Editorial RPG Codex Editorial: Where Journalism Goes to Write Itself

[tuluse]

Actually more than the quality of Gragt's piece is the nature of the article itself that it's pure fanservice, Larian is well liked around here and people were interested in their next game, so the Codex sent a representative to review fundamentally a work in in progress, this is nothing different from what mainstream gaming journalism does, they just add the exclusive bit to it.
Nothing wrong with that the Codex is still well far away from becoming another IGN but the similarities are there.

It's odd how games are reported on. You'd never see reporting on a movie's final quality based on seeing a day or two of filming. Novels are usually kept tightly under wraps. You rarely hear a song that isn't finished, and I've never seen photos of a half done painting.

 

[felipepepe]

Never would have I thought of reading that the Codex is too friendly with developers;.

 

[Infinitron]

I'm, uh, still confused.

I believe Maindros point was that the Codex may be getting a little too close to the fire with some of the coverage. If we look back at the doritos-gate, the issue wasn't that there was explicit corruption in gaming journalism, which was very likely rare, but that the nature of relationship between the journalists and the game PR/companies compromises the former's ability to stay neutral. I think shades of that (though it isn't PR, but developers themselves in the Codex's case) were somewhat evident in Gragt's preview, extremely thorough though it was, and more substantively in the Gamescom previews. Plenty of words were dedicated to informing how nice the developers were, their passion for the games they're making, how their hearts are in the right place, how hard they're trying, how hopeful one should be about the games etc. How much truth is in there is not the question, and it's likely all that is true, but the previews do not read like written from a neutral perspective.

There is no wrongdoing, and I don't intend to belittle the efforts of those that contribute to the Codex voluntarily, but I think the Codex should try to keep a healthy distance from developers.

LOL, in case you haven't noticed, you're posting on a forum that practically doubles as a Chris Avellone fansite. There was never such a distance.

 

[Grunker]

I'm, uh, still confused.

I believe Maindros point was that the Codex may be getting a little too close to the fire with some of the coverage. If we look back at the doritos-gate, the issue wasn't that there was explicit corruption in gaming journalism, which was very likely rare, but that the nature of relationship between the journalists and the game PR/companies compromises the former's ability to stay neutral. I think shades of that (though it isn't PR, but developers themselves in the Codex's case) were somewhat evident in Gragt's preview, extremely thorough though it was, and more substantively in the Gamescom previews. Plenty of words were dedicated to informing how nice the developers were, their passion for the games they're making, how their hearts are in the right place, how hard they're trying, how hopeful one should be about the games etc. How much truth is in there is not the question, and it's likely all that is true, but the previews do not read like written from a neutral perspective.

There is no wrongdoing, and I don't intend to belittle the efforts of those that contribute to the Codex voluntarily, but I think the Codex should try to keep a healthy distance from developers.

I think I have expressed pretty clearly why you're wrong in this thread - though you're welcome to challenge my perspective. "The Codex" (DU and Bee, really) has no obligation to do anything, and the respective content-creators have even less.

Influence follows effort in the world of free work. If you want standards, it's either do work or pay up. As is, the Codex is a pretty blatant fansite - we love and are biased towards specific games, genres, and developers, and biased against others. It's part of our profile, our content, and probably why people even register.

I spoke of "the opposite bias" (opposite to the mainstream) even when I first registered here.

 

[Kz3r0]

but I think the Codex should try to keep a healthy distance from developers.

Until now were developers that maintained an healthy distance from the Codex.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Methinks you guys are taking this a little too seriously. All of you.

 

[groke]

LOL, in case you haven't noticed, you're posting on a forum that practically doubles as a Chris Avellone fansite.

I think the jury's out on this after the Arcanum LP.

 

[Gragt]

Methinks you guys are taking this a little too seriously. All of you.

Probably. Wanna go and have a beer?

 

[Darth Roxor]

Methinks you guys are taking this a little too seriously. All of you.

Probably. Wanna go and have a beer?

Sure. Brb booking planetickets.

 

[:Flash:]

IMO, gamers do not want good journalism. Gamers get what they want. PR.

In Germany, there used to be four or five gaming magazines (that was before the Internet). One of them had very terse previews, only reporting about the supposed features the games were going to have. The others repeated page upon page of PR praise about how great the game was going to be. The one with the terse preview also had the best reviews. I remember, when Outcast came out, the other mags compared it to Tomb Raider (Tomb Raider's animations are more fluid, therefore it is the better game), the one mag compared it to Ultima VII (which was 7 years old at that point). The three mags had percentage scores, the one had a five star system (stating that it is impossible to compare games down to a percentage.
Now guess which magazine folded first due to lack of readership.

