh, and did I mention fun? Streamers make games look fun. I’ve seen streamers make 15 year old games look fun. Given that fun is what I sell, this is pretty significant, and holds HIGH VALUE for advertisers.
Now then, I confess freely that I know less about streamers than I should, because I’m old and fuck change. That being said, it’s worth considering their place in the media marketplace. They are in the journalism landscape, but they are in general a lot closer to commentary than actual journalism. They do, effectively, what Jon Stewart and Bill O’Reilly does, only for the games landscape. Which is good, but it also tends to frequently bend towards entertainment more than journalism (and I’ve no doubt that some of them insist that’s what they are more interested in being. Note: Rush Limbaugh also uses that line, although usually only after following bad behavior).
Streamers have some other problems, too. Streams aren’t easily googleable the way text is, nor are they very blurbable, which makes them hard to share and also criticize (the worst part of doing my pieces on Anita and Christina was actually having to transcribe the bits that I criticized). Streamers are much better for game reviews instead of game previews. In the absence of games to review, streamers (much like Jon Stewart) do better when talking about controversy, which is why #gamergate is like catnip to them. And there are ethical issues swirling around payola for streamers that make normal media seem saintlike by comparison.
But man, they make games look fun a hell of a lot more than most marketing departments.
So What’s Good About Media Now?
Here are the things that are way better about the media than most people give credit for.
- We now have a huge ecosystem of game sites, from mainstream gaming sites like Gamespot and IGN to more niche sites like RPS and Polygon. Which means that both hardcore fans and SJWs can find media and communities that match their tastes.
- We now have TOO MANY REVIEW SITES for one bad review to tank a game.
- Sites now can provide reviews of the game that shipped, and can even update reviews and notify players if patches fix problems.
- Streaming sites now provide highly engaging, highly tactile reviews and fun, interesting commentary.
- Being online only instead of print means that column space is practically infinite. In the old days, an indie game would be lucky to get a half column blurb. Now, any article can be nigh-infinite in length, and amount of content that you can provide is limited solely by how many journalism hours you can spend writing content.
- Game companies now can and do talk directly to the fans, and the whole network is very good at dissimenating information.
- The need to have content that differs from site to site results in… gasp… occasionally very good reporting. Including, and I’ll say it, Kate Cox’s investigation into the Brad Wardell sexual harassment suit and countersuit. Sorry, guys, that was a clean investigation of a public case, leaning on publically available documents. Gamers have a right to know if their game companies are crooks.
So what’s the problems now?
1. Games Industry Journalism is an Enthusiast Press, so Integrity is always in question. Which is to say, it’s like Car & Driver or Guns & Ammo. These people are only bought by people who like cars, or guns. And as such, the only people who want to advertise in these magazines are… people who sell cars or guns. And car or gun related accessories. All of which are the sorts of things which merit coverage in the magazine. Same thing with Games. In fact its worse than it used to be – PCGamer used to get SOME of their money from the checkout stand at Wal*Mart. Websites don’t have that revenue stream.
And if you want good journalism, you need paid journalists. This is a huge structural problem for the industry, and I don’t know how to fix it.
2. All of the money comes from the big guys. Most AAA games spend 1/3rd to 1/2 of their budget on advertising. Destiny had a budget that was easily nine figures (though the number of $500M has been disputed by their CEO). Still, think about HOW MUCH FRIGGIN MONEY THAT IS. And think about what it means to spend, oh, $50-$150M on marketing. Basically, the big boys can completely and totally saturate the market with advertising. They can have full paid staffs go and shill the games and drum up press. They can force the price of advertising up so the little guy can’t afford the ad space. They can make the game seem like it’s EVERYWHERE. And the little guy can’t compete.
I keep seeing people say that the problem is that people like Zoe Quinn, Phil Fish or the TFYC are doing shady things to get, or are unworthy of, press. That’s not the problem. The problem is that if you’re one of those little guys, the only way you GET significant press is if shit goes horribly, horribly wrong somehow. Which is really fucked up, when you think about it. But the fact of the matter is that, if you want to talk about corruption in the games industry, and you’re talking about indie games, you’re basically talking about the change under the couch cushions while the big boys are lighting cigars with one hundred dollar bills.
3. The importance of streamers is still not truly appreciated. So Metacritic is the most important press input that game developers care about, right? Yeah, they don’t factor in anything from streamers right now. Hrmmm, seems kind of like there’s a business opportunity in here somewhere….
4. Some media writers get out of sync with their audiences. Let’s go back to the Gamespot review of Dead Rising 3. For me, the question is not “Is this a fair review” as much as “Is this review useful to the audience of this particular media outlet.” It’s not the reviewer’s job to represent the game to ALL GAMERS. It’s the reviewer’s job to represent it to THAT AUDIENCE. As an example, if you went to political sites to get reviews for Game Change, you would hopefully get VERY DIFFERENT reviews from DailyKos than you would from NationalReview. I find Gamespot to be much closer to the ‘standard gamer’, so I can understand some criticism there. If this review had showed up on Polygon or some girlgamer site, I’d have no problem whatsoever.
5. Game publishers have more control over their message than ever before. Now that I can talk directly to my fans, I worry a lot less that I’ll screw that message up, or that a vicious edit or unexpected/unwanted query will sideswipe me. It’s INCREDIBLY easy to keep feeding the population information, and force the magazines to fight for crumbs of information found on twitter between cutting and pasting what I put up on my official site.
