Shamus Young said:
But in games that line just doesn't exist. The centerpiece of games journalism - the reviewing of games for consumers - is unavoidably subjective. You can't very well review a game without giving your opinion.
But you can separate your opinion from the facts.
The first job of the game reviewer is to determine what the developer was trying to achieve and then assess whether or not they achieved it. These are pretty objective things. Do the mechanics work? Is the game polished? Is this something the intended audience would enjoy?
The core of any professional review, and this is true when reviewing anything from microwaves to movies, is a simple matter of "Does this product do what it is supposed to do?"
The problem we've been getting into with reviews lately is that instead of determining if the product does what it's supposed to do, they're making a judgment on what the product is supposed to be doing. That's a subjective review.
The only time subjectivity should really enter a game review is when the intended audience is there for the reviewer, not the game. Zero Punctuation is pretty much the epitome of this. He has things he likes and doesn't like, but he generally is able to separate the things he doesn't like in a game from the things that the game simply does wrong.
Shamus Young said:
This makes gaming journalism inherently weird. There's no clear line between factual reporting and opinion reporting.
Yeah there is. It's a very clear line. One is professional journalism. The other is hack writing by fanboys playing pretend.
Shamus Young said:
It's all one big soup of information, all mixed together. The same people do both jobs, at the same time, and often in the same space.
As somebody who has spent the bulk of his adult life working at one of those vanishing newspapers, I promise you that I wear more hats than anybody on your staff. That doesn't change the fact that news is news and opinion is opinion.
A while back my city's mayor started a debate over whether or not to continue adding fluoride to the water supply. I wrote a story explaining the facts of how the city's water system works, how fluoride is distributed, what the local dentists had to say, what the city council members had to say, and what the mayor had to say. Objective reporting.
In my column that week, I laid out my personal opinion on the matter.
News on one page. Opinion on the other. It really is that simple.
Shamus Young said:
More importantly, gaming journalism is more intimate and connected with the audience. In the newspaper, it's rare to care or even notice who wrote any particular article. They seem to come from some unfeeling computer at the heart of the printing press.
That's called being a professional and doing your job right.
Shamus Young said:
But in gaming, it's completely normal to see bits of personality injected into an otherwise straightforward news items. An author might end an article on a studio closing by saying, "Hopefully these developers land on their feet. Best of luck to everyone who lost their jobs, and let's hope the layoffs end here." That would sound crazy in a newspaper, but in gaming it's more or less expected.
It's expected because of the already low expectations. Not because it's right.
The biggest issue in Gaming Journalism is that the journalists have very rapidly had to grow up. We are long past the days where it's acceptable to give the games media a pass because they're just writing about video games for ten year olds.
Games journalism didn't originate with professional reporters. It originated with fanboys that could string together a coherent paragraph or two. None of these guys knew better when they started injecting opinion into regular news coverage.
And that was fine when the editor-in-chief of your publication went by "Scary Larry" or you pretended to have a ninja on your writing staff, but those days are gone. Gaming is now the world's largest entertainment market. It's a multi-billion dollar industry. It's time for the games media to grow up because this isn't a joke anymore.
