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Penny Arcade - Comic - Parabolic
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - Parabolic
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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Are there really any standards, whatsoever?
(yes, this is where you all chime in about the state of print and/or broadcast media. but they at least pretend/aspire/pay lip service to the notion. does "games journalism" even make that hollow effort?)
Imagine someone being paid to sift through your household garbage and, from that evidence, compile a profile of your purchasing habits to be sold to marketers. And they get paid double if they find certain products or can get you on certain lists, which no one ever would consider an incentive to falsify/alter/salt the results.
A reporter's duty is to the consumer. The consumer wants information. The reporter delivers the information they get. They are not friends with the corporation. The consumer isn't friends with the corporation.
That's the problematic part. Ideally yes, a reporter's duty would be to give the consumer what they want. In practice, though, a reporter answers to popularity rather than truth - An unexpected headline sells better than a predictable one, and it may soon dawn on even the most honest reporter that 'Bethesda makes good open-world game' isn't going to move many copies, or drive many page views. The incentive is to turn heads and sell more.
Mind you, I agree with your point that the publishers etc. are likewise benefiting (possibly short-term) from making false promises or concealing flaws, but finding a developer who truly wants to make a great game seems infinitely easier than finding a game 'journalist' with integrity.
And unavoidably, though often deliberately, adds bias/slant/context, based upon their idea of what else the consumer wants. Some consumers want to laugh. Others want to feel that they're hearing a secret, something that someone else (like the source) doesn't want them to know. Some want a reason to buy a product they're already disposed to, or a reason not to buy one they're uncertain about. Some want a sound bite, others detailed analysis. And so on, and so on.
And if the reporter does a good job in guessing what the consumer wants to hear, and presents the information in that particular form and context and slant, they make more money, from satisfying the consumer's confirmation bias and increasing the probability that the consumer will continue to visit their site, read their magazine, stay on the page and read the next article, etc.
IMHO there is a lot more to this than Kotaku's selfish whining about how all they did was report news. Kotaku has been the epicenter of some of the most atrocious reporting ever done in video games, and regularly, if not making up rumors out of thin air, distorts facts to inspire rage. Their bread and butter is baseless accusations.
I bet a lot of people in this very thread still believe Brad Wardel sexually harasses employees thanks to Kotaku, despite his court case being thrown out with prejudice, the judge demanding the accuser write an apology, and nearly every news outlet which covered the story (except Kotaku) retracting their coverage once the court documents were made available.
It may be possible that this really is all about Kotaku breaking embargo. But to ignore the rest of Kotaku's blatant malfeasance and portray them as the victim here requires some incredible blinders.
I realized halfway through my post I stopped responding to you, and started just venting my undisguised hatred of Kotaku. So yeah.
I really hate Kotaku.
South Park is about horrible online "news" sites with all their click-bait, sensationalized headlines, ads, links to celebrity gossip nonsense articles, slideshows, and other crap.
Games "journalism" suffers from all those same things.
It's really sad when a "news post" on a site is reporting on hearsay and gossip that popped up on Reddit. But that shit is happening all the time now.
Developers are not innocent in all this either. Remember back when new info straight from the source was called a preview? Now whenever anything new comes out it's a "leak." But leaks are intentional these days, which means they aren't really leaks. Which means we are being lied to and manipulated.
And what the hell is up with adding un-released content for games into patches and then feigning surprise when the fans data-mine it. That's all a game at this point too. Devs are intentionally putting game previews of future content into patches, because they know full well that enterprising fans are data-mining for un-released content. It's all a big deceitful game.
There's no honesty anymore.
Expecting journalists not to report negative things is dumb. Expecting companies to enable reporting negative things is also dumb. There is no noble side here. There is just the endless war between haves and wants, and the people in between who profit from being middlemen. And the consumers, I guess, who feel pressured to be drafted onto "a side".
That's the point. No one's being cast in a bad light here. The point is that it's the 21st century and if you don't understand the consumer/journalist/corporate relationship by now you're just kidding yourself and when you get stung it's your own damn fault for being a goose.
Wait, not shocked at all.
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But fuck it, the PA guys just only a few months ago dusted off the old "you just gave X game I liked a bad review because you want attention", so I'm not shocked this is their opinion on things.
Can't wait till a video gets released of Gabe and Tycho wearing Pip Boys and complaining about Jeff Gerstmann and we can merge two dumb situations into one.
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There is something to be said for the fact that the more monolithic games media outlets (an outgrowth of traditional media) are rarely the center of such scandal, while it is the ones that value the "individual voice of the reporter" more (an outgrowth of blogs) that attract such ignominy.
Perhaps it is time that gamers demand that games media be held to higher standards, and to show all those covens of toxic, individualistic blowhards the door.
It's about ethics in games journalism.
Case in point - got a buddy who just got left by his wife for another dude. Both of her parents cheated on each other prior to their divorce when she was a kid, and her older sister cheated on two husbands, plus wrecked another marriage by being "the other woman." And his wife in fact cheated on her boyfriend in high school, then later cheated on another boyfriend in college prior to meeting him....but she *swore* she was done with that kind of behavior when they started talking marriage. Two years into their marriage, she slept with her boss at work, and after a few months of this decided to jump ship to him. My buddy had the nerve to be shocked at this turn of events. He really didn't see it coming, or so he says. The rest of us in our circle of friends figured she had it from both ends (grew up around cheaters, plus was a cheater herself, so nature and nurture both pointed the same way), and told him it was a terrible idea to marry her.
