Worth Reading: 07/28/2014

SO.. it may be a crazy concept.. but to me.. a journalist is someone with a journalism degree... not the grace of god.

Hip hop Gamer is cool but I find that he does has an issue expressing his point. I often fail to understand what he's trying to say, and he falls into a lot of slang. He sure is a gamer, and as that, he's great. But I wouldn't say hes a very good communicator in any way, not really anything to do with his color.

However! It is quite likely that black people are underrepresented in the gaming industry, and that is indeed most troublesome, beyond the hyperbole and confusion in his rant.

PS doesn't Brad Miur play Dota with Brad? Dota is a bad place to not like trash talk.

Brad Muir can't handle the bants!

Yeah but one dude using a word in the company of his friends, who know how he uses it and what he means by it, is a lot different than the fastest selling piece of media of all time throwing it out there like "Yeah, this is authentic."

What if they are not working as a journalist? And what if somebody gets a job as a journalist without having a journalism degree (maybe not even something like a journalism degree)?

@video_game_king said:

I wrote a few stories for a local newspaper as a freelancer, but I never really considered myself a journalist. That was more of a lack of work thing than a lack of degree thing, though. If I had really tried to I think I could have been a writer for that paper without a degree, but I heard bad things about it and didn't even get properly paid for the work I did do, so I think I dodged a bullet on that one.

Anyway, I agree. I think if you have a breadth of work to show, I think that can make you a journalist even without the degree to buttress it. I think a college degree in something is a must, mine was English, but really I think the point is getting out there and doing the work. To me at least.

I said this elsewhere but that comment towards the end of the Melee-piece about Pinkerton is so spot on that I'm still not over it after reading it like 2 weeks ago. (Also, I'm not trying to call you out Klepek for being "late" or w/e. I just really like that comment)

I think HipHopGamer is sending out a great message, even if his delivery is a little contradictory. I think what he wants is for everybody to be heard if they've got something to say, and not feel like they've got to 'be like everyone else'.

Now, I'll be honest, I've never been discriminated against in my life. I'm a middle-class, heterosexual white male. I don't fully understand what others feel and what they go through when they are the victim of discrimination. However, I am and always have been viciously opposed to discrimination. I find it abhorrent that anyone would ever deny any opportunity to better understand another person's perspective in life.

I love learning and having new, interesting experiences, and if I'm stuck with all the people who are only like me, then I'm never going to have that. I want to meet people who aren't like me. I want to learn about them and from them, and I want to see things from their perspective. I truly believe that every single person you have ever met, or will ever meet, knows something about the world that you don't.

I feel like it's my duty to myself to seek out the things and people I don't know, to see things from the eyes of others, and to share my perspective and unique knowledge with other people. I feel this is my personal duty because it helps me to be a more understanding human being. If I can better understand things and people, I'll be much more prepared to fix things when they break, or to be there for someone when they need support. I want to be curious, and I want to encourage everyone else to be curious as well, because having more knowledge and more perspective can only help you.

Technically, in the public view, that sort of job is just in the fringe. IE: a person can be a writer without formally studying literature. An artist can paint without ever having received formal arts education and still be considered an artist. Particularly in this case, I'd say the person in question is working in journalism without being a Journalist.

I guess it's a social prejudice: That arts don't require professional training and may respond more to talent. While it is only understandable if you are talking about lawyers or doctors, it is accepted that those professions ONLY respond to advanced technical training.

I personally mean no offense to anyone, but I try to keep it to the basics. If someone works in something without training, they DO that. While someone with professional training on something, IS that.

But Franklin and Lamar are using it in the company of their friends. They know how they use it, and what they mean by it. That's the point. Even ignoring that, Franklin and Lamar's voice actors have explained several times that they changed the dialogue many times to make it more authentic.

And for many people, that is authentic.

A while back I made friends with someone on PSN who was fairly obviously a black guy. We played together a few times due to a mutual friend on our friends list. At one point I was in a party with him and a couple other people, when a black friend of his joined our party. At that point, over the next five to ten minutes, the N word was used many, many times and with far more frequency than Franklin and Lamar. After a while, they decided to go off and play another game, which made sense because we were currently at the max player limit allowed by the game.

Now clearly not every black person uses the word so liberally, and I'm sure many don't use it at all, but there was no doubt that it was highly "authentic" to the two guys in our party. They certainly didn't seem to have Isaish Taylor's "not using it in 'mixed' company" mentality either.

But even ignoring the input that Franklin and Lamar's voice actors provided in GTA 5, if you're telling me that Spike Lee can write dialogue for black characters like that, and Quentin Tarantino or Rockstar Games should not, I'm going to have to disagree.

This requires explaining.

@slag said:

I'm honestly astounded that I made Worth Reading and this week's Community Spotlight. I never think anyone reads my stuff, so to see people actually saying "Hey read this!" it's blowing my mind.

