Games Journalism Fart Attack: 2013 Edition

There's a difference between a small timer working with consoles and a big timer working with consoles, of course. I appreciate that, having had to rely on developer provided shots before.

But if there's a PC option and you're not taking your own screenshots, you have absolutely no excuse. Hell, all you have to do these days is run FRAPS or hammer the Steam screenshot key.

No sane person would give this a 9/10. Ever.

Polygon mentioned in their review that they usually use publisher provided shots:

They didn't for A:CM on the grounds that the differences were too great, but there's a bias that's very possible to occur when you are using the best possible shots to show off a title with.

I've also encountered rare circumstances where a dealer at a casino table game has counted something incorrectly and paid people as though they'd won when they had in fact lost. As I'm clearly a horrible person, I don't say shit when this happens but simply chalk this up to being incredibly good luck.

When that have happened to me, I'm usually convinced that I just missed something, or think that they've probably done the opposite just as many times without me noticing - if some lowly worker in a shop gives me the wrong change and I notice, I'll speak up, because I know they'll most likely get in trouble for it at days end.
So while I'm sure the store can spare the money and most likely will fleece me at every opportunity, I feel sorry for the employee.

At a casino, the dealer's best hope if they make an honest mistake that would cost the casino money is that the pit boss never finds out about it. Actively pointing out the error requires them to call the pit boss over and explain exactly how they screwed up, which doesn't score them any points. However, if I notice them make a mistake to underpay a player or take money they shouldn't take I'll point that out - the games are rigged against the player enough as-is without being compounded by human error.

So I was reading this article and the following kind of came out of nowhere.

I believe Mr Kuchera really, really, REALLY likes Predators.

So apparently pissy long form rants about as as good as your average "PC IS BETTER THAN CONSOLES YOU MORANS PLUS I WILL TOTALLY OWNZOR YOU WITH MY SUPERIOR MOUSE" forum post is now journalism. Fuck me, I didn't feel the "RPS has gone downhill" vibe before, but now I sure do. I am paid up member of the PC master race even (have not had a console in 15+ years) and it still looks like schoolboy juvenile stuff.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/02/17/destiny-not-coming-to-pc-bungie-deny-reality/

Then Ars technica chimed in:

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/...keyboard-and-mouse-are-losing-the-fps-market/

It's a actually fairly balanced tour of some available numbers (acknowledging any weaknesses of the sources), I didn't have a big issue with it (As ever DONT READ THE COMMENTS. The "editors pick" comment had some muppett saying he pulls out his mouse "when he wants to perform optimally". I think this means he can use it left handed)

That of course trigged this 1500 word (!!) turgid rant in response. To be honest I couldn't read it all.

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/201...ill-a-major-player-in-fps-market/#more-142705

I did get this far:

DEAR JOHN, PLEASE FIND FOLLOWING A LIST OF THINGS THAT SOLD MORE THAN THE PS3 and X360:

• PS2. More than both of them combined actually
• PS1. From 1994.

Nothing new happened with the PS3 and X360 mate.

That is as far as I got, the rest is too confused and shite to even do more than skim read.

I LIKED Kieron "fucking" Gillen. I think I'm going to have get into some marvel comics.

Flare Path at least is reliably awesome each week.

You know, it never fails to amuse me that Stern Defenders of Gaming Journalism always manage to post the most embarrassing screeds when they hold forth on What's Wrong With Writers Today.

Here's a tip for all people who write about games: nobody who isn't one of you cares about your job nor wants to read about it. Naval gazing of this sort is only of interest to you.

Eh, looking at that now it came off harsher than it probably should have. Somebody is obviously into that stuff, but I personally can't figure out why. Nevermind.

I don't think it was covered in this or the other thread, but last month Kotaku published an article about the divide between the east and west game developers. It's headline sparked a short twitter war between Kotaku and Hideki Kamiya of Platinum Games.

However, it seems like Kotaku still bears a grudge. Apparently Metal Gear Rising is just too hard! Here, read our emails as we complain amongst ourselves about how awful this game is at teaching you stuff. This is also not the first time Kotaku has complained.

