Grow up, game journalism!

Leigh Alexander on the perpetual adolescence of game culture—and a press corps only too willing to pander to it even as it makes a superficial show of fighting it:

No wonder that when the industry’s most successful creators hear of the demand for maturity and sophistication, all that results are teen-boy tropes. And we gripe in private, but we accept this. Stagnant, emotionally arrested culture isn’t anyone’s fault, it’s just how things are. What do we know about the complex craft of game development, anyway? Let’s stick to what we can comment on: at least the graphics look good, at least someone is trying. The problem is the audience, the marketers, anyone but us.

⟿ Follow Rob Beschizza on Twitter.

MORE: Games

More at Boing Boing

Ants and Stars: Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic visit the Sardinia Radio Telescope in Italy

The Snowden Principle

Timothy Krause

Great graphic, Rob. Do I detect your masterful hand?
- http://boingboing.net/ Rob Beschizza
  
  You do, and now I want to make a game. “SUPER FORUM BATTLE”
  - http://profiles.google.com/stephen.schenck Stephen Schenck
    
    Are there any achievements besides Lamentable Frustration and TEH BANHAMMER?
  - http://www.facebook.com/people/Robert-Drop/100000929402049 Robert Drop
    
    Need more… inane rage.
  - Felton / Moderator
    
    Rated M for graphic disemvoweling.
  - Timothy Krause
    
    Hahaha, that would be incredible.
jandrese

How much of this is just the major studios doing the same thing they’ve always done because they’re risk adverse? We know teenage boys will buy these games, so we make games for teenage boys. Girls might not buy the games even if we make them more palatable, so why take the risk? Worse, we could even alienate our core audience who expect a level of misogyny in our products!

Once you have targeted a particular audience for so long, it is really hard not to pander to them, even if it comes at the cost of a potential new audience.
- http://www.facebook.com/people/Robert-Drop/100000929402049 Robert Drop
  
  There was a time when the game industry could claim that only teenage boys played games – they can’t even do that anymore because it’s clearly, demonstrably not true. (Even if it was true, it would be a self-fulfilling claim.) Regardless of what the industry pumps out, that shouldn’t stop game journalists from calling them on what they’re doing, however. If they’re not, it’s not journalism, it’s fan-boy wankery (which, unfortunately, much of game “journalism” still remains).
  - retepslluerb
    
    The game industry is exactly that: The game industry. The games journalism industry is something else. The latter is still targeted mostly at (a subset of) adolescent teenagers / young men. To expect this to change is as futile as expecting Playboy and Maxim embracing other types of photography.
- echolocate chocolate
  
  The industry has always been predominantly male but used to make games for everyone. Once the generation of young men who grew up with games became the game makers, they started making games for themselves, like the ones they liked as kids–instead of pushing the medium forward. Many great game makers, or many people who could be making great games, “grew up” and left the industry. And along with them, the people looking for grown-up, intelligent games–or simply games that aren’t completely pandering to their audience–left too.
  
  Maybe that’s a wee bit overly cynical. We’re seeing a lot of great creators coming back, plus young upstarts making some amazing stuff. We need more, and we need to hear more voices from outside the typical audience.
http://twitter.com/dermotheaney dermot heaney

Boingboing does post blogs that make so little sense. This is one.
- http://boingboing.net/ Rob Beschizza
  
  Your concrete thinking bar is doing that flashing sparkly thing which means you can do a special move with it.
  - Finnagain
    
    Initiate Sarcasm Epic Kick Combo!
Thad Boyd

I think Jeremy Parish has been doing a pretty great job, both on his own blog/fanzine and in running 1up. But he certainly seems to be swimming against the tide.

