i don't. i'm sick of it. i'm sick of hearing about crunch culture. i'm sick of people fantasizing who they would fuck if their video game characters were real. i'm sick of hearing about gaming journalism itself. i'm sick of hearing about shit that has nothing to do with games.
really, if you want to write about the industry, start an industry rag. they can gossip all day long. talk about market shares. talk about business strategy. talk about crunch culture and corporate harassment. do stories on other reporters. pass off your dumb fan fiction as "articles". go nuts. none of that has to do with games themselves.
it's like, if i pick up a car magazine, are they doing deep dives into the management process at Ford plants? no. some pink haired lunatic fantasizing about fucking a jeep? no. they are looking at cars, talking about cars, reviewing cars, comparing cars, etc. the product is the focus.
with gaming journalism, it seems like means to an end. someone is a writer and they want to use games as a medium to express themselves and talk about other non-game shit they want to. they need their own high school club they can go to and leave the rest of us alone.
Fuck, I just wrote a really long reply to this but accidentally closed my browser.
My point was that I think specialist websites are
less prone to this kinda crap because they understand their audience and can tailor information. Taking
Gamer Network as an example, their 'gaming culture' sites like RPS, VG247 and Eurogamer don't seem to have an obvious readership so often rely on tourist clicks earned through conjecture and discussion about problematic things. By contrast, their specialist sites such as Nintendo Life and Push Square are more informative because they write towards a specific audience.
I think the same thing can be enlarged to explain why general sites such as IGN, Destructoid, The Escapist, Polygon, Destructoid, PC Gamer, etc do what they do. None of these write towards specific audiences so rarely offer anything resembling clear and obvious product information. Again, by comparison, specific websites such as Siliconera (Japanese gaming) and Adventure Gamers (obvious) are better at it because they curate their content to people who wouldn't be visiting their sites if they had no interest in those things.
That was the crux of it. Competition between gaming websites has forced a bit of a race to the bottom.
www.siliconera.com
