Ex-Kotaku staff go independent and launch Aftermath
aftermath.siteI find it funny how many comments here complain about the infusion of politics into games media but not one mentions the fact that games media in general is a prime example of "access journalism". Most gaming media outlets live in fear of losing access to pre-release copies of games because it would mean their reviews will lag behind their competitors. This means they go easy on games (the average review score on any large site is not 5/10). Games consumers then reinforce this dynamic by complaining loudly and angrily when their favourite games get scores they think are "too low". Compare this to movie or music reviews where critics are more than happy to tear popular releases apart.
This is the same thing that drove me nuts about "gamergate". It's like talking about how bad it is that the paint is peeling while the whole house is on fire.
I do agree, the bickering about politics is a little silly when you consider just how terrible the actual "journalism" part is. I think there's a general feeling that all journalism has faltered a little bit in the face of the Internet and a 24 hour news cycle, but I'm not even sure video game journalism was ever good. I'm not sure it was ever really 'journalism'.
I'll admit I do miss the older generation of video game 'journalism' nonetheless. Had its problems, but the thing is, it did feel like people were sharing their genuine and honest opinions as a capital-G "Gamer" more often. It became mostly known for the stereotypical attitudes that people have since come to dislike, which you can see manifested sometimes e.g. in old Penny Arcade comics. The only irony is that it feels like somehow, people's more progressive attitudes manage to have even less nuance than the older "unrefined" opinions that have since been walked back on by many. You can see this especially in the bizarro way that people have become regressive about sexuality in video games-I'm not really sure how a bunch of people were convinced to go all the way from 90's style "toxic masculinity" to a totally puritanical anti-sexuality stance in such a short period, but I'll be damned, they really managed to do it.
What happened in this time period, though, is interesting. There's really no such concept as a "capital-G Gamer" in a society where pretty much any kind of person plays video games to at least some degree. There's still a spectrum of different kinds and different levels of dedication, but the lines are firmly blurred. Gaming is just another thing that people do, on computers, phones, whatever, wherever.
To me, the modern era though, won't actually be colored by how gaming went mainstream, or by any event involving gaming at all. It'll be about how everyone became phony and full of shit with pandering to trends and moral grandstanding. I'd be willing to place a wager on that one. Unfortunately, that isn't specific to gaming, gaming journalism, or any kind of journalism.
> I'm not even sure video game journalism was ever good
In my youth I read a few PC game magazines. Not sure about the accuracy of the reviews but the people writing them did try to make their reviews as entertaining as possible with jokes and what not.
Sadly, those old magazines are long gone so I can't really go back and re-read them to see if it's just rose-tinted glasses. I don't even remember the magazine name or which country it was from.
Edit: Come to think of it, those reviewers were kind of like Yahtzee (formerly*) of Zero Punctuation fame.
* https://twitter.com/YahtzeeCroshaw/status/172168721254128042...
There are a lot of old video game magazines on the Internet Archive
> I'll admit I do miss the older generation of video game 'journalism' nonetheless. Had its problems, but the thing is, it did feel like people were sharing their genuine and honest opinions as a capital-G "Gamer" more often.
It's important to recognize that the stakes were lower back then. When games cost hundreds of millions to develop and market and are expected to have revenue in the billions bad reviews have the potential to have a massive impact on that revenue.
> You can see this especially in the bizarro way that people have become regressive about sexuality in video games-I'm not really sure how a bunch of people were convinced to go all the way from 90's style "toxic masculinity" to a totally puritanical anti-sexuality stance in such a short period, but I'll be damned, they really managed to do it.
I don't know if I agree. If you look at the most profitable gaming sector - mobile gacha games - some of these games are extremely "horny". But there's also another elephant in the room here that has nothing to do with games journalism: China. I think a lot of content in popular games is toned down so it doesn't run afoul of Chinese regulators. There are examples online[1] of it being done retroactively, but if a game is being developed from day one with the Chinese market in mind, you would never know what was cut to make that happen.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/wow/comments/49x7m0/chinese_wow_cen...
> I don't know if I agree. If you look at the most profitable gaming sector - mobile gacha games - some of these games are extremely "horny".
Oh I'm not arguing horny games don't exist or can't be popular. That's the thing with being dishonest with yourself and maybe with regressive attitudes towards sex in general: it's not that people are any different biologically than they used to be, it's just the social climate that people are living in. People will happily parrot on about how everyone is "pornsick" nowadays and then open an incognito window right after. I've experienced the whiplash of witnessing people like this personally. I'm sure it's not literally everyone... but I think in general it's underestimated just how two-faced the average person will happily be.
I don't really know a ton about gacha games, but players of gacha games have certainly developed a ... reputation on the Internet, and media coverage of this has not been very kind either. If social norms hadn't been shifting so much, I'd imagine that micro-transactions and a cutesy art style would be the things people lambaste the most about games like Genshin Impact and their playerbases. Instead, it has taken an oddly dark turn.
The claim that game culture has become sexually repressive doesn't pass the smell test for me.
In 2023 I can play mainstream "AAA" games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Baldur's Gate 3. These games have non-trivial systems designed to gamify human sexual behavior, including such features as "configure your genitalia" during character creation and choose-your-own-adventure-style romantic coupling complete with nudity, intercourse and full voice acting. I would guess that these games would have been banned or classified as pornography for being too sexually explicit if they were released when I was growing up (90s kid).
If anything, the trend I've noticed over time is a reduction in the conspicuous objectification of women in mainstream game titles. But even still: there seems to be an ever-longer-tail of borderline-pornographic content entering mass-market outlets like Steam.
All of this just to say: I don't think "sexually repressed" is how I would describe the relationship people have with games in 2023. Then again, I never found Lara Croft's outsized, rectangular bosom to add much to the story.
You may have a specific idea of what it means to be "sexually repressive" that doesn't match what I mean when I say it. Porn games on steam and horniness still existing doesn't literally conflict with people having sexually repressive social attitudes.
Of course, I am not asking for a return to the pathetic days of Lara Crofts' chest. I get that this is one of the most iconic things people think of, but it's neither appealing to me nor something I think was "good". I think if developers want to do that sort of thing because they want to, well, go for it, but it's probably going to come off as stupid.
In order to understand what I'm talking about, I think you'd have to directly confront the perception of media as seen through the lens of younger people on TikTok and Twitter. Personally, I have abandoned social media of any kind (unless you count traditional forums like this, and a few chats), but the way things were trending with regards to how people treated things could not be described as anything but regressive, full-stop.
And also, there's a bit more nuance to the situation than just sexualization itself. I think to illustrate the kind of distinction I'm talking about, I'll just link to someone who writes better than I do.
https://bloodknife.com/everyone-beautiful-no-one-horny/
(This is of course, not about video games. However, I do personally believe that this is in fact a general trend, and not specific to video games or movies.)
