I grew up with computer and video games journalism all around me.

I mean that literally: while I was growing up, both my father and my brother wrote for a newsstand magazine initially called Page 6, then subsequently New Atari User once it merged with another publication called, unsurprisingly, Atari User. My father regularly wrote about flight simulators and making music with computers and MIDI instruments, and my then-teenage brother had a steady stream of incoming Atari ST games which he would play, explore and then write about in chunks of anywhere between 250 and 1,000 words according to how much discussion the game in question warranted. Pretty much our entire collection of Atari ST games was made up of review copies; I think I remember purchasing a grand total of about four or five games altogether during the 16-bit era.

I was both fascinated by and proud of the work my father and brother did at the time — so much so that, in that way that kids do, I tried to imitate them. I would fire up AtariWriter on the Atari 8-bit — for some reason I always enjoyed using the 8-bit computers just that little bit more than the 16-bit ST — and write my own reviews of things that I’d played, trying my best to imitate the style and structure of my father’s and brother’s work. I would then print them out on our noisy Epson-compatible dot matrix printer and file them away in a blue binder that had come home from my father’s day job at some point — it once housed the IBM “Manager of Managers Programme” material, and I have no idea why I remember that — and pretend that I, too, was a published writer.

Some years later, I had the opportunity to follow in my family’s footsteps and provide my own contributions to New Atari User, and I took to this with great enthusiasm, reviewing games such as Psyclapse’s Defender-alike Anarchy and taking an in-depth look at Atari’s revolutionary but regrettably flawed forays into the handheld and home console markets, the Lynx and Jaguar. Meanwhile, by this point, my brother was getting ready to finish his school career and contemplate his future, whether that be heading off to university or jumping straight into a job.

He chose the latter option, finding himself working for Europress up in Macclesfield on a revolutionary new games magazine called Games-X. Games-X was remarkable for one main reason: rather than being monthly, as most magazines were at the time, it was published weekly. This meant that it had the opportunity to be a whole lot more timely with the things it was writing about, and essentially acted as a precursor to the immediacy of Internet writing we have today. It ran for a decent number of issues before it folded, too, and was a pleasure to read, combining a somewhat irreverent, humorous editorial voice with authoritative, knowledgeable content from staffers who knew their stuff about gaming.

I followed my brother’s career with great interest and pride as it developed through a series of further magazines on which he took increasing levels of responsibility — among them Mega Drive Advanced Gaming (whose speculative feature about what Sonic 2 might be like from well before any details were actually revealed to the world remains one of my favourite video game magazine articles of all time, alongside its Super Mario 5 counterpart in its sister publication Control) and the deliciously classy PC Player — before eventually hitting what can arguably be called “the big time” in the games magazine industry of the late ’90s by landing the role of Editor on PC Zone.

Such was my interest in the games press and pride in my brother’s career that when it came time for my Year 10 Work Experience placement at school, I chose to take the awkward route and refuse any of the convenient positions my school would have been able to arrange for me, instead opting to spend a couple of weeks down in London with my brother helping out in the PC Zone offices. I spent a lot of time making tea and being mothered by art editor Thea, but I also had the opportunity to write a full review of the non-3D accelerated version of Virtua Fighter and write the captions for some screenshots in a number of different articles.

I was sold. This was what I wanted to do, and I was good at it. In the subsequent years, I found myself freelancing both for PC Zone — both during and after the time my brother was in charge, and in all honesty, even when he was editor, he wouldn’t have allowed me to contribute if he didn’t have faith in my abilities, so this certainly wasn’t a nepotism situation — and the Official UK Nintendo Magazine. Most of the time I found myself writing walkthroughs, which were things that no-one else really wanted to do, but which I enjoyed doing because it gave me an excuse to play through some favourite games in great detail while writing about them. (I liked it less when my preview copy of Turok 2 on N64 crashed on the last boss and I had to play the whole thing through again on a retail copy just to get a single screenshot, but thankfully this only happened once.) I even found myself writing a whole book on Carmageddon which was subsequently included in the Virgin Megastores special edition of the game one Christmas, and which can now be found as a .PDF e-book included with GOG.com’s rerelease of the game.

