Mile Zero

Jan 05, 2006

Something Awful's Worst Gaming Articles, 2005

I agree with pretty much all of it. Even the part at the end when they mock the Escapist. Part two is here

I try not to rant about this too much nowadays, but the real problem with game journalism, as I see it, is the people who call it journalism. For the most part, "game journalists" are reviewers who have decided that they're going to elevate the culture through reviews. It doesn't work that way. First of all, you don't see reviewers in any other situation claiming to be journalists. The review is not the same, bluntly speaking, as actual investigative work. They did not have to call sources. They didn't have to verify facts. They didn't really have to synthesize anything. Writing for Consumer Reports, to draw an obvious analogy, does not turn you into Dana Milbank

Second, the review is the problem. Trying to analyze and fix the problems inherent to gaming culture with a review--no matter how clever it might be--is like an arms dealer protesting against war. It's counterproductive, and stupid. You can't enlighten anyone when your entire publishing industry is a poorly-disguised marketing ploy--and make no mistake, that's exactly what it is. Perhaps the assumption that gaming even really has a "culture" is to blame. Is it really that different from online behavior, which is not that different from offline behavior? I don't think having a jargon should really make a hobby into a "culture." It's a grave misuse of the term.

Games are artifacts of a wider culture, not something exclusive to their own community. Right now they are mostly commercial artifacts, due to the lack of a coordinated independent scene for gaming. This should be obvious to anyone who's a critical observer. Writing reviews for this community is a niche role and a necessary one, but it's not really journalism. I'm a little offended by the implication that it is. As David Neiwert observes, the standards may have degraded somewhat, but that's not an excuse. Athenae wrote a while back that "'Journalist' is a term, as a former editor used to tell me, for somebody who worries about his clothes too much." I don't like to think that, because I feel strongly that it should be a term that means something more, that means something about the Truth with a capital T. But for the current crop of people writing about games, it certainly seems like the case.

17:53 x Thomas x /gaming/media/online x link x 1 comment