Game Journalism 2009: The Continuing Plunge

Games
81

The rant was fun, but it was ranting about games journalism by [good] games journalists. So it was really people who were good at their job ranting about people who aren’t good at the same job. They weren’t really ranting about game devs, although the “stop the guy culture” was the closest we got, and no one was going to disagree with that, even if that rant was really spitting in the wind.

I went to another session called “Meet the (gaming) press” which was Crescente from Kotaku, Brandon Sheffield from Game Developer magazine, and Sam Kennedy from the shadow of 1up. They started the talk by ignoring the elephant in the room (the death of print, and really the move from an enthusiast press to a mainstream press) and bitching about PR people who contact them without knowing anything about their respective outlets.

  1. The people who do that aren’t in the room, so who gives a flying fuck?
  2. Game Developer is highly subsidized and I’m pretty sure most of their circ comes from IGDA membership (and it’s the size of a pamphlet that takes about 20 minutes to read), 1up just got bought and gutted by a site that has much lower writing standards but was much more profitable, Kotaku is… well it’s got dubious journalistic practices and it hides behind being a blog to cover it’s fuckups, and this is what you talk about???

At about 10 minutes in, I got up and left. Next door Randy Smith was doing “Helping your players feel smart: Puzzles as a user interface” which was much more interesting and helpful than anything those three were likely to say.

82

To be fair, I believe this panel was attempting to discuss topics they felt were relevant to the audience. They were addressing the questions around “how do I deal with the gaming press?” Certainly more relevant to small dev houses, or PR people. It’s not easy to get up on stage and start slagging off your employers, especially when those employers run the conference. besides, Brandon was the only one there still in print. Discussing the death of print is kinda like discussing the death of Communism, these days. It’s already happened.

Would loved to have heard discussion about the move to mainstream press coverage, however. Haven’t heard much talk about that.

83

Uh, all kinds of no on a couple of these things, Dean. IGDA members no longer get Game Developer magazine, as of about 3 or 4 years ago, and the two entities are completely separate - once upon a time, the IGDA had a management relationship with Game Developer’s parent, but this was many moons ago. Zero relationship nowadays.

I know this was a throwaway comment, but it would be nice if it were a correct one, given your caustic comments on accuracy in the media. And you can’t spell Brian Crecente’s name. :P

While I’m on my medium horse, ‘highly subsidized’ is also incorrect. All of our properties (including Game Developer magazine, Gamasutra, etcetera) are perfectly workable and profitable in a standalone sense. Of course, print ain’t what it used to be (hence your pamphleteering comment!), but people still find it useful for landing their message directly onto developers’ desks, so even in our smaller issues, we keep pretty constant at >30 pages of generally useful editorial - most of which is actually written by developers. And we’re gonna keep it up, darn it.

As for Brandon and friends’ GDC panel, I didn’t attend, but the number one mistake you can make as an independent developer (or established PR!) is not knowing how to market in today’s distinctly different media age. I believe that is what the panel was trying to address, but if you’re not trying to do that, then it won’t be that useful.

I agree that actually full-time paid journalism is important for investigative and breaking news reasons, and there’s far too much loosey-goosey shenanigans going on in that area re: inaccuracy.

But much of the good writing about games nowadays isn’t - shock - from full-time journalists. Heck, a bunch of the user op-eds in the new Gamasutra blog section we just started are as good or better than the ones that our editors take time to write.

In fact, I would argue that there is far better, more evocative writing about games in today’s Internet age than there ever has been when editors closely cropped strategy game reviews to finely hewed perfection. But I’ve never been much of a formalist, so YMMV.

84

Fair enough. All I know is that I started getting it when I joined the IGDA and I don’t pay a dime for it.

Whoops on Crecente, but hey, it’s just a forum, right? :-)

Maybe the three of you got to interesting stuff for PR people, but I’m not, so I left.

There was also the “Making the jump from games journalist to game dev” panel which I didn’t attend, but it seemed to me a pretty small audience (game journalists looking to become devs).

85

And let’s not forget Johnny Wilson, who practically invented the concept of writing about electronic games.

86

Which raises the question: If Leigh Alexander has direct access to so many developers, why does she complain that no one will tell her what a game engine is? Can’t she just call up Noel Llopis or Mick West and ask?

87

Totally.

When I was commissioning editor on Gamer, one of my diktats was that you couldn’t use “very” or “nice” in an situation.

Well, any exception other than together. You could say “very nice” because the double-negative give it an agreeable bland sarcasm.

KG

88

Great comment. I remember reading the very first CGWs (and Softtalks long before that!) and reading his stuff. I assume you actually know Johnny - is he as classy as he came across in his writing?