It would be a number of years before I’d have the opportunity to do some more work in the games press. I went to university, I trained as a teacher, I did some teaching work, I had a nervous breakdown, I did some other work. Eventually I found myself working alongside some friends I’d met on 1up.com — a site that my brother had taken charge of, initially as an extension of the magazine Electronic Gaming Monthly, but which subsequently became very much its own thing — on a site called Kombo. Kombo wasn’t a particularly big site, nor did it pay especially well, but during an extremely rough period of my life — shortly after my first wife had left me and I knew that I was going to end up having to move back home — it provided me with a connection to some other human beings as well as a trickle of income and a reason to get up in the morning. I proved myself to be pretty good at the whole news reporting thing, picking out interesting stories and presenting entertaining editorial spins on them where appropriate.

Kombo, unfortunately, folded after a while, and eventually I found myself living back at home again. After a period of unsuccessfully looking for work that I wanted to do, I stumbled into an opportunity to write some freelance articles for GamePro, yet another publication which my brother had worked on but had subsequently moved on from. I wrote the articles, they turned out well, and eventually found myself with a regular position on the site’s staff, covering the news shift on UK time so the site would have plenty of content by the time its native North America woke up. Again, I made a point of picking out interesting stories that other sites weren’t necessarily covering, and this helped to make GamePro a distinctive publication rather than one of the many identikit blogs out there. My contributions were effective, too; on a number of occasions, I was responsible for some significant traffic spikes to the site thanks to the interesting articles I’d written — though ultimately, sadly, it was all for naught as the publication folded, with most of its online content lost and the rest devoured by its sister site PC World.

A few years later, I was contacted by Jaz Rignall, with whom I’d previously worked at GamePro. Jaz was working on a new project that was hush-hush at the time, but he wanted me on board. Said project turned out to be USgamer, a North American counterpart to the popular Eurogamer. My job would be both to cover the news shift on USgamer, much as I had done on GamePro, as well as “localising” Eurogamer articles and republishing them on USgamer to give them a wider audience. Initially, we were given almost total editorial freedom with USgamer, with each of the writers contributing articles in their own particular areas of expertise and interest, and this made for a site with a very distinctive editorial voice that reminded me of 1up.com back in the glory days. Unfortunately, however, this proved too good to be true, and in the interests of that ol’ bugbear of online publications, traffic, we all ended up having to rein it in a bit and taking a more structured approach to “content strategy”.

It was during my GamePro-USgamer years that I first became conscious of something I hadn’t seen before in the games press: an apparently growing level of hostility towards the audience. This was at its clearest when Mass Effect 3 was released and the player base objected to what they felt was a poor ending to the series as well as EA’s increasingly exploitative DLC strategy, which in this case even went as far as to excise a whole playable character from the game if you didn’t purchase a particular edition. Suddenly, the press turned on gamers as a whole, declaring them “entitled” and claiming that they didn’t have a right to complain at BioWare choosing to end their series in that way. There’s an element of truth in there, of course — a work of art is its creator’s responsibility, not its audience’s — but the wilfully aggressive manner in which this argument was presented just didn’t sit right with me at all.

Around the same time, we started to get a lot more in the way of sociopolitical commentary in gaming. My friend Jeff Grubb, with whom I’d previously worked on Kombo, found himself on the receiving end of an Internet dogpile after reporting on some off-colour comments that Twisted Metal and God of War creator David Jaffe had made, but without editorialising on them or condemning them as being “wrong”. Such was the ferocity of attacks he suffered from supposedly respected critics such as Brendan Keogh and Justin McElroy that he had to retreat from Twitter for a while, and I became genuinely concerned for his safety. Thankfully he was all right, and was eventually able to dismiss the whole situation — though when the GamerGate thing broke last year, he once again came under attack for not condemning the people hurling abuse at Zoe Quinn and instead just reporting on the facts.

I was starting to feel a little uncomfortable about this. This was not the games press which I had admired from afar and eventually from within as I was growing up. I wasn’t sure what was happening, but I sure as hell didn’t like it.

