Jim Sterling on secrets in the Industry

I think this deserves a thread.

Basically Jim Sterling made a video about how everything is being kept secret in this industry and how even the Journalists take a part in this even when they are not under NDA. For example the Tweet that made Adam Sessler so concerned about having fear to quit his job was just this:

Sony wanted the people to go to New York test the hardware in a controlled environment for questions etc and than take the Ps4 with them. Nothing more. And that is what Sessler and Co made them go mad on the internet........

You really should watch it because there is so much truth to this....

http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/jimquisition/8371-Cloak-and-Dagger

I say lets get rid of all these secrets...

wait what did I do...

Did jim leave destructoid ? Or did he get let go.

@humanity: @kidavenger:

To be fair, I'm pretty sure he's gone on record as saying English isn't his first language.

@darji: Thanks for the post,this explains a lot.

???

Whats wrong with the post? I see a couple of places you could put commas and some misused ellipses. The thing is, this is forum thread, not a dissertation.

Usually, I just grab the popcorn and sit in my chair giggling. this is already getting exciting!

Sorry I never really really understood your comma rules and in my school we totally ignored them as well^^

Darji is certainly an enigma - but I must say this is a little awkward.. like a couple bickering over their child like it's not in the same room.

Jim Sterling continuing to be the realest motherfucker in the 'biz'.

Is that it? Seriously?

Someone needs to kneecap Adam Sessler. For real. Just sap 'em. Hopefully it'd bring him back to reality.

http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1rqsrc6

Who knows, but when an employer says "Our visions didn't line up..." or something to that effect, yeahhhhhh...

IF anything it's a good thing for him to move away from them, he really deserves better.

Jim went ham in that video. I've just recently began to follow some of his work and man he does it try to keep it real.

As far as the topic in the video, he's total right. We as consumers know absolutely nothing about how the games industry operates. I'm glad he called that out and I hope more people demand we get to know more things about games. We don't need to know every last detail but secrecy doesn't help anyone.

Jim Sterling is great. I never understood why everyone hates him so much. It usually just comes down to "he doesn't agree with me on my opinion of this game! What a troll!"

@video_game_king said:

@humanity said:

Darji is certainly an enigma - but I must say this is a little awkward.. like a couple bickering over their child like it's not in the same room.

Oh yah, sure blame me, just because I told Darji to read some Virginia Woolf now it's all my fault, typical..

@jayeh said:

He does go silly once in awhile, but his best quality is how he doesn't really care for pretense and just kind of slaps people around for being ridiculous. And in this case, he is right yet again. The industry really really does take itself way too seriously sometimes.

One of my favorite things Jim did, was make a long video and a few articles about how horrifically fucked Konami has been in the last few years, stating everything he thought plainly and making a decent case that Konami was just completely incompetent.. and that video ended up getting him blacklisted by the company. And he just kind of shrugged it off and moved on.

Secrecy it isn't something that's going to go away anytime soon. And it doesn't have to be a bad thing. Look at Valve. Everyone loves Valve. But they're probably one of the most secretive gaming companies out there. And the fans revel in it. Every time Valve says anything, they're hunting for the hidden Half-Life 3 references. They're playing along with convoluted ARGs that almost certainly aren't going to reveal anything interesting, because there is a slight chance that it might lead to a tiny hint about a game that may or may not exist. There is speculation and rumour - and everyone loves it. It is exciting to a lot of people, because they love Valve's games and they're so secretive about them that any chance of new information is thrilling to them. Valve has built an enormous and passionate following because of their secrecy.

Secrecy itself is not the problem. How you sugarcoat that secrecy, how you present it to your audience, that is where most companies slip up. Valve are masters at it.

Honestly, I think that's the best for both of them.

If it is about new games sure this stuff should be kept secret but these issues the last few weeks were not about new games but about issues or problems with a new console that is soon getting released. Or about the Sony issue which Sessler hinted at. All these things just harm this industry and especially the customer. In the end all these things that we discussed these weeks will come out anyway.