I think the high point of my writing career in this genre: I was at an E3, standing there at the bottom of the stairs waiting for them to open the doors. Denny had recently picked me up to do some sim coverage for CGW, and the first assignment he gave me was a multi-page feature on strategy for the then-current flood of WWII sims. I used quotes from various WWII aces to introduce the topics, and the art folks at CGW really made it look great. So, I’m standing there in the crowd, and this bearded guy next to me looks at my badge, and then says “Are you the Jeff Lackey that wrote that WWII sim strategy article in CGW? That was a superb piece, I really enjoyed reading it, even though I don’t play a lot of sims right now.” He then introduced himself as Johnny Wilson (I had seen his badge by now and recognized him) and he simply said “I used to work at CGW.” How humble, and how nice for him go out of his way to reach out to a lowly freelancer. Just class all the way.

89

From one of my earliest CGW issues as a kid, I still remember Johnny Wilson’s thoughtful back page article on violence in gaming contrasting with his police ride-along from his pastor days.

Crescente and Ashcroft have some good articles so Kotaku’s tabloid label is sometimes undeserved.

90

As someone who didn’t even own a computer until the late 1990s, the first thing that comes to mind when I hear Johnny Wilson is Ultima Online.

91
92

I wondered this myself as I wrote the rant. It’s just too perfect, like bait. Still, I decided to have faith–or, I guess, have no faith–and I went for it.

Thanks for the link, I added it to my article! Yikes, he was a bit down on the other ranters…I thought some of the journalist rants were pretty good. Heather’s rant was an instant classic (a AAA developer that will remain unnamed almost got in a fist fight jumping to her defense as some dumbass badmouthed her outside the session, what more could you ask for from a rant!?), and Jamin’s rant about RE5 and diversity in games was quite good as well. As for being eligible, I don’t think so, since I was the inaugural recipient last year. To get another award, I’ll have to get a new one created by topping the Wii rant, which is something I don’t plan on attempting anytime soon…my death threat quota is filled for the decade. :)

Chris

ObJohnnyWilsonStory: I’ve never met him, but I was hanging out at Looking Glass back in the Flight Unlimited development days, just visiting friends. Seamus and I chatted for a bit, but he had Johnny coming in to preview the game, so he couldn’t hang out too long. Johnny arrives, so I go hang out in Doug’s office, which has a view of the hallway to the kitchen. After Johnny and Seamus had been in Seamus’ office for about 10 minutes, Seamus walks by the door headed towards the kitchen. 30 seconds later, he walks back by going the other way, carrying a bottle of whiskey and two glasses. I assume the preview went well.

93

This is what I love about Qt3. I come for the video game discussion, but stay for the profanity laden grammar arguments.

94

Okay, as someone who’s going to have a game reviewed soon I’m going to do something really stupid: I’m going to post in this thread.

In my experience, game reviewers were pretty awful when I first started to experience game reviews first hand.

The game that led to me becoming friends with Tom Chick was Entrepreneur. He gave it a negative review but he was, as far as I could tell, one of the very few reviewers who had clearly PLAYED the game.

After that, I used to insist to the magazines that Tom Chick be the reviewer even though the PR guy/gal (usually gal) would try to warn me that Tom Chick was harsh and tough on games. But back then, our options were: Bad Ass Tom Chick OR random dude who might not even play the game before putting up their “safe” 80.

So from our vantage point, the game review system has gotten better in the sense that reviewers seem to actually play our games now. But that might only be because they’ve heard of us.

The problem now is that the number of experienced reviewers is dwindling due to “budget cuts”.

This has been a real problem on the PC side. Again, making a note that it’s stupid of me to be participating in this thread a week before our big game release is going out to reviewers but…

The PC is strong in some particular genres. Once the editors finally deemed that our games could be reviewed by people who actually played games, we found just how outstanding many of the reviewers were:

Besides Tom Chick who might be harsh but at least you can bet your ass that he’s played the game. You also had Bruce Geryk who not only knows strategy games but could probably design better strategy games than I could. There is also Jeff Lackey who has been playing PC games forever. And Allen Rausch at GameSpy knows these games incredibly well - insanely well. I’m just scratching the surface.

And here’s where we get to the negative part: Most of the reviewers now seem more like console gamers or, at best, fans of ONE genre:

As someone who isn’t a huge fan of first person shooters (and incidentally, if retail sales are any indication, neither are a lot of PC gamers), I’m particularly sensitive to seeing such ridiculous levels of attention and coverage given to them at the expense of everything else. Not saying that every article should be The Sims or WoW but sheesh, the last year of Games for Windows might as well been Games for First Person Shooters. There was ONE first person shooter in the top 10 PC game sellers last year. ONE. And given the massive coverage FPS’s get, you’d think they were the most common PC game sold. In 2007 there was ONE FPS there too. Strategy games, which generally outsell FPS’s at retail, don’t just get less coverage but the game journalists who are specialized in those types of games tend to have to fight to get published which is crazy.

The reason this matters is because pre-coverage can affect reviews which in turn massively affect retail sales.

I had a reviewer tell our PR person (and I was CC’d on the email) stating that if our game was good they would have heard of it BEFORE release therefore, they didn’t really need to spend that much time checking it out. This was, btw, for Sins of a Solar Empire.

