Have you ever even read a newspaper?
lazer_bean said:newspapers buy the info from agencies like Reuters and then a journalist makes it his own when writing his article. invetsigation most newspapers is almost dead as is fact checking a lot of the time.
In Communist Russia maybe.newspaper dont exist to inform, they're here to control (control what you think).
And this is why they succeed.In Communist Russia maybe.
newspapers buy the info from agencies like Reuters and then a journalist makes it his own when writing his article. invetsigation most newspapers is almost dead as is fact checking a lot of the time.
This is highly frowned upon and gets called out when it is discovered.traditional journalists hang out with politicians and other people they write about
on the principle they're not doing any better than gaming journalists.
The people working at newspapers want to inform you. Any newspaper that starts going into the realm of advertorials, if it was reputable, gets called out by the rest of the media.newspaper dont exist to inform, they're here to control (control what you think).
So Polygon is as bad as I predicted. Nice try tho.
jesus game "journalists"
is this seriously how you want to be known working in your chosen field? I mean, seriously.
This is why I don't trust any reviews or previews from any website and genuinely laugh at anyone who tries to show me one to persuade me about a game. I select a few neoGAFers I know are trustworthy and articulate opinions I can trust and just go from there.
This shit is sickening at this point. I know you guys read neoGAF so really, if you have any self-respect left, fix some shit
No, wait a minute, I'm the conspiracy theorist here! N'Gai even said so!And this is why they succeed.
What you're describing is personal recommendations from friends, family or anyone else in your social circle.
This has always carried more weight with consumers than product reviews from a critic or publication.
This is the same site that took $750,000 from Microsoft in marketing dollars, right?
If they had put it in their own words it wouldn't be an issue
newspapers buy the info from agencies like Reuters and then a journalist makes it his own when writing his article. invetsigation most newspapers is almost dead as is fact checking a lot of the time.
traditional journalists hang out with politicians and other people they write about
on the principle they're not doing any better than gaming journalists.
newspaper dont exist to inform, they're here to control (control what you think).
This is why I can't understand their existence. They have no added value to anyone.
The worst thing is they supposedly got this news hot off the press yet proper news is taking taking them sometimes a day to post about.
I don't see what Polygon's place in the actually is. If they really were 'different' they might have a place but as it stands their kotaku but shitter (and they can't even do that right) and pretended to be something new/special. Least Kotaku have somethings of interest; Polygon from what I've seen have nothing, everything behind the site seems very poorly thought out.
I don't think that's necessarily true at all. There are several movie critics I trust more than any of my friends and family - they know more than my family and friends do about the world of cinema, they understand filming techniques and the history of acting and movies and whatever. It can often be far more informative than just asking a friend or family member what they think. They carry weight, of course, but not necessarily more.
You'd think this would be the case with game journalists? Obviously not every last person is guilty, so I don't want to cast the net on every individual. Many are innocent. But because of the people leading the show, everyone has to be skeptical about what is coming out.
Don't you think it should be the case that there are game 'journalists' we go to because we trust their in-depth knowledge of a situation? That they know whether or not Koopalings have been in past NSMB games (IGN!)? That they realize what the difference is between certain mechanics and whether they are new to the series or not? That they are warrantedly critical whenever a title is sloppy or buggy, no matter if it's a AAA title or a no-name one? That they don't fear advertising revenue being pulled or someone not giving them early access because of a bad review?
It's very sad we've arrived at this point, because there was a time - briefly, admittedly - where it seems that genuine passion dictated the approach to looking at videogames. But I think that time has passed for MANY. And because of those many it's almost impossible to know which of the few left remaining who aren't that way are trustworthy.
Just as the GAF Journalism topic wants game journos to "wake up" to the fact that they're being influenced by PR even when writers insist they aren't, or when the writers insist they're aware of all of PR's tricks... that it's subconscious... the same is true here.
You're now insisting that you have your thumb completely on what influences your movie-going decision. You're insisting film critics... some critics, matter more to you than friends.
But then when journos insist they aren't influenced by PR the masses insist that that isn't possible. Do you see the double standard?
I appreciate that this is mixing arguments, now, and not addressing your central point. It's just something worth thinking about.
If you polled 100 people, 100 of them would probably insist advertising doesn't work on them. And yet the billions keep being spent. No one wants to concede that hey, maybe the multi-billion dollar industry does know better than me.
If you polled 100 people, many of them would probably insist critical reception mattered hugely to them. But what really gets butts-in-seats are a group of people you know vouching for something. "Dude... listen to this album you'll love it" is a stronger call-to-action than 5-star reviews.
I get what you're saying here, but there is a few key differences I'd say.
Firstly, obviously I am going to trust my own perspective on what influences me. I know what goes on inside my head. By default that means I am probably the most trustworthy person I can be familiar with: I can't ever lie to myself, no matter how hard I try.
