Editorial RPG Codex Editorial: Where Journalism Goes to Write Itself

[Metro]

 

[DarkUnderlord]

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.

So then how are we still here?

 

[Metro]

I'm sure he's speaking in generalities. Codex caters to an extremely small subset of gamers.

 

[Tigranes]

Though to be honest I'm not convinced that there even CAN be such a thing as games journalism. The highest heights it can aspire to are those of entertainment criticism, reaching the bar set by film/lit/etc critics. This is perfectly fine, and hopefully games coverage will reach that level, but it isn't journalism. After all, Roger Ebert isn't a journalist. The non-criticism aspects of game coverage are really nothing but a form of PR/marketing, and by their very nature can't be anything more. Any actual journalism there is to be done would be business journalism, not games journalism, since it won't have much to do with the games themselves (do we call news about the dealings of big pharma companies 'medicine journalism'?). For that, it'd be best to just rely on traditional sources of business journalism.

I'll take this a step further. Roger Ebert is actually trained/educated in film. Unlike games there are a lot of technical aspects to film making that are relevant to his critiques. Granted Ebert made most of his fame and money through 'At The Movies' which eschewed any forms of deep criticism as it was targeted to people who just wanted a quick synopsis. The thumbs up/down and star ratings leading to what we see in most game 'journalism' today.

To review/preview/critique games no comparable knowledge is required. Any moron off the street who plays games can be one. You arguably need more knowledge to be a sports writer as, for example, in (American) football you need to know various personnel, schemes, formations, statistics, etc. 99% of game journalism is basically 'is this cool?' You do have to be passably literate and capable of penning high-school level one page essays but that's not a particularly high bar to overcome.

Well, where would you actually receive a coherent education that equips you for video game criticism and interpretation? Film and cinema studies now has a venerable tradition (you can dismiss it all as academic fluffle, but the fact of the matter is it is generally reputable); academic analyses of games has yet to come up with coherent explanations of the game form at all, let alone something like that.

 

[Metro]

Don't give anyone any ideas. Before you know it there will be the EA School of Game Journalism with Total Biscuit and Angry Joe as professors emeritus.

 

[Humanity has risen!]

This is another thing that grates me, trying to transform glorified toys into a form of art. Let's stop being so pretentious, it's never going to happen. This is a medium about mindless fun, period. Great fun, but ultimately mindless fun still. It is a medium about making young kids, fratboys and hipsters scream "Dude, this is AWESOME!". It's never going to be anywhere near a classic novel or film. The gameplay always has to dominate, else it's not a game anymore. A game can convey a better atmosphere, but it cannot be a greater form of artistic expression.

If you take it seriously, it gives you pretentious, masturbatory hipster BS like Dear Ester, Richard and Alice or the Tales of Tales whatever studio who made the "deep" versions of Little Red Riding Hood and the woman who had St John the Baptist killed waiting in a jail cell doing nothing (????). If you think that these games get anywhere close to "art", you are even more deluded than Kotaku bloggers who think they're unbiased and doing great journalism.

 

[Metro]

If there's money to be made in creating a sub-industry than... it'll be made!

 

[Saark]

So your experience at GamesCom was like a long corridor without any options to break out of it, living through one cinematic of a "conference" after another, every single "journalist" getting the exact same dialogue options and storyline and the occasional chance for a QTE? Why am I not surprised...

 

[Jaesun]

This is one of the best articles on the Codex. Grunker

 

[RK47]

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

I believe people are still stuck with the mentality of 'fuck the dev' and the moment parts of codex start saying certain AAA devs are good after visiting their offices, enjoying previews (something that hardly happen half a decade ago) they prefer to think Codex is 'getting soft' instead of the dev situation improving.

Honestly, I just want a good game and I'll wait. And no, I won't get any sense of 'good/bad' from watching preview / trailers. I'd just wait for release, and then read this forum for impressions. That's how I 'check for reviews' nowadays.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Have you guys ever met anyone in RL or on internet forums that actually wants to be a game journalist?

 

[RK47]

Have you guys ever met anyone in RL or on internet forums that actually wants to be a game journalist?

I saw him on the mirror today. He lives in Singapore, same house as mine, I think.

 

[Broseph]

 

[Murk]

This thread got me to re-read the Grotskin editorial and its ensuing 26 page thread.

My oh my how we raged.

Rage on my brothers. Rage on.

