AkaDad said:
My deepest and sincerest apologies for not being calm after someone accuses me of lying. What was I thinking?
Thanks for suggesting the proper way to comment, I'll take that into consideration.
Anyone who wants to ignore the abuse that gamers, reviewers, and journalist have taken over the years can, that's up to you, but it doesn't mean that it didn't happen. Jim Sterling still gets shit on for his Vanquish review.
I also shouldn't have to put up a disclaimer that says I'm not talking about all gamers, I mean come on.
I'm not saying you are a liar, friend. But I was saying you are wrong. Either someone lied to you, or you went a little lazy with your research, or just haven't really gave it much thought. Hey, this sort of things happen, right? That's why we have conversations with other people, so we can share our thoughts and compare notes and come to conclusions together. Otherwise what's the point of foruns, right?
Ahem. (This one got a lot longer than I planned).
People who voice their opinions publicly often "get shit" from others who disagree with 'em. In order to understand how this happens I will ask you to bear through a brief interlude about my nation's favorite hobby: soccer.
Why don't you see soccer managers whine about how Soccer Fandom is Dead and how Soccer Fans are the most horrible people on Earth? Mind you this is a fandom where people travel several miles, into foreign countries, to kill each other over their club. Not figuratively, literally. These people kill and die by the hundreds, in the whole world, every year.
Now all these people, the fans, the players, they all have twitter and instagram accounts nowdays. Like most (but not all) journalists, players sign contracts about expanding their personal media presence, their online relevance. They get hassled, they receive, every week, more harassment than Zoey Quinn and Anita Sarkeesian have ever received and will ever receive in their entire lives. Not to mention that week-in week-out they will have to perform great acts of physicality in front of a crowd of several thousand people who will scream and chant horrible insults at players, refs, and coaches. So, you know, they have to perform their job under a little pressure.
Why don't you see any of these people whining like a fucking pussy on Twitter about how they receive death threats (please refer to how soccer fans kill each other by the hundreds every year) from their fans, and how their fandom is the worst kind of people in the world?
Because they are professionals who are prepared to this. They have classes on how to handle social media, how to behave online, what to do when someone harasses you for doing your work in ways that are unpleasant to some people. And they act like fucking professionals.
Now let's get back to Game Journalists.
Game Journalists are not very good in what they do. They have little training on anything, they sometimes fail at doing their job correctly in one way or another, and most (but not all) do not have an academic background in journalism.
Let's take Stephen Titilo for an instance: the editor-in-chief in one of the biggest game news websites of the world proudly has a Master's degree on Journalism. In my professional area if you don't have a master's degree and at least two MBAs and dozens of publications nobody's even gonna call you back after reading your job application. Because, like any adult like yourself knows, serious business require people with preparation and who are armed with the best practices available on the market.
But on game journalism, you see, there's this paradigm that anybody can write and be a journalism. Because writing stuff that other people have done is something that you used to do on your homework back in high school, so anybody has some experience and knows how to do it properly, emmareet fellas? The general consensus seems to be that you don't really need to know how to do your job in order to perform it correctly.
Which brings us to the current events.
Nevermind that this whole shitstorm happened because the editor-in-chief of one of the biggest game journalism websites of the world let one of his writers publish an article about another one of his writer's girlfriend-ish without checking the sources (I'm talking about the article where a certain game developer was allegedly harassed by people from Wizardchan. Journalism 101, always attempt to contact all the involved parties), just take a look at how this so called professionals react to criticism, about how Sarkeesian is scared shitless of people having doxxed her, even though there little or no evidence of people killing each other on real life over this.
This is the kind of tantrum that people used to throw on Blogger, usually when another user criticized their picture years ago. This is the behavior of amateurs. Knowing how to deal with your fan base and especially how to deal with internet comments is part of the fucking job, and is something that every single "journalist" seems to suck really fucking bad at doing.
This thing that is happening, all these journalists "harassed", this really, really sucks for the individual people involved, but it's really fucking good for game journalism as a media. This is the time bigger media corporations like Gawker start throwing some money on training their employees on the basics of their roles, or to review their current "we're like a blog, only not" business model.
Now, while I can understand empathizing with the people involved (because I do empathize with 'em. I've seem smaller-scale similar shit at my office and it was brutal), while I support that people should always keep civil in conversations, I can't agree with your position that the public is at fault on this one. Sure, some people are not helping at all, but placing the blame on how the public because they got mad after going to the best restaurant in town and getting served a plateful of crap when they ordered the steak of truth, seems to me like trying to oversimplify something over-complicated on it's own nature.
