Is the Game Media Being Oblivious?

MaryAlan writes "The National Summit on Video Games, Youth, and Public Policy was this weekend, and almost no one from the game media showed up. In fact, the game industry seems to pretty much be ignoring the whole event. There's an article up on GamesFirst, which attended the summit, that criticizes the mainstream game press pretty hard for not attending. Apparently only one game journalist showed up. From the article: 'The video game media owes it to our readers to come to events like this and listen, come here and think, and come here and base our editorials on the reality of what's being said instead of an interpretation of the talking points that are published afterwords. Too many of the people discussing these issues in forums do so based on the works of the game media, and too few in the gaming media are spending the time to make it justified.'"

Comments

Guess they didn't learn

[Mateo_LeFou]

From the online poker sites' experiment with passively-watching our legislators do their thing.

Re:Guess they didn't learn

[Swanktastic]

There is a term for this type of political extortion: Mud Farming. It comes from the story of a farmer who owned a plot of land next to a dirt road. Each night, he'd plough up and water down the road, then wait for cars to get stuck. He would then, of course, be ready to pull them out of the mud with his tractor for a tidy sum.

In politics, it goes like this: Give money to my campaign, or I'll go after your industry. Although I don't necessarily agree, many political analysts feel the Microsoft Monopoly case occured not out of public concern, but due to the simple fact that MS was not spending enough money on lobbyists or campagins. The tech industry as a whole during the 80s-90s spent orders of magnitude less %-wise of their revenues on impacting political legislation. Mature industries like the automotive, steel, lumber, oil, etc. industries have learned to "pay the piper." The high tech industry has finally come around, and the result has been much more favorable attention from our legislators.

The video game industry finds itself in the same quagmire. Young, fast-growth industries often do. Management is focused more on putting out product than seeing "the big picture." It takes a slap on the wrist to learn. We don't see legislators going after the movie and music industries, after all.

Many would say this is due to the public's fear of "new things for kids." In part, I agree. But, the mechanics of the process of legislation involve two things: money and public opinion. Unfortunately the video game industry is losing on both fronts these days.

Re:Guess they didn't learn

[Castar]

I'll ignore the offtopic bit of your post, and just say you've got your analogy wrong. The article isn't lambasting the game industry for not showing up, but rather the gaming press. That's a little like the sports press not showing up for the congressional hearings on baseball steroids. It's a story that's important to the industry that they cover - more important, surely, than the release of new screenshots, snarky comments by company executives, or perhaps even more important than the launch of a new console.

Most games journalism is sitting back and being spoonfed information by talented PR people, then regurgitating it. Getting up and actually doing some investigation is alien to most games "journalists", but those that put in the work are going to be the Woodwards of their trade. Which the industry sorely needs.

Ayn Rand: Philosophy for the Self Centered

[spun]

Screw Ayn Rand and her whole twisted philosophy. No man is an island, and we are all our brother's keepers. Meaning, we do not create ourselves, our personality, it is created by the world, by other people that influence us. Using your influence to harm others is wrong. For instance, I could raise a bunch of my kids to be serial killers if I wanted to. Is that right? No. Should society have a say in the way someone raises their kids, say, to prevent people from raising a whole brood of deranged maniacs? I say so.

Now, I'm not saying the games industry is raising a bunch of maniacs. Thought I would explicitly state that to stave of the likely horde of idiots wielding straw men. I'm just saying, people have a right to determine what is decent and what isn't for their community. I may not like what my society says is decent, and I may want to practice what they say is indecent, but it is their right to set standards that others have to meet in order to be a part of that community. Don't like it? Don't live in that community.

The dumbest thing you can do when your community is discussing standards is to tell them that you don't give a fuck what they think and you are just going to do whatever the hell you want to. They are perfectly justified in not taking your opinion into consideration. This is exactly what the gaming industry has done, and it is a sign of immaturity. The smart thing to do is to get involved and address people's concerns. The more you interact, the easier it is to reach a mutually satisfactory compromise.

Even from a purely mercenary, capitalist, objectivist (what a crock!) point of view, it's in one's own self interest not to alienate large segements of one's potential market.

Re:Ayn Rand: Philosophy for the Self Centered

[br00tus]

"I am an individual", yet one third of my salary is going to the US federal government, which is giving it to Halliburton so they can kill people in Iraq. So what do you do when they come to your door looking for tax money, you the individual are going to singlehandedly take on the police, the national guard, and the US army? That might play in Hollywood movies but it is not reality. The government doesn't even have to come to you for money, they go to the company boss who takes it out of wages anyhow. Which also leads one to wonder why a worker who is creating the wealth he lives on has a boss working for company owners who control his money anyhow. The idea you're "free" now is a joke - unless you really are well-to-do, which means you have little in common with the average Slashdot reader who is, at best, a professional.