It's 'hate on darji' week. Didn't you hear? We all got pm's. It came straight from the top.

You think that the Half-Life 3 teasing isn't a massive dick move? You know, forcing your fans to wait a decade to play something that you promised would be out within "a reasonable time frame" of the last installment? If anything, Valve's secrecy has pissed off and alienated a lot of their long time customers. Their absolute refusal to say "Half-Life 3 isn't happening" or "Half-Life 3 is in development" or even just a "Sorry guys, but we're fucking stumped right now so we're going to work on project X, Y, and Z for awhile" would be preferential to the cone of silence around that company.

I understand that these companies have a right to keep their shit to themselves, but that's not the argument. The argument is whether or not this is even effective, let alone worth all of the Tinker Tailoring. Right now, the only compelling case in this discussion is the one presented by Sterling.

He was a bit of an antagonising asshole way back when, and even Jim himself has admitted it in some his videos. Of course, it's somewhat understandable why he was (initially) such a twat considering all of the hate he received during that era. Difference now is he's learn to not let any of that get to him and is much more rational when it comes to discussing a lot of the hot topics in the industry.

That said, current-day Sterling is awesome and I always look forward to his next jimquisition video.

Wow, is that really what the Sess was crying about?

Yeah, there are definitely situations where being open and honest is probably the best course of action. But that's not something unique to the gaming industry. It's a fact of the corporate world.

Great point but I'm really tired of all the "insightful" game videos coming in this breathless sort of format. As much as I think Danny O'Dwyer is a cool dude, his "The Point" videos bring this to mind.

Or maybe I just hate northern european accents.

THAT SAID FOR NO GOOD REASON, I agree with everything he said. As a critic of another medium (music), I often get feedback from fans who claim that I "just don't get it". While it's a different form of obscurism, the fact is that if I'm investing myself purely in the record on hand rather than the Instagram drama surrounding it, I'm bound to "miss something". But if the labels are going to insist on sending out review copy via emailed YouSendIt links rather than the traditional promo-CD + press kit that was still fairly common when I started out seven years ago, then I'm likely to get something wrong.

Add in the long public gestation of game releases and I can see why the privileged few get smug and distraught over their various conveniences and inconveniences. But it's a farce to expose those things to the consumer if you're unwilling to expose WHY those things are as they are. Which is why I appreciate these guys at GB so much. If they don't feel comfortable telling it how it is, they make fart jokes. Humanity goes on.

Can't go wrong with a bit of Sterling.

So he's changed since then? (having seen very little of his work) I was under the impression that he was a cynic, in line with Ben Croshaw (Zero Punctuation) and TotalBiscuit, where his "asshole-ish" nature was part of the character. Was I mistaken?

I usually think Jim's desire to antagonize is larger than his desire to inform, but this is alright.

IS THAT SERIOUSLY WHY SESSLER WAS 'HUMAN AND SCARED' AND CONSIDERING A NEW CAREER PATH?! Because they wanted him to go to a specific place while he played their UNRELEASED, NEW CONSOLE? Oh heavens! Whatever will we dooooo, someone fetch my fainting couch I do believe I have the vapors!

Review events for unreleased consoles make Sessler 'human and scared', when he gets games three weeks early for free and they tell him the game has a release day review embargo, it's like Schindler's List Part 2.

I think he's spot on with the gaming journalists part. They really seem to revel in knowing things about games and drumming up controversy without ever actually saying anything meaningful.

"Wow if this thing I heard about some game that myself or someone else may or may not have played is true then wow..."

So what you're saying is that capitalism is the problem? REMEMBER YOUR CONNECTIONS WITH COMMUNIST ROBOT.

No matter where you go or what job you have you'll be privy to information that you'll have to keep secret. Getting rid of secrets isn't the solution. Not hinting at the secrets you know is the solution.

I don't understand the part about us not knowing sales figures. Each retailer should know exactly how many copies of a game were sold and be able to report that data.