Bears noting, too, that he used to be big on the snark and irony (his site was/journal is called Gamespite, after all) but had something of an epiphany that that’s what everybody’s doing, and decided to try something novel and go with sincerity instead.
ifreecarve

I read a very interesting take on the problem of misogyny in video game culture — specifically its origins — in a comment to an article about the Anita Sarkeesian video gaming fiasco: http://incisive.nu/2012/how-to-kill-a-troll/#comment-607630852

tl;dr: a society that treats nerds and geeks as worthless is a driver of the poor behavior on the part of the gaming community. This doesn’t excuse the behavior, but it’s something that will have to be addressed if we are going to move forward.
- blueelm
  
  Yes. Sexism affects men too, and men being more important and needing to be catered to first, must be perfectly happy or else we can not talk about how sexism affects women without hearing about how sexism affects men and will never be resolved until men are catered to first as they must be perfectly happy or else we can not………………………..
  
  By the way, that doesn’t make it untrue. Just frustrating.
- http://twitter.com/VisceralVixen Visceral Vixen
  
  Oh, poor white able-bodied middle-class geeks, WON’T SOMEBODY THINK OF THE GEEKS!!!
  
  **eyeroll**
- Halloween_Jack
  
  a society that treats nerds and geeks as worthless is a driver of the poor behavior on the part of the gaming community.
  
  Which society is that? The one that I’m a part of fell all over each other to eulogize Steve Jobs; name any other appliance manufacturer (which is what he was, when you get down to it) so honored.
- SumAnon
  
  Interesting, but I think the “society that treats nerds and geeks as worthless” in question is about 20 years in the past. Video games are mainstream now. Computer and math based majors are no longer the wimpy anti-social stigmas they used to be. SciFi, comic, and high fantasy films make hundreds of millions as summer blockbusters.
  The stereotypical nerd with big glasses and pocket protectors doesn’t exist anymore – they’ve (he’s?) been replaced by software developers, Mythbusters, and Neil Tyson DeGrasse.
Jeff R

When I saw the headline and the graphic and even Rob’s intro, I thought this was about “game”, meaning pick-up-artist game.
- http://twitter.com/TheDanslator Dan Schilling
  
  If that were the case, the “Inane Rage” and “Misogyny” bars would be full, and “Concrete Thinking” would be in desperate need of a restoration power-up.
  - http://twitter.com/VisceralVixen Visceral Vixen
    
    ZING!
- Halloween_Jack
  
  I think that there’s probably a big overlap in the respective constituencies, given their common preoccupation with scoring.
echolocate chocolate

Yes yes yes a million times yes. The industry needs a kick up the arse and it’s not going to get it without a healthy critical culture surrounding it, and an audience that expects and demands critique.
hymenopterid

So there are the journalists and then there are the game companies, but there is also a third party involved: the gamers. I played Counter Strike Source a few moths ago for the first time in over a decade. It’s full of shitheads now. No socially mature individual wants to interact with these kids. The only way to deal with a brat is to log out. So whats happening is that the reasonable people just calmly walk away from the clusterfuck and find a more healthy culture, while the antisocial kids just keep getting more antisocial.

But if this is true then there is a silver lining. Eventually through self selection the culture will get so vile that few people will want to associate with it. The antisocial misogynistic shut-in gamer will become the rule, rather than the exception and the outside world will be reserved for people who actually care to treat others with respect and decency.

And there will be lots of single girls out there looking for guys who know how to behave.
- mccrum
  
  The only way to win is not to play?
  
  I disagree with this premise, I play TF2 because it’s fun and there has been a good sense of community on the servers I’ve taken pains to find and support. I think it’s healthier for society as a whole to find a solution to the problem instead of walking away from something in it’s entirety. The latter is how we get a public apathetic to voting “because their vote doesn’t matter.”
  
  Pony up for your own server to get the power to ban the jacknuts and pretty soon you’ll get decent gamers to join in with you to create a decent society that you can enjoy.
  - hymenopterid
    
    But in the end you still went somewhere else to be rid of the asshats. That’s all I’m saying when I talk about finding a more healthy culture. It doesn’t matter if its another game or if its some other outside activity. Leaving a clusterfuck is leaving a clusterfuck, and that’s exactly why COD is almost solely inhabited by antisocial kids, because reasonable people like yourself have decided to leave it in the dust.
    - mccrum
      
      No, COD was quite simply too realistic for me when I have family members using those weapons and fighting similar looking folks.
      
