Something went wrong. Try again later

sweep

Stay in the woods. Stay green. Stay safe.

10886 3660 770 51356
Forum Posts Wiki Points Following Followers

The image problem.

"I really love it when game journalists write about other game journalists" said nobody, ever.

The last few months for videogame enthusiasts with any sense of online presence have been pretty rubbish. There's been a lot of vitriol, frustration and arrogance floating about online. As someone who's job involves cleaning up vitriol, frustration and arrogance, myself and the rest of mod team had to endure the entire iceberg upon which the good ship Giant Bomb crashed. It's OK, for now. We've patched up all 7 of the hulls. Patch notes coming soon...

It's outed some fairly nasty skeletons which we've been sitting on for a while. A light has been shined on our weird little subculture and for the first time in a long time I've been embarrassed to be associated with it. People leaking each others private information, forming weird little misogyny clubs, accusing each other of shady business practices, cursing and shouting at each other instead of engaging in rational discourse. And over the top of it all you have a bunch of smug videogame journalists giving you their two cents on the whole messy ordeal, planting their flag in whatever fresh moral high ground they believe they've found. Which would be fine, except these self-appointed bastions of decency aren't necessarily the people that I want representing our industry, or more importantly, me. When we're trying to combat misogyny and journalistic integrity I'm not sure that a socially awkward dude with questionable facial hair and beach shorts is the man I want waving the flag. It's a lifestyle that I myself subscribe to, and I love this website because it doesn't take itself too seriously, but I can also appreciate that public perception of said lifestyle is probably somewhat dismissive. It's hard to argue that "The games industry isn't full of childish, misogynistic assholes" when to the casual onlooker most of us still look like we're hanging out in a fucking fraternity.

I'm not saying there's no room for harmless fun, I don't want every website to turn into The Guardian, and sites like Mega64 should always be able to live in the company of Gamasutra. It's when you blur the lines that things get messy; Journalists want to be taken seriously but they also want to dick around and have fun. Which is fair enough. Some, people like Danny O'Dwyer, Alex Navarro and Patrick Klepek, manage this fairly well. Others such as [insert Polygon writer here] simply appear pretentious, or out of their depth, or both.

The real problem is when people who aren't familiar with the games industry, or games journalists, look in from the outside it's very difficult to look past the dick jokes, or the 5 guys lazing around on a friday afternoon playing windjammers. I'm not saying the Giant Bomb staff should be wearing suits because, fuck that, but we collectively have an image problem and ultimately it's detrimental to any meaningful discussion. Which is why when our dirty laundry leaks out in to the public eye, most people don't seem particularly surprised that we're collectively acting like a bunch of fucking dickholes, and suddenly I don't really want to bring up the fact that I play videogames to people at work because it's not something I want to be associated with any more.

I appreciate a lot of the thoughts here are half-formed. I've been wanting to throw something down for a while and I'll probably need to come back to this at some point and tidy it up. I hope it makes sense, though.

Thanks For Reading,

Love Sweep

43 Comments