6. Clickbaity bullshit headlines. You know what the problem with Leigh Alexander’s ‘Gamers are Over’ article was? The fact that ‘Gamers are Over’ was in the title. I don’t think she did it well, but she was trying to address some very troubling issues of harassment in the games industry. But because of that clickbaity headline, the article never had a chance, and it erupted into full-blown war. (edit: corrected from ‘gamers are dead)
7. Games Journalism needs to Embrace the Principle of an Ombudsman. It turns out that the New York Times gets accused of shady shit all the time. It comes with the territory with being one of the most important political players in the world. However, it’s crucial that they maintain a sense of impartiality, and a sense that their shit don’t stink. And so they have an ombudsman (what they now call a Public Editor) whose entire job is to write a column about the NYT’s own reporting, as critically as possible, based mostly on feedback from their community. Their job is like Internal Affairs – it’s to be sure their own shit doesn’t stink. Typically, they have very public contact information so they can take complaints directly from the press, and report outside the normal reporting and editor structure. This ensures they can sidestep any pressure from the editorial board of the paper.
Right now, the gaming press has actively had to recuse themselves from this story, because they are at the center of it. They are afraid that anything they say will be viewed as slanted or tainted. But that’s ridiculous. The New York Times, all the time, has to report on stuff where they are major players, such as when the NYT helped Bush in the march to the Iraq war. It’s dereliction of duty if they DON’T. The Ombudsman allows them to do that – effectively in these instances, the ombudsman’s job is to verify the story is clean and ensure that it is as transparent as possible to the concerned public.
If I could suggest one meaningful, effective thing the press could do to reduce the appearance of imagined and actual instances of corruption in the gaming media and improved transparency, it would be to embrace the principle of an ombudsman
Games Journalism is no rose. The fact that it is an enthusiast press means that there are structural problems that I don’t know how to fix. And lord knows, I still hear about hints of tons of shady stuff, and lord knows there’s a lot I’d do if I were king for a day to make it all better.
That being said, I remember the old days, and comparatively speaking, we’re living in a golden age of rich, multivaried news and commentary on gaming. For a long time, I said that the only thing I missed about the old days of magazines whose only redeeming quality is that I could easily read them on the toilet. And then the iPad came along and took that away from them, too.
To be fair, the websites *put* themselves at the center of the story when they put out the “Gamers Are Over” article storm. They picked a side, in terms that made it very clear they had no respect for the other side or anyone attached to it, in even the most minor degree. If they’re in a dilemma now, it’s because they painted themselves into a corner.
They can’t even engage the very controversy they created all by themselves, “Why did you all do it together?”, without a tacit admission they made a mistake.
–Dave
There was no mistake in expressing an honest opinion about the state of things, as observed by columnists empowered by their publications to put the times in context.
Every publication that has ever done this has risked alienating their readership. The readership has the right, therefore, to stop reading them, cancel their subs, and not acknowledge what they don’t like.
Gamers that genuinely took offense and two months later, still feel strongly, are empowered to do so. But if any of them declaring their desire to fight the man on social media expect anything to come of it that they do not make themselves (and posting on unmoderated forums is not making anything that’s designed to last), be aware that there are no scenarios in which anything special will come to you for feeling a certain way about someone else’s opinion about a broad swath of people that you might or might not identify with.
Unless you count: http://wealldraw.tumblr.com/post/41441002018/do-you-ever-just
I’m hoping to cover this in my next article. Central thesis: what was the motive?
As a note –
It appears that – as it partly arose from the #fiveguys #quinnspiracy debacle, all of these outletss received countless emails messages and the like about WHY THEY WEREN’T COVERING THIS and WHY THEY ARE A PART OF THE CONSPIRACY the day before and the day before that. It could be said that the timing of the Death of Gamer articles are largely a response to that.
And it was and it wasn’t. The phrase has been around at least as long as Ian Bogost’s How to Do Things with Videogames, and Mattie Brice subtitled her blog “Death to Videogames”, since she doesn’t hide from her activist stance. Further, it’s co-oping the language used for the metaphorical “death” of any trend – ever – in history.
People just took it as an actual threat.
Mattie Brice hates videogames since her autobiographical game wan’t so well received, but that was because she hates any sort of tool beyond Twine. If she had devoted herself to learn Unity or any equivalent tool instead of hating games with all her soul, we probably would have a masterpiece from her by now.
So… it’s bad and “shady”, but it was worse, so let’s not get upset about how bad it is?
I’m being a bit reductionist here, but you wrote a lot of words to basically just state the fallacy of relative privation.
Honestly Damion, I’ve been silently following all of your blog posts regarding GamerGate, and while it appears that over time you’ve started to come around to a slightly more nuanced view of the entire mater, it’s obvious that you are unwilling to give up some sacred cows. If your intention is to actively reach out to the GamerGate supporters, then you need not dismiss their concerns. You may think that your tepid acknowledgement of the validity of some issues is sufficient, but it actually just comes off as more insulting than anything.
If you think that you’re helping, then I can assure you that you’re not. I am probably typical of the most receptive type of audience you can hope for (life time liberal *and* a feminist) and you actually managed to put me off. However, if your attempt is to feel better with some self righteous moralizing, then I guess you’ll have to be the judge as to if you succeeded or not.
I’m pretty sure that I both began and ended my article with huge laundry lists of the way that games journalism is still fucked. It’s totally fucked. But (a) it used to be WAY WAY WORSE and (b) the things to get angry about are not what GG is getting angry about yet.