There is a thread that I think I may agree with here - something along the lines of the regression towards the acceptable sexual mean in mass media - but you specifically called out a trend where "people have become regressive about sexuality in video games", stating:
> a bunch of people were convinced to go all the way from 90's style "toxic masculinity" to a totally puritanical anti-sexuality stance
To the contrary, I find that there is more sex - including a greater variety in the expression of human sexuality - in mainstream video game titles than I can ever remember there being in my lifetime. Surely a lot of people are paying money for these video games, or else they would not be produced.
Edit: fixed redundant phrasing.
> Surely a lot of people are paying money for these video games, or else they would not be produced.
Absolutely. It is important for me to be clear that I do not believe video games are significantly less sexual overall.
I do think, however, that people's treatment of sexuality in media is dramatically different, and the amount of criticism and scrutiny that it receives outpaces most other social issues these days. This has led to at least a little bit of a chilling effect, as if you're a game developer, or anyone else producing media, you probably feel the pressure to be a lot more careful about exactly how you handle sexuality, as things have gotten a lot more cutthroat overall. That's not to say every consequence of this has been unilaterally bad, but I do personally believe that this leads to things that overall feel less authentic in a lot of cases. Personally, I like to see people's personal creative visions, uncompromised by concerns of how it will be perceived.
But socially and in media coverage, I do see what I personally would consider regressive. It feels like socially, the safest thing you can do is merely tolerate the existence of sexual content, and outwardly enjoying it can earn you some scrutiny. For example, A good amount of the NoFap crowd paints pretty much anyone who enjoys pornographic content as being pornsick. In addition to just them, there is a serious amount of scrutiny regarding the nature of sexual content, and there is a lot of pressure to be careful about how you openly enjoy things; the safest place to be is to merely tolerate sexuality rather than embrace it. If you do embrace it, you can count on it being scrutinized. If something you enjoy is considered problematic, such as a relationship with a power dynamic issue, it will be scrutinized-it doesn't matter that there's media like Game of Thrones filled to the brim with incest and other such content. (In fact, Game of Thrones has become almost cliche to bring up, not unlike Grand Theft Auto with regards to video game violence.)
I can see why my position seems startlingly inaccurate from some perspectives. That said, I do think there is something regressive going on, even if describing it as "puritanical" is perhaps a misstep, as it is clearly a lot more nuanced than that.
I understand where you are coming from. I think we agree that there is something dysfunctional about mass media and its relationship with those who consume it in 2023. But, we probably disagree about the nature of that dysfunction.
My favorite thing to point at to illustrate my own take is the utter corporate sterility of Meta's "Horizon" social vision compared to the untamed (and often sexually-charged) landscape of spaces like Second Life and VRChat. There is a clear mismatch here: open-ended channels show us the forms of creative expression that the human psyche is drawn towards when given a blank canvas. Meanwhile, Meta reduces creativity down to something that the corporate hegemony considers "brand safe." You can be whatever you want to be on Meta's platform, so long as it is an anatomically correct human who aligns with a handful of well-defined social archetypes (all vetted by committee to be a representative cross-section of the diversity of humanity dontchaknow).
Even if I don't agree with your specific claims, this at least seems to rhyme with some what you're observing here.
Exchanges like these give me a small bit of hope for humanity! Thanks cdata and jchw!
> bizarro way that people have become regressive about sexuality in video games
There's a certain amount of "puriteen" pushback, but BG3 has done extremely well out of it without a backlash. The trick was to do something other than the same old exploitation.
Player reviews for games aren't much better, unfortunately. So many games get review bombed for political reasons. It's the Amazon equivalent of "this book sucks because my package was late" but orders of magnitude more frequent. It's nearly impossible to find high quality game reviews.
While I'm not sure I see as much games being review bombed for political reasons in my sources for video game reviews, I strongly agree with you that it's really hard nowadays to find high quality reviews. It's always been bad in mainstream video games medias though, but underdogs that are more open to criticise game tend to not last very long.
The best approach I've found is to become aware of who are writing the reviews I perceive as high quality and simply follow them when they change medias and pay attention to what they communicate about their current position.
Ultimately, the best reviews are almost always coming from sources that have a business model that doesn't rely on ads.
Worse even that gamergate was about Kotaku who also got blacklisted by Bethesda for their reporting.
I think reviews in general suffer a lot from the commodification that's happened as the gatekeepers have conglomerated. I never trust reviews from publications that have a whole team of reviewers anymore, you have to find individual, usually independent, reviewers who have their own fanbases to have any trust. Best video game reviewer is dunkey, best music reviewer is anthony fantano, I haven't found anyone I love for movies or film, but I'm always looking.
> the average review score on any large site is not 5/10
Because this score is in relation to the whole market, not just the reviewed games. Journalists only review the promising games, which means usually from established studios, or from unknown developers when they received some positive feedback from the community. But as it's their job, they still see the whole market, they know how low the bottom, and how high the ceiling is.
Food for thought: maybe because people try to make better than mediocre games, the average review score is higher than 5/10.
There's also a selection bias going on with the reviews: There are thousands of games coming out every year, so why would a publication pay someone to write reviews of the games everybody knows are going to be bad, and that readers aren't interested in reading?
Couldn't the same be said for movies of music? I don't think most people set out to make mediocre media. There's nothing special about games in this regard.
In general the whole scale of scores for games is shifted upwards: https://old.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/eu63f/modern_gaming...
> don't think most people set out to make mediocre media.
Heh I’m not sure. I’ve been following the drama around CA and total war recently and the company seems to have set to do exactly that. Pump out mediocre recycled crap as long as people keep buying it. Except this time it’s blown up on them.
At least it's better than the scale used by many outlets to rate wine, where 80/100 is for wines they consider undrinkable, and 91/100 is a pretty good mid-level wine.
This is very 2008 understanding of the industry.
Sure, insider access to studios and pre-release games is important to media, but that’s… also the same for movies and books and TV and music publications? And the argument about the scoring is so old and trite. There are so many games coming out nowadays that the bad ones just don’t get the time of the day. Does median score on Pitchfork hover around 5?
But even apart from that, written reviews aren’t the big traffic drivers they used to be. Bits of gameplay narrated by staff, guides, walkthroughs etc, and other commentary are only increasing in how much they matter traffic-wise.
The truth is that for the most part (with notable exceptions) people on both sides of the divide are adults, and nobody is going to blacklist a website because they didn’t like a negative review.
Publishers also generally do not get to influence review scores, the firing of Jeff Gerstmann from GameSpot and subsequent exodus of editorial staff is still An Event that everyone remembers and knows about.
