Gaming Journalism Hurts the Industry Again. Also, It's Wednesday.

[cmlancas]

It is definitely internet meme time. We went from an artfag circlejerk to the Book of Grunk. Therefore:




Anyway, no Grunk. Every dev is trying to create the next big thing. Trying to trivialize their endeavors to "systems this and systems that" is idiotic.

By the way, Ninty is on record stating that they will not support an MMO that needs patches on any console. Also, Blizzard currently has the best-selling MMO on the market. I'm pretty sure they are writing the how-to guide on MMORPGs right now.

Grunk, I have a hard time thinking that you can read anything over a fifth grade level -- how are you reading Dev posts? ><

[Ironwood]

Who's Schlid ?

[schild]

My evil twin. He's a Squid.

[Yegolev]

HEY, I just got back from an extended vacation in Bizzaro World.  What MOG did Lord British design?

My first thought about Schlid was: Schlid's Malt Liquor.

[Nonentity]

My evil twin. He's a Squid.

Hm.



(<3 my schildy)

[Ironwood]

Trouble is, your Evil Goatee just looks like a fanny.

[Xerapis]

Um...I do actually know what that means over there, but in the United Slaves of Bush, fanny means ass.  FYI.

[cmlancas]

Intranet embarassment to the extreme!


Sorry :/ It was my first chart, I had to mess it up somehow. And Yegolev, hi5 on the recommendation of Paint.net. It is awesome.

[Ironwood]

Um...I do actually know what that means over there, but in the United Slaves of Bush, fanny means ass.  FYI.

I'm well aware.

[Xerapis]

meep~!

[cmlancas]

EVIL!

I think in every post that I have ever mentioned schild, I spelled it schlid. I suck.

[Yegolev]

The funny part is that the real-life schild has the evil-twin goatee.  I assume the good twin was eaten long ago.

[Nonentity]

The funny part is that the real-life schild has the evil-twin goatee.  I assume the good twin was eaten long ago.

The good twin loves a good 5 man dungeon in World of Warcraft, and can pass the hours away with a good bout of level grinding. He hates cigarettes and alcohol, and keeps his house free and clean of games, not wanting other people to know of his shameful hobby.

[MournelitheCalix]

Fuck the audience. You can be both.

Schild, I agree with your premise, it is possible to do both credibly.  A person's journalistic integrity isn't necessarily compromised if he/she does consulting work for the company involved.  However, as a customer who has been burned by the video games industry multiple times  (including the very same company whose idea you are advocating) I have to tell you I would not only be suspicious of any review coming from a journalist who was a consultant but also I would look for journalistic outlets whose journalists were on record as not engaging in the relationships that you are advocating. 

The reason is very simple.  While you may or may not allow such a relationship to affect your reporting, as a consumer I am unwilling to take that chance.  The addition of having the title of "paid consultant" to your job history simply raises to many credibility issues in my mind. 

You don't review any game you helped with.

Once again. Games sell themselves. Reviews can sell games sure, whatever, fine. But good games sell. I have an interest in good games more than telling you about the bad ones.

Journalists recusing themselves, would be a better solution in my mind.  If the journalists recused themselves of reviewing any game they were a consultant upon, then there would be no problem just so long as their is transparency in regards to the person's involvement.  I must however disagree with your premise though that great games sell themselves.  While this is true most of the time, I would refer you to the old Interplay game, Planescape: Torment as an example of how great games are sometimes not great sellers.  Also if just being a great game was all that was needed, then why exactly does just about every gaming company I can think of engages in PR campaigns prior to their product's release?  I think the reason is relatively simple, the reason is there are a large number of gamers out there who don't follow the industry very closely, who have money, and who look to journalists to expose them to games that they may just want to purchase.

I believe it is a large number because in all honesty, I am one of those people who sometimes look to other sources before purchasing.  Whether its word of mouth, seeing a review on either TV, the internet, or in print; it isn't just quality that will cause me to make the decision to purchase a game.  You can have the best and most fun game in creation, but if I don't know about it I am still not going to purchase it.  An example of this that comes directly to mind is the game G.U.N..   I first saw G.U.N. in my local blockbuster and it looked cool so I picked it up.  It was a western based game.  I was intrigued, I had never played a western based game.  It looked like good graphics to, it looked like quality.  I still however did not purchase it.

