Editorial RPG Codex Editorial: Games Journalism Scandal

[a bear named spigot]

Who are you in this story anyway Marsal? Grotsnik did the research and wrote the text? You just read it on the 'dex? WTF are you even arguing about?

 

[treave]

I'm just surprised all the negative attention Wainwright has been getting hasn't become a "she's getting picked on because she's a girl!" shitstorm like it did with Hepler.

 

[Taluntain]

*sigh*

I'm going to go on a rant about a few things.

I don't see how reading text on a monitor is different from reading a book; reading text is just reading text.

You can start with the "I don't see" part of that sentence and go from there.

I read a lot of books, both academic and fiction, on the PC because I only have them in digital format. Please tell me how that makes it different from reading them in paper format.

I think pretty much everything on this subject has been covered in this thread already, so no need to rehash it any further.

 

[felipepepe]

I'm just surprised all the negative attention Wainwright has been getting hasn't become a "she's getting picked on because she's a girl!" shitstorm like it did with Hepler.

Hepler was a developer lamb, so the journalist came riding in to save her, as they are paid for. Wainright is the journalists sacrificial lamb, not even turbofeminists journalists want to associate thenselves with her now, she HAS to die so that they may live.

I read a lot of books, both academic and fiction, on the PC because I only have them in digital format. Please tell me how that makes it different from reading them in paper format.

It's extremely annoying to do academic research on a digital book, I miss not being able to highlight & write stuff on the book.

 

[kazgar]

I'm just surprised all the negative attention Wainwright has been getting hasn't become a "she's getting picked on because she's a girl!" shitstorm like it did with Hepler.

Hepler was a developer lamb, so the journalist came riding in to save her, as they are paid for. Wainright is the journalists sacrificial lamb, not even turbofeminists roll journalists want to associate thenselves with her now, she HAS to die so that they may live.

Or its due to the fact the actual material here is strong enough to allow people to keep on topic, and with all the shenanigans about Hepler (and the awfulness of her writing and all the shit romances), the outrage wasn't actually about much, it was just a chance to attack her.

 

[Marsal]

I think pretty much everything on this subject has been covered in this thread already, so no need to rehash it any further.

I thought you needed a recap, seeing how you missed the fun part.

yes reading text is just reading text congratulations captain obvious but both the composition of the text and the medium by which you receive it can impact legibility for example a complete lack of punctuation and formatting can make it both a bit more difficult and a whole hell of a lot more aggravating to try to read something indeed this particular bit of text would be pretty fucking annoying to read for most people and most people wouldn't be able to read it at their usual reading speed even so all this legibility bullshit is just elitist wanking imo

Who are you in this story anyway Marsal? Grotsnik did the research and wrote the text? You just read it on the 'dex? WTF are you even arguing about?

I'm partly responsible for the reading, so I argue about the reading. I'm running out of material. This doesn't fit at all!

I was just injecting some humor into the argument. We usually agree on things, but this is not an argument you can win... and even if it was it wouldn't be worth doing.

We actually do agree again. Those are not my words

inspiration 1

inspiration 2

I was just messing around. After Taluntain wrote a post similar to

mine

, I wanted to see his reaction to posting stupid shit. Now you foiled my plans! Damn you, Jim, damn you!

felipepepe Interesting that you chose to reply to this now

 

[PlanHex]

God you people have a short attention span:

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...-journalism-scandal.77426/page-6#post-2342484
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...-journalism-scandal.77426/page-6#post-2342489
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...-journalism-scandal.77426/page-6#post-2342499
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...-journalism-scandal.77426/page-7#post-2342520

edit: beaten to it :-/

 

[Zed]

I'm just surprised all the negative attention Wainwright has been getting hasn't become a "she's getting picked on because she's a girl!" shitstorm like it did with Hepler.

That's because Wainwright actively sought to bring decline to the gaming industry (committing something undeniably evil), while Hepler was doing creative work that just happened to suck balls. One isn't really defendable by co-workers and employers, the other is.
Hepler also got ridiculed and picked on cuz of her ugliness and fatness (which wasn't very cool, but that's the internet). Wainwright looks relatively fuckable to be honest and is probably not getting the same sort of hurtful insults.
EDIT: actually, with that reasoning, more men should be white-knighting Wainwright.

 

[a bear named spigot]

EDIT: actually, with that reasoning, more men should be white-knighting Wainwright.

Nah, it's inversely proportionate. Schmucks online are more likely to go in to bat for ugly women because there is a better chance she will realise what an amazing person they are and want to meet irl for sex.

 

[Jaesun]

EDIT: actually, with that reasoning, more men should be white-knighting Wainwright.

They were. Rex among them (unless he is hastily deleting all his twitter posts like Wainwright is (and others).

 

[Marsal]

God you people have a short attention span:

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...-journalism-scandal.77426/page-6#post-2342484
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...-journalism-scandal.77426/page-6#post-2342489
http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...-journalism-scandal.77426/page-6#post-2342499

edit: beaten to it :-/

Teachers must have loved you. Well done! It seems that there is hope for Denmark still.