If there is a better living representation of the monk (or frog, or whatever version of the parable you like) in real life, I have not seen it yet :-/
That presupposes that, much like the scorpion, people who work in games media are unable to rise above their base animal instincts and behave in a decent manner to the people who have put their trust in them. And while this may be, for the most part, true at sites like Kotaku, there are so many counterexamples that I don't see why this should be assumed to be the "natural order".
No one watches The Daily Show and expects CNN.
That's a weak deflection. You can still have serious, well-researched reportage geared towards enthusiasts that doesn't have to devolve down to TMZ/Gawker levels of smut-peddling, click-baiting social-agenda-pushing in a race to the bottom. I don't watch The Daily Show and expect CNN, but I sure as hell don't expect the Weekly World News.
Honestly I'd be satisfied if Kotaku just stopped making shit up, and calling everyone and everything sexist/racist/transphobic. I mean, wasn't it Kotaku that ran with the bullshit Reddit rumor about you only being able to play a male character in Fallout 4? Using it as an opportunity to rant about how sexist Bethesda is, was, and always will be?
Yeah, that's who I'd want to get buddy-buddy with for news coverage.
Edit: I gotta do my research before I go off all half cocked. Apparently Kotaku actually came out against that rumor. For once.
I still hate them.
This seems like a classic quid pro quo (with unfortunate effect on everybody's integrity).
The only problem would be if said video game gossip blog had convinced itself that it was actually doing something honest and pure under this framework, stopped offering controlled exposure, and then publicly complained about losing the access.
Seems like if the gossip blog is going to complain about the quo expected for the quid in the name of JOURNALISM, the honest response would be to refuse preferential access from any company going forward. I'll guess that that happened, and not some self-serving article about brave journalism in the face of an oppressive system.
The gaming press DO lie, but in favor of the developers, not against them.
Case in point: dragon age 2, any recent bethesda game, asscreed and so on.
I think this comic sums it up pretty nicely :P
yeah people lie about liking things you don't. They're all against you.
This comic is a gross misinterpretation of what's actually happening. It's sad to see so many comics churned out lately that must completely re-invent a situation so that Gabe and Tycho can make fun of an imaginary topic.
EDIT: And given A. the former existence of the PA Report and B. the many work for hire jobs G&T have done for Ubisoft and Bethesda, the whole thing comes off skeezy in multiple ways.
Expressing a positive opinion of a game you have a negative opinion of is not the same as "lying."
There are really three parties to this and the bigest problem involves the third party not represented in the comic.
1) Developers/Publishers: Attempt to make video games and sell for profit.
2) Journalists: Attempt to seek out truth and expose malfeasance for profit.
3) Consumers: Want to buy Video Games, but are wary of poor quality or abusive industry practices.
So we have a situation where the Developers who want to sell their games to the consumer, but the Journalists want to sell writings about the Developers to the consumers. However since Consumers are risk adverse any negative reporting by the Journalists can adversely impact the sales by the Developers, and because Consumers are more likely to pay attention to negative news articles than positive ones tension is created between the Developers (who have an incentive to keep their games looking good) and Journalists (who are incentivised to make the games look bad).
Complicating matters is that the average Consumer has no concept of the timelines involved or iterations necessary to create something as complex as a video game. So, any piece of seemingly bad news can poison the Developers well (even if its from a standard early build), and since that kind of news brings viewers the Journalists are subsequently compensated.
This creates a negative feedback spiral as mistrust builds on both sides, and leads to games and shady practices. The only logical and complete resolution to this is: Kill all Consumers.
QED
That said, both Kotaku/Gawker are pretty shitty, and certainly Zenimax/Bethesda have done some shitty stuff too (re: prey 2 and Human Head, later their acquisition of Arkane) so it's more two scorpions stinging each other. Kotaku really has no right to cry about this, it was a pretty logical outcome for their previous stories. I'm sure on the Bethesda side this was a pretty simple assessment of "Do we need them? No? Send an all hands email telling people not to talk to them." and that was that.
This 100%. I think the comic is a response more to the people saying Bethesda/Ubisoft should un-blacklist Kotaku, as though this will prevent Koaktu from continuing to post leaks about their products.
Kotaku has every right to do so of course, but these companies also have every right to not like that and stop offering Kotaku free stuff.
The only thing that developers can really offer the press, or should be offering is access- interviews with staff and/or preview builds which of course are going to be incredibly controlled. The press has to realize this and walk a fine line in reporting on what they see, versus just being another part of the game industry PR mechanism. In a perfect world, any freebies/swag should be declined or immediately donated to a local charity or something, but of course, I'd guess that isn't the case. My take on it all is that games journalism these days is that they're the movie industry's Entertainment Tonight - just another word for games PR so I don't bother with gaming sites anymore outside of a few forums.
EDIT:
Aside from that this comic is pretty much pure nonsense and doesn't really make the point they think it does.
the shunning has nothing to do with a lack of professional standards. it's corporations mad they can't get their way 100% of the time. It's fine to hate Kotaku - I do - but acting like Ubisoft and Bethesda are in the right in this situation is ridiculous.
So you're telling me if someone ends up with a ton of advance information about Fallout 4, they just shouldn't publish it? Should entertainment news sites stop running articles about directors being hired to do movies too?