Literally every game journalist article I see feels like the people who wrote it never even played the game to begin with.
There is no such thing as journalism in gaming unfortunately. There’s only third-party marketing.
But to further answer your question as to why the standards might have degraded even further, I blame the advent of internet. Whoever plays the least amount of time and writes fastest will have several hours of advantage in getting their article published. Back when gaming magazines were dominant, the dynamics were different because your article wasn’t published faster because you wrote faster.
Another part of the reason why internet degraded written articles is video reviews. Video reviews are a distinct format from written reviews, yet both tasks are given to the same writer in most publications. This will obviously result in decreased quality for both formats and pure writers who are not as good at editing/narrating videos might get pushed out.Well that explains that article comparing teabagging to rape.
My favourite type of video game journalism is pirating the game to find out if it is good myself.
Yes
Welcome to the glamourous world of gimme-stuff-so-i-like-your-shit-“journalism”.
I usually try to find YouTube-reviews with <500 views. They still try and are probably uninteresting for the industry.
The Jimquisition AKA James Stephanie Sterling is the only games journalist I trust because they talk about workers rights and how game companies abuse their customers.
Thank god for them.
I don’t really follow that many games as a whole so that is the extent of my interest.
Yeah she is consistently a sane voice in an ocean of grifters and corporate liberals.
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They are first a games journalist and a critic of capitalism second. Their utility to the communism pipeline is still good.
In the liberal alternate reality where China is as fascist as India, but with a competent omniscient survielence state, a person wanting to talk about wanting to be freed from their tyranical government presenting at a Blizzard corporate event would still be banned. This is to do with criticizing Blizzard for being amoral and willing to make concessions to whatever governments they want to sell their products in.
If she gave full throated support for China, her function in the communist pipeline would be less functional.
If you don’t want to watch her, good. Enjoy doing other things than watching videos.
That’s fair, though I feel they’ve moved left since then. They talk far more openly about capitalism and more openly.
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Because someone who is writing a review of the game has to write a lot of reviews of games in order to afford rent. So they rush through a game as quickly as possible, playing for a few hours, then write a quick review, then move onto the next game. Plus there’s the whole issue with companies refusing to hand out review copies of future games if their games get negative reviews, so they have to be overly positive a lot of the time. So they’re rushed, forced to say things they don’t want to, and don’t have time to really soak in a game and analyze why something happens in it, just a quick surface level reaction to everything. So they often feel like a wikipedia or cliffnotes summary of the game’s plot and themes because they didn’t really analyse it at all because they just don’t have the time to do so.
The other answers in this post already sums it up pretty well, but there’s this recent video from the Kavernacle that talks about gaming journalism and I think is pretty good: https://youtu.be/nsgTD9bLVsU?si=cWR7rNmpB7t3mM96
I was also gonna link a video of the same topic from Ranton, but I saw he had a Pewdienazi gaming chair and saw he making various nazi/holocaust jokes throughout the video, so, ugh.
But back on topic. The issue is capitalism as always, overworked writers/journalists that need to write as much as possible as fast as possible to generate as much clicks as possible. Then there’s the whole thing with the whole gaming journalist industry being in bed with the companies whose products they are supposed to critically review. You end up with fake journalism that serves the interests of the gaming companies that control what is played, when, for how long, in what circumstances, and if you fuck up you’re blacklisted.
Because they don’t. Or they play it for hour or two tops and then write a review.
The chad way of getting gaming recommendations is through absurdly in depth video essays related to an ultra specific topic
That way you know which game can provide an experience that is meaningful enough to be worthy of discussion in another context than simple game consumption
I feel this way about the majority of articles devoted to software of any kind. Being a Linux user and a developer makes the shortcomings, the factual errors and the erroneous assumptions in those articles pretty noticeable and moderately annoying.
Pretty much every game journalist except probably the indie ones are being paid off to write good reviews and do this quite often meaning the quality of their writing suffers. Basically, capitalism
I have a very select few people in the game space I follow (basically all the Ex-Giantbomb folks, mostly Nextlander + Tamoor these days). They’re more from the old school system where you weren’t just PR for the games you were covering. I don’t always agree with their gaming tastes, but I enjoy listening to them. Been following them for nearly 20 years at this point.
The best thing you can do is honestly find someone whose tastes are about the same as yours rather than find some impartial critic. The latter is frankly impossible, there are critically acclaimed games that I hate just because they don’t match my tastes.
Maybe I should jump into the game journalism space though I am not sure how well I would fair.
It’s extremely saturated though. Those guys have the luxury of being able to do it without taking bribes from publishers, because they have been around for so long. They built up an audience before the industry has shifted to what it is now. If I tried to make something like Nextlander or Giant Bomb right now, it wouldn’t work.
There’s a reason so many of the “new reviewers” are just glorified PR, it’s the easiest way to do it for the people who care more about getting free games to play than the actual writing.
I actually did do some freelance game journalsim work before/during grad school. You need a pretty thick skin for being turned down, you probably make 50 pitches for every article you end up actually getting to write.
