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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
Assume that a video game magazine just published reviews of video games. It's a pretty good place for a video game magazine to start. However, another magazine starts in competition to this first one and decides to include previews as well as reviews. Now this second magazine has more to offer than the first. Some people might no care about previews, but if the company publishing the first magazine doens't start adding previews they might lose a good deal of business to their competitor. So they decide to include previews as well.
This process continues and the whole thing escalates to what we see today. Not only do game magazines, websites, or newsletters contain reviews, they also contain previews, editorials, letters from readers, fan art, comics, and loads of other stuff.
The base problem is that these publications are generally not created for gamers to get informed opinions, that's just a side product. The real reason these publications exist is to make money. It's a true fact, so just get used to it.
If you wanted to, you could start a "free" website that just reviews games. If you become popular you start getting more traffic which bumps up the bandwidth costs. You have a few options now, charge people to increase revenue, let people advertise on your site to increase revenue, or have a website that doesn't work well because it's constantly over its bandwidth limits.
You could probably make a lot of money with such a site from advertisement and paid for content. Hell, that's what IGN and other sites have been doing. Of course if people stop visiting your site you lose advertisers, people who'll pay for content, and a lot of the money you're making. Unless you're rich and doing this as a hobby you need to keep the people coming. Unfortunately this means adding the "fluff" content. You might not like such-and-such content, but there might be several thousand others that do, and might be willing to pay for it as well!
If they can't find what they want from your site, they'll most likely go somewhere else, taking their money somewhere else.
Is a minimalist site bad? No. Is it for everyone? No.
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.
A single person can't make a movie either, and yet directors still pull in top dollar and a fair amount of fame and respect. The problem is that we are ingrained to the cog mentality and we refuse to take credit for our individual contributions. Good designers/developers/artists make good games.
/rant.off
We allow ourselves to believe that anyone in our position will produce the same product when the exact opposite is true. Because game development is a creative effort, the individual contributions are unique to the person who creates them. If I were to leave my current project and another designer took my place, it would be a different game than the one that would be created with my input.
We have no system of self-promotion in the game industry and until that changes, individual talent and individual contributions will continue to go unrecognized. However, this change must start in how we view ourselves.
I NEVER said game journalists were vultures. That was Next-Gen.Biz....they were talking about my blog entry when they said that. I swear, I didn't expect people to be so upset because I was asking for something I wanted (meatier game writing). To those offended- and it seems there have been a good amount- sorry if there are some folks who don't agree with my request. I didn't know having an opinion or desire contray to your own was so offensive. David