Not that I am much into gaming, but I just checked out the site and the one article I clicked on was literally the writer bitching about how the coffee machines were depicted in Starfield. I miss the gaming sites of the 90s and early 00s, you could expect to read passionate articles from gamers. Just reading the headlines on the main page makes me feel like they have some agenda to push, in a political kind of way, and you won't be finding any good game reviews here.
As a fledgling coffee nerd, that article is very clearly a coffee nerd being a bit tongue in cheek. The thesis is not "Starfield is bad because the devs made bad coffee machines", instead he's connecting the lifeless NPC's to the strangely designed coffee machines in a way that should make it pretty clear that it's not entirely serious. Totally fair if the humor didn't land, but I thought it was amusing. Those coffee machines do look absurd.
Individually packaged units of coffee grounds in a micro-chipped plastic container for the pot to recognize it as an officially licensed “pod” is our daily life. I think real coffee has become absurd. lol
That’s lazy average Joe’s daily caffeine supplement. Coffee nerds have their own brand of absurdity: coffee distribution tools, pressure profiling, temperature profiling, water treatment mineral packs… never mind all the money people spend on high end burr grinders and plumbed-in rotary pump machines!
I do feel like the last remaining werido in my family with a standard drip machine. But why would I replace it with pod-DRM hell? It makes a perfectly good cup of joe, with the quality mostly impacted by the beans and whether or not they were pre-ground. So far, every cup of coffee I've had from a pod has been noticeably worse. And I'm supposed to pay a premium for these things? I'm not even a coffee snob and I can easily tell something went horribly, horribly wrong somewhere along the line.
As another coffee nerd I'm happy to realize I wasn't the only one who did a double-take when they first noticed the in-game espresso machines.
My only complaint about the article is that the 'perculator' is clearly a Braun KF20. haha
Based on the link it sounds like they want to carry on with what they've always done but get more money. I get the desire but I doubt the content is going to go back to what it was 25 years ago.
The way I see it today, ideological reviews are what is mainstream. It's not about how the game is, it's how inclusive they are to minorities that is what reaches the front page. It's fucking bizarre but it makes sense when the goal is to reach as many people as possible. On both sides of politics it's just rage bait depending on which way the needle swings. Rage bait creates the clicks that brings the mass appeal not just "nerdy gamers."
I'm a nerdy gamer. I just want to know how good of a game stuff is. When you go to actual niche forums you find real information without the bullshit. You aren't going to find that at all on mainstream mass media sites like the Verge, Motherboard/Vice, Kotaku, et al. I think the goal of aftermath is to just create another mainstream outlet. I hope they prove me wrong.
I'd rather watch some gameplay footage with no commentary. I don't find that a person reviewing a video game contributes anything meaningful to the decision of whether or not I want a game or not unless I know them personally and we have similar taste.
I have a suspicion that the only way such content has any value today in a world with quick and easy access to online video is that they are given copies prior to the release of the game. They get clicks because of peoples impatience to learn more despite being able to see effectively infinite amount of content as soon as a game is officially released.
But the problem here is that game reviewers livelihood is entirely dependent on getting early access and if they don't speak highly of the game then their livelihood can be cut off. They are basically all bribed into giving positive feedback. I think it is actually worse than nothing at all. It is actively harmful to finding out what a game is actually like.
I guess my point is that we should just wait until a game is released. There are infinite copies and there exists more games than anyone could ever play. Reading some heavily biased opinions about a video game a week before it comes out is not meaningful.
> I'd rather watch some gameplay footage with no commentary. I don't find that a person reviewing a video game contributes anything meaningful to the decision of whether or not I want a game or not unless I know them personally and we have similar taste.
Are you really willing to watch 10+ hours of footage, just to figure out the worth of a game? Because that's the actual worth of a review, telling you not just about the game itself, but also how well it continues after the initial tutorial-phase.
I am willing to take that risk. It's not really a big concern to begin with.
I'd consider someones review if they bought the game themselves, they don't generate any revenue from it and we have had similar taste in the past. Even the most brief word of mouth praise of something from a friend is going to be more valuable than any length review from a biased source. It might also be possible to find a collection of random people on Steam to follow just for their reviews. I've never tried this, but I think it would abide by my guidelines of trustworthiness.
I don't think that is very accurate, in my experience the most popular reviews are Personality Driven and it is largely done in the youtube space, the next most popular writen sites are also more neutral when it comes to their reviews (Gamespot, IGN, Gameinformer, Eurogamer). Honestly people just want two things, to hear their favorite content creator talk about the game or have someone say how great it is. But in my opinion the best way to sort out all the noise is to just find a content creator you share tastes with since IGN et al have such a massive cast of reviewers constantly shifting around so it doesn't make sense to rely on that.
You could also use a review aggregator if you just want to see what the overall consensus is: https://opencritic.com/
My other advice which has worked very well as a PC Gamer is to look up Steam reviews, there are a LOT of underappreciated games that were poorly received by critics but players actually enjoyed. It is also review bomb resistant since you actually need to buy the game,will allow you to filter out by time periods, and notify you if there have been a noticeable change in review patterns.
I guess modern gaming journalists are journalists first, gamers second. It used to be the other way around.
I miss the sh*t out of printed specialist journalism. Growing up, we had a couple of printed magazines. You could tell they were incredibly well written, with great reviews, walkthroughs, interviews with people in the local industry, as well as surprisingly in-depth exposes about things like for example, how CG animations are made etc.
Unfortunately, thanks to a leaky water pipe, I can only cherish the memory of said collection.
Their business model was exchanging product (the magazine) for money. Based on that business model, they could pay their employees, a couple of passionate and talented people a living wage. something that I'm not sure modern internet-based outfits accomplish.
> ideological reviews are what is mainstream. It's not about how the game is, it's how inclusive they are to minorities
This seems like a pretty heavy exaggeration to me. I just spotchecked several reviews on IGN, PCGamer, and GamesRadar (top 3 sites I get when googling "games reviews"), and found nothing of the sort. I'm sure if you go digging you could find that content somewhere on the site, but to claim it's the crux of their review model is just false.
For example, the new MW3 is a game where there's lots you could comment on in terms of the ideology of their portrayals of the war on terror and "ends justify the means"... but not one of the mainstream reviews I can see spends time on it, other than to mention the villain's vague motives. Or on the flip side, take Fae Farm, a game that explicitly advertises itself as inclusive - only one paragraph of GamesRadar's the nine page review is on the topic of inclusivity, and it doesn't go any ideologically deeper than "there's a lot of customization here, including androgynous options and things like dreadlocks and turbans". The entire rest of the review is about gameplay and graphics.
Yeah, agreed.
The first name in that list is a guy who gave great reviews of a game by a developer who was sleeping with him.
