Is there any merit to it or is it just more gamer seething?
There's a multitude of factors at play here.
It's a young profession by any means and it's not far removed from the transformation of 10 dudes who like the video games start a cool zine to tell you stuff, with all the suburban white guy bias that brought with it, to being a bit more professionalized and then being a mouthpiece for publishers and full of dumb shit.
Which kinda harkens back to the predominant moron moment the capital G gamer scene at large has, they demand their medium to be taken seriously as an art form, which I genuinely agree on, but then they also want objective product reviews and those two are not things that go together well. Which leaves you at a product review that tries to take itself much more serious than it has any right to be and that's just very, very hard to pull off without it being shit. You can't tell someone to buy a Ford Mondeo 2010 because it's a sensible, good product and also wax about how it's a piece of art unless you're very good at your job, and there's very few game journalists which are that good at their job. Most of the ones I see seem to have found an entry into art mostly via videogames, which is fine and all, but they lack any analytical skills to figure out something interesting or any broader swath of knowledge about anything but videogames to contextualize any of it to make an interesting point.
I think the length of game's also plays into this. The youtube video game way too long video essay scene makes, at least for this moron, really good interesting videos about games with an approach that is much more analystic than it is reviewing a product for it's use, but then those videos come out 5 years after the game was new and take 3 hours because all the video games are so long.
Like some of them shits run on for 100 hours, for better or worse reasons, but gamers still want a review ready to go about 3 days, better before, the release date to tell them whether this product will produce enough endorphins in their brains for it's price. And so large parts of the industry try to mix the two and it never works.
There's the other reporting, labour practices, sexual harassment and what have you and the gamers seethe at having to think about what they're supporting with their money, the racists, the chuds w/e, but that's hardly a problem of games journalism, that's just journalism now.,
TL;DR: the average gamer depends on the video game both as his only form of relation to art but also a product and thereby sets impossible standards onto the coverage which
I don’t think bloggers who write about how much they like Dark Souls and NYT foreign affairs ghouls have much in common beyond sharing the title “journalist”
Sam Biddle used to be at Kotaku during G-gate and currently works for The Intercept. Some other guy I recognized from the G-gate ended up trying to do Russia stuff (I forget for whom) and got played into being photographed seated beside a Russian neo-Nazi, discrediting him over there.
Like someone else said, part of the problem is that "games journalism" is full of people who don't care about the medium and want to drop the "gaming" part of their job title off asap.
In other words, to some extent, gaming journalism is like a farm league for more serious journalism. So, there is a common thread to be examined.
Plenty of people who program games move on to other industries when they grow frustrated with the conditions of the game industry. That does not mean they never had an interest in games
Yeah for sure. I mean across the whole industry, it's automatically mostly shitty
I dunno about :reddit-logo: gamers, but I hate them because they too often act as public stenographers for whatever the billionaire publishers state, give them glowing reviews, and never question their awful labor practices and workplace abuses. I also hate them for not taking awful devs and publishers to task for their awful takes, like when the 6 Days in Fallujah devs said the warcrime simulator was not political and they left it at that, or when they interviewed the CoD MW4 devs about what politics the game was advancing and they couldn't be bothered to press them harder on what they meant by their "apolitical" game. This keeps happening over and over again, and the meain fault is that gamer press doesn't criticize or analyze the industry's own practices as a whole instead of focusing on their product output.
Totally agree here. Why are they even called journalists? Are they not just advertisements for videogames under the guise of "articles"?
There was one instance where the devs of CoD WW2 made the confusing decision to include black Nazi soldiers in the multi-player and when confronted about how bizarre that is, rather than offer a historical explanation or get into the politics of a decision like that, they instead side stepped it entirely and were like "it's just a game, bro. You can make your own character." (yes I know there were black German soldiers in the North Africa campaign it was still really weird)
There were Muslims, and Jews, and Russians, and French, and Danes...the Nazis were remarkably diverse for being Nazis.
Games journalists used to be pretty shitty, like the joke about IGN "worst game ever, 10/10" but they've come a long way from what I've seen. They seem to be more critical about games and actually touch on relevant shit in society in their reviews now. But the brunt of the hatred journalists get from G*mers is due to gamergate.
