Videogame Journalism Doesn’t And Can’t Exist
People are sell-outs, the industry is too small and nobody cares.
Let me first explain what I mean when I use the term ‘œjournalism’. Nobody uses the phrase right, and I’m not going to buck that trend. Ignoring all the proper definitions, I see journalism as the act of reporting on news and events. In doing so the journalist makes sure to find the truth as best he or she can, and has a strong emphasis on investigation. This is what I want ‘œjournalism’ to mean.
Annoyingly for me, very few people agree. Most people who write about videogames take the untroublesome definition of journalist as a person who writes about news. To me, that makes you a writer. A very good writer perhaps, but still a writer. (Most examples of ‘œgreat videogame journalism’ I get pointed to are just examples of good writing.)
So many have reached for the title it has become almost meaningless. Get a domain for $8, install WordPress, subscribe to Kotaku and re-word the popular news in your unique, edgy style. Pop! You can now attach the phrase ‘œvideogame journalist’ to the end of your name and be happy with your accomplishment. Now get off my lawn.
For the record, I am not ‘œJohn Kershaw videogame journalist’.
Perhaps labelling most videogame writers as sell-outs is a bit much. You can’t sell out of something you never bought into. Most writers claim they are doing what they do because they love games. They don’t long for lasting industry improvements, they don’t lament a lack of transparency and they sure don’t want to see gaming scale the IQ pile. They do it for a love of games, more accurately free games.
If I was getting free games from a publisher, I would be happy. Granted they only give me games when they think they can make more than the cost of said game back. But hey, writing about games is what I love because I love games! In this situation, if it transpired that there were some dodgy dealings going on with the developer what do I do? Nothing.
The current media economy puts up barriers. I’ve known a number of people get in ‘œtrouble’ with PR because they tried to contact a developer directly. You can’t do that! Are you trying to break everything!? And with the threat of no more free games or juicy PR-cleaned quotes and events, you don’t ever cross them again. But that’s OK, because you’re doing this because you love games. Sell-out.
The videogame industry is tiny. Yes it’s world-wide and billions of dollars, but it’s (relatively speaking) not that many people. As such, you can’t get away with being a real journalist at the moment. No website is too big not to feel the pain from angry PR, and no name is too forgettable not to be tarnished. Until more people join in (and they’re coming, don’t worry about that) we are stuck in this room, just us, pretending to matter.
The pint-sized population of writers also has another unfortunate side effect. One person writes one good thing, and because there are only a dozen good (and promoted) articles per month in the videogame writer’s world, it gets help up so high it enters orbit and floats away before anybody can point out it’s not that good. Good articles should be, and actually are, a common occurrence with this many monkeys and typewriters. Put the cheese and wine down and realise this.
My last point is similar to my previous one. Nobody cares about videogame journalism. Lots of people care about the fact nobody cares. Guess what people who care that nobody cares? Do something! See a great article on [insert name of blog that's not shit]? Then tell people! Stop masturbating over the potential of the 2.0 clouds and actually use them. The reason the gutters of the gaming world are the majority is because those of us who care just sit around doing fuck all.
To solve all of this in one penultimate paragraph I propose we just reset everybody’s status back to not-a-journalist. People who wrote something good half a decade ago have to re-write something relevant today. Those people must also change their name, to stop their unwarranted popularity carry them around any more. Everybody with talent has to work again for their reputation. Those unseen but arguably more talented get a fair shot. We all end up in the gutter, crying and complaining. And we’ll stay there until we pick our collective selves up.
Also, stop writing navel gazing articles about videogame journalism and calling that journalism. It might be meta, but that still doesn’t make you a journalist. You know what does make you a journalist? Journalism! Go watch All The President’s Men.
*starts slow clap*
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I help edit a photography magazine based in Tokyo, and we’ve been discussing some similar notions ourselves. Against the backdrop of the recent economic resurgence of the late 1990s and through early 2001, there has existed a proliferation of ‘aestheticism’ in journalism. This continues and is amplified by the progress of the internet and other forms of digital technology. It has reduced the judgement and appreciation of good journalism to its most basic level – ‘surface aesthetics’. This has created by a culture that thrives on the rapid production and consumption of simplified and idealised content, devoid of nuances, investigation, effort. A kind of textual hedonism, in which, as you correctly pointed out, writers are self proliferating through their own celebrity.
We now live in an idealised, highly-retouched, soundbite world of high-resolution and high-speed; a world of one-minute theories and single message stimuli where all things amazing fit in the palm of our hands. We’re no longer able to value anything outside these criteria, thanks to the current standards of production quality and speed. The slow, thought out editorial suffer the same fate as the Eastern Abnaki or the Naiji. One also have to ask themselves what the value of ‘journalism’ is to the gaming audience, who’ve in the most part shown their preference for short, soundbite updates through sites like Kotaku and a preference for the internet.