See, Grunker? It's not the education system. Some people are just... different. I still love you, just the way you are

 

[waywardOne]

EDIT: actually, with that reasoning, more men should be white-knighting Wainwright.

No, because white knights are faggot neckbeards who cannot into attractive out-of-their-league women. Make Wainwright a fat hipster vegan and there'd be a Kickstarter to fund her own publishing house.

inb4 jae... ah fuck.

 

[Dexter]

To be honest, funny as I find that twitter exchange I just posted, the focus on Wainwright or any other single games journlolist only serves as a distraction from the real problem, the fact that games journalism in its current form is institutionally flawed.

Of course, I doubt that's going to change any time soon, so perhaps it's best to just keep on posting screencaps of particularly amusing examples.

True enough, but to be able to show the systemic problem you need to have a few examples, like in the Gerstman-Gate affair, or Driv3rGate, so too does #DoritoGate need its protagonists.

Every time this kind of discussion has come up in the past, like: http://www.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=6228583

My industry pisses me off.

I was a little suspicious of the cover choices one of our competitors was making, so I checked in with a contact of mine from a major game publisher. "Yes," he confirmed. "We can pretty much get whatever cover we want from that magazine. All it takes is for us to meet with the publisher, promise that we'll buy some ads, and discuss the details from there." So...that magazine's cover stories are for sale. Great.

Recently, some publicists for another game company were lamenting the fact that they couldn't get any coverage on a certain, very high-profile website out there, because they weren't advertising with that site. To get stories written up on their games, they'd have to start spending the bucks. More editorial coverage for sale. Wonderful.

Sadly, I'm not making this stuff up.

I have no stake in these two situations, so why should I care so much? Because even though they're competitors, they affect my business and my reputation. Why do so many mainstream newspapers and periodicals command respect? Because they don't act like the idiots I referred to above. But how will gaming journalism, a relatively new field, gain any credibility when certain prominent outlets or even entire publishing groups whore out their editorial integrity (if I can even call it that)?

in the end it petered out, if you check that article he was even *criticized* for not naming any names by other Journos.

http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Games/Interviews/larian_studios_pt1/

Q: Talk about your experiences with press from the early days up until now.

A: Press was a lot more open in the early days of the industry; they were much more accessible. And in my view they were much more representative of their players in what they were writing than they are today.

People are much more vocal now and that vocality is translating to the press, which seems to be more free. But then you have a press which seems to be almost run by the advertising agency of a publisher. You can see a lot of examples of that in the reviews being posted; you can almost pick which ones where you say 'Well, I know where that influence came from', which is publisher organized, and then the ones where you say 'Well that guy actually played the game and is just writing what he's thinking about it'.

Q: I feel like that's a misconception, though. Maybe you know things I don't, but, as I've usually understood it, the advertising and the public relations (PR) teams are generally very separate and have little or no influence over each other. We've never had that problem; it's never been brought up. I mean, we're not a massive site, but I think we're big enough we would've seen that by now, because we deal with a lot of big publishers.

More often it's an issue where the writer isn't as critical as they should be, but it's more down to them and PR. It doesn't even have to be a spoken thing, they just don't want to upset PR for whatever reason.

A: In general it's not that outspoken. Sometimes it is; I've seen examples of it. But it's probably not the norm. Although, and I'm not going to mention the magazine (it's a fairly big one), not sooner than I'd just done an interview with somebody [recently] was the advertising manager talking with us on the phone a couple of hours later about how many pages we'd wanted to buy, etc. So it does happen like that.

Public relations is all about creating the perception around a game, which does cause problems. You see situations where the guys going to review a game are invited to go to Venice, and they're going to spend a half hour with the game and a week in Venice in a five-star hotel. It's going to be extremely hard to be extremely negative about it.

I've seen a PR manager in action for one of my games make a 79 an 81. And it cost him a lot of money; it cost him full page ads over multiple titles, but he managed to, and it had a big impact on the sales of the game.

Though true enough, that it doesn't necessarily have to be about her, there's many-a-name on the list:

Spoiler

Most of them apparently from VideoGamer.com, who in turn have been rather protective/defensive about both Driv3rGate and Gerstmann-Gate before:
http://www.videogamer.com/xbox360/kane_lynch_2/news/io_gerstmann-gate_got_out_of_hand.html
http://www.pcworld.idg.com.au/article/341103/history_gaming_biggest_scandals/

What about this guy?

*sigh*

(And yes, the article's good. It'd be even better if it was easier to read. And this thread is so bloody long I'm very likely very late with this comment, but meh.)

True, he should instead write formatted articles, like this here: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/reviews/8701-Dragon-Age-II-Review

 

[DarkUnderlord]

re: The actual editing, I read it all right (because I can) but I did wonder why the links were all specially coloured, rather than using the standard Codex formatting.