Things came to a personal head for me when USgamer published a review of Hatsune Miku Project Diva F for PlayStation 3 in which the reviewer Dustin Quillen repeatedly referred to the game as “creepy” and “voyeuristic” and, in an earlier draft which was thankfully edited out, referred to people who might enjoy the game as “degenerates”. Both I and my colleague Cassandra Khaw took great exception to this, particularly as prior to this, we had both made USgamer a site that was inherently friendly to fans of Japanese games — an aspect of gaming which most modern gaming publications were, by this point, either ignoring completely or devoting a disproportionately small amount of their attention and effort towards. We made our feelings known, and, after a bit of arguing, this situation eventually resulted in the creation of my weekly JPgamer column for USgamer, a feature through which I made a number of very good friends, and which my audience seemed to appreciate very much indeed.

Things proceeded comfortably for some months from here, though I was conscious that the sociopolitical commentary surrounding gaming — particularly with regard to the treatment of women, spurred in part by Anita Sarkeesian’s high-profile Kickstarter campaign, and with regard to representation of people outside the heterosexual cissexual majority — was ramping up. This was particularly apparent on sites like Polygon, which appeared to have interpreted its original mission of “reinventing games journalism” as “posting as much inflammatory nonsense under the pretense of ‘progressiveness’ to blow things out of proportion as possible”, which, to be fair, is something Kotaku had been doing for years and still continues to this day.

Now, I’ve commented a number of times with regard to my feelings about this, but I’ll reiterate them here: I have absolutely no objection with people using theoretical frameworks such as feminism to talk about games — they’re a mature art form and means of creative expression by now, and as such it is absolutely possible to analyse them in these terms. Where the problem comes is when only a single ideology — in this case modern, borderline radical “third wave” feminism — becomes completely dominant to the exclusion of all others, and where any attempt to question, challenge or refute the claims made by this ideology is met by ridicule at best, harassment and abuse at worst.

This problem only gets worse when writers with no background in artistic criticism try to jump on board the feminist bandwagon by throwing in terms like “problematic”, “sexist” and “misogynist” at every opportunity, often without backing up their assertions with evidence or explanations of why they feel [x] is problematic, sexist and/or misogynist. This is high-school English stuff; even at the age of 34, I remember my English teacher Ms Derbyshire encouraging us to “PEE all over our work” by making a Point, giving an Example and Explaining its context and relevance, but this simply doesn’t happen a lot of the time; “sexist” and “misogynist” in particular are used as catch-all terms to look “progressive”, but because of the amount of power these words have managed to attain over the last few years, we’ve reached a situation where mainstream journalists now seemingly feel that they don’t have to back them up with evidence, explanations or theoretical context.

Which — finally — brings us to yesterday’s Senran Kagura 2 article, why it’s unacceptable and why it’s worth criticising rather than ignoring. Diver’s Senran Kagura 2 piece was the perfect example of what I’ve just described: he refers to the game as “unapologetically sexist” without giving any evidence other than the fact that the girls have big breasts and some of the art is sexualised. Pro-tip: “sexualised” or “sexy” is not the same as “sexist”.

The reason Diver doesn’t give any evidence is that, despite appearances, Senran Kagura is not sexist. Senran Kagura as a series features an increasingly large cast of capable female protagonists who don’t need men to help them out, save them or tell them what to do. They’re comfortable with their bodies (for the most part — characters like Mirai are an exception, but this is used as one of the aspects of her overall character development) and many of them take ownership of their sexuality, with characters such as Katsuragi, Ryouna and Haruka being pretty up-front about their tastes and fetishes. Each game passes the Bechdel Test, as flawed and stupid as it is, with flying colours, and the overall story and lore of the Senran Kagura world is fleshed out to a surprisingly comprehensive degree, repeatedly refuting Diver’s shallow assertion that “it’s about breasts”.