 

[Lhynn]

This is another thing that grates me, trying to transform glorified toys into a form of art. Let's stop being so pretentious, it's never going to happen. This is a medium about mindless fun, period. Great fun, but ultimately mindless fun still. It is a medium about making young kids, fratboys and hipsters scream "Dude, this is AWESOME!". It's never going to be anywhere near a classic novel or film. The gameplay always has to dominate, else it's not a game anymore. A game can convey a better atmosphere, but it cannot be a greater form of artistic expression.

If you take it seriously, it gives you pretentious, masturbatory hipster BS like Dear Ester, Richard and Alice or the Tales of Tales whatever studio who made the "deep" versions of Little Red Riding Hood and the woman who had St John the Baptist killed waiting in a jail cell doing nothing (????). If you think that these games get anywhere close to "art", you are even more deluded than Kotaku bloggers who think they're unbiased and doing great journalism.

The essence of art is being a form of expression, games, as a potential form of expressions can be art, as much as painting or writing a book really.
Right now we are not quite there yet, there are some great moments on multiple games tho, for example spec ops the line was certainly something i didnt want to play, didnt find it fun at all, but it evoked in me feelings that no war movie ever did, and that is a form of art.
Some games can pump you up, but others can make you sad, or make you angry, and i do mean genuine emotions, but that doesnt come with shinny graphics or a sweet character creation system (even if they are good things and do help somewhat), it comes with good writing.

 

[RK47]

spec ops the line was certainly something i didnt want to play, didnt find it fun at all, but it evoked in me feelings that no war movie ever did, and that is a form of art.

You didn't want to play it. o_O
It was not fun at all.
Yet it's a great a war movie.



The absurdity is hitting me on the thighs and ass.

 

[POOPERSCOOPER]

That was a good editorial, something that we should be proud is on RPGcodex as it really represents the core of what the codex is (or was) in that we should always be unafraid to ask the tough questions and be willing to criticize the "system" in regards to the game industry. The codex has always been the site to ask the deep questions or right out call developers on their bullshit and it's why we stand out compared to other game websites and communities because we are categorized by our style and not necessarily the subject of our content. Keep up the good work, Grunker

 

[Zeriel]

spec ops the line was certainly something i didnt want to play, didnt find it fun at all, but it evoked in me feelings that no war movie ever did, and that is a form of art.

You didn't want to play it. o_O
It was not fun at all.
Yet it's a great a war movie.



The absurdity is hitting me on the thighs and ass.

I can see what he's trying to get at. I mean, the game's mechanics are about as "fun" as any modern realistic shooter can be, but it tears away the "you're the hero, way to go!" background morality other modern shooters fed to you via IV, and replaces it with a crack ball of freebasing "you fucking douche, why'd you do that?".

It falls apart under any examination, however, because there are no choices to not be a douche. They create the illusion of you actually making those terrible choices, but in fact there are none to be had. Everything you can do is bad, so you are not really bad, so much as a victim of someone trying to make you feel like shit. It's like if Bioware designed an art installation.

Still more interesting than any Bioware game, though, in case people were ready to misunderstand what I'm saying there.

 

[RK47]

No buddy, I'm wondering why he even pushed to finish the game when it's NOT FUN and HE DIDN'T WANT TO PLAY.
I certainly couldn't. It bored me to tears, I quit and uninstall midway.
I just don't understand how some people can suffer through all that and claim ITS A BAD GAME WITH GOOD STORY.
It should've just been a bad game.

 

[Excidium]

This is another thing that grates me, trying to transform glorified toys into a form of art. Let's stop being so pretentious, it's never going to happen. This is a medium about mindless fun, period. Great fun, but ultimately mindless fun still. It is a medium about making young kids, fratboys and hipsters scream "Dude, this is AWESOME!". It's never going to be anywhere near a classic novel or film. The gameplay always has to dominate, else it's not a game anymore. A game can convey a better atmosphere, but it cannot be a greater form of artistic expression.

If you take it seriously, it gives you pretentious, masturbatory hipster BS like Dear Ester, Richard and Alice or the Tales of Tales whatever studio who made the "deep" versions of Little Red Riding Hood and the woman who had St John the Baptist killed waiting in a jail cell doing nothing (????). If you think that these games get anywhere close to "art", you are even more deluded than Kotaku bloggers who think they're unbiased and doing great journalism.

In that sense it isn't much different from movies or novels to me. I read a book or watch a movie much for the same reason I play games: entertaiment. All the shit I had to read for education because it's high art and shit were as boring to read as those hipster games must be to play.

 

[ERYFKRAD]

So then how are we still here?

Because we have GD?

 

[Grunker]

I actually agree with everything you say. Interviews and reports are perfectly valid forms of journalisms, and should be taken for what they are.