I would LOVE to have good games journalism. However, I have a different vision. In this vision, we aren’t castigating game sites for covering different beats, and more people embrace more different beats – people stop slamming Polygon for being Polygon. In this vision, streamers are recognized for being important. In this vision, indie developers get way more coverage than they do now, and world class developers like Tim Schafer don’t have to claw to get their kickstarter noticed through the cloud of Destiny-related bullshit that permeates the money bomb activision dropped.
A lot of times, people express the statement that I listen to their views and end up not agreeing with them. And that is certainly true! It’s true with Gamergate. It’s true with Anita. It’s true with Raph Koster and Will Wright. I challenge EVERYTHING, and find most things problematic. I don’t think I have ever blindly signed up for an ideology ever. And I really wish this was true of more people, about all manner of topics.
Holy Shit do we have the same vision of the future of games journalism. I want it to be in the Arts & Culture section of major Newspapers – er, I mean – Newspaper Apps, and find a place with the New Yorker audience. I want there to be a Cahiers du Cinema of videogames, a Cahiers du Ludica, as it were.
Cahiers du Cinema was started in 1954. The magazine itself is decades older than the entirety of the commercial video games industry.
Patience pays.
Note that the journal was published nearly 6 decades after the invention of the medium it was dedicated to.
Thanks for the article, I’ve become increasingly interested in how game developers view the current state of games media, so I really appreciate articles like this one.
Honestly, I struggle to like either “side” of this. I think a lot of Gamergate make increasingly bizarre claims (racketeering, devs are “concern trolling” them etc.) Tbh, I was initially taken in by some of the ideas of possible collusion in the early stages, but in hindsight I’m increasingly unconvinced. Further adding to this, I don’t see what Gamergate does which is particularly special. Don’t like what a publications does? —–>There’s a different one over here.
I do think the vast majority are wholly sincere and not driven by misogyny, I may disagree with them but I think they do truly believe there are problems with games journalism which could have severe impacts on how games are developed (Divinity Original sin is the common, and seemingly lone, citation). I must admit the Divinity example, if true, does make me somewhat uncomfortable. I’m also a bit saddened by the lack of reporting on TFYC. I understand it was a loaded subject for some but by ignoring them, the narrative was given fuel that there is “selective reporting”.
However, all told, I don’t see what Gamergate can really do as a “movement”. There have been some good things, TFYC, raising money for charities etc. But in terms of games journalism, I don’t see the “endgame”. Run people out of business? I don’t like that kind of aggressive idea. The idea of someone losing their job always makes me uneasy. I genuinely think the best answer is subscription to “good” websites.
At the core I think Gamergate perhaps overestimates the influence that people they are worried about have. I myself was interested in this until I’ve seen devs coming out saying “we’re ok thanks”. (You, Koster and Jaffe being 3 examples.)
At the same time I’ve been saddened by what appears to me to be a lack of professionalism by a number of journalists, especially on twitter. I’ve tried to see it from their perspective.
I believe, charitably, they see peer’s colleagues receiving abuse and harassment, and, to their horror, have attempted to rally to those people and present a firm stand against abuse. I did think however, that Leigh Alexander’s article was very “clickbaity” and honestly, insulting. It was a very poor article. At the same time, I believe there was a motivation behind it.
I have to stress I don’t know Leigh Alexander in any capacity so I’m just speculating but it certainly felt like it was a “straw that broke the camel’s back” moment and it felt like an article months if not years in the making, rather than imply a PR spin generated on the spot vs Gamergate in the early days. To my mind there was quite an intense(?) anger behind the words.
“They don’t know how to dress or behave.” That’s simply insulting and I struggle to see it as calculated to do anything other than insult. It’s not surprising things like this help “fan the flames”.
I believe many genuinely view Gamergate is a movement of misogyny/abuse. Again, I believe they’re being sincere. But I also think there are a number of honest complaints being made (honest, of course, does not mean correct.) and a number have given the appearance of “nailing down the hatches” and preparing for war. I do think they have a greater ability to quell some of the anger. I believe many have reneged to do so and helped make this affair as toxic as it has become. I think empathy would go a long way for a number of people here on both “sides”.
Looking at Koster’s AMA, I got the feeling that a number of people were simply quite saddened at being, in their opinion, deliberately/wilfully miss-interpreted. I think an honest discussion, or long form letter, written by some of those involved which accepts the possibility of sincere but incorrect views could help for a lot of people. I know I would appreciate it.
Sadly I know for a fact this would be decried as a “PR move” by much of Gamergate since they’re expecting some co-ordinated PR campaign to destroy them. The insanity of such a viewpoint truly boggles my mind. Perhaps it would be worth it anyway, perhaps not.
I generally agree with David Jaffe, if you think it all sucks, crowd-source your own. I don’t see any other option frankly. As I’ve said to my friend several times, Escapist to d8 = Queen is the winning “move”. Of course the publication in question might not be Escapist, but the idea remains true.
Thanks again for the article, it was a good read, have a great day.
Actually people have mentioned before the reason TFYC didn’t get attention was because they looked shady. And since they have had to post multiple blogs explaining things it seems journalist were not alone in misgivings about the group.
Also the Divinity thing is blown out of proportion, they changed one thing, the boxart, by slightly modifying the outfit the female character wore.
You haven’t lived long as a man if you haven’t been accused by a woman of bad behavior and dressing badly. If you really felt personally insulted by the Leigh Alexander article, I’d advise taking the L and moving on.