Of course, due to one (or both? I forget which) of them being married, of course that fact had to be a secret.
In any other publication, the author's sexual liasons with the subject of the piece is considered a clear conflict of interest. Not so in gaming, it appeared.
What, there are still people that believe this? That Nathan Grayson never wrote reviews on any game by Zoe Quinn is easily verifiable, like you can just go look at the webpage. The claim has had zero veracity for years, that its false is widely known and documented, theres multiple Wikipedia articles discussing how and why its wrong.
I don't think I've ever read an article on Kotaku, I never read any games news and barely even play them anymore other than occasional Doom Eternal to blow off steam. But I know Grayson and Quinn's names because of how widely and loudly this argument getting disproved was.
I'm honestly kind of amazed to see someone still claiming this. Like I'm back editing more stuff into this because my brain is so confused and still thinking about it.
Review? No. But possibly "positive coverage"-> https://archive.ph/LXLli
The top screenshot comes from DQ, and the post lists it as a "standout".
I hate that I spent the time to check but this was posted a few months before Grayson and Quinn were together. Even if it weren't its really not much of a smoking gun.
Wow! I thought you were joking but the first name is the dude at the center of what started “gamergate” and everything that followed it.
Thanks for pointing that out.
This site is just another in a long list of game journalism sites that is worthless.
How are there still people that believe this? I seriously thought the claims about Grayson were so widely discredited that even the people still saying gamergate is about "ethics in journalism" stopped making them because it was so embarrassing. Like its obviously not true, go look at the Kotaku website, he never wrote any reviews about Quinn's games, it takes like 30 seconds to check.
No, they didn't stop, actually. Even here:
I thought a deranged online mob started Gamergate.
I recall a lot of it was driven by Kotaku, as well as the whole gang of cancel-culture twitter journalists.
It may be wrong, or right, but that is the narrative in my head around this. So it's probably the same in a lot of other disgruntled peoples' minds.
Kotaku had the wrong author write a review of a niche video game that nobody cared about. Gamergate was started by people who thought something totally unimportant like that was reason to send death threads to people.
Could you post a link to this review? I would like to verify this information.
Frontpage littered with activism and first-world whining. Looks like it was the worst parts of Kotaku that left.
Where’s the whining? I didn’t find it. Please substantiate your claims.
Turns out lots of people play video games!
Turns out a lot of people don't care about those people's political hot takes when they just want to read news about video games!
No one is making you read this specific gaming news site.
So don't be surprised when sites like this pull no revenue and end up shutting down because people really, really do not care about some nobody's political hot takes when they want to read about video games.
You seem to care quite a lot...
Are you trying to well-poison "caring" about the scope and quality of entertainment media? What's your aim here? Am I supposed to pretend that total randoms flooding entertainment media with their off-topic pretentious garbage is normal and alright?
Genuine question: what other „entertainment media” are you reading in 2023 that does not contain what you describe as „off-topic pretentious garbage”?
These days, nothing. I avoid entertainment media. But I remember the days when PCGamer used to write about how amazing Carmack was at pumping out engine tech, how Guild Wars was going to revolutionize MMO design, how Supreme Commander would have a freaking unit cannon that could fire units tens of kilometers across a map. It's impossible to find that now without having to wade through low-quality sophomoric political treatises and exposes on activist developers making games nobody is going to play.
There's lots of places on the internet for those people too. They are also free to find them and share them! Maybe they'll even been upvoted on HackerNews!
Be careful what you wish for. Sites like these aren't lasting long in an era when people are exhausted of being 24/7 assaulted by the political hot takes of random nobodies.
What is 'news about video games?' Can't you just read a dev blog for the technical aspects, and ask the game store clerk what to buy?
It also turns out lots of the people making them like unions.
I don't know anything about Kotaku, but I read that same article and thought it was pretty clearly a tongue-in-cheek faux investigative article and laughed at it.
op's is a valid criticism in a post gonzo journalism world. hunter thompson, an otherwise conventionally trained professional, embeds himself in the world of his subjects, and produces a masterpiece of investigative journalism. it's also sexy, and generations of journalists imitate him after. but the division remained up until quite recently, where you have the chicago manual of syle, and then you have (late 90s) vice magazine. tongue-in-cheek faux investigative article works when you're a professional humorist and that's your beat, or when you're a professional game reporter, and you want to produce some levity. in the second case the deficiencies are excused, because what otherwise carries your writing and by extension your reputation, are your serious pieces. in the post gonzo journalism world most writers act as if they have that reputation to cary them, but what they consistently produce are low effort tongue-in-cheek, insider jokes articles. there's simply not enough good will to humor them.
Careful, it’s gatekeeping to prefer that your game journalists have ever played a game at all other than when researching for an article.
They write like this because it’s how anyone writes on a topic about which they have no experience. If you embed me as a wartime reporter, I’ll talk about the weird food and noise, not what most people reading the article want to read about.
You really think that these people who have worked for multiple gaming sites and are now starting their own gaming site really don't play games? It seems like there would be an easier way to make a living than writing about something you don't care about.
I do think that, and a lot of other people do as well. It’s why they aren’t taken seriously and have a hard time being employed unless we’re in wasteful high growth economic states.
And identifying a profitable market segment, inserting yourself as a critical member, and blaming doing a poor job on vague concepts of gatekeeping and bias seems like a good enough way to make a living that they keep trying at it
Personally I only read reviews of running shoes from lazy obese people, paraplegics, and amputees.
What do you think people reading wartime coverage want to read about?
Going by Henry Ford's "faster horse" quote, I prefer my media to be aspirational, to assume potentially too much of me and be disappointed, not the other way around.
I don't know. So I will let my 0.0% experience with the topic keep me from writing about it.
Well, considering Kotaku is well-known for gaming articles filled with political activism and social justice, this is not surprising at all to me.
My recollection was that Kotaku had an entire subsection of the site dedicated to posting pictures of attractive women doing cosplay. I don't remember much political activism -- do you have an example?
They generally have a lot of quality content, but will slip in political commentary. IMO, this review is a decent example: https://kotaku.com/1850858948
The political commentary starts a paragraph after the summary box. Huge article and maybne two paragraphs fit the bill. The anti-capitalism stuff always makes me roll my eyes, but it's a game review, just ignore the parts you don't care about.
The paragraph you describe criticizes some of the characterizations in the game and a lack of options for character customization, both of which seem to be safely within the ballpark for game reviewing. The reviewer clearly has an anticapitalist perspective, but I don't think that's sufficient for "political activism". Reviewers always have some kind of perspective that affects what they emphasize and de-emphasize.
Yeah, I hope I made clear that I don't think it's a big deal. It's exaggerated by the gamergate crowd which might have truly kicked off our current culture war in it's current form.
