slasherepoch

@slasherepoch

1993 3 legged race champion

troglodyte

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slasherepoch
@slasherepoch
sulcata
@sulcata
MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE

i think the difference between a casual blogger and a journalist is that journalists confirm sources and check basic information by asking people who would know, before writing an article

with apologies to most of modern game journalism for saying so

MOOMANiBE
@MOOMANiBE

It's depressing honestly, i used to be the biggest advocate in the world to other devs that game journalism was doing important work and critical analysis mattered but now we're at a point where polygon is crossposting low quality tiktok explainers to their front page and it's like. idk. What I loved is gone. It left. It was destroyed.

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Bigg
@Bigg

It's interesting - they had some guys who really actually knew how to do video, and I think they had a pre-existing video content strategy before "pivot to video" became the hot site-obliterating buzzword. I think that pre-existing experience with it allowed them to avoid getting suckered in too bad; I recall Justin & Griffin experimenting with the "Just Like Art" Monster Factories on Facebook, which I think allowed them to compare the views they were getting there to their regular YouTube stuff and conclude that there wasn't much "there" there.

I think Polygon's real video-based petard that they got hoisted by was that once Justin and Griffin and BDG left to have their own (much more lucrative) independent careers, Polygon was left with this McElroy/BDG-shaped video content hole that nobody left was really equipped to fill. And they couldn't NOT keep producing videos, so, like, they kind of just had whoever was there push out of bunch of painfully underperforming stuff featuring people who really weren't great on-camera or on-mic but who had to make videos because Polygon needs videos!

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LukeBeeman
@LukeBeeman

I mean, they still have Patrick Gill there and he's done some incredibly funny and unhinged stuff at Polygon (Video Game Theater Theatre, Please Retweet, his interviews with Ben Schwartz), but whatever reason, now he's making generic video essay / explainer-type videos that don't play to his strengths at all instead of the weird hilarious shit he used to do. I went back and watched some of his old stuff and it still had me cackling but I couldn't make it through 5 minutes of any of his most recent videos at Polygon.

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Video-Game-King
@Video-Game-King

Arguably you could trace the problem all the way back to the rise of podcasts, when having a clearly marketable personality for visitors to relate to became a much higher priority for sites. I don't know that I would, though - that wouldn't really explain the growth period in the mid-late 2010s - and personally, I'd say the much surer sign of game writing's decline was when everyone started accepting game guides as a genre of publication writing. And on that note: god, I've always hated the space capitalist realism carved out for itself in game writing.

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itsnatclayton
@itsnatclayton

even during my time regularly doing shift work for RPS (2018-2020) there was a real sense that it was losing its voice; that even as the old guard had mostly moved on, all the younger, queerer writers it was hiring couldn't find a sustainable future there. ReedPop barely knew what to do with the site, and I have almost no hope IGN does either.

(Especially now that even Alice O has left, maybe the last remaining flagbearer for "the RPS voice")

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ecter
@ecter

The moment i realised it's more "entertainment" than "journalism" was when my fave reviewers were repeatedly mixing up terms "copyright", "trademark" and "patent" during podcasts (when topic of patented game mechanics came up).
It doesn't require going to law school to understand the difference. And i thought it'd be a bit more common knowledge among people who make a living by talking about games and the environment they're made in (IP ownership, patents etc.)

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Shadolith
@Shadolith

man I’m still not over Polygon running a whole article initially claiming that Toby Fox purposefully used a motif from his ancient intentionally-incendiary preteen mpreg musical in his Pokémon Sword/Shield Battle Tower theme, based entirely on twitter hearsay. I had to literally get the article amended with a strongly worded message because it was just severely untrue, and they published this mere MINUTES after I’d just finished a huge public rant about WHY IT WAS UNTRUE, which now remains cited at the bottom of the article (though they’ve since amended it further to remove even the traces of them having ever made the claim that it was Definitely True, leaving only citation of my claim that he was never fully banned from the MSPA forums for making it….)

anyway. ugh.

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DigitalBeast
@DigitalBeast

August 2014 is when the whole enthusiast writing industry around gaming just up and died for me, and I decided "yeah, I'm done". I don't think I've intentionally read anything on a gaming site since, and stopped writing about games in 2015 after 11 years of doing nothing but that.

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