Great post on the Escapist forum earlier today, though.
The Divinity example is not a great example. That’s one of the two articles I have in the pipe. Here’s my stance:
The biggest problem with #gamergate is that it is leaderless, and steadfastly refuses to accept one. As a result, what #gamergate actually believes is a shifting, amorphous beast. It’s a Rorschach test – you see in it the things that bug you. For some people, it really *IS* about shitting on Zoe Quinn. I’ve definitely seen a whole bunch of people on this very blog bring up MRA articles, including things like disputing rape stats as real, and seen lots of comments about how all PC stuff needs to be removed from games – period.
But if you try to address these issues, people just shout at you. “WHY DO YOU KEEP BRINGING THESE THINGS UP?! THAT’S NOT WHAT GAMERGATE IS ABOUT!” Because to them, it’s not. But because there’s no leader to focus the message or cull the bad actors, trying to argue, reason, or negotiate just fails. Repeatedly. Over and over again.
This leads to several related problems.
* Shifty assholes latching onto the leaderless cause and filling that vacuum. I’ve pointed out why TFYC, Christina and Milo are bad actors. But since they are stepping up and filling the vacuum of leadership, everyone flocks to them and defends them, even as they do stuff that could be very damaging to the cause.
* Change is ultimately impossible without getting the publishers on board. Because all of the corruption actually comes from the money they provide, and at the end of the day, publishers NEED a functional games press to sell games. But publishers are never going to sign onto a cause when its so easy for it to be hijacked by these antiquated worldviews. Hell, most game companies are actually quite progressive, and NO ONE wants to volunteer to be Hobby Lobby or Chick Fil A.
* The fact that #gamergate followers don’t talk with one voice leads to the inevitable feeling that you’re talking to a brick wall. Raph spent 11 hours + engaging on Reddit the other night, and did a fantastic job. But we’re still talking about hearts and minds.
* Since the primary information conduit is twitter and nothing is blessed or verified before becoming outrage catnip at high speed, gamergaters work themselves up ALL THE TIME over unverified bullshit or tiny, insubstantial bullshit. When they are proven wrong (“Anita didn’t really call the FBI!” or “Zoe never gave money to charity”), they never acknowledge it, and they don’t recognize how much it hurts things.
If I were one of those major-league gamergate supporting streamers and I wanted to instill real change, I would push for the formation of an official consumer-level organization. Think in terms of a lobbying group like the NRA, or a pure consumer group like Consumer Reports. They could fill that role of Ombudsmen. They could give letter grades to both game publishers AND press based on meeting consumer expectations. They could be negotiated with. They could explore crazy claims being passed around on Twitter, and actually flag the ones that are legit. They could send spokesmen to news outlets to elevate their points of view. They could have spokesmen that could be sent to GDC to bring religion to a skeptical developer community. In reverse, they actually could gather research and information to be sure that the changes they are asking for are actually impactful and feasible.
But instead, we’re arguing about THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT THING WE NEED TO DO TO FIX GAME JOURNALISM, but whenever someone tries to talk about something that someone else brought up, we get told ‘THAT’S NOT WHAT GAMERGATE IS ABOUT!’ And I gotta tell you, it’s friggin exhausting.
Thanks for the replies!
@ Omegaman: I think I was unclear, here are my propositions:
1. People in Gamergate believe games journalism impacts game development.
2. *They* cite Divinity Original Sin as an example.
3. I thought I expressed being unconvinced by it by describing it as “seemingly the lone citation”.
My concern from the blog post is not in them changing the box art, that’s not a big deal at all. My worry *if it was true* was in the “members of the press” saying “do this or no coverage”. Obviously they would have that right, I just don’t like it. Am I convinced by their claim? No. I find it near preposterous given the lack of agreement from other devs. Apologies for not being clear. I phrased that horrifically.
re: TFYC: Fair enough, thanks for the info.
@ John Henderson: I suspect this’ll be an “agree to disagree” but I don’t like insults like those in articles, I simply think it’s unkind and unhelpful. Of course there’s a certain right-wing journalist whose articles seem to specialise in them, I really don’t like them either.
We may disagree on whether it’s a “big deal” and that’s fair enough. I’ll agree it alone isn’t worth what “Gamergate” became but I’m not making that claim, I simply think it helped fan the flames which is very unfortunate.
Thanks very much for the compliment, glad you enjoyed the post. I suspect it’ll fall on deaf ears for Gamergaters though.
@ Damion Schubert: “Divinity Original Sin isn’t a good example”. As I’ve said above I think I misspoke, I suspect we’re in agreement, I apologise for being unclear.
*Quote about Rorschach test and Gamergate having MRAs*
Fair enough, I can’t dispute facts that there are horrible people involved. All I can say is I haven’t seen them as a majority of Gamergate, perhaps I’m wrong since I can’t prove it. I’m also not the one being engaged by them. Doesn’t make it tolerable of course. It also means Gamergate isn’t something people want to engage with. I suspect this feeds Gamergate’s narrative of “being ignored by corrupt SJW press.”
I agree with you that #Gamergate’s issue is it’s a leaderless movement. Imagine you talk to a member of Gamergate, and both of you reach an *exact* agreement on what to do next. That’s convinced 0 other Gamergaters. Which is hugely tiring and irritating. I also believe that a leader has the ability to cull and disown the bad actors which is something sorely needed.