1. Why would you cite a trivial non-political example to support your position that they have a political agenda?
2. What separates someone simply having beliefs that inform their lives from them having a political agenda? And where did you ever get the idea that politics is this thing that lives in a bubble, so innocuous as for its effects to be separable from our lives, such that we all have agreed to conduct our lives and careers without mentioning anything related to that bubble? Is it possible you see political ideas you agree with throughout each day and don't find them to be an agenda because they don't make you uncomfortable?
Check out Rock Paper Shotgun. One of the few sites whose articles I read purely for pleasure.
I very much enjoyed RPS in the days of the original four writers, and also when Quinns was contributing, though I haven't kept up so much in the last eight years or so.
Eurogamer seems to cover the games news and reviews in the way I like best right now, and Digital Foundary's writing and videos that lean on the more technical side of games are just excellent. (I believe DF also have an arrangement to do some content for RPS, so it's probably being shared around as it should.)
RPS is a shell of its former self. The amazing writers from the early days all left years ago and it's mostly just an SEO spam site now.
That site has been dead to me ever since the gamersgate fiasco.
Leading up to that fiasco people were already frustrated with game media for being in bed with game publishers. And no, I don't care if they have a right to sleep together, I care that the journalistic integrity was so missing they couldn't be bothered to have someone else write the piece or be open about it. And then the entire war on gamers as misogynists for wanting game journalists to have some integrity.
I've never even opened their website since.
If you actually read the article instead of reacting violently to the headline, you'll find that the coffee machine subject is just a conceit to talk about Starfield's clumsy aesthetics and lack of cohesion as a whole.
I’d you all you talk about is games, eventually you’ll have to talk about the fucking coffee machine in the video game.
I get the sentiment of people who are only interested in game reviews and recommendations. But as a gamer myself, if that’s all a site offers then I’m not paying $7 per month for it. I wouldn’t be willing to pay anything for that content to be honest. I can get a better sense of the quality of a game from aggregated steam reviews. I’m not the target audience for this site, but I do recognize that they can’t just write dry game reviews if they want to make a living.
How do you reconcile being a journalist, who WANTS to write an in-depth piece (being a writer and all), and the powers that be wanting you to write an advertisement for their game? You lambast something innocuous like the coffee machines to get your furvor for writing out.
You might enjoy rock, paper, shotgun?
A lot of the blog news sites beyond just gaming had a vibe switch in the 2010's.
You used to find passionate and hungry writers with something to say. Then it became bitter and jaded misanthropes that don't recognize they're misanthropes. They tried to keep an alt-media rebellious tone, but warped it into tired boomer-splaining.
A tragedy really. I had to admit it was over when someone argued an opinion I already agreed with and they were still pissing me off.
> one article I clicked on was literally the writer bitching about how the coffee machines were depicted in Starfield. I miss the gaming sites of the 90s and early 00s, you could expect to read passionate articles from gamers.
You and I have very different memories about what "passionate articles from gamers" were about in the 90s and 00s.
The way I remember it is the gaming sites of the 90s and early 00s were all pretty dire.
Did you read the Alan Wake II article?
It's a turbulent time in games media: See how Yatzhee just quit The Escapist, taking with him most of the video team.
Either way we slice it, we'll all soon see what is what brings people to certain publications? The brand? Long form, high research articles that just take too much research? The wokeness/andti-wokeness posturing? Is it a matter of just a few extremely talented people, carrying a publication?
We all can make our guesses, but the market will say who is right.
Oh wow, I didn't know about Yatzhee. I really need my Zero Punctuation dose, and turns out he doesn't own it
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/the-escapist-staff-resign-foll...
I worked as a contract writer for The Escapist from 2005-2009 and consider Yahtzee's resignation the end of the publication. Zero Punctuation was most likely the primary revenue driver as I know how he had an outsized impact even back in the heyday when all of the content was getting accolades.
That's crazy, I didn't know either.
I recently came across The Game Discoverer Newsletter, which seems to be about 100x more insightful and data rich than boilerplate journalism like Kotaku. They also have some other interesting data tools for game developers.
More broadly, I'm not sure general "journalism" really has a bright future outside of the big names that can field huge advertising budgets. I'm more convinced that niche sites should specialize on a specific topic and figure out a use-case that makes it worth subscribing to from a business perspective, not an ideological one.
Links:
1. A good overview post: https://simonowens.substack.com/p/how-the-gamediscoverco-new...
> More broadly, I'm not sure general "journalism" really has a bright future outside of the big names that can field huge advertising budgets.
To be fair, it doesn't have a bright history outside of that, either.
I actually do think there are many great opportunities for journalists to reframe themselves as sources of intelligence for business use cases, in the way that Game Discoverer has. There are a ton of Substacks that have this same basic model. Another great example is the Financial Times, which seems to be doing well financially.
The key point here being that these publications are providing businesses with useful information, not just writing reviews and commentary for a mass audience.
Thanks! There is RSS too: https://newsletter.gamediscover.co/feed
I enjoyed Kotaku enough to keep reading through all of their Theil/Hogan bullshit, so I'm very happy that there is now a spiritual successor, that ditches the legacy crap and lets those bloggers do what they do best.
I wish there were some more of their more "journalist"-type peer that made the migration over, but Kotaku seems to have done fine without them, so I don't think that's going to be a problem.
I will say that the site design is really bad. I hope they get something less "stock" pretty soon. I don't mind minimalism and clean design but...this isn't that. It looks like the pre-made "blog" template from some site-builder app. A design that highlights what they do best, while keeping news available chronologically, would really make the website comfortable to browse. Though, I do wonder if I'm just the odd man out, still going to a website to read gaming news. If they're delivering it through some kind of feed or whatever, I guess it doesn't really matter what the site looks like. Still; if they care about the site looking good, I hope they change it soon.
Other than that, a quick perusal of the content that's available seems to be very in line with what I would have found on Kotaku, so I'm very happy to just move all of my reading over to aftermath. It's a great plan and I wish them all the best in it! They've at least got one reader (though, not quite a subscriber; at least with what is currently offered).
I would love it if some of the other old-timers could make it back. I assume the people I really liked, Steven, Jason, Kirk, Maddy and of course Fahey, since he no longer is with us, are very unlikely to come back. I also miss their Japan pop-culture reporting from Richard Eisenbeis and Bashcraft. The latter was a big part of what made me visit kotaku instead of Destructoid or Polygon.
Interesting timing—a bunch of people from The Escapist either were fired or quit yesterday, including Yahtzee Croshaw.
Holy shit, I had missed that entirely.
Thanks for that heads up, I’m subscribed to their discord community (sigh, why is it discord), and excited to hear what comes next from the leaving employees.
