The Problem with Game Journalism

Been mulling on this for a while (as have many other folks in the industry). Most recently I was reminded of the issue when reading an article from Joystiq where the author asked some tough questions of Sony’s Phil Harrison and was allegedly rewarded for his efforts with a sarcastic comment along the lines of “well those were positive questions.” Joystiq’s comments on the statement are telling:

“This got me to thinking, does that mean Phil was expecting “nice” questions? Has the situation got so bad that executives are surprised when journalists ask questions that are hard to answer? If “the face of the PS3″ is surprised when a blogger asks him a question that goes beyond “uh, so what’s your game like?”, then you have a very large, and worrying indicator that something, somewhere is going wrong in terms of the relationship between the press and video game companies. If anything, Phil should have been surprised if I wasn’t asking tough questions!”

I have to agree. The overall quality of videogame journalism is very poor and frankly, depressing. I was going to write a piece about the reasons why, but coincidently Chris Buffa of Gamedaily.com just wrote a better article on the subject than I was planning and so I’ll just point you there. Go ahead and take a read. I’ll wait right here.

Back?

Excellent.

While I agree with Chris’ comments, I think there’s a larger overriding issue that drives all these problems: money. You know, root of all evil and all that. I’ve watched this industry grow over the last twenty years from something associated with eight year-old kids and geeks to becoming as mainstream as the movie and music industries. Games have become a big business, and unfortunately where there’s money to be made, there’s influence to be bought and sold.

Some of the biggest culprits are magazines and websites that survive on advertising dollars. Simply put, most of these guys have to walk a fine line between having the editorial control to write what they believe but also keep good relationships with the PR folks at publishers who give them access to previews and other magazine sale/page view driving material. To put it another way, imagine your favorite magazine was suddenly dropped from the advertising spend of a major publisher or two (pick whichever one(s) you want). Think about the number of ads you usually see in a magazine from those publishers. Now, take into account that the number of pages of non-advertising content in the magazine (articles, reviews, columns, etc.) is calculated as a ratio of the paying content (advertising). The more ads you get, the more content the magazine can afford to put in (and vice-versa). Finally, imagine the next few issues of your favorite magazine shrinking due to having less ads, hence less editorial content. You can guess what that might do over time to subscriber numbers, reader retention, etc. It’s often a bit of death-spiral, and obviously something these content providers want to avoid at all cost.

In short, a magazine or website’s financial health tends to pivot on two areas: subscriptions and advertising. The need to support one or both of these revenue generators makes pretty obvious the need to cozy up to publishing and development partners, accept press junkets, and work hard to retain early access to games so they can drive magazine sales and/or page views.

Another example? I find it telling that individual editors of major game journalism publishing corporations can have strongly held, well-documented, negative positions on the potential of something like the Playstation 3 (arguably having a tough time right now) in their blogs, yet those same beliefs simply don’t make it into print editions of their magazine. Why? Because the business simply cannot take the risk of losing a major funding source, and in this example it’s easy to believe Sony will be spending a lot of money on advertising in the coming months. (There was a recent example of this sort of behavior from a game editor’s blog, but I can’t remember where I saw it. It was a long, well-written discussion of some of the challenges the PS3 is facing. If any of you have it, I’d hugely appreciate getting a link as a comment to this article so I can add it here!)

So that’s the negative side of the picture. Luckily there are a few things you can do to get good information and believable opinions.

The first is simply to look at sites like gamerankings.com and mediacritic.co.uk. What’s nice about these sites is that they aggregate average review scores across many different sites and magazines. This also helps smooth out inconsistent or poor quality reviews. (For what it’s worth, my personal bar is around 8+ or around 80% for an average review score. While I’ll occasionally play games ranked below that line, it’ll mostly be out of curiosity about something new or interesting the game is doing. It’s unlikely I’ll ever finish it.)

Another thing to look for in these aggregation sites are the “outlier” review scores, or the scores that spike high or low from the average. Those can sometimes highlight an influenced review from what the general opinion of reviewers is, although it’s important to watch for a trend of these happening over time. The occasional game having review scores spread wider than average doesn’t necessarily point to nefarious dealings. Take Prey, for example. Review scores are a little wide on this one (example is GameSpot giving it a 7.5/10 and IGN giving it 9/10). You need to read the reviews for additional context to see that GameSpot just didn’t like some of the game mechanics, especially the way the game handles death. In their opinion, that made the game too easy and it negatively impacted the score.

Another way to get good, reasoned opinions on games is to find independent websites with a strong editorial ethic. Here are a few sites (or specific writers) that I rely on for this sort of content:

• Penny Arcade – it’s impossible to say too many good things about Gabe and Tycho (and the rest of their crew). I’ve had conversations with them in the past about their attitudes to accepting advertising. Simply put, these guys turn away free money because they don’t believe in the product that some people would like to promote on their site. Most importantly, the whole crew are gamers, and when they speak to you it really is just as though it’s one of your gaming friends giving you their honest opinion. (Much to our chagrin at times.) They also play a huge role in keeping this industry honest – believe me, a lot more than you might expect.
• Evil Avatar – sort of a combination of Slashdot and Digg, but for gamers. I’ve found that the Evil Avatar editors tend to be pretty fair about what they post on their front page, and just as important, readers tend to have reasonably thoughtful comments. You’ll still see fanboy wars, but they’re usually damped down pretty quickly. Also appreciated is that a lot of industry insiders frequent the boards which tends to drive more insightful discussion (albeit with a lot of passion).
• GameSpot – especially Executive Editor Greg Kasavin’s reviews. Gamespot’s news reporting tends to be slightly more objective than some of the other large sites, but they do fall prey to the PR hype machines almost as much as the rest. (Sony’s infamous PS3 video renders from E3 2005 are a great example.) However, GameSpot does have a few excellent writers, Greg Kasavin being one of the best. He scores fairly, and it’s obvious from the history of his reviews that he’s played the games enough to write about them intelligently. It doesn’t hurt that he can string a decent sentence together, as well.
• IGN – specifically Douglass Perry’s reviews. I know a bunch of you are rubbing your eyes in amazement as we speak with my inclusion of IGN. Yes, the site is notorious for rumor-mongering and just bad writing overall, but I have to point out one of the exceptions with Doug. Just as with Greg Kasavin above, Doug’s writing is definitely far above par, and more importantly, his reviews are tightly written and don’t wander off into the strange padded verboseness you often see from other writers on the site. A good example of his writing can be found in his Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle-earth II review for Xbox 360. It’s three pages long, but hits all the major areas you care to know about, including the key question of how a RTS controls have made the transition to console.

Please note there are other fine writers and websites out there. My inclusion of those above is only because they’ve proved reliable over time, and I feel comfortable recommending them to you. If you found this useful, please let me know and I’d be happy to update the list with other well-written individuals and sites as we come across them. Any suggestions?

[Edit: clarified that it's impossible to say too many good things about Penny Arcade. Thanks to Jason Cross!]

[Edit: digg this article if you found it interesting!]

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3. Top 100 Games of All Time…
4. Fun Times: Economics of Game Development and Publishing
5. Rose-colored Glasses