Even though I had liked what I saw I am very cautious.  I have been burned way to many times in the industry with blind purchases.  Pools of Radiance: Return to the Ruins of Myth Drannor comes to mind.   I waited on purchasing the game until I saw a review of it I believe on the G4 channel.  That review was a piece of journalism and it was the deciding factor in getting me to purchase the game.  I purchased the game after seeing the review, I purchased it because I was satisfied that I was going to get quality back.  However had I in any way saw the review from a journalist that I knew to be tainted (as in a paid consultant), I more than likely would not have bought the game at all and dismissed the review as biased.

I have taken a long time to say simply this.  I agree with you, for some people money can not cause them to abandon their integrity as journalists.  Unfortunately as a consumer, I don't know if these are the corruptible journalists or not.  As such anyone who took this money and did a review would not be considered by myself to be a legitimate journalist, simply because I couldn't trust the information they were giving me.

My .02$ for all its worth.

[lamaros]

All I've learnt from this thread is that you can make up for any deficiencies in argument by passing said argument off as a 'rant'... while still maintaining that said argument is valid, sound, etc.

Right?

Or is it just a really bad job application... to everyone...

[tazelbain]

Right?

Well you could, but the quality rants are passionate, funny *and* correct.

[lamaros]

Right?

Well you could, but the quality rants are passionate, funny *and* correct.

Ah, the fabled Chimera.

[tazelbain]

More like John Stewart rare.

[always_black]

I object to being called an art fag. I've never stroked a beard in my life.

[Litigator]

I think this kind of business would be a good idea, if the game developers actually wanted the feedback. However, I doubt their motives. I think they were looking for a way to pass a bribe to website editors who will be publishing the reviews for their games. I think it was very obvious, and I think the editors were right to take umbrage at it. I believe, as you do, that the independence of game websites is inherently compromised by the fact that they require pre-release access to games and therefore are beholden to the sources. But if this arrangement colors the pre-release coverage of games, the sites have held firm on the independence of the reviews. All questions about the judgment, taste or qualifications of the reviewers aside, and with a necessary caveat that the star ratings or x out of 10 ratings are weighted, the editors are very clear about which games they choose to recommend and which they do not, and I don't believe relationships or economic pressures impact that choice.

When game developers start handing cash to reviewers, it changes the picture.

And the game developers don't have to pay for this kind of feedback, which is why there aren't consultants in this area. Devs post a web forum and their players will tell them all this shit for free. If the developers of any of these games pick out a couple of outstanding guild leaders and forum posters from other games and get them in the beta, these people will tell them the same stuff that you or the game reviewers will tell them, and it won't cost a dime.

[Litigator]

I think that there can be decent discussion about technique.  How someone uses a camera.  How someone uses a paint brush.  However, my experience has been that when these critical discussions are put to the task of determing whether something is entertaining they end up missing the boat. 

The red part is way different than the orange part. Siskel and Ebert or the New York Times do the orange part. Scholars do the first part. Trying to compare the two is much like comparing apples to oranges (hooray for color!). Now, if you have a qualm about the second part, I'm with you. My tastes, especially in movies, are almost completely contrary to every 'movie critic' in the media. However, when it comes to analyzing textual usage of 'pooling of consciousness' or 'stream of consciousness' or 'insert literary technique here,' I can agree with any of the arguments. Literary criticism, in my opinion, is something to further your thought on a certain piece. It is almost like the "editor's cut" of a particular piece of literature. Maybe you disagree -- and that's fine -- but it is much farther from self-fulfilling circle-jerking (which you have strayed from in your last post).

Edit: Colors are hard.

Double Edit: To reinforce my point, I just got done watching Pan's Labyrinth on On Demand -- really didn't live up to the hype. It was okay, but I thought it was going to be more than what was there -- a lot like 300.

Disagree. I think Ebert and the more prominent critics like AO Scott at the times are as capable and adept at generating scholarly analysis as any of the professors writing analyses on the New Wave. The difference is that their job is to analyze a movie the day it comes out. Its place in the ouvre of the director is still in flux. The cultural significance of the movie is unclear because nobody has seen it. These critics put the film in the context of their knowledge of the artists producing the work and the context of the films preceding it and influencing it, and generate very quickly the narrative that that film fits into. This leads to mistakes; when you show someone something new and unexpected, they may react negatively, even if they might have appreciated what they were seeing on more considered analysis, and most critics will identify their own mistakes and the reviews they wish they could undo. (I realize Ebert's comments on games as art make him persona non grata among developers).

The primary difference is that scholarly criticism ordinarily takes place with the benefit of more hindsight and the wider view that provides on the significance of the movie to the careers of the people who made it and the greater themes that run through their work, and the place of the film in the time and social reality from which it emerged.