Unfortunately suggesting leaders has been declared a “shill tactic”. I did have some sympathy for Gamergate when it started. I don’t have much sympathy anymore. I can certainly understand *why* they think the way they do. But it seems to me to go as the following:
1. Gamers are worried devs are being constrained by external factors (ignoring corporate demands/direction etc.)
2. Devs come out and say “nah that stuff’s ok”. “But btw the harassment is public enemy no.1. ”
3. Gamergate seems to miss this point. And people are still demanding people get fired. I really, really *hate* that as a concept.
4. Gamergate jumps on random allegations and gets proven wrong time and time again. While deriding “sensationalised editorials”. The irony.
I find it strange that people are demanding apologies while having plenty of sins to confess themselves. For example: Everyone saying “Kotaku and Polygon are corrupt” didn’t even thank them for instituting new policies re: patreon. *What do you want from them!?!*. Oh, for them to go bust? Gotcha. I don’t like those sites, so I never go on them. Problem solved.
I wholly concur Raph did a great job. I personally derived a huge amount from his AMA, I don’t have a reddit account, but I’ve thanked him on twitter, not that means much really. I don’t know how/why he does it but I’m very grateful to him.
*I* was feeling exhausted reading the replies he got and I’m not even being addressed by them. I’m frankly sick of the word “shill” being banded around. These are the same people who ask “why don’t they engage with us?” with a straight face. KIA really seems to be a paranoid echo-chamber to me.
I do like your idea of an Ombudsman, I don’t know how one could be funded, but I believe Gamergate only gets a “good ending” by doing something positive rather than negative. Negative being “fire these people”. No. Seriously screw that. I disagree with a lot of MovieBob’s points but I’d be livid if he was fired. Sometimes I wonder if people realise how *big* of a deal firing someone is, especially in this kind of industry.
“Gamergaters work themselves up ALL THE TIME over unverified bullshit or tiny, insubstantial bullshit. When they are proven wrong (“Anita didn’t really call the FBI!” or “Zoe never gave money to charity”), they never acknowledge it, and they don’t recognize how much it hurts things.”
Very true, I *despise* unverified allegations being hurled around. I didn’t know whether to point out the stupid or just stay quiet. I find it tone-deaf that people can’t fathom that stuff like this harms them. On a scale of 1-10 of whether I’d want to engage with that, I’m not even going near the scale cause fuck that noise.
Sadly I don’t see how progress happens without engaging each and every person in the tag, do busy developers/journalist etc really have the time for that? Guys like yourself and Raph have already given a great amount of time to it and it really does annoy me that people aren’t grateful for such engagement.
The point stands now that I don’t *get* what Gamergate does a movement. At first I was willing to look past all the “noise” and see the points. Patreon, allegations of affairs for favours etc. But they’ve all been addressed. Maybe not in the way Gamergate claims it wants, but they’ve been addressed in some manner. All that remains is anger at the sites for who they are in general, which is just toxic.
Claims like “thar be corruption here” don’t mean anything. There’s not a statute which says “corruption = bad”, there are specific corruption offences, where is the corruption? Specifics please. All I see from Gamergate nowadays are things that have been debunked, except for like 1 thing Koster has agreed *could* be bad, subject to investigation, during his AMA.
Of course, Ombudsman solves this, out of curiosity, do you have any thoughts on how such a thing could be started/funded?
Small note: Does anyone know where this “co-ordinated PR campaign is going to be set upon us.” Nonsense came from? I’m almost convinced it was a third party stirring gullible gamergaters, that’s how stupid it is. (I do think it was all Gamergate, I just mean it’s so stupid that it almost seems plausible.)
You are aware that a lot of devs also came out and said “Yeah, this is a very real problem”
But since its reported on nichegamer and not escapist, its been completely discounted so far.
Is the objective change, or headlines? Because if there are devs in a position to care, they might be able to influence their employers’ position.
Also, being able to say it’s a problem, especially off the record, is not the same as being able to identify or exact a solution.
Especially when some of them might have been scared to death of what would happen if they said anything other than that.
Most of it is probably in association with Silverstring Media, which @legobutts works for/worked for. Beyond that, 1) people don’t understand how media works, 2) PR is media 3) see part 1.
The problems come from Journalist assuming their role is to dictate to gamers how they ought feel and think instead of honestly reflecting the sentiments of gamers in the writing. Gamers don’t need approval from those in them media, they need balanced coverage and they got little to none because the media is very corrupt. Last I checked it was the press that is accountable to the public and not the other way around. Journalist who don’t have the training in ethics or simply choose to ignore them will struggle with checking their privilege. When the public rises up in anger the media, like our politicians, and captains of industry are expected to listen. Responding to a uprising by the public with arrogant contempt is a red flag that hubris has gotten the better of those in charge.
Journalists don’t decide who is a good person or not. They don’t tell us that MRA’s are bad and Feminists are good. They don’t need to tell us conservatives are bad and liberals are good. The people actually get to think for themselves and balanced reporting gives them a chance to do that What the people get is usually spin from a group of people who behave as though they persecute any who disagrees with their politics in what supposed to be conversation about vidya.
Such an efforts to hijack an industries with politics is no different from the Red Baiting under McCarthyism. Those in Hollywood were facing purges for fear of hidden politics being spread through mass media. This isn’t unlike the claims being made by journalists about vidya who’ve embraced this old school fear mongering. People had good reason to get mad about behavior like this The Hollywood blacklist was a national disgrace that reminded us that those with great power who become unaccountable who wage ideological witch hunts to purge dissenters through the media are a threat to democracy itself. Gaming journalist purged dissent in their ranks and policed the politics of those in the industry with the threat of malicious accusations, black listing, and other forms of intimidation. The people want their freedom back.