I’m not a gamer, but I’m interested in the video game industry. This could simple be nostalgia on my part. In my own logic, there aren’t many alternatives left if one wants to address these issues but to turn to those institutions that continue to uphold the real definitions ‘journalism’. Wired, Slate, Skeptic Magazine, the list goes on.
I can’t help but feel like this is all nattering about semantics a little bit. My question to the “is there really any games journalism, though, maaan?” arguments is always “why do you care?”
And I mean that in the nicest possible way, not as an aggressive response. I’m interested in why people are often so bothered by the terminology. And if it’s because you hope to see more hard journalism in the gaming press, then looking down your nose at those who engage in meta commentary on their craft is shooting your cause in its poor little foot. Ouch!
In some sense, I agree with you. I call myself a games journalist because, well, that’s the accepted phrase, and if someone’s browsing Linkedin looking to commission somebody, I’d rather I turned up in their search results. Plus there seems little point in confusing matters by introducing a new term to our already overflowing lexicon. But this will only improve with a combination of discussion and practice, not by just the latter.
In theory I agree with you. I don’t consider myself a game journalist, and I feel most people that do are being pretentious (and they usually write pretentious things too). However, your terms for what is and is not a journalist is undefined.
What about people who write for newspapers? Are they journalists? Bear in mind, many of those guys get their news from press releases too. Same with television news. The “real” news media are just as guilty as copypasta as the bloggers. They just hide it well.
So, investigation and “doing” things constitutes journalism for you. What about people who conduct interviews with games developers? What about people who get a tip on a new game and follow it up with studios and get confirmation and break a story? I have done all these things. I don’t consider myself a journalist, but it was certainly journalism, and you said that doing journalism is what makes you a journalist.
The article’s message is pretty accurate. “Games journalism” is a pretentious term made for people who are slightly ashamed of their job and want to feel validated. However, your demands for journalism aren’t exactly realistic.
@Jim Sterling: @Jim Sterling: “Pretentious” is a horrible word, though. In what way is it pretentious?
“Also, stop writing navel gazing articles about videogame journalism and calling that journalism. It might be meta, but that still doesn’t make you a journalist. You know what does make you a journalist? Journalism”
I’m hoping that’s self-aware fun-poking
“My last point is similar to my previous one. Nobody cares about videogame journalism. Lots of people care about the fact nobody cares.”
I also applaud this article. I can tell when sites don’t/won’t dig deeper than what the PR or wire reports say.. What’s worse is on most websites when a commenter does pose an actual question to the writer of the article (and it is relevant) many writers never come back to what they’ve wrote and often ignore their “ownership” of the article, (present company excluded of course).
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I mean sure, I get yout point and all, but couldn’t this article have been better constructed as a Top 10 list of some variety?
Interesting article and one that I agree with for the most part though as I read it I couldn’t help but feel I disagreed on some level.
The video response definitely helped a lot with that and I find myself more in agreement now that your view on journalism is better defined.
Still, to me, this article seems to be calling out for harsher classifications of what journalism is and should be.
After reading this I feel like I want to split the term “journalism” into seperate categories based on the same idea.
Something like “Weak Journalism” and “Strong Journalism” (though perhaps less derogatory than that).
Since I feel that both covering wars for months or years on end AND detailing a press release on a blog are both “journalism” I would want to see them both under the same banner. However it’s obvious that comparing them directly is kind of ridiculous, but (to me at least) they’re both journalism in their own way.
So calling one “Strong Journalism” and the other “Weak Journalism” kind of works for me.
It’s not a solution to the problems you’ve raised in any way…it’s just semantics, but it conveys the issue of what videogame blogging really is.
Like Jim Sterling said: “What about people who conduct interviews with games developers? What about people who get a tip on a new game and follow it up with studios and get confirmation and break a story?”
Those things seem like they should be classified as journalistic even if comparing them directly to following a lead for months on end and breaking some massive story in a newspaper is a little ridiculous.
If the qualifier here is “effort” like you said in the video response, Wardrox, then videogame blogging is certainly Weak Journalism, but journalism all the same.
I also think the points Roundlay made are important such as considering how “journalism” itself (or it’s importance) can be defined by its audience.
Good read anyway…I’m probably talking bullshit.
