Gaming Journalists Make No Damn Sense
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My man, who cares?
The cuphead video was amusing to watch, but I don't know why anyone is willing to get worked up over it.
Out of curiosity, did this guy ever say anything controversial, or is he just a target because people don't like gaming journalists?
Who cares? People who want the professionals that write about their hobby to be competent. You start to think "How did this person get this job, if they don't even understand the basics of how to play a video game? Who hired them, and why? What sort of standards does his employer have, and why? Are his standards shared across the industry? Does this explain why games journalists spend more time talking about politics than the mechanics of the game?" and then it all starts making sense.
Actually, that was the point I wanted to make but I couldn't word it well enough (besides of "one person's garbage is another's treasure"). That aside, drama is frequently half-truths mixed with rumors and misinformation; that's garbage in my book, frequently worse than what it's attempting to fix.
And a lot of Youtube drama is garbage. Youtube is the very definition of a mixed bag, which is kind of obvious given the concept of anyone being able to upload a video. Of course 99% of it will be garbage.
But there's nothing inherent in the concept of a video critique that makes it garbage or "toxic" or whatever. That's my only point.
Takahashi is a tech writer. He posted the cuphead video so you could laugh with him. Give the guy a break.
Except he did exactly that. Two and a half years ago. And you don't care, because that's not what this whole thing is actually about. https://venturebeat.com/2017/09/08/the-deanbeat-our-cuphead-runneth-over/
Like, he previewed the game. Praised the game. Said the game was hard (It is). Didn't review the game. *Doesn't* review games, as a general rule.
But here we are, literal years later, talking about The Cuphead Example as a great gaming sin.
What, exactly, is "that"? Did he issue a retraction, correction or apology? Looking at the article (which it's not the first time I've read it), he didn't apologize for being incompetent, he instead apologizes for "misreading the tone". He then gets defensive about it and goes on to say "But there are things I will not apologize for", and proceeds to blame the people that made fun of him for electing Donald Trump.
So what do you think he did?
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This is a real apology:
This is the very same Dean Takahashi who reviewed Mass Effect (the exception to the rule?), and gave it a low score because he didn't know that he needed to assign skill points after leveling up.
A massive mea culpa and apology for a bad Mass Effect review - A+E Interactive: Your Bay Area hangout for gaming, music, movies, culture -
The movies, gaming, music, theater and arts and entertainment blog from the San Jose Mercury News
web.archive.org
This is the very same Dean Takahashi who reviewed Mass Effect (the exception to the rule?), and gave it a low score because he didn't know that he needed to assign skill points after leveling up.
...Apologized for airing his poor performance in public. Because it wasn't as funny as he thought it was.
Like, what the fuck was there to retract? Should he have rewritten his Cuphead preview to say "actually, ignore my first article, it sucks ass"? Should he have actually reviewed Cuphead despite saying he wasn't the person to do it?
Because, and this is important: Dean Takahashi never criticized Cuphead
How much prostration are we expecting somebody to do for uploading a (un)funny video of them being bad at a video game? I mean, I watch Game Grumps, maybe I don't get how being bad at playing games sometimes is a career ending flaw?
Exactly. He didn't apologize for being incompetent. He didn't recuse himself from playing games in his professional capacity until he learnt the basics. His editors didn't apologize for hiring someone who didn't know how to play games. He even calls it in the article you linked a "nonapology".
What he should have apologized for, is for being a games journalist who doesn't know how to play games.
So what I said is still true: "Nothing of the sort happened with the Cuphead example". Instead he got defensive and brought Donald Trump into it, for some reason.
So do I. It's first and foremost a comedy improv show, not a game preview/review/journalism show. So I really don't see why you brought it up.
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It always makes me proud to see one of my threads get so many pages of posts. Discussion is great, just remember to keep it civil ya'll.
Except he *does* know how to play games. He plays lots of them.
But he should blow up his 25 year career of writing about games because he didn't adequately play a 2D platformer once on camera.
His entire career should've been cancelled because it took him a few minutes to figure out a dash jump and he didn't hide his shame. At a preview event. Where he had nothing but nice things to say about the very good game Cuphead.
We're back to canceling people over a single mistake that doesn't have anything to do with anything. Not even like, a heated gaming moment or videotaping a bathroom at a convention, but a single bad spat at a game.
Would it actually matter that he filmed himself beating said level in a respectable amount of time later, or would you find a reason for that to not be good enough too?
