A sorta defense of game journalismby skip 06/18/2013, 11:12am PDT
His points that game journalism aren't as broken as some others is okay, but that's only if you compare it to drek like cable news. News magazines or large newspapers still have higher standards that most gaming websites. I also like his defense of academia (they're in ivory towers because that's where we put them). The comparison of hits between his game videos and Blade Runner video isn't relevant (there's been a ton of analysis of the movie already, many from academics). The big thing he's missing though is that critics of movies, books, and sometimes TV often act like the meeting of academia and journalism. The average ones let you know what a work is about and why it's good/bad from an informed perspective. The best ones can evaluate a work in its historic/cultural context and occasionally provide reviews of older works. The shitty ones, like the ones that write for Entertainment Weekly, give everything 5/5 stars to avoid causing problems between their parent company and the movie studio and those are the ones that resemble what video games mostly have. If the rating of FF XIII was closer to Friday the 13th the general industry whorishness could more easily tolerated.
