Old News Making The Front Page

With our dear leader departing for foreign lands, I thought it might be a good idea to lend a hand and step up my post count a bit. Desperate for inspiration I leapt from my chair and roared “to the RSS feed!” before sitting down and apologizing to my cat for making such a horrible racket. It didn’t take long before I noticed that a number of sites had picked up on an interview with Microsoft bigwig Shane Kim conducted by Official Xbox Magazine (UK).

The interview sounded quite interesting with Destructoid focusing on comments made by Kim regarding the breaking down of barriers to entry for new gamers. CVG went with the equally eye-catching quote from Kim about how Microsoft would ‘win the generation.’ I started clicking merrily away to find the original source and perhaps write up something for you, our beloved readers, about this clearly important interview. Then it all started to go wrong…

Simply because it’s always the polite thing to do, I thought I’d read through the interview myself in case there were other interesting quotes to comment upon. That’s when my first suspicions were aroused as the introduction to the interview clearly states,

We asked Shane Kim, along with questions on Milo, the future of the 360 and what his favourite game is when we caught up with him at E3…

Do you see what caught my eye? Yes, this interview was conducted during the E3 press conference, which places it sometime in the first week of June. So there’s our first point of concern, OXM publishing a three month old interview. To be fair they’ve done absolutely nothing disingenuous, they clearly state when the interview was conducted. Perhaps there was some sort of agreement that it wouldn’t have been published immediately, or maybe OXM are doing a lot of coverage on Project Natal and wanted an interview to back that up. I don’t know why this interview was held in reserve for such a long time, it doesn’t contain any earth-shattering revelations.

The point where this story really started to irk me was when I went back and read the Destructoid and CVG posts. Call me a nitpicker but to my mind something which is classified as ‘news’ must have taken place recently, in other words it must be information about something ‘new.’ I’m willing to accept a number of definitions of what new is, perhaps it took place in the past 24 hours, maybe even the past week. However, something which took place three months ago is not new by any stretch of the imagination. The only ‘news’ here is that OXM have taken three months to post a fairly innocuous interview.

All this would be at least tolerable if Shane Kim had taken some kind of holy vow of silence and not spoken to anyone about Natal, its purpose and the future of the Xbox 360 as a platform. A brief Google search later and this theory was resoundingly disproved. The folks over at Gamesindustry.biz conducted an interview with Mr Kim and posted it within days of Natal’s announcement. The earlier interview covers much of the same ground as OXM’s does but without the slightly sycophantic tone. If you doubt me then take a bite of this tasty and well-aged quote,

…this has everything to do with unlocking the potential of the industry and addressing the many millions of people ‘“ the 60 per cent of households who don’t have a videogame console at all. That’s the real opportunity for us.

Sounds a lot like he’s talking about breaking down barriers doesn’t it? In fact a number of similar points are touched on in both interviews, probably because they were conducted with the same man at roughly the same time. The purpose of Project Natal is far from mysterious, it’s something that was clear during the Microsoft E3 press conference. As for Microsoft predicting that they will win the generation, platform holders tend to do that on a fairly regular basis. Think of it another way, how many platform holders have you heard say “we suck, we screwed up and we’re gonna finish dead last?”

It’s probably worth mentioning that although I highlighted CVG and Destructoid, this is far from being a problem unique to those websites. Check out VG247, The Escapist and Gamerblips to see how quickly identical versions of the story proliferate. The issue here is not one of specific wrongdoing by any one blog. The original interview, although somewhat dated and redundant, was indeed posted on 31/08/2009. It’s newly released but there’s still no really new information. There’s no dishonesty at play, just a lack of critical thought about what the news in question actually constituted. The problem is that as long as the economic model on which these blogs are based, prioritizing page views and speed of posting, trivial news stories will remain plentiful. I wish I could end this rant with a decent solution, but if I could figure out how to monetize a non-pornographic website I wouldn’t be blogging in the first place.