Why Mainstream Media misrepresents GamerGate - Page 2

On October 21 2014 01:02 JimmyJRaynor wrote:


you paint a dim pessimistic view of the industry.
and its 100% accurate.

things are in a bad state, however, there is hope.

One small sign of hope: AngryJoe's review of the 500 million dollar game Destiny received 5 times as many views on youtube as IGN's review.

I was impressed that IGN managed to give the game a review score under 80. IGN made a brilliant strategic/political decision by stating: "we didn't get an advanced review copy of the game so we need to take our time to fully explore the game". They waited until the game was out 10 days and gave it a score that was 5% higher than the Metacritic average. Really impressive corporate politicking on the part of IGN.com.

I bet AngryJoe and several other 100% independent game reviewers are well paid.

Ostensibly GG is about “journalism bias” in gaming, an issue that deserves inspection but is not as widespread or as damaging as many assume. Gaming journalists and the industry they cover may seem, on the outside, as a cozy pair and we can assume that collusion and marketing dollars steer media opinion. However, I would argue that the truth is far more mundane. Gaming sites sell ads, journalists get paid. If everything is working correctly, there is little connection between the two except for the transfer of cash. However, gaming journalism is a form of access journalism and you are perceived as a failure if you don’t get the hot “scoops” spoon-fed you by PR people. I ran Gizmodo for a few years when access was hard won and often pulled on a whim and when Michael Arrington refused to accept embargoes a few years ago it affected our work at CrunchGear and TechCrunch because we couldn’t get the hot new gadgets when everyone else did. We are not immune to this either but it’s been my goal throughout to move as far from the PR spin cycle as possible.

Online politicking is not new. But online politicking via the techniques of trolling – the use of pointless arguments to confuse subjects, the desire to get a rise out of the Internet, and the careful management of media through threats and calls of bias – are all coming into the mainstream. GG is a testbed for these tactics. It will be frightening to see these tools being used to address serious subjects and without self-control and granular filtering tools, we’re doomed. I’m not calling for censorship, I just want to be able to ignore the trolls.