      But leaving specific servers that are CFs doesn’t mean I’m walking away from the game. I’m starting to solve the problem by opening up a private club, not becoming a teetotaler and impugning the entire culture.
      
      These antisocial kids can come and play as long as they play well with others, how else are they going to learn? Otherwise they sit in the same echo chamber all day which can’t be healthy for society (see News, Fox).
      - ocker3
        
        Exactly, carrot And stick. If there’s an exclusive club, people will try to get in, and if the cost is learning to clean up their vocab and focus on game-play, the better ones will do it.
        
        Rather than spurning an entire generation, show them a better way, make it attractive. It’s long been a draw to sit at the “Adult’s table”, and we all learned that we had to curb our childish antics while sitting at the table to participate in the discussion. Antics can of course resume once we leave the table.
      - hymenopterid
        
        But leaving specific servers that are CFs doesn’t mean I’m walking away from the game.
        
        My point is you’re walking away from a culture.
  - http://twitter.com/VisceralVixen Visceral Vixen
    
    I agree with what you’re saying but the companies aren’t going to go around banning people from servers when they could be making money out of them…
    - mccrum
      
      I’m not advocating for the companies to do so but advocating for private citizens to do something about it instead of walking away.
- SoItBegins
  
  I would hazard that it is unique to the community of each gamespace: that is, different gamespaces and servers are like different neighborhoods in a city. What you have described sounds like a very run-down and vandalized ‘neighborhood’.
jmzero

Gaming is growing up naturally and gradually – just like other mediums before it. That doesn’t mean it’ll ever be free of adolescent crap (movies and books certainly aren’t), but over time creators are producing better things, critics and reporters are building a language to better describe and categorize those things, and consumers are making better choices.

Sure there’s high profile crap – like there is in any media – but we’re also seeing good games getting elevated attention through good journalism and reasonably progressive distribution methods (like Steam or the iOS App Store).

I don’t think it’s really a time for hand wringing; gaming as a media is coming along really well. Sure we could use more Portals and less Duke Nuke’m Forevers – but it appears that’s the way the market is steering already.
- Gabriel Morgan
  
  “Gaming is growing up naturally and gradually”
  
  Err, no it isn’t and no it isn’t. Setting aside what ‘naturally’ means above, Pong was released 40 years ago. In comparison, motion pictures went from ‘Hey, there’s a guy moving on the wall!’ to ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’, ‘A Farewell to Arms’, ‘It Happened One Night’, ‘The Thin Man’, ‘Cleopatra’, and ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ in a slightly shorter period. The time for growing up, producing better work, finding a critical vocabulary, etc etc has long passed, and we are better served identifying the reasons why this isn’t happening in timely manner.
  - http://bannedsorcery.com/ Bryce Anderson
    
    What else came out the same year as Cleopatra?
    
    Atom Age Vampire
    Beach Party
    Blood Feast
    The Day Mars Invaded Earth
    The Nutty Professor
    Playgirls International
    Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man
    The Skydivers (described by MST3K as “Manos without the lucid plot.”)
    
    Need I go on? I think you may need to refer to Sturgeon’s Law. There are good games and good game reviews, but 90% of everything is crap. I don’t see evidence that cinema matured more quickly, only cherry-picking.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      Yeah, Cleopatra was pretty much the least entertaining film that came out that year. Skydivers is an existentialist masterpiece.
      
      Coffee?
      - retepslluerb
        
        You guys do realize that you are off by 30 years?
  - Beanolini
    
    Pong was released 40 years ago. In comparison, motion pictures went from ‘Hey, there’s a guy moving on the wall!’ to ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’, ‘A Farewell to Arms’, ‘It Happened One Night’, ‘The Thin Man’, ‘Cleopatra’, and ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ in a slightly shorter period.
    