 

[Azrael the cat]

I'm not terribly concerned about the poor quality of games journalism. We already have an excellent mechanism for dealing with publications (in all forms of journalism) that become PR rags and gradually lose the trust of their audience, in turn devaluing their advertising space. It's called bankruptcy.

I'm a lot more worried about why the market is failing so badly here. We already have one egregious case of market failure in gaming, being the ability of large publishers to survive on a mass-market model, but that's (a) explicable because it's an oligopoly, and (b) has been waning for years, with multiple large publishers now in a 10 year+ share slide, direct download services taking increasing market share and alternative funding mechanisms spriniging up. I'm not expecting the mass-market model to collapse anytime this decade, but at least it's showing the slow decay that one would expect from normal market mechanisms.

Are gaming review sites in a similar state of slow financial decay? I haven't read any stats one way or the other, but I'd be interested to know. In any event, I can't imagine they'd have the sheer size to stay in the game while underperforming - EA might keep on leaking money for decades before it either reforms or collapses, but surely IGN doesn't have that kind of financial base. Simply saying that consumers are idiots doesn't answer it - even idiots gradually lose trust once they've been burnt a few times (and gaming journalism doesn't even cater to idiots very well - a naive gamer would get burnt time and time again if relying on major gaming sites to determine what CoD clone they should buy next). What is it about the game journalism market that enables them to maintain enough traffic that companies are still willing to pay professional sponsorship via their advertisements? In particular, how have they managed to avoid a scenario where the publishers simply deem them irrelevant and use the net to communicate to fans directly without paying for advertising space? I don't see how the gaming sites actually provide the publishers with any value - if they're adding neither consumer trust nor in-depth commentary, why haven't the publishers cut out the middle man?

 

[Scruffy]

Methinks you guys are taking this a little too seriously. All of you.

VIDEO GAMES IS SERIOUS BUSINESS

 

[Lhynn]

Methinks you guys are taking this a little too seriously. All of you.

VIDEO GAMES IS SERIOUS BUSINESS

It kinda is? we are talking about your free time, how much do you value it?

 

[Scruffy]

Methinks you guys are taking this a little too seriously. All of you.

VIDEO GAMES IS SERIOUS BUSINESS

It kinda is? we are talking about your free time, how much do you value it?

i'm posting here right now


edit
but seriously
i was being half serious, video games are ofc serious business if we are on this forum, i was just making a silly remark, but ofc i value the industry since i hope to get good products out of it. if the strategy is making bad games and hyping them to sell anyway, i'm not happy.

don't take stuff i write too seriously.

 

[Darth Roxor]

we are talking about your free time

Precisely. Which, to be honest, has fuck all to do with the levels of subjectivity and fanboyism in RPG Codex articles, that are widely known to be heavy on heavy opinions in the first place.

Also, one more thing to note that seems to be relevant to the key point in this thread is that there degrees of cutting slack. I can cut Harebrained some slack because I know they've been on a tight budget. Gragt can cut Larian some slack because they've shown many times that they care a lot both about the games and their fans. Grunker can cut Logic Artists some slack because they are all rainbow Danes that sing koombayah. But then comes the obvious "I've been given all these shiny cool things and invitations to hotels and stuff by the Hellgate London folks, how can you expect me to suddenly turn on my FRIENDS? ;_; " which is unacceptable.

 

[tuluse]

Methinks you guys are taking this a little too seriously. All of you.

That sounds like something a commie would say.

My grandfathers didn't free the world from the Nazis just so EA can tell me how great DA2 is without dissension.

 

[Grunker]

Honestly, I think the notion that video games are silly is part of the mentality that makes us think we don't deserve proper critics.

For me, my primary source of diversion is serious business, and so, vidya games are serious business for me :/

 

[Minttunator]

IMO, gamers do not want good journalism. Gamers get what they want. PR.

Absolutely. It's no longer a surprise that people are happy to buy into hype - hell, they are happy to help spread it.

Just one quick example: I frequent a (mostly crappy) site called 9GAG, where people typically post funny images and pictures of cats. Recently there have been loads of pictures like this:
http://9gag.com/gag/aM1wdgA
(it's a photo of an advertisement of the new GTA game and the top comment is "they did that for skyrim. it's so fucking cool")

The exact same shit happened for Diablo 3, Skyrim, The Last of Us... I think this is pretty much representative of the average modern gamer. These fucking muppets are more than happy to work - for free - as advertising drones for their next fix of mediocre entertainment.