THANK GOD, FOR JIM.

He's... still probably not for everyone and might be a little grating, but I personally think he's genuinely one of the only ''gamesmen'' who's willing to call out all of the bullshit that pervades this industry, which sometimes even includes fellow critics, but he also comes across as surprisingly reasonable amidst it all. He's basically what 'Annoyed Gamer' is trying to be, only isn't quite as... desperate or petty.

Here's a really good video he put up a short while ago that focuses on public figures (specifically Phil Fish) in trying to deal with the rampant abuse they may receive on the internet.

Great video. I'm tired of the bullshit. That was one of the main frustrations I had with the Xbox One reveal. They gave us no information and then said no one had the facts right.

Then, like Hades army, commenters and journalists who were defending the DRM would use the lack of information as ammo for people and say they were over- reacting. The video game community could be a lot more civil if there was more honesty from those peddling rumors and holding information.

My favourite part of that entire video was the truth behind publisher reactions towards an opinionated review.

I don't even kn....huh...

I'm not picking up a PS4 this launch, Darji. I'm sorry to have disappointed you :(

@alkusanagi: Which means someone needs to aggregate all those sales, and digital sales are rarely if ever included in those numbers. Secondly, development costs of games are never revealed, so the financial success of viability of a franchise isn't known, which is how Tomb Raider sells like 3 million copies and is "disappointing".

I can understand why people don't like him, but I would say that Jim Sterling can always back up his opinions and is a pretty level-headed voice most of the time

@darji: No worries. I was not clear enough in my original text then. The first thing a reader should do is determine the purpose of something he/she is about to read. This is a forum thread, not a dissertation (the paper you write when you are trying to get a doctorate), so the purpose is nothing more than an insignificant form of entertainment (I do not mean this in a derogatory manner, but then who is going to remember this thread ten years from now). Because of the intent of this thread, any mistakes are so insignificant that they do not matter in the slightest. If a reader is experienced enough with the written language then they can understand the meaning of a sentence and add their own commas when reading. Any complaint is just them being a grammar-nazi, and that is never something that one should aspire to be.

TL:DR

There is no issue with your thread. There are just people, either joking, or being dicks because of internet annonymity.

Jimquisition videos usually make good points but the way he presents them is sometimes just insufferable. Like a bastard who knows he's right, and you know he's right, and he's going to tell you why, and you're going to agree with him, but you're going to want to rip his head off the entire time he's saying it.

It's not just that. Your sentence structure and word usage is usually understandable, but sometimes your meaning is hard to discern. I can parse speech without commas, I can't parse speech that isn't written with common syntactical rules in mind. For instance, this:

For example the Tweet that made Adam Sessler so concerned about having fear to quit his job was just this:

is very awkwardly worded. I understand what you are trying to say, but it should say:

For example, the Tweet that made Adam Sessler so concerned about his job was this:

"having fear to quit" is a phrase that makes no sense. Most of your posts have something like this in them. Learning a different language is difficult, and managing to do it is admirable, but it's something that you should never stop working toward.

Okay, that was pretty good. I'm a little disappointed I hadn't checked out his videos earlier, if (at least) his newer stuff is of that quality. I'll go through the archive and see what I think, at any rate.

@monetarydread: I wasn't being a dick, I think he fixed most of the issues with his original post, it was almost unreadable when I first saw it.

It honestly never occurred to me that he was ESL with 3000+ posts in less than a year.

Eh, I find his persona to be somewhat endearing. I mean he's just so comically that much of an asshole with how he carries himself, that you know it's apart of the character of Jim Sterling and his ever-present catchphrase ''Thank God for me''. I could see why others would prefer he cut out the attitude and stick to his message, but I personally like that he has a bit of fun with it all.

I would imagine it's similar to why so many people found Ryan Davis so likeable as well. After all he would also act like a dick to everyone for the sake of comical effect, and was known and respected for not giving a single fuck about what people thought of him.