    The oldest surviving film: 1888. ‘The Thin Man‘: 1934. That’s 46 years.
    
    So that should mean games now are as cinema was in 1928- ‘Steamboat Willie’ was released, and the talkies and technicolor are just getting going.
    
    Personally, I like to think that where games are now is more like the last days of the studio system.
Purplecat

There’s a point there, but I think the picture is less gloomy than is painted. There is actually some very good gaming journalism out there. I’ll just throw a couple of links out there:
http://www.bogost.com/blog/
http://extra-credits.net/

The problem with the journalism is that the best writers aren’t at the forefront of mainstream gaming culture. And the reason for that has a lot to do with the economic structure of gaiming journalism. Until recently, the publishing gateway was controlled by publishers who relied on ads from the very people they were supposed to be holding to account. Pressure from advertisers lead directly to lazy reublishing of press releases, reviewing vapourware as product, the adoption of the four point scale and other terrible habits. If you didn’t toe the line, you didn’t get published. Is it any wonder that in such an environment, we didn’t find quality writing about gaming?

But it would also be a huge mistake to write off the past of writing about gaming as purile, juvenile and unevolved. Perhaps it’s just nostalgia talking, and I can only judge by the publications that I read (it may have been different in other countries, natch), but I remember gaming journalism from the 90s to be creative, thoughtful, highly readable all while being highly amusing. It would be wrong to confuse a serious, dry tone with making serious points. Despite their light tone, the writing back then was critical of bad gameplay, looked down at the purile nonsene of its time (I’m looking at you, Larry.) and was passionate about its subject matter.
- http://twitter.com/VisceralVixen Visceral Vixen
  
  Also Bitcreature is good, plus the Borderhouse.
  
  Yeah I’m not going to provide the links – if you can see this comment you have the power of google, you lazy bums! :p
gnp

A major problem with game journalism is that if you write negative reviews of games, the game companies will stop sending you advance copies of their products. This is bad if a major source of funding for your website relies on visitor numbers and click-throughs. Or sometimes when you receive advance copies, there’s only a small window of time to play through the game and get your review online, if you want to beat other game reviewers to the punch. So a lot of game reviews score games between 7-to-10 out of 10 to stay on the good side of the game companies. That’s a huge additional hurdle to overcome, on top of having the reviews themselves improve their social maturity and ability to critique.
- Halloween_Jack
  
  That’s true, and it’s interesting to imagine the same thing happening with movie reviews, with studios giving previews only to critics who never gave a movie less than 3 1/2 stars; both the studios and the critics would be mocked mercilessly. (At least, by the general public. Contrast that with the spamming of the Rotten Tomatoes comments for The Dark Knight Rises due to a couple of negative reviews, even though it was later revealed that one of them was deliberately trolling the boards. I wonder how many of the people outraged at TDKR not getting a perfect score were gamers used to rating inflation in game reviews.)
Daemonworks

It’d help if the game companies didn’t basically hold a gun to the head of every reviewer. The developers need good reviews to drive sales. If a reviewer gives a bad review, the developers can, and often will, simply cut that reviewer off for future release, press kits, etc.
http://www.facebook.com/Muneraven Karen Sylte

I”m a long-time gamer and I am a 52 year old woman. My sister, who is 43, is also a gamer. My partner, who is also 52 and female, has been playing computer games pretty much since such things existed because she’s been playing around with computers since punch cards were in vogue. Think we just play cute games? I played so much Tecmo Superbowl that I wore out the cartridge. I played the archetype FPS game Wolfenstein 3D, Diablo 2, the Grand Theft Auto games . . . you get the picture.

Women like video games. We’d shell out our considerable expendable income for them if anyone bothered to create an environment that wasn’t so much like a junior high boy’s locker room. Yes, we like games. You know what we don’t much like? Grown men who haven’t learned to deal with their impotent rage and just spew it all over random strangers so they can feel manly for ten seconds.