Now, re: massive paragraphs...

3) Look at the size of a page in your book. Look at the size of your (likely) 16:9 or 16:10 monitor. See the difference in size, font size, reading distance?

This is the text copy-pasted into Word. You can see the paragraph breaks - in some cases there are only 2 paragraphs per page.

4) Look at the chunk of text you read in a book/newspaper, in a nice, compact column. It's not done like that accidentally. It's done like that because that's what makes it easy to read. Fluid layouts (the default here, unless you use my Fixed Width forum style) are inherently flawed because you get the text stretched across the entire width of the monitor which is much harder and/or inconvenient to read especially on widescreen ones, which are the default today.

I've been trying to get DU to switch the site and forum layouts to fixed width for exactly this reason some time ago. It's not by accident that most sites out there have fixed width layouts.

What width is grotsnik using?

5) Brevity is the key with online articles. Most online readers do not want and do not have the patience/time to read very long articles

On this point, I'd say that if you don't have the patience to read it, you're not Codexian.

 

[RK47]

this thred is nao abut e-buks

 

[Taluntain]

re: The actual editing, I read it all right (because I can) but I did wonder why the links were all specially coloured, rather than using the standard Codex formatting.

Now, re: massive paragraphs...


This is the text copy-pasted into Word. You can see the paragraph breaks - in some cases there are only 2 paragraphs per page.

View attachment 1075

And your point is...? I think that's too few. Subheaders could help here as well.

What width is grotsnik using?

I don't know... personally, I still read stuff like this on my second 4:3 monitor in a fixed width style because I can't comfortably read text stretched across my wide monitor. Most people don't keep a legacy (or a second) monitor around, though.

On this point, I'd say that if you don't have the patience to read it, you're not Codexian.

I kept that in mind writing what I did (SELECTIVE PARTIAL QUOTING THERE, HMMM...), but you also need to keep in mind that a boatload of people reading the Codex articles these days aren't (hard-core) Codexers. You're not losing anything by making long text easier to read. It's a win-win situation, really.

 

[DarkUnderlord]

This is the text copy-pasted into Word. You can see the paragraph breaks - in some cases there are only 2 paragraphs per page.

View attachment 1075

And your point is...?

I agree with you. And subheadings would be good.

What width is grotsnik using?

I don't know... personally, I still read stuff like this on my second 4:3 monitor in a fixed width style because I can't comfortably read text stretched across my wide monitor. Most people don't keep a legacy (or a second) monitor around, though.

I just double-click the blue bar at top to minimise the window a bit when I need to. Then drag the sides as needed, depending on what I'm doing.

a boatload of people reading the Codex articles these days aren't (hard-core) Codexers.

Fuck those losers.

 

[Primordial Soup Nazi]

Great editorial! If I were one of those corrupt gaming journalists, I wouldn't rally against this sort of interweb outrage at all; ultimately, it just makes every single name on the "GAMING JOURNALISM IS FINE, GTFO" coalition look corrupt. The smart play would be to keep quiet for plausible deniability. Please consider composing more articles in the future, Grotsnik.

Now, if it wasn't so late, I'd whip up and example of what it could be with a proper styling. Maybe someone else can demonstrate.

 

[Taluntain]

I just double-click the blue bar at top to minimise the window a bit when I need to. Then drag the sides as needed, depending on what I'm doing.

I've got a thing about not constantly resizing windows. You shouldn't really have to do that.

Fuck those losers.

Ah, yes, the traditional Codex welcome.

 

[Turjan]

I'm late to the party, but great article.

As to the format discussion, I just switch to windowed browser view if I think lines get uncomfortably long to read. Unfortunately, you cannot do newspaper columns on a webpage, as they don't make sense, so windows work just fine. A couple of images would be nice to have in the article, but you would probably have to steal them from someone else, so I can see why this didn't happen.

 

[ironyuri]

snip

Would have brofisted, but... newfag.

 

[RK47]

iron will yuri.

 

[tuluse]

DarkUnderlord, I've been playing around with firebug.

I think setting the max width of "content" and "panel_nowdith" to 800 px improves readability.

nb4 rpgcodex doesn't scale to your monitor.

 

[ironyuri]

DarkUnderlord, I've been playing around with firebug.

I think setting the max width of "content" and "panel_nowdith" to 800 px improves readability.

nb4 rpgcodex doesn't scale to your monitor.

Could you PM me about how to do this in my LP thread? I've been trying to figure out a way to decrease page width because I find currently I don't like what it does to my paragraphing when I c/p from MS word.

 

[Dexter]

Well thanks to John Hynd's coworker David Hynd (brother?), who retweeted John's opinion of this piece, I've found this: https://twitter.com/JournoShits

It seems everyone else is just behind the curve on this one. I especially liked "Take a minute to spare a thought for @atheistium who won't be able to play her free video game as she'll be on a free trip #pray4lauren" from May 11th.

lol, this one was great.