Lively

@alazoral: Well said. I think a lot of the original Giant Bomb audience is getting to the stage in life where they have more money and less time, and I really hope that is kept in mind when choosing a direction for the site.

@dirtybirdy: I feel like half the issue is the drama that comes with an "official review" that affects the Metacritic score and because of that is a magnet for PR pushes and fanboy arguments alike, combined with the pressure to have a reviewer get through close to 100% of the main content in a rush before being able to write it.

I agree that it would be nice for Review to be able to skip all that. At the end of the day I think there's value in the reflective, organized thought about a specific game that comes with written pieces. I don't really care what it gets called or if it comes after the initial release.

I guess I don't quite understand the perspective that written reviews are so much more work than video content which gets multiple items published every week. Granted it often requires that the review finish the game or otherwise sink a lot of hours into it, and maybe that's not something that they want to do very often. But when a crewmember does "finish" a game (especially single player ones), I think it's super valuable to capture that in a format that's more long-lasting than a podcast segment or 2 hour long video. If this site isn't interested in doing that at all, I'm glad there are others that are.

I feel like this "reviews are dead" thing is kind of a game of semantics. Sure, the "review of a static product" often won't apply to modern releases, but I think it's still super-helpful to read a written reflection on the positives and negatives of a game near the time when the largest chunk of people will be deciding to spend time on it. Even if the purchase price consideration isn't as simple; time is often more valuable than money. Curating what is worth people's time is basically the entire reason I come to sites like this beyond the general fun personalities.

Reviews are especially helpful when the reviewer has put in the time to finish or almost finish the available content and has the ability to reflect on it in more thoughtful detail than some random podcast segment will be able to capture, especially when people might not be listening to the podcast every week or up for watching a 2 hour video to get the same ideas across.

I love reading GiantBomb reviews and will read them more faithfully than any other site, and it's been that way for years. I don't even care if their written content comes months after the fact or if they call them something different like a "reflection/retrospective/whatever". By the same token I love reading their end-of-the-year writeups. Maybe their click metrics tell them written content isn't worth the effort, but I would be very sad to see it disappear entirely.

Didn't end up playing a lot of new games, but these I liked a LOT.

I think I would be OK with this format if the text version was a little longer - doesn't need to be 20 paragraphs, but just three is so brief that it fails be useful as anything except as a "preview" / pull quote for the real review.

I imagine they have site metrics that back up this decision, but it still seems kind of sad to abandon the clarity, organization, and authoritative voice of a good old fashioned written review.

1-hour long video conversations are fine and good, but they aren't nearly as useful as text for some things - especially when I'm looking up an older game review, and I want to quickly digest the opinion from someone who worked through the game and gave some real thought to their reaction.

Except in rare cases I don't think people these days are calling for censorship, which strictly speaking is only applicable with government intervention.

There are certain things that should be sufficiently socially unacceptable that people don't buy it and stores don't carry it (for example, something that is straight up promoting ethnic cleansing). Industry groups and stores are usually self-policing in this case, responding to market forces.

For other issues (stuff that some people see as sexist) I think most self-described "SJW's" would say that they don't expect games like that to disappear entirely. Rather, there should be a much greater selection of games that are more inclusive, cater to other groups, etc. There will always be a place for a straight-up juvenile teen boy fantasy version of gender portrayals, but it should be a choice on a much larger menu.

The good news is that this is already happening - I think there is a much greater diversity in tone, representation, characters, etc in games these days than 10 years ago, let alone 20 years ago. The more alternatives are readily available, the less complaining you will see on the existence of the more juvenile, white male-dominated stuff that used to corner the market entirely.

Think of an analogy to books, or TV: the market is big enough that a lot of different demographics are catered to.

I guess a counter-argument would be that "the market decides what it wants", and that social justice types are trying to get companies to artificially cater to very small alternative audiences. I think part of this argument is that there is a zero-sum total number of game developers and market for games, and creating more games for one audience will take away games from another.

I can't say for certain, but I think there is enough opportunity to grow alternative markets and expand the total number of good games out there for multiple audiences, that the fears of censorship are overblown.

Racial justice issues being "not as bad as 1957" is a really low bar; many things have improved, we have so far still to go on others.

See the supreme court overturning the voting rights act, and subsequently you have a bunch of states (mostly in the South) try to make surgically precise attempts to prevent minorities from voting via closing down polling places, implement voter ID and residency proof restrictions, etc.

In other situations you have police brutality getting more attention - not necessarily because it's gotten worse, but because it's become much more visible via social media and cell phone cameras.

Much of the injustices that are still being fought over aren't hard-coded in to law like the Jim Crow era, but are still very real - carried out by judges, politicians, police, employers, schools, and many other institutions that don't have discrimination written down as official policy, but it finds its way in regardless.

These are the trickiest things to fight because the people causing them will usually deny racist intent, and likely don't think they are in the wrong at all. It's often hard to say what is the real case, but I've talked to black folks who say this kind of thing is sort of like "gaslighting", where someone else tells you you're imagining things. To get this treatment constantly whenever trying to speak up about something can't be good for anyone's emotional well-being.

I think one of the most damaging things that public schools taught people my age was that the Civil Rights era succeeded, and things were basically fine afterward, so the common refrain you hear from conservatives and moderates is "nobody is treating you unfairly, just settle down and stop complaining".

I think it's human to hear people complaining and get a bit irritated, especially since we as humans aren't very capable of understanding problems that we ourselves haven't faced. However, I think it's true that silent, well-behaved people rarely brought about any change.

I wouldn't go that far, I don't think they've really promoted alt-right / white nationalist stuff (although there is a bit of overlap in the anti-pc crowd). It's more fair to say they don't seem to care that much about the consequences of politics - they repeatedly push their "douche vs. turd sandwich" metaphor for elections and that not voting for anybody is a valid reaction to current politics.

To me that's massively irresponsible, as sometimes the lesser of two evils is a lot less damaging than the greater of two evils, and only people who either are very privileged or very ignorant can afford to put their heads in the sand about the real consequences these things have.

I guess I fail to see the difference, based on how I've seen the term used in the wild.

I totally get how there are instances where "virtue-signalling" can come across as obnoxious or self-serving, but there are many occasions where failing to say something is much worse. As the saying goes, "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing".

There are a lot of occasions where there's a gathering / community of people, and someone tells a super racist/sexist/etc. joke, and no one calls them out for it - if they do call the person out, and try to make a case for being less awful, they might very well be accused of virtue signaling by anti-pc types.

It's kind of hard to not come across as obnoxious to people who really don't want to hear it, but awfulness of many types is on the rise in the world right now, and it feels utterly dispiriting how many people just casually seem to think it's no big deal, since it doesn't seem to affect them personally right here and now.

In the end I'm usually very suspicious of the motives of creators who seem to hate "virtue signalling" a lot more than the injustices being highlighted.