But hey. Ignore over half of the population. The half that is getting more college degrees. LOL! Because girls don’t play games, right?
- SumAnon
  
  I’m a woman who started playing video games when I was 7. I cut my teeth on violent games like Mortal Kombat II, Resident Evil, and Turok. I played MUDs and text RPGs online before graphics were even an option. Until I got to college the majority of my money went to video games, far more than what I put into clothes or movies. $50+ video games (in the 90s!) were an investment I was willing to make, because they were so much fun.
  
  Sadly, I’ve lost a lot of interest in games, in no small part because of the misogyny I see so much of today. As a teenager, I used to go to arcades and theaters to play full out quarter arcade games. I played in tournaments in high school and college. And while I was more often than not the only female there, I never experience the sexism, hatred, and venom like whats been going on in the past 5 years.
  
  I don’t know what’s changed. I can’t imagine something like the trash that happened at Cross Assault going on in the arcades in my youth. It just wasn’t acceptable – to myself, to my friend, or to anyone else who showed up.
TheMudshark

I think the OUYA with it´s low threshold, low budget approach for developers has the potential to seriously mix up the gaming industry. Can´t wait for mine to get here.
Chentzilla

Leigh Alexander is not the first to write about this, and probably in no position to write about this.
This would be a good place to share our own examples of good game journalism, right? So here’s one Mike Lowell, who dissects the industry pretty well: http://www.learntocounter.com/

Highlights:
http://www.learntocounter.com/used-video-games-the-new-software-piracy-part-one/
http://www.learntocounter.com/top-ten-reasons-your-video-game-list-blows
http://www.learntocounter.com/i-play-for-fun-the-four-dumbest-words-in-video-games/
http://www.learntocounter.com/the-digital-death-of-video-game-art/
http://www.learntocounter.com/the-decline-of-console-video-games-is-upon-us/

On a lighter note (and from another author):
http://www.eegra.com/pages/show/title/13_09_2007_Babblefish__Sony_s_Sixaxis_Emmy/
- wizardru
  
  As a counter to claims about a lack of maturity in game reviewing, posting a link to a guy with “11 sexy girls with Star Wars tattoos you don’t have the rights to publish’ in the beginning of the article may be sending a different message than you intended.
  - Chentzilla
    
    You didn’t follow the “11 Girls” link, did you?
    Or do you mean that some people (not you) may get a wrong impression?
Unconscience

I got a subscription to Game Informer from GameStop the way many others have, by having it shoved down my soy hole by an aggressive cashier. But I have come to enjoy
the mag, and one of the main reasons I do is because of the decided lack of misogyny and pander. Actually, in the latest issue, I just finished an article on the upcoming new installment of ‘Army of Two,’ and that Visceral dropped all the frat-boy mouth-breather temperament from the franchise was celebrated and underscored.
apwnalypse

At least when people rail against sexism in movies, they usually have a more specific target, like action movies, comic book movies or Michael Bay, but the criticism of games is always directed at games in general because of 1 game. Never mind that the wii is the most popular console and it’s most popular titles feature little more violence then the occasional red shell, and little more sex than a giggling princess peach: games must all be sexist and purile because that hitman trailer exists. Well the fact of the matter is that beyond the sex scenes in god of war, you’d be hard pressed to find any women actually doing anything degrading in a game, because that would require cut scenes, and cut scenes are boring. Yes, the majority of shooters and other games targeted at adolescent males feature attractive women in skimpy outfits. Just like Catwoman in The Dark Knight Rises, or Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot. This widespread phenomenon didn’t stop Hollywood from making universally adored films or avoiding accusations of sexism. The difference presumably is that those actresses were real women who were paid millions and got the opportunity to go in front of the press and say “I’m a feminist, I wanted to do this, I find being sexy empowering,” the women in games are not real, but that has not stopped a segment of feminists from denying hte empowerment argument, and claiming that a group of pixels is being exploited, and rushing to their aid because it happens to be arranged in a shape not unlike their own.