#gamergate called gamers out for being misogynist, racist freaks and they responded with an extended outburst of incel rage. I'm still surprised one of them didn't burst into the offices of Kotaku and mow down every woman in the place.
To their credit, the games journalists would have none of it and bravely resisted. Even today you can find a general disdain for gamers and constant interweaving of themes they hate in any reporting.
Other people answered better than I did. Some of it is legit but a lot of it is manchild whining.
as far as video game media magazines or websites existing mostly as extra advertising space for big publishers, it's all true. publishers reward video game magazines that provide good coverage and/or good reviews with insider scoops, access to early review copies, etc... which is an invaluable resource for any news outlet competing with other news outlets. but i think gamers have a diffuse idea of how profit motive works so they tack on whatever ad-hoc theory they can imagine into why IGN is "corrupt" (their words), the most popular just happened to be some baffling story of sexual bartering you happen to know as gamergate.
i think game reviews with a score are a thing of the past though, consumers are too savvy now and either they'll trust their own instinct or follow individual curators whose opinion they trust before buying a game, so early access is becoming less of a valuable resource, which means some outlets can now start to skirt the line drawn by publishers, which is good and i hope this keeps up.
A complete misunderstanding of the profit incentive does seem to do wacky things to a person's brain. They end up coming to the conclusion there must be some organized group effort to do things simply out of a desire to make g*mer types miserable.
If they have any brains at all they coordinate on slack or discord servers privately to make content that pisses misogynist incel gamers off.
This happened either because gamers became Qanon weirdos or journalists have lost much of their authority. Everyone and their cousin has a YouTube review channel now.
Yeah, prolly, the press also died down a lot scale wise, it’s 2-3 big sites and individual reviewers. Outside of 9/10 ign, people seemed to checked out to their favorite vlogger, and calmed
Journalists that cover almost any topic are awful. Almost every word they publish is either bullshit filler or a lie that makes them money.
Video games are unique in that it's extremely easy and inexpensive to buy the products they shill and see they are full of shit when they say it's good. Nobody is buying a bunch of cars to see if automotive journalists are full of shit (they all are). Nobody can afford to buy every piece of hobby related equipment to see that the reviews are all bullshit. As long as a journalist doesn't shill for a product that doesn't work at all, you probably won't notice that the expensive gear you are buying based on reviews is actually extremely average and overpriced.
But it's pretty easy to drop $60 on a 9/10, game of the year - IGN title and see that it's some generic shooter with four hours of single player and $200 worth of dlc. And it's pretty noticable that somehow all the good games you own made by smaller developers that can't afford to bribe the reviewers get low scores despite everyone who plays them saying they are awesome.
. And it’s pretty noticable that somehow all the good games you own made by smaller developers that can’t afford to bribe the reviewers get low scores despite everyone who plays them saying they are awesome.
What are the good games that are getting low scores?
Idk, but go on metacritic and you can find a ton of games were the journalist and user reviews are very different.
Like most reactionaries, gamers take real phenomenon and then extrapolate the worst possible conclusions. There are real instances of magazines and websites colluding with game developers to ensure better coverage, but that comes with the territory anyway. All the ads are for games, so how would it look to publish "horrible game 2/10" next to a two page spread advertising the same game?
The actual two things gamers focus on are: the supposed inability of journalists to properly play the games they cover and the supposed socially liberal progressive agenda being pushed. Both of these have been extrapolated by gamers as some sort of organized plot to make all video games into simplistic, slow, story driven games containing academic writing addressing concepts like homophobia or feminism. Since they're mostly reactionary young white men, anything involving story or concepts not addressed to them personally is interpreted as confrontational. At least, that's what g*mers were upset about like 7 years ago. I think nowadays they expanded their horizons to hate typical sorts of journalists as well.
There was a big deal about how political themes do not belong in games, which is a frankly bizarre stance for them to take. Go ask them some of their favorite games and one of them will inevitably say Final Fantasy VII or Half-Life 2, two games about being a terrorist against an evil energy corporation and leading an uprising against a dictatorship respectively.
In short, g*mers are racist and misogynist.
g*mers are garbage people that run on hatred of just about everything, but games journalism is mostly paid-for garbage too
but game journalism gave us this timeless image so i cant be too mad
