@Ragnagoth @Cowbie Also, when you are lobbied by PR people from the publisher (paid hotel stays, paid travel, fancy dinners, parties, gifts, etc.) it's hard to be objective ...
The story exploded. Wainwright closed down her Twitter page, so as not to feed the trolls who were criticising her maliciously based on nothing more than the various things she’d done and said, while Cook began to communicate with Florence, complaining that republishing something he’d written on a public social network ‘makes me look like a ****’, that the article ‘could have done without it,’ and that all of the negative attention made him ‘properly miserable.’ Our sympathies must surely go out to Cook, who can be read here describing his thoroughly uncunt-ish attitude towards journalism with the memorable words, ‘We only report on what Sony tells us’.
If you aren’t already aware, the trouble kicked off with a short Eurogamer article written by Rob Florence, which comments upon the hilarious image of one Geoff Keighley, supposedly a gaming journalist, caught on camera setting a high bar for criticism as an art-form by advertising addictive junk for overweight American kids (as well as Doritos and Mountain Dew) with a facial expression that perfectly displayed his inner turmoil as he tried to figure out exactly how he could permanently end his own suffering with such a limited assortment of tools at his disposal.
Florence's article, however, only really touches on this photo as a springboard to talk about the Games Media Awards, which he characterises as an event at which ‘games PR people and games journos voted for their favourite friends, and friends gave awards to friends, and everyone had a good night out’. At this orgy of mutual congratulation, Florence continues, a number of journalists demonstrated their unshakeable integrity by advertising ‘groundbreaking transmedia experience’ Defiance (it’s an upcoming shitty MMO that’s going to be set in the world of an upcoming shitty SyFy Channel show starring Dexter’s wife and a guy from Ugly Betty, in case you were wondering about 'transmedia') to their own Twitter followers, as part of a ‘contest’, in exchange for free PS3s. A few commentators - including RockPaperShotgun’s John Walker - took public issue with the fact that a bunch of professional journalists, at an event celebrating journalistic quality, had allowed themselves to be bought off with a console that most of them probably already owned. To this a couple of his peers responded by snapping at him, ‘It was a hashtag, not an advert. Get off the pedestal’, (multi-award-winning journalist and former Ink Media PR man Dave Cook), and shrugging, ‘Urm... Trion were giving away PS3s to journalists at the GMAs. Not sure why that's a bad thing?’ (Lauren Wainwright).
Everybody needs to read this article (an excerpt is below): http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=8579
What those journalists who count themselves as honest have to accept is that what they see as an unfair, cynical caricature of their vocation is not the result of wild conspiracy theorising and groundless internet paranoia on the part of the gaming public, but stems from the collective perception of a system that has quite visibly been formed around a particularly wealthy and disproportionately powerful industry with an eye towards manipulating, wooing, and managing a particularly inchoate and frequently impecunious press - some of whom would apparently be delighted to be invited over onto the other side of the fence anyway. Even more worryingly, it's a system that continues, despite the protests and the eye-rolling, to give the outward impression of being compromised, frequently to the point of absurdity, from the inbred closeness of that relationship. Defending their profession might be their first reaction to all of this mess, but regulating their profession is the only sensible reaction. If gaming journalists and editors want to enjoy genuine credibility amongst their public, untainted by any suspicion of misbehaviour, they’re going to have to demonstrate that they're bold enough to take three steps back from that system, that they have proper visible safeguards in place to maintain a healthy, professional distance between themselves and the manufacturers of the product they’re supposed to be commenting on, and that any misconduct will be recognised, publicly acknowledged, and stamped out, whether by whistleblowers or by watchdogs.
@ronvnit2006 The movie industry is a healthy one with lots of competition, objective reviews, and a very healthy independent scene. The gaming industry, on the other hand, is owned by a small handful of companies. They control the reviews, they control the IPs, they control everything.
A very small handful of publishers run the entire industry legally. If a console is released for "fun" it will get zero support from all of the big titles IGN/Gamespot have been hyping for years.
@Muteki_X until multi million dollar publishers start giving sites like IGN & Gamespot an offer they can't refuse and the 9.5/10 scores start rolling out! (hey wait a minute this happens now!!)
Don't worry -- once gamespot and ign start the hype-wagon and start putting up 9.5/10 scores for exclusive titles on the PS4 & X1 ... you guys will start buying the new systems in droves.
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