I don't have a copy of the game to play but from what I can tell via youtube, you can perfectly parry or block every single attack from that Blade Wolf boss. The game even has him retreat several times and throws easy enemies at you so you can recharge your health. And from what I've read, the game does include a move list in-game that tells you which buttons to press to perform certain actions.

I couldn't really get a handle on parrying from the demo, but I only played through it once and gave up on the stupid wolf boss. It was certainly no Bayonetta.

Hello Ben Kuchera, meet cognitive dissonnance.

I mean it's not as if he didn't write the same exact preview as anyone else when Activision asked him if he would kindly come to Seattle to hear PR talk about Bungie's next game.

That (non) event, and the way everyone talked about it and gushed about it embodies what is wrong with the gaming press. Even if the reporters bitched because they didn't get enough information, Bungie got a lot of hype without showing anything except the wheels of their desks and a bit of concept art.

The best part is that most of the important informations about Bungie next title were made public during the Activision / West-Zampella case 9-10 months ago. But it didn't get a lot of coverage then. Of course, it's easier to read PR than the LA Times.

Well, you confused him. Jack isn't actually In the navy.

Holy shit, I can't believe I missed out on that at the time.

I'd like to suggest if the problem is previews, then DON'T WRITE-UP PREVIEWS OF GAMES.

Reading the article, the 'best' preview experiences are when Mr Kuchera gets to play a game before anyone else. The worst is where he has to watch someone else play a game and he can't.

This is an ENTIRE THREAD about their job. Methinks, protest, yadda yadda.

EXCEPT THAT PREVIEWS ARE REALLY POPULAR WITH READERS.
You know, those that pay the bill.

Previews are why I bought Colonial Marines.

THE SYSTEM MUST BE OVERTHROWN.

I didn't say readers were intelligent, just that they liked previews.
There's no money to be made from writing to intelligent gamers.

Not pictured: he's gazing at a navy.

Then game writers need to shut up and accept that they are part of a massive consumerist industry designed to extract time and money that no-one gets back on experiences that aren't real and mostly have little to no redeeming value. Complaining that the preview content you got wasn't good enough so that you couldn't write an awesome article that drew eyeballs and encouraged hype for an unreleased, unproven title that gamers shouldn't pre-order because the games writer hasn't played it yet is tiresome wankery. Don't complain about PR when you are part of a giant PR-sponsored machine.

I've been thinking that there are really only five types of games site items:

1) Previews of unreleased content
2) Reviews of just released content
3) Post-release follow-ups on released content
4) News
5) General articles e.g. industry profiles, evaluation of events, editorial, etc.

(Happy for anyone to add to this, but let's ignore tone / style such as rants versus factual accounts versus everything in-between.)

Yes, previews are popular and attract eyeballs, but they are a big part of the reason gaming "journalism" has such a terrible reputation.

No offense, Charles, but you and like twenty other people. I'll forgive the VC funding for not jumping all over the Serious Investigative Reporting about Games startups.

(More seriously: The problem is that what people want when they say "investigative journalism" tends to be "get interviews with people inside the industry, on-record, saying mean things about their companies/competitors/products" and/or "report numbers about what is and isn't selling at what price points and which platforms." Both of those things are basically impossible to obtain. The best that you tend to get are things like the recent [excellent] Eurogamer piece on gun licensing, in which the reporter reports on how he was 100% stonewalled by every gaming company he approached and had all of his info from other sources like politicians and gun manufacturers.)

On the previews topic, despite my drive-by linksnarking yesterday I do sympathize with the disgust at the preview hype machine. You know what, though? People will happily read (well, click on anyway) previews with whateverthefuck text you write as long as you've got some screenshots in there. Sure, sometimes they're bullshots. Blame PR, and write about it if you feel it's necessary. But there's tons and tons and tons of room to take a critical eye to preview materials and write about it if you're any actual damn good at your job.

