Is there any merit to it or is it just more gamer seething?
There’s a multitude of factors at play here.
It’s a young profession by any means and it’s not far removed from the transformation of 10 dudes who like the video games start a cool zine to tell you stuff, with all the suburban white guy bias that brought with it, to being a bit more professionalized and then being a mouthpiece for publishers and full of dumb shit.
Which kinda harkens back to the predominant moron moment the capital G gamer scene at large has, they demand their medium to be taken seriously as an art form, which I genuinely agree on, but then they also want objective product reviews and those two are not things that go together well. Which leaves you at a product review that tries to take itself much more serious than it has any right to be and that’s just very, very hard to pull off without it being shit. You can’t tell someone to buy a Ford Mondeo 2010 because it’s a sensible, good product and also wax about how it’s a piece of art unless you’re very good at your job, and there’s very few game journalists which are that good at their job. Most of the ones I see seem to have found an entry into art mostly via videogames, which is fine and all, but they lack any analytical skills to figure out something interesting or any broader swath of knowledge about anything but videogames to contextualize any of it to make an interesting point.
I think the length of game’s also plays into this. The youtube video game way too long video essay scene makes, at least for this moron, really good interesting videos about games with an approach that is much more analystic than it is reviewing a product for it’s use, but then those videos come out 5 years after the game was new and take 3 hours because all the video games are so long.
Like some of them shits run on for 100 hours, for better or worse reasons, but gamers still want a review ready to go about 3 days, better before, the release date to tell them whether this product will produce enough endorphins in their brains for it’s price. And so large parts of the industry try to mix the two and it never works.
There’s the other reporting, labour practices, sexual harassment and what have you and the gamers seethe at having to think about what they’re supporting with their money, the racists, the chuds w/e, but that’s hardly a problem of games journalism, that’s just journalism now.,
TL;DR: the average gamer depends on the video game both as his only form of relation to art but also a product and thereby sets impossible standards onto the coverage which
I don’t think bloggers who write about how much they like Dark Souls and NYT foreign affairs ghouls have much in common beyond sharing the title “journalist”
Sam Biddle used to be at Kotaku during G-gate and currently works for The Intercept. Some other guy I recognized from the G-gate ended up trying to do Russia stuff (I forget for whom) and got played into being photographed seated beside a Russian neo-Nazi, discrediting him over there.
Like someone else said, part of the problem is that “games journalism” is full of people who don’t care about the medium and want to drop the “gaming” part of their job title off asap.
In other words, to some extent, gaming journalism is like a farm league for more serious journalism. So, there is a common thread to be examined.
I dunno about :reddit-logo: gamers, but I hate them because they too often act as public stenographers for whatever the billionaire publishers state, give them glowing reviews, and never question their awful labor practices and workplace abuses. I also hate them for not taking awful devs and publishers to task for their awful takes, like when the 6 Days in Fallujah devs said the warcrime simulator was not political and they left it at that, or when they interviewed the CoD MW4 devs about what politics the game was advancing and they couldn’t be bothered to press them harder on what they meant by their “apolitical” game. This keeps happening over and over again, and the meain fault is that gamer press doesn’t criticize or analyze the industry’s own practices as a whole instead of focusing on their product output.
There was one instance where the devs of CoD WW2 made the confusing decision to include black Nazi soldiers in the multi-player and when confronted about how bizarre that is, rather than offer a historical explanation or get into the politics of a decision like that, they instead side stepped it entirely and were like “it’s just a game, bro. You can make your own character.” (yes I know there were black German soldiers in the North Africa campaign it was still really weird)
