Instead of Sunday Soundtracks, today I’m going to do some personal writing about the concept of games journalism. I’ve been in two minds about publishing it since to comment on this particular argument is to become part of it, and I’m not sure that’s where I really want to be when it’s so needlessly navel-gazing. Still, I have certain Views about games writing in general and this is as good an opportunity as ever to air them.

So unless you’re literally the ambulatory mummified remains of the dead Egyptian priest Imhotep you’ll probably have noticed the minor kerfuffle over a certain article on Eurogamer. This article was penned by one Rab Florence, a well-known games writer responsible for the Consolevania series of review shows, and in it he did what somebody in the games journalism industry does from time to time: he pointed out the gross level of dependence the business has on friendly relationships with PR reps/companies, and asked whether perhaps this overly reliant relationship might compromise the integrity of journalists who take part in it. The results were predictable.

First, the games journalism community at large did what any insular community does when it perceives itself as being under attack: it closed ranks and rounded on Florence for having the temerity to question this natural order of things where it is seen as perfectly normal and above board to accept gifts/hospitality from the people whose products you are supposed to be giving an impartial opinion of. Then the counterculture element of games journalism waded in to his defence, and UK games journalists spent a large part of Thursday tearing bloody chunks out of each other as a result. And then one of the journalists named in Florence’s article complained/made threats of legal action (depending on who you believe) and Eurogamer amended the piece to remove the offending passages, apparently without Florence’s consent. Florence quit his Eurogamer writing gig in protest and the piece was widely circulated around the internet as a result in a classic manifestation of the Streisand effect.

I don’t really want to talk about the integrity of gaming journalism. I have no real interest in games “journalism”, and haven’t since State died a death back in 2004.  The one comment I would make is that if your industry as a whole cannot react to criticism from a perceived outsider except by imploding as spectacularly as this one has done, then it’s entirely possible that you don’t really deserve to be calling yourselves professionals. Professionals would be professional; they wouldn’t resort to slinging abuse at each other via the Twittersphere. Largely this is a result of the bar for entry being set so low it’s not even immediately apparent that one exists; when any bedroom blogger can bang out 2,000 words on whatever they happen to have played that week and call themselves games journalists ¹ it’s not surprising that the industry doesn’t really have any professional standards whatsoever.  Added to this is the fact that there’s a revolving door that leads from games journalism into the PR business; unless you are very very lucky being a games journalist is not a job with any long-term career prospects, and so your best bet for the future is to build up a web of contacts and experience with the industry and then make the jump to the other side of this non-existent fence. A discussion of integrity is pointless when the whole thing is irreversibly compromised from top to bottom and has been for decades.

That there is an article published in the immortal Amiga Power way back in 1993. It rails against exactly the sort of vested interests and low level corruption that are so pervasive in the industry today, so it’s not like this suddenly became a problem when the internet became a thing and the floodgates opened. It has ever been thus, and it will probably still be thus twenty years from now. As far as integrity is concerned games journalism in general is a lost cause.

However, I’d like to make the argument that, on the whole, this largely doesn’t matter. Not because journalists accepting material rewards in exchange for promoting a game isn’t a bad thing, because it is, but because the people who read their output are going to be separated into two distinct camps. On the one hand you have the people who read Nintendo Power, a magazine that until 2007 was wholly owned and published by Nintendo of America. Nintendo Power was admirably upfront about the primary reason for its existence being to sell more Nintendo products to the point where they stated as much on the cover ² . People still read it, and they did so without twigging that maybe, just maybe, the writers behind the magazine might have reasons for scoring a game highly that went beyond its quality. Or perhaps they did and they just didn’t care, I don’t know; the whole reason console fanboyism exists is because people like having their prior purchasing decisions validated in some way, and so there’s going to be a significant subset of Nintendo owners that bought it because they wanted to hear how the Nintendo system de jour was so awesome and had all these awesome games and weren’t they awesome for owning one. It’s undeniable that a substantial part of games journalism these days – hell, a substantial part of any journalism – is playing to your audience’s preconceptions and telling them what they want to hear. If the writers said something that went against that paradigm they’d be shredded by their audience³; and by the same token if that audience wanted to make the mental leap of effort involved in identifying possible sources of author bias they probably could, but they don’t, so they don’t. The audience exists. That section of the gaming media caters to it. And that’s okay.

