Your idea of game journalism

[Sigmund Av Volsung]

What games journalism should be?
It should be less so a buyer's guide, so much as an academic examination and discussion of games. Review scores should not exist, and journalists should be given free reign to say what they want to say, without the presence of corporate interests or community backlash influencing their writing.

When reviews shift away from evaluating a product, and assessing an art, then Games Journalism will be properly manifested. Downside is that games are still at that intersection between a work and a product, with mentalities often leering towards conceptualising a game as an item first. I find that idea to be detrimental.

Oh yeah, and there should be tacit standards in place for journalism. One of them would include the consideration of alternate interpretations, and doing background research on how the game was made. Thematic or non-standard discussion in the review should be fully fleshed out, and avoid completely from making any broad statements with an authoritative tone.

 

[tippy2k2]

What games journalism should be?
It should be less so a buyer's guide, so much as an academic examination and discussion of games. Review scores should not exist, and journalists should be given free reign to say what they want to say, without the presence of corporate interests or community backlash influencing their writing.

When reviews shift away from evaluating a product, and assessing an art, then Games Journalism will be properly manifested. Downside is that games are still at that intersection between a work and a product, with mentalities often leering towards conceptualising a game as an item first. I find that idea to be detrimental.

Oh yeah, and there should be tacit standards in place for journalism. One of them would include the consideration of alternate interpretations, and doing background research on how the game was made. Thematic or non-standard discussion in the review should be fully fleshed out, and avoid completely from making any broad statements with an authoritative tone.

Do you think there would be a demand (or enough of a demand to keep a website going) for that kind of analysis?

Maybe I'm wrong here but most people I know use game sites to determine if they should buy games. Having analysis in there is a nice bonus but if it's JUST that, could that work?

Go into "Featured Content" on here and you'll see a big difference between viewership of the "analysis" stuff and the "review" stuff (this is obviously all anecdotal but I think it's relevant):

"Critical Intels" last two articles have 412 (Assassins Creed) and 512 (Last of Us/Advanced Warfare) views as of now. The last two "Experienced Points" did a bit better with 1999 (Anything be off topic in gaming?) and 944 (Frame Rate) views; although Shamus are overall points about the industry and not individual games.

The latest reviews have 6790 (Dragon Age; which also was just posted less than one week ago) and 2182 (Call of Duty Advanced Warfare) views.

I suppose your idea could be a great niche one but I don't think you could ever become Kotaku or Escapist or any of the "big boys" level of coverage.

 

[Something Amyss]

I'm afraid I don't know what you're referring to when you say "Both of these are acceptable to ethical journalism" though. Unless you mean "monitoring" and "investigate and interrogate"?

The part before it, where I said:

not because it doesn't meet journalistic standards (questionable) but because it doesn't portray his "side" in the appropriate light. OR because something nice was said about the other "side."

Taking for an extreme example, the Westboro Baptist Church. A journalist covering WBC has no journalistic obligation to portray the WBC as positive or their critics as negative for the sake of fairness or reporting both sides. People seem to want gaming media to enter into a form of false equivalence I call an "illusion of fairness."

Well it'd be nice if they all did that too.

But at the same time, it seems wholly unnecessary.

I mean, honestly, do you think there is some sort of problem going on elsewhere in entertainment journalism? People have literally demanded things while comparing game journalists to Roger Ebert, who may have had a code of ethics but it didn't stop him from doing some of those things (like reviewing movies by/featuring people with which he had relationships). People cite the New Your Times' ethical guidelines but ignore that things they want (such as accepting review copies) are done by the times. Based on the reality of these other industries, there should be all sorts of backdoor deals.

Or maybe these safeguards are largely unnecessary and put people through extra hoops for a job that isn't exactly great to begin with.

Well a simple Google Search of "Gamers are dead" comes up with articles from Kotaku, ArsTechnia, and Gamasutra all released on the 28th/29th of August.

So already not the same day. You couldn't even get to three examples without violating the same day principle. One of those three articles also is reporting on the trend, citing one of your other examples and another to talk about a trend in coverage.

And are you saying the mailing list doesn't exist, or that the people on the mailing list never colluded to release the articles.

