Every gamer is aware that conventional media harbours disdain for the gaming industry, often stating that the industry is primarily geared to create products and titles for children to waste their time on when school breaks. It is a view that can draw ire from the older contingent of gamers who feel they are forced into a demographic they do not belong in, a form of discrimination if you will.
One of the most prominent sources of such criticism comes from the newspaper media and more notably, for example, the United Kingdom's Daily Mail. If there was one name that drew universal feelings of hatred from the gaming community, regardless of any allegiance or not to a certain manufacturer, it is that news distributor.
But what was the cause that made the Daily Mail look upon the gaming industry as a business model designed for children? Well there could be some truth in what critics of the Daily Mail say when they point out that the Chief Editor prefers to highlight and keep alive long gone stereotypes and has an unhealthy taste for over-exaggerating problems in any topic, not something a broadsheet should be known for but instead a tabloid. Yet despite being the most infamous for such views, they are not the only ones to report about gaming in such a demeaning way.
Having close ties to somebody who is involved in such an industry I had the opportunity to find out why newspapers take this view, a family member of mine is married to a reporter for a national newspaper in the United Kingdom. I shall not be naming anybody but be rest assured this particular journalist does not draw the ire of gamers, because he is one himself. He is perfectly placed to explain what is happening.
The biggest reason the mainstream media treat you and me as they do is because of the media entities involved in gaming itself. HOLD! IGN? Eurogamer? News 4 Gamers?
I can already feel the rage from the quiet majority who are reading this, telling their computer screen that they said it all along. Others will similarly be screaming that the Daily Mail don't know a thing about gaming. And yet, the mainstream journalists get their opinion on gaming from what they see on the internet and what they see is a disjointed community fuelled by immaturity, which in turn see's the places providing those communities with journalists who cater to exactly that. It is considered immature because of the myriad of comments being made by what is perceived to only possibly come from the over excited finger tapping of pre-teen/teen boy. And those mainstream journalists can see that the likes of the IGN, Euroamer and N4G websites are feeding it such a culture and similarly feed off it themselves.
This brings us to point of the immaturity of gaming industry itself because if the words the outside world reads is riddled with bickering readers and writing skills that would guarantee a lowly F- in the SATS tests taken by 10 year olds, how does that relate to the online media companies that allow such vulgar and hate filled comments to become so prevalent?
Well that is the real bad thing about the gaming industry. The mainstream media, all across the planet, put the blame solely on those websites like IGN, Eurogamer and N4G. It is because of the lack of professionalism shown by those portals in keeping order in their own domain that the industry simply hasn't matured enough to be taken seriously, it is those sites that are seen as breeding grounds for problems facing gaming in becoming a truly respected and accepted form of digital entertainment to compete with movies, music and digital books.
Naturally I thought that was that and it was simply a case of journalistic snobbery and a sense that the gaming media were regarded as being glorified blogs in how the kept discipline across it's viewers. But I was then informed about a more concerning problem that see's the gaming industry being unable to command the same respect as it's more established forms of entertainment.
The journalist I was speaking to informed me that the national newspaper he works for has on every occasion ruled out employing these gaming journalists after reading through the articles they have been writing, for the reason of unprofessional and inconsistent standards amongst their very own work. In short, there appears to be no standard model for any reviewer to use when reviewing a title which means they appear to make it up as they go along, changing what is good and what is bad on a game by game basis. The result is bad games getting good reviews and good games getting average reviews, an ire of many a gamer you might be saying.
Now the bloke does have a point there and nobody who reads both newspaper article/reviews and gaming article/reviews can deny that. The papers believe the editors, authors and reviewers at sites like IGN and Eurogamer quite simply need to grow up because they do not doubt these people could become balanced, fair and competent journalists, the problem they see is their attitude and that will be hard to change.
It would appear that only way the stereotypical view on gaming being an industry for children is going to be reversed and given the same good press that it's more established forms of entertainment enjoys, is for the gaming media itself to enter some form of Golden Age and drastically change way they are run and change their target audience. They will need to start acting professionally to be given respect by the professionals.
This is not a question of the mainstream media's stereotypical view on us, but a question of the gaming media feeding itself off the premise that they encourage such stereotypical actions via the readers that comment on their portal, and the practices they use for the articles/reviews they create to satisfy that culture.
One business analyst this journalist works with believes this has caused a loss of over 50% revenue for gaming developers, had the media part of gaming matured professionally in the 1990's the mainstream media would have got in on the act themselves and provided their own, fully qualified and professional journalists covering everything gaming. That in turn could have shown games purely based on story telling being given a fair review despite not being named Call of Duty or Mario Kart, the gaming audience would have been massively bigger.
But as things stand a newspaper whose parent company is stock listed cannot justify paying the expense of hiring a full team of journalists and analyst just for gaming when the upper echelons, that is the shareholders, can only see that the comments are akin to what children write and they know children do not read newspapers. It is an incompatible idea and business model, and they will only move in to gaming when they see more mature comments and that ultimately is the responsibility of moderators to control.
IGN, Eurogamer and their ilk it would appear are the big reason you are stereotyped. And that is a worrying thought for you, Sony, Microsoft and all other gaming companies to face up to. You cannot stop someone writing vitriol in the comments section, but the moderators can. You can't introduce a more professional culture amongst gaming articles, but the gaming website editor can.
Will they change? The basic answer is we do not know because the current culture they promote is quite possibly quite lucrative in that these websites are likely to draw fairly large sums of money from advertisers. It is ironic though that the people who pay for those advertisements are the gaming developers themselves, or more accurately, the publishers.
It is those who make the games that find themselves in somewhat a catch-twenty-two scenario because if just one of them ceased funding, it would draw criticism from the review sites and could even affect the scores of potential games they may want to release. It is indeed possible that as many as ten different publishers acting together would not force the change, there many others who would see this as any opportunity to cash in by getting on the good side of such editors.
The answer would not be wishing for an established news company buying out such websites because IGN is owned by none other than Rupert Murdoch's News International so there is no doubt those websites are making money, would they ever see a reason to change to benefit the industry as a whole?
That might seem contradictory in that a newspaper would not want to employ these gaming journalists but the biggest gaming news site of them all is owned by a news distributor, the biggest of them all actually, but let's not confuse a money making machine with the decision of a team leader which is ultimately the editor at, for instance, the Daily Mail. Perhaps all the major game publishers should tackle this issue together and be united on this issue, because it is their revenue that looks to suffer while IGN's, Eurogamer's and News 4 Gamer's looks to increase. And perhaps then the stereotype will finally fade away into oblivion.
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