A few years back, during my junior and senior year of high school, I bought a domain and attached it to a blog I created the same day. It focused on video games, technology, and random internet findings that I thought were interesting. I did write feature articles occasionally, but for the most part, the majority of my articles were sourced from other sites, which I always gave credit to. I spent hours every day writing articles, mainly with the intentions of giving my friends something to laugh about while at school. At the time, it was the hardest I’d ever worked at something. I found an incredible amount of satisfaction that people were consistently reading and enjoying my “blog.” It was immature, never proof-read, and incredibly vulgar, but I was very, very proud of it. Over a modest eight or so months of writing I think I ended up somewhere in the two hundred thousand hits range, including a day of 35,000 hits when an “essay” I wrote about he Jack Thompson / VT shootings made the front page of digg. At some point I started attending college and lost the extra time required to maintain it, but I still joke with friends that it was my shining achievement in life… ;)
I never even once thought about making money or receiving a free video game for writing. I did it purely out of passion for an incredible medium, which I can only hope is the foundation of your own motivation to maintain your blog. I was never a game journalist, nor did I consider myself to be one. Rather, I was simply an adolescent kid with a really terrible sense of humor and an obsession with video games, which I wanted to share as belligerently as possible.
And Jim Sterling… You were one of the reason’s I created that blog. Thank you.
all i want is better games.
I view video game “journalism” like I do all entertainment journalism. A waste of fucking time and energy and distracts people from more important issues. People love to idolize people, places things that don’t really fucking matter.
I will make case in point, lets say Halo 4 is coming out. To be frank, all I need to know is the release date and I’m set. I don’t need an interview with the creator, I don’t need a video preview. I don’t need an article about people waiting for the game. The game is coming out on a day in the future and no amount of “journalism” can change that(I will say if the game is delayed, that would be worthwhile information, but beyond the delay I can’t think of anything that might else need to be “reported”). I am not knocking video game journalist (if there is such a thing), I am knocking all entertainment news journalist. If I didn’t I’d be forced to put Ryan Secrest on the same journalism hold as say a Lisa Ling, or Anderson Cooper.
I think its less of a video game problem, but entertainment “news” your video game review has as much worth, as the new Jon and Kate plus 8 break up article. When its all said and done, who gives a fuck, its entertainment. And entertainment, doesn’t need to be covered like real news.
@Josh: If I agreed with you, I’d probably say you were talking utter nonsense anyway, or else I’d be shooting myself in the foot. But I actually do think you’re talking utter nonsense.
Entertainment doesn’t need to be covered like “real” news? How are you defining “real” news? Is there some sense of entitlement that certain events deserve over others? I mean, okay, I guess most people would agree that the dawn of World War III would be a little more important than a review of a World War II shooter, but how do you define and then manage those lines?
It’s all horribly prescriptive, and based on nothing whatsoever. Who gives a fuck about entertainment? Probably all the people consuming it every single day, eager to buy the latest issue of the NME, or head over to IGN for their daily fix, or tune into Film 2009 on a weekend.
They speak in numbers, y’know? To dismiss all of them is pretty arrogant.
Does Video Game Review (Videos) count as Journalism?
I make Vido Game Review Videos and I don’t consider myself a sell-out. Do you?
http://www.youtube.com/ZeitgeistReview
Rather than focussing on the definition of journalism, I keep my eye on the power that PR people have like Wardrox mentioned. I think that as long as people are deperate for “access” and “free games” they are surrendering any hope of maintaining independance.
I agree with most of Wardrox’s points; video game journalism doesn’t in fact exist. I think that it could exist if there were a unifying body to protect the independance and interests of blogs.
@Lewis Denby: are you somehow suggesting, that entertainment news should be considered on the same level as actual real journalism? So you think its ok, that more people know about Jon and Kate’s breakup then, the genocide in the Congo or whats happening in Afghanistan?
I am not dismissing entertainment news, I was pointing out people like you focus to much energy and time on thing, that don’t really matter. The United Stats as a whole puts to much emphasis on entertainment, and not enough on world events and actual culture. Just because tons of people go to IGN to read review and previews, doesn’t make it any more credible, or somehow justify it to be considered an actual news outlet.
Look at the WWE millions of people flock and watch it, buy the games, buy the merc. Would you consider it a real sport now because millions of people enjoy it? I didn’t think so.
Just because people love to focus their energy on entertainment, doesn’t make entertainment news any more credible.
@Josh: Well I’m not based in the USA, so maybe it’s different where you are.
However, over here, I’d say something had gone pretty wrong if a celebrity couple’s divorce got headline status over a genocide.
People like me? Who are people like me? People who earn a living by writing about entertainment? What would be the correct amount of energy and time to put into my job, then?
I wouldn’t consider WWE a real sport. That’s because it objectively is not a real sport. It’s scripted and staged. You could probably mount an argument for entertainment news being scripted and staged as well, but you haven’t.
How are we defining credibility? I still can’t quite fathom your argument. You seem to have a problem with entertainment news in general because you don’t have a particular interest in it and find it distracting, and as such are slamming the opinions of a huge range of other people for not agreeing with your own standards — and, in the meantime, taking a pop at those who provide the entertainment news for those who /are/ interested.