“The problems come from Journalist assuming their role is to dictate to gamers how they ought feel and think instead of honestly reflecting the sentiments of gamers in the writing.”
—
No.
You’ve already written off “objective reporting” entirely in your definition (since you want them to reflect the “sentiments of gamers”), so we’re talking about viewpoints here.
When it comes to viewpoint pieces (and all reviews are viewpoint pieces), the press should be expressing their opinion, not putting a finger to the wind and telling you what they think you want to hear.
If you want someone to express your opinion, *express* your opinion. There has never been a better time in the history of humanity for individuals to make their views known.
—
“Last I checked it was the press that is accountable to the public and not the other way around.”
Neither one is accountable to the other.
—
“Such an efforts to hijack an industries with politics is no different from the Red Baiting under McCarthyism.”
So, you think free speech is tantamount to being dragged before the House Unamerican Activities committee? Seriously?
Because that is what you are arguing against. You don’t like what someone is saying, and all they are doing (and in fact, all they can do) is exercise their right to free speech.
—
“Gaming journalist purged dissent in their ranks and policed the politics of those in the industry with the threat of malicious accusations, black listing, and other forms of intimidation. The people want their freedom back.”
—
Well, no, they clearly haven’t “purged dissent” in their own ranks, since there is no gatekeeper on the media in a free country.
And frankly, the ability of the gaming press to “police the industry” and enforce some nefarious goal is pretty much non-existent. There are too many outlets, and they are too dependent on publishers for both money and access to do anything of the kind. The problem the game industry press has is *not* that it is in control of the industry. It’s that it has historically been a poodle press that is utterly dependent on the market that it covers.
As far as the people wanting their freedom back? No one took it away, histrionics notwithstanding. You can make any game you like, write any article you like, and publish either on a scale never before available.
So, let’s be clear. Someone saying mean things about something you like is neither harassment nor an attack on your freedoms.
The people being doxxed, getting death threats, getting actually directly harassed (on both sides) are the only people who have any claim to having freedoms taken away.
If you don’t think a journalist is accurately representing your views, then go to a different website. No one makes me watch FoxNews.
The only people really trying to silence a worldview are the people trying to bully the press into not letting the SJWs have a tiny podium that all game makers are just going to ignore anyway.
“Here’s the thing. We used to have a smaller, more focused games media. It was sharp. It was glossy. It printed just the previews, and once the game came out, it printed just the reviews. It was the amazing world of Print Media: PC Games, PC Gamer, Computer Gaming World, Nintendo Power, EGM and NextGen magazine. Let ol’ cranky grandpa developer tell you about it.
It was fucking DREADFUL.”
You lost me there, I thought it was pretty fucking great. They wrote honest articles about the games, there was limited room so they had to think about what to include, they had an honest respect for their readership and reviews were a lot more objective than they are today. They actually paid attention and analyzed the different disciplines (game/systems/level/sound/graphics design) that went into game design and made up parts of the game and things like graphics, sound, controls, the quality of the multiplayer mode when available etc. went into the score instead of writing emotional pieces about themselves that are utterly uninteresting and tell you nothing about the game.
This might come as a surprise to some people, but when most gamers read about games they want to mainly know if they are worthwhile and not if the writer is a very strong member of PETA, holds strong religious beliefs, recently joined scientology or Jehova’s Witnesses and has seen the light deciding he has to convert everyone else to his faith or has problems keeping his alcohol. This is why people are running off to TotalBiscuit and other YouTubers, because they seem to still know what gamers care about and despite any “payola” are overall seen as a lot more honest and straightforward than about any “game journalist”. Nowadays even GameInformer looks more professional and like they know what they’re talking about than most mainstream gaming sites. We’ve had gaming press before, now we have mainly tabloids whose main job seems to be smearing people for clicks and controversy.
Another secret, gamers at large don’t give much of a fuck about Metacritic and find it useful, this is the industries problem and you let publishers dictate terms based on it, not the users.
When magazines were still printed there was no Twitter circle jerking or seemingly large “cliques” of people that should hold professional distance communicating freely and providing financial and sexual support to each other like there are now, no weekly Internet drama or calling all their readers shitheels, misogynerds and basement dwellers (among other things) because they knew who buttered their bread and the most important thing it was mostly about games being fun. They similarly didn’t constantly attack game designers for artistic choices they didn’t like – and no a character assassination attack piece trying to ruin someone’s career based on hearsay is neither “very good reporting” nor a “clean investigation”.
“You lost me there, I thought it was pretty fucking great. They wrote honest articles about the games, there was limited room so they had to think about what to include, they had an honest respect for their readership and reviews were a lot more objective than they are today.”
—
Seriously? Nintendo Power was a house organ, it’s entire job was to be PR for Nintendo. PR is, let’s face it, pretty much the opposite of honest articles.
Also, there is no such thing as an “objective review”, at least not in any meaningful sense. Sure, you could recite the installation size, the target platform, and describe the box, but once you get to talking about the game, you’re pretty much all in subjective land.
What it sounds to me like you are saying is that they only covered the things about games that you are interested in, and didn’t include anything in the review that you are not. Which is fine, but that is not the same thing as “more objective”.
