Comments on Hit Self-Destruct: You're Not A Journalist

Thanks Korey! I'm not a regular reader of Ben Frit...

2008-06-30T06:55:00.000+12:00

Thanks Korey! I'm not a regular reader of Ben Fritz's blog, but yeah, every time someone's linked me there I've appreciated what he's had to say. The Colonization post really seems like an out-of-nowhere overreaction.

Great post, Duncan. I've really enjoyed reading y...

2008-06-29T23:51:00.000+12:00

Great post, Duncan. I've really enjoyed reading your blog. I'm still amazed at Internet users' ability to attack, attack, attack. Personally, I don't agree with everything Ben says at Variety, but I often see where he's coming from. Surprisingly to me, I felt like I really understood what he meant about Colonization, since I had been thinking something similar about the Civ games.

It's already been said, but being a paid journalist has little to do with the quality of your writing or ideas. Oh, and that quote you highlighted is everything I dislike about anonymous Internet commenting.

Keep up the great writing. I look forward to your next post.

Yeah, completely agreed, and you make a really goo...

2008-06-29T06:46:00.000+12:00

Yeah, completely agreed, and you make a really good point about game journalism stagnation.

It's ironic given that point about "natural evolution" that I'm trying to resist a natural language shift here with the word "professional". Regardless, I think that redefining it as a measure of quality is a particularly counterproductive and demeaning change. Amateurs, like anyone else, can of course produce fantastic game writing but it's still a binary state. You're an amateur or you're not and that affects the quality of your writing about as much as your gender or your ethnicity or your sexuality. There's nothing wrong with being an amateur so how did the term get so pejorative? The world allows for so much more gradation than "good" and "bad".

This pretty much boils down to the grand ol' discu...

2008-06-29T03:00:00.000+12:00

This pretty much boils down to the grand ol' discussion of the internets - whether the internet is responsible for something called The Age of the Amateur. Now everyone can write a blog. Now everyone can make music and find an outlet for it. Now everyone can make an indie game and sell it.

A significant part of the professional classes react by saying how terrible this is, how they're losing their 'gatekeeper' function directing the huddled masses to the 'good stuff'.

This ofcourse completely ignores the idea that the whole 'gatekeeper' thing was/is controlled by huge corporations in it for the big bags of moneys and that this whole notion was desperately in need for an overhaul anyway. It also doesn't acknowledge that people are smart enough to recognise quality for themselves.

I think you're right in your assumption that when you get paid to do something, you can call yourself a professional - but it's still just a title, it says very little about the quality of what is produced (sadly, really).

Games journalism seems to be almost hysterically self-conscious - there is no natural evolution, everyone is fretting about not just writing "consumer guides" but instantly being the "Lester Bangs of videogame journalism", which is a pretty hard thing to do anyway when the games industry itself is still mostly an entertainment industry at the moment. This is where those little review explosions like BioShock, GTAIV and MGS4 come from, I'm guessing.

Oh, wow, this has nothing to do with anything, and...

2008-06-28T19:06:00.000+12:00

Oh, wow, this has nothing to do with anything, and I don't want to be the blogger sneering at the rest of the internet but I want to highlight this comment from Ben Fritz's blog:

"When people start whining about racism, that is when I tune them out. You removed any doubt anyone might have had that you were clueless."

Fantastic!

I think the internet has soundly disproven the not...

2008-06-28T19:05:00.000+12:00

I think the internet has soundly disproven the notion that the journalism/writing industries were ever meritocracies. I'd say that in the internet age it's harder to find good journalism but there's more of it to find. That's based somewhat on signal-to-noise ratios but also on the hyper-competitive, globalisation dynamics that tore apart the TV media in the nineties.

I'm fascinated by how the internet will affect people's careers. Used to be that the first time someone famous appeared in the public eye, it'd be when they starred in a movie or having a novel published or playing for a baseball team. You know what I mean? If you saw DeNiro in the Godfather in 1974 you couldn't google him and find his facebook and his blog that he'd been writing for ten years. Because the internet has such a low barrier to entry, it's exposed more people to a public audience than ever before. You can really track the course of their lives.

It's impossible for me to understand what these wo...

2008-06-28T13:34:00.000+12:00

It's impossible for me to understand what these words mean anymore. Blogger, journo, enthusiast, amateur, professional. They honestly have no real significance to me. High traffic sites with paid professionals produce writing that barely reaches the elementary level. Bloggers nobody has heard of write sophisticated analytical essays that challenge my perceptions. And vice versa.

Is the internet the great field leveler everybody said it would be? I have no idea, but it does seem to me one useful benefit of all this is a clear imperative to think for yourself. Good writing about games is out there, and it's not terribly hard to find. The same can be said about the bad stuff.

Great piece, Duncan. Thanks.