We live in a capitalist society, which means it is run by capitalists. Federal reserve surveys show that over 40% of the corporate stock in the country is owned by 1% of the population, while the bottom 90% of the population has to split up the less than 20% of the pie left for them. The numbers are similar for private business as well (and bonds etc.) If you look at these types, say on the Forbes 400, you see that half of them inherited all of their money. And the cutoff between the inheritance half and "self-made" billionaires is at the $300 million line, meaning someone inheriting $280 million and parlaying it into a few billion is "self-made". In fact the top people on the list all came from wealth - Bill Gates's father and grandfather were well-to-do lawyers (Preston Gates was huge before Microsoft), Warren Buffett's father was a congressman whose family owned many stores etc. I won't even go into how much of capitalism is based on imperialist theft - say the English robbery of Ireland, India or English settlers robbery of American Indians (in the US and Canada). Or US theft of oil in Iraq.

Ayn Rand takes the reality of capitalism, hides it, and creates a fantasy land. The workers movements, the left, has always been about giving control of the workers work to the worker. This is what the capitalists don't want, or people nominally on the left who try to betray this tradition - US trade union bureaucrats who don't care about workers, or USSR communist bureaucrats who ultimately became straight-out capitalists, showing what they really were all along. Of course, people who have had workers movements and the like know this, which is why Ayn Rand is a joke anywhere outside of the US. Ayn Rand is the equivalent of the fundamentalist Jesus bullshit in the US, except for professionals and managers too smart to buy into those myths. But not smart enough to know about the world outside the US, or even inside the US going back a century or two.

Re:Sponsoring Organization are Nutjobs

[Bryansix]

First of all don't be so sure about Joe Liberman. As soon as people find out who his opposition is they will run to the polls to vote for Liberman and act like they never associated with the other guy.

Secondly, this organization is not all bad. Look at this quote.

As I've said for years, some video games, especially ultraviolent and killographic games and certain industry practices deserve some public condemnation. The evidence for a causal link between violent games and violent behavior is mounting. And with so much money to be made, some in the industry often seem to lose sight of their public responsibility to protect children. As I've said before, however, there are a lot of very good video games. The term video game shouldn't be derogatory, and the term "gamer" shouldn't be a dirty word either.

Criticizing the people who play video games for the irresponsibility of some in the industry is nothing more than guilt by association. Millions of people-hardworking, responsible adults and healthy, happy kids-play good video games.

Censorship and demonization are not the answer. If we antagonize thoughtful, reasonable people, we'll only make it harder to reform a flawed industry and protect our kids. We'll never find "the better way, the more effective way, to allow both freedom and responsibility to co-exist," that Matthew Metzo hopes for in his letter.

Taken from this article. Emphasis mine. They don't want to censor, they just want oversight of the ratings process. I for one think that the whole GTA San Andreas thing is stupid. I can't sell my copy back to the store now because of the re-rating. I still think video games need to be rated though and if the ESRB would have gotten off of their lazy asses and taken a real look at GTA San Andreas it probably would have been rated Adults Only in the first place. AO does not need to equal Porn.

What gaming media?

[supabeast!]

From TFA:

Shame on the game news outlets like GameSpy, IGN, and GameSpot, among others; outlets with the resources to send a reporter to the conference, but chose not to...

Why would such "gaming media" bother showing up at a political event? None of those web sites or their related magazines have anything to do with legitimate journalism. They're a bunch of hacks who sit around giving absurdly friendly reviews to game companies which return the favor by advertising with them, or in the case of Gamespy, licensing their code. They're a bunch of parasites, not responsible journalists, and they don't go to events that don't involve free stuff and half-naked girls because they don't care about the game industry in the first place. If they lose their jobs they can all just go work in some other BS wing of the American media.

Why would they bother

[Wovel]

1. Were they invited? 2. Gaming Press covers games, how to play them , if they are fun. They do not cover public policy. I fail to see why the gaming press would express any interest in this at all, or the author thinks they should.

No one's reading this anymore anyway, but...

[DorkusMasterus]

The truth is that the author has a good and valid point. While it's not going to cure what ails the industry all by itself, the gaming media has a responsibility (I think) to objectively see what's out there in terms of perspective (not just from Jack Thompson soundbytes, and also from Rockstar soundbytes) and to really see what the "community" says about the subjects. That way, you get (OMG) balanced journalism, that, when opinion is then later injected into, has the right to say what it has to say, without being fanboyish to one side or the other.

I mean, who ever really got upset at someone for having an opinion that was actually well-informed, even if you disagreed with it? IMHO, this is the kind of thing that separates gaming journalism from other forms of the genre, in some arenas. The reporting of the industry is better, but not necessarily the "perhiphery" of the industry is getting glanced at, and nothing more. Digging deeper in these areas are what take journalism from being a niche and making it accessible to everyone, even outside of games.

Again, this is only my opinion, but seriously, the author has a right to call out those who consider major "non-press-conference" events, not worth attending.

http://www.videogamevoters.org/

[ClioCJS]

Video Game Voters network

Don't just talk about it here. Join the organization and write your congressman when they ask you to. Participate. It has a higher ROI than bitching.