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gamergate LITERALLY stopped the ethics conversation from happening. it isn't that there were maybe some mythical people in the movement that cared about ethics getting taken along for the ride. i do not understand why you, or anyone, is still so incredibly dense about this
you know how you can tell that Pitts is continuing to buy into gamergate's rhetoric? you can tell because of the way he frames conflicts of interest. gamergate exaggerated relationships between people who worked in the same industry and made shit up out of whole cloth.
that was part of how the smear campaign worked.
the thing pitts wants to do to fix this is to do the Kotaku method of disclosing interpersonal relationships in articles. this isn't just putting a band-aide on the problem. this is like putting a band-aide on your elbow for a headache.
here's the biggest, most glaring flaw in games journalism: IT'S A FUCKING INDUSTRY THAT REVOLVES ENTIRELY AROUND THE FICTION OF PEOPLE DOING ACCURATE REPORTING AND REVIEWS OF THEIR FUCKING ADVERTISERS
every fucking games writing site does this thing where they're acting like making their people note that they were college roommates with the designer on an indie game they're writing about is transparency but they're embedding ads for overwatch in every story about overwatch
yeah i think this is what i find so incredibly offensive about the whole thing
here's the thing: remember back in 2017 when Disney through a shitfit about the LA Times giving them some bad reviews and they blacklisted them from screenings? and then the LA Times made a huge fucking stink about it and Disney relented?
game review sites will make a little bit of effort to do something like that about review codes but they'll come at it from such a weeksauce angle and with absolutely no inter-industry solidarity. it tends to just fall flat.
here's the thing: if you want to talk about these things, you have to just talk about these things, and not try to include them in the "ethics in game journalism" umbrella. that tag is RUINED. stop pining for the version of the hate group that you'd have loved to have joined.
tw nazisim, 14 words/ it frankly is like trying to stand on a stage and literally talk about securing a future for white children. there is too much baggage. talk about it differently. english has a ton of words in it.
here's some things you can talk about: the relationship between reviews and advertisers, why we refer to reviews as "journalism" in the goddamn first place, reprinting press releases, how to cover the companies that advertise on your website
unions, whether the lavish several-week coverage that is given to every AAA game with horrendous labour practices is okay to do, whether reporting on those labour practices beforehand and then doing that coverage anyway is hypocritical
whether the "i know this person because i've been in the industry with them for my career" thing is actually useful to disclose or if it's giving into the demands of a hate group to go through with that, or if there's another way of doing it
alternatives to the constant pressure on companies to grow grow grow like cancer and how that negatively affects both work produced and the conditions for people working at the companies. the relationship of that to loot boxes.
the limitations of the usefulness of representation, how to do representation right. sensitivity readers. how to not treat QA like shit.
fan entitlement to the time and energy of creators and the way it creates resentment and a toxic environment for fans who think their being fans entitles them to everything from attention to jobs
workers in the games industry getting fired for standing up for themselves or for marginalized people when their toxic fans get out of hands. the way that toxic fan bases are empowered. the relationship between that and in-game moderation policies.
that's just off the top of my head and i'm not a fucking professional. i'm just someone who is capable of basic compassion for people who both games and the games journalism industry have been toxic shit shows.
bit of an addendum in the form of someone getting mad about how newsrooms and advertising are totally different and then i looked up what she did and her job is rewriting video game press releases for Variety
it's often more subtle than that but i am guessing that this is one of those things you need to make you able to sleep at night
seriously, the fact that this shit gets stories spiked is an open secret, but the fact that this shit runs on an economy of clicks isn't secret at all. that's just flat out there in front of everybody. how did y'all think those clicks turned into money, fucking fairies?
also if y'all want something to focus on and get defensive about y'all should look at company swag lol
this is an institutional problem and one that happens across the board for everyone, games journalism just happens to be an industry that is built entirely around shitting where you eat
but if you want to keep getting defensive about it and telling on yourselves individually that's fine i guess
games journalism just lives in this particularly awful place where it is at the intersection of clickbait/content mill stuff, being reliant on the subjects of its pieces for its income, and a huge percentage of the audience being absolute monsters
no it's def it
that guy's pinned tweet is a How To Have Fun In This Thing People Aren't Having Fun In article
god i had no idea that telling game journalists that people take their work with a grain of salt because of their industry's flagrant baked in conflicts of interest would ruffle so many feathers
like i figured everyone was either sort of hopeless about it and just doing jobs that get them a paycheck or they were trying to work within the system to clean up their corner, not losing their shit about the obvious problems being pointed out
a useful point
also i'm betting there's some pressure to do more of that content mill bland rewrites of positive press coverage from overloaded workers who are having to write several pieces a day for certain publishers over others
part of that might be advertising, part of it is DEFINITELY which companies can afford a full time marketing team to send out the press releases that people with those jobs rely on as to be their main source for most of those posts
and games journalism is 100% an "only game in town" situation, the best you can do to make informed decisions is to grab information from as many sources as possible and take it with bucketloads of salt
man and this isn't even getting started on gamer-as-identity shit or how much of video games is about reliving a protracted adolescence that is inaccessible and often actively off-putting to people outside of that culture
and which has a like 80% chance of punishing any originality outside of that scope
i figure i might as well lay it all out there if i'm pissing people off
a lot of people have mentioned access journalism in the responses to this and that is exactly what this kind of thing is. it's just got the advertising thing thrown in on top and generally matters a lot less
oh and while we're on the topic, classifying reviews with reporting/journalism is a big part of this problem. all reviews are opinion. the reviewer's job is in part to lay out their biases just in the forms of what kind of stuff they are into in general
the fact that every conversation about this is by default about reviews is a big part of why video game reporting is regularly incredibly shallow press release sales numbers garbage
i know the "they're defensive so i'm onto something!" thing isn't always a correct framing but i feel like the urgency in changing what i said from "a news industry that relies on funding from the industry it's supposed to be covering" to "critics are bribed" is... telling
like this is... not what i said
do access journalists all get mad in this same way if you write about how access journalism has problems
also holy shit lol
that is not an endorsement of video game journalism that is a fucking indictment of journalism as an entire field
