lol wut

If you don’t know what this is in reference to, search for the part of the title in quotes.

I didn’t even want to link to it (not that our traffic would be any sort of noticeable bump for them, but still…).

I’ll summarise the video by saying they want to create a new website/publication which will revolutionise video game journalism because all journalists are bad. Oh, and they’re scared it will fail. Surprised?

Here’s the link:

Yeah, but it’s not like Polygon is some little start up no one is sure of. It has a multi-million dollar start-up backing, and is part of a well established web media group.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vox_Media

It’s so pretentious and so annoying. They haven’t even pissing launched. Plus they’ve got one of the head guys from Kotaku. Seriously.

Actually they got the EICs of Kotaku, The Escapist, and Joystiq…so what, Nukezilla not good enough for you? We have well over 100 views a month!

But what happens to their other jobs? Are they fired?

I’m confused. If they wanted me to care, hiring off Kotaku staff for reasons too numerous to list, and the anyone from Escapist, a site so pretentious it considers it’s farts a valuable commodity, is not the way to go. Making circle jerk videos about themselves before they’ve published word 1, doesn’t help either.

Have they even seen the Internet? This is going to go down in flames.

I hate it. I hate everything about it. They’re creating a circle jerk when they haven’t even started the website.

Sure, games journalism has it’s highs and lows, but it’s really not all bad and saying that it needs saving or calling a video “press reset” is dumb.

Also, Kotaku is the bottom of the barrel right alongside the escapist (excusing Yahtzee), they’re already off to a bad start.

My thoughts on that teaser:

Ok, this might be kind of OK

Wait, is that a tattoo parlor, and these “A-List”(in quotes because lolololololol enthusiast press does not a journalist make) games bloggers?

>sponsored by Internet Explorer

ಠ_ಠ

Don’t get me wrong, I like many of the people they’ve brought in (especially Justin McElroy and Samit Sarkar) and think they’ll do great things.

I just think it’s a bit ridiculous to run with this before they have their site open.

I just find it hard to believe that they’re touting this as “journalism” yet they’re accepting funding from ONE OF THE BIGGEST CORPORATIONS IN THE INDUSTRY. I guess they’re disclosing that fact, still feels wrong to me. Who knows, we’ll wait and see.

Still, VOX actually is big enough that the editorial staff probably don’t know who is buying ads on or sponsoring their content until it goes live on the site.

There’s a whole staff of people involved in selling the ads for the TV station I work at and I’ve never even met most of them, let alone had discussions on which company is buying ads on what.

Yeah, like I said, we’ll have to wait and see. I’ll just try and remember that the “journalists” are just getting paid to do their job(or run around with cameras or whatever it is they’re doing), and they just see VOX on their paychecks hopefully.

I’m just not clear what they really believe they are going to do that justifies this self applauding nonsense. The gap between a so-called elite games journal is what? A bit more effort? Better diction? A fatter rolodex of PR people? They are going to be bound by the same BS other sites are, fed the same press releases, the same embargoes and NDAs. Outside of editorial and releasing videos of themselves jerking off in front of a mirror,they aren’t going to be able promise anything consistently or substantially different in terms of access, because at the end of the day, it’s still industry press in a tightly controlled industry. But they are the ones we’ve been waiting for, apparently, a video told me so.

Hilarious. Man games journalism sucks. Who should we emulate OH WAIT I KNOW KOTAKU

Comments are getting a little frothy here, so I think perhaps a little perspective is in order here.

1) The trailer video is hilariously misjudged for reasons that John Walker has most articulately set out here: http://botherer.org/2012/08/23/polygon-and-the-documentary-that-cured-cancer/

2) That aside, they have some very good people working on it and Justin McElroy has himself said that that article maybe has some good points.

3) Also, while the website itself isn’t ‘launched’, it has been producing articles for some time. These articles have generally been praised for their high quality.

4) They’ve also been engaged in podcasting and other activities that suggest they take themselves far less seriously than the whole documentary thing suggests.

Conclusion: sure, they messed up with this documentary thing, whether the whole thing will be like that I’m not sure, but I’ve heard things suggesting no. Still, they messed up on some level. But using this to comment on the wider value of their website is probably a bad idea, given that it’s likely to be very good when it’s done, and it’s ALREADY demonstrated itself to be pretty good when it’s NOT done.