Sigmund Av Volsung said:
They are essential practices, but Journalism courses and degrees familiarise and help students internalise those principles. SuperBunnyHop is a fantastic example, and it shines through all of his work and I believe it's precisely because of said qualification.
Not necessarily the case, nor does pointing to a general job description mean you'll be held to that in the real world. I've written reviews and reported for money, and my father spent a decade or more as a reviewer.
And yes, the sense of investment that a lot of gamers have towards their games is problematic, but that brings things back to what I said initially: there's a lack of professionalism in games journalism. There's no respect for journos, and that's because they literally are just other gamers.
And if I wrote a review that mentioned GTA's sexism, do you honestly think it would be taken better?
I actually did, on a blog which has gone more in depth about my experience (Which I've gone out of my way to not link to my profile or activities), and I got a pretty nasty response from people who have issue with "social justice warriors," people who think I'm "not a real gamer" and people who were just upset that I criticised the game I hate so much I've played it for literally hundreds of hours (my play time on GTA Online can now be measured in months, actually). I have two YouTube channels which have featured GTA footage and one of them is exclusively GTA footage at this point, and this isn't enough demonstration of my cred as a "gamer." Which, for the record, I'm not, but that's another story.
For the record, I believe GTA V is my highest-reviewed game ever to be posted on said blog. It still wasn't enough. Because I gave some readers the sads by bringing up legitimate points that they just didn't like.
Thankfully, I don't have a large reader base, so I probably avoided most of the shitstorm that comes with daring to say honest things about video games.
Because I tried to talk to GamerGate about journalistic standards and practice from my (again, admittedly limited) experience with journalistic ethics, and they threatened to kill, rape, and out me.
Then there's also the fact that GTA V reviews were followed by ravenous hordes of maniacal fanboys and you get the perfect shitstorm.
Almost every high-profile game is like that. That's kind of the problem. You can't just say "it's GTA." It's any major game. Hell, I've seen it with Dynasty Warriors. Not the death threats and the mentions of sexism, but the outrage that Dynasty Warriors X only got a Y score. Relatively niche markets still have these fits. Hell, I've got crap for being "unfair" to niche games. Or being "too fair" to niche games. Or, basically, speaking about gaming.
zinho73 said:
I do not think he was bought, I do not think he was going the "easy way" (specially because he knew he was going to get flack for the Dragon Age Inquisition review), I even think he was insightful sometimes in other reviews, he was just being more a fan than a journalist, which is not what most people expect from a news site.
I honestly can't speak to that. I've never play past the first DA game, which I didn't not like. I don't know what the claims are about the game, or the validity of said claims.
If I were to return to GTA, however, I felt like Greg Tito's GTA V review told me more or less what I needed to know about the game. It informed me despite his opinions not matching mine (I didn't care if M,T, and F are terrible people or need a justification to kill things in a video game). A lot of people still took issue with his description of the game's story, characters, and what passes for "satire" (where Greg and I actually are of similar minds). A 3.5 is lower than I would have rated it (or did, since I did rate it) but it meets with the picture he paints: if these numerous things bother you, this is a deserved score. If you don't care, then it probably shouldn't bother you. Gaming reviews should assume a broad variety of players, not just people who want to explode everything in sight.
In fact, one of the good things about sites like Metacritic is that they ostensibly give you a broad range of views. I don't look at aggregate scores so much as why the people are saying what they are. Which, by the way, is why it's bullshit that so many people havce started blaming reviewers for low scores hurting a dev financially. We should be looking for honest reviews, not scores which are padded because "the developer has to eat."
Maybe he was under-critical of DA2, but I have no practical experience to answer that. The reality is I probably won't buy another Bioware game again, barring some radical shift in the company. So I can't talk to Greg's review on the subject. I do, however, know that this followed him through his entire run here.