While I respect that there are many game journalists who probably really do feel they're not being influenced, I'm obviously going to trust that authority less than I trust myself. After all, I'm not in their head. I'm in my own.
But the problem is not, once again, that SOME game journalists might genuinely avoid the pitfalls that have shown up. It's that with the way things have gone, there is simply no way for me to tell one way or the other. The bad game journalists have poisoned the pool, and the rest don't have a large enough influence to change the overarching trajectory. We have seen in the past few years case after case where game journalists have been exposed for taking gifts from developers/publishers; where they have been shown posting Halo 4 articles with giant fucking Halo 4 advertisements plastered all over the border of the article; where they have been shown to be consistently manipulating scores (look at the Gamespot controversy with Jeff); that they will sit in a room filled with Doritos and Mountain Dew while talking about a game those objects are sponsoring.
And god forbid a website or magazine decides to actually buck the trend and give a major AAA title a bad score, they might lose future access! It has happened many times!
Ponder this: Why is that whenever a game is in a big franchise, whenever a game has a AAA marketing campaign, that almost without exception we can expect a score of 85 or above aggregate? Think about what this would mean comparably if it happened in the realm of film criticism. But it doesn't. By and large, it's nearly impossible to predict how a movie will score even if it's a HUGE one with big marketing dollars. But a game? There are so few exceptions to the rule I can list it on one hand, and that's generally from a game so outrageously bad that even a blind man can see they couldn't get away with rating it higher.
If you listed a AAA game right now off the top of your head, I will list the super high score range it almost undoubtedly will fall within. Even if the game is still three years from coming out, I'll tell you what it will score. I bet there's even a scientific formula for it: take off such and such if it's a new IP, take off such and such if its game budget is less than 30 million, take off such and such if the marketing budget is under 5 million.
I would simply have to disagree if the idea is that all these games actually deserve these scores. I can't tell you the number of times I've played a AAA game and thought what the hell were these people actually playing when they posted their so-called "critique." And as anecdotal as that is, you can routinely see the backlash when people's raised expectations from reviews meet the crushing reality of actually playing the game with all its bugs and imperfections.
I certainly respect that this may be the case for plenty of people. But it certainly has never been the case for me. My family routinely tells me to see garbage films and I just laugh at them and say "ok mom sure maybe someday." I know that their standard for quality films is something like a Lifetime movie. And that's OK. But I know if I read my trusted film critics, they're going to be informed in a way my family and friends can never even come close to. They understand what a film is trying to do, they know the references, the filming techniques, the actors, the directors. They offer a depth of knowledge that frankly embarrasses the average game journalists, because these people don't view it as a sort of happy pass to play free games and maybe one day land a job at 343 Studios.
Many actually retain knowledge of past experiences and hold it against the current film. They may even RESEARCH what they're saying before they post something. "Hey, has a Koopaling been in past New Super Mario Bros. games? I wonder if that's something I should check up on before I post a effusive article about the new Wii U title on IGN!"
You read GAF so I'm sure you've come across many topics highlighting the just outrageous editing discrepancies in these articles. Things that would have been caught by anyone who was even bothering to try. So the only conclusion is that they are not, in fact, trying.
I don't mean to cast accusations on those who are genuinely trying to keep their head above water. But you must understand I am a consumer of videogames and I do believe this behavior has cast a very real pall upon the industry, because legitimate criticism is one of the only ways to keep shitty development practices in check. If that criticism is so muddied nobody can trust it, what effect can it have?
I guess God was just letting anything go when Medal of Honor and RE6 got trashed in reviews.And god forbid a website or magazine decides to actually buck the trend and give a major AAA title a bad score, they might lose future access! It has happened many times!
I guess God was just letting anything go when Medal of Honor and RE6 got trashed in reviews.
Or you are really good at lying to yourself.
How did @Polygon come under fire? I've only read positive things.
@chrisgrant
In short, they're on a witch hunt, every outlet is on the take. Etc, etc.
so after chris grant "agrees" the mistake in running the pizza article and says how it didnt live up to their fine standards, apparantly now nothing was wrong at all and we're just out to get them.
https://twitter.com/chrisgrant/status/264169305187438592
thank god polygon are here to run the brave new world news that EVERYTHING IS FINE.
so after chris grant "agrees" the mistake in running the pizza article and says how it didnt live up to their fine standards, apparantly now nothing was wrong at all and we're just out to get them.
https://twitter.com/chrisgrant/status/264169305187438592
thank god polygon are here to run the brave new world news that EVERYTHING IS FINE.
so after chris grant "agrees" the mistake in running the pizza article and says how it didnt live up to their fine standards, apparantly now nothing was wrong at all and we're just out to get them.
https://twitter.com/chrisgrant/status/264169305187438592
thank god polygon are here to run the brave new world news that EVERYTHING IS FINE.