I'm saying neither. What I will say is that the claims of collusion and same-day articles are false, because they are based on lies, damned lies, and dishonesty. The "same day" thing didn't exist as it is represented. The people who supposedly "colluded" aren't all on the list. And counting things like news roundups is whole-handedly dishonest. By that argument, the people who complained about this

I should note, in the interest of disclosure, that I know Dan Seitz, one of the guys who is sometimes lumped into the mix (though his article was posted in September). If anyone thinks this impacts my opinion on gamergate, I think uproxx is a tumour on the neck of media. I also think Dan's generally full of crap, and it annoys me to see him comment on my friends' walls/feeds/whatever they're called now. But now he's part of gaming's illuminati.

If the articles are right there and still on the sights that published them, I wouldn't call them lies. If people still include articles that were published months or years before though, they shouldn't be.

But that the articles are there, and that you pointed to three (one of dubious quality) doesn't actually prove that they colluded. That people frequently mentioned in this conspiracy weren't part of the list debunks the conspiracy, but I can't disprove that they in no way colluded ever. I mean, that's not the way evidence works. I can evaluate a specific claim like the ones here, but I cannot evaluate whether or not people privately colluded (say, off-list).

Also, it seems that GameJournoPros was not as top secret as people claim it was in the first place. It's a bad sign when you have to drum up the opposition as some terrifying secret organisation.

A similar instance would be the relationship between Gearbox and Destructoid, which nobody seems to have hid. Ever. In fact, gamergate didn't seem to care about this relationship until Anthony Burch pointed it out (and then we had someone on here try and get us to abuse the FTC with fraudulent claims), and it died down by the time Jim Sterling addressed it.

Phony claims from the earliest days of this movement still persist, but I keep having to ask why it's different with Gearbox and Destructoid/The Escapist (Where Jim was reviews editor until recently).

But more to the point I'm curious as to how much research you've actually done. Did you take these claims at face value? When I look at GameJournoPros articles, I see a bunch of people trying to finesse statements to say something else. That the ArtTechnica editor is on there doesn't mean much. That people have to take Ben Kuchera's line about Grayson out of context to make a case doesn't help. That most of these rely on twisting someone's words to mean something else, or to indicate collusion doesn't help. Most of the quotes pulled from GameJouroPros are harmless in and of themselves (at worst, seem like venting) and don't come together to form a cohesive narrative. People hammered puzzle pieces together and saying it was a smooth fit. This should be a real problem to anyone who cares about honesty, and yet we're expected to take this collusion at face value.

Also, it's not so much that I know the previous poster as it is I did my homework to make sure I knew what I was talking about. Though I do have a mild history with Wandering Hero.

I doubt most people were organizing illegal activities.

It really doesn't matter. They couldn't shut down the people fast enough, so they apparently said "fuck it" to the whole thing. And this is the sort of thing websites have been sued over before.

In that light, I'm not particularly sure I blame anyone else from playing it safe.

I regret taking this somewhat off topic, but my point remains that a lot of the desires of people who want "ethical" journalism are unrealistic or outright based on misrepresentations and falsehoods. This relates to your desires because you want people to not do what there's no evidence of them doing in the first place.

So I'll bring this back around to topic: What I would like to see from journalism, games journalism, is the people who think it's so bad (and this isn't aimed at you) step up to the plate. I mean, I don't think I'd like what they put out, but I'd like to see what they think real journalism is in action.

 

[Something Amyss]

Well being pro-corruption, I think its very important that we hold indie game developers responsible when they try to send us thousands of dollars to give their gammes 11/10 scores. My solution to this would be to unionize, which would also help alleviate the issue where game journalists have to actually write the reviews that are being paid for by publishers, rather than having publishers email the article to them directly.

You get money? Gawd, all I get is sex. It's a good thing I swing both ways[footnote]well, more than "both"[/footnote], or it might bother me that gaming is such a sausage fest.