Now, the reason why we shouldn’t stand for this, why we should criticise this and why we shouldn’t ignore it should be clear: passivity simply sends the message that it’s okay to carry on like this. Passivity is why things have gotten to the situation they are now; people haven’t been willing enough to stick up for themselves and demand better from the press that is supposed to be representing them. The perpetually offended outrage brigade already have the press on their side, whereas fans of games like Senran Kagura and its ilk only have each other to turn to. The “feminism as default” ideology adopted by most of the mainstream press these days means that there is absolutely no way that games such as Senran Kagura will ever get a fair shot at coverage and criticism because of an overwhelming unwillingness to engage with them on anything more than the most superficial level possible. And that’s unfair both to fans of the games, and to the people who make, publish and localise them for the fans.

Let me close with a few relevant quotes from the SPJ Code of Ethics, and how they relate in particular to the Senran Kagura piece but also to games journalism as a whole.

Journalists should:

– Take responsibility for the accuracy of their work. Verify information before releasing it. Use original sources whenever possible.

– Remember that neither speed nor format excuses inaccuracy.

– Provide context. Take special care not to misrepresent or oversimplify in promoting, previewing or summarizing a story.

– Gather, update and correct information throughout the life of a news story.

Diver’s piece breaks all of these principles. It is inaccurate, it does not verify its information, and it does not provide any sources. It outright boasts about its lack of context, misrepresents and oversimplifies the subject and, following its publication, Diver has proven that he is unwilling to “gather, update and correct information” regarding the game. It may not be a “news story” as such, but it should still be held accountable, and the audience should demand better.

Journalists should:

– Balance the public’s need for information against potential harm or discomfort. Pursuit of the news is not a license for arrogance or undue intrusiveness.

– Show compassion for those who may be affected by news coverage. Use heightened sensitivity when dealing with juveniles, victims of sex crimes, and sources or subjects who are inexperienced or unable to give consent. Consider cultural differences in approach and treatment.

[…]

– Avoid pandering to lurid curiosity, even if others do.

[…]

– Consider the long-term implications of the extended reach and permanence of publication. Provide updated and more complete information as appropriate.

Diver’s piece has the potential to cause if not outright harm then certainly discomfort. Consider if someone who knew nothing about Senran Kagura read nothing but Diver’s post, then met another person who told them that they were a huge Senran Kagura fan. What impact would Diver’s piece have on the first person’s perception of the second? I’d like to think that the first person would have enough in the way of critical faculties to realise that the second person probably isn’t a sex offender, but as human beings we are inherently judgemental creatures, and there will be at least a hint of negative prejudice there.

Not only that, but Diver’s piece shows woeful insensitivity towards a variety of people, including victims of sex crimes. He also shows a complete lack of consideration for “cultural differences in approach and treatment” with regard to Japanese games, in the process pandering to “lurid curiosity” by giving woefully ill-informed impressions of a creative work he spent no more than an hour with in total.

And on top of that, there is no consideration for the long-term implications of the extended reach and permanence of publication. Consider an extreme case, if you will: a lonely, depressed individual who finds great comfort in video games and who draws strength and courage from the things they enjoy, particularly if they’re as rich in story and characterisation as Senran Kagura is. Now consider how that lonely, depressed individual might react to reading Diver’s piece, with its dismissal of the thing that is so important to them and its implication that enjoying it makes them a deviant at best and a criminal at worst. The potential consequences aren’t pretty — granted, as previously noted, this is an extreme example, but you need to take these things into account.

---

The final thing I want to address is why we should give pieces like Diver’s any attention in the first place instead of just ignoring them: the argument runs that giving them attention just “gives them what they want”, and falls into the trap of clicking on clickbait.

Well, aside from the fact that not criticising these severe lapses in judgement sends the implicit message that It’s Okay To Keep Doing That, we live in an age where it is almost painfully easy to completely nullify clickbait through the use of archive sites and adblockers. In doing so, we are able to acknowledge, discuss and criticise bad and potentially harmful examples of writing without providing any benefit to the outlet on which they are published. Some may see that as a low blow, but it’s the Internet equivalent of “voting with your wallet”, and it’s important to do so.

Why? Because as is so often said that it’s become a running joke now, games journalism is broken. Completely broken. Until we get that message across, sites like Vice are going to continue doing a disservice to significant proportions of their audience — and that, to me, is completely unacceptable. So let’s do something about it.

TL;DR: I used to love games journalism, now I hate it, because it hates me for the things I love.