Games

I am screaming into a pillow of art critique frustrations right now.

Okay, look , first of all, that's the point of magazines, they had more than one person in them. There was both some editorial oversight keeping an editorial line AND multiple voices working together, so you were never railroaded into just the one guy. We called those newsletters and the understanding was they were supposed to be obnoxious.

I don't disagree that there is good game critique right now. For every ragebaiting, hyperfocused, the-end-is-nigh culture warrior there is someone who actually knows what they're talking about going "alright, ya chucklefucks, here's the deal". But the point is you don't HAVE to get through one of those to get to the trash. The trash is now algorithmically selected and pushed into your eyeballs, and it's your job to sift through the recommendation engine to personally decide what level of that you want in your life.

You want more than you should. On average, anyway.

With no gatekeepers outside the corpobot gatekeepers there are no concerns but engagement. Hard to get that job done like that, and there's more unexpected damage downstream from that change.

Am I saying that a heavily gatekept media landscape where the reputation of publications drives attention more than specificity and focus? Eh, I'm not NOT saying that. It's hard to argue that the societal outcomes have not been great. And while there's good critique out there it's dense, and dull and itself heavily specialized. Even after we went digital there used to be approachable, good critique, -not "reviews", but critique- in loose, ugly blogs written in good humor with sharp observations and constructive approaches. Newsletters, but good newsletters.

Look, I don't mean it as an insult, but your post is a good example of why there were some positives to having people come for the guides and the "technical reviews" and the personalities and have the rest of the package literally stapled to those. I don't think much of the print world delivered on that potential before the Internet took over. The website-based world had a better go at it, some people did great work. A bunch moved on to make great games from there.

The pivot-to-video, content-as-a-service social media landscape we have today? Nah. Not by itself.

This is incredibly ironic because if you follow the history of this stuff somewhat rigorously there is a very good case to be made that the "pivot to video" beginning of the end starts when Jeff Gerstmann gets told by sales people at Gamespot to mellow out a review for advertising purposes and he aggressively refuses (as this was not at all a usual request), gets fired and starts Giant Bomb as a video-first outlet.

This is one of those things where an insider could have a very nuanced set of opinions about the relationships between the game marketing industry on one side and the craft and art of game criticism and journalism on the other, but it has somehow seeped down into mainstream opinion as "games journalism was all paid for", which is definitely wrong.

When it was still possible to support yourself from journalism you could see concessions being made and certain news being definitely sponsored but it was never as bad as it is now. If you subscribe over RSS you can see how much crap is being created - every new game release means my feeds are flooded with dozens of „Best places to farm underpants in Zenless Zone Zero” or „How to beat minor boss in episode 27”. Google broke the internet.