Games Journalism 2018: We're taking it back!

I learned and worked for John Keefer. Great man. I also had help from great people like Tom Chick, Mark Asher, Sal Accardo, etc…

I miss Arnie Katz and Bill Kunkel.

That’s prudent. QT3’s appeal is its original content and interesting takes on actual news.

Keefer was cool at Crispy. Tom did the most editing of anything I ever wrote for anyone. Both were helpful to me. Thing is, except for Tom, most are gone on to bigger or better things now and it left a huge void for bringing along others.

Well, you said course requirements. I would be completely unsurprised to learn that the same courses were being taught in different ways, reflected differing social philosophies/ priorities, or had different course titles. I would be surprised to learn that new ways of doing journalism had sprung up in the last 28 years requiring additional course requirements. Maybe some classes focused on writing for online, or writing without an editor? I’m not sure that would be substantively different, because producing properly sourced journalistic writing is still what it is. And because I went to a boring old state school in the middle of the country that is not prone to chasing trends, from what I see, my sons are getting what I basically got (although they are not in the j-school).

Even when I was in J-school at Boston U in 05-09, there was a heavy focus on pushing people to train into being “backpack journalists” (that is, an independent all-in-one solution who carried around laptop, stills camera, video camera, mic, etc. in their backpack, enabling them to produce all the needed content by themselves without requiring multiple skillset-defined people for the job). It wasn’t required at the time, so I skipped the video production classes they were recommending, but IIRC, there was talk of pushing everyone into that track a year or two after I graduated. They have, however, against all reason, kept the Magazine track option around, lol: http://www.bu.edu/com/academics/degree-programs/bs-in-journalism/

And this is part of it too. With print as the main outlet for annoucements, companies could work with magazine publishers for exclusive access and scoops.

In the digital world it is post now or miss the zeitgeist. It is hard to be both friendly with game publishers and get timely scoops.

You can definitely get a job in magazines, just not game magazines, at least not in the US.

I still buy Retro Gamer every month at B&N religiously! I also often pick up PC Gamer or Games™ but again, both are created in the UK.

There are a LOT of magazines for sale at B&N, though.

Hot Rod Magazine still turnin’ and burnin’!

If I had a kid and that kid was 18 and that kid asked me to help pay his $50,000/year tuition at BU to major in Print Journalism - Magazine Track in 2018, I would laugh and laugh and laugh.


Edit: And I wish my dad had told me to do that in 2004 and made me suck it up and major in Comp Sci.

What passes for ethics at the NY Times or Wash Post are probably a little to restrictive for TV Guide or Sunset Magazine.

I took plenty of journalism classes in my college days, got a degree in Radio-Tv Broadcasting, and I know several of the teachers I had then would be shocked at much of today’s TV “journalism ethics”.

The 24 hour news cycle has damaged real journalism. You can’t wait to be last out but correct with something. By them no one cares as 20 other outlets have stories on it.

I paid for a daughter to get a degree in screenwriting. I wish your father could have talked to me and her. :)

Does anyone have any links to clips from print magazines that exemplify this golden era of gaming journalism you’re talking about?

Stuff that was unflattering to a publisher, that made a developer angry, that got, say, CGW blacklisted by Electronic Arts, or something comparable.

(I’m not talking about a bad review here and there.)

Because I’m not really remembering anything from that glossy enthusiast press that compares to the kind of critical, groundbreaking work being done on the web these days.* The most memorable legacy of print gaming magazines is the 7-9 scale, as far as I can tell. Please correct me (with links, if possible).

*I know it’s not all, or even most, critical and groundbreaking. But the work is there, if you’re looking for it.

This is a good point to bring up, but especially pre-internet there wasn’t much news other than what the games companies fed the press. And the only way to get the news was through monthly print publications.

I honestly can’t think of one off of the top of my head, but I think that the long-form investigative journalism wasn’t really done back then.

In the print days, bad reviews would sometimes get a publisher to say to a mag behind the scenes things about pulling advertising, etc. over a bad review. A guy like Bauman would say, “Can I quote you on that?” and it stopped right there.

One thing people should always think about with regard to game reviews is that often the majority of reviews agree because that game is actually really good or really bad and it’s you who is the outlier. We didn’t all sit around back then discussing our scores and playing together, at least I know I didn’t. I played the game and submitted the score and text and screenshots based solely on my own experience with the game. In many cases, CGS+/CGM ran my review in print nearly unedited from what I sent in to Steve or whatever editor was handling it.

I can honestly prove that today by doing a scan of my articles and showing you the original Zip with the text I wrote and timestamped Word Docs that left my PC. PC games especially are easy because I took the screenshots that appeared in the mag for more fact checking of what left my “pen” and arrived in your hands in the mag.

I did take video production, but that was back in the Chyron days so no digital tech.

And cameramen still don’t leave enough headroom.

I’m really not talking primarily about reviews, as my original post said. For the sake of argument let’s consider it settled that print game reviewers gave their honest opinions. (That said, if you dared to write a review that went below a “7,” or whatever the equivalent would be on your employer’s ratings scale, congrats! You’re a rare bird indeed!)

I’m talking about work that provided readers information before publishers wanted the information out there – and that made the publishers so mad that they stopped talking to the magazine altogether. Work that revealed dangerous or harmful working conditions at a company. Work that existed to serve the readers, not the games industry. Because I see all this stuff being produced every day on the web in 2018. If you’re not, I can provide links.

Thank you.

There have always been some great people writing about video games though. Here’s a really good interview with Arnie Katz going back over his career.

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4226/electronic_games_the_arnie_katz_.php?print=1

Hold up a second though… does working conditions of developers “serve the readers” or does it actually serve the people who are working in crappy conditions? Why do people who are wanting to purchase entertainment media want or need to know that Game Dev X is working 20 hours a day? You realize articles like those get far fewer hits than a story about the latest Pokémon game, right?

What you’re talking about are insider articles that would appear in the likes of a business journal for games makers. When I worked in video stores, we received “Video Business” which looked at that sort of thing. It was a free publication that was propped up by the vendors who would advertise their newest films on its pages.

In 2018, those articles on the web are basically produced for free. No one gets paid to write them in most cases, because no one would pay to read them, except maybe people who work in gaming. The reason that stuff exists now is because the medium is free and production is free and people’s time is used for… free.

That said, there was some coverage of that sort of thing in magazines of the time, but it definitely wasn’t selling mags. The cover with Civilization II was selling mags.

Okay, I don’t want to get in an Internet Fight, but it’s simply a fact that the work is out there, and people are getting paid to write it, and it’s being read by ordinary people, not merely “insiders.” I’ll take my leave now and shift back into LurkMode, but I just wanted to raise this point for the thread. Thanks for listening!