Regular readers will know that bad games journalism is an absolute pet hate of mine. The reasons for this are numerous: respect for what my brother did during his tenure at PC Zone, EGM, 1up.com, GamePro and Gamespot; my own experiences in the industry — both trying to do the best job I possibly could and being forced out of it against my will; a desire to see good quality writing about games rather than cheap, lazy clickbait; and a desire to see games respected as the form of artistic expression that they are.
As such, I make no apologies for frequent ranty posts on how awful modern games journalism is in 2015, whether it’s atrocious, prejudiced reviews of games that the reviewer has no interest in, outright insults and abuse towards particular subcultures and audiences, or, in today’s case, pieces that simply shouldn’t have been published, full stop.
Before you go any further, do please take a look at this article from VG247.
For those who are unfamiliar with VG247, allow me to put it in some context. VG247 is one of the larger, more successful, more active video games news sites that are based in the United Kingdom. With the death of CVG (formerly Computer and Video Games, one of the original games magazines from back in the ’80s) VG247 is, along with Eurogamer, one of the few remaining UK-based gaming sites that are still putting out regular content as an actual proper business, making money and paying their employees and everything.
VG247 is, for the most part, a site that is quick with news stories, and certainly used to be a reliable secondary source when I was covering the news beat. It is, however, also a site that published a spectacularly unprofessional rant from one of its writers about how angry she was that a preview version of a PS4 game didn’t have any playable female characters, along with a site that frequently publishes the self-indulgent ramblings of its founder and editor-in-chief Patrick Garratt, who clearly very much wants to be a modern creative fiction writer rather than someone who pays his bills by writing about silly old video games.
This latest piece — the work of Garratt, so unbeholden to the whims of a “superior” and consequently free of any sort of accountability — is, I think, a new low for the site. Entitled What it’s like to get stoned and watch Uncharted 4, WiLD and Dreams dev sessions in Paris, the piece is ostensibly an attempt to put an interesting spin on coverage from last week’s Paris Games Week event, interesting spin in question supposedly being the author’s intoxication at the hands of “some brutal hash”.
Whether or not Garratt was actually stoned when he wrote the piece is kind of besides the point — I get the impression from his distinctly arrogant responses in the comments beneath the article that he wasn’t, and that the whole thing was some sort of elaborate trolling attempt — because the fact remains that, intoxicated or not, this is an absolutely atrocious piece of writing. It’s disjointed, it barely has a structure and it reads like a page of notes rather than something that has actually been written up into an article. To its credit, it does at least mention some things about the games in question — unlike Polygon’s dreadful Rock Band 4 preview from a month or two ago, where the author was more concerned about sipping his fizzy water and contemplating the political situation in the Phillipines than actually paying any attention to the game in question — but it’s still just plain bad.
I’d ponder how and why this got published, but I’ve already answered that by revealing who the piece’s author was. Garratt clearly doesn’t have a lot of respect for this sort of event, carefully PR managed as they tend to be, and consequently seems to be demonstrating that lack of respect through something that reads worse than the crap the kids I used to teach at “challenging” schools used to scrawl in their English books. By initially making the assumption that Garratt actually was stoned when he wrote the piece, doubtless I fell victim to his trolling, but the fact is, it’s not particularly effective trolling in the first place because it’s not at all clear what point — if any — he’s trying to make.
Games are art; I’m not willing to broker any sort of discussion on this any more. Games should be treated with respect when you’re writing about them. This doesn’t mean that you can’t have fun or write “experiential” pieces about them — in fact, some of the most powerful pieces of writing about games describe the way interactive entertainment makes the player think and feel. But Garratt’s piece here isn’t any of those things; it’s just a jumbled, garbled mess of words that doesn’t go anywhere, say anything or have anything to add to the global conversation about games. It’s not successfully criticising anything and it’s not celebrating anything. And this is something that passes as “acceptable” on one of the few big sites that is still standing while others are dropping like flies.
To preemptively respond to any sort of criticism I might get for pointing this sort of thing out: yes, I am fucking bitter about the way I left the industry, because it came without warning one morning, and the more time passes, the more I feel I was lied to about the reasons I was pushed out. I put my heart and soul into the things I wrote about for Kombo, GamePro, USgamer and all of the other outlets I’ve contributed to over the years; I made a real effort, and I produced numerous pieces that I’m genuinely proud of. And to see that all that effort I made was for naught; that I — someone who treated every game I wrote about with respect, whether it was Mario and Sonic at the Olympic Games for Wii, Time and Eternity for PlayStation 3 or The Fruit of Grisaia for PC — should be pushed out of the work I loved while Garratt is able to get away with posting unfiltered garbage like this — and even celebrated by an army of sycophants presumably desperate for freelancing opportunities on Twitter — is genuinely upsetting, painful and downright insulting.
It saddens me that modern games journalism has become such a joke. And it’s nothing to do with GamerGate or anything like that; something has been rotten for the last few years, long before any Internet activists decided to band together and start pushing back against the things they didn’t want to see any more. Knowing how much effort my brother put into turning sites like 1up.com into places that gamers could genuinely call “home” online, and how much effort I put in in my ultimately unsuccessful attempts to follow in his footsteps… it really does make me both sad and angry that the things both of us — and numerous others like us — did were ultimately useless, fruitless efforts. What we’re left with now on the commercial side of games journalism is an insult to those who actually cared about and respected gaming enough to want to write about it for a living — not to mention an insult to the many hard-working people who toil to make ever more spectacular pieces of interactive entertainment to keep us happy for hundreds of hours at a time.
I sincerely hope that dedicated, enthusiastic small-scale sites like NicheGamer, Operation Rainfall, Digitally Downloaded and their ilk can make use of this opportunity to show readers that nonsensical gibberish or clickbait is not the only way; there is scope for intelligent, passionate writing about games that treats both its audience and the subject matter with respect. And I sincerely hope that readers will put their money where their mouth is and support efforts like this however they possibly can. Because shit like Garratt’s piece here — and others like it — is simply unacceptable. It’s terrible writing that serves no purpose other than to fuel the author’s ego — the same could be said of this blog, of course, but then I’m not making any money from it, nor am I attempting to position this blog as any sort of professional news source — and has absolutely no place in the modern industry.
Unfortunately, with the number of people happily sucking Garratt’s dick on Twitter over this article — not to mention the apologists and defence force in his comments section — I don’t see the situation changing any time soon.
What can we do? Serious question…