To say that a scholarly critic is of a higher order than a newspaper critic is similar to saying that a historian who publishes on the administration 20 years previous is of a higher order than a newspaper correspondent who covered the events as they were unfolding.

[cmlancas]

I wasn't really focusing on movies. I really don't know that much about the criticism that comes from them. I do, however, know quite a bit about literary criticism, and your argument for literature holds no water at all.


Also, I'd like to think of criticism more like a really long winded forum thread where the posts are eight pages long. A professor explained the idea of "the conversational discussion nature" of critical ideas this way and it really helped me in my endeavors.

[CmdrSlack]

I wasn't really focusing on movies. I really don't know that much about the criticism that comes from them. I do, however, know quite a bit about literary criticism, and your argument for literature holds no water at all.


Also, I'd like to think of criticism more like a really long winded forum thread where the posts are eight pages long. A professor explained the idea of "the conversational discussion nature" of critical ideas this way and it really helped me in my endeavors.

That would almost make sense since most scholarly lit crit is utter bullshit that follows formulaic readings of texts to come to a "deeper meaning" that is preordained by the formulaic method of reading. See also *ist crit (feminist, marxist, etc.).

Hint: there is no deeper meaning to find when you come to it with a biased reading style. For fuck's sake, if I could get away with applying Hegel's master-slave ideas to Paradise Lost, then most lit crit is BS.   

[cmlancas]

There are a few scholars who get published with very sparse content on a new book.


"First!"

[Lindorn]

but the masses have spoken with their wallets and their time so that's what we are stuck with.

The masses of gamers are much like the masses of......well anything really.  They aren't going to go research gaming theory and take their sweet time in the thinker position pondering cybersociology and how games need to evolve.  These people want to play good games, and quite frankly you can only bag on them so much for not being educated....as I'm sure it isn't one of their primary goals to be so in regard to games.

I think the blame is plenty large enough to be spread across the board.  Gamers have spoken with their wallets, but until they are offered an alternative scenario (for a fucking change) how can we expect them to even know what the possibilities are?  That is why it's great that there is a whirwhind of new content relating to forward thinking in this department.  These people are slowly getting educated and that's the best we can hope for.

I keep quoting this guy (Robert A. Rice) everywhere I post but frankly the discussion keeps coming up.

If you go to market every day and everyone there is selling rotten eggs, then you are going to buy rotten eggs.  After all you've grown up living near this market and buying these eggs....until someone offers you a fresh one....how the hell are you even going to know fresh eggs exist?  The truth is our online games are rotten.....we've left the same templates out on the shelf for the last decade now and we are utterly failing to keep up with the evolution of gaming.

I think someone with money will have to grow a pair and make everyone realize that "this" was what they wanted all along.  Sadly I think they might just have to see it to realize it, which really takes us back to where we started.

[cmlancas]

Disagree. People don't make games because they want them to be unfun; everyone is trying to make the "fresh egg."

So far only a few developers have succeeded.

[Lindorn]

Disagree. People don't make games because they want them to be unfun; everyone is trying to make the "fresh egg."

So far only a few developers have succeeded.

You missed my point entirely.  Nowhere did I even insinuate that people are purposely making crappy games.  However there are preconceived notions about how a game "should" be built and those my friend would be the rotten eggs I am referring to.  I don't blame the seller any more than the buyer.  On the contrary everyone shares the blame.

This site is chalked full of criticisms and claims that "most developers don't know their ass from a hole in the ground" so this line of thinking shouldn't be unfamiliar.

[WindupAtheist]

You girls just need to accept that 90% of games are shit and always will be, just like 90% of books and movies and everything else are shit.

[cmlancas]

You missed my point entirely.  Nowhere did I even insinuate that people are purposely making crappy games.  However there are preconceived notions about how a game "should" be built and those my friend would be the rotten eggs I am referring to.  I don't blame the seller any more than the buyer.  On the contrary everyone shares the blame.

This site is chalked full of criticisms and claims that "most developers don't know their ass from a hole in the ground" so this line of thinking shouldn't be unfamiliar.

I guess I need to spell it out for you. Plenty of games are trying to "make it new." I'd cite PotBS, EvE, Fury, Hellgate: London and possibly AoC as trying to "make it new." These games are trying to be more than what came before them. There are also games that are following the mold, rather than break it. I'd cite LOTRO, Mythos, WAR, and pretty much every other DIKU clone out there in this category. I'll concede that some of these games I listed have a few ideas that are new -- Monster Play being one of them -- but overall they are just clones.

