Naw, you just brought up a bunch of ridiculous and discussed it in a tone that offers the patina of reason, where none exists. This is the same nonsense being peddled elsewhere with less sophistication; it doesn’t make it any more accurate.
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I do believe that there are people who are honestly concerned with corruption in games journalism, but it’s pretty hard to taken them seriously when the single event they chose as their catalyst and rallying point had sweet fuck-all to do with corruption and everything to do with a thin excuse for misogyny and slut-shaming.
Corruption in the gaming press is very real and has been for ages, but nobody seemed to think that any of the actual, in-your-face corruption was worth starting a movement over. Remember when Eidos got Jeff Gerstmann fired from Gamespot for giving Kane & Lynch a bad review? Remember how people grumped about it in comment threads for two weeks and then completely forgot about it?
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There is certainly a difference between those two things. It’s weird to even talk about the idea of “playing favourites” in reviews since reviewers are there to tell us which things are their favourites. If a reviewer likes different things than you, then it’s probably best not to take that reviewer’s word on what’s good, but I don’t see how that’s even related to taking money from big publishers to write nice reviews for them.
I’m not sure what you are trying to express here.
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That Breitbart article claiming that the existence of an email list for game journalists is evidence of a conspiracy, is ridiculous on its face. But on looking into it a bit more, what really jumps out at me is Ben Kuchera’s involvement. Ben Kuchera, when working at Ars Technica, wrote some very good articles documenting corrupt practices in game journalism. And this was real corruption: big game publishers sending gifts to game reviewers, hosting lavish parties to announce new games, and exacting retribution on the careers of gaming journalists who gave their games negative reviews. Also, Ben Kuchera left Ars Technica shortly after he published a review of Duke Nukem Forever, in which he described its extensive, brutal misogyny, and its complete lack of any real creativity or other virtue. There was an enormous flamewar in the Ars Technica forum thread for that article, with a lot of the all-too-familiar condemnations of any hint of social consciousness in a game review.
It’s clear that what Breitbart really finds scandalous is that there are gaming journalists with progressive ideals, and who will critique games and the gaming industry from that perspective – and, horror of horrors, they talk to each other. That’s not corrupt, it’s not unethical, it’s not a conspiracy, and it’s not even mildly surprising.
At worst, by Orland’s account, he suggested to the list that game journalists counter sexism by highlighting a game Zoe Quinn had produced – a suggestion he later concluded was inappropriate, and withdrew. He had no power over the other subscribers on that list. That’s no conspiracy, and it’s not comparable to the group of 4chan users planning a campaign of lies.
EDIT: Oops. I hadn’t decided how to finish the sentence at the end of the first paragraph, and I’d left it incomplete.
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The breitbart stuff is interesting in that it is quite honest about it being all about attacking feminists. It made gamergate more political and marginal (and easier for most folks to ignore), but also much more intense for those who went in the deep end.
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