Jul 31, 05:01 AM

Game Journalism Sucks?

Over at GameDaily BIZ Chris Boffa comments about why video game journalism sucks and how to become a better videogame journalist.

I’d like to offer some other suggestions on why it is hard to be a video game journalist:

One, video games are very personal. Everyone has their own favorite game, and the experience each person gets is often very different from the next person. We each value a game on very different criteria and look at it with a different lens. While this can be said of TV shows and movies, the interactive nature of video games makes the individual lens effect much more pronounced.

Two, game journalists are surrounded by a different environment than traditional journalists. To conduct proper research and due diligence (at least online anyway) you have to put up with language and syntax that would be unintelligible to normal human beings. In the gaming world, it’s either all caps or no caps at all – there’s no in-between. Proper spelling isn’t a priority, and I would even argue that gamers who insist on good spelling and grammar only isolate themselves from the larger community.

I’ll admit, sometimes the urge to insert lols, rofls, and omgs into writing is very strong. I’m not entirely convinced, however, that informal language like leetspeak is all that bad. While the mainstream media must talk to everyone, gaming journalism is, well, mainly consumed by hardcore gamers. The use of this type of language can act as a kind of signal that you are a fellow gamer.

I guess what I’m trying to say with all this is that whereas traditional journalism requires a more objective, observational, non-intrusive style, gaming journalism almost requires someone to be subjective and participatory by its nature.

-Jon
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  1. A game that i’ve been working on is about to have it’s day with the media. It’s an awesome game, but because all gaming journalist are not total gamers, small changes have been made just for the media. Nothing that will make them say ahhh or ohhh, mostly taking out spoilers, guns that take some exp to use and thing like that. Since they will only have a short time to play it. But this also will show in their write ups, if they only play 1 hour how can their story on the game be even close to what you would experence when playing it for 40 hours

    — GamingGuest    Jul 31, 10:28 PM    #

  2. That’s a good point – with a book or a movie, a reviewer can finish the entire thing and get the “complete experience.” This is almost a paradox for games, because arguably the journalists who could write the best review will be the ones who have the least time to play them.

    — jon    Aug 2, 01:23 AM    #

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