Armchair Games Journalism
In video game journalism, original source material is surprisingly hard to come by. Most video games journalists rely on press releases to get information about a game — video game studios have a closed-door policy to outsiders, and tours are closely monitored affairs, where journalists are sometimes ‘wined and dined’ on the publisher’s budget. This has always been a slippery slope for games journalists, as it goes directly against the mantra of traditional reporting, which asks for a separation between the reporter and his subject. After GamerGate and accusations that personal relationships were being leveraged to garner reviews, people became extremely skeptical of the so-called video games journalists and their craft. Many publications felt the need to reach out to their audiences and confirm their standards.
The reason that video games journalists remain close to their sources is simple: they require early access to games in order to release timely reviews. To do that, they need to build trust with the big publishers and development houses. They depend on them for advertising and often need to play softball in order to get access. This access often comes along withsome sort of swag or bonus package, which writers generally remain hush about, to avoid giving away free advertisements. Remaining hush about the swag can also backfire, because there’s no way to definitively prove that it hasn’t influenced the nature of the coverage.
Oftentimes, everything about a new video game reads like video game public relations — and it’s impossible to put too much distance between the journalists and PR, because they can’t receive the games without interacting. Employees aren’t allowed to speak with the press without signing a Non-Disclosure Agreement.
The best way to address this is for gaming organizations to be open and transparent with journalists, and allow them easy access to the people and products they are interested in learning about, as long as they aren’t stepping on any toes, or jeopardizing anyone’s jobs. NDAs are fine, as long as both parties are able to get/protect the information they need within the agreements. Putting on a developer on blast for things they do wrong is fine, as long as that company or individual is allowed the chance to reply and tell his or her side of the story. And if a reporter is going to call out an individual for poor behavior, it’s important to have verifiable information.
Reporting on the industry itself is tricky because most companies tend to have non-disclosure agreements and other policies in place to protect the privacy of their employees — it’s one thing for an employee to talk about his personal experiences and history, but quite another for him to talk about the current structure of the company or what they’re doing to improve their work environment. Anonymous sources would be necessary in this case, but are inadvisable because gaming audiences don’t trust uncredited sources — they’d much rather hear filtered information from the company than from some journalist professing to have gathered anonymous knowledge.
This makes interviews with game developers some of the most valuable pieces of gaming journalism, especially when they are in a position to speak candidly about their relationship with the industry. These are why trade sites like Gamasutra continue to be valuable for game designers and gamers alike — speaking about the business and process of making games will always be in vogue, because it’s always changing and evolving together with the technology.
There are plenty of video games journalists (myself included) who prefer to write in a form of new journalism, where they focus on personal narrative and subjective experience akin to travel journalism. They also feature lots of creative analysis. These narratives are sometimes frowned upon for lacking in journalistic integrity. Those of us writing them try and be transparent about the subjectivity of our judgments. I’m very aware that many people adore Trevor and think he’s the best protagonist in the Grand Theft Auto series. I’m not one of those people, but my girlfriend is. (Most people value him from a ludological standpoint, where my issues are narratological in nature…)
Writing media reviews about the games themselves is a bit more tricky because it requires access to the games. Many people detest video game previews, because the press is sampling a game in its unfinished state and it’s an incomplete picture of what the game will really look like. While previews are still an important part of gaming culture at events like E3 Expo and Tokyo Games Show, many people lump them in together with press releases, as all of the available content has been carefully prepared for that particular day.
A great example of this in action is how Bungie and Activision handled Destiny — they were able to concoct a brilliant and beautiful press campaign in the year leading up to its release. The previews were vague and calculated, and Bungie was able to secure a massive amount of early adopters. But the final release of the game was released to much less fanfare — the game was beautiful and delivered on its promises, but felt barren and lonely — leading many (myself included) to drop it after playing through the story. (For a fun read, check out how Cara Ellison shamelessly mocked the preview process for Crysis 3).
In any other industry, rewriting press releases and working closely with corporations is seen as lazy journalism because it fails to get both sides of the story and seek out the truth. In the article, Brenda Norrell notes newsrooms rarely ask reporters to ‘get the grassroots side of the story’ when they are quoting politicians, but when they are quoting the grassroots movements, they are forced to publish the lies of the big corporations. Compare this to things like the Denis Dyack interview following the anonymously sourced Kotaku article, and you’ll begin to question whether big gaming news sites are dealing with the same issues.
Some popular gaming sites seem to be taking notes from the success of Bleacher Report, which is one of the top three sports websites on the web. Bleacher Report is full of articles like “wardrobe malfunctions in sports” and “the biggest criers.” One of the most unique aspects of Bleacher Report is its blanket policy actually forbidding writers from breaking news. (Starkman 2013) Instead of trying to legitimize sources from user stories, they recommend that users craft articles or slide-shows based on news from mainstream outlets. The goal is to give consumers the kind of content they demand. This works because sites like Bleacher Report use a large analytic team to comb through data and find the ideal time and audience for each type of story, thus fulfilling the audience’s’ needs and predicting trends before they exist. The editorial team will come up with a headline and pass it on to writers to fill in the content, essentially transforming data into editorial pieces.
Writers are encouraged to play into hyperboles, so a simple news item like “LeBron James signs with Miami Heat” turns into “LeBron James Signing Makes the Miami Heat the Best Team in History.” They’ll even give writers stories like “Why Tom Brady is the Most Overrated Quarterback” and young amateur authors will pick it up, blaming success on the team, not the quarterback (despite even the author acknowledging plenty of evidence to the contrary). These articles bring in plenty of traffic because they encourage debate. Even the salaried writers are forced to create slideshows and top ten lists underneath pre-written headlines.
What conclusions can we draw from this? What should those of us who lay claim to be professionals in the creation and distribution of media do to best encourage and harness an active community of amateur content creators (in some cases, a community that we may even be members in)? For sports, this was done with heavy-handed targeting and keyword analytics that packaged all of its content into pre-made, rigid boxes.
In Kelly McBride and Tom Rosenthiel’s New Ethics of Journalism, Steven Walderman talks about how news and media organizations need to work harder to actively create and moderate community platforms where people can engage and exchange information, whether these communities are based on demographics like location or gender, or interests. Many of these communities already exist in some form but are largely user-created, leaving them in the hands of amateur curation, unable to reach their full potential as media platforms. Others, like Bleacher Report, are so heavily curated that they stifle any sort of user creativity or attempts to gather credible information.
Alex Handy from the Made talks a little bit more about how these changes are impacting video game journalism, and where the media needs to shift its attention in order to become more beneficial to its audience. He calls for deep investigative journalism, and content that boils down detailed information into accessible chunks.