Or at least, I'm apparently pro-corruption because I don't take issue with the publication of editorials or people giving their honest opinion about a game in a game review. Heaven forbid, it'd be disastrous! But yeah, I think the people writing reviews provide some sort of way of demonstrating their personal tastes in games - genres, playstyles, aesthetics, themes, content, etc. It takes a long while to start to understand somebody's personal tastes, and it takes time some people just don't have. Nintendo Power had something like this in their magazine going back well over a decade ago, so its not unheard of. More honesty and transparency benefits everyone.

Wait, you weren't serious? I mean...NEITHER WAS I!

I think the best way to get to know someone's interests and playstyles is be reading, not disclosure, though. Like, this is why I came to like Jim Sterling's reviews. Not because of a thesis statement, because I knew what he and I agreed on, didn't agree on, and what his writing tended to mean. Back when Gamepro was originally around, I followed certain reviewers without necessarily having a cheat sheet to work with. I think what reviewers write is more telling than what they say about themselves. I mean, if you think about it, how accurately do we really describe ourselves?

I could give you a list of genres or bands I was interested in, but my reviews might paint a different picture, and I know my Last.fm profile does. What we often see from people in these terms is very similar to the Dunning-Kruger effect.

 

[veloper]

4) Take your profession seriously

"Who even gives a shit about video game journalism?" has been the sentiment of a few people in video game journalism lately. If you can't take yourself seriously don't expect anyone else to. Stephen Totilo, you're not a complete idiot... but don't openly state that Kotaku doesn't need to adhere to certain standards of ethics. Or, if you do... state it proudly on the home page. "This site is not concerned with ethics".

AMEN on that.

"It's not really journalism" is also such a cop out. Such sentiment makes sense of course when shilling for a bunch of publishers, but it's a pretty shitty attitude for mags that are supposedly there to inform their readers.

 

[Dizchu]

More invested relationships, be honest, disclose, and on my part I'll behave like an adult human being and not go "obvious fake review score!"

I think Patricia Hernandez was more guilty of this than Nathan Grayson. ZQ got everyone riled up because abuse, infidelity and all sorts of stuff not relating to video games at all were thrown in the mix. That's why I urge people not to talk about her when it comes to video games because the accusations that she did X, Y and Z for positive coverage are unfounded.

Now Patricia Hernadez's actions were so bad that Stephen Totilo had to step in and address them. I think her relationships with Christine Love and Anna Anthropy are much more relevant. Which is a shame because I like Anna Anthropy's games and now people are gonna call her an SJW.

Instead trust the journalist because I recognize that people can actually review content without their biases towards the creator getting in the way.

Biases are usually not easy to overcome. I've been to a talk given by Steve Gaynor (Gone Home), went drinking in a bar where him and his friends were, and personally I like the guy. Under these circumstances I could review his next game without much bias. However if I lived with him, frequently went out drinking with him and talked to him regularly... that is bias. Similarly, if he offered me a role in the development of the game or gave me gifts, that'd also result in bias. Maybe I'd consciously try to thwart that bias but subconsciously, he'd be a friend and I wouldn't want to upset him.

 

[Sigmund Av Volsung]

What games journalism should be?
It should be less so a buyer's guide, so much as an academic examination and discussion of games. Review scores should not exist, and journalists should be given free reign to say what they want to say, without the presence of corporate interests or community backlash influencing their writing.

When reviews shift away from evaluating a product, and assessing an art, then Games Journalism will be properly manifested. Downside is that games are still at that intersection between a work and a product, with mentalities often leering towards conceptualising a game as an item first. I find that idea to be detrimental.

Oh yeah, and there should be tacit standards in place for journalism. One of them would include the consideration of alternate interpretations, and doing background research on how the game was made. Thematic or non-standard discussion in the review should be fully fleshed out, and avoid completely from making any broad statements with an authoritative tone.

Do you think there would be a demand (or enough of a demand to keep a website going) for that kind of analysis?

Maybe I'm wrong here but most people I know use game sites to determine if they should buy games. Having analysis in there is a nice bonus but if it's JUST that, could that work?

Go into "Featured Content" on here and you'll see a big difference between viewership of the "analysis" stuff and the "review" stuff (this is obviously all anecdotal but I think it's relevant):

"Critical Intels" last two articles have 412 (Assassins Creed) and 512 (Last of Us/Advanced Warfare) views as of now. The last two "Experienced Points" did a bit better with 1999 (Anything be off topic in gaming?) and 944 (Frame Rate) views; although Shamus are overall points about the industry and not individual games.