Seriously. It's, like, super fucking easy to not hyperventilate about the top-line bullet points on the onesheet. Hell, it's entirely possible to go to a studio in another country, see their game for the first time ever and do a bunch of interviews with the dev team, and write a 12-page preview talking about the game without giving one sloppy handski in the text.

Now, some people want to see writers tear pre-release games apart for every little thing. I shouldn't have to explain why games that aren't fucking done yet get a whole lot more benefit of the doubt than products being actually reviewed. But I don't think that's what youse guys in this thread are asking for.

Anyway, rant off.

tl;dr -- writing good previews is not that hard. Promise.

I think a related problem is that there probably aren't that many stories that would fit the investigative journalism mold if you want to limit it to games. There's only so much to investigate and I doubt you could update daily or even weekly with that kind of content. That said, I would totally donate to a kind of scholarship or foundation that earmarked a salary for someone to do this kind of investigative journalism and put out something say once a month (or more, depending) even if it's not bringing in as much ad revenue as other content.

You're saying the *exact same thing* that Kuchera said in his piece. Report on things, but be comprehensive and honest. If PR won't let you touch a game, take your own scerenshots, or answer questions report on that as well. But otherwise Previews as a whole are a net good and people shouldn't swear off them.

So, is there some deep nuance of meaning that I'm not getting which explains why you snarked all over a guy saying the exact thing you did, or did you see the Kuchera name and your knee jerked all over your keyboard and pressed post reply?

See if you can detect a difference in tone between Kuchera's breathless earnestness and my post, Astromarine.

That stuff is out there. The better outlets -- Eurogamer, Gamasutra/Game Developer, Gamespot, Polygon (there are so very many things that make my teeth itch about Polygon but they run some good features for sure), hell even us -- run those kinds of pieces from time to time.

And then they get 20k views and die on the vine. But we do them anyway, because believe it or not people who do this professionally would in fact rather write about interesting, deeper topics from time to time rather than how gosh darn pretty them thar Crysis trees are.

If the worth of an article is the page views it gets, then no one should be surprised at the game journalism we have.

In fact I was wrong (or pretty bad at googling). I checked a bit and the information on Destiny came out on most major sites, althought I'm pretty sure it didn't generate a whole lot of comment. The raw info was there, but the followup wasn't.

There's a reason even traditional media is moving further and further from the investigative journalism, even though it's still what they praise and talk about when giving out prices or (over here) explaining to politicians why they're important to society and need tax breaks - it's expensive and time consuming and sometimes dead ends after weeks of work... and the majority of readers don't care. Certainly not enough to pay.

Investigative journalism only about gaming would be severely limited in scope.

Investigative journalism in gaming would be a blog pointing out obvious acts of collusion and malfeasance. Since indepth investigations would violate some NDAs.



After the colonial marines debacle... I'm starting to regret buying SimCity 5 based on previews.

That makes sense. Gearbox and Sega have a lot to do with SimCity.

This is a thread about industry wide issues and you suddenly assume we're just talking about one game?

This is not a "gaming" journalist only issue. Surprising numbers of mainstream journalists manage to bore the world shitless with their endless fundament gazing brought upon by the wholesale smashing of their industry structure.

Mainstream investigative journalism is basically on life support. How many times does even stuff like the New York Times etc get a genuine "investigative" story up? Couple of times a year tops? (NOTE: Getting a drop from some PR person that wanted to give you the materiel does not count as "investigative" journalism) Game journalism has no hope.

Does Game Developer Magazine do that somewhat?

In anycase, I'm with you in wanting to read that, but also pretty sure few developers will actually talk about the stuff that goes behind closed doors. There's a whole veil of secrecy around most game development projects, not completely unearned, but bordering on super -secret science projects type behaviour. Protecting the hype as it were. Even post-mortems tend to paper over the worse of production excesses and mistakes, or exaggerate aspects that memory and nostalgia bring about.

Who'd talk to this journalists though? and still keep working in the industry. Most other companies employment is fluid enough as it is without somehow jeopardizing your career path by saying something you shouldn't have to someone you shouldn't have to piss off someone's ego in some place you might have wanted to work.