Jan
7

Game Journalism: No such thing

7 Comments

I loved this article. Go read it before doing anything else…including eating that bacon in you hand. Yeah…that’s right…I see that piece of bacon.

Going to chime in on this, because this has always been a sore point for me…and I apologize off the bat if I’ve gone over this before.

In my opinion, there is no such thing as a journalism in gaming. Gaming is an entertainment medium (…duh..) and as such, coverage of the gaming industry seems to fall under the Entertainment Tonight or the TMZ category. In other words, gaming “journalism” is very tabloid-like. They are more concerned with the “who” than the “what”…except there is no “who” there, and when there is, they seem to think they are the “who”. Ummm….did that make any sense what-so-ever?

Another question I have is how many have actual journalistic training? Not sure myself, but wouldn’t it be interesting to find out? Brian points to something that I have also suspected…that what they like to call “game journalism” is just editorial opinion pieces from enthusiastic gamers. Looking at the LinkedIn profile of this Randy Nelson character (author of the article Brian mentions), the only education seems to be a highschool degree. That means nothing…he might have gotten the education/training elsewhere and forgot to update LinkedIn. True…on the job and life training…you can’t beat it sometimes, but I would assume you’d take something from formal journalistic training.

Bottom line is that I really don’t respect the field of “game journalism” because they seem to lack that “Walter Cronkite-ness” that is needed to give it legitimacy. Walter had a knack of delivering journalism in a way that made it clear what was opinion/editorial and what was news….and I’d like to see that in “gaming journalism.

It’s not really the fault of the “gaming journalist”, really. The line between what is opinion and what is news and fact seems to be blurring quite a bit in quite a few fields. So..par for the course I guess.

D out.

Posted in Editorial
7 Comments Posted by Darren

7 Responses to "Game Journalism: No such thing"

  • Rob says:
    January 7, 2010 at 4:57 pm

    *Isn’t holding bacon*
    …
    *wishes he was holding bacon*

    :(

  • Daniel says:
    January 7, 2010 at 5:12 pm

    This is the problem of games journalism: Money. (http://insomnia.ac/commentary/the_videogame_news_racket/)

  • Cindy says:
    January 7, 2010 at 6:46 pm

    I had a similar rant except it was about reviewing MMOs, and yes I’d say 90 some percent of ‘reviews’ are just opinion pieces to be taken with from the sidelines, even if this is your favorite writer ever. There’s many bloggers and game writers I really admire for their flair and intelligence, but I won’t insult my own intelligence by hanging on to every written word and believe every syllable without asking myself how I think about it too.

    I would love to see more professionalism in this field of entertainment, that people hired to write reviews for online zines that pay should look for people with journalism degrees or some sort of strong training in writing and how to criticize the media and art. There is such a course I took one in college! :D

  • wilhelm2451 says:
    January 7, 2010 at 7:23 pm

    Walter who?

    (Sorry, just repeating something I heard your kids say.)

    And are you insinuating that I was playing “hide the bacon?”

  • Bhagpuss says:
    January 7, 2010 at 7:30 pm

    I shudder at the idea of writers needing qualifications before they are deemed worthy of being published, or even read. Are the best, or the most famous, or the most successful magazine columnists or features writers trained journalists? Some are, some aren’t.

    My favorite journalists and reviewers mostly came from the underground press, or began being published while they were still at school. Mick Farren, Charles Shaar Murray, Lester Bangs, Nick Kent, Ring Lardner, Julie Birchall, Toby Thompson, Hunter S Thompson, Nick Cohn, Dorothy Parker… I could list a few dozen more. Writers not just good enough to be worth publishing in newspapers and magazines, but good enough to have their work collected in books that are still in print years, even decades later. And good enough writers, some of them, to work as novellists, short-story writers, scenarists.

    The problem with games journalism isn’t a lack of journalistic qualifications; it’s that games magazines and websites are failing to attract writers of the same calibre AS WRITERS that film, music, even sports publications.

    If you want to read some really vibrant, funny, eclectic, games journalism, get hold of some copies of “Crash!” magazine from the 1980s. It wasn’t original. It modelled itself heavily on the Neil Tennant era “Smash Hits”, but it’s a damn good read!

  • We Fly Spitfires says:
    January 8, 2010 at 3:07 pm

    I think the issue is really the blend between blogs and official news/journalistic sites now. Brian is absolutely right when he talks about being objective and digging into and verifying the facts etc. Bloggers don’t do that because their blog is their own opinion.

    Sites like Joystiq though straddle that faded line between blogging and journalism and I couldn’t say which side of the fence they sit on. I probably see them more as a blog than a ‘newspaper’ etc so I don’t really expect them to be held to the same standards.

  • sid67 says:
    January 9, 2010 at 1:26 am

    I like Zero Punctuation over at the Escapist and that’s pretty much it (if you can call that journalism). Most game “journalists” aren’t getting paid much more than bloggers — which is to say, not much at all.

    Technically, there should be two types of articles. Fact based reports and Editorials. In gaming news, all you really get are Editorials. Even when fact based reports do come into existence, they are more often written as editorials.

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