Anyone can be a “games journalist” today. All it takes is a basic understanding of spelling, grammar and a website. Unfortunately, the word “journalist” implies a certain level of integrity and responsibility that is all but absent in the field of gaming. Journalism, at its ideal, requires critical thinking, awareness of tonality, who your audience is, the grand scheme of the subject you’re writing about, and at the end of the day, what it all really means.
There are only a couple game journalists that I follow these days, and the majority of them work for Giant Bomb. These are mostly people who have been in the industry for at least a decade and have the distinction of being crotchety old 30+ people like myself. One other example is Ben Croshaw, whose one-trick pony satire belies a deeper understanding of the games industry and gives him a platform to make some insightful comments about both game makers and consumers that he can get away with because they’re shrouded in humor.
In most cases you get banal reporting that serves little more than to take the marketing points of a company’s game and expose it to the writer’s audience. In the worst case you have people like Allistair Pinsof of Destructoid who outed a transgendered woman on Twitter and then proceeded to insult and mock those who called him on it, creating a Twitter meltdown that resulted in him getting suspended indefinitely and potentially fired.
As one who spends more time playing video games than he should, it’s frustrating to see the lack of standards in the gaming media. Of course, not all gamers are the same, or are interested in the same kind of coverage. When I was younger and the industry was evolving, we didn’t have the range of choice in gaming that we do today, and had to take what we could get. In a lot of ways, gaming journalism was hamstrung by being a niche media market with a limited audience. Now, years later, the industry has evolved to the point where the word “gamer” has lost a lot of its formerly derogatory edge, the market has expanded to take over the living rooms of Middle America, and a vibrant indie gaming scene has spawned more creativity and consumer choice than ever before.
And yet journalistic standards remain largely the same. There’s a cavalier attitude in the industry that needs to change for gaming media to become as respected as traditional journalism. When editors and writers make offensive statements on Twitter and then defend them with righteous indignation, there’s a problem. When gaming writers are recorded talking about how they find Nazi SS uniforms sexy during a drunken tirade, there’s a problem. And it’s not because we can’t say dumb things – we’re only human, and we make mistakes, but when we’re representing a company, an industry, and a subculture, we have a responsibility to exercise a level of judgment beyond what we might say to good friends behind closed doors.
Make no mistake, there are good, hardworking, and responsible journalists in the game industry, but their efforts are easily overshadowed by amateur writers who give gaming culture a bad name.
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