My point is, that game journalism arrived at a bastardized fusion of the two, which they deigned to label a "preview", which discards everything personal and interesting a real report or interview would contain, and instead simply focuses on the properties of an upcoming product. And it desperately tries to obfuscate the fact that it's inherently incapable of providing any factual information on the game in question. The name says it all, really - it's meant to be a proto-review, a prelude to the majestic glory of the true 10/10 Dorito-laden beast. And as tuluse rightfully points out, whereas journalists covering other forms of entertainment make do with interviews and reports, game journos love the preview, they're unique like that.

Like I said, I have no complaints about what you and Gragt wrote. Since Kzero was complaining about the "preview" parts of your reports, and that you were too chummy with the developers for his tastes, I wanted to point out that his problem is really with the form itself, rather than you or Gragt specifically. Since, again, whether you love or hate the people you interact with, in terms of actual information you can only report what you've been told, and that indeed does not carry any guarantee of truthfulness. I think the idea that what you wrote should be a source of factual information to some extent is what causes this cognitive dissonance. Because that's what previews are supposed to be.

I guess, I just don't think my report was a preview. Obviously I agree that the 'preview' is pretty useless

The conclusion of every forum discussion about corruption and the game industry ever: the industry has no right to present endless self-congratulatory circles as legit, it's only forum posters that do.

Well to be fair, that's true. Forum posters aren't getting paid for coverage of games, and aren't portraying themselves as 'journalists'.

Though to be honest I'm not convinced that there even CAN be such a thing as games journalism. The highest heights it can aspire to are those of entertainment criticism, reaching the bar set by film/lit/etc critics. This is perfectly fine, and hopefully games coverage will reach that level, but it isn't journalism. After all, Roger Ebert isn't a journalist. The non-criticism aspects of game coverage are really nothing but a form of PR/marketing, and by their very nature can't be anything more. Any actual journalism there is to be done would be business journalism, not games journalism, since it won't have much to do with the games themselves (do we call news about the dealings of big pharma companies 'medicine journalism'?). For that, it'd be best to just rely on traditional sources of business journalism.

That's why I'm trying to call it games criticism in this thread. I think 'games journalism' is a stupid notion.

I also disagree completely with what Metro says about "lol, you need no knowledge to be a games critic." Another example of people in this thread thinking video games are somehow silly as a rule, and therefore you can't take the critique of them seriously. Critics should educated in their field, and at least have a deeply seated knowledge of their field. The integrity of critics is alpha omega for our trust in them, and our trust in them is alpha omega for their relevance.

Though like a few others, Metro has time and again demonstrated that he doesn't think people exist who could possibly know more than him about video games, so I guess that's part of the reason he doesn't see the point in better criticism

You had me until...

...and games journalists certainly aren't lazy by any stretch of the word. Being at Gamescom to fetch content is hard work. You walk for 10, 12, 14 hours among huge crowds of people, constantly trudging back and forth, juggling ten pages of notes along with maps to help you find your way around the giant conference center, while trying to pen down more notes when you meet someone interesting or play something worthwhile.

...and the following apologist slant for game journalists. Sorry, it's not hard work. Not by any stretch of the imagination. That said, I do agree with your critique of the system and that it is the heart of the problem.

Edit: (Unless that was intended as sarcasm.)

You are dead wrong if you think these people are lazy, and I think you should walk a mile in their shoes before continuing down that line. It is an unthankful, underpaid job where you are the underdog constantly.

This is another thing that grates me, trying to transform glorified toys into a form of art.

I don't care what you define them as. The point is that they're my main source of diversion, and they're the central hobby for many people. Any such form of entertainment requires a good industry of critics to flourish, like Roguey's link points out.

So fuck the "r vidya games art, omg" discussion, 'cause regardless of whether or not it is, we still need decent criticism.

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

I believe people are still stuck with the mentality of 'fuck the dev' and the moment parts of codex start saying certain AAA devs are good after visiting their offices, enjoying previews (something that hardly happen half a decade ago) they prefer to think Codex is 'getting soft' instead of the dev situation improving.

I don't know if this is an indirect jab at me, but I actually didn't like Expeditions: Conquistador that much, and I haven't hesitated to say it. My two visits to Logic Artists has not swayed my position on the game.

 

[RK47]

Nah, I'm one of them.

 

[Grunker]

Nah, I'm one of them.

I actually misread your quote, I thought you were saying the Codex was 'getting soft' because of visits to devs. Sorry about that.

 

[RK47]

all that troll statue, .. .headstones.. fuckin.... hangars. star citizens.
make it stop. that's a lot of money burned for nothing.
make it stopppppp.