First I hear of it. Seemed like an inevitability.
What is it about news media, newsletters, etc that makes them so bad at pricing their subscriptions? When you consider the fact that the average reader will want to read a variety of publications/newsletters about topics, charging $7/month for JUST your news site is, I'm sorry to say, delusional.
This isn't to single out Aftermath specifically, I see this kind of thing all over the place. Lots of substack newsletters are particularly detached from reality when it comes to what they charge.
Yes, journalists need to be adequately paid of course, but I think this can be done much more effectively by charging a more reasonable monthly rate that will broaden the customer pool.
It makes more sense when you consider that many of the journalists who have gone into newsletters are there because they felt that the need to appeal to "average readers" and build a broad customer pool (edit: often at the insistence of their evil bosses) was restricting their genius and that they'd have a better time narrow-casting to a smaller (but more consistently monetizable) fanbase.
That price point seems about right to me. I just signed up to The Economist Podcasts+ for a similar price because I listen to virtually every piece of content they produce. Sure it's just one publication but it's an excellent one in my opinion. If these folks think they can bring a similar level of value, go for it. I personally wouldn't pay a single solitary cent for people to write about video games but that's just my personal preference.
I think the logic is that getting anyone to get out their credit card and pay anything at all for content is a tough barrier, and the difficulty of crossing it doesn’t scale linearly with the asking price. That and micropayments remain an unsolved problem.
Now that Apple Pay and Google Pay are a thing, it’s become incredibly easy for someone to just tap a button, their face unlock does its thing, and payment goes through.
Unless you mean a psychological barrier?
Google and Apple instantly eat a third of your revenue.
That's for in app purchases. If you use Apple pay on your website, they don't charge any fee actually, only the payment processor does. Scroll to the bottom to see more detail: https://www.apple.com/apple-pay/
People used to pay a few bucks every day to read the news. People will pay $7 a day on coffee. But people are used to free, ad-supported news so they'll never pay what's required for real journalism.
You fundamentally misunderstand why people pay for those things.
They’re not paying to get news/articles about _a_ topic, they’re paying to get news/articles _from specific people_.
> but I think this can be done much more effectively by charging a more reasonable monthly rate that will broaden the customer pool.
Can it?
For many, just paying anything at all is the initial hurdle.
It would be good to know what the "new ownership model" is.
Aftermath uses a similar model found at 404 Media and Defector.
They say "worker-owned." I'm not sure about a new journalistic outlet, but in the context of lesbian bars and communist coffee shops, this means the business will last about a year.
What a time to be alive
Is this a good or bad thing? I don’t really know much about kotaku.
But I do know game journalists don’t exactly produce the greatest content, everything from “the game is too hard 1/10” to IGNs obvious paid for scores to “this game has a male character, therefore it must be sexist”.
This is a pretty hyperbolic take on games reviewers, other than the paid reviews which does exist but is pretty easy to identify and ignore. I've seen games being criticised for being too hard but even Elden Ring, Lies of P et al aren't getting 1/10 for that. I've seen people lamenting the same lazy copy-pasted male character being the protagonist again and again, but never decrying that it's outright sexist that a male character exists in a game (and you're kind of telling on yourself with this one, tbh)
There's plenty of great games journalism out there. I'm similarly unsure about Kotaku, but let's not get silly here.
The gaming community is often delusional and will rant online about a journalist giving a game a 9/10 instead of a 10/10. Good reviews, where the journalist actually played the game and has experience to compare it to, goes unnoticed. Garbage articles, like "Nintendo used a disability slur in a song" (turns out they're speaking Japanese) get huge attention.
Yeah I’ve seen that a few people get very upset over one reviewers’ subjective take on a game to the extent that they’ll hound them online. James Stephanie Sterling’s 7/10 on Tears of the Kingdom springs to mind (though they seem to be a bit of a lightning rod for hate overall). I can’t fathom it myself, I’ll read and watch a few reviews to get an overall feel for the game and see from there. Come to think of it, most of the reviews I encounter don’t give a score.
Isn’t there a discussion to be had about journalists (and activists) needing to insert intersectionality into fantasy worlds in a genre for a demographic that didn’t ask for it?
I’m detecting an air of elevated ego in your reply. I understand the toxicity that has and does (now to a much lessor degree) exist, but can’t we recognize when social justice jumps sharks? I think we can. It’s ok to admit when activism goes too far, wandering into the territory of enforcing morals onto other people; making the same mistake the religious right has done…
If you want to have that discussion, feel free to find the people who think the existence of 1 (one) male character indicates sexism, like the GP described, and discuss it with them. Tbh it sounds more like you want to use the GP's hyperbole as a wedge to open up a (ugh) "culture war" debate and frankly I'm not interested.
Isn’t there a discussion to be had about journalists (and activists) needing to insert intersectionality into fantasy worlds in a genre for a demographic that didn’t ask for it?
Don't we need to have a discussion first to debate whether you should be writing comments on such topics first? I mean, I didn't ask for your opinions, so I think it's a discussion worth having.
There's some lazy, parasitic, and axe-grinding writing in games journalism, as in all kinds of journalism. I am personally annoyed by how often I see Reddit posts and YouTube summarized like they're a story. But the good stuff is good, and this is IMO a good trend. Aftermath itself might suck, but I'd like to see more passionate video game writers get an opportunity to run their own outlet rather than churn out stupid bullshit about Twitter posts to create more surface for ads.
>Aftermath itself might suck,
The initial articles are well written.
"We're trying something different, thanks for joining us"
A comma splice isn't the end of the world, but if this is the post that's advertising your new enterprise to the rest of the world, then it tells me you have some inexperienced writers.
Even experienced writers suck at this. It means they have no actual editors.
That's an interesting observation - I'd have never noticed it in such a way. Reminds me "Nobody. Understands. Punctuation."[0] that's often reposted on hacker news.
[0]: https://www.stilldrinking.org/nobody-understands-punctuation
I do not agree. It's readable, but not well written.
ex. "Fortnite saw 3.9 concurrent players on OG’s launch day, besting recent records, and huge subsequent numbers. It was the number one category on Twitch, bolstered by a 24-hour stream by Ninja, who made his name on the game."
As a potential game player, why do I care about that? Is the game any good? What is it about?
Fair enough, I want to give it a chance for sure.
From my experience, "great content" to gamers is just content that confirms their pre-existing opinions and biases. Anything that goes beyond that is labeled "bad journalism".
This part is true for most people and most topics, including politics. A lot of the gaming audience would be young(er) people that are part of the scene - so the strong feelings part is given.
i do wonder how many people are willing to pay almost $100 annually for blogging. defector seems to be successful-ish with that model? if you can make it work, the editorial independence is probably amazing. i don't really care for kotaku now or back in the day, but wish them luck nonetheless - funding for journalism in general has been badly broken for a long time.