Well that Arab Gaming Spring didn't last long!
Its back to pretending that the games media are the victims here.
https://twitter.com/chrisgrant/status/264171264694964224chris grant ‏@chrisgrant
@PeterSkerritt @cuppy All we can do is stay true to our ethics, make great content, and some people will enjoy it and some won't. :-/
But the fact remains, review scores (and how much a game gets a pass in the text of the review as well) are all too often directly proportional to the hype level of a game, rather than the quality level.
so after chris grant "agrees" the mistake in running the pizza article and says how it didnt live up to their fine standards, apparantly now nothing was wrong at all and we're just out to get them.
https://twitter.com/chrisgrant/status/264169305187438592
thank god polygon are here to run the brave new world news that EVERYTHING IS FINE.
so after chris grant "agrees" the mistake in running the pizza article and says how it didnt live up to their fine standards, apparantly now nothing was wrong at all and we're just out to get them.
https://twitter.com/chrisgrant/status/264169305187438592
thank god polygon are here to run the brave new world news that EVERYTHING IS FINE.
How many bad games get good reviews, much less great reviews. Everyone talks about the evils of hype coloring reviews and coverage, but at the end of the day these are subjective views on design often attached to a number.
Most games, especially "hyped games" are good. Really fucking good.
lol
What's happened is that a lot of newspapers have had to cut the departments that made them particularly valuable to those who bought them and have come to rely heavily on the newswires over time. While a lot of people attribute this to print being 'dead' in general, many newspapers remained perfectly profitable prior to this evisceration of their content, but were also publicly traded, so they didn't just need to turn a profit, but to provide increasing returns every quarter. The way to do this when you aren't actually expanding your market is to lay people off, and this has resulted in them shutting down a lot of their investigative reporting and relying increasingly on agencies like Reuters, which now means that they don't provide any content that can't be gotten anywhere on the internet, and the death of print becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
When it comes down to it, the problem with reviews is the classic "4 point scale" issue. An average game is an 8, a good game is a 9, and a great game is a 10. 7 is not good and 6 and below all might as well be the same thing.
Reviewers have been using three methods to counteract this: 1) The decimal system creates a much larger scale in between 6 and 10. This is a stupid solution though because almost all games are still in between 8.25 and 9.75 instead of just between 7 and 10 now.
The other solution is 2) Star system. They know they only use four points anyway and so they just make it a five point scale. There are a couple of problems with this however. First of all, many people use half stars, which completely loses the point of the star system in the first place. Second, big sites like Metacritic still use the 10-point scale (or 100 really), and just convert star ratings. So a 3-star game that a reviewer really enjoyed but didn't quite go above and beyond ends up as a 60 on MC, which relative to other reviews doesn't line up to the reviewer's intent. Third, reviewers still just don't like giving out low scores. They'll more often than not give a game 4-stars just because they feel 3 may undersell how much they enjoyed the game.
The final method is just eschewing scores altogether, but this is still unfavorable because people just like to look at a number, they like to quantify things. It works really well for something like RPS but as I said before it can screw up the quantifiable score overall on sites like Metacritic (which I'm not defending, I'm merely saying its place is very important in this industry).
So, to be brief, the best possible solution that would work for both consumers and reviewers, is to change the average. Just throw out all the old scores and start from scratch, with the average base score a game gets being 5. A game has to go above and beyond to get anything more than that, and a 10 is near mythical, coming maybe once or twice a generation.
This also means that if most games coming out now are an 8 or 9, then that is what is average. Call of Duty gets a 5 for preserving the solid gameplay of its predecessors, but can only get a 6 or higher with significant additions, and likely can't get above an 8 without some great shakeups to the formula. Another example, maybe something like Mark of the Ninja could be a 7 or 8 because it is a wholly unique experience executed excellently, while ACIII would be a 4 for not adding significant improvements.
I guess the main problem with that would be Ubisoft would shit themselves if an AC game has a 4, but in this idea 4 would be like today's 8.
This is pretty simple stuff though, honestly. It's all stuff I believed even when I was like 15 and only had a Gamecube. I remember hearing most of these ideas from McElroy and Grant themselves on the Joystiq podcast. I just don't get how those guys can have all these solid ideas for legitimizing game press and criticism but then turn around and do stuff like this. They have no self-awareness.
so after chris grant "agrees" the mistake in running the pizza article and says how it didnt live up to their fine standards, apparantly now nothing was wrong at all and we're just out to get them.
https://twitter.com/chrisgrant/status/264169305187438592
thank god polygon are here to run the brave new world news that EVERYTHING IS FINE.
http://i.minus.com/iYqupHvXxzG3e.png