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“This is why people are running off to TotalBiscuit and other YouTubers, because they seem to still know what gamers care about and despite any “payola” are overall seen as a lot more honest and straightforward than about any “game journalist”. ”
—
You’ve just pretty much undercut the entire claim that this is about journalistic integrity. Payola is the opposite of integrity, almost by definition.
To me, this sounds like more of the “talking about things I care about”, which isn’t a matter of ethics at all, and is purely a matter of personal taste.
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“…calling all their readers shitheels, misogynerds and basement dwellers (among other things) because they knew who buttered their bread and the most important thing it was mostly about games being fun.”
—
Actually, when it came to who was buttering their bread, it was the advertisers. Think on that.
The miracle isn’t that there were questionable practices in the enthusiast press, the miracle is that things were as honest as they were.
Want a preview? Need to get the preview build from the publisher. Exclusive preview? Even more need for help from the publisher.
Want access to the developers? Inside information on what’s coming next? Early review builds? All need access.
(It was not all one way, there were, for example, only 12 covers a year, which is something the media had that the publishers coveted)
The irony here is that the things you seem to want (show me the new hotness, give me news fast) are the things that work in favor of the publisher and against any idea of an independent press. Certainly house organs and preview puff-pieces do.
Also, there are plenty of people giving you exactly what you want (as Damion pointed out, we are in a relative golden age of media options), so why are you all in an uproar over reviewers who disagree with you?
Your post is why I said previously on this page that historically, mass media has not chased objectivity and fairness in reporting as much as it’s just tried to give readers something they would like, and the appearance of objectivity when it suited them.
Because you present one fiery, challenging opinion and boy howdy do the wheels come off.
So, here’s the same challenge I presented earlier:
Define “gamers” in a positive light, and provide at least 3 examples.
We have that media now. That’s what IGN and Gamespot is. Those guys have fully taken the old business and content model, and moved it online. They have effectively locked up this avenue of journalism. If you try to do it too, you just get ignored, because you’re not saying anything actually different.
Now this being said, if they start writing articles from a point of view that doesn’t represent this mainstream view, those journalists might possibly need to be shown out the door. But for the most part, you have to go ‘off the grid’ to find these stories.
Put another way: IGN and Gamespot are network TV. They’re Fox and CBS. They put out the big, safe, predictable stories. They will likely never actually challenge their readers OR their subject matter. That’s what they do.
Sites like Polygon, Kotaku and the Escapist are like MSNBC, CNN and Fox News. They are smaller, and focused on capturing a fraction of the audience. If they start to just do what CBS does, they will flat out die. The readers of these magazines are actually DEEPLY interested in going a layer deeper on their coverage, discovering stories too small for Gamespot to care about. Seriously, those are the articles that get the most clicks.
And Gamasutra is like the Columbia Journalism Review. No one is SUPPOSED to read it but game devs, and 90% of what’s written on there is usually about dense shit that gamers won’t understand or care about (how to iterate on an art style. How to better use microtransactions to screw your customers).
Oh, also one more thing. Games media used to be a FUCKTON more cliquish – because there wasn’t that many of them! Dude, there were only like 10 magazines of any note, and IIRC many of them were actually owned by the same parent organizations and worked in the same building. Games media today is too BIG for cliquishness to matter too much. GameJournoPros had 150 or so people on it, half of which were devs or ‘mass’ media? Fuck, there are either hundreds or thousands of web sites trying to make money talking about games, and either tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people actually doing it.
In this metaphor, I assume Zero Punctuation is the Daily Show?
I would say that, probably yes, and that the streamers are Rachel Maddow, Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh — commentators with a marketable personality moreso than journalists.
To add –
Daily Show specifically goes after media sources. Perhaps there needs to be a sort of games journalist outlet that does that?
I have no deeper knowledge of US magazines before the Internet, but I can tell you that I enjoyed the ones in my country immensely (I recognize some of the brand names, don’t know if they were owned by the same parent companies) and they had a lot better writing and content with staff that were actually passionate about games and knew a thing or two about them instead of trying to insert their own politics in pieces that are tangentially about games.
You know what I’d want to read in-depth analysis about? Gameplay mechanics, game world, game design, technical facts and so on.
Also your analogy is wrong, IGN and GameSpot are just industry mouthpieces and if you want to compare Kotaku and Polygon to anything maybe The Daily Mail and a much shittier version of the Huffington Post or if you want to go with TV maybe TMZ and TheCW. They don’t challenge me into anything other than face palming over the sheer stupidity of it all. That you think they do might say more about you than them. And The Escapist is FOX News?
“dense shit that gamers won’t understand or care about”
Also seems very telling as to your thought pattern towards what you see as “gamers”. Your assumption that everyone playing them is a mouth breather might have something to do with the attitude.
“there were only like 10 magazines of any note, and IIRC many of them were actually owned by the same parent organizations and worked in the same building”
There’s not much wrong with that, gets into really shady territory as soon as all these “journalists” get together to “cooperate” on any sort of news reporting. People in other fields would have lost their jobs (as they did in 2010).
Some of the above commenters also sound like they need to listen to Dr. Lisby’s interview about objectivity in journalism or read some of the late articles in regards to it (like on GamesIndustry.biz or various Medium pieces). If there was no objective worth to judging a game and designing it then there would be no need for game design formalities in the first place, because if a game turns out great or bad is subjective after all. You could have a spinning cubemap that is “so artful reviewers start to cry” or a game about a mountain that reminds you of screensavers in the 90s that would beat AAA budget games in quality and entertainment.