The Autopian's been doing pretty well with it, too.
I think there's two things interacting here that make this more tractable than first impressions - first is that the cost of running one of these sites as a sustainable business is a hell of a lot lower than whatever crazy shit the PE & hedge funders were pushing for. I also think people's willingness to pay for quality content is higher than has been assumed, and I think part of that is a lot of us have seen what the cost of free content is over the last couple years.
I think you're right that these sites will never be more than niche by subscriber count, but I think there's more appetite now than before and I think it's entirely possible to make a sustainable business here.
I'm also generally in favor of a world where writers and creators get paid a decent wage to write and create things I find valuable or interesting, so I'm biased here.
I always preferred Joystiq (RIP) to Kotaku, but I'm happy to see more sites moving to this model. I'd much rather just pay writers money so that they give me content than have to wade through ads anymore. And I think it's a model that can work: Defector has been a great successor to Deadspin. Now if only they would do that for the AV Club...
I can't afford to subscribe to every site starting up. None of them have day/week pass options or the ability to pay to read one story out of their archives, so it's $7/month or nothing. My budget for this isn't going to grow just because subscription sites proliferate.
I know we love decentralization here but I'd love if all these co-op sites shared an umbrella subscription, MaxFun style, where you could direct most of your subscription fee to the sites, or even the individual writers, that you want to support. Shared infrastructure, focused support.
Good.
They need a bit better website design though. You shouldn't need to scroll through an editorial column to get to the articles.
Ah, the folks from the worst example of journalistic integrity in the last 10 years spinning off to do the same thing?
I think I’ll pass.
Kotaku is the worst example of journalistic integrity in the last 10 years?
Kotaku is one of the only game outlets that actually got blacklisted by publishers for negative coverage. What's the integrity violation you're so upset about? I hope it's not a completely made up one like gamergate
For reference this is why people have a low opinion of kotaku, they publish clickbait stuff without double checking properly before publishing:
* https://www.keengamer.com/articles/news/kotaku-uk-apologizes...
Right. I don't know anything about gamergate. My comment is sole based on their low quality output.
This is about Kotaku UK, for all intents and purposes a different website.
The staff were the worst part…
I agree. Made by the people from Kotaku is not exactly a phrase that would make me want to visit a site.
That was my first thought, I am sure that there were some incentives from Gawker that contributed to it but Kotaku quickly became one of the gaming sites that I strongly avoided around 2017 when it seemed like they would get a crusade against any game that had some problems and just run it into the ground. (Mass Effect Andromeda was the straw for me)
Yeah, Kotaku was either a firestarter or a SEO chasing dogpiler way too often.
> Mass Effect Andromeda was the straw for me
Always good to see a fellow Andromeda appreciator/semi-appreciator.
Here is my thing about Andromeda, it was a bad Mass Effect game in the same way that Mario Sunshine was a bad Mario game. The bar was incredibly high so in comparison it was a "bad" game.
But both were still solid games. now ME:A had its faults (especially at launch), but to this day I blame Kotaku for single handily causing that game to fail and the public perception of it being the way it was and we never got the DLC that was clearly hinted at in the game. Which I am still frustrated about.
It seemed like on a daily basis for a couple weeks we got a negative article about ME:A from Kotaku and suddenly everyone talked about how bad it was even though they never played it.
Disclaimer: I have a Mass Effect tattoo that I plan on turning into a sleeve so I am not exactly... impartial
I couldn't agree more, with every word. Except for:
> I have a Mass Effect tattoo that I plan on turning into a sleeve so I am not exactly... impartial
I'd say this lends you even more credibility, because way too many trilogy superfans hated Andromeda to a silly extreme. And you get Mass Effect.
I often wonder how Andromeda would have been recieved if it wasn't branded a Mass Effect game, and launched like a week later.
I think part of the reason I say that is... I don't want to say I have a lower barrier for more Mass Effect but at the end of the day more Mass Effect is a positive to me and I am willing to forgive a lot.
Same deal with Halo, I also have a tattoo of it and I have stuck with Halo Infinite this entire time (and that is finally paying off).
I feel like many of those that hated Andromeda are also those that said that the ending of 3 ruined the franchise. Which... yeah the ending sucked. But I don't understand how a crappy 10-15 minutes ruins a close to 200 hour playtime for the trilogy. It for sure hasn't stopped me from replaying the entire trilogy multiple times or waking up this morning, seeing the date and knowing to put on my N7 shirt.
> I often wonder how Andromeda would have been received if it wasn't branded a Mass Effect game, and launched like a week later.
I have wondered that quite a few times. Especially if it still had the BioWare name attached to it just as a new IP. People would have been a lot less critical and... out for blood frankly. And maybe more people would have just ignored it and the game could have just had peace...
I wrote a comment above around that topic, looks like my question was answered…
And you nailed it in that comment btw.
if you look into the names of the founders, all of them are activists, one of them has a colorful gamergate history, one mentions labour issues in their byline.
their position statement is in the fourth paragraph, it starts with "widespread labor organizing, industry-changing mergers and acquisitions, sweeping layoffs", and then reads "We need a curious, independent press to hold power to account, to cut through the marketing hype, and to elevate the voices of those affected by the gaming industry’s upheaval." they bring up the issue of labor again, "we’ll keep you up to date on the worlds of video games, board games, comics, movies and tv, nerd culture, tech, streaming, and the labor issues that surround them"
would it be safe to assume that their goal is to be a kind of jacobin for gaming? jacobin's digital only pricing model is $30/yr, which $3/mo against aftermath's $7/mo, and i'm comparing them here on selective paywalling model. jacobin doesn't have dedicate gaming section, but they do write about video games from a socialist perspective, in their culture and labor sections.
i would say it's safe to assume that aftermath is going after a niche audience, people who want an indepth coverage of the video game industry from a socialist perspective, is that an attractive enough value proposition? they might also be explicitly trying to build an activist audience to be able to put political pressure on gaming industry. this is another possible reading from "holding power accountable". i'm not sure if that's compatible with their pricing model though.
How could someone who worked for Kotaku not have a "colorful gamergate history"? What does that mean, exactly, when Gamergate was a hate campaign originally targeting Kotaku writers based entirely on false allegations? Or were they one of the organizers of gamergate somehow?
You're perfectly entitled to dislike their work but it's weird to see people use language like this.
Also, what's wrong with being an activist? Is it bad to care about things now? What is their activism for? Are they an activist for something bad? If you specify what it is about their activism that's harmful it's much easier for people to understand the concern.
