In case you’re not tired of talking or reading about this yet, this month’s Escapist Magazine is all about games journalism. It has the expected bit on how blogs will/will not save the world and a round table that, naturally, goes round and round.
I will isolate two quotes though.
From Simon Carless of Gamasutra and GameSetWatch: “But it’s the excessive and twisted introspection that is doing us harm. Let’s just write good copy, instead of picking at why we aren’t.”
From video game critic David Thomas: “I’m more or less a print guy, but I can smell death all around me.”
Oh, and Kyle Orland says you are ten years too late to make a really successful fan site. Sorry, guys.
God, that was a horrible issue.
But I do like it when bloggers tell us that blogging will save the world. Nevermind that bloggers rely almost exclusively on “old media” sites for their own content. Without anything to link to, they become Gamespot or IGN.
I wonder if there’s this much navel gazing in other forms of journalism, at least in public like this? You’d think game journalism was actually important.
All journalists like to talk about journalism. The news media is full of this kind of stuff (news bias, focus on fluff stories, “keeping score” journalism), but I can think of no other entertainment media that takes itself so seriously and focuses as heavily on introspection. I never see TV writers obsessing over it, nor are movie critics/Hollywood scribes convinced that they are engaged in work of earthshaking importance.
Part of it, I guess, is that so much of the games journalism out there isn’t quite sure if it should be doing business reporting (Sony v. Microsoft!!!), in which case most writers have no training for any serious conclusions, or sticking to games and the personalities attached, in which case there isn’t a whole lot of serious journalism to do though you can certainly have serious criticism.
It’s pretty funny to go from “there’s nothing serious to report on” to “I’ll seriously report on what I do for a living.”
It’s probably a defensive reaction to not being taken seriously, so we all try to appear like we take our own jobs very seriously. And we share that with other people. But what people seem to fail to get is that you can take your job seriously while realizing that what you’re doing isn’t that serious.
Or something like that. My brain is mush. I haven’t taken a day off in two weeks. Maybe I should write about that.
Reminds me of the Sims putting “game journalist” low on the “slacker” career path / totem pole ;)