Is that better?

I'd also contend that quite a few people here don't hold the notion that devs don't know what they are doing. Rather, I think people are scattered between opinions of project design sucking, QA sucking, horrid interface design and a few other qualms. To come out and say that this site claims that devs don't know their ass from a hole in the ground is generally pretty insulting. I certainly don't think that.

[Murgos]

This site is chalked full of criticisms and claims that "most developers don't know their ass from a hole in the ground" so this line of thinking shouldn't be unfamiliar.

Nope, generally we question specific decisions but I think every regular poster will agree that running a 5 year project with a budget in the 10's of millions and the pressures from the fans and from the money and your own/teams instincts is HARD.

Making MMO's is complicated, that's why most of them suck.  Occasionally it's possible to point the finger at one person specifically who 'doesn't get it' but even then there will be debate about what specifically it was that he/she screwed up.

[Arrrgh]

You girls just need to accept that 90% of games are shit and always will be, just like 90% of books and movies and everything else are shit.

They don't want 60 bucks for a book or a DVD.

[Murgos]

You girls just need to accept that 90% of games are shit and always will be, just like 90% of books and movies and everything else are shit.

They don't want 60 bucks for a book or a DVD.

Plus 15-20 bucks a month...

[Lindorn]

I guess I need to spell it out for you.

Hey man I'm going to respectfully ask that you stray away from outright patronization in the future with me.  I am here just as much for the enlightening discussion as you are, and I personally could do without the smartass remarks.  I think you have some great things to say, so let's just leave it at that and keep it clean please.

When I talk about lack of innovation I am talking about the mainstream.  I think examples like Eve Online, PotBS, and Shadowbane are among some of the best virtual world concepts I've ever encountered, however these games (minus PotBS) until recently have received little attention.  I think it speaks of the conceptual design that Eve is finally getting the recognition it deserves after 4 years on a rocky road.  Someone would be hard pressed to argue though that the amount of innovation even compares to the vast amount of high budget "repeats" we are all seeing pop up one after another.  The truth is that the spotlight of mainstream attention from gamers and developers alike has traditionally failed to fall upon games like Eve because they detract from the traditional idea of what an MMORPG can and should be.

I find this to be a travesty of course, but my point is that the 800lb gorilla isn't moving anytime soon and I'm not just talking about World of Warcraft.  I am speaking of this entrenched but outdated ideology that see us experiencing the same single player game over and over again in our MMORPG's.

As for my comment regarding developers "not knowing their ass from a hole in the ground" that was pulled right off of the front page of this website, and I didn't use it to back up my own opinion.  I was simply stating that this ideology should not be unfamiliar to anyone on this site as it is not just mentioned, but trumpeted around here at times.  This site wouldn't have hundreds of active users coming by per day if it didn't offer diverse and enlightening discussion.....hell that's why I'm here.

[cmlancas]

To be fair, that was Schild's rant. I'm under the impression that he generally gives devs the benefit of the doubt.

I'd be unbelievably  if EvE stayed as popular as it is now for a lengthy period of time simply because of the enormous barrier of entry that goes with 0.0. The first threads I check when I log in are related to EvE. EvE drama is unparalleled on any network television show. I'd play if I could go spam BoB for fun -- I'm not all about SA/Goons, but Endie just makes it seem like so much fun!

My opinion starts here: As far as innovation, I think that there will come a time where a game takes the fun aspects of multiple games and amalgamates them. You like the hands-off approach to EvE? Check. You like the ease of entry in WoW? Check. You like the fun gameplay of DotA PvP? Check. You like the character models of X game? Check. (Insert whatever idea you like here)? Check.  However, there is something to be said about why people still pay for the same worn out MMOG.

Quite a few people like vanilla and chocolate ice cream, ya know? Breyers, Edy's, Publix Premium? Whatever. Just give me vanilla and I'm a happy camper.

Forgive me for the attitude, I guess -- I saw your first post. But if you're going to hang out here for awhile, you have to know that there are many posters that are ruthless. I'm a speck of space dust compared to the likes of angry.bob.

[hal]

You have to realise that you can do any thing you want in eve while skilling up. As in playing wow or whatever. If you want to be there you can get there. The first job in a PVP corp is a tackler. (snarer) and you can be there in a week. And there allwas looking for more. The game is very accessable from that angle. Try to carebear it, be a miner or industrialist and it takes years.