I think it's awesome that the community members are getting featured. I know I can't read everything that everyone posts, but having a curated article like the Community Spotlight or seeing members here is great and makes me check out stuff I may not have even considered looking at because maybe it's about a game I don't play or something. But if it's a good read, it's a good read.

@jadegl: You wrote a good blog! You deserved that.

The problem I have with this viewpoint is that doing something IS training for that thing. At some point someone who has been doing journalism for years (despite any previous training) has accrued experience and training on the job that is at LEAST equal to prior training. There are tons of ways to learn, I think the viewpoint you are using here holds a single form up as the end all be all.

Kim Kardashian: Hollywood and Threes! are the only games I'd consider GOTY quality so far in 2014.

I agree, but that's only because you don't believe there is anything particularly impenetrable about journalism that requires "hard theoretical" knowledge. If I started performing surgeries, without a title, you'd hardly call me a surgeon unless I had some deep knowledge and success doing it, and even if I happened to succeed and learned the basics, I doubt anyone would be OK with declaring me a surgeon.

But I guess that's an extreme. In general, the more specific the knowledge required, the more we agree as a society that professional training is needed.

To me it is a technicality, but a necessary one, I don't think being academically trained as a journalist is more or less valid than working as one.
It is even likely that the real world effectively provides a more useful training technical training ( but it undeniably lacks a lot in the more inscrutable and less intuitive theoretical training. The old discussion of theory vs practice). And it is likely that the best people have a balance of both kinds of knowledge.

For functional purposes, If someone has a professional degree in journalism ( or some similar career ) they are journalists, and if they don't but work as a journalist, they simply work as one. In this way, a "non journalist" could potentially perform better as a journalist than a trained one, but it still doesn't change the denomination. At least that is how I see it.

Again, not saying that there is a better or worse one, but there are certainly specific techniques, ethics and exposition that are surely trainable in a variety of ways.
However I do consider that as a communicator, the profession does require having some specific abilities and techniques, and simply having a space online to ask questions doesn't constitute journalism.

This Hip Hop gamer guy, for example, is a gamer who conducts interviews about the Gaming Industry, but I wouldn't dub him a journalist. And there's nothing wrong with that. I don't have a problem with it, and neither should he.

There are a billion language learning blogs that refute this very notion.

Really? language learning blogs?

So you are saying a licensed French language teacher is basically the same as a Teach yourself french blog? sure thing then.

Well again... on certain topics where you might believe common sense and regular experience is enough ( in general, the arts, languages and soft sciences tend to fall in this categories for most people). But one doesn't teach oneself to be a lawyer, or theoretical physicist, or surgeon. There are specific requirements that are needed to be met before having that qualification. Journalism is somewhere in the middle.

I'm sure a professionally trained Journalist can detail the many ways in which their theoretical preparation has made them better at their job. In my areas of expertise, I know that while real world knowledge is vital, a strong theoretical basis is irreplaceable, and can hardly be grasped directly from practice.

And even with your example "refuting the notion", you cannot compare teaching yourself rudimentary notions of a language and studying it academically in depth. Evidently first hand experience is necessary and positive, but to achieve any significant functional understanding of a language, a lot of theoretical knowledge is required.

Candid learning of the functional aspects of a language can be great, but it doesn't really compare. It does not refute the notion, it doesn't even come close.

In any case its not like I'm discriminating in any way, I believe it's a technical distinction that doesn't necessarily mean anything, just that someone has specific training for a certain activity. It says nothing about how dedicated or even how good a person is at some job.

It's worth noting that professional video gamesman Jeff "Black Mamba" Gerstmann never went to no fancy book-learnin' school.

Actually, I'd say the fact that he didn't and most of the 'new generation' in games journalism has is one of the reasons I find Jeff's voice to be relevant and resonate with me.

came here to post this. just spent the last hour watching his videos

Hah! You are too modest, but I suppose that modesty is also part of why people like your thoughts as much as they do. IMO you certainly more than earned the shoutout, you are one of the very best posters of our community.

For sure @zombiepie does a really fantastic job with his community spotlight and doesn't get nearly enough credit for the wonderful weekly spotlights he puts out. The duder is incredibly thorough and like clockwork every week.

Congrats!

I read your stuff. Have been for a good long while now. I don't have time to read everything and certainly don't in multiple pages long threads so i usually glance over comments and posts looking out for a select few users i find interesting and you are one of them. Keep the blogs coming, you're a good writer!

Indeed, that blog was a fantastic write-up, and it's great to see Patrick give it recognition like this. Though there's been a lot of drama in the community recently, one of the better things to come out of it has been an increased interaction between the staff and community, and this is definitely a sign of that.

Somebody just caught up on Idle Thumbs!

HipHopGamer's great.

HipHopGamer needs to be on the show like now