This.
Game journalists analysis skills
This article bothers me so much for two reasons I think:
1/ You game journalists are so, so bad at connecting the dots. When you hear stories about crunch time for decades now, you should fucking investigate the why and how and see that behind that crunch is insane complexity. Developers haven’t been that shy about it. I remember hearing about how it took a couple months to create 3D models for Gran Turismo cars. Months for one car made by a highly skilled artist, guys. And that’s the easiest fucking part of making a racing game.
If you keep destroying game developers in reviews while being well aware of those facts, you’re a mean idiot and a liar to your readers. You participate into creating a culture that thinks that things are simple and easy on computers. You enable and vouch for stupidity.
Worse, with this article some game developers are saying thank you, I shit you not! Yes thank you game journalist for being a dumb ass dick for years, it really helped all of us. Fuck me.
2/ You game journalists are passionate enough about the medium to totally forget how it operates. Which makes subtlety impossible in your critics: if it’s technically perfect it’s fine for you while you don’t really connect to what extent it is, it’s fine. How can you have recognition of a medium when its media are unaware of why shooters are cool programmatically speaking because we can debug that gameplay easily (has the target gone down? No? Debug) compared to heavy simulation a la Sims where you don’t know what the hell the computer or the player are going to do and there are dozens of variables at play. Tons of shit happening in games are happening for a technical reason. We’re dependent, we’re working around tech to create gameplay.
With your ignorance you foster a profound lack of knowledge within your audience. The amount of horseshit or entitlement I read from gamers, it’s mind blowing. As if people were like “I saw the boom in this movie shot, 2/10 will not watch again”. You game journalists nurtured that bullshit. You participated into creating a world where 2D games are inherently not as good as 3D games. It’s sad.
Passion isn’t about clearing 100% of all Nintendo games or playing the most obscure and obtuse shit around, it’s about understanding processes, the craft, the tools so that you can judge accordingly the collaborative work of developers and teach your readers about the most complicated medium in the world, enjoying it more and more importantly, make it progress.
This article should have come up in 2000 if not 1995. In 2015, it’s a disgrace.