The latest reviews have 6790 (Dragon Age; which also was just posted less than one week ago) and 2182 (Call of Duty Advanced Warfare) views.

I suppose your idea could be a great niche one but I don't think you could ever become Kotaku or Escapist or any of the "big boys" level of coverage.

You asked me what it should be, and I believe that given enough drive to get out of the current format would allow for such a thing to be possible. How do I know this? Rock Paper Shotgun exists, and it has an active readership.

The discussion should be on the side stuff to encourage thought about the game in question, as that will enrich a person's experience. I honestly believe that the 'buyer's guide' thing is endemic of an industry that treats its creative output as a product, and I don't like that. This idea of a product is the reason why AAA games are being inflated in budgets, have inescapable marketing, and how publishers still get away with making decisions as per the numbers dictate.

 

[Scootinfroodie]

Keep in mind that during the print age, a company pulling its ads from a magazine could kill or at least gravely wound a magazine, and its fair to say its still the same nowadays. (example - Eidos pulling all adverts from PC Gamer over their running joke of Daikatana's lateness came close to putting it out of circulation).

To be fair, Jim Sterling seems to be going out of the way to avoid such reliance but (A) he's effectively running a one man show, so his expenses aren't as bad as running a well staffed website and (B) he's getting extensive Patreon backing

The scenario you're describing wouldn't be an issue if ad revenue came from non-gaming sources

Also I see this thread devolved rather quickly into a snarkfest. What a shame

 

[Callate]

Hire (reporters, anyway) from backgrounds of journalism or research, rather than video games, comics, or other "geek" pursuits. Such people may need more guidance from the start, but they're also more likely to ask open and interesting questions without the baggage of history, preconceptions, and personal preferences.

Address controversies in interviews, but don't attempt to provoke them. If you're going to contradict a interviewee, do it with clear, solid, and well-established reasons; don't fall back on "others say" or "many say" or even the queries of some other games journalist. Give the person being interviewed a chance to answer; don't throw invective post-interview at someone who can't respond. To press a point at the time and make it clear the interviewee is unresponsive or scripted is good journalism; to attack what they said later for failing to live up to a standard the interviewer never made apparent is craven.

Try to keep op-ed pieces, reviews, and reports as separate entities. This may at times be difficult, but it's a goal worth moving towards. If someone continually bleeds over from one to another, suggest they move into that section until they get it out of their system.

Get qualified people to explain intricate or complicated subjects, whether it's the process of a AAA game moving from concept to market or the difference in a figure moving through an open RPG world versus a figure moving through a crowded street in an adventure game.

EDIT. Someone should be reading everything before it hits a web page, looking for spelling errors, run-on sentences, errors in phrasing.

Your goal should always be, first and foremost, to inform. At times, the information you choose to highlight will by its nature shed light on a particular point of view or suggest a certain course of action. But don't try to lead your readership by the nose. Don't try to tell them how they should feel about something.

 

[WindKnight]

Keep in mind that during the print age, a company pulling its ads from a magazine could kill or at least gravely wound a magazine, and its fair to say its still the same nowadays. (example - Eidos pulling all adverts from PC Gamer over their running joke of Daikatana's lateness came close to putting it out of circulation).

To be fair, Jim Sterling seems to be going out of the way to avoid such reliance but (A) he's effectively running a one man show, so his expenses aren't as bad as running a well staffed website and (B) he's getting extensive Patreon backing

The scenario you're describing wouldn't be an issue if ad revenue came from non-gaming sources

Also I see this thread devolved rather quickly into a snarkfest. What a shame

That would be awesome... but you have to ask what adverts people visiting a website covering videogames want to see. Sure, there's probably a bit of crossover with blockbuster films, anime, comics, other nerdy things, but I doubt it those have enough of a crossover appeal to cover all the costs on their own.