 

[Cowboy Moment]

I'm, uh, still confused.

I believe Maindros point was that the Codex may be getting a little too close to the fire with some of the coverage. If we look back at the doritos-gate, the issue wasn't that there was explicit corruption in gaming journalism, which was very likely rare, but that the nature of relationship between the journalists and the game PR/companies compromises the former's ability to stay neutral. I think shades of that (though it isn't PR, but developers themselves in the Codex's case) were somewhat evident in Gragt's preview, extremely thorough though it was, and more substantively in the Gamescom previews. Plenty of words were dedicated to informing how nice the developers were, their passion for the games they're making, how their hearts are in the right place, how hard they're trying, how hopeful one should be about the games etc. How much truth is in there is not the question, and it's likely all that is true, but the previews do not read like written from a neutral perspective.

There is no wrongdoing, and I don't intend to belittle the efforts of those that contribute to the Codex voluntarily, but I think the Codex should try to keep a healthy distance from developers.

I think I have expressed pretty clearly why you're wrong in this thread - though you're welcome to challenge my perspective. "The Codex" (DU and Bee, really) has no obligation to do anything, and the respective content-creators have even less.

Influence follows effort in the world of free work. If you want standards, it's either do work or pay up. As is, the Codex is a pretty blatant fansite - we love and are biased towards specific games, genres, and developers, and biased against others. It's part of our profile, our content, and probably why people even register.

I spoke of "the opposite bias" (opposite to the mainstream) even when I first registered here.

I think there is a point to be made there, he's simply not broad enough in his observation. In fact, maybe your gamescom impressions aren't broad enough in their generalization either, and tuluse is actually right - this is all a problem because game previews are a weird editorial form that inherently gravitates towards mirroring publisher PR. I mean, for all intents and purposes, the previews you and Gragt wrote, for Logic Artists and Larian respectively, were informative, exhaustive, and fair. The problem with them is that you're ultimately just reporting what the developers show and tell you, with no way to verify it. You can ask pointed questions, and they can answer to your satisfaction, but there's no guarantee a particular feature will ultimately make it into the game, and this isn't through anyone's ill will (look at the SRR gameplay demo vs how that mission looks in the actual game).

There's really nothing you can do about this. You can strive for a neutral tone and refrain from describing how nice the people you met were, but that doesn't change the content of your piece in any meaningful way, and that content is unilaterally determined by the developer and publisher.

So maybe it's not really Gamescom that's the problem. It's the fact that everything's a preview. And that's not even to mention the exclusivity deals around early access to games in production.

I'm not terribly concerned about the poor quality of games journalism. We already have an excellent mechanism for dealing with publications (in all forms of journalism) that become PR rags and gradually lose the trust of their audience, in turn devaluing their advertising space. It's called bankruptcy.

I'm a lot more worried about why the market is failing so badly here. We already have one egregious case of market failure in gaming, being the ability of large publishers to survive on a mass-market model, but that's (a) explicable because it's an oligopoly, and (b) has been waning for years, with multiple large publishers now in a 10 year+ share slide, direct download services taking increasing market share and alternative funding mechanisms spriniging up. I'm not expecting the mass-market model to collapse anytime this decade, but at least it's showing the slow decay that one would expect from normal market mechanisms.

Are gaming review sites in a similar state of slow financial decay? I haven't read any stats one way or the other, but I'd be interested to know. In any event, I can't imagine they'd have the sheer size to stay in the game while underperforming - EA might keep on leaking money for decades before it either reforms or collapses, but surely IGN doesn't have that kind of financial base. Simply saying that consumers are idiots doesn't answer it - even idiots gradually lose trust once they've been burnt a few times (and gaming journalism doesn't even cater to idiots very well - a naive gamer would get burnt time and time again if relying on major gaming sites to determine what CoD clone they should buy next). What is it about the game journalism market that enables them to maintain enough traffic that companies are still willing to pay professional sponsorship via their advertisements? In particular, how have they managed to avoid a scenario where the publishers simply deem them irrelevant and use the net to communicate to fans directly without paying for advertising space? I don't see how the gaming sites actually provide the publishers with any value - if they're adding neither consumer trust nor in-depth commentary, why haven't the publishers cut out the middle man?

Afaik, IGN suffered mass layoffs after being sold to Ziff Davis, and some of their subsidiaries have been shut down.

There was also something about Extra Credits moving to PA because The Escapist couldn't afford to pay them on time.