Labour issues, for example, are extremely relevant in video games since labour conditions at game studios frequently contribute to games shipping unfinished or in a bad state, and players actively dislike that. Games press cannot avoid covering labour conditions with how frequently crunch and layoffs harm the quality of shipped games.
hello, man from the other side of the divide! i grew up in a socialist country, so i find socialist activism frightful and dangerous, so yes, i think that they are activists for something bad, in general, though not necessarily specifically. (not having grown up in america, i don't share the same divide lines as you people do)
i'm not personally willing to engage in political subjects in my escapist media, and i generally don't. this is the part where you said "you're perfectly entitled", that's good that we agree on this. the rest of my op comment is my personal analysis of the nature of this new publication, which i thought was factual, because it's a collection of facts that i extracted out of this announcement, which i then used to make my decision about the publication. i've preemptively filed it in into a "do not click" category in my brain.
Many of the most popular escapist video games coming out are intensely political. Call of Duty, for example, is absolutely saturated in American politics. Final Fantasy 16's main plot is filled with political themes like slavery. Final Fantasy 7 (with one remake already out and another coming soon) is filled with political themes like ecoterrorism from top to bottom. The number of games with gender politics, race politics or war politics front and center in the text is limitless.
You can escape from politics in something like FIFA or Madden, I suppose, as long as you're willing to ignore the politics of the team ownership/management and how players are treated. And of course something like Tetris isn't intrinsically political, as long as you ignore the origins of the game itself (which is totally reasonable in a 'separate the art from the artist' fashion).
In practice with many games whether they seem 'political' to you or not depends on whether the game's politics are legible, and depending on our upbringing and education we may or may not be able to recognize a given political theme in a given game. It feels naive to act as if x% of games are Political and y% of games are Not Political and thus coverage should entirely avoid politics. Typically when you see political themes brought up in games coverage, it is usually in regards to games that have political themes beneath the surface, if not directly out in the open in the text of the game itself.
I totally understand the desire to escape from politics, and a good way to do that is to avoid reading coverage that focuses on the politics and to avoid playing games that engage too deeply with political themes. It just feels deeply misguided to me when I see people criticizing games journalists for 'bringing politics into it' when usually the games they're covering are already deeply political. It's fine to want to ignore that as a player but they are rarely bringing something in that isn't there.
A great example of this would be the Yakuza/Judgment series of games. They are filled with social commentary and themes that are most legible to someone who grew up in Japan, and if you read coverage of them from journalists with that context it can seem very political. To me as an American, I lack most of that cultural context so it's very easy to treat them as apolitical fun romps where gangsters fight against corrupt politicians or dirty cops. But even so, corrupt politicians and dirty cops are a problem here in my country too, right? To call these works apolitical from any perspective is perhaps trying a little too hard.
you want to explore, what "political" means, that's fine. we're not making a thesis here, so allow me to also ramble, but i'm cautious of your alies: another person in this thread has implicitly acused me of homophobia, sexism and racism, because that's the tactics with these kinds of people.
first of all we clearly have different relationship with video games, just by the games you've mentioned, or the fact that you've worked in the industry. i don't play call of duty, because i'm not on board with jock sniffers on political grounds. your other examples are similar, and i agree with you, a lot of video games are political, and i stand by my point. i don't like to engage with them! i find their treatment of political subjects to be juvenile, naive, reductionist, historically illiterate, and yet often moralizing and grandstanding. few games that aspire to deal with tough social subjects ever deliver. this is in my opinion.
there are two dimensions to the question of politics in video games, that make engagement with politics often an unpleasant experience. the question of familiarity that you touched on, and the question of player's choice. with low familiarity and low choice politics are not a problem. yeah i don't know anything about organized crime in japan, why would i care what the game tells me. with high choice politics are also not a problem, this is a very very very rare thing in the games treatment of politics. and i think the faux choice between "i sided with the developer's prefered political position, and got the good ending" and "i sided with developer's disliked political positions, and now i'm literally hitler" is not a real choice.
so the real problem with politics in video games is often high familiarity with low choice. the developer wants you to know that their guys are really the good guys, and they imbue them with all the political views that the developers share. you're "forced" to play out scenarios, where you are not invested in the narrative anymore, you're just doing it for the mechanics of the game. i've played shadowrun: dragonfall recently, you're part of an anarchist commune, and there's a lot of kind of talk that you hear in anarchist communes, and, man, i've been part of anarchist communes before, and all this talk is bullshit, but in the video game universe it works!
which gets me to my original criticism of "activist journalists". these people want more politics in their games not less. by virtue of their activism, and interest of the kind of audience they attract, they are also much more likely to dedicate both time to games with explicit political subjects, or often times explore games from political perspective. they are also much more likely to advocate for high familiarity, low choice games. that's my past experience with their output. there is a lot apolotical games, there's a lot of low familiarity political games, "activist journalists" pretty much gaurantee that politics is front and center of gaming experience.
> i'm not personally willing to engage in political subjects in my escapist media
When I see this I just think of that old joke that gamers think there are two sexes: male and political. Two races: white and political. Two sexualities: straight and political. etc etc you get the idea.
Bad news tho the political subjects are already in your escapist media your only choice is how you engage with them. Regarding any aspect of it as nonpolitical is itself a political act.
> When I see this I just think of that old joke that gamers think there are two sexes: male and political. Two races: white and political. Two sexualities: straight and political. etc etc you get the idea.
Aren't you doing the same? "There are two sides - my side and the evil side."
this thread started with me basically saying that i'm not willing to engage, and there's a lively downvote brigading going on against the original comment (it goes from -3 to 3 over and over and over again, the grand battle of ideologies!)
i'm not signing under your strawman, because it's not true. but i know the tactics you people use, because you took them straight from the commissar books of my homeland. history books will not treat you kindly.
lmao ok buddy extremely normal reaction here have a good one!
What exactly makes you think that they are in any way socialist?
It's wild to see the sheer impact of Gamergate on online culture. The fact that this thread is filled with GG talking points baffles me. The level of vitriol for Kotaku specifically made no damn sense, given how diverse the writing staff was.
I always interacted with Kotaku the way everybody should interact with a publication: there were some writers I liked, some I didn't, and some clickbait. It declined in quality over time until I stopped reading. That's all there is.
And if you really want to blame somebody, blame Kieron Gillen. Kotaku just merged New Games Journalism with the gossipy Gawker model to create a weird hybrid. Weirdly, a lot of what people complained about wasn't the Gawker stuff but the deep games criticism. The "hipsterdom" of it all. That was the best part! It was the clickbait that was annoying.
> The level of vitriol for Kotaku specifically made no damn sense, given how diverse the writing staff was.
I think you got the cause and effect backwards here, unfortunately.
I meant in terms of perspective and writing style, but fair point.