Then you have the second group, which is the group that actually does care about the PR shenanigans Florence was writing about; the group that has been posting and posting and posting about this debacle non-stop for the last 48 hours. And I think this would be perfectly justified, if any of these people were taking the output of the journalists in question seriously in the first place.

I hate to subject Lauren Wainwright to any more scrutiny at this point as she has rather unwittingly become the central figure in this little saga and I don’t think the opprobrium being directed her way is entirely justified. However, one of the links I absent-mindedly followed led to the writing she’s been doing for MCV. I read it. I strongly recommend you don’t, since reading it led me to put my head in my hands and begin weeping uncontrollably, but this is a typical sample. I’m having difficulty figuring out what sort of audience MCV serves by publishing this sort of churnalism – wikipedia says it is “a trade magazine which focuses on business aspects of the video game industry” – but whoever it is it certainly isn’t anyone who forks over their own money to buy games⁴.  Let’s be honest here: let’s say you read one of Wainwright’s pieces before this whole thing blew up into gaming journalism’s own Three Mile Island. Is there literally any way you could read that and think “Yes, this is an impartial and objective opinion of the game in question”? I suspect not. It’s not aimed at you. I don’t know who it is aimed at, but it’s not aimed at you. Or me. Or anyone possessing a functioning brain.

(Edit: I have since been informed that MCV is a magazine by games PR people for games PR people, so I pretty much stand by everything I wrote above.)

Anyway, enough about Wainwright. Legal threats (or lack of them) aside she’s not the enemy here; she’s just symptomatic of an industry that is a long, long way beyond help. If you’re anything like me you weren’t reading MCV in the first place. You weren’t reading IGN either. Or Gamespot. Or Kotaku⁵. The race for the bottom has rendered these websites largely useless as legitimate sources of information, and this should have been obvious from the moment they started trying to pass off press releases as news. I’d wager that if you’re a part of this second group, you’re getting your information from a mix of gaming forums and slightly better-than-average sites like RPS⁶. That’s the neat thing about living in the internet age: the existence of the large number of interconnected communities that are linked into the big information clearing houses like Reddit ensures that if there is a worthwhile piece of games writing out there, there’s a high chance it’ll float to the top and get noticed due to propagation by those communities. Thanks to the internet – and thanks to the vast majority of games journalism being free to read – it is no longer necessary to get your news and opinions from a single PR mouthpiece. Games journalism is a large enough entity that even though the vast majority of it is tainted and awful, it is still producing a sizeable amount of quality material, and that material can give you a decent aggregate opinion of what’s really going on. And all of this tends to happen without any intervention on the part of games PR bods whatsoever.

So Wainwright and David Cook and Geoff Keighley and many of the other people desperately scrabbling for an established position as a games writer may or may not be gulping down mouthful after mouthful from the corporate PR teat in their off-hours, but squabbling over who said what and who accepted what from which company honestly doesn’t matter to me when the content of their “journalism” is so obviously terrible that I wouldn’t have gone within a hundred miles of it if Florence hadn’t written his Eurogamer article. Moon landing conspiracy nuts have a couple of tiny problems with their hypothesis, not least that keeping that kind of secret in an organisation as diffuse as NASA and its various subcontractors would be next to impossible, and I apply the same reasoning to games journalism. If corruption and bias is so rampant within the industry it’ll show through sooner or later, and guess what? It kind of does. It’s useful that it does, because it lets me know who to read and who to avoid. Several writers I more-or-less respect have gotten oddly defensive in justifying the system, but this hurt their case more than anything else as their writing should have been able to speak for itself. And when pictures are worth a thousand words, the photograph of Geoff Keighley sitting next to a table piled high with Mountain Dew and Doritos says everything I need to know about the man and the kind of journalism he practices. Everything else is just semantics.

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