And you know what, this outrage isn’t helping, because when some developers decided to take this criticism onboard and add a bit of depth and character development to Lara Croft, deflate the boobs and take on a real feminist issue (rape), they were blasted for disempowering her. Well, that should put a stop to any of that. When she was sexy and taking names it was adolescent: she was being exploited and objectified. When she was desexualised and vulnerable she was being patronised and made helpless. The message to developers is clear: you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t: when it comes to sexy women in video games the feminist lobby will adopt either the “empowering” or “demeaning” argument depending on what can justify outrage. The only thing you can be certain of is that if your industry or audience is male dominated, you will always be wrong.
DewiMorgan

Art critics: lowest form of life, fersure, whatever the medium.

We (gamer programmers: men and women of all races and creeds and sexualities) make the games we want to play.

We (gamers: from the same stock as the above) also buy the games we want to play.

Want to play another game?

If it exists, buy it instead. If not, write it.

Either way, whining about what OTHER game-devs “should” do, what OTHER game-players “should” buy and want to play, won’t help. But it’s a whole lot easier, and means the detractor can carry on playing the stuff that you, too, really want to play, but feel morally good about himself.

To me, the worst and most evil class of “games” are the social grind-games, the Zyngaville audience-is-the-product profit-min-maxing manipugames. Games designed by bean-counters instead of gamers. But, people enjoy them, so, whatever floats their boat.

Make the game you want to play, and enjoy yourself. Ignore the whiny detractors. If they really cared, they’d make their own game, and change the market to fit their whiny whims. They don’t really care, though – like all critics through history, they’re just attention-whoring: “look at me, I can claim racism or misogyny or other bigotry, and then I’ve got the moral high ground to rag on everyone else’s work”. The whole “games are aimed at teen boys” thing is just another tired trope they’ve been dragging out and flogging since the 80s.
- http://twitter.com/VisceralVixen Visceral Vixen
  
  Sure, let me just raise a six-figure sum, set up a studio, employ hundreds of people and spend years of my life developing games because I’m not allowed to raise valid concerns about how my race and gender are represented in a medium.
  
  You just repeated the argument that so many 13 year olds have used in comments sections of IGN & Kotaku that it’s a square on the “Sexism in videogames” bingo card.
  
  An art form can not be expected to mature without criticism, and before you use the whole “BUT, BUT FREEDOM OF SPEEEECH!!11!” argument, telling someone to shut up about their concerns and make their own comic/videogame/movie/etc kind of makes you a hypocrite…
  - DewiMorgan
    
    You don’t need a six figure sum to buy a different game. You need LESS money to not buy a game.
    
    Not only that, but as an indie dev, the idea that I am somehow ever even remotely connected with any six figure number outside my highscore table is frankly laughable.
    
    My point stands: artists make what they want to make, and if you have a problem with it, then yes, you have every right to whine about it.
    
    The artists, however, have every right to ignore you. Game devs are *used* to the users whining. You can *never*, as an artist, designer, or developer, make everyone happy. If you try, your work will be bland and soulless. Upsetting at least some people is pretty much a requirement to make anything with spirit.
    
    But please, prove me wrong. Making art is free. Learning to make it is free! There’s endless help out there. All you stand to lose is your frustration at the current crop.
    
    Or, remain a critic, and be forever wiped off the shoes of artists.
    - Antinous / Moderator
      
      Or, remain a critic, and be forever wiped off the shoes of artists.
      
      If you can’t tell the difference between political/social criticism and whining, you should let the adults continue the discussion without you.
psychedelicdonut

Are you trying to tell me some press corporations pander to their readership, perceived or real? If only gaming press corporations were more like television news corporations…bad example I guess. Maybe more similar to magazine corporations, oh wait, most of them do the same thing. Hmmmm, how about ad agencies, they seem to be on the up and up? I guess it might be a tad unfair to make such generalized statements about an entire industry, except the video game industry.