Another thing that drives me crazy is seeing reviewers complain about meta scores (like metacritic). Well, here’s a dirty secret that no one likes to talk about:

If game has metascore < 85, retail reorders go down tubes. The retail buyers look at Metacritic (and GameStats). So those reviewers, especially the early reviewers, have immense power over the economic fate of a game. Think of the conflict that puts at the business vs. marketing side: Review scores are basically 7 to 9 most of the time. Many reviewers will just give a game an 8 if the game looks “slick” and they don’t have time to review it. But an 8 is still economic death for a game.

So for indie developers, you end up with this situation: If the game isn’t well known before it comes out, a reviewer might just give it an 8 if the game looks slick and they don’t feel like spending much time on it. This is bad in both ways: If it’s a crappy (but slick) game it gets too high a review. But if it’s a real gem, it just got creamed. And if the game doesn’t look slick (like a hard core strategy games) it could really get ripped even if the game itself is awesome.

Anyway, getting back to the point: There are a lot of really good gaming journalists out there. I know, at least over the past few years, the quality has gone way up (in my opinion) and I say that because I find myself enjoying the articles more and more.

Here’s an example: PC Gamer. I used to be so annoyed with PC Gamer some years ago that I wouldn’t send them preview or review copies (that’s the kind of bad business idiocy you can get away with when you own the company). It’s probably worth noting that Stardock is a mutant company in the sense that’s it’s made up largely of game enthusiasts who learned how to code in order to make games and release them so that we could put our money where our mouth was in terms of our forum opinions. :)

Anyway, looking back over issues of PC Gamer, you can see how it’s gotten better and better. Before someone beats me up, I’m very serious. Go and look back at the quality of the articles and reviews and compare them to today or even a couple years ago. I actually found myself re-reading an article on Turtling by Dan Stapleton from years ago to remember why people like turtling (I hate turtling) to design things for Elemental.

My point is, even with PC Gamer, it went from a magazine that used to try to turn the editors into a kind of cult of personality to being a magazine that was good enough where readers are going back and using its articles as reference material.

Now, in the past few months though, things have gotten…odd. At the last QuarterToThree dinner we noticed how many old faces were gone. Scattered to the wind due to budget cuts and such. I’m not sure what’s going to happen.

I have this recurring nightmare that I’ll be talking to someone reviewing Demigod and I’ll make a reference to Kohan or Total Annihilation and they’ll say “What is that?”. Whereas, I have no doubt that when talking about Demigod I could say to Tom, Bruce, Jeff, and others here how Demigod reminds me a bit of Mail Order Monsters.

Sorry to ramble. Just taking a brief respite from crunch. :)

95

At the minor risk of derailing the thread after Brad’s lobbed up a post with a lot to talk about, I wanted to comment on this…

(Not least because it’s the thing I can give an easy, quick and useful comment to)

In terms of magazines*, the accepted wisdom was that while the average big RTS sold twice what the average big FPS** did in terms of pure retail numbers, the average big FPS on the cover sold considerably more than the average big RTS game. Or, to put it even simpler, FPS fans buy more mags than RTS fans***.

At its core, it’s pure economics. Is it true any more? Fuck knows. But even if it’s not, that sort of accepted wisdom takes a while to shift.

(I think there’s a secondary issue connected to that, as I agree that strategy coverage tends to be worse in quality than more action-related coverage. Magazines primary source of writers are their readers. So if more readers buy it because of FPS games, more of the writing applicants are from that, leading to an increased chance of the genuinely good ones having those kind of preferences. But that’s a much more theoretical thing than the previous point, y’know?)

And I’ll think about the rest overnight.

KG

*In the UK.
**With one exception in my time on PCG from 1998-2003. That being, Half-life 1.
***Or possibly RTS fans make less of their buying decision based around the cover. In which case, it equally doesn’t matter.

96

So, there’s loads to talk about here. But this made me chuckle. The first thing I do when someone requests a particular reviewer is give the game to someone else. Soz Brad.

97

EDIT: not going to upset things.

98

Or, apparently, Titan.

Troy

99

Is the overall quality of game reviewers or game journalists (are these the same thing?) really that much different from the quality of a movie reviewer or a music critic?

Is it really that much different from the mainstream press? The traditional print media doesn’t exactly cover itself in glory with its attention to detail or fact-checking. Just last night, Leslie Stahl had to apologize on-air for slandering a group of Finnish teenagers because she characterized them as Russian computer criminals. That’s a bit more consequential than not knowing the difference between the subjective or objective case, and a million dollar news organization can’t get some essential facts straight.

Every time I come across a story in the mainstream media that concerns a topic that I know a quite a bit about, more often than not significant details are omitted or flat-out wrong. I suspect their errors aren’t limited to my own knowledge areas.

I’m talking about the overall quality here, not specific individuals. I’d submit that the overall quality of the gaming press is the same quality as the mainstream press which is quite poor. There are noteworthy exceptions, and they should be rewarded, but those are well, uh, exceptions.

100

Which is more evidence that game journalism has gotten better.