Don't get me wrong, the AAA games publishers clearly have too much power in this equation right now, but the audience is more keen to take this out on those who are having terms dictated to them, than the ones dictating them. (or even going after people who have no terms to dictate, or power to if they did)

 

[tippy2k2]

Hire (reporters, anyway) from backgrounds of journalism or research, rather than video games, comics, or other "geek" pursuits. Such people may need more guidance from the start, but they're also more likely to ask open and interesting questions without the baggage of history, preconceptions, and personal preferences.

This is something I hear a lot and something that I've always questioned...

How would that help?

Game journalists can't "investigate". There's no freedom of information that allows you to look into things. The Publishers have no reason to talk to you (and when they do, they seem to be doing a pretty damn good job of sticking their own feet in their mouth, right Ubisoft?).

What would adding "real" journalists give the industry?

 

[IamLEAM1983]

Game journalists can't "investigate". There's no freedom of information that allows you to look into things. The Publishers have no reason to talk to you (and when they do, they seem to be doing a pretty damn good job of sticking their own feet in their mouth, right Ubisoft?).

What would adding "real" journalists give the industry?

It would damage or kill half-hearted or slapdash projects in the egg and maybe add further layers of control to the Early Access market. If journalists had open access to game developers, we'd be able to have a greater appreciation for the work of those who actually do deserve our support, and awareness of those who don't. We wouldn't have to rely on YouTube takedown scandals or word-of-mouth anymore, and that would also eliminate a lot of the unsavory tactics that have come to light recently.

Good journalism would eliminate the need some idiots feel for swatting attempts or doxxing - as well as most forms of scapegoating. If one approach has irrefutable credibility, all others lose credit. We'd have less self-proclaimed Reddit information vigilantes and more verifiable sources. Saying "I know somebody who knows somebody who works at Developer X" doesn't cut it and SHOULDN'T cut it.

 

[Godhead]

Pinky swears would be legally binding.

 

[tippy2k2]

If journalists had open access to game developers

But that's my point, how are "real" journalists getting this access?

There is absolutely zero reason for developers/publishers to open their doors and allow journalists to just look into what they want to (and a lot of reasons for them not to allow it). There's no laws in place that would force them to do so.

The happier picture you're painting all begins at these journalists getting more access to Publishers/Developers and I do not see how having "real" journalists grants you this access.

 

[Senare]

I prefer slower journalism which picks apart the games long after the hype has died down. I am more interested in deep analysis of the game than any score or buying guide. Stuff like Critical Intel, some of the Zero Punctuation series and Matthewmatosis [http://www.youtube.com/user/Matthewmatosis?spfreload=10] is what I am looking for. More in the vein of articles as well-researched as Watergate than daily news reporting.

I would also really like to see analyses taken to a level of clarity and maturity that they can be used for the developers (not the stakeholders) as great feedback. Perhaps a series dedicated to give constructive feedback on game design choices, summarizing opinions from different sources as a list of pros and cons for that design choice.

hmm... After some reflection I think I am just describing gamasutra.com. Nevermind.

 

[IamLEAM1983]

Pinky swears would be legally binding.

Not that much, no. A skeezy dev who makes promises is still a skeezy dev, and more stringent investigation procedures would show that. We'd be able to look at Kickstarter Pipe Dream no. 23445 and think "Yeah, no. Guy has no idea how to steer this ship. Reporting this ASAP."

If journalists had open access to game developers

But that's my point, how are "real" journalists getting this access?

There is absolutely zero reason for developers/publishers to open their doors and allow journalists to just look into what they want to (and a lot of reasons for them not to allow it). There's no laws in place that would force them to do so.

The happier picture you're painting all begins at these journalists getting more access to Publishers/Developers and I do not see how having "real" journalists grants you this access.

Then it's a matter of corporate culture. Openness needs to be fostered.

 

[Signa]

Ad affecting reviews I think is the biggest sticking point here. I'd be satisfied if reviewers did something similar to the radio show host I have around here. He will not do a commercial spot for a company unless he's vetted them himself. While that isn't too different than what we have now with reviewers playing a game to see if they like it, there is one key difference. The reviewers aren't saying "you have a good product, if you pay me, I can pitch it" it's the other way around. Companies are paying reviewers to pitch their game.