I try not explicitly come out and wear my political beliefs on my sleeve on this or most of my other sites, because this is a gaming site and not an ‘Obama [Sucks|Rules|Perhaps the issue is more complicated]’ one. But I do listen to and read Lying Media Bastards, so there you go. Jake just released a new podcast (huzzah!), and in it he talks about Comic-Con and how, essentially, fansites do little more than give companies free PR.
He was speaking primarily about movies, but games played a part too (and video games are, thematically consistent or not, a large part of the convention now). And in many ways he’s right: with the exception of some posts on some sites, gaming news is essentially taking what publishers and their PR firms send out, perhaps rephrasing it a bit or adding a small amount of critical commentary, and hitting ‘publish.’ Gaming Shenanigans gets the vast majority of its news from press releases (though I’d like to say we get some points for not just copying the press release verbatim, like I’ve seen done). Am I unwittingly Part of the Problem?
Well, yes and no. The central problem is that this is, like most small gaming sites, a fan site. We don’t get paid for this. It’s done in our spare time, and as such I simply don’t have the resources to go out and be a capital J Journalist. Despite that, I wouldn’t say that we’re only shills for game companies. Allow me to digress slightly:
The problem with all journalism is that it’s never unbiased. Ever. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you, and I don’t just mean Fox News and their slogan. Even presenting a history of events in a timeline includes some of your own bias, because what you choose to include or exclude is based on your own opinions and values, both on what’s right and also on what’s important. There are an infinite number of ways to approach any story, and the angle I choose, the wording I use and the structure of the information all adds up to something that only I would write, and which includes, intentional or not, at least subtle nuances of my own worldview.
So how does that translate back into our site? I subjected you to the above bit of journalistic philosophy (I have a degree in history; expect me to analyze the motives of writing) because we filter the hell out of gaming news. We talk about what we, Dan and Dave and Anthony, think is important. You’ll notice a fairly severe lack of MMO news (though there is someone who constantly bugs me to post about the newest EVE Online patch), or PC sim, etc. It’s because I’ll see a press release in our inbox, scan it, and either say ‘oh, cool’ and post it or — as happens with well over 90% of them — mark it as read and forget it ever existed. For every Left 4 Dead DLC announcement we make, there are 10 or more bits about obscure PC betas, Nyko peripherals or Monster Hunter. For instance, today I did not post about how ‘Codemasters and Transmission Games Select NaturalMotion’s morpheme for Ashes Cricket 2009.’ I’m not even sure what that means.
Which is why, at the end of the day, if I give ‘free PR’ to some companies, I’m actually happy to do it, because I’m only posting about the news that interests me. Fan sites are run by fans, and we’re excited about what we’re talking about. Be it a movie, video game, comic book, whatever: if I talk about it, chances are it’s because I like it and want you to like it too. Of course that doesn’t mean blind devotion, and the reviews we write are more critical, but even then we acknowledge that our scores are generally higher than other sites might be because we only play games we think we’ll like. Why spend our free time playing something that sucks? That’s not to say I’ve liked everything I thought I would, of course (cough NHL Arcade cough), and I can be happy with a game like Prototype without thinking it was perfect, but chances are if I say ‘Wow that game is going to suck’ it’s not going to be reviewed here.
This isn’t Newsweek, or even the MTV Multiplayer blog. It’s a site run by two to three dudes who enjoy playing video games and writing about it afterward. And maybe we, and sites like us, are being used by evil PR gremlins to do their dirty work for little to no reward. If that’s the case, though, then the issue is with the existence of the enthusiast press at all, and that’s well beyond the scope of this editorial or Gaming Shenanigans (there were other parts of Jake’s discussion that I have comments on, but I think I’ve made you suffer through enough of my mental self-pleasuring). At the end of the day, all I can say is that I enjoy doing what I do, so I hope there will always be a place for us.
