Video game journalism needs to be reshaped if writers want to be trusted among gamers. Their lack of credibility hurts them more than they think.
Video game journalists are not just people who write about games for money, but they should also be passsionate gamers.
Video game journalists need to emphaize not only good writing, but also playing video
games well.
Imagine that you’re buying car parts and the salesperson you talk to has no background working on cars; that would destroy the salesperson’s credibility.
This can be applied to professional reviewer Dean Takahashi from VentureBeat, a website that covers tech news
and events.
There’s a YouTube video of Takahashi struggling to play “Cuphead’s” early levels, even including its tutorial.
For any experienced gamer, it’s painful to watch and makes Takahashi look like he’s never played a video game in his life.
“Cuphead,” a run and gun platformer, is known for its difficulty, but Takahashi played the tutorial and the first level terribly, ruining his credibility as a video game journalist.
The early stages in a video game are generally very easy and help you learn how to play the game at a basic level.
Takahashi also wrote a “Mass Effect” review where he thought the game was unplayable, but he failed to understand its role-playing mechanics, which affected his playing experience.
Poor exposure tarnishes video game journalists and stereotypes them as poor gamers and reviewers.
Video game journalism website Polygon featured footage of 2016’s “Doom” and its early levels, catching the gaming worlds attention.
The gameplay was lackluster because of poor aiming, reaction time and sense of awareness shown in the video by Polygon reviewers.
The awful skills shown not only make the video difficult to watch, but it doesn’t make viewers want to purchase the game either.
Video game journalists shouldn’t be required to win national championships or have a professional gaming background, but for God’s sake, can they at least understand how to play properly?
Gameplay can convince customers to buy a game if a player is gaming well because it makes the game look exciting.
Not only should video game journalists, as a whole, focus more on improving their skill level, but also the content they write for their articles.
A good example of this is G.B. Burford’s retrospective piece for gaming website Kotaku about one of the original “Halo” single-player levels, “The Silent Cartographer.”
Burford uses great detail to show why the level was well-designed, comparing the original “Halo” with present-day shooter games.
Burdford’s piece stands out as the correct way to write a feature about video games.
If more video game journalists don’t address these issues, readers won’t take video game journalism seriously.
Video game journalists should prove to gamers that just because they review games, that doesn’t make them any less of
a gamer.
