1966: Yes, Please Kill Clickbait

I read an interesting piece earlier on the subject of clickbait. I won’t quote it extensively here as I recommend you read it yourself, but I will provide a handy link for you to do just that. Here. Go on, I’ll wait.

The article makes a lot of good points, but the one which stood out most strikingly to me was the suggestion that “via clickbait, many companies believe they can do away with the concept of demographic”. And it’s absolutely true: the concept of a “target demographic” when it comes to Internet-based publications is fast becoming a thing of the past in favour of casting a wide net in the hopes of snagging as many people as possible.

It feels like it’s getting more and more transparent, too; I don’t know if this is simply because I’m aware of it from the inside — during my latter days at USgamer, I spent a lot of time publishing walkthroughs for new games to draw in the clicks, so believe me, I know clickbait — or whether outlets really are getting more and more transparent. But when, for example, sites like Forbes Games (games, note) are publishing articles about something that happened in last night’s Game of Thrones (a TV show), or sites like Polygon and Kotaku are trying their level best to relate real-world events to video games in as ham-fisted a manner as possible, something is very, very wrong.

I’ve mentioned before that I very much miss the “golden age” of magazines in the mid-to-late ’90s. Magazines each had a distinctive voice, style and target audience. Some, like the Official Nintendo Magazine, were aimed at kids, and used layout, language and presentation to match. Others, like Zero, were aimed at slightly older people who enjoyed a bit of irreverent humour. Others still, like ACE, were aimed at the general games enthusiast, not someone loyal to a particular platform. And others still, like Page 6/New Atari User, which my father, my brother and I all used to contribute to, had a tightly focused target audience of platform enthusiasts who were into more than just games.

While certain sites do still have “voices” to an extent thanks to well-known writers, there’s less and less to distinguish between them, particularly as the default “thing to care about” for these publications these days appears to be Social Issues like sexism and racism. But I find it hard to take these articles seriously when they clearly very much fall into the clickbait category — Polygon’s recent piece on The Witcher 3 maybe possibly probably being racist was a double whammy, in fact, combining two pieces of bait: the name of a popular current release, and an accusation that said popular current release is, in some way, bad and wrong. Whether or not it’s “right” to read the piece in that way — or in a manner which suggests If You Like The Witcher You’re Okay With Racism — is kind of besides the point; people do read it that way, and they quite understandably take umbrage with the implications suggested by articles like this. Same with Kollar’s piece on Dungeon Travelers 2 from a while back, though in that case the game was largely unknown and it was the publisher Atlus that was the “household name” to draw people in and then slap people around the face with a bit of This Is Problematic bullshit.

I remember before this dark period of games journalism started when a lot of people were attacking Kotaku for different reasons to today. In fact, there’s a relevant entry on this very blog from that very period, in which I explored the possibility that Kotaku might have actually been doing what I’m arguing for here: pursuing a specific demographic.

Targeting a specific demographic isn’t a negative thing, and we need to stop thinking that it is, because if you spread yourself too thin, you don’t serve any of your audience to their satisfaction. One size does not fit all, and not everyone wants to read about the same things. And that’s fine! What we need is more diversity of opinion and more places for people to go and get different viewpoints. And that’s something we’re not getting at the moment — at least not from the commercial sites. It’s pretty telling that the small, independent sites out there are doing a far better job of this than the big names — and it’s absolutely criminal that sites like this are, at present, unable to make money thanks to the business’ continued reliance on the clickbait model rather than something more fair and less manipulative.

Ultimately it’s best to find places you enjoy reading that you feel “speak” to you, but if I may give a recommendation to those of you who are into similar sorts of games to me: do check out Digitally Downloaded; editor-in-chief Matt Sainsbury and his team work hard to provide interesting, thought-provoking and well-written pieces of criticism about a diverse array of games as well as anime, manga, film and literature. They manage to produce pieces of relevant social and cultural commentary and criticism and relate them to games without pointing fingers or pandering to anyone; its writers are passionate and believe in the things they write, and the result is a site I continue to enjoy and respect even as I’ve switched off from reading most of the mainstream games media these days. It’d be great to see sites like this grow, and the industry as a whole evolve.

Will it happen? Well, that’s partly up to you, isn’t it?