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The Game Industry Is About The Games
Over at Gamespot Bob Colayco fires back at David Jaffe, who you may recall referred to game journalists as vultures, saying that Jaffe's ideas about what journalism should be are just as uninteresting as the most sycophantic game plug. From the article: "Am I the only one who picks up rags like Entertainment Weekly, skips the fluff in front, and goes straight to the reviews sections? Maybe that attitude is really dehumanizing. But I don't think it's any coincidence that other entertainment industries started going to crap when people started caring more about our manufactured pop stars and their gossip than they did about the product. This is why we have reality shows with the likes of Jessica Simpson."
As much as I always enjoy this sort of crotchety-old-man grumbling about how the world has completely gone to hell, and things aren't like back in the good old days of the 1980's -- "manufactured pop stars and their gossip" have been around for centuries. Does Bob Colayco think Hollywood was any different in the 60's, in the 40's, in the 20's?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
And I actually got a response from Jaffe ...
- plea-to-game-journalist.html
http://superrob.blogspot.com/2005/11/david-jaffes
The real problem is that the majority of "games journalists" are starry-eyed kids (adults now, I suppose), who really wanted to be that guy making a game, or that guy who got to play games all day. They're not going into this because they want to inform people. Sure, they might have a desire to do it, but for the vast majority of people, it's a mix of wanting to play games and wanting to tell people what you think.
That is a really, really bad mix for any sort of journalism that isn't strict opinion/editorial.
Add in the fact that these people are now working at getting information from companies who made the games that sparked this desire in the first place, and you have a real conflict of interest problem. You can't get objective analysis, because everyone is so bent on what their favorite genre is, or what type of art they like, or whether they think graphics are as important as sound or story or vice versa. The only real hack I've seen that's come close to working is IGN's system of just separating the fanboys and having them write on specific companies, but even then there's a problem because they then want to rate highly games they think will help their system of choice "win."
It's really a sorry state of affairs, and I'm happy that someone called them all on it.