Hmm, I'm not so sure. As noted by the Mass Effect apology, this isn't the first time he's demonstrated an inability to grasp the basics. Then there's his Doom Eternal footage, as posted by Dreiko. His latest attempt was a review of Modern Warfare, where the youtube comments are asking "Is this a bot?" and "Dude ur garbage" after he spent almost half a minute wandering around aimlessly, looking for a gun in Gunfight mode. Presumably he was playing with his co-workers or against bots, because the average online player would have smoked him within the first 10 seconds. Did I mention he was standing in the middle of the map without a gun, trying to pick up a grenade like Velma, trying to find her dropped glasses?
So yeah, I'm not convinced that he knows how to play games.
I never said anything about blowing up his career. If anything, he should be relegated to only writing about tech, and should be forbidden from touching a controller until he can demonstrate a grasp of the fundamentals. He keeps his job, nobody has to suffer his bad gameplay or ignorant opinions. Win-Win.
No we're not. I never suggested anything of the sort. Those are your words. Please do not put them in my mouth.
"I never suggested anything of the sort" he says, in the post where he suggested an entire review of Call of Duty was invalid and shouldn't've been written because the previewed multiplayer mode wasn't sufficiently 360noscope.
What KDA do you need in order to review CoD's story? What sort of sick internet trick shots should you have to pull off before you have fun playing multiplayer?
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I didn't suggest that the review was invalid. I used his gameplay video as a recent example to show how he hasn't improved.
I think your are equating basic video game capability, with competence.
I personally don't care if a game critic or reviewer is a pro at any given video game. But your footage and information should at least look and sound like you've played a video game in your life before.
But I'd also like to point out that this topic isn't meant to just bash on poor old Dean. It's meant to point out the general flaws in games media folk who contribute to a website in a paid capacity.
The article that originally spurred this whole thread was an article in which a writer struggled with basic combat in FF7 in a fairly early mission that even provides extra NPC help, so they bumped it down to easy and then COMPLAINED that the said "easy" was too easy. Which to me is like saying, "I don't want a challenge, but I want a challenge." It contradicts itself, and just isn't presented to the reader with any logical argument imo. This issue also applies to those articles that say a game is too hard. Say Dark Souls or Sekiro is too hard of a game, but usually these articles never give a reason to why they are too hard, and they never offer any solution beyond "easy mode plz" and it always feels like the writer immediately started writing the article after a couple of attempts in any given section. Like the person trying to play the game didn't give the game a chance to marinate with them and instead got upset because they didn't breeze through the first level and got upset by it.
One of the biggest problems in gaming is people don't seem to have the ability to understand what target audience is, or the concept of "not every game will appeal to every player". Games by their nature simply cannot be played by everyone. Design choices, story elements, game mechanics, graphics, something about one or all of those things will ALWAYS turn players away. When you focus test design things to appeal to as many people as possible leads to Ubisoft games, and we already have Ubisoft games so we don't need every company trying to make Ubisoft games.
But there always has to be a fight.
I don't see why it's unreasonable to ask for someone doing a job to know HOW to do that job. Writing about video games means you should know how to play video games. It's not a difficult ask.
- Mar 13, 2020
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The whole Dean thing is a waste of time. They uploaded a video they thought would be funny, apparently not reading the room and knowing how gamers would react to it when the environment against games journalists is already hostile enough. There was nothing to "apologize" for Houseman, it was dumb, silly and I suppose ruined any credibility Dean had with a lot of gamers who most likely didn't follow his work that closely already.
It's a non-issue at the end of the day that was blown out of proportion to "show" how all games journalists apparently suck at video games. People that still bring that up, or Polygon's DOOM video need to move on already. You obviously don't think the guy is credible as a games journalist, so why even bother wasting time thinking about it?
I don't get it sometimes. I'm not calling you out personally here, but I see things like this brought up all the time and I just don't understand why people act like they hold personal grudges over it. Just go find people you actually enjoy getting coverage from.
The cuphead thing is just a really good example when making the case against people who try to make you sound like an elitist or a gatekeeper. Because you are not an elitist for wanting your journalists to be better at games when they happen to be as bad as this guy. It's less about the guy himself and more a clear counter-example to the claim someone is making that by requiring certain amount of skill (which is necessary to experience the fullness of the content a game can offer hence is integral to reviewing it fairly) you're being a gatekeeping elitist True Gamer (TM).
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