 

[Darth Roxor]

Let me clarify: I didn't mean that everyone is taking vidya gaemz too seriously because it is obviously a legit hobby for most people here, and everyone (me included) has the right to rage incoherently at the attempts of mainstream gaming media to feed us shit and calling it the second coming. What I meant was that you folks take the Codex article subjectivity too seriously.

I mean, it's a matter of target audience and/or perception. Sometimes overlooking some stuff and focusing on other is fine and dandy if your audience is aware of it, and you can get away with it freely. As it was said before, an article on IGN with all kinds of "impartial" information saying how the latest call of d00ty is great, cinematic and visceral is sure as fuck not gonna convince me to buy it on day one. But if I see a bloke I trust on the 'dex say that game_x fucking rocks and he doesn't give a shit about what anyone else says, I'll consider his opinion, solely on the basis that this is basically a no-bullshit environment where nobody takes any profit from such activity.

TL;DR if an article on the 'dex wanks all over a game, odds are it's for a reason. And if there's no reason, there's gonna be a hundred rageposts under it calling the author a retard with no taste. And everything stays in the family.

 

[felipepepe]

Yeah, fuck tumblr, deviantart, twitter and other hugboxes, on proud Codexia bros gather to rage.

Is like that Gran Torino scene:

 

[deuxhero]

I cannot think of anything similar in any other field of journalism

Clearly you haven't been paying attention. We just had a drug using thieving violent street fighter, who is dumb enough to solicit drugs using his full real name on Facebook, try to break the skull of a Mexican man who shot him for it, and the media turned the hoodlum into a saint and the Mexican into a white guy.

 

[Grunker]

I think there is a point to be made there, he's simply not broad enough in his observation. In fact, maybe your gamescom impressions aren't broad enough in their generalization either, and tuluse is actually right - this is all a problem because game previews are a weird editorial form that inherently gravitates towards mirroring publisher PR. I mean, for all intents and purposes, the previews you and Gragt wrote, for Logic Artists and Larian respectively, were informative, exhaustive, and fair. The problem with them is that you're ultimately just reporting what the developers show and tell you, with no way to verify it. You can ask pointed questions, and they can answer to your satisfaction, but there's no guarantee a particular feature will ultimately make it into the game, and this isn't through anyone's ill will (look at the SRR gameplay demo vs how that mission looks in the actual game).

There's really nothing you can do about this. You can strive for a neutral tone and refrain from describing how nice the people you met were, but that doesn't change the content of your piece in any meaningful way, and that content is unilaterally determined by the developer and publisher.

So maybe it's not really Gamescom that's the problem. It's the fact that everything's a preview. And that's not even to mention the exclusivity deals around early access to games in production.

You are missing the point entirely, in my humble opinion.

An interview is an interview is an interview. It's not some sort of factual review and it isn't supposed to be - it doesn't attain quality in the attempt to be. When I visit Logic Artists, I have time for critical questions, I have time to ask for clarification. I sit down with the developers, and everything - the surroundings, my time with them, everything - is focused on my questions for them. As such, the premise is worthy of a good report. You can't make reports better. I'm not sure what you expect from a report beyond a good overview of what kind of developer we're talking about and what their intentions are for the game.

This has purpose, depth and meaning.

The problem with Gamescom is that it cannot even offer that. There is no room for contemplation. It is just "go here, get fed, regurgitate for audience." It was a struggle to get enough impressions and conversation time with Pirou and Winter to be able to write about the team behind M&M X, and I had a million questions that could have made the report much better.

From your post it sounds like any piece of games journalism has to report factual information about finished games to be worthy, and that's completely false from my perspective. There are great interviews out there with Lars Von Trier or whatever that shows his character and his attitude toward films in genereal, and they provide worthwhile, critical looks into the director's role in current cinema. Why shouldn't we do the same with games? You write:

You can ask pointed questions, and they can answer to your satisfaction, but there's no guarantee a particular feature will ultimately make it into the game

as if the point with reports is to give factual information about games. It isn't. The point of journalism and criticism isn't to provide readers with fact sheets.

EDIT: Gragt is missing the point as well

 

[Sacred82]

So... "gaming" "conferences" are nothing more than gigantic ads? More news at 11

More like: random doods on the internetz find fault with an industry/ form of entertainment? Gasp. You know investigative journalism isn't dead as long as we have blogs and niche forums.

 

[Grunker]

I cannot think of anything similar in any other field of journalism

Clearly you haven't been paying attention.

Eh? I was talking specifically about demo previews. Not sure how that relates.