Why spend the budget on all the different disciplines required to make a worthwhile experiences in the first place?
It is important to be aware, when talking about media, that we are not the consumers. We are the product, and we are being sold to the advertisers.
Which is why magazines like Nintendo Power (which was pure advertisement of Nintendo Products BY Nintendo) was different from modern media: as pure advertisement, the readers were not the product. The product was Nintendo Games, and they were being sold to us. And we liked it.
But it wasn’t journalism: what you want is better _marketting_.
The day I connected to the internet and was able to download game patches was the day I unsubscribed from my regular gaming magazine (that’s over a decade ago now, closer to 15). Truth be told, I’d stopped reading the reviews a long time before that, my interest was held by the aforementioned patches, the dry sarcasm of the game reviewers, and Charlie Brooker’s backpage commentary.
I guess one of the advantages to growing older is you start to see through the hype of the ‘next new thing’. You’re less willing to buy into over enthusiastic reviews or artificially inflated game reviews. You’ve gained a few more life skills that let you make your own enquiries into whether you will like a game or not. Perhaps more importantly there are a whole host of competing priorities in your life that push ‘Must have on launch day.’ further and further down the list.
There may be exceptions to this, when I heard about ‘Elite: Dangerous’ being developed I was like a school kid again, alas I missed the Kickstarter but Frontier got my Premium Beta access money (money I’ve already had far more game time out of than many other AAA games I’ve purchased).
But, far more often games now have to survive my ‘Inspection on You Tube’ test. About a week after release I’ll hop onto You Tube and have a quick peek at the game. If the walkthrough guides hold my interest then the game stands a good chance of being purchased.
What I’m looking for in these You Tube clips is ‘actual’ gameplay by an average gamer (annoying voice over optional, there’s always the mute button). I really don’t want ‘live action’ adverts that do not show any in game footage. I tired of this a long, long time ago; although the ‘Destiny’ adverts have served to remind me just how patronising this practice is. Or to be shown the set piece fights, I really want to know about things like; How often are loading screens and how long are they?
In many respects I’m surprised some of the big publishers haven’t latched onto this source of information more aggressively. I guess they still base a lot of their success level on that first rush of purchases though. Those purchases driven by pre-orders and the ever hopeful, over enthusiastic fan base, unable or unwilling to postpone their instant gratification a week or two until they see footage of the actual game.
Your writing is pretty spot on, I definitely agree with your point that an ombudsman would do a lot of good for the industry. For all press really. Because we live in the internet age, and things move at the speed of light.
The one point I do want to address is the focus of gamergate on the indies rather than AAA. And I believe the reason here is that it is a case of low hanging fruit. Some indies left a trail all across social media of dealings and things that don’t look on the up and up. But the AAA PR machine would not get so careless. Their messages and dealings are in private e-mails and conversations behind closed doors. The only way those stories could break is if those involved would bring them out. And I believe that is going to be an important thing that needs to be addressed too. We need to create an environment and culture where reporters or publications can come forward and speak out about AAA publishers forcing them to write positive press. We need to create a culture where these kinds of dealings so regularly brought to light and shamed, that they no longer become common practice.
There’s no way for anyone to be the ombudsman for “the industry,” as the industry is a bunch of individual companies. But we do have them to a degree, they’re just not empowered to do much, and their ability is scattershot.
They’re called “community managers” and they eat bees for a living.
If you want culture, start by respecting one another’s humanity, even if you don’t like or understand the other. #gamergate did NOT start with that notion, and the worst of the division is based on not knowing or caring about the people at the other end of the Internet.
*swipes tears from laughing away*
CRM/CM = Ombudsmen; Oh John you Joker! That was a real funny one.
The best ones are exactly that. They are few.
My only gripe is you capped “Rock Paper Shotgun” “Rock Paper Scissors” in the article.
Once I got internet access I stopped all my magazine subs, and eventually stopped reading any review that had a number designation (Graphic: 8.5? What the hell does that mean?). I think you’re spot on with regards to sites being like news outlets and churning content for a smaller audience. Now that gaming is so huge, it’s easy to cut a chunk away and sustain a business off of it. The same goes for podcast, streamers, etc ad nauseum. I find it amazing that people find Game sites to be some sort of power broking sacred cow. Games are such a subjective thing that the best you can hope for is find a site, or journalist that has similar taste in games and follow what they say about certain games.
I think the idea of an Ombudsman is kinda silly. No one is doing objective reporting on games and rating them in such a way. No one is doing objective reviews of movies (Camera Work: 8.5 rating). I think Gaming “reviews” are finally getting to the point movies were at a decade or three ago. New voices are speaking to a smaller segment of the consumer. There’s still plenty of tit’s and guns in movies, but there’s also a vibrant indie scene that didn’t really exist or generate buzz prior. I’m looking forward to games getting to that point.
A nice recap. I was looking through older games journalism articles and it appears that Sega in the 1990s was really instrumental in kicking off the ‘games journalist events’ that flew people in from all of the country in order to promote a game.
One of the other things that people seem not to understand about ‘hard’ journalism as practised by newspapers is that it was funded by not only advertising and direct sales, but also classified ad money. Video game sites can’t get direct sales (no-one likes a paywall!) and the classified ad space is owned by eBay and the like, leaving gaming sites to subsist on thing gaming ad money.
The irony is that in trying to drive non-gaming sponsors from gaming sites only gives game publishers even more leverage to encourage positive coverage of their titles.